“A Prostitution Alike of Matter and Spirit”: Anti-War Discourses in Children’s Literature and Childhood Culture Before and During World War I

ORI GIN AL PA PER

‘‘A Prostitution Alike of Matter and Spirit’’: Anti-WarDiscourses in Children’s Literature and ChildhoodCulture Before and During World War I

Kimberley Reynolds

Published online: 2 November 2012

� Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012

Abstract Histories of the First World War have regularly implicated children’s

literature in boys’ eagerness to enlist in the first two years of that conflict. While

undoubtedly the majority of children’s books, comics and magazines did espouse

nationalistic, jingoistic and martial attitudes, there were alternative stories and

environments. Looking at the publications, organisations and educational estab-

lishments that opposed the war and resisted the Germanophobia that began to

dominate public discourse at the start of the twentieth century casts new light on

some of the challenges and dilemmas facing a proportion of boys as they decided

whether or not to join up. Additionally, the fact that there were alternative dis-

courses is a reminder that not all readers would have responded in the same way to

the same texts. Three areas are considered: children’s stories and pamphlets pro-

duced by Quakers and peace societies; left-wing publications, especially those

associated with Socialist Sunday Schools; and two of the first progressive schools in

Britain.

Kimberley Reynolds is Professor of Children’s Literature in the School of English Literature, Language

and Linguistics at Newcastle University in the UK. She has lectured and published widely on a variety of

aspects of children’s literature, most recently in the form of an audio book, Children’s Literaturebetween the Covers (Modern Scholar, 2011) and the volume on Children’s Literature in the Oxford

University series of Very Short Introductions (2011).

This article arises from research done in connection with two Leverhulme-funded projects: the

Leverhulme International Network, ‘‘Approaching War: Childhood, Culture and the First World War’’

and a Major Leverhulme Fellowship to research ‘‘Modernism, the Left and progressive writing for

children, 1910–1949’’.

K. Reynolds (&)

School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University,

Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK

e-mail: [email protected]

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Children’s Literature in Education (2013) 44:120–139

DOI 10.1007/s10583-012-9179-y

Keywords Pacifism � Peace societies � Progressive schools �Socialist Sunday Schools � Quakers � Conscientious Objectors

In Britain, the summer of 1914 was exceptionally fine. In the collective memory of

the leisured classes, ‘‘One lolled outside on a folding canvas chaise, or swam, or

walked in the countryside. One read out of doors, went on picnics, had tea served

from a white wicker table under the trees’’ (Fussell, 2000, p. 24). It was raining on

Sunday, 2 August, however. Reporting for a very different constituency—readers of

The Young Socialist magazine—on a gathering of ‘‘thousands of Socialists and

Trade-Unionist’’ peace activists in Trafalgar Square that afternoon, F. J. Gould, a

regular contributor to the magazine, noted that ‘‘Rain fell in heavy torrents.’’1 The

change in the weather must have felt like a portent of things to come for, as Gould

reminded his readers, speakers and protesters ‘‘lift[ed] up their voices against

war…. in vain.’’ Three days later, England was taking part in what Gould figured as

a civil war, pitting Europeans against Europeans and workers against workers

(September, 1914, p. 216).2

Literary historians such as Paul Fussell have privileged male, middle-class

writing for adults when examining Britain’s entrance and participation in the First

World War, pausing on what was written for the young only long enough to point

the finger of blame. George Orwell claimed in My Country Right or Left (1940) that

the enthusiasm for war that led to mass enlistment in 1914–1916 by adolescents and

young men was directly underpinned by boyhood reading, the books, comics and

periodicals produced for the generation of boys growing up before the First World

War have regularly been treated largely as propaganda produced first in anticipation

of and then in response to the need to recruit young men for Kitchener’s new army.

It is certainly the case that the vast majority of what was available for boys to read

before and during the First World War was steeped in a form of patriotic

nationalism that often centred on military heroes and British victories. Such stories

were found in publications as diverse as the historical novels of G. A. Henty, the

popular press and boys’ periodicals and comics. Nevertheless, Orwell’s and

Fussell’s conclusions about boyhood reading have been repeatedly reproduced

without sufficient examination. As recently as 2009, John Oakes’s Kitchener’s LostBoys: From the Playing Fields to the Killing Fields states as fact that ‘‘the mind-set

of the boys who offered themselves for sacrifice in the First World War, w[as]

profoundly influenced by the juvenile fiction of the day’’ (p. 45). As will become

clear, this account not only misrepresents the character of a good proportion of both

popular and mainstream children’s literature, but it also ignores whole categories of

children and publications produced for them. While some of these children also

volunteered or served in various capacities, as will be shown, their reasons for doing

1 Frederick James Gould (1855–1938) was a noted secular-humanist and prodigious writer for both

children and adults on issues to do with ethics, morality and peace.2 Records in the National Meteorological Archives confirm that it rained heavily in London that day

(private correspondence dated May 8, 2012).

Children’s Literature in Education (2013) 44:120–139 121

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so—or, indeed, for refusing to serve—were more complicated than has been

suggested.3

Surprised by War

The sun would still have been shining when 17-year-old Anthony Eden and fellow

members of the Eton College Officers’ Training Corps (OTC) left leisurely summer

pursuits behind to join OTC contingents from other public schools at a training

camp in July 1914, though looking back on that interlude shortly before he died,

Eden (Prime Minister between 1955 and 1957) recalled not the glorious weather but

the boys’ ignorance. ‘‘There was,’’ he claimed, ‘‘no conception at all of what the war

would really be like’’ (quoted in Vansittart, 1984, p. 252). Given that he was writing

more than 60 years after that camping trip, Eden’s memory is unlikely to be

accurate in every detail, but it gives a sense of how ill prepared a boy who signed up

to serve in the First World War could be, even if he had been in a succession of

proto-military organisations both in and out of school. Eden’s recollection is also

useful for thinking about the relationship between militarism and boyhood reading,

first because he makes no reference to children’s books as feeding an appetite for

battle (indeed as a group he claims they were not eager for war) but also because he

instead highlights the inadequacy of what these officers in the making were required

to read as part of their training. As an example he names The Defence of Duffer’sDrift (1904) by Major General Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton, a training manual based

on Dunlop Swinton’s experiences in the Boer War. The book proved to be

hopelessly out of date since in the decade between its publication and the outbreak

of the First World War the nature of warfare had changed beyond recognition. The

same would have been true of most writing for boys available at the time. It was

only in stories which speculated about ‘‘the war-to-come’’ that boys would have

found versions of the kind of mechanical devices and new forms of weaponry

encountered on the battlefields of the First World War.4 However, boys who had

access to kinds of reading and ways of thinking about war other than that contained

in popular books, periodicals or training manuals would have been better informed

than Eden and his cohort.

