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Abstract
The impact of the First World War on London has long been unduly overshadowed by the war that came after. In fact, the years 1914–1918 proved transformative for the future direction of both London and the Londoners. The unprecedented employment prospects of the war years revolutionized the working lives and living standards of the London poor. The metropolis expanded to accommodate new industrial areas that formed the nucleus of London's suburban development in the interwar years. As part of that, the war ensured that the economic fortunes of West London would be tied to the aeroplane, quickly adapted for civilian uses once hostilities ceased. This wartime capital, which depended so heavily on women's labour to oil the machinery of government and of munitions manufacture, would never lose its dependence on women in the new industries that emerged from the economy of total war. And the experience of London's workers during the war began a tendency that altered for generations their political alignment; the Labour Party in London continues to reap the harvest sown during the First World War.
Notes on Contributor
Jerry White teaches modern London history at Birkbeck, University of London. His first book, Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block 1887–1920, won the Jewish Chronicle Non-Fiction Book Prize for 1980; his London in the Twentieth Century. A City and Its People won the Wolfson Prize for 2002; and his Zeppelin Nights. London in the First World War was Spear's Social History of the Year for 2014. His Mansions of Misery. A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison is published by The Bodley Head in October 2016.
Notes
1 H. Ward, Harvest (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co, 1920), 208–9. MacKenzie, Norman and Jeanne (eds.), The Diary of Beatrice Webb. Vol. 3 1905–1924. ‘The Power to Alter Things’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 315, 4 November 1918.
2 See, for instance, M. Connelly, The Great War, Memory and Ritual: Commemoration in the City and East London, 1916–1939 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002); A. King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); E. Harrison, Remembrance Today: Poppies, Grief and Heroism (London: Reaktion Books, 2012); S. J. Heathorn, ‘The Civil Servant and Public Remembrance: Sir Lionel Earle and the Shaping of London's Commemorative Landscape, 1918–1933’, 20th Century British History, 19:3 (2008), 259–87. For a discussion of the recent literature, see B. Scates and R. Wheatley, ‘War Memorials’, in The Cambridge History of the First World War, Vol. III: Civil Society, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 528–56.
3 For casualties see F. W. Hirst, The Consequences of the War to Great Britain (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 231. C. A. Pennell, A Kingdom United. Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 147, gives regional proportions of men aged 19–38 in London from the 1911 census, and the proportion enlisting before 12 November 1914. A. Gregory, ‘Lost Generations: the Impact of Military Casualties on Paris, London, and Berlin’, in J. Winter, J.-L. Robert et al. (eds.), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 59 gives a higher estimate of 131,000 for deaths in active service of recruits from Greater London.
4 The Times, 4 January 1919.
5 The Times, 5 December 1918.
6 H. L. Smith (ed.), The New Survey of London Life and Labour. Vol. I, Forty Years of Change (London: P.S. King and Son, 1930), 5–6.
7 The Times, 3 and 4 January 1919.
8 The Times, 9 February 1920. See generally, A. Forty, Objects of Desire. Design and Society 1750–1980 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), especially chap. 8 and 9. The washing-Up Machine Co. traded from Goldsmith Road, Peckham, from 1919: see The Times, 10 May 1919.
9 The Times, 30 December 1920.
10 Smith (ed.), New Survey Vol. II, 428. In 1931, a depression year even in London, the census recorded 185,000 women in domestic service in the County of London. See also S. Alexander, ‘Becoming a Woman in London in the 1920s and 1930s’, in .Metropolis London: Histories and Representations Since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1989), 245–71; L. Lethbridge, Servants. A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
11 Smith (ed.), New Survey Vol. II, ch. VIII.
12 For women and demobilization, see D. Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls. Women Workers in World War I (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), 187–93. See also S. T. Abernethy, ‘Moving Wartime London: Public Transport in the First World War’, London Journal, 41:3 (2016). doi: 10.1080/03058034.2016.1213526
13 For Park Royal, see Grange Museum of Community History and Brent Archive, Places in Brent. Twyford and Park Royal (London: Brent Archives, 2001), 6–8; G. W. R. Gray, ‘The Rise and Decline of the Park Royal Industrial Estate’, Oxford Polytechnic, Department of Town Planning, MSc Project, 1980, passim.; P. Grant, ‘Brent's Women at war and at peace, 1914–1919’, 2010, www.brent.gov.ul/archives, 2–3; A. C. Lee, As I Recall, the Memoirs of Arnold Charles Lee (Leicester: Anchorprint Group Ltd., 2010), 7. For Park Royal and west London generally, see J. E. Martin, Greater London. An Industrial Geography (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1966), 30–1, 40; History of the Ministry of Munitions, 12 Vols, 1919–22, Vol. VIII, Control of Industrial Capacity and Equipment, Part II, (London: Naval and Military Press, n.d.), 166–7, 173–4, 183–4.
