Projecting Guilt and Shame in Wartime: How British State and Philanthropy Lectured on the Benefits of Retraining Schemes for Disabled Veteran Workers, 1914–1919

Abstract

The First World War induced a fundamental change in Britain’s treatment of disabled ex-servicemen. The newly created Ministry of Pensions established legal pension rights and acknowledged accountability for the medical treatment and professional rehabilitation of disabled veterans. This chapter demonstrates that with an emotional culture of sympathy for war disabled victims growing, as a result of a close relationship between industry, charities, and the state, newspaper editors and picture-house proprietors generously placed their services at the disposal of the government to bring that suffering directly into the civilian community. Ever-larger audiences and readers became emotionally attached to the disabled ex-servicemen’s plight and felt a collective responsibility for their transition back into civil and domestic life, not just leaving philanthropy to the social leaders.

The First World War induced a fundamental change in Britain’s treatment of disabled ex-servicemen. The newly created Ministry of Pensions established legal pension rights and acknowledged accountability for the medical treatment and professional rehabilitation of disabled veterans. During the war, what it meant to endure disability and to suffer as a result of war service underwent a radical transformation. Being incapacitated from returning to one’s own trade or occupation and rendered unfit for work became unacceptable. Thus the disabled ex-service community became objects of compassion. Consequently, the moral norms and social customs around war disability also changed. Rehabilitation and charitable fundraising became something to feel for rather than something to be taught or learnt in a bureaucratic way. With an emotional culture of sympathy for war disabled victims growing, as a result of a close relationship between industry, charities, and the state, newspaper editors and picture-house proprietors generously placed their services at the disposal of the government to bring that suffering directly into the civilian community. Ever-larger audiences and readers became emotionally attached to the disabled ex-servicemen’s plight and felt a collective responsibility for their transition back into civil and domestic life, not just leaving philanthropy to the social leaders.

Emotions have been considered fundamental to humanitarian narratives and practices since their inception. Historians, for instance, speak of ‘the guilt and shame’ (Leys 2007), and ‘arousing sympathy’ (Wilson and Brown 2009, 10), and the ‘irresistible compassion’ that so moved people in modern times; they rethought ideas of vulnerability and sought to eradicate human hardship. In this sense, scholars hint that the history of humanitarianism can be conceived of through an increasingly organised ethic of ‘compassion across boundaries’ (Barnett 2011; Gill 2010). Yet while emotions are seen to pervade humanitarian sentiments, motivations, and actions, we know surprisingly little about how the emotions and collective bodily affects felt in response to experiencing and, in particular, to witnessing the suffering of disabled Great War ex-servicemen have functioned to shape and support the rise of humanitarianism in Britain.

With a renewed impetus given by many varied philanthropic initiatives, a new form of action to overcome helplessness through projection media and narratives in the press served as a collective body of humanitarian sensibility to bring the British nation together and shape the role of emotions in aiding the victims of war and their sufferings (Crossland 2018). In these narratives and practices, active compassion differed from the passive compassion that referred to viewing disasters from faraway and doing very little to help other than sympathise and pity. In 1914, The British Red Cross Society asked the public to donate money to what would soon come to be known as the ‘Compassionate Fund’ to financially support war hospitals. This was an act of compassion, in other words, which was visible in the public domain and sponsored and maintained by the generosity of the public to aid the recovery of sick and wounded ex-service patients (1917g, 11). In thus organising a domestic humanitarian campaign, the Society fostered the development of a modern network by facilitating a form of collective participation in caregiving associated with war hospitals: intrinsically forging kinship bonds between wounded ex-servicemen and those who set about helping them (Bate 2020). This space, I argue, created the conditions for the government to appeal to a ‘humanitarian sensibility’ because the ‘victims’ were war veterans and thus associated with a military conflict. Were they domestic famine victims or the urban poor, it might have been otherwise. In redeploying local cinemas and theatres to their own ends, government experimented with the cinematograph as a propaganda tool. In this sense, the moving image became a powerful instrument in that it facilitated the emergence of a modern, networked, sense of participation that, in turn, the Pensions Ministry was hopeful that they could use to prompt (and ideally, enact) compassion of movie-going audiences.

Philanthropy and voluntary action provided Britain with a reservoir of social capital on which it was able to draw and acted as an integrating network of guilt between social classes that helped initiate changes in the relationship between ‘top-down’ philanthropy and ‘bottom-up’ mutual aid, and this trend continued into the post-war period. Fundraising was vital to allow the government to carry out its work, which included money and gifts in kind received from the public—through a variety of funds, collections, and donations—to supply services and machinery in Britain and in the conflict areas abroad. The innovations in caregiving carried out during the Great War were either initially or entirely by voluntary organisations rather than the government. As Deborah Cohen, for example, has noted, ‘philanthropists ran most initiatives for the long-term treatment or rehabilitation of wounded servicemen, from the country’s largest artificial limb-fitting centre at Roehampton to the comprehensive program for the war blinded administered through St. Dunstan’s Hostel’ (2001, 7). Voluntarism brought about reconciliation between disabled veterans and the public for whom they had suffered (Cohen 2001, 7).

