Bostridge - The Fateful Year: England 1914

Staff from the Curzon Laundry in Acton, West London, enjoying a Bank Holiday outing, 3 August 1914

It seems only natural for us, a hundred years on, to scrutinize the faces in this group for some trace of foreboding, or presentiment about the tornado of change and destruction that was about to hit them. Yet, even if we were able to discern such thoughts or emotions, we would be unlikely to find any sign of them here. War with Germany, frequently imagined and predicted, had none the less managed to creep up on the British people, catching them unawares. It has all come as by the leap of some awful monster out of his lair, the novelist Henry James wrote on the eve of war, he is upon us, he is upon all of us here, before we have had time to turn round.

That shocking transition from peace to war has always been one of the terrible attractions for anyone writing about the English experience of 1914. Philip Larkins popular and much anthologized poem MCMXIV, with its famous lines Never such innocence, / Never before or since, ingeniously dramatizes the way in which the year took an unexpected turn by employing one long sentence without a main verb. Larkins use of multiple present participles evokes the onward flow of time, but the poets voice in the final stanza hints at the violent break that is about to occur, unsuspected by the men and women of 1914. (Larkin used Roman numerals for the title of his 1914, rather than Arabic ones, both in order to suggest the inscription on a war memorial and because he felt that the emotional impact of 1914 was too great for anything I could possibly write myself.)

Larkins poem also mythologizes a vanished English way of life, destroyed by the war, and suggests a world of prelapsarian innocence. In the most obvious sense, of course, England in 1914 was no more or less innocent than any other time or place. Moreover, the first half of the year had seen violent challenges to the established order from three broad areas.

The labour movements acceptance of class-war doctrines had contributed to a wave of strikes, and there were widespread predictions that the country would soon find itself paralysed by continuous outbreaks of industrial action. Secondly, the publicity-seeking stunts of the suffragettes, demanding Votes for Women, had turned increasingly from symbolic gestures of protest to actions which posed serious threats to life as well as property. Finally, the direst portents of all were reserved for the situation in Ireland, where the prospect of a new Home Rule Bill was provoking resistance in Ulster, increasing fears that Ireland would soon be on the brink of a civil war.