Written evidence submitted by Sir Hew Strachan

 

The Centenary of the First World War in the UK: some bullet points

Origins

  1. The commemoration of the centenary began spontaneously at local level, and so grew from bottom up. It was not delivered from top down.  Without that ground swell from below the programme would never have flourished or expanded as it did.  By 2010-11 there were already groups in towns, villages, churches and schools, many of them focusing their study around local war memorials, and linking what happened in their area to what happened globally.
  2. Initially, the government was not interested in taking a lead.  Part of the reason for this was austerity; part a repeated (if ill-conceived) refrain that in Britain we do the ends of wars not their beginnings.  This demonstrated the grip that Remembrance Sunday has on popular culture, of which more below.
  3. In April 2011, conscious of the work already in hand at governmental level in Australia, France and Flanders, I organized a meeting in Oxford, attended by senior figures from High Commissions and Embassies, the Royal British Legion (RBL), the Imperial War Museum (IWM), the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), representative academics from the home countries (including Ireland), and two junior ministers – Andrew Robathan from MoD and Ed Vaizey from DCMS.  Andrew Robathan was keen that the MoD take a lead, but the Secretary of State for Defence was not, given the issue of costs and resources.  In the end MoD would join what became a bandwagon and play a full part in the delivery of the centenary.  At this stage too the RBL was not interested on the grounds that its concern is with current service personnel, veterans and their families: that too would change.
  4. In November 2011 the Prime Minister finally responded by appointing Dr Andrew Murrison his special representative for the First World War.  Dr Murrison provided consistency of direction to the centenary’s delivery – vitally important given the high turnover in Secretaries of State at DCMS (the department eventually charged with its delivery). There were five in the period of the centenary. Over the next year Dr Murrison gathered views and prepared the ground for the Prime Minister’s announcement of the government’s programme in October 2012.
  5. Given the UK’s late start compared with many other governments, the government was relieved to find out how much work had already been put in hand by the IWM.  It had been planning for the centenary for some time.  Its new First World War galleries were in preparation, and due to be opened in 2014, and it had established a national and international partnership of bodies working on the centenary, including many of the local groups mentioned above. 
  6. Abroad, given the location of the cemeteries, the delivery of the centenary would not be in the hands of the IWM, but of the CWGC.  The CWGC too had been preparing – by bringing its sites to the highest standards, and by beginning to recognise what would be a new function, its role in presenting those cemeteries as opportunities for public education.  But it was not initially as proactive as the IWM, and it took time for the government to see how central the CWGC would be in the centenary’s delivery. 
  7. The PM’s speech at the IWM in October 2012 launched the official programme.  He announced funding of £50m, which immediately generated false hopes of future financial support in local groups, which had done so much work without support.  The figure was misleading.  At that stage there was no fresh government money available: £40m had already been spent, much of it not directly by the government, and most of it on the IWM’s new First World War galleries.  The only new money was a further £5m for the IWM and government support of £5m for school visits (but that was funding for England only, not for the whole of the UK).
  8. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland also planned their own programmes, and in the Northern Irish case that included working with the Republic of Ireland on a programme that looked at Ireland’s decade of conflicts, from 1912 to 1923.  Much of the delivery of the centenary, as it affected the UK as a whole, came not from Westminster, but from the other home nations and regions.  Its full scale, cost and impact can only be assessed when their contributions are also taken into account.
  9. The UK government initially seemed uneasy with these national and regional partnerships.  It was aware of the potential flash points in Ireland, especially when it came to 1916, with the Easter Rising and Ulster on the Somme.  The Queen’s visit to Glasnevin was vitally important in setting a tone for reconciliation.  Scotland, with an SNP government and plans for an independence referendum, also generated nervousness in London.  In practice the centenary proved not to be divisive and was not used for political purposes, although that outcome did not look self-evident before 2014.
  10. Europe was also a challenge, particularly as France was well advanced with its thinking.  Sarkozy saw the war as the most important event after the French revolution in modern French history: for him in 2011 the years 2014 and 2018 would be when the world came to France, as it had in 1914 and 1918.  By 2014 Hollande was president and did not buy into this narrative, which he saw as a right wing narrative: the result was the centenary of the First World War had to compete with the commemoration of D Day and the liberation of France in 1944-45. In 2018 President Macron returned to the global theme, and took Georges Clemenceau as the pivotal figure in France’s victory. This contrasted with Britain, which – except in Wales - entirely ignored Lloyd George.  Before 2014 Germany was nervous about a re-run of British Second World War narratives projected back on to the First World War, and the revival of the argument about Germany’s war guilt, part of the peace settlement in 1919 and re-stated in the 1960s by the German historian, Fritz Fischer.  The Germans were wrong to be worried: by 2014 the British public had forgotten Versailles and academic historians had moved beyond Fischer.  Given the Conservatives’ own divisions over the EU, the government was initially reluctant to engage with European partners on these points.
  11. The government also struggled with the Commonwealth.  In 1914 Britain went to war as an empire but in 2014 the government was fearful of suggesting any echoes of imperialism.  So it did not provide a lead to the Commonwealth, although many of the Commonwealth countries were looking for that lead.  The CWGC is a Commonwealth organization, and sometimes the government did not seem to understand that point, treating it as solely British. The initial plan was to leave the whole of the Gallipoli centenary to Australia and New Zealand, although Britain sent more troops (and lost more lives).  Gallipoli captures some of the complexities of national narratives, even for the Commonwealth: India and Newfoundland also contributed, and France was an ally who suffered more losses there than did the Australians and New Zealanders. 
  12. Given these international and cross-UK dimensions, DCMS was in many ways not the most obvious department to choose to deliver the centenary.  Its remit is confined to England, not the whole of the UK.  It had to deliver in Belgium, France and Turkey.  Many regretted the government’s reluctance to engage in Palestine and today’s Israel, as well as in Greece and the Balkans.  Because of this overseas engagement and its focus on battle fronts, both the FCO and MoD would have key roles in Whitehall.  Within the UK, and given the roles of the devolved governments, the Cabinet Office might have been the more obvious lead.  Westminster did take decisions unilaterally or without consultation, for example on the commemoration of VC winners, which could have been better delivered with more openness and consultation.  These problems diminished over time, without ever completely evaporating.  DCMS’s problems were reduced by experience and hard work, but compounded after 2016 by Brexit, which diverted people and expertise from the First World War team.

 

Delivery

  1. Remembrance was what engaged the public from the outset.  Even those events held on 4 August 2014 had a strong element of remembrance about them, although for historians what was being marked was the uncertainty as to the future at the outbreak of war in 1914, not a foreknowledge of the numbers of the dead.  The Poppies at the Tower of London in 2014 generated an extraordinary and surprising response, and ignited a wider public interest.  The focus on those who had died in the war never went away.  Remembrance is not history, but it could and did become a route to wider understanding and public education.
  2. The polling completed by the IWM, the CWGC, the British Council and – above all – British Future showed the extraordinary levels of public ignorance about the war before 2014. Australia and New Zealand were both surprised and hurt to be told that in the order of 60 percent in Britain did not know they had fought in the war (itself an indication of ignorance about the British empire).  Many wondered whether the public had the stamina for a four-year commemoration; they did, and one of the reasons why was the shift from remembrance to a desire to understand, as their knowledge deepened. 
  3. 14-18 NOW was involved with the Poppies in the Tower, and delivered much else besides.  It was an imaginative and important programme, which ensured that the commemoration had contemporary artistic resonance, and it brought that to a wide public.  But it could be unduly secretive in its planning, which made incorporating its output in other proposals and events hard to achieve: that was particularly the case on 11 November 2018, when the day had become too full well even before 14-18 NOW finally announced what it was planning.  It also struggled to depart from a familiar narrative, shaped by the emotional responses to the war, and loss in particular.
  4. The national events on major anniversaries avoided triumphalism, spurned an excessively British narrative, sought reconciliation, and were each slightly different in tone and content, but some worked better in these regards than others.  At the outset the UK government thought it would lead on three events only – the outbreak of the war, the battle of the Somme, and the end of the war – and therefore would deliver to a high level by focusing on 2014, 2016, and 2018.  In the end the government reflected popular demand and added in Gallipoli, Jutland, Passchendaele and Amiens.  It did not always get the international dimensions of these right (especially on Passchendaele); on some it told the story of the events better than others (Amiens was especially well done); and Jutland was a triumph of Anglo-German cooperation which should have been an exemplar for much else. 
  5. The obvious criticism of the national commemoration was the focus on battles, not on the national commitment across society. British Future’s polling before 2014 in Glasgow reflected concerns that the story would be Unionist in tone, and would neglect the rise of Labour and Red Clydeside. The fears were justified, even if the element of grievance they contained dissipated over the course of the centenary. To respond to this gap, WW100 Scotland supported a conference on the British Home Front in 2018, which DCMS also funded.
  6. There was more hesitation about taking outside advice, not least from historians, than there need have been. The view was that the history was contentious and that it was not for government or other comparable bodies to enter such debates.  That was naïve.  Whatever was chosen for commemoration involved some sort of historical judgement about its significance.  Omission could itself court criticism. The name of Douglas Haig was not cited once at either the Somme or the Amiens event: this would have been inconceivable to most veterans in the 1920s, and was itself a statement.  Fear over the legacy of the Balfour declaration (for all that Balfour had said Palestine should be a home for both Arabs and Jews) was given as a reason for not commemorating the Palestine campaign, although neither Australia nor New Zealand had any problem in doing so.  More use might therefore have been made of the UK advisory committee.  It tended to be told what was happening after decisions had been made, not asked for its views beforehand. The WW100 Panel in Scotland was used in a much more proactive way.
  7. The BBC handled the outside broadcasts very well, but was not ready for the public take-up, and seemed sometimes reluctant to deliver documentary content that was rigorous or challenging.  Speaking personally, I found myself being telephoned on an almost weekly basis before 2014 by producers looking for ideas for programmes without any idea of what else was planned across the network.  They sought out the work of younger scholars working on fresh topics and yet never got round to making proper use of it.  Its preference for presenter-led content (Jeremy Paxman and Kate Adie in 2014 and then Dan Snow) meant it failed to engage fully with those who were actively engaged in fresh research, and content could be dated and even wrong.  Before 2014, the BBC view was that the centenary was of interest to white, middle class, middle-aged males. It responded when it woke up to the reality, but it did so in a haphazard and often rushed way and proved unable to think more than a year (at best) ahead.  For example it decided in 2016 that it would cover the Somme but not Jutland: in the end it did both.  Its documentary coverage for 2018 was commissioned late and parochial in its content.  The documentaries were poorly keyed in with the outside broadcasts.  It appointed a succession of individuals to coordinate its WW1 output, beginning with Adrian van Klaveren, but each channel in practice did its own thing, each remained locked into a set image of its own audience, and there was little if any cross-referencing from television to radio.  Its output was vital to the centenary, but it could have been so much better.
  8. The Heritage Lottery Fund committed £96 million in grants to a large variety of projects across the UK.  Many small, local schemes were enabled as a result of its activity.  However, its lower threshold for grants (up to £10k) carried no requirement to relate outputs to a coherent vision of the whole.  As a result those organizing the projects were not encouraged to engage in fresh thinking, tending to look inwards, not outwards.  The HLF was not really able to plug the gap in public education, as its emphasis on local participation made it hard to provide for top-down educational delivery, however imaginative the proposal.  There was a lack of balance between expert and community inputs which resulted in less imaginative projects. Many of the smaller schemes produced web-based content, but there was no plan for their long-term maintenance, either as part of the funding or as a requirement of the grant.  The government has not tasked the IWM to find a solution but, given the scale of the resource committed, this remains a major concern.
  9. Gradually, Britain did acknowledge the ways the war had impacted on the ethnic minorities now living in Britain but who one hundred years ago were drawn from South Asia, Africa and the West Indies.  The Big Ideas project made a major contribution here – although the suggestion that those who died were ‘forgotten’ was something that did not please the CWGC, which commemorates all those who died, regardless of rank, race or creed. 

