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In the first two decades of the 20th

century, the newfangled discourses of social welfare are linked into the charitable provision with which most Britons would have been very familiar. As discussed above, for centuries a shifting system of charitable provision for the poor had been distributed largely to those who were classed as the ‘deserving poor’. By and large, this would include widows who were reduced to poverty after the death of their husbands and thus were (usually) regarded as being in this position through no fault of their own. For younger widows with young families, this was often a very hard life as childcare commitments meant they were unable to go out to work. Reliance on family for support was usually the first resource these women called upon, but most such woman quickly remarried. Young widows were frequently the wives of soldiers, so would be associated with a

garrison town or else ‘on the strength’ of the regiment. The ‘on the strength’ system limited the number of men who were given official permission to marry by their commanding officer, and hence the number of wives who were allowed to follow their husbands around their postings.27 This much-used military phrase indicates that these soldiers’ wives were the ‘strength’ and therefore a complement to the regiment, not a weakness to it, and as such were expected to carry out domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning and laundry. As Trustram (1984) has shown, most such women remarried with quite astonishing rapidity following the deaths of their husbands, some woman remarrying several times. Of course, the haste with which such women remarried was most often explained as being out of necessity rather than any true attachment, but it is difficult to find any documented evidence of such hasty remarriages as being regarded as ‘indecent’ haste. In a

strongly patriarchal society, it was expected that a woman should be looked after, materially as well as financially, by a male breadwinner. However, this informal arrangement whereby a soldier’s widow would be taken on as the wife of another soldier worked effectively in the regular army where the proportion of servicemen to women was strictly regulated by the ‘on the strength’ system. The army would generally tolerate these ‘on the strength’ wives, although as Trustram has observed, they occupied an ambivalent position which reflected contradictory attitudes:

The wives’ morality was continually questioned – they were considered dirty and shiftless, a corrupting influence on the brave defenders of the Empire. Yet at the same time the women were useful to do the men’s washing and sewing and in their role as wife and mother they were idealised as a

steadying, humanising influence on the licentious, drunken soldiery. (1984: 30)

Thus by 1914 the regular soldier’s wife was already enshrined in army (and national) culture as someone who was untrustworthy, yet who should embody the ‘angel of the house’ ideology that had risen to unprecedented heights in the latter half of the 19th

century. The war widows’ pension system was devised along the lines of previous charitable provision which enshrined such ideologies. That this notion of the army widow was based around the institution of the army rather than the civilian world would have a huge effect on the lives of men who had simply signed up ‘for the duration’.

The existence of a volunteer rather than a conscript army in Britain in 1914 had a significant impact upon the perception and kind of separation allowances granted. As Grayzel (2002: 23) points out the British government viewed separation allowances as an aid to recruitment: with generous allowances, men could join up and feel confident that their families would not endure any financial or material harm whilst they were away fighting for ‘king and country’. The living standard of soldiers’ and sailors’ families was maintained, at first, by a combination of private and public sources that granted payments to all wives, and through them, children. What makes this allowance so different from previous provision is that it was not

means tested. As the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, commented during one of the debates in November, 1914:

We have no motive of any sort of kind for failure in liberality of generosity. On the contrary, our motive is the other way. We want to get as many recruits as we can to the Colours, and therefore we, of all people in the world, can understand greatest possible stimulus to act with liberality, even lavish liberality […]28

This link between separation allowances and pension, and recruitment can be clearly seen also in the fact that the government issued propaganda posters designed to publicise the allowances available to families. There was thus a strong emphasis on the State’s role as financial provider in the place of the absent husband, implicitly acting as moral as well as material guardian. In the above extract of Asquith’s speech, we can also see him highlighting the British government’s (and hence metonymically the country’s) presumed moral superiority to that of other countries, implicitly the ‘enemy’ but also countries which were perceived to be threatening Britain’s place in the world.

Because the allowance was paid to a serviceman’s wife (or de facto wife) and was granted as a right based on his service to the nation, women could and would be disqualified if they failed to fulfil their duty to their husbands. In this way, the State saw part of its role as being obliged to subject women to surveillance, making infidelity and misbehaviour grounds for the denial of this allowance (see also Pedersen, 1993).

However, in a startling piece of insight into the reality of working-class culture, separation allowances and pensions were ultimately granted to women who could prove their marriage or de facto marriage29

, most commonly through the serviceman stating on his enlistment papers that such a woman was financially supported by him. Both sets of women were treated equally, the amount they were paid rising occasionally throughout the war and in the decades that followed, but

28 Parliamentary Debates, 5th Series Vol LXXII (1914-1915) p30.

29 My own research has shown that approximately half of the women who were married had actually

given birth to their first child within the first nine months of their marriage. However, out of the 200 case files I have examined, I found very few cases of women claiming a pension without being

never reaching a level when they could live on this amount in comfort. In keeping with Victorian self-help ideals, the allowance was set at a rate just above subsistence level in order to keep the widows of servicemen out of the workhouse, but assuming that they would have another source of income – primarily, a job of their own. In 1919, after much discussion, the amount was set at £1 a week for a childless widow under the age of 40, and remained at this level until 1967.30

The arrival of universal welfare provision in Britain in 1948 saved many of these widows from abject

poverty as their wage-earning capacities declined with age, but as we shall see in the case studies which follow this section, not all war widows were so lucky.

Again in the early debates on the pension legislation, Asquith had highlighted the expectation, indeed the presumption, that working-class women would be able to support themselves by going out to work. He presents his

argument for a minimum pension amount in terms of ‘fairness’ to other unpensioned female workers, doubtless bearing in mind the feminist calls for equality in the workplace.

There is then the problem, the most serious problem of all, the problem of the childless widow, who is in most cases a young woman, a woman accustomed to work, a woman who, under normal conditions, would work and go to work after she was unfortunately deprived of the companionship and support of her husband […] You must consider, and you ought to consider, when you are dealing with a matter of this kind, the effect on the labour market, on the conditions of female labour in particular, and the standard of wages which women generally earn in this country. You must consider the effect upon them of letting loose, in competition with their sister women, a number of these young widows highly subsidised by the State.31

In recognition of the realities of working-class life, Asquith assumes that all ‘childless widows’ will be in paid employment. In direct contradiction of the middle-class containment of the widow in the weeks and months immediately following her husband’s death (see Flanders, 2003), he assumes the working-class

30 It is useful to compare this with Spring Rice’s survey of working-class married women in 1939.

This showed that almost half of these women had less that 4/- per person a week in housekeeping money and were in very poor health compared with that of the 17% who had 10/- or more per person. (Spring Rice, 1939)

widow would not have such a period of closeted mourning when he employs the repetition of work: ‘would work and go to work after [her husband’s death]’.

He presents the case for a widow’s pension as part of wider concerns about the economy in wartime, thus linking to discourses of patriotism in terms of what is good for the country. He then draws on intertextual reference to pre-war concerns raised by feminist and other social campaigners for better wages for women, maintaining the earlier link to wider economic concerns but more specifically to female employment on a national level. This carries the assumption that women’s wages are lower, the negative connotations triggered by the series of destructive images which follow in the final sentence here. The responsibility for these negative actions is placed on the other members of parliament, who have ‘let loose’

pensioned widows on the employment market. This triggers assumptions of

negativity through lack of control, women who are also uninhibited by a patriarchal head to their household.

Drawing on feminist discourses, he refers to sister women, but here employs this discourse to support his argument for a lower pension rate to reduce the risk of disruption to some assumed female sisterhood. Asquith’s argument links this speech with that later made by Rhys Davies (above), although he used it to support the case for a widow’s pension, whereas Asquith had used the suppression of wages as an argument to reduce the amount paid to widows.

This extract is immediately followed by Asquith’s warning that a ‘lavish’ pension would impose an ‘enormous burden’ on the ‘resources of this country’ for years to come’ (ibid). Thus the long-term financial condition of the nation was coupled with recruitment concerns to underpin the legislation which was drafted, rather than an immediate concern with the social welfare of widows and dependants.

Whilst the ever-cautious Asquith employed first-wave feminist discourses as a weapon against women to cover up the underlying parsimonious ideology, Bonar Law employed discourses of nationalism to apparently support a more generous allowance. In the presentation of the interim report of the Select Committee to parliament on 24th

I think we must realise, all of us, that on the whole allowances of all kinds which are made by the State are made in this spirit, which was the spirit of every member of the Committee, and which represents the spirit of the House of Commons and of the country, that however great may be the demands caused by the War on the financial resources of the country, the men who are giving up their lives in her service and their dependants come first, and that in what we give to them there must be no suggestion that we are not treating them really in a way that the heart and conscience of the country will regard as just and generous.32

Bonar Law interpolates the common opinion climatically, from the members of the Select Committee, to the House of Commons then to the country. He frames the ‘spirit’ of public funding of allowances as being in the national interest and by the nation. The politicians’ part in ordering men to the front line to act as ‘cannon fodder’ is downplayed as the servicemen themselves are the active agents in the verb phrase giving up their lives. Discourses of national identity are drawn upon to frame them as being willing to act on their country’s part, here personified as female so emphasising the need to be defended from enemy attack. As Billig (1995: 58) points out, the love of the Ingroup provided the most important motivation for going to war in the 20th

century for Western nations, where ‘the willingness to die in the cause of the homeland precedes a motive to kill’ (ibid). This homeland included the ‘defence of women and children, of family and honour’ (Grayzel, 2002: 9), as represented in recruitment posters and the wartime media.33

