Abstract
During World War I, over one hundred troopships carried nearly one hundred thousand New Zealand soldiers to battlefields in Europe and the Middle East. Crowded and confined, and characterised by regulation and a lack of privacy, these were the spaces where men negotiated their transition from civilian to soldier. This essay focuses on the magazines produced and circulated during and subsequent to the voyages. These documents provided distraction, entertainment, and an outlet for creativity; chronicled—and later served as mementoes of—the journey; offered a sanctioned opportunity to challenge authority; helped bind the men into a community that would outlast the voyage; and, when sent home to friends and family, communicated the men’s experiences to those beyond the ship. In the content and the materiality of such magazines, this essay argues, the space of the ocean and of the troopship are acutely present, as is the wider context of war.
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Notes
- 1.
The Tahiti Times 1 (20 October 1914), 1, available at: https://dunedin.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/201209 [accessed 2 March 2021]. The Tahiti Times was actually a four-page publication, but the fourth page in this first issue as well as subsequent issues remained empty. It was printed on one sheet of paper, both sides, then folded. This size, approximately modern A5, and the simplicity of the publication, indicate that the printing process was kept as basic as possible and the onboard printing capacity limited. It also indicates that a lack of content rather than lack of equipment resulted in an empty fourth page.
- 2.
‘Main Body of NZEF sails to war’, available at: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/main-body-nzef-sails-war (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 7 September 2020 [accessed 4 March 2021].
- 3.
For a descriptive study of Australian troopship magazines during World War I, see David Kent, From Trench and Troopship: The Experience of the Australian Imperial Force, 1914-1919 (Alexandria, NSW: Hale & Iremonger, 1999). Kent also notes that ‘During the First World War virtually every troopship leaving Australia published a shipboard newspaper or magazine. Indeed, it was almost unimaginable that a voyage would be completed without at least one issue of a newssheet of gossip and jokes’ (11).
- 4.
A useful overview of New Zealand’s involvement in World War I is offered by Damien Fenton, New Zealand and the First World War: 1914-1919 (Auckland: Penguin, 2013).
- 5.
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 157.
- 6.
For a very useful summary of the scholarly debates and criticism, as well as the continuing influence of Fussell’s book, in the fields of literary and cultural history of World War I, see Kate McLoughlin, ‘The Great War and Modern Memory’, Essays in Criticism 64.4 (2014), 436–458.
- 7.
Shafquad Towheed and Edmund G. C. King, ‘Introduction’, in Shafquad Towheed and Edmund G. C. King (eds), Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1–25 (1).
- 8.
Martyn Lyons, Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 157. This point relates not only to the nature of print culture in France, but to print in the Western world more generally.
- 9.
Fussell, The Great War, 158.
- 10.
On soldiers as readers, in addition to Fussell, see, for instance, Amanda Laugesen, ‘Boredom is the Enemy’: The Intellectual and Imaginative Lives of Australian Soldiers in the Great War and Beyond (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012); Edmund G. C. King, ‘“A Priceless Book to Have Out Here”: Soldiers Reading Shakespeare in the First World War’, Shakespeare 10.3 (2014), 230–244; and a number of chapters in Towheed and King (eds), Reading and the First World War.
- 11.
Scholarship on the literature of World War I is vast. Useful starting points are Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout (eds), The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); Jane Potter, Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War 1914-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Randall Stevenson, Literature & the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). On publishing see, for instance, Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed (eds), Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
- 12.
Martyn Lyons, Reading Culture and Writing Practices in Nineteenth-Century France (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2008), 186. See also Martyn Lyons, ‘French Soldiers and Their Correspondence: Towards a History of Writing Practices in the First World War’, French History 17.1 (2003), 79–95; Martha Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters: The Epistolary Tradition in France During World War I’, American Historical Review 108.5 (2003), 1338–61; and Martha Hanna, ‘War Letters: Communication between Front and Home Front’, 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel et al., issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15463/ie1418.10362
- 13.
See Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War 1914-1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France during the First World War, trans. Helen McPhail (Oxford: Berg, 1992 [orig. 1986]); J. G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Robert L. Nelson, ‘Soldier Newspapers: A Useful Source in the Social and Cultural History of the First World War and Beyond’, War in History 17.2 (2010), 167–191; Robert L. Nelson, German Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Graham Seal, The Soldiers’ Press: Trench Journals in the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
- 14.
See Ryan McLane, ‘Influenza on the SS Tahiti’, available at: https://ww100.govt.nz/influenza-on-the-ss-tahiti [accessed 28 February 2021].
- 15.
See for instance, Johanna de Schmidt, ‘“This strange little floating world of ours”: Shipboard Periodicals and Community-building in the “Global” Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Global History 11.2 (2016), 229-50; Johanna Beamish, Im Transit auf dem Ozean: Schiffszeitungen als Dokumente globaler Verbindungen im 19. Jahrhundert (Fankfurt, Campus 2018); Roland Wenzlhuemer and Michael Oppermann, ‘Ship Newspapers and Passenger Life Aboard Transoceanic Steamships in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Transcultural Studies 1 (2012), 77–121; Martyn Lyons, ‘Ships’ Newspapers and the Graphic Universe Afloat in the Nineteenth Century’, Script & Print 42.1 (2018), 5–25; David H. Stam and Deidre C. Stam, ‘Bending Time: The Function of Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Polar Naval Expeditions’, Victorian Periodicals Review 41.4 (2008), 301–22; and Erica Behrisch Elce, ‘Labour, Leisure, and the Arctic Shipboard Periodical, c. 1820-1852’, Victorian Periodical Review 46.3 (2013), 346–67. The Dunedin Public Library, New Zealand, holds within its collection of troopship magazines a small number of publications produced on New Zealand military transports during the Second South African War.
- 16.
‘Troopship Collection’, Dunedin Public Library, https://dunedin.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/199660 [accessed 28 February 2021]. After donation to the library, most of the troopship magazines have been bound into hard-cover volumes arranged by transport number, combining all issues produced during one voyage into one volume. The collection amounts to more than 180 different publications; other New Zealand depositories also hold additional titles. Unless stated otherwise, the troopship magazines cited in this essay have been accessed through the Dunedin Public Library online collection.
- 17.
A few exceptions exist: for instance, the first issue of The Oilsheet, published on board the SS Tahiti in December 1916, ran to 16 pages, and The Periscope, printed on board SS Maunganui in November 1915, was 22 pages long.
- 18.
The Tahiti Herald is one of a small number of titles produced on voyages returning to New Zealand. This essay focuses on outward-bound journeys only.
- 19.
This is the case, for example, with The Devil’s Own Rag, published on board the SS Willochra in June 1916.
- 20.
For example, Ocean Chronicle 1, no. 1 (14 November 1914) is typed in blue and red; and all four pages of the type-written Casey Court, Grand New Year Number (1 January 1915) have smudges, suggesting the paper got wet during the production process.
- 21.
Letter by G. Elpis, 22 February 1921, inserted in the later bound volume of The Maunganui Mirror and Ocean Chronicle, Dunedin Public Library McNab Collection, ZT MAU.
- 22.
The Arrower 1, no. 5 (15 November 1914), 3; no. 6 (24 November 1914), 1 and 3.
- 23.
The Kiwi 1, no. 1 (2 June 1917), 1.
- 24.
The editorial of the souvenir number of The Kiwi, printed at Cape Town in July 1917, proclaimed that the magazine was ‘following a precedent established on troopships almost from the commencement of the war, and time has proved that each successive paper has outrivalled its predecessor in style and brightness, but apart from this we feel safe in assuming that our souvenir copy, if not better than previous publications, is at least equal to the best’ (1).
- 25.
The Deep Sea Roll (in which is incorporated “The Ground Swell”), 29 August 1916, 1.
- 26.
The Kia Tupato 1 (25 November 1917), 1.
- 27.
For example, the titles of The Link, produced on SS Ulimaroa in March 1918, and The Kit-Bag, produced on board SS Maunganui in July 1916, were decided upon as a result of onboard competitions.
- 28.
Bubbles from the Thir(s)ty Sevenths was produced on board SS Maunganui in May 1918; The Waitemata Wobbler was produced in August 1917.
- 29.