The different reading experiences of boys from different classes and educational

backgrounds is just one of many problems with the claim that fiction for boys was

central to youthful enlistment. Others include the fact that while the stock of

militaristic stories grew during the war, the appetite for enlistment did not. George

Orwell, a schoolboy during the war, recalls that ‘‘Among the very young the pacifist

reaction had set in long before the war ended. To be as slack as you dared on O.T.C.

parades, and take no interest in the war, was considered a mark of enlightenment’’

(Orwell, 2001, p. 244). By 1916 it was no longer possible to rely on boys and young

men being eager to serve: the Military Service Act of January 1916, which heralded

3 Reynolds (2009) argues that even in writing which is not consciously anti-militaristic, attitudes to war

in children’s literature from this period are often more conflicted than is usually suggested.4 For overviews of such stories see Eby (1987) and Clarke (1997).

122 Children’s Literature in Education (2013) 44:120–139

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Conscription, acknowledged that enforced enlistment had become necessary. Other

problems with over-emphasising the role of reading in recruitment include the fact

that then as now many boys would not have been regular readers, and a good

proportion of those who were old enough to enlist (aged 18) would have ceased to

read boys’ fiction.5 Of particular relevance to this discussion is that for a minority,

responses would have been shaped by reading books and periodicals that were very

different from the jingoistic and militaristic reading matter that historians have

associated with enthusiasm for war among the young.

This points to the most important weakness in the theory that boys’ reading was

largely responsible for encouraging them to sign up: it assumes that, irrespective of

who wrote or read them, at the beginning of the twentieth century boys’ stories

conveyed a single message understood in the same way by all readers; that war was an

opportunity for adventure, comradeship, duty and service. Boyhood has never been a

monoculture, however, and the two decades leading up to the First World War were

politically dynamic, seeing many challenges to educational and social orthodoxies,

challenges that spanned all permutations of social class and would have affected

markedly how different groups of boys understood and responded to the materials they

read. Moreover, while the vast majority of books aimed at boys subscribed to the view

that duty and service are noble, attitudes to conflict, the military, and death in battle

were inflected in many different ways in their pages. In other words, in writing for boys

the attitude to war was far less stable than has been suggested, and the messages about

war, patriotism and empire contained in the books, comics and periodicals available to

boys were susceptible to many possible interpretations, including resistant and

subversive readings.6 In many cases such readings would not have been spontaneous

but the result of deliberate and sustained social and intellectual training. This can be

seen by examining organisations, institutions and publications for children that

opposed militarism, promoted pacifism and questioned the validity of the conflict both

before Britain became involved and throughout its duration. Ironically, boy readers

from these groups who later found themselves on the battlefield may have been less

surprised than most at what they found there.

Quakers, Christians and Peace Movements

Working- and lower middle-class boys might have encountered arguments for peace

and internationalism through Christian and left-wing organisations and their

associated publications. Peace activism was not a sudden and short-lived response

to the approaching war but an expression of attitudes deeply ingrained over time in

many segments of society. The First London Peace Conference was held in 1843, and

there were several similar events in the UK and Europe in the decades before the war,

many of which were reported and announced in newspapers and so were on the public

5 It should not be forgotten that some soldiers were reading children’s books and comics in the trenches.

A. S. Byatt discovered when researching The Children’s Book (2009) that some trenches, copses and

redoubts were named after characters in children’s books (Leith, 2009, n.p.).6 Jonathan Rose demonstrates that working-class readers often took different messages from texts from

those who were higher on the social ladder (2001, p. 9).


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radar. There was a Congress of Peace in London in 1891, and the First World War in

fact broke out while a meeting of international pacifists (including several prominent

figures from Britain) was being held in Switzerland. Following this meeting, two

Britons formed the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which gave a more public face and

voice to those who had been peace activists before the war (Brock, 1971, p. 361). One

of the founding members of the Fellowship was the Quaker, Henry Hodgkin, reflecting

the fact that Quakers (members of the Religious Society of Friends) were among those

who were actively involved in the pre-war peace movement. Hodgkin spoke out and

wrote extensively against war, some of his books being aimed specifically at children

of all ages and both sexes. Some other Christians were also pacifists, but since most

Christian churches officially supported the war while the Quakers as an organisation

opposed it, for the purposes of this discussion the Quakers need to be considered

separately. While less than half of one percent of the population at the beginning of the

twentieth century, it should be remembered that Quakers were disproportionately

influential through their roles as bankers, manufacturers, entrepreneurs, philanthro-

pists and reformers.7 Quaker writing for children, then, had the potential to move

beyond its immediate audience through philanthropic activities, gifting and other

kinds of distribution, word of mouth, and sharing, though to date it has been impossible

to locate information about print runs, distribution and other means by which non-

Quaker children might have encountered Quaker-produced books and periodicals. Nor

have I yet been able to establish whether the sixteen Quaker schools functioning in

Britain before and during the First World War regularly stocked such publications.8

No specifically Quaker titles became bestsellers and none is mentioned in standard

histories. What and how Quakers wrote about war is nevertheless interesting since

many of the devices in Quaker children’s literature are also used in later anti-war

children’s literature, suggesting a degree of influence.

