Booklet of Abstracts

Ireland, Wales and the First World War: History, Myth, and Cultural Memory An Interdisciplinary Conference Booklet of Abstracts 1 Abstracts/Crynodebau ‘War and Peace in The Welsh Outlook (1914-33)’ Malcolm Ballin The Welsh Outlook was the only English-language periodical in existence in Wales throughout the First World War. It covered issues such as profiteering and conscription, and the interplay between industrial policy and the war effort. The Outlook discussed pacifist opinion in Wales and the part of women in the war effort. It was opposed to jingoism, and favoured the nascent League of Nations. Other themes included the special relationship imagined between Wales and Belgium, the differences between British and German approaches to philosophy and the importance of post-War planning. Differences in emphasis appear between the Outlook and Welsh-language magazines such as O.M. Edwards’s Cymru. The Outlook gave scant attention to Irish affairs, despite the historic 1916 rebellion and its aftermath. The paper will consider the roles of particular individuals, including Thomas Jones, its first editor (who later served as deputy secretary to the War Cabinet under Lloyd George and became deeply involved in negotiations about Irish independence). Others include the mine-owner David Davies (the Outlook’s proprietor) and the ‘Cardiff/Barry Circle’ who were involved together in the journal’s creation. Their masthead bore the message ‘Where there is no vision the people perish.’ The Outlook treated the War and Ireland as matters of relatively peripheral interest, compared to the social and political issues in Wales that constituted its main agenda. ‘The Flying Corps and the Flying Column: Irish Revolutionaries and First World War Culture’ John Borgonovo While revolutionary Ireland (1916-1923) is often placed in the context of the First World War, the conflict’s cultural impacts seldom factor into studies of the period. Yet, Ireland’s 1916 Generation were also part of Europe’s 1914 Generation. This paper will examine the Irish independence movement’s engagement with British First World War culture, focusing on republican paramilitarism, propaganda, and memorialisation. Though it pioneered modern guerrilla warfare, the Irish Republican Army was influenced by British Army traditions and structures. IRA leaders also applied contemporary First World War terminology to their own thread-bare guerrilla operation, often with considerable irony. (For example, fugitives who went underground were described as having, ‘joined the Flying Corps’). Republican propagandists studied the British government’s Crewe House information techniques, echoing British atrocity propaganda by swapping Ireland for Belgium and Britain with Germany. Black and Tans replaced rampaging Prussian Huns. Amid state criminalisation of the republican campaign, fallen IRA fighters received elaborate paramilitary spectacle funerals that mirrored British military processions. This struggle 2 for legitimacy could also be seen in post-war republican monuments that often resembled British memorials to the Great War dead. While Anglo-Irish cultural transmission is evident in some cases, in others republicans harnessed British war culture for their own cause. As they mobilised support for the independence movement in Ireland, Britain, and abroad, republican activists often deliberately communicated in the language and practices of the First World War. In this way they could make themselves better understood in societies that had recently emerged from the 1914- 1918 conflict. ‘“Waiting had killed every yearning”: Rationing, Thrift and Self-Denial in Welsh women’s interwar short fiction’ Michelle Deininger Welsh Women’s short fiction in the years after World War One often points to the impact of rationing and the necessity for thrift in the domestic sphere. When rationing became a feature of everyday life in 1918, it fundamentally changed how women could provide for themselves and their families. Self-denial, as a means of ensuring that more vulnerable family members did not go without, became a common part of women’s existence. This paper seeks to illuminate the extent to which the legacy of government policies and social expectations shaped the way Welsh life is imagined in short fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. This paper will discuss the social and economic implications of rationing and thrift by exploring the way in which these issues were depicted and discussed in newspapers and literary journals towards the end of the war. It will then examine how these issues seep into the stories of writers such as Kate Roberts, Ellen Lloyd-Williams and Kathleen Freeman, focusing on the ways in which a mentality of thrift curbs not only spending, but imagination and even sexual relationships. At the same time, frugality is counterbalanced by a recurring focus on the material – from the inexpensive cawl bowls with huge sentimental value in Lloyd-Williams’ ‘“When Thou Shalt Be Old”’, to the luxurious but unaffordable fabrics in the shop windows of Roberts’ ‘Red-Letter Day’. These stories are all, in some