British Army Uniform and The First World War - Men in Khaki (PDFDrive)

British Army Uniform and the First World
War: Men in Khaki

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British Army Uniform
and the First World War:
Men in Khaki
Jane Tynan
Senior Lecturer, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK
© Jane Tynan 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-30157-3
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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ISBN 978-1-349-33717-0 ISBN 978-1-137-31831-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137318312
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
In memory of my late grandmother, Mary Jane Buckley
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Contents
List of Figures viii

Acknowledgements x
1 Introduction: Khaki and the First World War 1
Part I Making Men
2 The Kitchener Image and First World War Recruitment 27

3 Fashioning the Civilian Soldier 55
4 ‘Quakers in Khaki’: Conscientious Objectors’
Resistance to Uniform 87
Part II Ranking Men
5 ‘Improvised Officers’: Khaki and Social Class 105

6 Fitting In: Race, Ethnicity, and Army Dress 130
7 Conclusion: Demobilization and Reconstruction 157
Notes 176
Bibliography 199
Index 211
vii
List of Figures
2.1 ‘Which Ought You to Wear?’ IWM PST 7664 28

2.2 ‘If the Cap Fits You Join the Army Today,’ IWM
PST 5146 (date unknown) 31
2.3 ‘Britons Join Your Country’s Army,’ IWM PST 2734 37
2.4 ‘Our Fashion Plate,’ Tailor and Cutter, 8 October 1914,
British Library, 800 43
2.5 ‘Blanco,’ John Bull, 10 November 1917, British Library, 22 45
2.6 ‘Come Now – Be Honest with Yourself,’ IWM PST 5072 48
2.7 Postcard sent by George Wilkinson, Pte. 575, 10th Batt
Royal Fusiliers, 8th Platoon, B Coy, Windmill Hill Camp,
Ludgershall, near Andover, Hampshire; Card made by
Inter-Art Co., Red Lion Square, London WC, ‘K.A.’ series;
papers of G. A. Wilkinson, IWM Con. Shelf 52
3.1 ‘The Tidiness of Mr. Thomas Atkins,’ The War Illustrated,
26 December 1914, British Library, 154 56
3.2 ‘Uniform Suits You to a “T,” My Lad,’ Daily Mirror,
1 October 1916, British Library, 1 59
3.3 Enlistment: Recruits have kit fitted, Photographic
Collection, Q30069 61
3.4 Enlistment: Measuring recruits with kit, Photographic
Collection, Q30060 63
3.5 Dress Regulations for the Army, 1911, an image of sealed
patterns: ‘Service Dress Jackets.’ Plate 19 68
3.6 W. D. F. Vincent, The Cutter’s Practical Guide to the Cutting
and Making of All Kinds of British Military Uniforms, The
John Williamson Co. Ltd., London College of Fashion
Tailoring Archive, University of the Arts London 73
3.7 ‘Norfolk Jacket,’ Tailor and Cutter, 14 January 1915,
3.8 ‘Aldershot Stores,’ Military Mail, 7 January 1916,
3.9 ‘Women and War: How to Knit and Crochet Articles
Necessary to the Health and Comfort of Our Soldiers
and Sailors,’ published by Needlecraft Ltd., Manchester and
London 1914–1918, Acc. no: 8208–203/3, National Army
Museum, 3 81
viii
List of Figures ix
5.1 ‘With “Tommy Atkins” at the Battle Front,’ The Sphere,

12 December 1914, British Library, 260 106
5.2 ‘With the British Officer in the Ypres Salient,’ The Sphere,
5 June 1915, British Library, 240–241 107
5.3 ‘Fox’s F. I. P. Puttees,’ The Sphere, 17 July 1915,
5.4 ‘The Tielocken,’ The Bystander, 25 July 1917,
6.1 ‘Stalwart Indians being decorated,’ Q.70214 139
6.2 ‘113th Ambulance, British and Indian Troops in
Northern France,’ print (from 70 War Sketches), artist:
Paul Sarrut, 22 October 1915 141
6.3 ‘Sikh Pioneers, British and Indian Troops in Northern
France,’ print (from 70 War Sketches), artist: Paul Sarrut,
3 August 1915 142
6.4 ‘Battles of the Somme, 1916. Indian cyclists at the
cross roads on Fricourt-Mametz road. July 1916,’ Q.3983,
Photographic Collection 143
6.5 ‘Men of the British West Indies Regiment cleaning their
rifles; Albert-Amiens Road, September 1916.’ Q.1202 149
6.6 ‘Men of the British West Indies Regiment cleaning their
rifles; Albert-Amiens Road, September 1916.’ Q.1201 150
6.7 Royal Fusiliers tailoring for the war effort, who referred
to themselves as ‘the King’s own Schneiders.’ Jewish East
End Celebration Society 154
7.1 Royal Artillery Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, 1925 (detail 1) 166
7.2 Royal Artillery Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, 1925 (detail 2) 168
7.3 ‘Ready to Start, Self Portrait,’ 1917, Oil on panel, Sir William
Orpen (1878–1931), IWM ART 2380 172
7.4 ‘How the War May Influence Men’s Fashions,’ Daily Mirror
18 March 1915, 7, MirrorPix 174
Acknowledgements
I thank the following friends and colleagues for help, advice and encour-
agement in the completion of this book: Tadhg McGrath, Anne McLeer,
Janice Miller, Jacqui Malcolm, Jude Philips, Micheal Addley, Agnés
Rocamora, Eva Rothschild, Mick Wilson, Blaise Smith, Anne Marie
McAuley, Geraldine Biddle-Perry, Royce Mahawatte, Victoria Kelley, Jacki
Willson, Cheryl Buckley, Dipti Bhagat, Paul Antick, Roger Sabin, Juliet
Ash, Jane Holt, Sarah Foster, Lisa Godson, and in particular Amit Jain.
Also, to the students at Central Saint Martins, whose stimulating ques-
tions caused me to continually reassess my work. Suzannah Biernoff was
particularly encouraging and offered invaluable suggestions at various
stages in the writing of the book. Natalia Wieczorek and Richard Dabb at
the National Army Museum were generous with their time, helping me to
locate some key sources. I am indebted to Christopher Breward, Stephen
Bury and Caroline Evans, for their support and guidance in the earlier
part of the project, and to Joanna Bourke, who made suggestions that
became critical to the development of the research. Janet McDonnell and
Anne Smith at Central Saint Martins gave financial support for research
time and image publication. For permission to reproduce images, I am
grateful to the British Library, Imperial War Museum, National Army
Museum and the Jewish East End Celebration Society. Finally, I want
to thank my family, and in particular my son Dylan, who has endured
every stage of this project.
x
1
Introduction: Khaki and
the First World War
In 2009, a new infantry camouflage pattern and kit was widely reported
in the British media. The new Multi-Terrain Pattern, a flexible colour
scheme devised in response to the diversity of terrain experienced by
British soldiers, was the first major change to the uniform in forty
years. Three years later a newspaper reported that British soldiers were
unhappy with the new pattern. The various press stories emerging at
the time concerning the clothing worn by soldiers in the field of battle
suggest that uniform design forms part of an ongoing public discourse
on the state of the armed forces. What soldiers wear is critical to their
discipline, protection and morale, but their clothing also shapes the
public image of the military.
Army clothing seems to embody all of the fears and anxieties we have
about sending people to war. This book is about the politics of dressing
soldiers and in particular, how clothing transformed men into combat-
ants. I take uniform seriously to explore both what khaki service dress
meant during the First World War and also what it has come to mean in
the collective memory. Its most enduring image is the British soldier in
khaki. What first appeared unremarkable became, by virtue of the scale
and reach of the war, part of its visual and material legacy. This book
asks how khaki came to constitute the public image of the British army
and perhaps offers some insights into why it was subsequently adopted
by various armies to become the standard design for modern military
uniform.
It is important to return to where khaki started and why the British
army originally adopted this drab colour for their uniforms. There are
a number of stories about the genesis of khaki but most point to India
in the nineteenth century. A scholarly journal from the 1930s offers a
detailed account of Sir Harry Lumsden’s first attempts to create khaki;
1
2 British Army Uniform and the First World War
as a lieutenant at Peshawar, he raised the Corps of Guides in 1846, and

when he was ordered to ensure that his troops were ‘loosely, comfort-
ably and suitably clad,’ he bought up white cotton cloth at the bazaar at
Lahore, and as the story goes, ‘this white cotton cloth was taken down
to the river bank; there, first being soaked in water, mud was rubbed into
it, which had the effect of making the cloth very much the colour of the
plains around. The stuff was then dried and ironed, and cut into loose
blouses and pants as a uniform for the Guides.’1 This crude camouflage
caught on and in 1848 Hodson, then second in command and adjutant
of the Guides, wrote home to his brother about selecting ‘drab’ uniforms
and requested that he send enough of the material to clothe 900 men.
In 1850 Sir Charles Napier observed that the Guides were ‘the only prop-
erly dressed light troops in India.’2
Hodson was keen on this lightweight uniform of khaki colour for the
regiment, which he declared would ‘make them invisible in a land of
dust.’3 Denis Winter also dates khaki back to the Indian Mutiny of 1857
but claims that the former uniform was boiled in water with mazari palm
to make it less conspicuous.4 While various accounts suggest that khaki
was first used in battle in India, it was widely adopted for the service
dress of British troops when changes in military technology gave soldiers
in camouflage clothing tactical advantage.5 For the Indian Mutiny drab
shades were adopted by two British regiments, not just for camouflage
purposes but also to lighten the soldier’s kit, as more practical colours
meant that men could carry fewer garments: ‘The 52nd dyed their white
uniforms before leaving Sialkot, and the 61st before leaving Ferozepore
to join the army in front of Delhi ... other British regiments who arrived
at Delhi in their white uniforms soon followed this example and stained
them khaki.’6 As Friedrich Carl Theis in his 1903 book on khaki dyeing
observed, khaki was not one colour but described certain shades of drab
that varied from ‘grey to olive, and from olive to brown.’7 Whoever was
responsible for the genesis of khaki knew that clothes that adopted the
colour of the landscape would be infinitely more useful to soldiers than
the bright colours that had made them so conspicuous.
The root of the word khaki is thought to come from the Hindi and
Urdu word for ‘earth’ or ‘dust.’ What started as a practical alternative to
white became so much more; as Hodson suggested, khaki became the
solution to the dangers of visibility on the battlefield. Drab shades for
battledress were a success in India, and between the years 1860 and 1870
a khaki field service uniform was gradually introduced into the Indian
army.8 In Britain, when the army became concerned with visibility, they
looked to the Indian experience; an 1893 report finds the Secretary of
Introduction: Khaki and the First World War 3
State directing commanding officers of regiments at home to give the