 

Outcomes

  1. The centenary in many other countries lost impetus at various points along the way, but that was not the case in the UK.  Indeed, Britain may have profited from its late entry, as it gained and then sustained momentum.  Given the keenness to understand why the centenary worked so well, it is important not to forget the capacity of the First World War to reach into all parts of the British community, including those from other areas of the world, both because the war touched all of British society and because it was a truly global conflict.  The centenary belonged to all of us.  It is hard to see anything other than a world war working so effectively in terms of eliciting such a broad response. 
  2. Remembrance was a big part of that appeal, particularly at the outset.  It provided rituals with which the public was already familiar, and they were, and are still, rejuvenated every year.  The proximity of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars gave remembrance contemporary resonance, and yet its forms – the Poppy, the Cenotaph, the Unknown Warrior- are all products of the First World War.  The rituals have been revitalized and made relevant for a younger generation as a result of the centenary.
  3. Polling shows that public knowledge has improved dramatically and that people’s horizons have moved beyond the familiar tropes of the western front, the trenches and war poets.  Here too it has been a success.
  4. The school visits to the western front organized for English school pupils by University College London have been a vital element in this process. Scotland also organized its own visits for schools.  Thanks to Eurostar and the proximity of the western front, many schools from across Britain already organized such trips before 2014, but the strength of the UCL trips was that they emphasized understanding, awareness of tactics and battlefield conditions, and so did not simply stay with remembrance.
  5. Nonetheless, there is a danger in over-emphasising the change.  The excellent schools project, ‘Never Such Innocence’, set up by Lady Lucy French, and which like many other worthwhile projects did not get HLF support, produced a booklet each year for distribution to schools in order to inform the pupils in their submissions of poems and art in the competitions run under the auspices of NSI.  Despite the breadth of the booklets’ content, the submissions (which were of a high standard) did tend to focus on loss, death and mourning, and not respond so fully to what will have been new, as opposed to familiar,to their readers.
  6. The opportunity to take the centenary in fresh educational directions was not exploited.  In part that ambition could never be achieved given the absence of the First World War from the national curriculum for most of the centenary period in England and Scotland (the same was not true in France).  The change in the English curriculum came too late to benefit most pupils but it may help sustain the legacy of the centenary.  It is a great pity that the proposal to use the war as a way of encouraging pupils to discuss the rights and wrongs of war more generally, and its place in the international system, was not taken up.  The First World War is wonderfully instructive in this respect, especially for Britain. In 1914 the cabinet was divided about the wisdom of war in 1914, in 1916 the powers failed to make peace despite opportunities to do so, and the war did not end neatly in 1918 but continued to 1923.  There was fighting across the British empire, from Ireland to India.  These are all points with contemporary resonance, appropriate for discussion in general studies classes.  The potential educational value of the centenary lay here as much as in understanding the war of 1914-18 itself.
  7. Many on the UK Advisory Committee were keen to continue the commemoration at least until 2019, not least in order to explore the challenges of ending war and establishing peace, and to make that part of public understanding.  The UK government was not; however, Wales is doing so, and Ireland will take the story till 1923.
  8. The centenary was an opportunity to kick start fresh research on the war.  It is too early to judge what its effects will be on widening our knowledge; somebody beginning a Ph D in 2014 will only just have submitted by 2018, and that knowledge will only appear in published form from the early 2020s.  Sadly, however, the research councils did not see the centenary as an opportunity to promote fresh research.  The Arts and Humanities Research Council sponsored six universities to lead programmes on aspects of the war, but for the purposes of engagement with schools, not in order to generate fresh research.  The universities chosen failed to achieve an adequate geographical coverage of the UK, and there was none in Scotland or Wales.
  9. Memories of war can be used to rekindle or keep alive old hatreds.  In the Middle East, ISIS used both the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 and the Balfour declaration of 1917 in this way, to the point where western opinion has often mirrored its views more than accurate history.  During the Turkish elections in March 2019 President Erdogan took the Christchurch attacks in New Zealand as evidence of ANZAC Islamophobia by linking them to Gallipoli, so undermining the reconciliation strikingly put in train by the founder of the Turkish republic, Ataturk, and embraced by Erdogan himself on 25 April 2015. Again the historical basis for the claims was shaky.  However, the centenary has more often shown the opposite effect: the capacity of commemoration to enable reconciliation.  In 2014 Britain was hesitant in its responses to France, its principal ally in 1914-18, and to Germany, its principal enemy.  It could not have delivered so much of its centenary programme in France without French cooperation, and all the battles marked by Britain on the western front were ones in which it fought alongside the French.  On 31 May 2016 the band of the German navy captured the hearts of Orcadians at the commemorations for the battle of Jutland.  On 11 November 2018 the German President both laid a wreath at the Cenotaph and read a lesson in Westminster Abbey at the service to mark the armistice with Germany, in sight of the Unknown Warrior. Rather than evoke the controversy some feared, his presence barely elicited comment.  Most striking of all, for those mindful of thirty years of conflict in Ireland, and of the roles in deepening sectarian divisions of the Easter Rising in Dublin on the one hand and of Ulster’s commemoration of the Somme on the other, has been the capacity of the centenary to heal wounds.  That spirt of unity and reconciliation was the true validation of the centenary.
  10. It would be good to know what the total cost to government has been.  One of the principal reasons for reluctance to engage with the centenary was cost, given the government’s stress on austerity.  In the event the United Kingdom must have comfortably exceeded the significant sums which Australia and France had already allocated to the centenary by 2011.  However, because of the delegation of budgets across Whitehall and more widely across the United Kingdom, it will be very hard to produce a global figure.  Three government departments have put major resources, not least people, into the centenary: DCMS, MOD and FCO.  The MOD, having said in 2011 that it would do nothing, ultimately allocated an SO2 in each regional brigade to its delivery; the Army conducted three staff rides in France, in 2014, 2016 and 2018; the Royal Navy made a major contribution to the Jutland commemoration; and the RAF folded the First World War into its own centenary commemorations. That is without taking into account the MoD’s ongoing commitment to the work of the CWGC.  And that is just the start. Each of the devolved administrations has also contributed, with Scotland leading events at Loos in 2015 and Arras in 2017, and Wales and Northern Ireland doing so at Passchendaele and Messines in 2017.  Then there are the British Council and HLF, and more besides. If the HLF contributed nearly £100m, the combined total must be more than double that.  