A fundamental change both in the nature of philanthropy and in the role of the state seems to have taken place specifically because of the war. Understood here is that imagery of suffering can be instrumental in communicating humanitarian meanings and enabling collective feelings about those ‘suffering amongst’ the British public as opposed to distant disasters. For the first time in British history, philanthropy experienced a cultivated change which involved the whole of society over an extended period and under the emotional stimulus of wartime, developing from the preserve of the well-to-do and religious leaders, as had been the case, into a mass voluntary activity with patriotic meanings.

The emotional dimensions of witnessing suffering through images remain essential to contemporary humanitarianism (Barnett and Weiss 2011; Käpylä and Kennedy 2014). By drawing attention to war and suffering, in often graphic and emotionally distressing ways, images help to summon necessary humanitarian actions (Hutchison 2019). Some scholars even go as far as to suggest that images are fundamental to summoning intervention or aid. Denis Kennedy (2009), for example, contends that images have become the ‘public face’ of humanitarianism, ‘images of suffering are a means towards a set of humanitarian ends’. Similarly, Michael Barnett and Thomas Weiss claim that ‘[t]he more graphic the image and the more it screams innocent victim, the more effective it will be in mobilising compassion, action, and money’ (2011, 119). Though there were moves in the direction of state control of charitable activity in support of the war effort, the role of photographic and moving images in the government’s domestic humanitarian campaign in wartime Britain brings to the forefront the compassion that was rallied for the disabled war veteran and also just how much definitions of domestic compassion can change from one humanitarian context to the next within the same culture and in the same historical time period.

Emotions associated with humanitarian and fundraising imagery are often seen to present a significant ‘humanitarian dilemma’ (Kennedy 2009; Vestergaard 2008). The types of images that most effectively solicit solidarity in times of human need and garner the most humanitarian assistance are also those that enact what is termed a ‘politics of pity’ (Arendt 1990).¹ A politics of pity suggests that while audiences feel grief and deep sympathy for the suffering before them, they still remain quietly and safely detached. As Hannah Arendt argues, pity meant ‘to be sorry without being touched in the flesh’ (Arendt cited in Naylor 2001). In this sense, pity is perceived to maintain a distance or ‘passive compassion’ between viewer and victim and, in turn, fosters viewers’ incapacity or unwillingness to engage in a deeper, potentially more reflective form of empathic identification or understanding. Sufferers are framed not as resilient actors but as vulnerable and disempowered victims, waiting, passively and powerless, for the arrival of aid, instead of actively helping themselves and their communities. In other words, suffering individuals are thereby disempowered and appropriated through visual practices; bodies in pain become objects of viewers’ pity. Significant here is that the images most likely to mobilise humanitarianism are also those that focus on victims’ vulnerability and dependence.

Dudley Myers, secretary to the Employment Bureau, posited the logic of self-help inherent to disabled ex-servicemen as an alternative to the view of the country being saddled with thousands of untrained idle pensioners. The Ministry’s self-help practice can be seen as a palliative photographic treatment of ‘their ignorance of their rights’ as pensioners, working to heal the wounds of a maimed body politic and serving ‘lectures as a means of education’ as a prophylaxis against their future dependence on state benefits and charity (Myers 1918, 258). Through what Emma Hutchison (2019) describes as an explicit plea for consideration, whereby an emotional appeal is made to audiences through a victimhood that increasingly necessitates compassionate feeling, here the disabled ex-service community was presented to themselves as ‘shameful’ sufferers to encourage them to overcome their perceived helplessness, disadvantage, and reliance. For Myers, it was clear that lectures on ‘the subject of pension provisions, training, employment’ garnered more publicity and schooled the disabled ex-servicemen on ‘everything that touches their future welfare and interests’. Myers’ vision for educational lectures as an effective way to prepare a soon-to-be-enfranchised ex-service population for rejoining civil and domestic life was a complex intersecting politics of labour, capital, nation, and local identity where ‘the facilities and the machinery at their disposal for training’ had to be ‘properly visualised and handled’, and he urged ‘the desirability of lectures being given in all hospitals to men about to pass their Invaliding Boards’ (Myers 1918, 259). The Ministry’s projection services and distributing practices thus addressed itself to the crisis of disabled ex-servicemen from the perspective of a post-war economy.