One approach used by Quaker writers was to transform familiar stories, genres

and verses into works about peace. This strategy had the advantage of exposing the

extent to which the originals elevated and naturalised war while the stirring

rhythms, phrasing and tunes associated with jingoistic rhetoric and glorifications of

conflict were redeployed to serve peaceful purposes. A good example is ‘‘God Bless

our Native Land,’’ included in Josephine E. Penrose’s Talks about Peace and War(1902). Based on the lyrics to the British national anthem, it overturns the

assumptions that enmity and war are inevitable and that God’s satisfaction with the

British way of doing things is confirmed through victory in battle. Here it is not

enemies who are scattered, confounded and defeated but war itself. God’s true

blessing, it claims, will take the form of friendship with other nations that will bring

an end to war forever. Although it offers a corrective to many of the attitudes in the

original anthem, Penrose’s verse maintains that being against the war does not mean

being unpatriotic. This is a distinction frequently found in anti-military writing for

children, whatever its origins. The volume includes pieces that point to the flawed

7 Statistics supplied by the Religious Society of Friends. As well as playing key roles in abolition,

suffrage and peace movements during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Quakers also established

such cornerstones of British commerce and industry as the Lloyds and Barclays banking groups, the

confectionary manufacturers Cadbury, Fry, Rowntree and Terry, and Clark’s shoes.8 See Quaker Schools in Britain and Ireland (n.d.) for details of these schools.


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logic of imperialism, the benefits of arbitration over aggression, and the costs to

soldiers of what they are required to do in war.

Similar lessons and strategies for teaching children about why war is wrong are

found in The Children’s Treasury of Peace (c 1890). Typical of the kinds of stories

and verse it contains is ‘‘Playing at Soldiers,’’ which is designed not just to

encourage children to identify with those they are taught to regard as ‘‘the enemy,’’

but also to impress upon them the suffering caused by war, including those for

women and children. ‘‘Playing at Soldiers’’ features a group of children who, from

many possible options, decide to play at war (England vs. France, of course):

‘‘Here’s laths for swords and reeds for spears,’’ they cry:

For knapsacks here are bags

And white and scarlet handkerchiefs

With elder sticks for fifes and flutes

We’ll make a glorious noise

And meet the French, and charge them home

And rout them well, my boys. (ll. 18–24)

Clearly the children in the poem are modelled on those who have heard and taken on

board tales of British success and superiority in battle and the associated ideology of

entitlement to the spoils of war, though whether from books or other sources is not

clear. The corrective combines both text and oral telling as they hear it from the lips

of an old soldier who has been watching them play.

The soldier is persuaded to tell them about his time in battle, but far from tales of

glorious victory he tells them of ‘‘sieged towns’’:

Where want and hunger rise

Till the vermin that we loathe the most

Men seek with greedy eyes;

And the horrors of the storming

When the dreadful siege was done

The child upon his mother slain,

The father on the son. (ll. 50–56)

He goes on to describe fields of battle ‘‘Where the wounded lingered long’’ and

bodies are plundered. At this point, ‘‘The charm of war was broken’’ and the

children, sickened, turn away.

There are several similar examples of anti-war writing for children in the library

of the Society of Friends, including an entire ‘‘Olive Leaf’’ series for young readers

that contains some longer and more ethically challenging works.9 Among these are

‘‘The Soldier’s Return’’ (no. 28), which shows how different from the hero’s

welcome promised to a handsome youth who goes off to war is the reaction he

receives when he returns as a mangled veteran. Other publications in the series

focus on the fate of women in war (‘‘The Widow’s Appeal,’’ no. 14) and women’s

9 The Children’s Treasury of Peace is an anthology of pieces presumed to be from this series. None of

the publications is dated, but the contributions appear to have been written some time after the Crimean

War and before the Boer War.


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part in encouraging men to go to war. ‘‘‘Eyes Opened’: A Girl’s Impression of War’’

(no. 5), for instance, begins with the writer looking back to her girlhood and

confessing that through literature and history she learned to think of soldiers and

war as romantic, not noticing the appalling death tolls chalked up by the warriors

and kings she venerated. As a young woman reading the daily reports from the

battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War her thinking changed, and the purpose of the

piece is to share her insight with young readers so that they do not make the same

mistake of condoning and participating in war. Emphasis is on the numbers of

soldiers who die in battle, the suffering of the wounded and the cost to civilians and

settlements. What soldiers endure is set against attitudes at home:

I recognise now with a shudder that these neat figures [100,000 lives lost at

Sebastopol] mean one hundred thousand flesh and blood bodies to suffer pain,

and one hundred thousand immortal souls to be violently hurled into the

presence of their God abroad; but at home we rang joybells and lighted

bonfires. (p. 3)10

Quaker texts represent the earliest examples of pacifist children’s literature

considered here. Though these works would have reached only a very small number

of children, they contributed to and helped shape a body of anti-war writing for the

young designed to impede unthinking acceptance of the attitudes and ideologies

associated with the books, comics and periodicals discussed by Orwell, Fussell and

Oakes. Many were printed and distributed by the numerous local branches of the

International Peace Society (founded 1816), rather like the tract literature of the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As these tended to be cheaply produced using

self-covers few have survived, but a bound volume of miscellaneous materials from

the early twentieth century held by the London School of Economics includes a

story distributed by the Leicester Peace Society.

‘‘The Toy Soldier: A Children’s Peace Story’’ by the otherwise unknown

E. J. Hawley (1902) is interesting both as an example of a subgenre of anti-war

fiction for children that features toy soldiers (discussed in more detail below) and for

the way it privileges direct experience and empathy in order to teach the pacifist

message. In this case the setting is the Boer War, though the message is relevant to

all wars. It features young Bertie, who is staging a battle with his toy soldiers and

innocently delighting in the death of an ‘‘enemy.’’ His aunt, a pacifist, agrees to help

him hold a funeral, but in her role as ‘‘parson’’ she tells a short story:

This man, whom we have just buried, lived in a farmhouse on the veldt. He

was a very good husband and father. All his children loved him very much.

When he went away to the war his little girl threw her arms around his neck

and hugged him tight, and said she hated war because it took father away.

Then her mother cried, and said she hoped father would come back again for,

10 This story may have been modelled on the phenomenally successful Lay Down Your Arms. A RealisticRomance of Modern War, published in 1889 by Austrian pacifist Bertha von Suttner. Von Suttner’s novel

was abridged in 1900 by the editor, social reformer and pacifist W. T. Stead. In its Preface, Stead

specifically refers to the need to tell British children about war since they had lived through a quarter of a

century of peace (p. 2).