14 C. Wilson and W. Reader, Men and Machines. A History of D. Napier & Son, Engineers, Ltd. 1858–1958 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958) 101–10; A. Vessey, Napier Powered (Stroud: Chalford, 1997), 30ff. For the west London aircraft industry, see G. Hewlett, Aviation in and around Brent during the First World War (London: Brent Archives, 1984) passim.
15 D. H. Smith, The Industries of Greater London (London: P.S. King and Son, 1933), 79–80.
16 The Times, 27 May 1919 (Fellows), 18 June 1919 (Virol).
17 The Times, 29 July 1920. Much has been written about London's suburban expansion between the wars, but for a modern take see R. Bowdler, ‘Between the Wars: 1914–1940’, in London Suburbs (London: Merrell Holberton, 1999), 103–29.
18 J. White, London in the Twentieth Century. A City and Its People (London: Viking, 2001), 188–9
19 White, London in the Twentieth Century, 190.
20 The Times, 25 April 1919. The British Airways Ltd. flying Neville Chamberlain was formed from an amalgamation of smaller London airlines on 1 January 1936 and operated largely from Heston. It was merged into the state-owned British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) on 1 April 1940, so can be counted as one of the forebears of today's giant carrier.
21 The Times, 9 August 1930.
22 For school dinners, see London County Council [LCC], London Statistics Vol. XXVI, 1915–20 (London: LCC, 1921), 241. W. Beveridge, British Food Control (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 327–8. No London-wide statistics on food samples taken by borough councils and found to be adulterated during the war.
23 Parliamentary Papers, Report of the Working Classes Cost of Living Committee, 1918, Cd. 8980 (1918), 9.
24 Charity Organisation Review (XXXIX, 229, January 1916), 1–2. LCC, London Statistics Vol. XXVI, 76, 78, 153, 217 and 92 (common lodging houses); M. Sheridan, Rowton Houses, 1892–1954 (London: Rowton Houses Ltd., 1956), 52–5; LCC, London Statistics. Vol. XXV, 1914–15 (London: LCC, 1916), 248; Parliamentary Papers, Report of the Commissioners of Prisons and the Directors of Convict Prisons, with Appendices (For the Year ended 31st March, 1919), Cd. 374 (1919), 5.
25 For elderly people no longer in the workhouse, see Wandsworth, Board of Guardians, Minutes of the Board, 27 March 1919, Triennial Report of retiring chairman, Canon Hubert Curtis. LCC, London Statistics. 1921–23, Vol. XXVIII (London: LCC, 1924), 66–9 for the historic trends of poor relief.
26 M. MacDonagh, In London during the Great War. The Diary of a Journalist (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1935), 196, 28 May; 237, 16 December 1917. C. Biron, Without Prejudice. Impressions of Life and Law (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 273. A. Gleason, Inside the British Isles (New York: Century Co., 1917), 105.
27 Smith (ed.), New Survey Vol. III, ch. VI.
28 Smith (ed.), New Survey Vol. I, 364.
29 Smith (ed.), New Survey Vol. IX, 245. White, London in the Twentieth Century, 266.
30 See E. C. R. Hadfield and J. E. MacColl, Pilot Guide to Political London (London: Pilot Press Ltd., 1945), 159–96; B. Barker, Labour in London. A Study in Municipal Achievement (London: Routledge and Sons, 1946), ch. III; M. Clapson, Mark, ‘Localism, the London Labour Party and the LCC between the Wars’, in Politics and the People of London: The London County Council, 1889–1965 (London: Hambledon Press, 1989), 127–46; White, London in the Twentieth Century, 365ff.
31 For London housing between the wars, see LCC, London Housing (London: LCC, 1937); S. Parker, ‘From the Slums to the Suburbs: Labour Party Policy, the LCC, and the Woodberry Down Estate, Stoke Newington’, The London Journal, 24:2 (1999), 51–69.
32 LCC, London Statistics Vol. XXVI, 45 (birth rate) and 88 (health visitors). For difficulties in Camberwell, see Winter, Great War and the British People, 201–2. For a wartime survey of this new provision, see E. W. Hope, Report on the Physical Welfare of Mothers and Children, England Wales, Vol. I (Dunfermline: Carnegie UK Trust, 1917), 206ff (and 382–3 for St Marylebone); and for prewar provision, J. M. Campbell, Report on the Physical Welfare of Mothers and Children, England Wales, Vol. 2 (Dunfermline: Carnegie UK Trust, 1917), 82–90. LCC, London Statistics Vol. XXXV, 74 and 385.
33 Smith (ed.), New Survey Vol. I, 82.
34 Parliamentary Papers, Report of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population, Cmd. 6153, 1940, 201. For the fear of the bomber in the interwar period, see S. R. Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire. Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); M. Haapamäki, The Coming of the Aerial War: Culture and the Fear of Airborne Attack in Inter-war Britain (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014).