More controversially, this chapter will show that during the Great War, the concept of compassion, whether it intended to describe a physical war disability and a veteran stripped of his ‘use value’ and social class and to be pitied or was intended as a metaphor considered potentially disruptive of social order by the government and ruling classes, served political and organisational purposes for the British government. In this sense, compassion performed a key role in the debates on the nature of a domestic humanitarian campaign, its effects on communities, their emotions, and their bodies. Responding to the rehabilitation of disabled veterans’ ‘use value’ became a preoccupation of the government and its Ministries. Compassion, as a concept, portrayed and evoked different emotions but it also performed specific roles. It explained and justified state failure and alone could evoke the relief of the war victims’ individual injuries. As a form of action to overcome helplessness and state reliance, active compassion performed a key role to explain or justify caregiving aid, shape or condition responses to genuinely observable hardship and economic disadvantage, and allow social reintegration and reemployment to be defined by embodied emotions.

Moving the British Public Towards Guilt

Between 1917 and 1919, a series of Cinema Talks titled ‘Recalled to Life’ were presented by the travelogue lantern lecturer Arthur B. Malden, which combined films with slides illustrating all aspects of the rehabilitation methods and benefits of training schemes overseen by the Ministry. Malden’s movements across Britain were facilitated by the transport technology of the railway, which brought more locations within the government’s reach and allowed the Ministry to move the lecturer and heavy boxes of glass slides and films. Malden addressed audiences in a vast range of provincial towns and gained fulsome reviews in local papers. The development of a network of Cinema Talks was closely entangled with a range of other technologies and infrastructures. These included a wide range of linked endeavours with charitable associations and local communities serving to supplement government pensions and allowances through the polymorphic activities of voluntary workers, War Pensions Committees, technical institutes, and local business.

Figure 3.1 depicts one such training workshop for disabled soldier-patients established at the Regent Street Polytechnic in Westminster circa 1918 (see Fig. 3.1). Malden delivered his first lecture on behalf of the Ministry at the Kingston Public Library on Monday 10 December 1917, under the auspices of the Surrey War Pensions Committee, followed by reviews in the Surrey Advertiser and County Times. One local reporter told readers, ‘a series of photographs showing various training centres’ and ‘disabled men that were being or had been trained in occupations’ demonstrated how veterans could earn a comfortable living, ‘over and above the pensions to which their sacrifices in the war had entitled them’ (1917a, 4). The trades being taught in the shops were those that the authorities saw as providing long-term employment and a decent wage and thus ultimately spurred Malden along new inventive trajectories of persuasion. The job opportunities embodied by the carefully orchestrated slides and films are founded on a jointly patriotic sense of civic rights, whereby ‘the training programmes were not considered to be complete until a man had actually been placed in a job’.² This narrative thus opened up the opportunity to envision a classroom environment where disabled soldiers could feel and be productive and useful, where they ‘received their full pension, and this remained permanent after they had got their final certificate’ (1917d, 4). Malden’s touring lectures also served to counter the idea among many disabled ex-servicemen and the public that they would never again be able to work or earn their living when they were discharged from the army and thus constituted a performance that worked to emphasise their role as productive citizens in the community.

Fig. 3.1

Group of disabled ex-servicemen training as cinematograph operators at the Regent Street Polytechnic, Westminster, circa 1918. Photographer unknown. From an album of photographs of disabled ex-servicemen receiving training in various workshops in London, 1918–29. RSP 9/49. (Reproduced by kind permission of the University of Westminster Archive)

With the introduction of film projection as a new screen technology from 1895 onwards, the relationship between lantern and cinematograph was characterised as continuity in practice (see Fig. 3.2).³ The moving image was quickly absorbed into a fluid interchange of shared practices and musical performance networks. These integrated media technologies thus built the relationship of the public with the moving image and the immersive nature of the spectacle. Following a talk delivered at the Cheltenham Hippodrome on 12 December 1917, one reporter wrote in the Gloucestershire Echo, ‘[t]he tragic sadness of seeing groups and processions of men who have lost a leg or arm, or in some cases both legs, was in a measure relived by the motion films exhibiting the great advance, if not perfection, of artificial surgery to date’ (1917d, 2). The Ministry valued moving pictures for their inherent mechanistic worth over lantern slides, the films were screened only after the slides had been projected and thus ‘saved for last’ as the most effective part of the spectacle. The value of film within this narrative lay in the way it was used as animated versions of the previous still images, which increased the impression of ‘progress’ with ex-servicemen’s regained bodily function by bringing them (back) to life. While lantern slides were useful, when it came to questions over the men’s independence to ‘earn a good livelihood’, a film had more of an emotional use value because the moving image was better at moving audiences. Disabled ex-service workers learning new job skills thus relied on cinematography in making them fit to take a position in civil and industrial life (1918g, 4).

