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Renewal: Life after the First World War in Photographs @ Imperial War Museum London

Making a new world

For the past year or so, Imperial War Museum London has given over its third floor to four related but very different exhibitions marking the end of the First World War a hundred years ago.

The four are presented under the overarching title of Making A New World, a major season which has also included a programme of live music, performances and public debates, all addressing aspects of the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Here’s the promotional video of the season as a whole.

The biggest of the four exhibitions is titled Renewal: Life after the First World War in photographs. Over the next few days I’ll review the other three exhibitions.

Renewal: Life after the First World War in photographs

In the years after the First World War, countries, cities and individuals had to regenerate and rebuild themselves on an extraordinary scale.

The exhibition uses poignant and evocative photos, diagrams, posters and objects from IWM’s vast collections to convey the challenges and experiences of peace which were faced by soldiers, societies, and Europe as a whole.

Armistice celebrations in Birmingham, 1918 IWM (Q 63690)

Each individual photograph or object comes with an informative wall label, which is well worth reading and pondering.

There are about 130 objects in all, covering a wide range of subjects and formats, from a big map of Europe, black-and-white footage of the ruined town of Ypres, a wall-high reproduction of architects’ designs for new homes fit for heroes, through to recruiting posters for the army, an example of a prosthetic leg made for an amputee, photos of demobbed soldiers, diplomats, abandoned munitions, and – isolated and forlorn – a broken ceremonial sword once belonging to a German officer.

Room one: reconstructing the individual

More than 70 million fought in the First World War, some 16 million died, tens of millions were displaced. In Britain, many soldiers wanted to return home as soon as possible, although many were injured and condemned to spend the rest of their lives in care homes. There was suddenly a crying need for houses and jobs for all the demobilised men.

Installation view of Renewal: Life after the First World War in Photographs © IWM

Topics in this room include:

Returning Home

Including photos of demobilisation offices, crowds of soldiers being demobilised. Sometimes the hold-ups led to frustration and there demobilisation riots in some places.

Regaining Freedom

Around eight million soldiers became prisoners of war during the conflict. Allied prisoners were released immediately upon the Armistice but were often given little help. One poignant little case contains a pair of wooden clogs given to a returning British POW who had no boots by a Belgian peasant, which the Brit obviously kept to the end of his days and donated.

Pair of clogs given by a sympathetic Belgian to a shoeless British prisoner

In contrast, prisoners from the defeated nations were only slowly released, some being kept in captivity for up to two years after the war ended. France, in particular, was tough on the Germans, forcing German POWs to help rebuild all the villages and towns the war had ruined. There is a photo of German POWs rebuilding the Basilica of St Quentin in 1919, and many other photos showing the complete devastation of northern France and Belgium

Horses and men of 1st Anzac Corps on their way past the ruins of the Cathedral and Cloth Hall in Ypres © IWM E(AUS) 1122

Starting Again

The theme of rebuilding runs through the show. Many photographs show citizens who had fled the fighting returning home and setting up house again amid the rubble. There are photos of the new wooden houses built among the ruins of Ypres, and the first tobacconists shop blossoming among the rubble.

Apparently, Winston Churchill had suggested that Ypres be left a rubble-strewn ruin as testimony to the men who lost their lives there, but the people – as the commentary wryly puts it – didn’t go along with his suggestion, and soon began rebuilding.

Soldiering On

Many soldiers found it hard to adjust to peacetime, both psychologically and, in practical terms, found it hard to get work. There was a major economic slump after the war. By late 1919, with most of the British forces demobilised, many men decided to re-enlist in the new, smaller, more professional British Army, Navy and Air Force, since it offered the best hope of steady work, plus opportunities to travel and ‘see the world’ which were not available to most of their working class peers. Thus the exhibition contains some colourful 1920s posters singing the praises of a career in the forces.