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if not, who was to see to the farm, and get food for the children to eat? The

eldest boy, who was named Bertie, after an English man who had been kind to

the farmer, stood very quiet and still, and when his turn came to say ‘‘good-

bye,’’ he clenched his little hand and vowed that if ever he became a man he

would not let people fight. He would make them all be good, and then there

would never be any war at all to take little boys’ fathers away. (p. 6)

Auntie drives home the lesson by saying a prayer for ‘‘all the little children who have

not got any fathers’’ and writing on the tombstone, ‘‘Here Lies Somebody’s Father.’’

Her efforts are not wasted. Before bedtime Bertie asks to disinter his soldier and

restore him to the bosom of his family and, having understood that in real battle

soldiers are real people with real families, declares himself to be against war.

Through stories such as these Quakers and other politically unaffiliated peace

organisations actively promoted pacifism in and beyond their own communities.

They were particularly staunch in their support for those (approximately 16,000)

British subjects who identified themselves as Conscientious Objectors (COs). So too

were the Socialist groups and institutions from which many COs originated and

whose organs held COs up to young readers as role models. Although small in

number, together religious and left-wing groups made their views heard and worked

hard to convince the rising generation of the wasteful folly and wickedness of war.

The Left and Peace

The many Socialist, Communist and Labour Party organisations in existence at the

approach of the First World War provided a more broadly based and politically

motivated anti-militarist constituency than the Quakers. Although their peace

activities found them in the rain on 2nd August 1914, their symbol was the sun—the

rising sun of Socialism—and Socialist children, they hoped, would see its dawn

(Fig. 1). Like the children of Quakers, young Socialists were encouraged to resist

Fig. 1 An image regularly used as a header in The Young Socialist magazine showing the rising sun ofSocialism. Reproduced from the archives of the Working Class Movement Library, Salford, UK


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the view that war is noble or virtuous and to remember its human cost. Indeed, the

ninth of the Ten Commandments learned in Socialist Sunday Schools (SSS) and set

out in A. P. Hazell’s The Red Catechism for Socialist Children (1907) is ‘‘Do not

believe that he who despises other nations and desires to wage wars against them is

a good patriot. War is a remnant of Barbarism. Fight only in defence of your

country’’ (p. 1). The only war worth fighting, Socialist children read, was ‘‘the war

against poverty, against slumdom, against children going to work, when they ought

to be in school: against unemployment, over-work, low wages’’ (The YoungSocialist, 1912, p. 219).

Socialist children’s publications, including The Child’s Socialist Reader (1907)and The Young Socialist (a journal associated with SSSs, which was launched in

1901 and was intended to inspire the rising generation to build a new world founded

on justice and inspired by love), were opposed to the aggressive militarism,

stockpiling of weapons and Germanophobia that began to dominate public discourse

in the run-up to the First World War.11 The 1907 bound volume of The YoungSocialist, for instance, contains regular features on peace including a summary by

‘‘Kalek’’ of what is wrong with war which encapsulates the journal’s position that

while ordinary people die in wars they are not the ones who cause them or benefit

from them. The piece concludes:

You and I, and the others in this country, have no quarrel with people of other

kinds, but on the contrary, we at least look upon them all as brothers and

sisters, and that is one of the grandest things that can be said about

Socialists….We Socialists do not believe in destroying and wasting the things

that take so many hard hours of labour to produce, and you know that cannon

shots soon deface and destroy all the necessary and beautiful things with

which they come in contact. (p. 822)

On the first Sunday of 1913, the SSSs held a National Socialist Peace Service at

which all scholars sang ‘‘A Hymn of Futurity’’ which looks forward to a time

‘‘When all mankind shall be/ Bound in fraternity,’’ and when universal peace will

‘‘Bless all humanity’’ (The Young Socialist, 1913, p. 4).

1913 also saw the launch of the Young Socialist Corps, the magazine’s peace

movement. The banner for the Corps shows children in surprisingly military-

looking uniforms, very similar to those worn by the Boy Scouts. Just as the SSS

made use of many of the trappings of Christianity (children attended Sunday

Schools, sang hymns, learned a Socialist catechism and commandments) so it

borrowed strategically from other successful movements. Its emblem was designed,

as was so much Socialist printed material from this period, by Walter Crane, and is

replete with anti-militarist symbolism. It depicts an ‘‘olive wreath crested with a

civic crown, encircling the cap of freedom, and enclosing the heart of love and life,

over which hovers the dove of peace’’ (p. 219). The motto reads: ‘‘The children of

all lands shall unite for Peace.’’

11 Before war was declared the Independent Labour Party regularly and enthusiastically passed anti-

militarist resolutions at its conferences (Ward, 1998, p. 113).


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Emphasis on other lands was consistent with the internationalist spirit of the

Socialist movement. Their books and periodicals taught young socialists that in order

to be free from the oppressions of capitalism it was necessary to replace national

governments with a world government, to create one body of international law, and

to promote free trade. Together these changes would secure peace because, in the

words of William Morris, ‘‘harm to one would mean harm to all’’ (quoted in TheChild’s Socialist Reader, p. 44). From 1907 the internationalist spirit was fostered at

regular Socialist peace conferences including one held in Basle in 1913 where Keir

Hardie, the first Independent Labour Party MP, observed young Socialists taking part

in a ‘‘great public procession for peace’’ (The Young Socialist, 1913, p. 3). The

Editor’s Page for October 1907 carries a report of the first International Conference

of Young People’s Organisations in Stuttgart, where representatives from 23 nations

gathered to protest ‘‘against the inhuman and diabolic art of military warfare between

nations’’ (p. 120). One of the concerns of that meeting was to resist the militarisation

of children through such things as drill in school and the various corps for training the

young for military service. Recognising that there was merit in some aspects of these

activities, alternatives were found: by 1912 SSSs were able to use specially devised

drills, exercises, dances and games ‘‘free from the taint’’ of the military system (TheYoung Socialist, 1912, p. 219).

