Abstract
The month of August 1914 was a frightening and exciting time for British people. War between the continental powers erupted on 3 August, a bank-holiday Monday, and in London crowds of citizens, many of whom had been prevented from taking trips to coastal resorts due to suspended rail services, thronged the streets of Whitehall hoping to catch a glimpse of the government ministers who were deciding the fate of the nation. Later in the day, and again the following evening when Britain’s entry into the war had become certain, crowds of tens of thousands gathered outside Buckingham Palace to serenade King George V with choruses of the national anthem.1 The presence of such animated and apparently cheerful crowds in the capital was interpreted both during the conflict and much later as a sign of mass enthusiasm for the war. Niall Ferguson, Adrian Gregory and others have challenged this interpretation and argued that the behaviour of the London crowds does not in itself indicate an eagerness to go to war, and, even if it did, the atmosphere on the streets of one district of the capital city by no means accurately reflects the contemporary mood across the United Kingdom.2 The myth of a naive popular enthusiasm for war has tended to obscure the complexity of emotions people felt in the earliest days of the conflict.
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There has been a great deal of talk since the war began of ‘the Church’s opportunity’. It is one of those vague phrases, which is the delight of the man who has no responsibility in the matter and the despair of those who have. It suggests that ‘somebody ought to do something’ and in this case the ‘somebody’ darkly hinted at is obviously the unfortunate chaplain.
Donald Hankey, A Student in Arms, 1916
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Notes
Michael Macdonagh (1935) In London during the War (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode), p. 9 and The Manchester Guardian and the Times, 3, 4, and 5 August 1914.
Niall Ferguson (1999) The Pity of War (London: Penguin), pp. 174–211;
Adrian Gregory (2008) The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: CUP), pp. 9, 13 and 14.
See also Cyril Pearce (2001) Comrades in Conscience: The Story of an English Community’s Opposition to the Great War (London: Francis Boutle), p. 25
and Catriona Pennell (2008) ‘A Kingdom United: British and Irish Responses to the Outbreak of War’, Ph.D. Thesis, Trinity College Dublin.
Hugh McLeod (1996) Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914 (London: Macmillan), pp. 59–70.
John Wolffe (1994) God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843–1945 (London: Routledge), pp. 78 and 82.
Ibid., p. 83, and Jeffrey Cox (1982) The English Churches in a Secular Society (Oxford: OUP), pp. 48–50,
and David Thompson (2006) ‘Popular Religion and Irreligion in Countryside and Town’, in S. Gilley and B. Stanley (eds), World Christianities c. 1815–c. 1914 (Cambridge: CUP), p. 197.
John Stevenson (1984) British Society 1914–′45 (London: Lane), p. 271.
Hugh Macleod (1974) Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London: Croom Helm), pp. 23–35 and Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches, pp. 22–3. Cox cites the example of the London borough of Lambeth, where less than 10 per cent of the largely working-class population attended a morning church service on a particular Sunday in 1902.
Peter Borsay (2006) A History of Leisure, the British Experience since 1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 206–7.
Tony Mason (1980) Association Football and English Society, 1863–1915 (Sussex: Harvester Press), pp. 3 and 138–48
and Stuart Mews (2003) ‘Religion 1900–1939’, in Christopher Wrigley (ed.), A Companion to Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 474.
Albert Marrin (1974) The Last Crusade (North Carolina: Duke University Press), p. 30.
F. M. L. Thompson (1988) The Rise of Respectable Society (London: Fontana), p. 140.
Thomas W. Laqueur (1976) Religion and Respectability, Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780–1850 (London: Yale University Press), pp. 74 and 239–41.
For an in-depth examination of the significance of the Sunday School movement in British social history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Keith Snell (1999) ‘The Sunday-School Movement in England and Wales: Child-Labour, Denominational Control and Working Class Culture’, Past & Present, 164, pp. 122–68.
Keir Hardie (1996) cited in Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (London: SCM), p. 132.
Kenneth O. Morgan (1967) Keir Hardie (Oxford: OUP), p. 36.
Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches, p. 91 and S. C. Williams (1999) Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c. 1880–1939 (Oxford: OUP), pp. 54–86.
Peter Parker (1987) The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos (London: Constable), p. 99.
Stephen Spinks (1952) Religion in Britain since 1900 (London: A. Drakers), p. 23.
Brian Stanley (2006) ‘The Outlook for Christianity in 1914’, in S. Gilley and B. Stanley (eds), The Cambridge History of Christianity: World Christianities c. 1815–c. 1914, p. 597.
F. A. Iremonger (1948) William Temple: His Life and Letters (Oxford: OUP), p. 20.
For a comprehensive overview of the volunteerism that helped build the New Armies in 1914 and 1915 see Clive Hughes (1985) ‘The New Armies’, Ian Beckett and Keith Simpson (eds) A Nation in Arms: A Social History of the British Army in the First World War (Manchester: MUP), pp. 100–25.
