The Home Front: recruitment, DORA and propaganda

Britain Goes to War: Recruitment and Kitchener’s Army

When Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, the British Army was small by European standards — around 250,000 regular troops, compared to the millions of conscripts in the German and French armies. The Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, was almost unique among British leaders in predicting that the war would last for years, not months. He immediately called for a mass volunteer army of 100,000 men. Within two months he had received more than 750,000 volunteers.

Recruitment was driven by a powerful propaganda campaign. The most famous image of the war was Alfred Leete’s 1914 poster of Kitchener pointing directly at the viewer with the slogan “Your Country Needs You.” Recruitment offices opened across the country. Social pressure was enormous: women were encouraged to give white feathers to young men seen out of uniform as symbols of cowardice.

Key Fact

Pals battalions were created to encourage men to enlist by promising they could serve alongside friends and neighbours. Towns and factories raised their own units. When a Pals battalion suffered heavy casualties — as many did on the first day of the Somme in July 1916 — whole communities lost an entire generation at once.

The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), 1914

The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) was passed in August 1914 and subsequently extended several times. It gave the government extraordinary powers over everyday life. Under DORA the government could:

Censor newspapers and restrict reporting of military operations.
Requisition buildings, land and factories for war purposes.
Restrict pub opening hours and control the alcohol content of beer to maintain worker productivity.
Prosecute anyone whose actions were deemed to undermine the war effort, including pacifists and conscientious objectors.

DORA represented a dramatic expansion of state power into areas previously considered private. The government took control of the railways, coal mines and munitions production. Daylight saving time was introduced in 1916 under DORA to extend working hours. Citizens could be prosecuted for flying a kite, lighting a bonfire on the beach, or discussing naval movements in public.

Conscription, 1916

Volunteer recruitment began to fall short of the army’s needs by late 1915. The Military Service Act of January 1916 introduced conscription for single men aged 18 to 41; it was extended to married men in May 1916. This was the first time in modern British history that men had been legally compelled to serve in the armed forces. A system of tribunals was established to hear applications for exemption on grounds of conscience, health or essential employment. Those who refused to serve on grounds of conscience were known as conscientious objectors; some performed non-combatant duties, others were imprisoned, and a small number were sent to France and threatened with execution.

The war transformed women’s employment. As men enlisted, women moved into jobs previously closed to them: as bus conductresses, delivery drivers, police officers, civil servants and bank clerks. Most significant was their role in industry. Munitionettes worked in munitions factories making shells, fuses and explosives, often handling toxic chemicals such as TNT that turned their skin yellow, earning them the nickname “canary girls.” By 1918 around 800,000 women were employed in munitions. Women also served in the Women’s Land Army (farming) and as nurses close to the front line.

The government used propaganda to sustain public support for the war. Propaganda took many forms: recruitment posters, cinema newsreels (the Battle of the Somme film of 1916 was watched by an estimated 20 million people within six weeks), newspaper reports censored to downplay defeats and emphasise victories, and stories about German atrocities in Belgium, some of which were exaggerated or fabricated. The government established the War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House in 1914, staffed by prominent writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy.

By 1917 the propaganda effort was increasingly strained. Casualty lists published in local newspapers contradicted optimistic official statements. War poetry by soldiers such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen circulated privately and began to reach wider audiences, presenting a very different picture of the war than official communications.

Growing Disillusionment

The early enthusiasm of 1914 gave way to a more complex public mood by 1916–1917. The Battle of the Somme’s casualties, food shortages caused by the German submarine campaign, and the endless casualty lists in newspapers eroded initial patriotism. In 1917 Siegfried Sassoon wrote a public statement refusing to return to the front, condemning the war as “a war of aggression and conquest” being prolonged by those with “the power to end it.” He was not court-martialled but declared to have shell shock and sent to a hospital. Wilfred Owen, who met Sassoon there, wrote much of his greatest anti-war poetry at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh.