C.R.W. Nevinson depicted confident female welders during the First World War (1917).
‘Duchesses wash dirty dishes in canteens; munitions workers, at so much a week, have their portraits painted. The world is upside down.’
– The Graphic, wishing readers a Happy New Year, 1918.
Two hundred miles northwest of London, Edward Carter Preston narrowed his eyes in thought. He was used to challenges as a sculptor, but he had never been faced with amending an entire gender. As Marie, his wife and model, looked on, Carter Preston made one tiny revision to his design for Britain’s next-of-kin memorial plaque – a change that would make room for the 600 women who had died before the next English spring.
Liverpool, like all of England, was on the long road back from war in December of 1918. Edward Carter Preston, known as ECP, had been declared unfit to serve due to an earlier bout of rheumatoid arthritis. A bright spot came in March when The Times named him the winner of Britain’s memorial plaque competition to honour its fallen heroes. ECP had submitted two entries anonymously, as required, under a pseudonym.
More than 800 entries had poured in from across the British Empire, including designs produced by men in combat. The judges included members from both houses of Parliament, the secretary of the War Office, the director of London’s National Gallery, and the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as the museum’s keeper of coins and medals.
ECP’s winning design showed Britannia, possibly modelled by Marie, with a trident in her right hand and two surrounding dolphins representing Britain’s dominance at sea. A laurel wreath in her left hand stretched out above a panel for the soldier’s name (ranks were not cast, to convey equality in valour). The sculptor placed a roaring lion at Britannia’s feet, with a smaller lion below tearing into a winged surrogate for the German Imperial Eagle. The large bronze medallion would become commonly known as the Dead Man’s Penny.
All was well until pre-production work started over the summer. First, The Times received a letter from a zookeeper in Bristol criticising the main lion for being feeble-looking and implausibly small next to Britannia. Then technical conflicts arose between the requirements of mass production and the need for artistic integrity. Heated tempers ensued.
This was followed by a challenge as old as Adam and Eve. As a condition of the competition, ECP had put the words HE DIED FOR FREEDOM AND HONOUR in a curved inscription, starting just above the lion’s back leg. But the government had not specified, and thus ECP had not produced, a version with the inscription SHE DIED FOR FREEDOM AND HONOUR.
And so ECP showed his approving wife a second version, one where the H of HE was made narrower, allowing room for a narrow S. A supply of 1,500 bronze medallions was struck before the S was removed from the mould. The narrow H remained for the balance of production – a silent reminder of the female nurses, cooks, clerks, drivers, typists and mechanics whose work freed thousands of men for combat as the casualties mounted.
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The story of the missing S is one of countless small intersections between British artists and the First World War. Edward Carter Preston wasn’t a household name in London, but his initials would end up on medallions in almost a million British homes. It is a small but insightful story about the role of art in conflict.
The bigger stories, of course, are attached to the more prominent names: Britain’s official war artists. These include Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, John Singer Sargent, Stanley Spencer, Augustus John and William Orpen. The government wanted to create a record of the war through paintings, and was willing to embrace styles ranging from the figurative to the modern to the truly avant-garde. Most of the artists they chose had the courage to capture the truth of war first-hand.
In addition to those with official standing, hundreds of unknown artists endured the war as common soldiers. For these men, classrooms, studios and models were a distant memory. They were free of commercial and academic constraints, but shackled to a war that threatened to consume them. In the absence of any creative exchange with fellow artists, the soldier-artists took their inspiration from their military units. They learned to work with scant materials that could be mobilised quickly and carried long distances.
No mention of artists at war would be complete without the exploits of Augustus John. John was at the Café Royal when the start of hostilities was announced; subsequently he was attached to the Canadian forces as a war artist and an officer. His status allowed him to keep his beard, and he and King George V were the only bearded army officers among the Allies. John got into a brawl after only two months in France. He was shipped back to London in disgrace, but managed to fulfil some of his responsibilities as a war artist to brilliant effect.
Between conscription with its ever-widening parameters, gallery closings, German raids and a general tightening of belts, the demand for artists’ models in London declined from 1915 to 1918. The art schools continued teaching, but the number of males aged 18 and older was shrinking. Exhibitions were hung, but the public was not particularly interested in buying art.
A great many models of the anonymous variety joined the ranks of women moving into the workforce. They volunteered as nurses or teachers, or found work in the munitions factories. The ‘munitionettes’ received attractive wages but risked their health and even death from the toxic substances they handled. In 1917, an explosion at the Silvertown manufacturing plant in London’s East End claimed over seventy lives.
C.R.W. Nevinson depicted confident female welders during the First World War (1917).
Female factory workers became a favourite subject of artists on the home front, as painted by C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Frederick Skinner, Flora Lion and others. Some of the same young women that had been posing as models in Chelsea and Fitzrovia just months earlier were now crafting ammunition shells or cutting files for the cause. It is questionable how many munitions workers went back to modelling after the war, with skin and eyes yellowed by jaundice and beauty drained by the poison of ‘doing their bit’.