Fig. 3.2

‘Wrench’ series lanterns, cinematographs, and accessories (1908): 167. EXEBD 36621/3. (Reproduced by permission of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter)

In the nineteenth century, European churches adopted the projection lantern as a means of education and propaganda, and these shows became a small sub-industry in the charity sector. With slide projections being performed in various entertainment and educational contexts and attracting targeted audiences, the network of religious and missionary services was well prepared for the cinematograph (Kember 2009, 2019). Besides the Salvation Army, which was based on Methodist traditions, there had been several large welfare and charity organisations in Anglican church networks engaged in poor relief, youth work, and the temperance movement. The Church Army, founded in 1882, had introduced musical bands and lantern slides into Anglican services to return poorer groups to the fold of the church.⁴ In 1892 the Church Army had established a Lantern Department and produced around a thousand slides per week and lending out around 1.5 million slides for projection each year (Loiperdinger 2014). Starting the same year, the Church Army began using horse-drawn mission vans in rural areas, travelling from village to village to proclaim the Gospel with the aid of the lantern. By 1898, a fleet of sixty-five vans were in service (Gärtner 2008; Kessler and Lenk 2019). The United Kingdom Band of Hope Union, devoted to complete abstinence from alcohol, counted 3 million school pupils in their Sunday schools in Britain even after the introduction of religious instruction in schools. Band of Hope and the Sunday School Union favoured using lantern slides to make their performances attractive for their target audiences.⁵

In these illustrated lectures offered by charities, educational associations, and the labour movement, a speaker’s oral commentary articulated the emotional experience of the projected images. The lecturer achieved this by explaining or commenting on the projected views. The large charity organisations had professional lecturers with their own repertoires to perform their illustrated lectures. Most lantern shows, commercial as well as persuasive, were performed by individual travelling town hall showmen (Kember et al. 2012). These shows were literally theatrical performances and so they had to appeal to commonly accepted notions of emotions. Charity and welfare organisations in Britain engaged professional lecturers who earned their livings with lantern shows. This demand for slides for lecturers by non-commercial religious, educational, and political organisations constituted a relevant, if not predominant, sector of the market.

The use of projection media by welfare organisations was a mass phenomenon in Britain. For charity and welfare associations, the value of projection services came not only in instructing the poor and preparing beneficial and affordable entertainment and education, but also the affective practices through which they captured the conditions of the poor and offered responses to poverty. The overall effect of all these addresses to the social question was to promote it as a matter for public concern. Presenting a question or dilemma to an audience was an invitation to all members of the group or community, to act collectively and participate in the issues presented. While there were other methods of doing this, the projection services occupied its own place in this context, using spectacle to impress serious points on its audience. Hugo Münsterberg, writing in The Photoplay in 1916, noted that the sensorial properties of moving images ‘has taken a stronger hold of us or, as we may say by way of metaphor, it has come into the centre of our consciousness. […] Our ideas and feelings and impulses group themselves around the intended object’ (Langdale 2002, 36–37). Thus the audience in turn projected itself into the social problems that were being presented to them, stimulating debates around social prevention in the context of healthcare and wellbeing in the public domain and facilitating communal responsibility.

Activities of social intervention like the ongoing temperance campaigns fed directly into the Ministry of Pensions’ projection services and were an established network to combine beneficial entertainment with propaganda and emotionally engage the community and local businesses in their potential role as humanitarian actors. Yet the Ministry’s rehabilitative project was embarked upon at the very moment when ideals about convalescing ex-servicemen had never appeared more drastically divorced from the smooth surface of propaganda. The fraught question of disabled ex-servicemen’s future employment had been raised publicly by the Ministry, which formally announced the career benefits of retraining schemes to local industry, while promising the British public to place these ‘discharged soldiers […] in remunerative occupations’ (1917b). Such conciliatory political sentiments strongly informed the British Red Cross Society’s and Ministry of Pensions’ vision. By promoting the British relief initiatives on the aftercare of disabled ex-servicemen—those caregiving narratives and practices and retraining and employment schemes that stimulated active compassion towards the sick and wounded victims of the war—the Red Cross and the Ministry locates public sympathy at the heart of rehabilitating these soldiers and returning them to their communities as fully functioning citizens.

While these educational lectures illustrated by lantern slides and films transformed the ex-service pensioner into a legal and economic object of compassion, the performative function had to circulate across popular networks to build partnerships with local relief associations, and the element of entertainment had to be present. Numerous reviews, while declaring that the overall purpose was instructive, noted the attractions and theatrics of animated photography, music, and song as key features of the programme. For those audiences who reacted the most intensely, the popularity of entertainment spaces like the cinema, theatre, and public assembly hall made it easier to connect with and immerse community spirit. The local community’s participation was explicitly desired, and cultivated, especially from company managers and employers. The Ministry’s specific aim was to generate local solutions to restoration by implementing regional help to secure jobs for disabled and discharged men. Crucially, it was not the disabled men themselves who were seeking help, but the government. As Major Robert Mitchell, the London-based Regent Street Polytechnic’s Director and Adviser of Training for the Ministry, put it in 1918, ‘it is certain that thousands of men, who at present do not realise it, will at the end of the war find themselves in a very precarious position unless they can acquire new trades’ (Mitchell 1918, 326). Such guilt and shame, and even blame, for help—moulded, ultimately, into one that imagined discharged and disabled ex-servicemen overcoming their war disabilities and reliance on the state or private philanthropy and actively learning new trades and industrial skills—was symptomatic of an underlying anxiety that viewed the physical and economic rebuilding of British veterans as tantamount to the aftercare of the nation itself (Mitchell 1918, 325).