Writing for young Socialists took many forms, including verse, hymns, journal

articles and plays and, like the earlier Quaker examples, familiar pieces were

regularly reworked to new ends. Often Socialist writing for children was designed

for public performance, which helped spread the message to others in the

community, not least adults close to the performers. A typical example is actor,

pacifist and reformer Miles Malleson’s short play, Paddly Pools: A Little Fairy Play(1922), frequently performed by SSS children during the war (others of his plays

from the same year were banned as defeatist by the Lord Chamberlain and

confiscated). As its title suggests, Paddly Pools is deeply rooted in what to today’s

eyes seems like a twee fascination with fairies and the ideas of a higher world of

spirits, though at that time of mass bereavement it is perhaps unsurprising that large

parts of the population sought comfort in the hope of other worlds and afterlives.

The play’s particular appeal to SSSs lay in its conviction that, unlike adults, who

had repeatedly proved deaf to promptings towards peace, the young could be taught

to create a more just and equable world, a world that ‘‘might belong to everyone …without any barbed wire or quarrelling’’ (p. 14).

Although critical of the current conflict and the attitudes that brought it into

being, Paddly Pools is respectful of fighting men. The central character is a small

boy called Tony whose father has been killed in action, though Tony’s grandfather

has not yet broken this news to the boy, who prattles on about how kind his father is

to all creatures. Evidently Tony’s father was a reluctant soldier fighting on behalf of

others. In this way Malleson’s play is typical of war-time Socialist publications for

children, for while these never ceased to champion peace, once war was declared

most supported and empathised with the fighting troops, respecting their sacrifice

and hoping that this would be ‘‘the war to end wars.’’ The strongest support in SSSs,

however, went to Conscientious Objectors. Following the introduction of Con-

scription The Young Socialist increasingly relates stories of Socialists who have


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suffered for their beliefs. These were supplemented by detailed accounts of tribunals

of SSS members who were approaching or had just attained military age and ‘‘who

held true to the principles of internationalism, the wrongness of shedding human

blood’’ and the conviction that ‘‘arbitration of the sword’’ is futile (The YoungSocialist, 1916, p. 50). Time and again readers encounter young people like

themselves who have gone to tribunals armed with SSS literature as evidence of

their ‘‘Socialist faith’’ (p. 67). There are also first-hand accounts of how the effects

of Conscription were experienced by readers, usually in the form of letters to

‘‘Flora,’’ editor of the correspondence pages, from child readers about family

members who had been incarcerated for refusing to serve. For example, Annie

Swallow of Honley, near Huddersfield writes:

Dear Flora, – I attend the Honley Socialist Sunday School, which began on

August 4th, 1918. I have had a ‘‘Young Socialist’’ magazine for three years,

and I look forward to it every month. My father has been away for nearly two

years as a Conscientious Objector and he has now come home. It feels a treat, I

can assure you… (The Young Socialist, 1918, p. 118)

Not all correspondents have such happy tales to tell, however. Also included are

contributions of various kinds from former members who, being old enough to be

called up, have declared themselves to be COs. Writing from prison Sidney Warr

(jun), Fred Tait, William Morris Duff and David Guffie among others greet young

readers and underline the importance of the values and ways of thinking they

learned through the SSS. Sidney Warr tells readers that ‘‘The S.S.S. movement can

be proud of the fact that it has helped so many young people to become

Conscientious Objectors to warfare and its causes’’ (The Young Socialist, 1916,

p. 35). While they do not dwell on their hardships, CO contributors make sure these

are understood. William Morris Duff tells of comrades who have ‘‘suffered so much

that they have given in’’ because ‘‘only the strongest can survive all the threats and

tortures which are meted out to those who are fighting (passively) for freedom of

conscience’’ (The Young Socialist, 1916, p. 112). The nature and range of hardships

endured is conveyed in different ways. In a poem called ‘‘Thoughts from a Cell’’

written in June 1916, Fred Tait (at the time sentenced to six months hard labour)

explains that he spends his time trying to imagine the natural world since he is so cut

off from it inside. The poem reassures readers that although he is trapped ‘‘between

four gloomy walls’’ he is ‘‘Without regret or sorrow, or impatience with my lot’’

because ‘‘I dream of lands where LOVE shall reign, and war and hate be not’’ (TheYoung Socialist, October, 1916, front page). His equanimity was sorely tested; news

from the Tyneside Union SSS later that year included the announcement that

Our comrade, Fred Tait, is now undergoing a second term of imprisonment.

He was not allowed at liberty after serving his first term, even for a few days,

but had to go through the mill again without a respite. Never mind, Fred, the

Sunday School is proud of you! (The Young Socialist, 1916, p. 156)

One of the most detailed accounts of life in prison is contained in a letter written

in May 1916 by Comrade Littlefield of Willesden School, an SSS teacher

imprisoned in Felixstowe:


123

Well, it is over three weeks since I left you, and it seems years. Shut up in a

cell with nothing to do, with only the four walls and bare boards, time indeed

passes slowly. I walk round and round my cell sometimes to pass the time. Our

punishment rations are a round and a half of dry bread three times a day. I am

not allowed any books or papers, so don’t know what’s going on in the outside

world….To all good comrades I extend the hand of fellowship. ‘‘Carry on,’’ as

the Army says, and we will save England from the nightmare of unrestricted

militarism which exists in Germany, France, and Russia… (The YoungSocialist, 1916, p. 100)

The conditions he describes are not exaggerated (nor is how he managed to write to the

magazine explained): COs who refused to join non-combatant groups such as

ambulance drivers were often held in solitary confinement, had their diets restricted to

bread and water, and were given prison sentences of up to ten years. Unsurprisingly,

then, contributions to The Young Socialist tend to present COs as martyrs to the cause

of peace and the project to build a global commonwealth of workers.

