Sentimental Equipment‟: New Zealand, the Great War and Cultural Mobilisation
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„Sentimental Equipment‟: New Zealand, the Great War and Cultural Mobilisation By Steven Loveridge A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Victoria University of Wellington 2013 ‗See that little stream - we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it - a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs … This western-front business couldn‘t be done again, not for a long time … This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. …You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment [emphasis added] going back further than you could remember… This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle - there was a century of middle-class love spent here … All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love‘.1 1 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (London, 1985), pp.67-68. ii Abstract During the First World War, New Zealand society was dominated by messages stressing the paramount importance of the war effort to which the country was so heavily committed. Reflecting the total nature of the conflict, these exhortations regularly linked individual duties to the war effort and associated that effort with larger, or higher, purposes. It is often perceived, or presumed, that the dominance of this material arose from general wartime hysteria or was the result of imposed propaganda - with all the manipulative trickery that term connotes. Either way, such perceptions dovetail with notions that the war represents a historical rupture and that wartime discourse might be characterised as insincere, inauthentic and abnormal. Challenging this interpretation, this thesis considers wartime messages as emblematic of deeper cultural sentiments and wider social forces. Specifically, it argues that they represented the results of a cultural mobilisation; a phenomenon whereby cultural resources were mobilised alongside material resources. Consequently many pre-existing social dynamics, debates, orientations, mythologies, values, stereotypes and motifs were retained, but repurposed, in response to the war. A range of subjects illustrating this phenomenon are surveyed, including collective identity, anti-Germanism, gender archetypes, gender antitypes and social cohesion. This study highlights two major dimensions of the phenomenon: firstly, the relationship between the pre-war social/cultural landscape and the mobilised results; and, secondly, how the ideological war effort operated by layering meanings upon wartime developments. Analysing these aspects of cultural mobilisation sets New Zealand‘s military involvement in a broader context and enriches our historical understanding of the society which entered and fought the Great War. iii Acknowledgements I imagine any author writing their acknowledgements feels a need to balance two things: a sincere want to articulate gratitude towards the, inevitably lengthy, list of people and institutions who aid in completing a large research project, and avoiding Oscar night clichés. Here goes. First and foremost I thank my supervisors, Professor James Belich and Professor Roberto Rabel. Their advice and insight sharpened my arguments and I appreciate their support and encouragement of the wide-ranging nature of this thesis. I owe a debt to various institutions, and the staff that keep them ticking. I thank the staff of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Archives New Zealand, the Parliamentary Library, the Defence House Library, Te Papa, the Auckland War Memorial Museum, the National Army Museum and the Victoria University Library. All jumped through various hoops to connect historian and sources. I am also grateful to Louise Grenside and her successor Debbie Levy who administered the Stout Centre during my study and did their best to keep the historians up to date. Then there are those who helped debts not build up. Production of this thesis was financially supported by a Victoria Summer Scholarship and a Postgraduate Research Scholarship. I am also appreciative to Victoria University for helping meet the costs of conference attendance and research trips; this work is better off from the resulting wider survey of material and feedback. Additionally I am grateful to friends, family and colleagues. Matt Pomeroy, Stephanie Gibson, Judy McKoy and Margaret Tennant allowed me to examine their unpublished research. I owe thanks to Jennifer Campion, Brian Johnson, Kelly Broomhall, Charlotte Bennett and Sam Ritchie who were often, involuntary, sounding boards for ideas. Lati Moodie, Roger Loveridge, Anne MacMillan and Peter Hill proved themselves kind and studious enough to labour through drafts. Lastly I am grateful to those who reminded me not to live entirely in the past; it is fitting that we reflect on the war, though it does one good to remember that it has ended. iv Contents Page Abstract ..................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... iv Abbreviations ............................................................................................................. vi Introduction: Cultural Mobilisation ......................................................................... 1 Chapter One - Being British: The Mobilisation of Greater British Nationalism ..... 25 Chapter Two - Being Truly British: The Mobilisation of Anti-Alienism ............... 74 Chapter Three - ‗Half a Soldier Before Enrolled‘: The Mobilisation of the Proto-ANZAC Ethos .......................................................................................... 118 Chapter Four - ‗Shirkers‘: The Mobilisation of a Masculine Antitype ................. 158 Chapter Five - The Women‘s Part: The Mobilisation of Womanpower ............... 201 Chapter Six - A Cult of Sacrifice: The Mobilisation of Public Responses to the Costs of War ................................................................................................. 241 Conclusion - The Results and Means of Cultural Mobilisation ............................ 285 Bibliography ........................................................................................................... 293 v Abbreviations AJHR - Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives ANZ - Archives New Zealand ANZAC - Australian and New Zealand Army Corps ATL - Alexander Turnbull Library AWN - Auckland Weekly News DNZB - Dictionary of New Zealand Biography EP - Evening Post FOL - Federation of Labour MP - Member of Parliament NCW - National Council of Women NZEF - New Zealand Expeditionary Force NZFL - New Zealand Free Lance NZG - New Zealand Gazette NZH - New Zealand Herald NZJH - New Zealand Journal of History NZO - New Zealand Observer NZOYB - New Zealand Official Yearbook NZPD - New Zealand Parliamentary Debates NZS - New Zealand Statutes OCNZMH - The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History ODT - Otago Daily Times OW - Otago Witness PPA - Protestant Political Association RSA - Royal New Zealand Returned and Services‘ Association US - United States of America VD - Venereal disease WAGL - Women‘s Anti-German League WCTU - Women‘s Christian Temperance Union vi Introduction: Cultural Mobilisation In 1917, a sketch by a New Zealand soldier, Private Gordon Calman, appeared in a troop magazine published for the men being shipped on the troopship Corinthic from New Zealand to their ultimate destination of the Western Front. Tiki-Talk: Epistles of the Corinthians was a rather light-hearted publication, full of amateur poetry and amusing caricatures. The sights, sounds and sickness of sea-voyaging - the shared experiences of its audience - made up the bulk of the content. Calman‘s sketch is in stark contrast to other submissions and shows a remarkable glimpse of one man‘s expression of the act of journeying to the centre of the global crisis of the First World War. In his work, the North and South Islands of New Zealand are transformed into a grief stricken figure (fig.1). 2 North Cape, as a waved handkerchief, bids farewell to those departing. A downward face sobs into the bosom of Taranaki, supported by an arm spanning the distance between Cook Strait and Lake Taupo. The bent knee of the Southern Ranges and the drape of the dress around Foveaux Strait display a sense of anguish and despair. The East Cape as a copy of the casualty list reinforces the heavyhearted and possibly permanent nature of the country‘s farewell. Art has a subjective element and there are several meanings that Calman‘s vision might invoke in observers. Comments might be made on loss, duty, futility, fatalism, perhaps upon gender, with a motherland farewelling her sons. However, beyond the potential range of sentiments that might be stirred is the poignant imagining of New Zealand as a single entity devoted to a nationwide task; an image indicative of the relationship between nations and war circa 1917. The process of national mobilisation was, as in Calman‘s work, a phenomenon