new ‘khakee’ colour a trial.9 By the late nineteenth century, in an effort
to standardize appearance the British army moved away from decora-
tive uniforms. This was partly a response to the success of functional
uniforms, which were becoming part of civilian life.10 Uniforms were
critical to the various systems whereby military and civilian organiza-
tions were disciplined and controlled. Khaki was a response to surveil-
lance technologies and tactics of dispersal; on the battlefield armies
strategically employed inconspicuous colours for camouflage.11 As
changing technologies brought surveillance techniques into ever greater
prominence, drab colours came into their own in battles fought by
British soldiers.
As this book will show, khaki reflected the modernizing of the British
army in the early twentieth century. Throughout this book I use the
term modernity to describe a particular form of social, temporal and
technological change in early twentieth-century Britain. The concept
of modernity is key to making sense of changes in the relationship
between war and society, changes that are reflected in the move from
military spectacle to uniforms made not only for utility but also for
mobilizing the mass production of army clothing. One of the central
arguments of this book is that khaki embodied changes within the
early twentieth-century British army, changes that became paradig-
matic for cultural shifts taking place in the wider society. As the century
progressed, armies all over the world took up khaki. If new uniform
designs reflected changing approaches to soldiering, did khaki consti-
tute a modern military appearance?
Modernity is a contested term. For Marshall Berman, it has three
distinct phases, culminating in the 1900s with the complete integra-
tion of various processes of modernization.12 A modern society has
been described as one that invests in reason and rationality, is organ-
ized around capitalism and state regulation, has faith in progress and is
defined by mass systems and surveillance.13 On the other hand, modern
society also generates new conditions of production and consumption.
This study of the First World War British army uniform engages the
contradictions of modernity: on the one hand the drive for increased
standardization and on the other the impulse to practice individual
creativity and consumer choice. It asks how the circumstances of the
First World War contributed to khaki’s establishment as the modern
form of military uniform.
An important aspect of the introduction of khaki was that it marked
the demise of military plumage, a traditional strategy to daunt the
enemy on the battlefield. With its drab colours and functional features,
khaki integrated the uniform with modern warfare, a design character-
ized by economy, comfort and convenience. As Thomas Abler argues,
khaki, along with other modern innovations in military clothing,
emerged for military tasks required on the frontier of the empire due to
the demands made on soldiers to be mobile and capable of individual
action.14 Visibility became a new kind of problem in battle, particularly
when the smokeless magazine rifle emerged in the 1890s, which gave
a soldier the advantage that black powder would no longer obscure his
field of vision.15 If the red coat symbolized the military techniques of
spectacle, did khaki service dress respond to new technologies of surveil-
lance? Did khaki demand a new visual iconography? Early in the First
World War a 1914 article in the Illustrated London News declared that
‘The Thin Khaki Line Repels the Corps d’Élite of the German Army,’ an
awkward attempt to describe the new inconspicuous battledress in the
language of the traditional warrior ethic.16
Subsequent chapters explore khaki as a design that embodied a new
modernity and challenged traditional ideas about military masculini-
ties. The book examines whether clothing worn by the British army,
in its first modern incarnation, visualizes military bodies and events
in specific ways. Visuality is, as Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, a militarized
technique to gain control over people, a ‘technique of colonial and
imperial practice, operating both at “home” and “abroad,” by which
power visualizes History to itself.’17 In warfare, visuality is a powerful
technique, particularly in a media age, but is not limited to the regime
of images. Rather, warfare is driven by capacities to visualize, which are
in turn linked to the desire to gain authority over others. In her study
of images in war culture, Dora Apel argues that the contest of images is
‘the continuation of war by other means.’18 As this book will show, in
the First World War, images played a critical role in the representation
and experience of war, but particular images of uniform reveal cultural
processes that made men and ranked them for military service.
Development of uniform
It is necessary to trace developments in uniform that led to the emergence

of khaki. In their modern incarnation, uniforms are strongly associated
with the rationalizing of institutional practices in the mid-nineteenth
century, when military uniforms took on a functional appearance.
However, the British approach to military dress originates in the 1400s,
according to James Laver, who argues that uniforms became increasingly
standardized up to the twentieth century.19 Uniform dressing started

with the liveries of feudal lords, for whom clothing advertised allegiance
through house colours. In the Napoleonic wars British soldiers were
wearing uniforms that were extravagant and decorative, but following
the Crimean War, army modernization saw a review of uniforms. By the
late nineteenth century, the British army was transitioning from red to
khaki uniforms.
Between 1869 and 1874, there were several major reforms to
modernize the British army, including the abolition of the commission
purchase system and the reorganization of regimental structure. But
there were significant changes to uniform, including the replacement
of traditional regimental facings, so that colours signified country. In
1897 khaki was adopted as the universal dress for all British troops over-
seas.20 Khaki came to embody new approaches to warfare and in the
First World War new ideas about the citizen soldier. British Army Uniform
and the First World War: Men in Khaki is very much about the ordinary
soldier’s war, which for Denis Winter was made up of ‘small details
and large emotions.’21 One of the aims of this book is to consider how
people responded to and interpreted khaki clothing, to determine how
it became a significant part of the culture of First World War Britain. The
decision to focus on uniforms worn during the First World War gave
me an opportunity to consider khaki in the context of a large conflict –
during the war over six million soldiers wore forms of khaki dress. This
book consciously adopts the concept of culture to consider whether the
analysis of uniform clothing can enhance understanding of the impact
of war on civil society.
The war was waged for just over four years, and from very early both
sides were caught in the trench system. By November 1914 there were
unimaginable losses; standards for recruits were lowered, suggesting
the urgent need to replenish the army in the first year. In the second
attack at Ypres (1915), the Germans used gas against the British, and
the September battle of Loos added 60,000 British casualties to the war’s
total. At this point new volunteers were no longer sufficient to replace
the dead. October saw the Derby scheme come into operation, antici-
pating the introduction of the Military Service Act in 1916. The Somme
was the final confirmation that the war was on a scale not seen before,
and the loss of life and limb caused people to question the wisdom of
continuing. By the time the war ended, the sense of purpose that had
characterized images early in the war were a memory. There is a huge
literature on how the war was fought, but in this book the actual fighting
is a backdrop to the analysis of cultural meanings created by the war
experience. The book is very much shaped by the images created by the
trenches, the tragic losses and the warfare, but the discussion considers
when and where events were mediated and by whom.
The research for this book is deeply influenced by cultural studies
approaches to history that seek meaning in the most ordinary prac-
tices and make close readings of a range of sources. Anthropologists
and increasingly historians find culture a useful concept to interpret
events to uncover the dynamic and contested aspects of human social
processes. Never static, cultural formations are always characterized by
struggle, as Jeremy Black argues in his analysis of the recent cultural
turn in military history.22 This is not to suggest that the present book
lies within the discipline of military history, but it does owe much to
the work of military historians, as well as of social historians interested
in perspectives on war and society, in particular those that challenge the
traditional view that military developments are necessarily progressive.
An analysis of khaki offers a different perspective on the relationship
between war and society. By looking to the minutiae of war, I argue for a
focus on everyday human experience in cultural history.
This research has also benefited from the perspectives of various
disciplines: design history, cultural studies, social history and fashion
history among them. It is clear that clothing offers the cultural histo-
rian multiple perspectives. Often found represented in images, it is a
malleable object that is made, bought, sold and worn; it embodies expe-
rience and creates myths and memories. Cultural historians of the First
World War have been interested in what the conflict reveals about early
twentieth-century modernity. When the new khaki uniform adapted
the body to modern warfare, it prompted responses from writers and
artists. This book is not concerned with how art and literature visualized
the war but instead considers how soldiers’ bodies were imagined and
created by images and experiences of army clothing. One of the chief
sources to describe the First World War in modernist terms was Paul
Fussell’s book The Great War and Modern Memory, which, by drawing
on the writing of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden,
David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen, argues that the war
represented a watershed between traditional and modernist literary
forms.23 Fussell’s book was influential but nonetheless attracted criti-
cism for its focus on writers who were largely infantry officers, thereby
excluding the experiences of wider social groups.24 Adrian Caesar, in
particular, takes issue with the emphasis placed on the perspective of
this group, arguing that the war poets mythologized the First World
War by linking a particular form of male sexuality with violence.25 The
dominance of this perspective on the war has also distracted atten-

tion from visual and material aspects of the cultural history of the
conflict.
The mythology of the literary war has directed attention away from
military design and has perhaps discouraged a search for meaning in
the symbols of modern warfare, which the modernist war poets fiercely
rejected. This is not to suggest that this book celebrates military design,
but there is a case for reconsidering the dominance of the literary war,
to critique material forms that might enhance an understanding of the
symbols that have formed memories of the First World War. Khaki is
clearly part of war memory, evident in British modernist art. As Sue
Malvern argues, far from producing visual propaganda, war artists left
testimonies that emphasized the legacy of fragmentation, rupture and
loss.26 For Modris Eksteins the First World War was a cultural event
representing the birth of the modern age; he draws on a range of artistic
sources to argue that a culture of militarism was underpinned by the
abstraction and myth making of a modern avant-garde.27 Samuel Hynes
argues that war experience actually gave rise to a modernist sensibility
in the post-war era in its radical break with the past and the efforts to
mark the discontinuity of history.28 All of these perspectives on the war
reflect its capacity to provoke artistic responses that could be described
as modernist. However, a visual symbol such as khaki gets less attention,
despite its critical role in wartime images and experiences. If the literary
war has predominated in cultural analysis of the First World War, this
research turns to the more ordinary visual and material cultural forms
that the war created.
Khaki and visibility
This book is about the military uniform worn by British combatants on

the western front during the First World War. Historically, the move to
functional designs such as the khaki service dress represented a retreat
from fashionability. From its humble beginnings, when colonial soldiers
rubbed mud into cotton cloth, this form of army clothing came to
dominate twentieth-century warfare. The move from spectacle to func-
tionality characterized the various changes in army clothing design
at the end of the nineteenth century. However, as forms of clothing,
uniform and fashion were clearly distinguishable. This book aims at
showing that there were many ways in which First World War British
army uniform was influenced by fashion – and indeed generated trends
in civilian wear.
Military uniform and fashionable clothing serve very different

purposes. According to cultural and dress historians, fashion is a provi-
sional form of identity; it is part of popular culture, associated with
modernity and concerned with pleasure and self-expression.29 On the
other hand uniform is about regimented appearance. Fashion and
uniform were both facilitated and intensified by mass production tech-
niques and new patterns of consumption in the nineteenth century and
both promised wearers body discipline and transformation. However,
the resemblance ends there. Elizabeth Wilson argues that fashion ‘subtly
undercuts its own assertion that the latest thing is somehow the final
solution to the problem of how to look.’30 For fashion, there will never
be a solution, as next season’s styles inevitably replace the last; whereas
uniform design is about the search for the most functional outfit for
active service.
Khaki came into its own in the context of intense popular mobiliza-
tion, an object that in fashioning the bodies of many formed part of
war memory. But khaki uniform was created as a functional camouflage
design. With much bigger, less ritualized and prepared forms of warfare,
khaki was a defensive design for soldiers facing a chaotic battlefield.
Anthony Giddens argues that the industrialization of war saw changes
signified by ‘the discarding of spectacular and ritual aspects of warfare,
perhaps symbolized above all by the relinquishing of brightly coloured
uniforms in favour of camouflaged battledress.’31 What started as a retreat
from fashionability made khaki an emblem for the dangers the body was
likely to endure in mechanized warfare. It represents a different kind of
war and a new kind of civilian soldier but also anticipated the increased
dangers of the industrialized battlefield. Bright colours and elaborate
costumes were strongly associated with the pre-modern soldier and an
age of chivalry. The strong colours standard across Europe for armies –
including red, the colour for the British – reflected a prevailing military
culture that valued honour. Like the Hussars, their elaborate uniforms
not only made their bodies distinctive but also echoed the heroic nature
of soldierly character. Khaki signified another kind of economy of the
military body; a response to surveillance technologies in battle, khaki
presented soldiers in tactical rather than fashionable terms.
Khaki was a direct outcome of visual technologies. As Paul Virilio
argues, the turn of the century saw developments in military aviation
that made the battlefield a ‘field of perception.’32 The role of vision was
by the First World War more instrumental, with a new khaki service
dress designed to incorporate camouflage devices to protect soldiers
from projectiles in the field of battle.33 When Cecil Gordon Harper, a
subaltern with the 10th Battalion Gordon Highlanders, was mobilized

for France on 8 June 1915, he was struck by soldiers’ efforts to camou-
flage by covering more conspicuous parts of traditional army clothing.
Distinctive dress for officers caused problems in the field, but tartan
was also conspicuous, and soldiers were forced to dull shiny buttons
to reduce their visibility to the enemy: ‘Bright light on polished metal
could give away one’s position and attract snipers. Tartan was a mark in
the open, and the distinction of officers’ uniform made them a prime
target for German marksmen.’34 Clothes designed for military spectacle
were making men targets in the field of battle. A new functional camou-
flage dress made uniform design integral to modern warfare.
The British were enthusiastic adopters of khaki, but dependence upon
Germany for a supply of synthetic dyestuffs meant that wartime short-
ages ‘seriously threatened to stop dyeing operations in these industries,
especially for the much-needed khaki colours.’35 In a bizarre twist to the
story of the making of the British uniform, the enemy held the means
of production for khaki during the First World War. This points to one of
the major themes of this book: how the story of khaki is bound up with
technology, in terms of the mass production of army clothing and visual
images. Most of all, though, this is the story of the largest, most ambi-
tious clothing-manufacturing project undertaken by the British state.
Harnessing industry and developing large projects mobilized British
society.
The First World War was a ‘total war,’ a term that describes the
deployment of national resources and manpower to meet the material
requirements of fighting a large-scale conflict.36 Total war involves the
administration of massed armies, to prepare them for rapid expansion as
well as quick and effective mobilization.37 As John Horne argues, stud-
ying national mobilization does not just consider the coercive powers
that harness the resources of the state but should be viewed as a political
and cultural process with a lived reality.38 In 1913, when H. G. Wells
predicted that science and engineering would be crucial to win the
next war, he anticipated that the side with the best technology would
succeed.39 The First World War saw the use of the tank and other new
weapons and the first use of poison gas. The modernity of war mobiliza-
tion underpins most of the discussions in this book, whether exploring
the production of army clothing or the making of the civilian soldier.
Furthermore, this book considers the social impact of clothing a mass
army. The unprecedented demand for military uniforms was difficult to
handle, but as soon as civilians were recruited, they had to be clothed.
When a war generates a large demand for uniforms, it impacts the whole
of society. According to Ben Fine, conflict was pivotal to standardization

in clothing; he cites the introduction of sizing in the American Civil War,
when there was a sudden large-scale demand for uniforms.40 Indeed, the
large demand for army clothing in the Napoleonic Wars gave rise to wide-
spread exploitative ‘sweating’ practices, which were largely responsible
for threatening the established craft basis of the tailoring trade in Britain.
Piecework, sweating and the slop trade dominated in the nineteenth
century, and the defeat of tailors in the 1834 strike enabled these early
but unruly forms of mass production.41 Alastair Reid found that the First
World War saw increased state intervention in domestic affairs through
the production demands for war, but it also brought with it the organ-
izing effects of collectivism.42 Wartime saw quick adaptation to govern-
ment contracts in tailoring, amongst other consumer trades.43 War drove
social changes, particularly in the working lives of British people. This
book explores how the scale and reach of uniform production during
the First World War saw the British Army draw upon civilian trades in
unprecedented ways. As Black argues, ‘total war’ was a development of
the First World War, not its cause.44 As the war got bigger, the demand
for recruits became greater, and the outcome was a project to clothe vast
numbers, many of whom died in uniform.
Designing bodies for war
Another major theme of the book is the male body at war. This is partic-
ularly poignant given that khaki was utilized in propaganda to create
the fantasy of durable masculinity, which inevitably clashed with expe-
riences of warfare and heavy losses. The book does what many others
about the First World War have done: highlights stark contrasts between
representation and reality. Wartime experience changed British society,
but what can the humble but ubiquitous khaki uniform reveal about
cultural shifts during the First World War? Whether mobilized to go to
the trenches or to work in war-related production at home, the British
people were focused on a national project. This book considers who was
involved in the design and production of the British army uniform and
explores the images and ideas that khaki created.
The book explores images of men’s bodies in wartime, images found
in propaganda, newspapers, official army manuals, ephemera from the
tailoring trade and advertisements. Did the wartime presentation and
the ‘design’ of the military body betray public fears about the more
disturbing realities of what happens to bodies at war? Looking at these
images now we are more sensitive to the realities of this conflict and
its legacy of loss, wounding and death. Brutal wounds, such as facial
disfigurement, haunt these images of perfectly turned out men in
khaki uniform. This has inspired the question of whether the drive to
compulsively report on the ‘care’ of soldier’s bodies in combat situations
reflected official fears about what was happening in the field of battle.
Clothing’s very intimacy evokes the body of the soldier, thereby giving
the media a focus on the care of soldiers’ bodies.
The new interdisciplinarity invigorating the study of dress history
underscores the range of issues that research on fashion and clothing
can illuminate.45 As Joanne Entwistle argues, fashion is a social process
that creates the body through dress to make it social and identifiable
in modern society.46 Fashion is both a social and creative process. A
new scholarly interest in clothing and dress engages with histories from
below, in line with historical approaches concerned with uncovering
various sources of ‘people management.’47 Clothing can tell much about
the history, experience and representation of the body but military
uniform has a unique story to tell about the embodiment of war. Khaki’s
powerful image and materiality give it a place in the distinctive visual
culture that characterized First World War Britain.
Whether it becomes part of the spectacle of military display or
promotes an instrumental view of the soldier’s body, military uniform
is all about illusion. In the following chapters the discussion explores
how khaki generated its own illusions. One of the problems with this
topic is whether to treat khaki as fashion, clothing or regulation dress.
Fashion might be too ephemeral for military institutions, which value
the power of clothing but want to be distanced from the connotations
of fashionable consumption. However, as mentioned at the start of this
chapter, popular media reporting on army efficiency and progress often
expresses this through features on improved military designs. Army
clothing has a special place in these discussions, due to its proximity to
the body and the opportunities it creates to express concern about the
vulnerability of fighting soldiers. The range of fashion images preoccu-
pied with military themes in the early twentieth century might reflect
the wider public interest in military values and models of social organi-
zation, but the ensuing chapters consider how the British military and
a sympathetic media looked to fashion discourse to recruit civilians or
found in a popular visual culture ways to engage the public in the life
of the soldier.
Khaki is a paradigm of how the military body is envisaged within
modern warfare. Historically, colourful clothing was exchanged for
khaki when new ideas about discipline replaced the traditional warrior
ethic. Daniel Roche argues that the discipline of appearances, which

is the purpose of modern uniform, is primarily concerned with the
formation and training of bodies for combat, achieved through the
instrumentality that standardized clothing gives the military body, ‘to
shape the physique and the bearing of a combative individual, whose
autonomy conditions his docility and whose obedience transforms indi-
vidual strength into collective power.’48 The French philosopher Michel
Foucault contrasted the disciplined appearance of the modern soldier
with the excesses of the past, when bright colours conveyed military
honour.49 He saw uniform as a feature of a modernity that made the
body a target of power: ‘the soldier has become something that can be
made.’50 Khaki is associated with that political project, and the modern
military uniform is critical to disciplining civilian bodies for military
service.
Khaki embodies body discipline and the desire for transformation
on and off the battlefield. Despite the influence clothing exerts on
each soldier’s sense of self, it is often overlooked in accounts of war.
However, there is evidence that the nineteenth century saw an increased
consciousness of the role of army clothing in improving military disci-
pline and morale. The Crimean War brought army clothing to the fore-
front of military debates, making it a turning point for the design of
British army uniform, but also drew attention to army clothing in public
and private debates on war supply. The severe cold in southern Russia
demanded better clothing than had been supplied to British soldiers,
which led to improvisations such as the cardigan and the balaclava.51
The twentieth century saw military uniform become a matter of public
debate. This study contributes to the social and cultural histories of
war by drawing attention to the critical role of clothing in the forma-
tion of collective disciplines. It addresses issues beyond the First World
War to consider just what constitutes a ‘modern’ approach to military
appearance. Modern uniform created the body in new and interesting
ways. This book asks whether the design of the khaki service dress gave
military planners enhanced techniques to standardize and discipline
recruits. Messages about army discipline were flowing out into civil
society during the First World War.
Costume historians acknowledge that a policy of regulation in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries standardized military dress, specifi-
cally to express discipline.52 In this sense, uniform represents the side of
modernity associated with the rise of the nation state and its forms of
standardization, bureaucracy and centralized systems of organization.
Uniforms, as sociologist Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi argues of the black
shirt of Italian fascism, were part of the regime’s construction of citizen-

ship.53 In the fascist project, the black shirt had transformative power.
Uniform clothing is about stabilizing identities to embody specific forms
of citizenship. As Jacqueline Durran argues, increased standardization of
sailors’ uniforms in the early nineteenth century reflected the rise of the
nation state by publicly intervening in their private lives.54 Khaki could,
therefore, be viewed as part of a political project to discipline civilian
bodies for war. According to Durran, British sailors, traditionally charac-
terized as heroic dandies in the late 1700s, were by the early nineteenth
century brought under more official control through standardization of
their dress.55 The move from a privatized body to a publicly owned one
was symbolized by increased regulation of clothing.
There are many ways in which uniforms can incorporate people into
a state system. Indeed, Gabriel Koureas argues that First World War
commemoration attempted to re-establish normative pre-war masculin-
ities through the use of the ceremonial figure of the soldier in uniform;
for him this was an act of incorporation at a time when many men had
another story to tell about their war experience.56 Uniform was utilized
to erase the unsavoury aspects of war experience and served as an ideal
image to incorporate those whose wartime experience challenged the
establishment view. Army clothing, an aesthetic artefact inscribed
in everyday life, created many images through practices established
in the field of battle, some of which were not welcome once the war
ended. Most notable were images of colonial soldiers captured in draw-
ings, paintings and photographs. These images, absent from public war
remembrance, suggested that an ethnically diverse army became inap-
propriate to the collective memory of the war. Images were very useful
to construct a standardized version of military masculinity in wartime,
but images that exoticized colonial soldiers during wartime were not so
popular in the post-war reconstruction.
Khaki and gender
Michael Roper argues that during the First World War, many women
sought to bring a sense of home to men at the front. For Roper, letters
between mothers and sons were an emotional support to soldiers that
reflected the strong links between home and battle front during this
conflict. Men were not supposed ‘to give details of location, effects of
hostile fire, the physical and moral condition of troops and details of
defensive works.’57 Thus, they were often driven to discuss domestic
issues, including their observations about clothing, perhaps to reassure
their mothers that they were caring for themselves. This focus becomes
clear as one trawls through letters, diaries and memoirs. Food and
clothing were preoccupations for soldiers in the trenches, but those who
revealed most about their uniform were men in the tailoring and textile
trades. Their observations have been critical to this book’s research.
Roper draws attention to gendered aspects of this conflict, but there
are very specific ways in which army clothing brought relationships
between the masculine and the feminine into focus.
Amongst other everyday things, army dress was an ideal prompt
for women to pressurize men to enlist. Indeed, groups of middle-class
women, such as the Order of the White Feather, went about publicly
shaming men who were not in khaki. Another gendered aspect of the
story is the love and care that war knitting represented; it inspired
poems, songs and wartime stitches. Subsequent chapters question
whether this was a simple matter of constructing the battle front as
masculine and the home front as feminine. Women were instrumental
to the war effort, and many were in uniform but were most likely to
be in caring or non-combatant roles. The many prohibitions on rela-
tionships between women and men reveal official concerns about
the moral threat women soldiers posed to the army. This book takes
the khaki uniform as a starting point to explore some of the debates
about war and gender. Jennifer Craik argues that uniform practices and
techniques enforce specific kinds of social identities formed around
a masculine ideal.58 Quintin Colville also finds that naval uniform
is critical to understanding the cultures of masculinity and class in
the British navy between 1930 and 1939.59 Both studies interpret the
representation and experience of uniform to engage in debates about
masculinities.
Gender identity has been widely posited as a cultural construction,
notably by Simone de Beauvoir, who argued that femininity is a social
and cultural construction.60 Later feminist theorists explored questions
of spectatorship in art and film to uncover the history and politics of
gender representation.61 Critical to their argument was a focus on the
visibility of women’s bodies in feminist critiques of art and popular
culture.62 When Judith Butler advanced a theory of performativity, she
was more interested in the instability of gender categories, the ‘various
forces that police the social appearance of gender.’63 A focus of this book
is the social appearance of masculinity, in particular how images of men
in uniform mobilized British society for war. The discussion identifies
the various forces ‘that police the social appearance’ of wartime mascu-
linity, from propaganda messages that offered images of khaki-clad men
to military punishments meted out to conscientious objectors who

refused to don the uniform.
The official role of military uniform, its masculine associations and
rigid adherence to rules, seem to naturally exclude it from fashion or
dress history. This is in part due to reluctance to consider the cultural
significance of men’s dress. Until recently, men’s clothing has gained
less attention in academic study than women’s, due in part to a tradi-
tional division of labour that made fashionable consumption appear to
be a woman’s role.64 However, feminist theorizing of women’s system-
atic exclusion from power prompted further work within gender studies
that broadened its reach to consider the formation of masculine identi-
ties in a patriarchal society.65 This offers fertile ground to consider how
cultural forms construct masculine identities. Military uniform may not
fit conventional histories of fashion, but it is critical to understanding
how normative masculinities are constructed and how men’s bodies are
expected to behave in war and conflict.
There are studies that consider soldiers as men, including Paul
Higate’s Military Masculinities: Identity and the State and Joanna Bourke’s
Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War.66 Bourke’s
study of men’s bodies during the First World War demonstrates how
material forces culturally produced men’s bodies, but she also points
to ‘the values ascribed to the body and the disciplines applied to
masculinity.’67 Uniform, which shaped perceptions of what constituted
manliness, was one of the techniques whereby disciplines were applied
to men’s bodies in the First World War. David Morgan also identifies
direct links between hegemonic masculinities and men’s bodies in mili-
tary practices.68 If men’s bodies became part of the many popular narra-
tives that conveyed the war to the home front, they were also in the
field of battle itself. Work on the visual culture of war, such as Michael
Paris’s exploration of popular culture between 1850 and 2000, explores
how war was treated as entertaining spectacle for British youth.69 All of
these frame this study of army clothing to consider whether uniform
was a significant site in forming wartime masculine identities.
These historians’ interest in the role of uniformity to advance hegem-
onic masculinities in times of war is matched by a comparable interest
on the part of fashion historians writing on similar themes. Debate
on the uniformity of masculine appearance from the mid-1800s and
its role in gender and class politics features in the historical analysis
of men’s fashion, in particular the move to more modest and uniform
appearance.70 In 1930 John Carl Flügel described the ‘Great Masculine
Renunciation’ as the inevitable embodiment of changing ideals in
the nineteenth century.71 A renunciation of sartorial excess, taken by

Flügel and other fashion historians to be a direct result of the growing
dominance of bourgeois values, was expressed through a disapproval
of brightly coloured and decorated costume.72 However, Christopher
Breward has challenged this theory of masculine dress by arguing
against this acceptance of a total masculine renunciation in his study of
the clothing and consumption habits of young men in London between
1860 and 1914.73 His consideration of the varieties of material qualities
of clothing, the methods of sale and promotion and evidence of use
and representations of menswear, makes a compelling argument that
men were not excluded from consumer culture. Instead, their sartorial
choices were constrained, and they consumed in a less conspicuous way
than women. But for David Kuchta this embodiment of manliness had
roots in earlier political upheavals, which led the middle-classes to wear
clothes that adopted an ‘ideology of inconspicuous consumption.’74 A
regime of uniformity and simplicity made deviation more perilous and
increased the chances for error. Military uniform appears to conform to
the ideology of ‘inconspicuous consumption,’ a neglected episode in the
history of fashionable consumption.
Visualizing khaki
Fashion history and theory has shown the benefits of a convergence

of historical and cultural studies approaches.75 However, this book also
looks to the relationship between material culture and design history
to analyse uniform as an object that reflects social transformations.76
The preoccupation in design history with consumer goods has resulted
in a focus on peacetime consumer behaviour to the neglect of the
large-scale public consumption associated with wartime. While the two
World Wars are often written out of design history, as either disrup-
tive of twentieth-century design developments or marginal to the
history of fashionable consumption, some concession has been made
to the role of war supply in the standardization of production systems.
However, there is also lack of information about those who ‘designed’
uniforms. A discourse that emerged in early twentieth-century civilian
life about the autonomy and ‘special’ status of the designer had no
parallel within military institutions. Indeed, war goods are not conven-
tionally viewed as designed objects. Design was an emergent concept
during the First World War, linked with civilian rather than military
practices, desires and behaviours. One of the challenges of this book is
to find a language to analyse military design while being mindful that
the very idea of design, in the sense it is understood today, was not
established.
The concept of culture involves the search for a better understanding of
social processes and the construction of social life through discourses and
practices. This research takes as a starting point the notion that cultural
representations structured the behaviour of civilians and combatants in
First World War Britain. Models of military change have been criticized
for their reliance on technocratic explanations to the neglect of cultural
analysis. This book traces the cultural life of the khaki uniform through
sources such as photographs, newspapers, posters, war office documents,
parliamentary debates, memoirs and diaries. Thus, the book assembles a
network of cultural representations to explore what khaki meant to the
construction of military masculinities. Newspaper editors were powerful
in shaping popular perceptions of the war and were largely sympathetic
to the government case. The clothing trade was keen to stay in business
but parts of the trade could be aggrieved when they lost contracts to
others thought to be less worthy. Clearly the state and the army had a
huge stake in the wartime representation of the fighting soldier. Those
who got to define khaki shaped the meanings that accrued to the bodies
of men in wartime Britain. For this reason, visual culture is the primary
focus of this work, but textual sources also build a picture of how the
uniform was defined, how it formed narratives and created social iden-
tities during wartime. For instance, war office documents and publica-
tions are critical to making sense of the official view of the wartime
soldier, yet most of these sources are textual.
Visual cultures, given the desire to remember, recover or ‘see’ those
lost to war, have resonance with notions of memory. High value is
attributed to traces and imprints that retain something elusive about
what is lost to war, giving visual images a critical role in programmes
for cultural recovery. What are the traces of khaki that bring us closer
to understanding their role in images of war memory? What is the
legacy of this modern uniform adopted by the British army and worn
by so many during the First World War? What becomes clear to anyone
studying the design of military clothing in this conflict is the dearth of
evidence. There are a lot of images, texts and objects, but it is rare to
find actual army uniforms dating to the First World War. Many of those
found in museum collections were made as sealed patterns for display
in the war office, not for battlefield wear. In this research, soldiers’
personal accounts discussing military uniform at length were few, while
the tailoring trade pronounced regularly on army clothing matters. The
trade’s investment in the issue of clothing supply for the army at the
time meant that these sources had to be treated with care. War office
publications were a rich source of information on both the official desire
for control over men’s bodies and the experience of men who wore the
clothes. Parliamentary debates offered an insight into the views of polit-
ical leadership on clothing, which took up a good deal of their time and
energy, especially regarding quality for the field, fairness in distribution,
flow of supply, industrial relations issues for manufacturers, innovations
and changes, and not least who could wear the uniform and when.
Minutes of a uniform or dress committee during wartime were not
found, but there is evidence, garnered from parliamentary debates dated
18 November 1914, that a committee existed: ‘The service dress jacket
for officers was altered to its present pattern on the recommendation
of a committee of senior officers, in consequence of a general request
from officers.’77 It is also clear that the committee instituted changes
to uniform design in response to requests from those in the field: ‘No
adverse reports regarding the present pattern have been received from
the Army in the field, and in these circumstances it is not proposed to
revert to the older pattern jacket.’78 What is clear is that design changes
were driven by reports from army command in the field of battle. From
9 February 1915 there is further evidence that two members of that
committee were from the House of Commons.79
Sources relating to state governance, trade organization, manufac-
turing and the supply and wearing of uniform were pertinent to how
army clothing was designed and experienced, but promotional sources
told the story of how they were sold. Advertisements are about persua-
sion, but their promotional language reveals much about cultural and
economic contexts for producers and consumers. The popular press was
a particularly good source due to the way clothing and fashion are found
in sites of entertainment and to these periodicals’ reliance on images.
These sources presented an opportunity to explore everyday concerns
during wartime. Further, the popular press was also likely to ‘visualize’
and ‘aestheticize’ news on war. Photographs’ dual role as entertainment
and evidence makes them particularly relevant to this research.80 Unlike
soldiers’ literary narratives of the First World War, which offered recur-
rent images of bodies in pieces, early war press photographs visualized
the strength and durability of men’s bodies.
Literature may be widely acknowledged as witness to the modernism
of wartime myth making, but visual and material aspects of wartime
culture also show a remarkable capacity for illusion. However, the overt
concern in official wartime photographs with the aesthetics of military
discipline to some extent denied the humanity of the soldiers depicted
and instead sought to express their citizenship through the uniform. The
visibility of collective disciplines on the pages of illustrated newspapers
constructed the illusion of collective action. Only bodies conforming
to the war effort appeared on its pages. It is also notable that news-
paper picture stories rarely humanized soldiers; they used the shorthand
‘Tommy’ to name rank-and-file soldiers. One of this book’s aims is to
consider the visual culture of the war as a corrective to literary depic-
tions that have shaped the cultural memory of the war.
This interdisciplinary approach tests representation against experi-
ence. It is only in the past twenty years that interdisciplinary research has
made studies such as this possible, with research on fashion and clothing
having been particularly alien to the academic mindset until recently.
This book considers military uniform, not as a function of battlefield
strategies, but as an embodiment of the military and civilian culture that
gave it life. One of the central concerns of this book is to demonstrate
the value of integrating military history with design history. Objects in
design history are studied to gain insights into how we live and make
sense of the world through the design of our environment. It is clear
that the optimism and creativity normally associated with commercial
design processes do not apply here. The presence of the strong hand
of official regulation is characteristic of military design, but this is not
the whole story. Military design is the result of a complex set of proc-
esses. Designing a uniform is often by committee and is invariably the
outcome of struggle, resistance and perhaps conflict.
In Chapter 2 I explore the images and experience of uniform through
official recruitment posters and press sources to consider how khaki
was utilized to militarize civilian men. The ‘call to uniform’ had wider
meanings in British culture, reflecting Muscular Christianity, which this
chapter illuminates to consider how wartime fashioned masculinity. The
chapter, exploring the construction of soldiering as patriotic duty, looks
to the image of Kitchener and a range of other representations to ask
why the appearance of men’s bodies became a matter of public concern
and goes on to consider what happened when the project broke down,
when inadequate uniform supply led to the adoption of replacement
clothing famously dubbed Kitchener Blue.
Chapter 3 explores the project of making the British soldier and
considers its spread across civilian society in the work of the tailoring
trade but also in informal craft projects for the war effort. I ask whether
images concerned with cleanliness, hygiene and the smart dress of
soldiers were a device in wartime popular culture to set limits on men’s
agency. Photographs, newspapers, war office documents and tailoring
ephemera that trace the specific shape of the systems of provision of

army clothing are examined to consider whether they opened up
dialogue between the military and the civilian tailoring trade. Here I also
explore wartime knitting to consider the range of social groups involved
in fashioning the soldier in wartime Britain.
In Chapter 4 I explore personal accounts from conscientious objec-
tors to discover what happened when men refused to wear khaki. This
chapter considers how and why COs politicized clothing by tracing
their efforts to expose the official drive to police masculine appearance.
If khaki signified a good and wholesome masculinity in wartime culture,
then resistors were presumed to be cowards. I consider why uniforms
were forced onto the bodies of detained COs and look to the legacy of
the prison blanket as a symbol of wartime detention.
In Chapter 5 I consider social class as the driver for constructing new
military masculinities. I trace the measures taken by state and trade to
cope with the complexities of supplying new army officers with uniforms.
Through a range of advertisements and official documents, this chapter
explores the system of provision for clothing officers during the war, a
system that found the wartime trade straddling innovation and tradi-
tion in the search for images to reflect changing masculine ideals. I find
commercial images that celebrate functional, mass-produced clothing but
retain the signifiers of sporting leisure. By linking the modernizing of the
army with the new flexibility in the wartime civilian trades, the discus-
sion identifies specific instances of compromise, such as the trench coat.
Chapter 6 explores how military uniform shaped ethnic and racial
divisions in the British army on the western front. I consider uniform
designs and styles of presentation to consider the role of colonial troops
and their perceived contribution to the war effort. This discussion asks
how popular culture utilized images of colonial troops to mobilize certain
kinds of feelings amongst the British public about what made an ideal
soldier. Further, the setting up of a British Jewish regiment demonstrated
that marginalized groups who utilized khaki formed their own military
spectacle and extended ideas of what constituted wartime masculini-
ties. In Chapter 7 I conclude by reflecting on images of war memory
and practices of demobilization, in particular the process of returning
soldiers to civilian suits.
Collective disciplines
For Gillian Rose visual culture is about integrating visual images with
social life.81 As Margaret Dikovitskaya observes, the cultural turn in the
humanities has given visual studies added impetus and has brought to
the study of images reflection on the interrelationship between power
and knowledge.82 Rose also sees the deployment of visual methods as
owing much to the work of Michel Foucault, specifically his concern
with discursive formations.83 Visual images are part of a network of
cultural representations that illuminate neglected historical categories.
A key theme of this book is whether the khaki uniform generated collec-
tive disciplines, which is why the first part of the book, concerned with
the cultural, economic and psychic processes involved in ‘making men,’
draws on the work of Foucault, for whom the body was a focus for social
control in modern institutional contexts.84
Many authors look to Foucault’s work to understand the deployment
of visual methods and how they form and reproduce discursive forma-
tions. Foucault’s model of modern institutions saw the body subjected
to a ‘normalising gaze,’ making it available to practices of rearrange-
ment, improvement and transformation.85 Foucault was not a histo-
rian, despite his interest in historical concepts of health, sexuality,
science, academic knowledge or artistic work. However, his commit-
ment to a larger political project has been used to explain this meta-
historical stance.86 His work has been criticized for viewing individual
agency as solely determined by institutional contexts, which appears
to construct subjects as simply a function of regimes of power and/or
knowledge. Foucault appears to attribute more power to institutions
than to people. Contrary to Foucault’s model of domination and subju-
gation, Charles Taylor argues that much of modern history is the result
of collective disciplines, in particular citizen armies.87 The British effort
in the First World War is a good example of Taylor’s definition of collec-
tive disciplines.
What is clearly important to this research is Foucault’s use of visual
economies to consider social behaviour in modern institutions.88
Visibility, which for him was central to the development of a certain
concept of modernity in the twentieth century, is a key concern in
this research on military uniform. Foucault advocates identifying and
analyzing emergent discourses and gauging their reliability against
witness accounts. In defence of Foucault’s nominalist approach to
history, John Rajchman argues it is more than a methodological prefer-
ence: ‘They are not histories of things, but of the terms, categories, and
techniques through which certain things become at certain times the
focus of a whole configuration of discussion and procedure.’89 Khaki
uniform is explored with this in mind, as something to be interpreted
through the various texts and images that put it to work.
Foucault was concerned with exposing illusions, but he looked to the

structure of organizations to find the origin of a particular worldview.
More interested in how things are ‘constituted,’ he was sceptical of
conventional histories of ‘development’ and ‘continuity.’90 His concept
of discourse involves conscious knowledge about a given subject –
madness, health, sexuality, class, race – but also refers to an uncon-
scious substructure of beliefs, myths and ideologies. If discourse is the
creation and organization of knowledge, it determines how and what
we know, as individuals and as a society.91 Historically, situated fields
of knowledge had the power to make subjects and objects come into
existence through the discursive formations that make speech possi-
ble.92 Parallels across ‘discursive fields’ prompted Foucault’s conception
of social life in terms of systems of representation and their reproduc-
tion through the operation of institutional structures.93 Foucault’s later
writings explored subjectivity – specifically how bodies are culturally
produced as subjects. In Discipline and Punish he explored institutions
as sites for the creation of knowledge that acts directly on the body.94
For Foucault, the prison is the architectural embodiment of the disci-
plinary mechanism to make the prisoner’s body available to a judge-
mental gaze, which then cultivates his conformity to its rules. Foucault
argues that discipline creates certain kinds of individuals, employing
Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as a metaphor for the functioning of a
disciplinary society.95 The panopticon was the ‘perfect’ prison, where
inmates exist in a state of permanent, total visibility.96 Self-discipline
is induced by the threat of surveillance, and a normalizing gaze takes
the place of physical force; visibility is a ‘trap’ that becomes the ‘guar-
antee of order’.97 It is clear that Foucault goes beyond the ideological
construction of subjectivity, to consider the discursive as a material
marker of the body.
There are some examples of a Foucauldian model being adopted by
theorists to explore how uniform clothing enhances citizenship and
embodies collective disciplines. The anthropologist Brian McVeigh’s
work on Japanese high school uniform uncovers how a ‘normalising
gaze’ became central to the maintenance of strategic schooling as part
of a nationalist economic project.98 For him, uniform inscribes bodies
to reflect particular constructions of citizenship. Daniel Purdy also uses
Foucault’s writing to contrast two modes of visibility, the tactical and
the fashionable, in his work on the uniform of the Prussian army in
the eighteenth century.99 His account of the development of a soldierly
aesthetic suggests that simplicity was instrumental to a disciplinary
field of vision: ‘The clothes cover the body with such intensity that
they become almost a second skin, a natural part of the body, and
thereby are almost no covering at all. ... The uniform was both invisible
and visible.’100 For Foucault, disciplines are the techniques that form a
sustainable strategy for sorting people into disciplined groups.
Modern uniforms offer a system to mark – and make visible – bodies
for classification and discipline, which is how Foucault replaces a regime
of spectacle with one of surveillance.101 For Foucault knowledge and
power are inseparable. As both McVeigh and Purdy suggest, uniform
constructs bodies in ways that promote a particular order of things.
Foucault’s theory of the disciplinary regime emphasizes embodiment,
and his model of corporeal ‘inscription,’ where power acts directly on
the body in the form of practices, has influenced the interpretation of
historical sources in this book. A focus on the visual gives close attention
to discursive formations that constitute military appearance. The book
seeks to explore various discourses that emerged about khaki to discover
how the wartime soldier was embodied.
Born of functionality, khaki was first a retreat from fashionability, a
‘modest and serviceable hue’ that made many transformations during
wartime. By 1916 the Illustrated London News brought home the
message of khaki with a colour feature entitled ‘Khaki As It Appears
against a European Landscape: Natural Colour Photographs of the
British Service Uniform Worn in the War.’102 Ten colour photographs
of soldiers in various combat positions illuminate the camouflage
effects of drab colours against the landscape of the western front.
Between the photographs close-up images of foliage appear to further
illustrate how khaki was adopted to give British soldiers tactical advan-
tage. What is fascinating about this feature article is that it reflects
a growing consciousness within wartime popular culture about the
power of visual forms by celebrating the invisibility of khaki on the
western front.
Increasingly, photographs were the medium for newspapers reporting
on the war, but here the effort to promote illusion as a battlefield trick
is striking, recalling Virilio’s view that perception had become a matter
of life and death in twentieth-century warfare. Did this functional
camouflage design for soldiers facing a chaotic battlefield become an
emblem for the vulnerability of the body in mechanized warfare? This
book considers how the army and civilians envisioned soldiers and how
they also broke out of the rigid categories created for them. Both are key
to constructing a sense of what the image of the British army soldier
meant during the First World War and what its material and visual
legacy is in anticipation of the centenary of its outbreak in 2014. As
this conflict now edges into popular memory, how it is memorialized