What this shows, then, is that the government wanted disabled ex-servicemen to look forward. ‘The young, happy-go-lucky man, said, “Well, here I can earn 47s. a week right away, and there, in training, only 27s.; I’ll take the 47s.” But that ready-to-hand £2 or £3 a week job would not last forever, while the training would fit him for the better and permanent jobs’ (1917a, 4). In other words, the Ministry’s performance created a palliative political shame through multimedia form, within a context of a ‘localised’ embarrassment towards war disability, unemployment, and dependency on state support and charity that simultaneously worked to undermine the government’s ideals.

Proving Worthy of Compassion

The government assigned the local community a crucial role in dealing with the physical, financial, and emotional needs of its citizen soldiers on the alleged basis of ‘a chance to return to a life of industrial activity, able in spite of his disablement, whatever it may be, to earn a comfortable livelihood’ (Mitchell 1919, 400). Through the appointment of trade advisory committees to safeguard the interests of employers and works, small firms and businesses involved with the Ministry’s local committees contributed to shaping a capitalist conception of compassion for war disabled victims. However, the government’s campaign of compassion did not work. Feelings of hostility between the disabled ex-service community and the government became more pronounced towards the end of the war. Because the government left the subsequent hiring of these disabled ex-servicemen to the initiative of civilian employers, not only did the public begin to feel anger, agitation, frustration, and antagonism towards state authorities and the British Army for relinquishing their duties and laying responsibility on to wider society but pensioners also felt disgusted for being blocked from pursuing their goal of full citizenship, for the injustice of a lack of compensation, betrayal with unfair pensions, and fearful of state abandonment and being swept out of the labour market (1918e, 3).

One of the main motives of the British Red Cross Society’s and Ministry of Pensions’ narratives and practices was grounded in a political conception of the British public’s guilt, a guilt that could be aroused and ripened into being via the implementation of relief funds and retraining programmes and increasingly inclusive local initiatives. The ‘regained self-reliant citizenship’ that the Ministry alludes to was not a firm pensionable category but stood instead for a more nebulous political aspiration for mobilising support and, ultimately, playing on the public’s empathy and sense of shared responsibility (1917d, 4). This is very revealing of what pity and compassion meant at the time and in this context. It would seem that these emotions were solicited by a community who could not help itself, who needed the help of others, notably the government, who had no qualms about asking for help, as shown from the recruitment drives for volunteers at the beginning of the war in Kitchener’s call. Thus political ideals exerted considerable pressure on governmental and charitable thinking in Britain to keep the Local War Pensions Committees running. The confirmation of relief efforts worked to reinforce politicians’ and philanthropists’ humanitarian goals. Repeatedly, ‘blue boys’ in convalescence emerged in photography as a means of spreading the news of the Red Cross’ and Ministry of Pensions’ good caregiving schemes. The camera lent significant support to extending the scope of their recuperative projects, which sought to concretise a sense of artificial kinship based on prescriptive altruism (Winter 1995, 30).

On 3 January 1918, at the Congregational Hall, Guildford, councillor Shawcross reiterated the functioning and commitments of the Ministry’s programme. He reminded Guildford residents of their responsibility to repay the ex-servicemen for the sacrifices they had made. ‘Although seriously injured, the patient was anxious to return to his work’ and ‘those men who were disabled and unable to resume their own employment were going to be trained to be useful members of the community in some other direction’ (1917e, 1 and 12; 1917f, 1). Malden validated Shawcross’ claim, taking the audience on an ‘imaginary tour through the different workshops where disabled soldiers were being trained’ and pointing out the trades ‘which they were likely to be able to follow’ (1917e, 1 and 12; 1917f, 1). The Ministry took the industrial economy of wartime Britain as a model and focused on stimulating rapid growth locally, encouraging small outfits and larger businesses to start up or develop.

On 24 January 1918, at the Rink Theatre in Wrexham, Lady Trevor, president of the Denbighshire Red Cross, ‘announced amid applause that a disabled man belonging to Wrexham had been trained as a cinema operator, and was now employed at the Rink Theatre, and would operate the machine for the purposes of the lecture’ (1918f, 2). Among the films exhibited were those depicting the training offered at Roehampton, Brighton, Lord Roberts’ workshops, and St Dunstan’s, together with slides showing Acton Park in Wrexham, where local soldiers were being taught the industry of diamond cutting and polishing. Malden detailed the various trades to which the men were trained. He declared that it was not sufficient merely to give a man a chance but that every effort should be made to give him an opportunity to once more take up his position in civil and industrial life. There was no use of training a man if he were not to get employment; the employment question must always be kept in the forefront. Indicative of the rigid social classes in British society, those with no social status were to be pitied and helped. Also, it is revealing of how British society would not tolerate individuals who did not conform to the standards of a given class—for instance, the working classes must work, and the government was perhaps more appealing to this than to anybody’s putative ‘compassion’.

Jobs for All

Much like a government-led venture project, the Ministry began promoting local business initiatives using the slides and films. The production Malden proposed consisted of cheap commodities like boot and shoe making or leather and fancy goods manufacturing to help kick start the economy. While the government were not concerned with rehabilitating the upper classes that had served as officials and were not expected to work, they were clearly attempting to control the working and poorer classes. Central to this particular element of humanitarian compassion was that it was reserved for the poor and had to be rallied, whereas other classes were simply entitled to the support. Large numbers of disabled veteran workers were being directed to domestic industries, and the use of hand tools was promoted for the economy against the large-scale factories employing workers in munitions manufacturing or operating steam-driven machinery. In many regions in Britain, factory work was a minority occupation and handicrafts and cottage industries persisted alongside manufacture. Industrial regrowth in Britain thus hinged on a broad base of small- and middle-sized business concerns. The technologies of lantern, photography, and cinematography were transformative of production relations without requiring huge investments in motive power or large concentrations of labour. The Ministry focused in particular on the trades serving local markets, promoting initiatives which would expand these markets through making a number of commodities faster and cheaper than international rivals. Malden regularly showed pictures depicting men making fancy leather bags, an industry which:

[B]efore the war was almost entirely confined to Austria and Germany. There was no reason why it should ever go back. If the ladies asked for a cheap bag the importer was obliged to get it from Germany or Austria, but if they were prepared to give a little more to allow of these men getting a decent wage, they would get a bag of English leather and manufacture. (1918g, 4)

The trades or firms that the government advocated were intended to operate in localised and specialised markets, whereby personal contacts with companies and businesses were essential, especially for obtaining financial support and job placements.

In February 1918, Malden gave a series of afternoon and evening talks in Scotland and a weeklong tour of Wales. Other bookings soon followed, and by the end of the month, he had visited Portsmouth, Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, and Torquay in the southwest of England. On 17 February, at the Picture House in Portsmouth, one of Malden’s main points of attention was the generous support of the local community. ‘It did one’s heart good to see the way in which the men had “tackled to” and carried on with the trades in which they were being instructed’. Malden showered praise on Portsmouth in terms of moral and material care, as well as fundraising, and thanked ‘the proprietors of the Picture House for the use of the building’. He hoped that these ‘lectures would encourage not only the men to do the work, but to further the efforts by assisting with money and in other ways to get more of these workshops established’ (1918b, 2).

Guilt, Shame, and Blame

There were less favourable opinions on the training schemes than this, however. When a large audience of mainly discharged ex-servicemen gathered at the City Palace Electric Theatre in Exeter, on Tuesday 26 February 1918, pensioners raised dissatisfaction with the government’s outfitting of artificial limbs and the training centres being offered (1918a, 1). So emotional was the outpouring of response in Exeter that one disabled veteran in the audience declared the training schemes ‘exploitation’, in the sense that war pensioners were being forced to sell their labour power to the government for less than the full value of the commodities they produced with their labour (Wolff 1999). ‘The training given at Roehampton and other centres’, Mr C. Oswald declared, ‘was not adequate to enable a man to pick up a new trade thoroughly’. Oswald was not alone in this opinion and other protestors ‘followed in the same strain’ (1918c, 4). What someone like Oswald felt as dissatisfaction towards the government, however, showed that war veterans shared much the same notions of class and their own ‘use value’ in society. In response to Oswald’s outcry, Malden, for instance, described how ‘the training at Roehampton was of a preparatory character before the men were sent to a [regional] training centre’ (1918c, 4). One disabled soldier in the audience credited his own training and ‘at once recognised his likeness in one of the film scenes of the Roehampton workshop. He is Mr. C. W. Jenkins, operator at the Empire Theatre’, a rival venue in the city, ‘a post which he holds as a result of the scheme, which he enthusiastically applauds’ (1918h, 1). However, if the government’s judgement differed in value from what the disabled ex-service community was noting, their message of Roehampton and the other flagship workshops was largely the same: they were merely clearing houses, it also rested with local committees to continue the Ministry’s work. In other words, the local authorities were expected to carry out, at their discretion, the job placements which were promised to disabled British veterans at the time of their discharge from the army (Roberts 1917, 15).