Bonar Law uses the inclusive pronoun we to continue the earlier

interpellation of this view being that of ‘the country’. Like Asquith, he employs multiple negation to intensify his point of rejecting the agentless ‘suggestion’ of a lack of generosity. However, as van Dijk et al (1997: 173) point out, the use of ‘apparent empathy’ can be employed to make decisions appear beneficial to Outgroup members. Here, Bonar Law, although presenting a superficial case for unparalleled generosity of State-funded allowances, is setting this within an

argumentative move where the State/country could be the victims in that there would

32 Parliamentary Debates, 5th Series Vol. LXVII (1914-1915), p70.

33 The ‘Women of Britain’ poster discussed in the previous section of this thesis (p53) is an example

of how this was employed in early recruitment posters in Britain. Grayzel (2002) further shows that this was widespread amongst the belligerent nations at this time.

be unlimited expenditure involved. The ‘heart and conscience of the country’ could also be rendered less favourable towards unlimited expenditure by this implicit threat, and thus allow the State to impose strict terms under which the widow could be granted a pension. Such terms could then be formulated as ‘just and generous’ to the country, rather than to the individual widow. This is exactly what happened with the widows in question here, where their idea of ‘justice’ is less to do with the national debt than with personal debt.

In keeping with the increasing State intervention into the family that had been such an important part of 19th

century imperial ideology, the war widows’ pension (under the Royal Warrant of 1916) was devised to confine the woman to the domestic role of idealised mother whilst refusing to pay her sufficient money to keep her within the home. At around half the ‘minimum wage’ of £1 a week, the pension was actually devised to prevent anyone from relying entirely on the State for their livelihood, and took for granted the assumption that working-class women would be earning a living from some form of paid employment. The payment was thus more of a token gesture, yet this token is one which the women themselves adopted as a badge of pride. The large number of women who appealed for a pension reflects the attraction of the public status of ‘war widowhood’ that they aspired to in many cases, rather than the actual amount to afford financial security, as will be discussed in more detail shortly.

As discussed briefly above, widows of servicemen in the regular army tended to re-marry, more out of practical need than strong attachment. However, this convention became an assumption that younger widows would remarry, and as such was built into the war widows’ pension scheme, whereby a widow would forfeit her pension on remarriage (and thus re-enter the patriarchal institution of marriage) in exchange for a one-off ‘gratuity’ amounting to a year’s pension payments. The Depression of the 1920s and early 1930s meant that for many widows the war widows’ pension was the main source of income, in terms of financial contribution as well as being a regular, reliable contribution to the household income. This resulted in many women having little choice but to cohabit because they would lose their war widows’ pension on remarriage.

The discourses of morality which were built into the Royal Warrant included the image of a sober, discreet, grieving widow who would care for the children of the fallen hero. These children were, unquestionably, of greater value to the

country’s future, being of noble stock, their fathers having given their lives for king and country. Many widows had their pensions suspended or withdrawn when they were adjudged to have failed to maintain the honoured memory of the ‘glorious dead’ who were immortalised in stone in just about every community in the country. It was the role of the Special Grants Committee of the Ministry of Pensions to handle such cases.

The Special Grants Committee was set up in 1916. As Lomas (1997) explains, it had wide-ranging powers which could not be appealed against.34 She

states:

It was able to pay alternative pensions, supplement pensions in cases of hardship, allow lump sum payments to cover emergencies, decide whether individual war widows were entitled to a pension or a gratuity, award extra allowances, pay education grants, remove children from the care of their mothers, arrange fostering and adoption for children in need of new homes, and to impose sanctions against war widows. (ibid, 1997: 89)

These powers were imposed in three different ways.

[Firstly, the SGC] had the power to administer pensions on behalf of any war widow whose payment should not be forfeited for a single lapse into

misconduct provided that the misconduct had ceased. Secondly, the

Committee had the ultimate sanction of forfeiture of pension. Thirdly, they [could] remove children from their mothers’ care and place them in the care of the Ministry of Pensions in cases where they are found to be suffering from neglect or want of proper care. (ibid)

The ‘misconduct’ of which widows could be found guilty was largely based on middle-class ideals of passive and virtuous widowhood and motherhood35

. As such,

34

The Ministry of Pensions Gazette, October 1917 makes this explicit:

From the point of view of the Ministry, the Special Grants Committee are a body

independent of the ordinary machinery of the office, though contained within it, whom they can call upon to act as referee, arbitrator or judge in certain cases; whose decision are final; and from whom no appeal can be made to the Ministry.

drunkenness, cohabitation and the birth of illegitimate children could be used to punish the widow.

The SGC comprised 15 members, mainly ex-military representatives, some of whom were also members of SSFA or the Royal Patriotic Fund, and others who