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Margaret Blunden (1980) ‘The Anglican Church during the War’, in Peter Warwick (ed.), The South African War (Harlow: Longman), pp. 279–80. Edward Lee Hicks, who was to be appointed Bishop of Lincoln in 1910, publicly criticised British aggression in South Africa in January 1900. At the time he was a canon of Manchester Cathedral and the Manchester Transvaal Peace Committee published a sermon he gave on the subject. See The Mistakes of Militarism: A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church at Manchester, 21 January 1900 (Manchester: Wm. Hough & Sons, 1900). In October, 1901, Charles Gore, then just about to be appointed to the See of Worcester, wrote an open letter to the Times deploring the death rates in British concentration camps. See Times, 28 October 1901.
For a brief examination of the impact that German atrocity stories had on attitudes in Britain, see Gerard J. de Groot (1996) Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War (London: Longman), pp. 187–91.
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Alan Kramer (2008) Dynamic of Destruction (Oxford: OUP), pp. 13–14. For examples of press reports on the ill-treatment and murder of European clergy at the hands of German soldiers, see Times, 4 and 16 September, The Manchester Guardian, 13 August and 16 October 1914, and The Standard, 18 and 21 August 1914.
Harnack, Herrmann, Eucken, Deissmann et al., ‘Appeal to Evangelical Christians Abroad’, reproduced in H. S. Holland et al. (1914) To the Christian Scholars of Europe and America: A Reply from Oxford to the German Address to the Evangelical Christians (London).
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Canon J. T. Mitchell cited in George Bedborough (1934) Arms and the Clergy (London: Pioneer).
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J. B. Crozier cited in Robert Brendan McDowell (1975) The Church of Ireland, 1869–1969 (London: Routledge), pp. 105–6.
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Stewart J. Brown (1994) ‘“A Solemn Purification by Fire”: Responses to the Great War in the Scottish Presbyterian Churches, 1914–19’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 45 (1), p. 84.
For an overview of the response of British Methodists to the different issues, and crises, raised by the outbreak of war, see Michael Hughes (2002) ‘British Methodists and the First World War’, Methodist History, 41 (1), pp. 316–28.
Kester Aspden (2002) Fortress Church: The English Roman Catholic Church and Politics, 1903–1963 (Leominster: Gracewing), p. 14.
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Jerome van de Wiel (2003) The Catholic Church in Ireland, 1914–1918: War and Politics (Dublin: Irish Academic Press), pp. 10–17.
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For a flawed but informative account of the relationship between the French Catholic Church and the Vatican during the war, and a discussion of the clerical response to the conflict, see Adrien Dansette (1961) Religious History of Modern France (Edinburgh: Nelson), pp. 327–55.
Wilhelm Pressel (1967) Die Kriegspredigt 1914–1918 in der Evangelischen Kirche Deutschlands (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht), pp. 11–14 and 21–2.
For an overview of the response of the German Catholic Church and clergy, see Heinrich Missalla (1968), “Gott mit uns”, Die Deutsche Katholische Kriegspredigt, 1914–1918 (Munich: Kösel).
Patrick Porter (2005) ‘Beyond Comfort: German and English Military Chaplains and the Memory of the Great War, 1919–1929’, The Journal of Religious History, 29(3), pp. 265–6.
Randall Davidson, cited in Trevor Wilson (1986) The Myriad Faces of War (Cambridge: Polity), p. 742.
Ilana R. Bet-El (1998) ‘Men and Soldiers, British Conscripts, Concepts of Masculinity, and the Great War’, in B. Melman (ed.), Borderlines, Gender and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930 (London: Routledge), p. 79 and Peter Parker, The Old Lie, pp. 99–100.
Bernard Palmer (1997) A Class of Their Own: Six Public School Headmasters who Became Archbishops of Canterbury (Lewes: Book Guild), pp. 3–4.
Joan L. Coffey (2002), ‘For God and France: The Military Law of 1889 and the Soldiers of Saint-Sulpice’, The Catholic Historical Review, 88(4), pp. 677–9.
See also Jacques Fontana (1990) Les Catholiques Francais pendant la Grande Guerre (Paris: Cerf).
Annette Becker (1998) War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930 (Oxford: Berg), p. 33.
P. Middleton Brumwell (1943) The Army Chaplain (London: Adam & Charles Black), p. 16.
J. E. Edmonds (1932) Official History of the War, 1916, Vol. II (London: Macmillan), p. 134.
John Smyth (1968) In This Sign Conquer (London: Mowbray), p. 157.
For personal recollections of interviews with the Chaplain-General, see Ernest Raymond, The Story of My Days, p. 59 and Guy Rogers (1956) A Rebel at Heart, (London: Longmans, Green & Co.), p. 92.
Rabbi Michael Adler, cited in Maurice Whitlow (1938) J. Taylor Smith, Everybody’s Bishop (London: Lutterworth), pp. 100–1.
Julian Bickersteth (1995) The Bickersteth Diaries (London: Leo Cooper), p. 67.
Dora Pym (1952) Tom Pym — A Portrait (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons), p. 58.
F. R. Barry (1970) Period of My Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton), p. 58.
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© 2011 Edward Madigan
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Madigan, E. (2011). The Church of England, the European War, and the Great Opportunity. In: Faith under Fire. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297654_2
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