Te Kiwi was the magazine on board SS Waitemata in February 1917; The Moa was produced on board SS Aparima in March 1917; The Huia on board SS Athenic. All three transports carried members of the Māori Contingent.
- 30.
Jane Stafford and Mark Williams, Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872-1914 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006), 10–12.
- 31.
Johanna Beamish has similarly observed this phenomenon with regard to emigrant vessels in the 1880s. As she notes, these rival publications reflect processes both of inclusion and exclusion. De Schmidt, ‘This little floating world of ours’, 244.
- 32.
The Maunganui Mirror was issued on 9 November 1914; the Ocean Chronicler only five days later, on 14 November 1914. A letter by the donor of The Maunganui Mirror preserved with the publication in the Dunedin Public Library collection states that only six copies were produced.
- 33.
The Pip, 1.
- 34.
The first issue of D3 was printed by W. F. Forster & Co. in Albany, Western Australia, and its second issue by The Times of Ceylon Company, Colombo. The souvenir number of The Blast was printed after the voyage by John Long Publishers, London, in 1917.
- 35.
D3 1, no. 1 (16 February 1916), 1.
- 36.
D3 1, no. 2 (no date [February 1916]), 2.
- 37.
D3 1, no. 2 (no date [February 1916]), 5.
- 38.
David Kent also notes this function, writing that Australian troopship magazines ‘provided an outlet for expression of those minor grievances and irritations which always occur in a closed community’ (From Trench and Troopship, 19); he is specifically referring to complaints about food on board.
- 39.
For a useful discussion of various forms of transit facilitated by and taking place on board ship, see Martin Dusinberre and Roland Wenzlhuemer, ‘Editorial-Being in Transit. Ships and Global Incompatibilities’, Journal of Global History 11 (2016), 155–162.
- 40.
The Digger (March 1918), 15, produced on SS Ulimaroa.
- 41.
The Huia 1, no. 1 (February 1918), 10.
- 42.
The Ionicall (1918), 6–7, relating to the voyage of SS Ionic.
- 43.
Les Depeches de la War 1 (17 December 1914), 3, on board SS Willochra.
- 44.
Glyn Harper (ed.), Letters from Gallipoli: New Zealand Soldiers Write Home (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2011), 42.
- 45.
Neil Frances and Doug King (eds), Things Have Been Pretty Lively: The Great War Diary of Melve King (Masterton: Wairarapa Archives with Fraser Books, 2008), 18.
- 46.
Frances and King (eds), Things Have Been Pretty Lively, 29.
- 47.
John Crawford (ed.), No Better Death: The Great War Diaries and Letters of William G. Malone (Auckland: Reed Publishing, 2005), 67; Glyn Harper (ed.), Letters from Gallipoli, 42.
- 48.
The Digger (March 1918), hard copy, Dunedin Public Library McNab Collection, ZT DIG; The Navua Nosebag 1, no. 2 (4 November 1915), 3; The Warrimoo Wash-Out (October 1915), 1.
- 49.
The Pakeha (October 1916), 4.
- 50.
Examples include The Digger (August 1918), The Pakeha (October 1916) and Our Grins (no date [April 1917]). The page from The Lytteltonik reproduced as Fig. 9.4 is representative of such autograph pages, even if this magazine was produced on a return voyage to New Zealand transporting wounded and discharged soldiers. Autograph pages were equally common in magazines produced on outbound voyages.
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Dusinberre, Martin, and Roland Wenzlhuemer, ‘Editorial - Being in Transit. Ships and Global Incompatibilities’, Journal of Global History 11 (2016), 155–162
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de Schmidt, Johanna, ‘“This strange little floating world of ours”: Shipboard Periodicals and Community-building in the “Global” Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Global History 11.2 (2016), 229–50
Elce, Erica Behrisch, ‘Labour, Leisure, and the Arctic Shipboard Periodical, c. 1820–1852’, Victorian Periodical Review 46.3 (2013), 346–67
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Liebich, S. (2021). Communities of Print at Sea and Beyond: Troopship Magazines in World War I. In: Liebich, S., Publicover, L. (eds) Shipboard Literary Cultures. Maritime Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85339-6_9
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