In March 1918, Malden travelled back to Scotland to address a crowded Sunday evening audience at the Pavillion Theatre in the town of Hawick in the southeast Uplands. As the audience assembled, ‘selections were played by the Pavillion orchestra’, opening ‘with the singing of the hymn, “our god, our help in ages past”, led by Hawick saxhorn band’ (1918d, 1). In the course of the evening, ‘at an interval, and at the close of Mr Malden’s address’, several ‘musical numbers were rendered, and were much appreciated, the audience insisting on encores’. Malden brought with him the official Ministry films supplied for the Roxburghshire region. He was ‘glad to be able to tell them that he had brought with him a new film which had never been exhibited before, showing what was being done in the south-eastern district of Scotland’, where two Hawick men were being trained (1918d, 1). Hawick’s manufacturing plants and mills were ‘thrown on the screen, and were followed with the most profound interest’. A combination of ‘agriculture and craft skills’ that showcased ‘the best of the new, symbolised by democracy and industry, and the traditional, as expressed in rural village life’ (Mitchell 1918, 325). Crucially, the interrelated performativity of images, hymns, classical music, and the national anthem stimulated in conjunction with the luxury knitwear industry shaped religious ideas and strong feelings of regional belonging. The proprietor of the Pavillion Theatre understood that a fitting selection of acoustic accompaniments to Malden’s live attraction would intensify loyalties to local business. Rather, the prayers and group singing characterised a remediation of earlier variety entertainments and media forms, which the community obviously knew from religious services and prayer meetings. The entire congregation, experiencing the confession of faith actively and seeming to initiate it, contributed to the creation of a collective feeling of Christian cause towards the disabled ex-servicemen’s needs and instruction on financial, social, and moral support.

Anger, Frustration, and Shortcomings in State Provision

By the end of 1918, training classes slowly started being established in various regional institutions across Britain. In October and November 1918 with visits to Horsham, Southwick, and Bognor Regis in the south and a return to large urban centres in the Midlands and the north of England, for example, Malden addressed ever-larger audiences to recruit the growing numbers of discharged disabled ex-servicemen on to new courses. In November 1918, Robert Jones received from the War Office ‘an unlimited sum for maintenance’ of workshops established at sixteen regional orthopaedic facilities, which by the end of the year were caring for nearly 15,000 disabled ex-servicemen (Jones 1918, 42). From the perspective of government officials, this cluster of localised orthopaedic centres and associated businesses was an essential component in stimulating rapid economic growth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, the scheme of training began to generate dissatisfaction amongst Trade Union members against the government’s motives and spread to the public and the disabled ex-service community. The main factor contributed to the loss in popularity for the scheme was the low wages and the haste with which the trainees passed through the courses. While some ‘men demanded a minimum wage of £3 per week irrespective of allowances and pensions’, others were anxious and concerned as they found themselves ‘out of work and drawing unemployment benefit from the state’ following their three-month preliminary training (1919a, 4).

What is particularly interesting in these comments—which, in turn, can help us understand the pronounced change in public mood for the national scheme more generally—is the recognition that confidence and donations began to wane. The main point of contention was not whether disabled ex-servicemen could be placed with local employers on completion of a course. Rather, as both these examples indicate, some ex-servicemen felt disappointed with, and even discouraged by, temporary training courses which did not equip them with the necessary skills to secure a trade job at all. Delivering an evening talk in Coventry on 4 February 1919, Malden found himself on the defence. First, he apologised to his audience ‘for not being able to show cinematograph films’ (1919b, 2). While Coventry was one of the few places where one of the picture palaces had not allowed the use of their hall for an hour for the films to be shown, Malden pressed ahead with his message that disabled ex-servicemen who did not take advantage of the training courses being offered were effectively remaining unskilled workers:

[W]hile […] unskilled jobs and high paid work in factories may seem attractive, and required no training at all, after the war, when the employer’s requirements would alter, and able-bodied and un-pensioned soldiers would return home and seek work, those disabled would find themselves pushed out of the workplace and unemployed. (1919c, 2)

One veteran in the audience rebuked Malden’s claim, expressing his anger towards the government for having ‘to make a quarterly return as to the amount of his pension to his department’ during training. A rebuttal came swiftly. One Ministry representative advised the frustrated veteran to communicate with his Trade Union: that matter was ‘too difficult to be discussed at that meeting’ (1919c, 2). ‘No matter how earnest the local committee were in their efforts to remedy his difficulty’, the veteran was told, ‘it was also his own duty, through his Union, to bring pressure on the government to support discharged and disabled men like him in a proper way’ (1919c, 2). Through both the projection and discussion of disabled veteran workers in broader economic terms, the Ministry cast blame by presenting ex-servicemen who did not take up training as not only unskilled and unemployable but also helpless and lacking control while ascribing a hegemonic masculinity and greater emotional wellbeing to retrained veterans who earned their own living. While this rhetoric emphasised the usefulness of disabled ex-servicemen to society, it also shows how compassion can be exploited in power struggles, especially asymmetrical relations.