See the World 1919 recruitment poster

Restoring Independence

Many men had been blinded in the war. They couldn’t return to their old jobs and risked poverty and isolation if left to themselves. A section of the show is devoted to the work of St Dunstan’s Lodge in Regent’s Park, a charity devoted to helping blind ex-soldiers. The photos belonged to Dorothy Irving-Bell, a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse who worked with blind patients and whose album amounts to a social history of the charity.

The black and white photos of rows of smartly dressed young man, every one of whom has been blinded for his country, some with bandages over their eyes, others wearing dark glasses, was quite upsetting. But something snapped in me when I saw the colour photos of blind men being shown how to weave tennis nets and fishing nets, from which they could eke a living. God, the waste. The waste on a scale we just can’t conceive today. It’s what makes John Singer Sargent’s painting, Gassed, almost unbearably moving.

The charity still exists and supports blind veterans of the services.

Blind Veterans UK

Repairing the Body

Not just eyes, every conceivable part of the human body had been eviscerated, gouged, melted and burned during the war. A section documents the advances in medical techniques which helped soldiers survive at the front, and then took care of them at home. This included a sequence about the doctors, nurses and patients at Roehampton which specialised in men who had lost a limb. Over 41,000 men lost limbs during the war.

Roehampton, patients being taught to use their new artificial limbs © IWM (Q 33690)

Rejoining Society

Disabled soldiers received state pensions but most others needed help registering for work, and claiming other benefits. This section displays some of the forms and documents required by the state or the many private charities which were set up to help soldiers.

Room two: A country fit for heroes?

Rebuilding society

British servicemen returned home to find a country short of houses (when has Britain not been short of houses?) The British economy almost immediately went into a slump. Fearing discontent on a large scale might trigger a Bolshevik-style revolution, the authorities move quickly, pledging to build thousands of homes for for heroes, and introducing a generous new unemployment benefit scheme.

There is a fascinating sequence of photos showing land being cleared at Becontree in Dagenham, and then a huge new estate being built, using new materials and modern (though not Modernist) designs.

Rebuild or preserve

Of course the problem of building in Britain was as nothing to the challenge facing the authorities in those parts of northern France and Belgium which had been devastated by the war. Here the authorities had to decide whether to rebuild a city like Ypres, brick for brick, or start again from scratch. The French did, in fact, leave a couple of villages in utter ruins, as a reminder of the pointlessness of war, and we are shown photos of them, Omes and Fleury, ‘the villages that died for France’.

A refugee family returning to Amiens, 17 September 1918 © IWM (Q 11341)

This room contains a slideshow on a big monitor showing photos taken by Louise Briggs, a British traveller who visited Belgium many times after the war, photographing the ruins then the rebuilding of Ypres, along with nearby villages and war cemeteries.

It comes as a shock to learn from the captions to several of these photos, that immediately the war ended the tourists started to arrive. Obviously not quite ‘tourist’ in the way we think of today, but plenty of British people wanted to come and see the sites where their sons or brothers or husbands had fought and died or been wounded. Some of the first buildings erected in post-war Ypres were makeshift wooden hotels for just such a clientele. Postcards were quickly manufactured showing views of famous battlefields, along with maps and other merchandising. Hard not to find this ghoulish.

Rudyard Kipling, much condemned now for his racism and imperialism, wrote a number of powerful stories about the Great War and its shell-shocked victims. And one really haunting story about a British woman who makes the pilgrimage to the grave of her dead son.

The Gardener by Rudyard Kipling

New Opportunities

When the war ended all sides found themselves with vast amounts of munitions and arms and equipment on their hands. The tens of thousands of cars and lorries could be quickly converted for civilian use, but what about the primitive airplanes of the war?

A fascinating little sequence is devoted to explaining the rise of the Handley Page Transport Co which built its first plane in 1909, was commissioned to make heavier ‘bombers’ during the war, and then very impressively converted these to carry passengers, and thus became one of the first manufacturers of long-range passenger planes. Photos show the cramped interiors of these earliest passenger plans, alongside altogether more glossy and stylish 1920s posters for Imperial Airways, formed in 1924.