Official disapprobation was not the only challenge facing pacifists and others

who opposed the war, however. Theories derived from evolutionary biology and

psychology both suggested that human behaviour was predisposed to validate and

even take pleasure in battle and the military life. For example, in ‘‘The Moral

Equivalent to War’’ (1906), psychologist and pacifist William James argued that the

kinds of peace activism and education undertaken by the SSSs were inadequate

because they addressed neither humans’ inherited instinct for aggression nor

provided a substitute for values associated with the theatre of war such as discipline,

fidelity, cohesiveness, heroism and physical health and vigour.12 In James’s view,

current programmes for peace were deficient because they offered no substitute for

going to war. Attempts to address this deficiency are found in several texts and

socialist-inspired programmes for children as well as the quasi-military use of

uniforms, flags, parades and exercises devised for SSS members. Among the best

known of such publications is the 1913 Little Wars: A Game for Boys of TwelveYears to One Hundred and Fifty and for that More Intelligent Sort of Girl Who LikesGames and Books by H. G. Wells. For most of his life Wells combined a broadly

Socialist outlook with a commitment to pacifism, though paradoxically he was

fascinated by war. The book shares James’s conviction that the instinct for war is

inherited. In it Wells puts forward the argument that, since the instinct cannot be

eradicated, humans must find ways to satisfy and redirect it. Little Wars proposes

that the aggressive instincts and thrills of war be assuaged by games of strategy

played out on miniature battlefields populated by toy soldiers.

How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing! Here is a

homeopathic remedy for the imaginative strategist. Here is the premeditation,

the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster—and no smashed

bodies, no shattered fine buildings or devastated country sides, no petty

cruelties, none of that awful universal boredom and embitterment, that

12 Although written for the American Association of International Conciliation, James’s reputation meant

that the piece was widely read outside the USA.


123

tiresome delay or stoppage or embarrassment of every gracious, bold, sweet,

and charming thing, that we who are old enough to remember a real modern

war know to be the reality of belligerence. (p. 97)

Little Wars, as its title indicates, was not written exclusively for children, though

it is almost always classified as a children’s book in catalogues, collections and

criticism. In it, as in its precursor, Floor Games (1911), he regularly addresses

adults, assuming that they will enjoy and benefit from playing war games and that

through the games they will quickly come to see the inevitable consequences of war.

Since even ‘‘military gentleman’’ of all ranks ‘‘presently get into difficulties and

confusions when making Little Wars,’’ Wells maintains that his game exposes ‘‘just

what a blundering thing Great War must be’’ (p. 99).

Despite his energetic defence of pacifism in the run-up to the war, once war was

declared Wells immediately adjusted his pacifist stance. In The War that will EndWar (1914) he justified the war on the grounds that in order to end war for all time it

was imperative to defeat German militarism. This curious double-logic did not

mean that he abandoned his commitment to the ideal of peace, however. In ‘‘Master

Anthony and the Zeppelin’’ (1917), the only piece he wrote exclusively for children,

Wells shows the eponymous Master Anthony (‘‘the nicest boy in the world’’ and

presumably named after Wells’s son Anthony) teaching a zeppelin not to drop

bombs but to make a nest and raise babies (Fig. 2). The short story, illustrated with

Fig. 2 A page from H.G. Wells’s ‘‘Master Anthony and the Zeppelin’’ (1917), text and images all byWells. Reproduced with permission of A.P. Watt ltd on behalf of the Literary Executors of the Estate ofH.G. Wells


123

simple drawings by the author, was the opening contribution in a hastily assembled

fund-raising volume of 1917 produced Josepha (1917). As a prefacing letter

explains, its aim was ‘‘to help the babies of Brave Belgium.’’

Wells may have moderated his view, but others remained staunchly anti-war and

the publication of pacifist literature by Socialist or Socialist-sympathising publishers

was unabated in the war years. A book highly reminiscent of Little Wars in the way

it uses toys and play to highlight the consequences of war for soldiers and the

limitations of those who direct activities on the battlefield is Harry Golding’s 1915

War in Dollyland (A Book and a Game). Little Wars uses photographs of Wells

himself crawling about among his soldiers; photographs also illustrate War inDollyland, though here images and text show toy soldiers caught up in a war about

nothing, being brave, saving the day and clearing up messes caused by an

inadequate, warmongering Sergeant Major. When reporting to his buffoon of a

General, for instance, he deliberately looks through the wrong end of his telescope

to make everything smaller:

‘‘Very tiny force, sir,’’ he reported. ‘‘They’ll run directly.’’

‘‘Then forward!’’ cried the General, and waved his arms so violently that he

nearly fell off his horse again. (p. 12)

As well as caricaturing those in charge, War in Dollyland shows spies being shot at

dawn (Fig. 3), the bodies of soldiers who have died from the effects of shock and

exposure or who are injured, and a monument that clearly fails to compensate for

the sacrifices of those it memorialises.

War in Dollyland attacks war, but tacitly assumes it was ever thus and ever will

be. William James, by contrast, shared the Socialist belief that a combination of

education and changes to social policy and organisation could make war redundant.

Where Socialists argued that peace would be established and sustained by sharing

resources and stopping the exploitation of workers, James maintained that peace

was only possible if young males’ aggressive urges could be satisfied off the

battlefield. To this end he proposed replacing training in fighting with training in

service, creating a new kind of army comprised of adolescent boys who were

compelled to serve their countries for a designated period. During this time boys

would live according to many of the regulations and regimes of military life, but

Fig. 3 Execution of a toysoldier from Harry Golding’sWar in Dollyland (1915).�British Library Board,12804.df.56


123

instead of fighting they would undertake some of the physically demanding and

necessary but undervalued jobs in any country such as mining, building the

infrastructure and farming. Similar understanding of the need to satisfy and redirect

youthful aggression is found in the ethos and pedagogy associated with the

progressive schools that began to appear in Britain from the end of the nineteenth

century. Such schools represent my final example of groups that generated sustained

and significant anti-war campaigns aimed at the young and capable of affecting their

responses both to conflict and to juvenile war fiction.

Progressive Schools and Germanophilia

Like the Quakers, whose schools also offered an alternative to state and traditional

public school curricula and regimes, pupils in progressive schools represented a tiny

but influential part of society, including printers, publishers and policy makers.13

Two of the earliest of Britain’s progressive schools, Abbotsholme School in

Derbyshire (founded 1889) and King Alfred School in Hampstead, London

(founded 1898), are used as case studies for this section.14

At Abbotsholme boys were taught woodwork, building and farming (Fig. 4) to

prepare for taking on roles of responsibility and to channel what William James

referred to as their ‘‘innate pugnacity and love of glory’’ (1906, n.p.). Despite the

different social strata from which children were drawn, peace, pacifism, equality

and internationalism were as central to the raison d’etre of both schools as they

were to the SSSs. The 1911–1912 number of The Abbotsholmian, the Abbotsholme

school magazine, for example, reproduces Geoffrey Huntington’s ‘‘International

Hymn,’’ sent to the current Headmaster by the American philanthropist, Andrew

Carnegie, to whom ‘‘the grand Peace-Song’’ was dedicated (The Abbotsholmian,

1911–1912, p. 3).15 Echoing Josephine Penrose’s ‘‘God Bless Our Native Land’’ it

uses the shared tune of ‘‘God Save the King’’/‘‘America’’ to eulogise the friendship

between Britain and the USA, which enables ‘‘victories of peace’’ so swords can be

sheathed while ‘‘God above/ Guard[s] the dear lands we love.’’