In March 1919, a large number of disabled ex-servicemen convened at La Scala Photo-Playhouse in Aberdeen. Malden showcased local courses in agriculture, horticulture, forestry, bee and poultry keeping and reported over 1000 recruits for boot and shoe making and repair. Five hundred men had already passed through the course and had obtained suitable jobs (Mitchell 1919, 396).⁶ Malden screened two films that afternoon, ‘the first film illustrated treatment at one of the large orthopaedic hospitals at St Helen’s, Lancashire’. The second film exhibited men learning new trades, including ‘motor mechanics, fancy leather work, poultry farming, diamond cutting and finishing, hand-loom weaving, carpentry, commercial classes’ (1919a, 4). This was the last lecture to be delivered by Malden, and the Ministry’s talks trickled out of the pages of the local press, the responsibility for training disabled British ex-servicemen was transferred to the Ministry of Labour in June 1919, in a further attempt to streamline Ministry policy and reduce the department’s hectic workload (Reznick 2004, 129; Kowalsky 2007a, 98–99). Two months later marked the onset of strike action, as disabled ex-servicemen in training across Britain demanded a minimum of £3 per week, irrespective of allowances and pensions (1919b, 4). The King’s National Roll scheme exemplifies this dilemma. The King’s National Roll was launched in September 1919, a British state programme which encouraged employers to ensure at least five per cent of their workforce were ex-servicemen in receipt of a disability pension. This indicates, then, that voluntarism and the incorporation of societal schemes to reintegrate the disabled Great War veteran remained central to Britain’s rehabilitation philosophy and, consequently, employers who participated were included on a national ‘Roll of Honour’ and able to use the King’s Seal in correspondence. Previous research into the scheme highlights its worthiness as almost 24,000 employers participated in helping 259,000 disabled ex-servicemen attain employment in 1921 (Kowalsky 2007b, 575). The newspaper reports on the Cinema Talks offer an intriguing example of a national sense of duty and appreciation to the disabled ex-service community for the sacrifices they had made for their country. The need for emotional and moral support, in addition to financial assistance, was never so intense as when faced with the ethos of self-sacrifice in wartime Britain, people could do no more than turn to their faith in their search for meaning to the heroic soldier of valour who gave his life for the defence and the victory of the British Army, in which narrow, immediate self-interest was subordinated to the needs of the war, and the good of the country (Bourke 1999, 25). This notion of sacrifice also had religious, and particularly Catholic, connotations.

Conclusion

Pointing to the problematic undersides of humanitarian politics is not to devalue the humanitarian impulse and political imperative altogether. Rather, it is to emphasise that while the state failed to fully provide for its disabled ex-service community, the very strength of British voluntary action ensured that philanthropic organisations reintegrated the country’s veterans. As I have argued, the British government presented a return to industry and the workforce as a symbol of physical and moral recovery and the means by which the disabled would regain their place in society and reassert their hegemonic masculinity. By considering cinemas and theatres as a modern network that enabled a collective participation in caregiving associated with a domestic humanitarian campaign thus illuminates how the rehabilitation and policy of disabled ex-servicemen’s rights as workers in which the Ministry immersed itself also laid blame directly on to the disabled ex-service community if they failed to help themselves and were unwilling to take up training and new job opportunities. Crucially, not over-regulating charitable organisations during the war was a strength rather than a weakness and supported civil society in Britain (Grant 2014, 165). Deborah Cohen rejects the idea of ex-servicemen being alienated from post-war society in Britain. Hers is a more nuanced argument that the failure of the state to provide for disabled veterans may have led to disillusion with regard to politicians, but it actually bound them more closely to the rest of society where ‘British philanthropists brokered a lasting peace between a public eager to prove its gratitude to soldiers and a conservative ex-service movement looking for signs that the country cared’ (Cohen 2001, 7–8). Furthermore, this demonstrates that shoddy treatment at the hands of the state did not shake disabled veterans’ belief that the public had appreciated their sacrifices.

Voluntarism shielded the British state from the consequences of its unpopular policies, binding veterans closer to their society (Cohen 2001, 8). In 1938 the British Treasury and Ministry of Pensions discussed the possibility of transferring financial responsibility of British ex-servicemen on to the British taxpayer: with no change in the pension infrastructure, the Ministry estimated that the cost of expenditure with regard to Great War pensioners would continue well into the second half of the twentieth century. The case of the government’s domestic humanitarian campaign can then be understood as a practice that was pulling towards the diversification of compassion from one context to the next.