way, concerned with the way identity is formed through material objects (or a lack of them) and the sense of inadequacy that ensues when these objects are lost or are unattainable. ‘Conscientious Objection to the Great War: the Welsh Story’ Aled Eirug One of the most obvious aspects of opposition to the War were the conscientious objectors (COs) who refused to join the military after conscription was introduced in January 1916. This presentation will provide an analysis of the conscientious objectors in Wales and assess their significance to the anti-war movement generally in Britain. It will analyse those COs who opposed on religious grounds and those who opposed on political grounds. It will consider the 'absolutist' view amongst COs that opposed any 3 compromise with the state, and the 'alternativist' view that allowed for some compromise. It will consider the geographical distribution and political or religious allegiance of the conscientious objectors, and will consider the response of the State to the growth of the anti-war movement in Wales from January 1916 onwards. ‘National Armies in the Field: National Identity and Recruitment in Ireland and Wales, 1914-16’ John S. Ellis The national identities of Ireland and Wales are often set in juxtaposition to the expansion of British patriotism during the First World War. The war is thought to have cultivated an Anglicized Britishness largely at the expense of Welshness and Irishness, the latter saved by the revitalizing uprising of its republican minority. Such interpretations rely on mutually exclusive definitions of national identity that ignore the essentially multi-national context of British patriotism in 1914. Under the unprecedented pressures of total war, the state asserted that Britain would fight as a multinational brotherhood in arms and explicitly recognized the distinct national existence, identities and patriotism of the Irish and Welsh nations. Produced by devolved organizations, war propaganda melded Irish and Welsh nationalist icons with the imagery of a wider but essentially pluralistic British patriotism. War devolution was perhaps carried to its furthest length in the organization of Kitchener's new armies, where distinctively national military divisions were successfully recruited from patriotic Irish and Welshmen. Ostensibly led by nationalist officers, ministered by Irish Catholic and Welsh nonconformist chaplains, and fighting in distinctive uniforms under national flags and symbols, the 16th Irish Division and the 38th Welsh Division were meant to be veritable "national armies in the field". Nationalist leaders hailed the units as a reflection of national worth and international standing and believed that their service would accelerate the movement toward further national recognition and freedom for Ireland and Wales. Rather than dissolving diverse national identities into a single Britishness, early war propaganda and recruitment reinforced and encouraged the national sentiments and aspirations of the Irish and Welsh. The national character and ethos of these divisions was a casualty of the tragic decimation at the battle of the Somme in 1916. Reeling from the devastation, the national composition of the units was diluted by available conscripts and the demands of military exigency. A more unitary sense of British patriotism becomes increasingly evident as the war moved into its more regimented phase following conscription and the collapse of the Liberal government. ‘Over by Christmas? Wales in the Early Months of the First World War’ Neil Evans When war broke out in August 1914, Wales was an area with a notoriously low level of recruiting to the army and often seen as a centre of pacifist and anti-war opinion. This 4 paper examines the response to the war in recruiting, attitudes to the conflict and in social mobilisation in the transition from peace to total war. Hew Strachan has emphasised how quickly perceptions changed with the outbreak of war as the conflict provided a new framework for discussion. The paper examines the particular Welsh expression of this. Much of the focus is on military recruiting, set in the context of the resistance to the army evident in nineteenth-century Wales. Enthusiastic recruiting meetings often failed to produce many volunteers and many expressed concerns about the fate of their dependants if they enlisted. As such it adds to the literature which questions the extent of enthusiasm for war in 1914. It raises questions about how well the army was organised to respond to the challenge of recruiting in Wales. There will also be a discussion of attitudes to the war and to Germany as expressed in the press, based on the comments made by people with recent experience of visiting Germany. The paper will attempt to deal with all parts of Wales and to highlight both internal differences within the nation and ask to what extent there were regional differences in the UK in late 1914 in the face of the homogenising rhetoric of social cohesion. The paper is an early presentation of work being undertaken for a joint project with Dr.

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