The other type of model at the time, and one far less at risk, was the entitled socialite. For that, look no further than Lady Cynthia Asquith, daughter of an earl, daughter-in-law of Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, wife of the poet Herbert Asquith, personal secretary to J.M. Barrie of Peter Pan fame, and a prolific writer herself. She spent some of the war years wondering whether to pursue a career as a model or an actress, interspersed with a genuine desire to volunteer at London hospitals.
Asquith (née Charteris) was an arresting beauty. She sat for portraits by Edmund Dulac, Augustus John, Ambrose McEvoy, John Singer Sargent and numerous others. Money and emotional distance shielded her from many of the horrors of war. Her socialising and her posing proceeded unabated while men of her acquaintance died inconveniently abroad. From her diaries:
On Friday, 18 January 1918:
We lunched at Cavendish Square. Margot, in another gorgeous new dress, was going off to thé dansant at Lord Curzon’s. I sat beside Eric Drummond and we talked of the growing comedy of rations. He claims to already be suffering the pangs of hunger.
On Tuesday, 5 March 1918:
I have never known D.H. Lawrence nicer. He crashed on to the war, of course, complained that it is fighting one machine with another and, therefore, futile in result beyond expression. I gave him a photograph of my Augustus John.
And on Tuesday, 17 September 1918:
I was to have dined with Moira but at 7:15 Willie told me on the telephone that Alex had been killed, and I was much too upset to go. I’m miserable about it, and feel completely sickened and discouraged about life. He had come to be a real alleviation to me and I was relying on him more and more … I feel bitterly bereaved and oh so weary and bored.37
In the interest of fairness, Asquith had many redeeming qualities. She was good at writing fiction of the spectral, high-Victorian genre and better at nonfiction about the Royal Family. She was also an excellent editor of anthologies who used her literary connections to attract illustrious contributors. Initially a member of the Corrupt Coterie of young aristocrats, Asquith would come to despise their use of drugs and the ‘insidiously corruptive poison in their minds’.
Considering the way London high society continued apace, it is no wonder that the British Government felt the need to close nightclubs at 10.30 p.m. under the Defence of the Realm Act – a failed attempt to get London’s upper class to set a better example during wartime. On 12 March 1918, Asquith wrote of going to a ‘dash to the throne’ dance attended by the Prince of Wales and many eager young women. While Asquith declined to dance because her husband was at the Front, she did not stay home either. It was amusing to get dressed up and go out, by her admission, in search of poker.
This kind of thing fed a misconception in later years that the upper class found ways to avoid combat through privilege. In fact that was made nearly impossible by the advent of conscription with the Military Service Act of 1916. The Act formalised the position of the conscientious objector and established the tribunal process. All others who were fit and of age were expected to serve, regardless of wealth.
The reality was that British casualties were disproportionately skewed toward the elite. Junior officers were appointed from the upper-middle and upper classes, and were expected to expose themselves to danger to lead their men by example. Seventeen per cent of officers died in the conflict, far higher than the average for ordinary army soldiers.
Another misconception had to do with conscientious objection. British men who qualified for military service, but sought exemptions, had their fates decided by the war tribunals. A man might be exempted from service if he performed work of national importance on the home front, such as mining, farming or specialty manufacturing.
The majority of the men who sought exemptions through the tribunals were not conscientious objectors – most were caring for large families or working in what were known as ‘reserved’ occupations. Fewer than 18,000 conscientious objectors registered at the 2,000 tribunals set up in Britain. Many more than that number supported Britain entering the war but were against forced conscription. In the spring of 1916, almost a quarter of a million people demonstrated against conscription in London’s Trafalgar Square.
Those conscientious objectors who did exist found that the patriotic British public did not take kindly to them. The hyper-nationalism of the war effort was fuelled by homophobia and encouraged by government propaganda. One cartoon poster entitled The Conscientious Objector at the Front mocked an effeminate-looking young man being prodded by a German’s bayonet. The text simpered: ‘Oh, you naughty unkind German – really, if you don’t desist I’ll forget I have a conscience and I’ll smack you on the wrist!’
British women flaunt petticoats to mock conscientious objectors during the First World War.
A substantial number of conscientious objectors came from within the intellectual communities and from the performing arts. The painters Mark Gertler, Duncan Grant and Alix Strachey were objectors, as was Dorothy Eugénie Brett, a society painter who knew Bloomsbury members from the Slade. London’s literary circles contributed Lytton and Ray Strachey, Clive Bell, David Garnett, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Harold Begbie and others: politicians, philosophers, ministers, educators and social reformers.