Room three: Reshaping the world

The world which emerged from the war was shaped by the peace conference of 1919 to 1920 and the series of treaties which emerged from it and continued to be negotiated into the 1920s. Thousands of books have been written about the compromises, haste and bad decisions made at the conferences. Most controversially, the defeated nations didn’t have representatives present and so were forced to sign to all kinds of conditions which they would have rejected, and which caused lasting resentment among their populations, such as the massive reparations Germany had to pay France, as well as the big chunks of territory Germany lost to France in the West and Poland in the East.

Peace Treaties

One wall of this room is dominated by huge photos of the leaders of the victorious allies, Lloyd George of Britain, Woodrow Wilson of America, Clemenceau of France.

Continuing Conflict

But it is often forgotten that the Armistice did not end the fighting across huge swathes of Europe and Asia Minor. The Russian Revolution led to a civil war which raged across that huge country until 1922. In 1920 Russia invaded Poland and it was only the Poles stopping the Russian advance at the great Battle of Warsaw which prevented the Bolsheviks reaching and helping the communist uprisings in Germany. Street violence continued in Germany for years after 1918. A bitter civil war erupted in Ireland when the southern part of the island was given independence from Britain. Hungary became a communist republic under Bela Kun in 1919, which was eventually overthrown by a militaristic regime. A terrible war broke out between Greece, egged on by the Allies to take advantage of Turkey’s defeat, and Turkey which surprised the West by driving the Greek forces into the sea in scenes witnessed by the young reporter Ernest Hemingway.

Occupation

All across Europe occupying forces moved in to administer civil authority and oversee the transfer of power to peaceful regimes. British forces were involved in the occupation of Germany, Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey. Photos show our boys fraternising with locals, chatting about horses and, in one vivid photo, toboganning in the snows of Austria

Disarmament

Stunning photos showing the vast, vast piles of abandoned rifles, artillery, shells and so on. What a breath-taking, awe-inspiring waste of raw materials and industrial resources, epitomised by the pile of 32,000 rifles awaiting destruction by British forces in Cologne.

Installation view of Renewal: Life after the First World War in Photograpsh at the Imperial war Museum. Photo by the author

Installation view of Renewal: Life after the First World War in Photographs at the Imperial War Museum, showing the huge pile of rifles at Cologne (middle right) and Allied ships anchored at Istanbul (top left). Photo by the author

Thoughts

The three ‘rooms’ have actually been created for this exhibition out of grey cloth stretched across wooden frames. They have windows so you can look into them from the corridor between. And there’s audio, a continual mix of ambient doodling over which we hear voices, crashes, military sounds. I couldn’t decide whether this was irritating or inspiring. But certainly by the end I felt moved, moved to tears by the pointless suffering of so many people, and then horrified, wanting to run away from the scale, the unimaginable size of the catastrophe, the end of the world.

It is to the exhibition curators’ credit that from this vast holocaust they manage to identify clear threads and themes to give the horror shape and meaning, and have selected 130 black and white photographs, documents and objects which really bring home the impact of something so inhumanly vast on individual human beings, whose stories we can approach and understand.

German sword taken at the end of the war in Cologne. Photo by the author

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by Simon on March 12, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in European History, Exhibition, Great War, History, War, World War One

Posted by Simon on March 12, 2019

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From Weimar to Wall Street 1918-1929 (1993)

This book is volume three in Hamlyn’s History of the Twentieth Century. It’s a fun, Sunday afternoon coffee-table book, nice and big – 28 cm tall by 22 cm wide – with plenty of space for full-page reproductions of photos, posters, film stills, art works and so on. It also includes timelines for each sector or topic, useful maps and ‘datafiles’, giving facts and figures about populations, industrial production, election results and so on.