At Abbotsholme and King Alfred School pupils came into contact with socialist,

pacifist and internationalist ideas that would have affected their thinking about war

and responses to writing which featured heroes and battles. Additionally pupils at

both schools would have had reason for being uneasy about war specifically with

Germany, since, like most progressive schools, they were founded on German

13 Early pupils from Abbotsholme, Bootham and King Alfred School included those from the Curwen

family (The Curwen Press), the architect Edwin Landseer Lutyens’s children, members of the Rowntree

family (Joseph Rowntree was a noted philanthropist; his son Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree was a

respected sociological researcher), Lytton Strachey, and members of the Unwin family (Sir Stanley

Unwin founded the publishing house George Allen & Unwin in 1914). In total, only a few hundred boys

would have passed through these schools before war broke out.14 Most other well-known progressive schools were established between 1921 (Summerhill) and 1933

(Gordonstoun).15 Carnegie, the item reports, was ‘‘the first man in the history of the world to give money to found an

Arsenal of Peace’’ (The Abbotsholmian, 1911–1912, p. 3).


123

pedagogic principles and so had close ties with that country. Many numbers of TheAbbotsholmian refer to exchanges between Abbotsholme and its companion schools

in Germany. The 1908–1909 number, for instance, includes a comparison of

‘‘School Life at a German Gymnasium and Abbotsholme.’’ The chief difference

between the schools is identified as attitudes to masters: at the Gymnasium a master

was an ‘‘awe-inspiring ‘Herr Professor,’ before whom we were expected to feel like

worms of the dust’’ while the relationship between pupils and teachers at

Abbotsholme was more equal and informal (p. 25). Nevertheless, the student’s

account of his experience concludes with the statement that Germans are ‘‘true and

trusted friends’’ (p. 3). The complicated position in relation to Germany of Britain’s

progressive school pupils at the start of the First World War is movingly captured in

an obituary published in the December 1916 number of The King Alfred SchoolMagazine, the official journal of King Alfred School.16

Maurice Basden (Lieut. Royal Flying Corps.)K.A.S., 1904–1908Maurice Basden was at King Alfred School for four years [….] in the Spring

of 1914 he went to Germany […] where he was treated with marked kindness

because he was an Englishman. He left Hamburg for the summer holiday in

England one week before war was declared, without the slightest suspicion of

approaching events, and with every hope of returning there in September [….]

He was killed on May 20th, 1916, in aerial combat….

His great desire, if he had lived through the war, was to return to Germany the

day after peace was declared. (The King Alfred Magazine (1917), p. 182)

Fig. 4 Boys from Abbotsholme School working in the garden circa 1900. Reproduced courtesy ofAbbotsholme School

16 Admiration for Germany was not confined to that country’s art and culture or, indeed, anti-militarism.

The 1908–1909 number of The Abbotsholmian, for instance, includes an encomium of the ‘‘German

Military System’’ which is described as ‘‘a marvellous organisation’’ to which the British Army and Royal

Navy are compared unfavourably (p. 3). Emer O’Sullivan (1990) provides a relevant discussion of

Germanophilia.


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Like many of those who founded and managed the new progressive schools, King

Alfred’s charismatic and influential Headmaster, John Russell, had spent time in and

admired Germany and refused to renounce his strongly positive feelings about that

country even when Britain and Germany were at war and pupils like Maurice

Basden were dying in battle. In ‘‘The School of War,’’ a public address to young

people that Russell gave in London in November 1914, just weeks after war was

declared and when ‘‘war fever’’ was at a peak, he testified to his affection for

Germany, German culture and the German people, including German soldiers, who,

he noted, were dying as pointlessly and as horrifically as British troops. He went on

to characterise war as murder—exactly as he had done in the years approaching the

First World War and as he continued to do for the duration. The title of this article is

taken from Russell’s Headmaster’s report of 1916 in which he lists the names of old

boys and girls who have engaged in some kind of war service and those who have

died and/or been honoured on the battlefield. While proud that former pupils are

serving their country, he concludes the report by saying, ‘‘It is impossible for me to

feel more strongly than I have always felt that war, in the absolute sense, is wrong, a

prostitution alike of matter and spirit’’ (n.p.). Throughout the war John Russell was

true to his conviction that peace would be won not on the battlefield but in the

classroom, where knowledge of other cultures and more equitable ways of

managing society could be taught.

There is little evidence in the archives of either school that pupils were

encouraged to read pro-German or anti-militaristic works; indeed, little emphasis

appears to have been placed on reading and the books in the school libraries were

often not specifically children’s books but classics or books about nature. TheAbbotsholmian and The Abbotsholme School Magazine occasionally carried features

on the Library, noting in particular recently received donations (there was no book

budget) and books that were popular with different sets. In 1906 popular authors

included G. A. Henty, Gordon Stables, Ernest Seton Thompson, H. Rider Haggard,

Alexander Dumas, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Dickens. In 1907 the two

books ‘‘which seem[ed] to be most popular with the upper sets’’ were Baroness

Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel and its sequel, I will Repay (Abbotsholmian, 1906,

pp. 113–114; The Abbotsholme School Magazine, 1907, p. 13).17 Some sense of the

kinds of materials pupils were reading can also be gleaned from their writing. The

King Alfred School archives contain an uninterrupted series of the King AlfredSchool Magazine, (1917) constituting samples of student work from a given year.