Lady Ottoline Morrell and her husband, both pacifists, opened Garsington Manor’s farm to their friends who were conscientious objectors. Farm work for the greater good was a useful way to avoid prosecution by the tribunals. Duncan Grant and David Garnett similarly worked for Vanessa Bell on the home farm at Charleston. But purists such as Bertrand Russell were imprisoned for refusing to support the war effort in any way. Russell, who lost his lectureship at Trinity College over his pacifist activities, felt that war was contrary to the interests of society.
Mark Gertler, another bred-in-the-bone pacifist, was spared the tribunal because of his Austrian parentage; this made him ineligible to serve. Instead, he painted a 6ft-high masterpiece entitled The Merry-Go-Round in 1916 after the start of forced conscription. The painting, which D.H. Lawrence described as ‘the best modern picture I have seen … terrible and soul-tearing obscenity’, would come to symbolise the public horror of war.
Gertler was more fortunate than most. Hundreds, if not thousands, of little known British artists and art students were conscripted or enlisted to fight for King and Country. Some joined the Artists Rifles, a nineteenth-century regiment of the British Army Reserve that was pressed into service. Others drilled in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts wearing cricket whites as part of the all-volunteer United Arts Force. They were split up by the army and shipped to the Front.
The death and injury of fledgling artists in the First World War was arguably the greatest loss to the arts in early twentieth century Britain. The advent of modernism had flung the doors wide open, but these young artists would never attain anything near their potential.
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Another intersection of war and art came in combat – it exposed artists to anatomy with more ferocity than any life class could hope to muster. Soldiers, living and dead, became unintentional models. Bodies sprawled in the snow or huddled in the trenches were opportunities to memorialise experiences that, for many, defied conversation.
Occasionally a nurse or other female figure would be included in sketches from the field; these were depictions of reality and not models per se. The nurse Edith Cavell, who was executed by a German firing squad in 1915 for aiding the Allies, is well represented in paintings and sculpture. The modest Cavell sat for none of these – they were all created after her death.
Back in London, Walter Sickert understood that the trenches were only a starting point for the impact of war. Sickert, born in Munich, was appalled by the German killing machine and would have enlisted if he could. While the young artist-soldiers were feverishly sketching fallen comrades at the Front, Sickert was painting cheerless, fraught images of those who were expected to get on with the business of living back home.
Sickert used models prolifically in London during the war years. In The Little Tea Party, his brushstrokes are a ruthless commentary on the marriage of the artist Nina Hamnett and her partner at the time, Roald Kristian. In Suspense, a famous painting of the war period (circa 1916), the watchful girl is thought to be a Cockney laundress by the name of Lottie Stafford. Stafford was prized as a model for her graceful neck and self-assured sensuality. Her fine reputation as a model is understandable, but Sickert never strayed far from anonymity, and in gritty music hall scenes inspired by Degas, he returned to nameless sitters.
The war is often described as taking a terrible toll on the English people, but in fact it took many different tolls, each incomprehensible in its own way. Two youthful artistic talents can be said to symbolise the cataclysm of war in strikingly different manners: the sensitive Paul Nash and the audacious Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
Nash was a talented painter who enlisted with the naïveté of someone in his twenties, broke a rib falling into a trench, and lobbied to return to the Front as a war artist. He executed powerful, nightmarish paintings reflecting the death of his enthusiasm and the horror of what he witnessed.
In November 1917, Nash wrote to his wife Margaret from the trenches in France, describing himself as a messenger of ‘a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls’. He survived the Front but returned to England a haunted man. Death had become his muse. Nash’s salvation was his love of nature, but he was never again fully at peace, as his surreal landscapes attest.
Henri Gaudier was a visionary. His death was a wrenching loss to his friends and to the development of modern British art. A native of France who moved to London, Gaudier hyphenated his last name when he took up with an unstable young woman named Sophie Brzeska. He enlisted with the French army at the start of the war and was killed in the trenches aged 23 on 5 June 1915.
Gaudier-Brzeska’s death, perhaps more than any other, brought home the mortality and immorality of war to his friends in London. On 17 March 1915, Ezra Pound had written to an American colleague that ‘if you touch art, even en passant, [Wyndham] Lewis and Gaudier-Brzeska are great artists though their stuff is still so far from public comprehension that I don’t expect many people to believe me when I say so.’ Three months later, a distraught Pound wrote, ‘Gaudier-Brzeska has been killed at Neuville-St-Vaast, and we have lost the best of the young sculptors and the most promising. The arts will incur no worse loss from the war than this is. One is rather obsessed by it.’38
On a wall of the portico at Burlington House in Piccadilly, home of the Royal Academy of Arts, is a plaque that hundreds pass by every day. It lists thirty-five students who ‘fell in the Great War’. None of the names are the least bit familiar to the average person. These students came to the Academy prepared to make their mark on art, and that is what they did – they left behind thirty-five question marks about what they might have been.