One of its appeals is that it doesn’t restrict itself just to Europe and America, but ranges right around the world, describing social and political history in Turkey, the Middle East, Africa, Russia, Asia, China. It’s divided into four big topic areas – Politics, Economics, Society and Culture – and these main chapter headings are interspersed with special features about, for example, Bolshevism, Hollywood, modern medicine, jazz, air travel and so on.

It looks rather like one of my daughter’s school textbooks, with its busy layout of pages, text, Fact Boxes, maps, graphs and graphics – all designed to retain the interest of the hyperactive teenager.

A Peace Conference at the Quai d’Orsay by William Orpen (1919)

It includes this striking painting by William Orpen, an Anglo-Irish painter who fought during the Great War and did some paintings of the Front, before moving on to portraits of key political players of the day. Here you can seee the leaders of the victorious allies – thin Woodrow Wilson at centre front, sitting in the red chair; to his right, with the big white moustache, Clemenceau, Premier of France; and to his right David Lloyd-George, Prime Minister of Great Britain, with the mane of white hair.

In the full-page reproduction of this painting what really stands out is the way Orpen handles the immense amount of gold decoration, shaping and moulding it in thick impastos of gold paint, alive with catchlights.

A flavour of the 1920s

11 November 1918 end of World War One. Collapse of the Wilhelmine Empire and creation of the Weimar Republic. Germany’s colonies in Africa handed over to Britain (Tanganyika), France (Cameroon) and Belgium (Rwanda). Britain maintains its blockade on German seaports leading to thousands of civilian deaths from starvation over winter 1918, until Germany signs the Versailles Treaty in June 1919.
The Versailles Treaty imposes punishing reparations on Germany. Successive treaties see the creation of new countries from the collapsed European empires e.g. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia. Establishment of the League of Nations which, however, the U.S. Senate refuses to ratify in 1919.
The Ottoman Empire is dismembered by the Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920). Mustafa Kemal, who has led the Turkish nationalist revolution, becomes Turkish president in 1920. the Allies encourage Greece to invade mainland Turkey which leads to the bitter Greco-Turkish War (1919-22). France and Britain take over ‘mandates’, controlling newly created countries across the Middle East in what had been the Ottoman Empire.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1918)

Economic boom in America. Political confrontations between Left and Right in Italy climax with Mussolini’s seizure of power for the Fascist Party in 1922. In 1923 Germany experiences hyper-inflation, economic collapse and the occupation of the Ruhr by France for failing to keep up with war reparations.
By 1920 Japan’s population has doubled since 1868 and it seeks new markets for its economy. This quest will lead to the creation of the Far East Economic Sphere i.e. the Japanese Empire, in the 1930s, to the invasion of Manchuria in 1937 and, eventually, war with America.
The Bolsheviks win their civil war against the Whites (1922) but catastrophic economic collapse forces Lenin to introduce the New Economic Policy, reintroducing limited business and trade. Lenin dies in 1924 giving way to a joint leadership which includes Josef Stalin. Only in 1928, with the exile of Leon Trotsky, does Joseph Stalin take full control of the USSR and impose the first Five Year Plan for full industrialisation and the collectivisation of agriculture.
In 1921 the Chinese communist party is created, in 1925 the Vietnamese Nationalist Party is established by Ho Chi Minh (among others). Both of which will have massive long term repercussions in the 1940s and 50s.