 

Conclusion

Some, but not all, lessons to be learnt from the UK’s commemoration of the centenary will be relevant in 2039.  Then our successors will confront the centenary of a far more awful war, but one now almost as encrusted with myth and received wisdom as is the First World War.  Much of its delivery will depend on different technologies.  Those responsible will be – like us – influenced by the moods and events of their own time: what we choose to commemorate reflects our own preoccupations as much as those of the people we are ostensibly remembering.  However, those in charge will also have been the school pupils and students who took part in the events of this centenary, and their policies may therefore be influenced by what they have seen and learnt over the last four or five years. 

Wars are international and multi-national events, but the tendency of official commemorations is to tell the story in national, and even nationalist, terms.  Between 2014 and 2018 Britain avoided the worst dangers inherent in such approaches, and instead learnt to use the centenary for reconciliation and common understanding.  That need for international engagement and partnership is one of the most important lessons to be drawn from the centenary, as well as one with the most relevance to our own times.

The centenary also showed a greater public appetite for knowledge than many had expected.  The demand for education generated a response, which was in some respects belated, and could have been better if it had been more readily anticipated. The IWM had seen it coming; the CWGC had not, but then responded as the centenary unfolded.  Both institutions will sustain their commitment in the twenty years until 2039, but they face falling budgets and may have to prune some of the very capabilities that the centenary has encouraged them to put in place.  There is therefore a case for a light-touch committee to bridge the passage from one centenary to the next; it could embrace the HLF and other bodies, such as UCL’s Institute for Education, as well as the IWM and CWGC.  Its functions could include the identification of a body to preserve the more ephemeral and web-based content from the First World War centenary.  Some is being collected by the IWM and by the British Library, but until there is a coherent policy much is in danger of being lost.  The material which has the potential to be the most lasting legacy from Britain’s popular engagement in the 21st century with the events of 1914-1918 still has no guarantee of a permanent home.

Hew Strachan

25 March 2019

Sir Hew Strachan, FBA, FRSE, has been Wardlaw Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews since 2015.  He is a Life Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he was successively a Research Fellow and Fellow from 1975 to 1992, and an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.  He was Professor of Modern History at Glasgow University 1992 to 2001, and Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford 2002 to 2015.  He was a Commonwealth War Graves Commissioner 2006-18, a Trustee of the Imperial War Museum 2010-17 (chairing the advisory committee for the new First World War galleries), and member of the national advisory committees for the centenary of the First World War of the United Kingdom, Scotland and France.  His publications include The First World War: To Arms (2001); The First World War: a New Illustrated History (2003; based on his 10-part series for Channel 4, which was retransmitted by the BBC in 2014); and (as editor) The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (1998; revised edition 2014). He is the Patron of the Western Front Association.