continues to be a matter of debate. The question for this book is what
ideas and values khaki uniform embodied. The next chapter concerns
how soldiers were recruited in the first part of the war and questions the
role of visual images in creating a culture of military participation.
Part I
Making Men
2
The Kitchener Image and
First World War Recruitment
What soldiers wear is central to the public image of the military. This
chapter explores the images that recruited men to the British army and
considers their role in the construction of military identities. As Scott
Myerly Hughes writes, the Victorian army used fine clothing to entice
promising men. However, the image of the military was suffering by the
early twentieth century.1 Given that the pre-war years were character-
ized by poor recruitment to the rank and file, it was extraordinary that
so many men took up khaki in the autumn of 1914. According to John
Keegan, pre-war enlistment was not a popular option and was driven
by poverty rather than patriotism.2 However, the outbreak of war saw
a surge in recruitment, and as this chapter shows, it was the drive to
reconstruct British military masculinities in the First World War that
gave impetus to recruitment images.
When recruiting declined between October 1914 and February 1915,
dropping to below 100,000 for the first time since the outbreak of war,
a poster campaign was launched.3 The imagery used in this campaign is
critical to understanding how the military uniform drew civilians into
the wartime culture of militarism. Gone were the trappings of Victorian
army dress; khaki appeared to represent a new kind of modernized mili-
tary body. The poster campaign gave visual clues as to how men’s bodies
were officially viewed during wartime. An all-party group financed
by the War Office and voluntary funds, the Parliamentary Recruiting
Committee (PRC), produced over two hundred posters intended to stim-
ulate recruitment.4 Of the many posters produced, some striking exam-
ples utilize clothing. One 1915 PRC poster posed a question to civilian
men: ‘Which Ought You to Wear?’5 In it five civilian hats set against
a green background frame a British soldier’s service cap placed at the
centre of the image.
27
Figure 2.1 ‘Which Ought You to Wear?’ IWM PST 7664, © Imperial War Museum
The Kitchener Image and First World War Recruitment 29
This poster appears to construct shirkers as men with a taste for

leisure, symbolized by the configuration of a bowler hat, the straw
boater, panama, top hat and trilby. On the other hand, the simple
service cap is presented as the patriotic choice. A similar poster, ‘If
the Cap Fits You, Join the Army Today,’ features an imposing image
of a service cap, signalling the correct appearance for young civilian
men during wartime.6 This poster suggests that joining the army is the
patriotic choice, that khaki embodies military ideals. In both posters
military uniform is presented as a symbol of conformity to a patriotic
military masculinity.
Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse demonstrates how visual
images can signal correct appearance and behaviour. He went beyond
the ideological construction of subjectivity; for him the discursive is
a material marker of the body. Thus, if these recruitment images were
subjected to a Foucauldian reading, the wartime posters appear to be
cultivating conformity to a new military masculinity. They use uniform
not only to entice men to the army but also to induce guilt and shame
in reluctant recruits. Laura Ugolini argues that a pattern of menswear
consumption arose during the war that gave civilian clothing negative
connotations.7 Clothing became divisive symbols of wartime culture;
as the posters suggest, men’s leisure clothing became associated with a
dereliction of patriotic duty.
In his memoir Harry Harding, from the 5th Royal Berkshire Regiment,
recalled a day in November 1916 when a group of soldiers heading for
the Arras front sang bawdy songs; amongst them one denigrated civilian
clothes:
We wore a tunic, a drab khaki tunic

You wore smart civvy clothes
We fought and fell at Loos while you were on the booze
That everybody knows.8
Harding and his company had cultivated a pride in the austerity of the
‘drab khaki tunic,’ secure in the knowledge that this garb represented
their patriotic efforts. In contrast ‘smart civvy clothes’ were taken as
a sign of laziness, and as this song suggests, their negative connota-
tions were apparently widely known. High military participation in the
conflict led to a widespread consensual attitude to war.9 Given how
they demonstrated the transformation of bodies, the posters that focus
on the male body made clothing a powerful signifier. Discursive forma-
tions such as recruitment images marked the body, which isolated
shirkers from what were taken to be the more desirable recruits. If

clothing became a visible reminder of who displayed patriotism and
civic duty, then dress became a key device to recruit men to the wartime
army.
Reform and modernization
Historically, visible military spectacle was valued to display the disci-

pline of ‘improving regiments’ all around nineteenth-century Europe.10
Military spectacle reflected the transformation and improvement of what
had been thought to be fairly unpromising material. Military spectacle
constructed imperial adventures as glorious and uniform as a source of
pride; according to one account of army life in the 1890s, ‘A not incon-
siderable number of young men join the Army under the impression
that they are embarking on a glorious life, the principal motifs of which
are a red coat, bands of music, well-oiled hair, jingling spurs may-be, and
a free kit and rations, and any amount of enthusiasm and admiration
from a grateful country, and the girls in particular.’11 Uniforms were a
potent symbol of the Victorian army, and their variety was an accurate
reflection of regimental loyalties and the small campaigns in which they
were involved.12 One of the chief attractions of military life appeared to
be the opportunity that the army gave men to participate in the power
and glory of war, to take on a new, improved image and to wear a beau-
tiful uniform.
For the British army the rejection of military spectacle did not mean
lack of concern with its image; khaki presented a modernized appear-
ance. In the pre-war period, the regimental system, designed to improve
the self-image of the British army, gave it a modern character; culti-
vating separatism tamed radical tendencies in what was becoming
a mass army.13 Historically, the origins of uniform lay in the loyalty
mercenaries displayed towards their superiors, but in the nineteenth-
century the British army underwent changes that gave army clothing a
new kind of social value on and off the battlefield. Uniform had always
been about representing discipline and transformation; khaki appeared
to suggest that the military body faced a new kind of experience in tech-
nological warfare and a changed status in a mass army.
Khaki service dress came about through a series of reforms, in
particular the cultivation of a new professionalism in the army that
modernized the image of the British soldier. Regimental ideology
was secured through regimental organization, which was designed to
encourage loyalty and professionalism amongst the ranks.14 Pre-war
Figure 2.2 ‘If the Cap Fits You Join the Army Today,’ IWM PST 5146 (date
unknown), © Imperial War Museum
army reorganization consolidated the identity of the British forces

and set the ground for mass mobilization. By 1914, the regular army
and the reserves were organized into an expeditionary force of six all-
arms divisions and one cavalry division, the former consisting of three
infantry brigades, each having four battalions, with additional divi-
sional mounted troops, artillery, engineers, signal troops, supply and
transport train and field ambulances. Each division had 18,000 men;
12,000 of them were infantry with 24 machine guns and 4,000 artillery
with 76 guns.15
What became known as the Haldane reforms, put in place by the
Secretary of State for War between 1905 and 1912, included the setting
up of a territorial force to ease volunteering and provide the means for
expansion should mobilization become reality.16 Haldane reforms reor-
ganized the militia and volunteers to support the regular army, and the
old militia, renamed the Special Reserve, was a quick supplier of trained
manpower to the regular army. Haldane’s territorializing of the army
meant the prestige of the regular army could branch out to new kinds of
units, while the role of infantry battalions of the territorial force boosted
manpower and provided specialist units.17 By 1914 both the regular
army and the territorial force had a fairly standardized uniform, but for
other ranks, while the headdress varied, the khaki dress was very similar
from one unit to the next. There was one pattern of tunic and trousers
and two greatcoats. Variations in the detail and materials of officers’
uniforms were subtle, and the khaki service cap with the matching peak
and brown leather chin strap with metal badge at the front was the basic
headdress for English, Irish and Welsh troops.18
Part of the project to modernize the British army was to transform
the design of the uniform and the image of the soldier. The year 1914
was significant for the British army uniform; it was the last time the
whole army wore full dress. Standardization was almost complete with
the 1902 adoption of khaki service dress for general purposes and
the confining of full dress to ceremonial occasions.19 Hew Strachan
acknowledges the importance of the 1855 introduction of the tunic to
the development in uniform design in the modern period, but he argues
that nineteenth-century reform was also responsible for the separation
of full and working dresses.20 Connotations of ‘work’ suggested by the
simple and practical appearance of khaki service dress made sense in the
context of new technologies.
As discussed in Chapter 1, replacing red coats with khaki began in
India in the 1880s; the process continued until the end of the century.21
Military spectacle may have embodied the business of soldiering in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in First World War Britain,
efforts to visualize khaki created a different kind of narrative. The motifs
of army life in the 1910s embodied the discipline and order the army
sought to create from within. The small campaigns of the Victorian
army gave way to the enlarged, unpredictable and chaotic battlefield
on the western front. If image, appearance and uniform were the trap-
pings of military life in the nineteenth-century, it was no less so in this
conflict; however, the appearance of the soldier came to mean some-
thing completely different.
In 1914 each recruit required two khaki service dress jackets and two
pairs of service trousers, as well as cap, greatcoat, boots, puttees, shirts,
socks and underclothes.22 A logistical requirement for war, clothing was
defined as a non-expendable item, difficult to replace and only renewed
if damaged or lost during a long campaign.23 The itemized list below
shows the infantry marching order carried by soldiers on the western
front, according to the notebook of Elmer Wilfred Cotton, private, lance-
sergeant and sergeant of the 5th Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers:
On his body: 1 pair of boots, 1 pair of braces, 1 service cap, 1 pair