Young Ho Chi Minh at the Communist Congress in Marseilles, 1921

A succession of British government reports fail to satisfy calls for independence from Indian politicians and the 1920s see the rise to prominence of Mahatma Gandhi with his strategy of peaceful non-cooperation.
Cinema evolves in leaps and bounds with Hollywood stars led by Charlie Chaplin becoming world famous. 1927 sees the first part-talking movie (the Jazz Singer). Jazz evolves rapidly with Louis Armstrong emerging as one among many star performers. Jazz becomes more sophisticated in the hands of arrangers like Duke Ellington and gives its name to the entire era in America. It spawns dance crazes not only across America but in Europe too (the Charleston, the Black Bottom etc).
America imposes Prohibition in 1919. This swiftly leads to the creation of organised crime across the country, running bootleg booze production and a network of illegal nightclubs. Gangsters like Al Capone become notorious and a world-wide symbol of American’s ‘criminal capitalism’.
Radio becomes global. In 1920, in a radio first, Nelly Melba broadcasts from London to listeners all across Europe. In the US radio explodes into commercial chaos; in the USSR radio is strictly controlled, like all the arts, by the Communist Party. Britain invents the BBC in 1922, funded by a compulsory licence fee paid by every owner of a radio.
The spread of affordable birth control (not least via the educational books of Marie Stopes) liberates women, many of whom had for the first time worked during the Great War. Many take jobs in the new light industries which are springing up around major cities – the spread of the phenomenon called ‘suburbia’, all facilitated by the enormous growth in car ownership. Women around the world get the right to vote: in the UK women over 30 got the vote in 1918, over 21 in 1928 – with some countries (the Nordics) ahead of this, some (France) lagging behind.

Constructing the Empire State Building

Some thoughts

I liked the way the book restricts itself to the period 1918 to 1929. It scrupulously avoids the Wall Street Crash because that economic catastrophe in fact rumbled on into 1930 and, of course, its economic consequences were chiefly felt in the following decade.

By limiting itself to just the 1920s, the book conveys the chaos and excitement of the Jazz Decade in itself, of itself, without the shadow of the Depression looming over it, let alone the Nazis. All too often histories of the period skip through the 1920s to get to the Crash and then to Hitler, who then completely overshadows everything that came before, whereas the 20s are quite fascinating in their own right.

Stepping back, the two Big Political Themes which resonate through the decade are:

The Repercussions of the First World War, namely:
- The collapse of the four empires, Germany, Russia, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian, which gave rise to a host of new independent countries, generally with very fragile new political systems and unhappy ethnic minorities,
- The economic consequences of the peace – the tough reparations on Germany lead to hyper-inflation, but Britain ended the war deeply in debt and never regained the worldwide power she enjoyed in the 1900s. By contrast, America clearly emerged as the world’s most advanced industrial, technological and financial centre.
The Repercussions of the Russian Revolution. New communist parties were set up in virtually every country in the world, promising freedom, justice, equality and so on, especially appealing to developing countries and colonies seeking their freedom.

Consumer culture

All these political changes were obviously important but the bigger message is that the 1920s were also a major step down the path towards a consumer capitalist society, as the practical notions of convenience and home comforts took precedence over older ideas of nationhood, morality and so on.

The populations of Western societies wanted to benefit from the invention and widespread distribution of gas, electricity, lamps and lights, hoovers, sewing machines, telephones, radio and gramophones, and so on, not to mention the huge growth in car use.

And accompanying all this were the posters, adverts, hoardings, design and branding, huge developments in the layout of magazines and ads, of fonts and styles. All these had existed in the 1890s, 1900s and 1910s and each of these decades had seen the steady growth in number and sophistication of all the media of consumer culture. But the 1920s saw the arrival of major new technologies – led by gramophones and sound movies, which promoted whole new forms of music (jazz) and new types of personality (the movie star) as never before.

Even if they didn’t all personally enjoy it, more people than ever before in the industrialised nations could see what a good standard of living – with a car, a home of your own and foreign holidays – looked like, bombarded through newspapers, magazine and billboard hoardings with compelling images of astonishing luxury.

Just flicking through the book shows that the imagery of consumer capitalism was more vivid, stylish, ‘liberated’ and ubiquitous than ever before. It’s lots of fun!

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All posts tagged Clemenceau

Renewal: Life after the First World War in Photographs @ Imperial War Museum London

Making a new world

Renewal: Life after the First World War in photographs