The image of happy volunteers marching off to war, cheered on by patriotic crowds who believed their loved ones would be home by Christmas, is vivid and, as recent historiography has shown, largely wrong. This tightly focused volume, which analyzes popular reaction to the outbreak of the First World War from July to December 1914, is a valuable contribution to the study of this period. It seeks to replace the image of happy crowds with one of grimly determined individuals electing to do their duty in the context of grave and acknowledged danger, an image captured by the somber photograph reproduced in the book showing British troops departing Sutton Coldfield station in Birmingham in 1914, sent off by a serious though smiling crowd waving handkerchiefs rather than flags (161).
As Pennell shows, there is more here than simply “keeping calm and carrying on,” as the now-ubiquitous slogan (dating from 1939 but not actually used during World War II) would have it. Pennell argues persuasively for the emergence of a new moral community, not generated by propaganda, but instead developing organically among ordinary people. This moral community was defined by an emphasis on equality and on a shared requirement to make sacrifices. Pennell insists that this community was enforced by social pressure rather than the official repression of dissent: “Under war conditions Britain became a self-regulating society where members of the public understood the rules and were willing to enforce them” (83). This is a fascinating argument and one that deserves to be considered and tested in future social histories of Britain in wartime.
A Kingdom United effectively narrates multiple aspects of the early wartime experience. After describing initial reactions to the declaration of war, the book proceeds thematically. It delineates the evolving demonization of Germans after the outbreak of the war, making use of telling Punch cartoons to illustrate the rumormongering and spy mania of these weeks. Invasion fears and the experiences of bombardment on the northeast coast in December form the core of a chapter on the encounter with violence. Pennell also describes interactions with Belgian refugees here, nicely capturing the tensions of hosting a traumatized foreign population after the initial wave of sympathy had worn off. Here as elsewhere, personal stories are vividly deployed in ways that convey the texture of individual experience.
The close analysis of local volunteering patterns demonstrates the virtues of a finely grained approach to chronology and causation. Pennell argues persuasively that volunteering was at its height during the moments of greatest danger rather than during the moments of carefree enthusiasm. This conclusion is based on detailed weekly evidence about recruitment read against diaries and letters that offer personal explanations for the decision to join up—or to wait. This section also showcases the author's ability to make highly localized arguments that, taken together, allow Pennell to suggest that rates of recruitment varied more by industry and according to an urban/rural divide than by region, including in the case of Ireland (148). A final chapter on “settling into war” (198) describes the new landscape of war that had emerged by winter, from trenches dug by the coast to family arrangements altered by separation. Pennell demonstrates convincingly that the notion of the war being over by Christmas was not widespread at this time; instead, most people seemed prepared for a lengthy dislocation.
The decision to include all of the United Kingdom, including Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, is admirable. The book is relatively slow to reflect the diversity of the whole United Kingdom; assertions of uniformity are sometimes followed by mostly English examples, and regional differences are not always fully developed. Although Pennell argues that Irish reactions were sufficiently similar to those in Britain to justify the claim that the kingdom was “genuinely united” in 1914 (3), Ireland is covered in a discrete chapter. There, Pennell makes the case that the stakes of the war were uniquely high for the Irish, whose future national determination seemed to hang in the balance; she speculates that a short war might have left the constitutional nationalists under John Redmond in power and fundamentally altered the course of Anglo-Irish relations (197).
The book draws on a rich body of evidence: an appendix offers biographical details on the “441 diarists, correspondents, authors, poets, and elite figures” featured in this work (8). Pennell is attentive to language: she notes, for example, the prevalence of words like “thunderbolt,” “whirlwind,” and “bombshell” in contemporaries' reactions to the immediate outbreak of war, reflecting their sense of surprise (36). Well-chosen quotations and short personal narratives work well to re-create a sense of individual experience. At times it would have been helpful to have an intermediate level of analysis between the individual and the national; it can be difficult to get a sense of how different categories of people, or different ideological groupings, responded to the outbreak of war, because the book tends to layer individual voices into an overall impression of homogeneity (171). Nevertheless, the book is a pleasure to read, making eloquent use of often-overlooked sources.
The narrow time frame allows Pennell to delve deeply into and to make new arguments about popular reactions. It would be interesting to see what this approach would yield if applied to the longer course of the war, particularly to developments such as the introduction of conscription, the 1916 Rising in Ireland, and the vast and mounting casualties. A Kingdom United is an important and absorbing book with much to say to scholars of wartime Britain.