drawers, 1 pair service trousers, 1 pair puttees, 1 service jacket, 1 field
dressing, 1 service pay book, 1 identity disk, 1 clasp knife, 1 shirt, 1
vest (in winter only), 1 pair socks, pouches, basic equipment and belt,
2 smoke helmets, 1 iodine in bottle, 1 waterproof sheet, 1 cardigan
jacket or waistcoat (in winter), 1 mess tin and cover, 1 rifle and sling,
1 oil bottle, 1 pull through, 1 bayonet and scabbard, 1 entrenching
tool head, 1 entrenching tool helmet, 1 entrenching tool carrier, 1
water bottle filled with water, 1 haversack, 1 valise and supporting
straps, 150 rounds-303 cartridges.
In Valise: 1 cap comforter, 1 holdall containing 1 hussif, 1 tooth-
brush, 1 razor, 1 comb, 1 shaving soap, 1 pair spare braces, 1 piece
soap, 2 pairs socks, 1 shirt, 1 towel, 1 pair drawers, 1 vest (in winter
only), 1 greatcoat, 1 blanket (in winter).
In Haversack: 1 table knife, 1 table fork, 1 dessert spoon, 1 tin bully
beef, 1 tea and sugar, 1 lot of biscuits.24
Each recruit reported to the regimental depot to be given a medical

examination and to be fitted for a uniform. Once the recruit filled in and
signed the attestation form, he was given a unique regimental number
and was then officially part of the British army.
‘Your King and Country Need You’
The call to uniform came loud and clear in 1914. The message came first
as an appeal for recruits on 6 August 1914 from Field Marshal Horatio
Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener of Khartoum and of Broome; it
resulted in a large number of men storming the regular army recruiting
service.25 A poster announcing ‘Your King and Country Need You,’ a
call to arms from Lord Kitchener, appealed for 100,000 men.26 A second
poster surfaced with a striking illustration of Kitchener pointing to the
viewer, accompanied by the words ‘wants you.’27 Alfred Leete’s illus-
tration of Kitchener, originally published on the cover of the weekly
London Opinion on 5 September 1914 and later adapted as a recruitment
poster, made Kitchener a striking image for campaigns organized by the
Parliamentary Recruiting Committee.28 By 1914 his name and image,
appearing everywhere, called British men to arms. Wartime recruitment
posters relied on a whole system of representation of patriotic milita-
rism in popular culture.29 Their preoccupation with masculine appear-
ance and their references to men’s clothing suggest that the authorities
sought to enlist civil society to identify recruits. The truth was that the
military authorities were poorly organized for the scale of recruitment
needed and relied upon the voluntary recruiting movement to deal with
the extraordinary drive for manpower in the autumn of 1914.30 Getting
powerful messages out to the public capitalized on the strong volunteer
movements in Britain of the time.
Kitchener, considered a war hero by the British public, constituted
the very image of patriotic militarism. He had fought in the Sudan,
and despite the exposure the Boer War gave to the inadequacies of the
British army, he emerged a hero. On his return he was created a viscount
and awarded a considerable sum by Parliament.31 His reputation as a
successful general gained him respect from the War Office and hero
worship from ordinary soldiers, a combination that made him an ideal
figure to attract recruits.32 Whilst the public greeted his appointment to
Secretary of State for War as a popular choice, it was viewed in political
circles as risky, as it was unusual to invite a soldier to the Cabinet.33
The public popularity of his appointment offers some insight into the
success of his image in recruitment campaigns. Military figures were
prominent in Edwardian British society due to the widespread identifi-
cation with the military ethos, and as Keith Surridge argues, Kitchener
embodied military success: ‘He was looked up to both metaphorically
and literally. After all, he was an imposing figure who contrasted sharply
with the image of the degenerate ‘urban Briton’. At six foot, two inches
he was well above the national average.’34 John MacKenzie argues that
the psychic power of heroic tradition gave imperial myths power in
the public mind, and for late-nineteenth-century Britain, reconciling
Christian values with a martial spirit was about renovating an empire
in decline.35
The physical image of Kitchener also held some excitement for the
British public; he appeared a figure of absolute will and power, an
emblem of British masculinity. In a declining empire, such myths advo-
cated the survival of British power by force of individual will.36 According
to John Tosh, the popular appeal of figures such as Kitchener and Robert
Baden-Powell lay in their distance from domestic life; their adventures
encapsulated the imagined link between imperial adventure and ‘homo-
social comraderie.’37 Ideal masculinities were nurtured through physical
adventure. Thus, visual messages that made reference to the male body
explicitly tested the masculinity of civilian men in wartime. In partic-
ular, the Kitchener poster was an innovative image that summoned men
directly to help him to fight the war in Europe.
Kitchener recruited like a military man, but he also possessed the
qualities of a working soldier. A biographer linked his physical features
with soldierly qualities: ‘Victory was his friend, and his very presence –
his huge frame, the luxuriant moustache, the fixity of his gaze – had
become a symbol of British pluck and resolve.’38 If Kitchener’s image
conveyed a durable, confident and dynamic masculinity, it also repre-
sented the official power of gentlemanly soldiering. The poster mixed
modern and traditional images of military masculinity. Kitchener was
both symbolic and real; his image embodied both state power and tradi-
tional military values. When he was Secretary of State, Lord Kitchener
wore a court dress jacket of a privy councillor, which is now on exhibit
in the Imperial War Museum. A waist-length fitted black jacket with
eight buttons down the front and highly embellished military lace based
on flowers and leaves, it embodied a more traditional version of soldier-
ing.39 His moustache, a high-maintenance affair, was what high-ranking
military men from the Victorian era wore to express class position and
luxury.40 Such concessions to popular style made Kitchener’s soldierly
appearance appear fashionable, as had the dandyism of the Hussars
from the Regency period to the 1830s, who were known for the florid-
ness of their regulation moustache.41 This kind of excess was not the
military appearance that was modernizing the image of the British army
in the First World War.
In 1916, the Military Mail announced that the traditional army
custom of wearing a moustache would be brought to an end: ‘That the
moustache should now no longer be compulsory in the Army may come