From these it is possible to see that as the war progressed events on both the Home

and the Western Fronts began to be reflected in the selections. The volume for 1916

includes a poem about the British scaring off a cowardly Kaiser, a drawing of an air

ship and a short story about ‘‘How Smith Won the VC,’’ but the school ethos is also

still evident. For example, a story set during the Civil War begins with the

pronouncement, ‘‘John hated boys’ games, swords and war & he missed his Father

who was rampageous and sports-loving though he always had a kind word for his

timid son’’ (Rocke, 1917, p. 85). The timid son proves to be a hero in the King

17 Similar evidence is contained in Bootham (1909–1949) and The Observer (1889–1949), the journals of

Bootham School, York, a Quaker foundation.


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Alfred mould when, having pondered the condition of a recently captured prisoner

(‘‘has he any little boys like me?’’), he secretly releases him. Before leaving, the

prisoner shows his nobility by first ensuring that the boy will not get into trouble and

then promising to come to his aid if ever he can. The act of compassion is vindicated

when the boy’s father in turn becomes a prisoner and is spared. Although not a story

of peace, it does hold to the values of empathy, humanity, and doing good for the

sake of good, which were core values of King Alfred School under John Russell.

This story, which reinflects familiar genres such as the historical novel and the war

story, illustrates how what was being read could be less important than how it was

being read and understood.

Maurice Basden’s obituary, the substance of which is reinforced by a letter from

the young man’s mother in the same number of The King Alfred School Magazine, is

a powerful reminder that the fact that a boy enlisted at a very young age did not mean

that he had absorbed militaristic, nationalistic or anti-German messages from boys’

fiction or, indeed, from any other source. Few pupils from either Abbotsholme or

King Alfred School could have enlisted unthinkingly or participated enthusiastically

in battle against a reviled enemy in accordance with representations in popular

literature. The founding aims of King Alfred’s included providing a ‘‘civilised

education’’ steeped in ‘‘the knowledge by which one may do joyous and effective

work in the world’’ and a sense of social responsibility that recognised the ‘‘full

claims of the other self: equal rights in the quest for happiness, the equal value to all

of liberty,’’ underpinned by a willingness ‘‘to sacrifice, and caring more than

anything else for justice’’ (Prospectus, 1907). Together these might support a boy’s

sense that he was called upon to serve his country and so result in his enlisting at a

young age, but the motivation behind the action must often have been far from

straightforwardly militaristic or adventure-seeking.

The positive attitude towards Germans, Germany and German culture was as

ingrained at Abbotsholme as it was at King Alfred. Founded on the broadly Socialist

philosophy of Edward Carpenter, its Headmaster, Cecil Reddie, worked for an

intellectual and cultural alliance between Britain and Germany throughout his time in

charge of the school, which spanned both World Wars. One old Abbotsholmian

recalled that at the peak of the First World War ‘‘Germany was extolled, although at

that very time German bullets were tearing Old Abbotsholmians to death’’ (Giesbers,

1970, p. 39). The war represented everything which Abbotsholme stood against, and

for its pupils and old boys it must have seemed a kind of civil war since there were

always a number of German pupils in the school. When war was declared the German

boys returned home, and some enlisted in the German army. The fact that both sets of

boys were Old Abbotsholmians is acknowledged in the war memorial that dominates

the School chapel; there the names of boys who died on both sides of the conflict are

inscribed. British and German pupils had a shared history and shared values which

included supporting internationalism and opposing war. Very few could have held

the simplistic mindset ascribed to them in Kitchener’s Lost Boys. Deciding to fight in

defence of one’s country when background, education and belief make war

repugnant is quite different from being seduced by tales about war-time adventures

and exploits which risk glorious sacrificial death.


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Like religious and political organisations and publications, progressive schools

such as Abbotsholme and King Alfred represent another of the largely unnoticed

filters that would have impeded direct assimilation of propaganda and thrilling war-

time adventures by boy readers and resulted in profound ethical and emotional

dilemmas for young men as they decided whether or not to enlist. It must be

remembered that, compared to the numbers of pupils who attended state and public

schools, SSS scholars and pupils at Quaker and progressive schools made up a

minute fraction of the boys and young men eligible to serve in the First World War.

Even taking into account the ripple effect of their influence on peers, siblings,

neighbours and parents—enlarged for some older ‘‘old boys’’ through privileged

access to influential bodies, government and the media—their views and experi-

ences are well outside the mainstream. Nevertheless, just as studies have shown that

working-class readers often responded to the same texts differently from middle-

and upper-class readers, so these examples provide a salient reminder that there

were other divisions in and across society that would also have affected readers’

responses (Humphreys, 1981; Davin, 1996; Rose, 2001). The approaching centenary

of the First World War is stimulating research into all aspects of that cataclysm and

turning up new documents and information that are helping to reshape understand-

ing of how it began, how it was experienced and its immediate aftermath. My own

research into children’s reading in this period continues in the search for additional

evidence that will improve understanding of the relationship between children’s

literature and youthful participation in the war. For now it seems fair to conclude

that historians have tended to be rather too ready to assume a commonality of

response among the generation of boys and young men who were of or approaching

fighting age at the start of the war. In doing so they may have misrepresented and

undervalued the motivation of at least a proportion of those who fought, and often

died, during the First World War.

Acknowledgments Several people have helped me in the preparation of this article. Josef Keith from the

Library at Friends House, London, advised me on pacifist Quaker writing for children, and Dr. Madelyn

Travis made a preliminary examination of some Quaker materials. Tara Sutton and her colleagues at the

Working Class Movement Library and staff at the People’s History Museum were helpful and hospitable.

Andy Simons of the British Library generously shared his expertise on pacifism and literature. Brian

Rance, Archivist of King Alfred School, Natalie Wood, Archivist-Librarian at Abbotsholme School, and

Jenny Woodland, Archivist and Trust Administrator at Bootham School welcomed me into their archives,

gave thoughtful advice and fact-checked. Finally, Jane Rosen of the Imperial War Museum has been a

regular sounding board, advisor and resource as this project has developed.

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http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/25/as-byatt-interview

http://archive.org/details/warthatwillendwa00welluoft

Documents

“A Prostitution Alike of Matter and Spirit”: Anti-War Discourses in Children’s Literature and Childhood Culture Before and During World War I