as a surprise to the older, and as a relief to some of the younger, members
of the Service’; the article also lamented that it had been ‘the mark of the
British soldier.’42 Kitchener’s appearance embodied contradiction: a tall
man with a luxurious moustache who favoured the splendour of cere-
monial dress but who posed for photographs wearing the khaki service
dress. His eccentricity was illustrated by an encounter he had with the
Duke of Connaught, related in an anecdote about his wilful flouting of
dress regulation.43 If his version of soldierly behaviour was predicated on
deviance, it was at odds with disciplinary strategies that sought to recruit
civilians to the rank and file. The two sides to the Kitchener image, the
fashionable soldier and the pragmatic combatant, were key to under-
standing the power of his image early in the war. His new army utilized
modern army practices, but Kitchener projected a traditional image: the
soldier hero associated with colonial wars.
A modernizer and traditionalist, a figure of physical strength and a
strategist, he summed up the social change the war appeared to repre-
sent for the British army. Images of Kitchener were plentiful, and many
emphasized a fashionable rather than regulation appearance. The Tailor
and Cutter ran a feature on 8 October 1914 called ‘Our Fashion Plate,’
which presented a ‘very fine portrait of Earl Kitchener, Secretary of
State for War, in Field-Marshal’s uniform, by Messrs. Bassano, of Old
Bond Street, W’.44 A photograph of the king with the towering figure of
Kitchener in service dress uniform inspecting the new army at Aldershot
accompanied a text offering a detailed description of the Field-Marshal’s
uniform. The Daily Mirror, meanwhile, announced the recruitment drive
with a photograph of Kitchener in service dress alongside the headline
‘Your King and Country Need You: Join the Army Today.’45 Mimicking
the famous recruitment poster, Kitchener does not project a fashion-
able image but instead is dressed like a working soldier. He wore the
khaki service dress when the occasion demanded it to appeal for new
recruits, but this last image also sent the message that mass mobiliza-
tion and technological warfare were creating new kinds of wartime
masculinities.
Much of wartime visual culture was focused on the appearance of
the male body; this same iconography was critical to the recruitment
drive. It was clear that this was no time for leisure, and men unpre-
pared to take the king’s uniform were labelled shirkers. Kitchener’s
decision to raise new armies meant training men from scratch, an
ambitious project that relied upon persuasive propaganda, described
by many as unofficial conscription.46 Most striking are the images of
Figure 2.3 ‘Britons Join Your Country’s Army,’ IWM PST 2734, © Imperial War
Museum
the male body in the recruitment campaign and the direct appeals
to individual men to transform themselves from civilians to working
soldiers. Recruitment messages that hailed the viewer made wartime
propaganda valuable to mobilize public opinion in Britain.47 The 1915
poster ‘Why Aren’t You in Khaki?’ was one such persuasive message.48
By issuing an urgent warning – ‘You’ll be wanted. Enlist at once’ – the
message hails the viewer directly, suggesting that he has been ‘caught’
without the prerequisite khaki. Like the Kitchener poster, this image has
a peculiar sense of presence; it registers mock surprise when it ‘catches’
men wandering around in civilian garb. One poster would not have
been possible without the other; to recruit civilians to the rank and file,
visual images had to be constructed around the new values associated
with the male body. What is clear is that such visual images appear to
take on a disciplining role. If Kitchener straddled social changes the war
represented for the British army, what was modern about him was the
fluidity of his image. Rather than rely on more traditional notions of
military leadership, these posters constructed images that mimicked the
command to take arms. What mattered most was the outcome of mass
recruitment of civilians to the army. To suggest that civilians had been
caught without khaki was a tactic to induce shame and guilt. Similarly,
if Kitchener, a war hero, calls you to the uniform, it may be a good idea
to respond.
Khaki uniform and new masculinities
As part of its drive to modernize, the army had given much attention
to the standardizing of uniform and appearance. Official army regula-
tions and manuals became central to managing a professionalized army,
and many of these publications instructed soldiers on their clothing,
hygiene and grooming. These published regulations reflected the
emphasis placed not only on the disciplines applied to soldiers but also
on the rational approach to fashioning men’s bodies. By the First World
War publishing regulations became standard for the War Office; there
were two main publications for army clothing, the Dress Regulations for
the Army 1911 for officers’ clothing and Regulations for the Clothing
of the Army 1914 for the rank and file.49 In Britain, uniform design and
military display were the legal prerogative of the monarch, but formerly
some colonels had resisted regulations to change the uniform of their
corps.50 They might have originated with the King’s Regulations, but by
the twentieth century these new books took on the distinctly ‘modern’
quality of the manual.
Regulations were part of the culture of the British army in the First
World War. The 1909 operational manual Field Service Regulations,
reprinted with amendments in 1914, set out the formula for the desired
behaviour of recruits in wartime conditions. The regulations guided
soldiers on marches, movements, administration, discipline, camps,
duties, guards and outposts, advance, attack, night operations and
ammunition supply. The Field Service Regulations declare that mili-
tary discipline is achieved through practice, to build up ‘sound military
knowledge ... by study and practice until it has become an instinct’.51 The
reliance upon discipline and rational pedagogical approaches to train
soldiers reflects the modernizing forces that established khaki as the
uniform worn by all ranks on the western front. A vogue for guidelines
and training manuals was also consistent with an emerging ideology
that favoured the acquisition of soldierly skills over the Victorian belief
in soldierly character.52 The army was using theory to train soldiers, and
by 1914 the body became a focus for army reform and education.
Such was the context for the production of the wartime booklet Health
Memoranda for Soldiers, whose detailed instructions on health empha-
sized the role of discipline in body hygiene.53 British army masculinities
are, as Rachel Woodward and Trish Winter suggest, performed and lived
through army training, work and culture.54 The health booklet recom-
mended frequent washing to offset the problems caused by clothing,
suggesting that care of the body made clothing a significant factor to
cultivate army discipline: ‘Dirt from the clothes reaches the skin, and
dirt and sweat from the skin soak into the clothing. Hence the reason
for frequent change and washing of underclothing.’55 The booklet
prescribed a personal hygiene regime that trained each soldier in mili-
tary efficiency.
Thus, it was not just the actions of men on the battlefield that deter-
mined their suitability for soldiering but how they performed at home,
particularly through the care of the body. Regulations and guidelines
gave soldiers detailed descriptions of how to care for the body and thus
how to enlarge its capabilities. Manuals raised soldiers’ consciousness of
their corporeality, recalling Foucault’s theory of the disciplinary regime,
which accounts for the drive to inscribe the bodies of recruits through
the disciplines of clothing, grooming and hygiene. It also accounts for
the narrow range of masculinities that men were directed to achieve
through these disciplines. By cross-referencing recruitment posters with
manuals for recruits, it is clear that wartime military masculinities not
only were performed through army training but were also given a more
public airing. To transform civilians into soldiers, a popular culture
that invoked the discourse of body reform and discipline made military
interests a wider and more public concern. Manuals were also useful in
the context of army expansion and mobilization; they were an ideal
form of mass communication to promote good conduct and check for
unmilitary behaviour. Military habits and disciplines were exhaustively
set out in manuals, but dress regulations dealt specifically with military
appearance.
Historically, change in the practice of war prompted change in mili-
tary appearance and dress. In France, when citizen armies were assem-
bled following Napoleonic Wars, the military gave increased ‘attention
to standardisation and the inculcation of merit’.56 Texts to guide
soldiers on appearance and behaviour are particularly useful for citizen
armies that call for collective disciplines. The western front established
distinctly modern forms of war. This demanded the rationality and
accessibility of manuals and regulations for the wartime British army.57
As Waldemar Kaempffert argued in 1941, soldiers ideally conformed to
military discipline: ‘Professional soldiers improve; they do not originate
as a rule.’58 Modernization meant finding an effective means to manage
the body of the soldier, particularly when the military started to recruit
large numbers of civilian men.
Images of soldiers, central to a popular culture of patriotic militarism,
overwhelmingly featured men. The British army sought to modernize its
image but relied upon traditional gender divisions to encourage women
to send their men to war. A poster from February 1915 addressed ‘To the
Young Women of London’59 asked, ‘Is Your “Best Boy” Wearing Khaki?
If Not Don’t YOU THINK He Should Be?’ As social pressure rose, charges
of cowardice were particularly potent from women. For instance, the
Order of the White Feather consisted of a group of women ‘whose sole
object was to hand out white feathers, the sign of cowardice, to any
young man they came across out of uniform’.60 The public was drawn
in, through the symbolic value of the military uniform, to describe
normative wartime masculinity. These posters sought to involve women
in the dramatic task of exposure.
Images of clothing were dividing practices in wartime culture: they
sought to expose unpatriotic men. Thus, khaki recruited some men
and constructed others as shirkers and malingerers. The desire amongst
civilian women for a military version of masculinity was not the result
of wartime recruitment posters; these images expressed a deeper pattern
for the militarizing of British civilian organizations that began in the
nineteenth century. Constructions of the ‘soldier-saint’ prevalent in
popular literature during the Crimean War diffused the idea of military
action as heroic sacrifice.61 By re-evaluating the soldier, Christian interest

groups found in militarism a vehicle for a muscular Christianity, which
drew on the ‘civilian imitation of military organization, discipline and
paraphernalia’.62 Michael Adams argues that intellectual trends made
war seem a natural expression of social values in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.63
Maurizia Boscagli argues that militarism was a major theme that
fashioned masculinity in early-twentieth-century Britain; ideals
of individualism, will, physical power and patriotism were at work
in the conception of the British Boy Scout movement founded in
1908.64 Thus, militarism became part of the functioning of civil
society. Robert Baden-Powell’s promotion of the Boy Scout movement
revealed a desire for military values to permeate civil society through
the discipline of healthy pursuits, to create ‘a body whose virtues
of endurance, obedience and physical prowess could function inter-
changeably in society and on the battlefield’.65 Quasi-military organi-
zations and movements, such as the Boy Scouts, were, according to
Allen Warren, conceived to resolve perceived deficiencies in the male
character through ideals of fitness, abstinence and religious observ-
ance.66 In particular, Warren found in Baden-Powell’s writings a
muscular Christianity that recommended ‘a greater candour in sexual
matters, a more rational approach to dress ... and finally the value of
exercise’.67 His ideal masculinity was located in the body, but the
rational approach to dress corresponds not only with the functional
design of British army clothing at the time but also with a military
culture that sought to emphasize rationality, discipline and self-con-
trol within and outside the army.
For Joanna Bourke, the First World War shaped popular perceptions
of the male body: it ‘fundamentally affected not only the shape and
texture of the male body but also the values ascribed to the body and
the disciplines applied to masculinity.’68 Emergent discourses circulating
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries around the male
body generated images of masculinity that transformed the experience
of a large number of British men. If images of clothing were effective
dividing practices in wartime culture, it was largely due to the popular
desire they created for a military version of masculinity. The pattern to
view soldiering as part of civil society intensified that desire. The poster
image of Kitchener mentioned earlier, for example, which embodied a
muscular Christianity through its simplicity and immediacy, made an
accomplished military identity appear accessible to a large number of
civilians. A year after Kitchener’s death, an article by Horatio Bottomly
in John Bull in characteristically excessive fashion termed him a ‘War

Lord’ and suggested that ‘he stood for all that we hold dear, and to-day
his spirit informs and invigorates the manhood of our Empire.’69 His
accomplishments as a war hero were viewed as a resource to generate
soldiers for the war effort.
The poster consolidated the desire for a renewal of imperial strength,
as well as the masculine physicality that ‘established Kitchener’s image
as the embodiment of the nation’s resolution and strength.’70 Failure
to participate in the war could cast doubt on the masculinity of
civilian men. Such was the power of his image and the many recruit-
ment messages circulating during wartime that a widespread desire for
a military version of masculinity was given a visual form. Whether it
was civilian women or army recruiters, social forces in wartime Britain
conspired to scrutinize men’s bodies and fit them up for active duty. The
discourses that these representations generated were significant; they
militarized men by reshaping their bodies. Kitchener was the exemplar,
but while this version of masculinity relied upon the myth of the soldier
hero, the goal in First World War Britain was not to produce a mass of
warlords but an army of dutiful soldiers.
‘Be Ready! Join Now’
Recruitment images throughout wartime described how military disci-

pline might transform men’s bodies. ‘There Is Still a Place in Line for
You,’ from February 1915, depicts smartly uniformed soldiers lining up
for inspection and a sign pointing to an empty space with the announce-
ment ‘This place is reserved for a fit man,’ followed by the question ‘Will
you fill it?’71 The image encourages the viewer to examine his body to
gauge whether he can ‘fit in.’ Paternalistic as they may have been, many
of the recruitment posters sought to establish a dialogue with the public.
A similar poster from March 1915 called on men to ‘Be Ready! Join Now,’
the wording invoking both the spirit of voluntarism and the civilian’s
readiness for combat.72 A black silhouette of a soldier carrying a gun
depicted against a yellow background has the effect of reducing military
appearance to a few physical characteristics. Both images suggest that
the aesthetics of the khaki uniform hold a particular kind of attraction
for recruits.
In popular culture, images of men in uniform embodied a range
of positive characteristics, often projecting a professional and well-
organized army. A modernizing British army prompted advertising
images that adopted an aesthetic that standardized men’s bodies; for
Figure 2.4 ‘Our Fashion Plate,’ Tailor and Cutter, 8 October 1914, British Library,
800. © British Library Board
example, a wartime advertisement for Blanco, a cleaning agent for

web equipment. In this image the mechanistic qualities of three iden-
tical faceless bodies convey the desirability of an impersonal army.
The Blanco ad appeared in John Bull in November 1917 to promote
three different varieties, one each for khaki-coloured belts, helmets
and other equipment, as well as the original for cleaning white equip-
ment.73 An image of three soldiers’ backs gives prominence to their
haversacks, and a thick graphic line renders a stylized depiction of
the body.
In his war memoir, Robert Graves recalled the smart appearance
of British soldiers in France: ‘They were magnificent looking fellows.
Their uniforms were spotless, their equipment khaki-blancoed, and
their buttons and cap-badges twinkled.’74 References to tidiness and
cleanliness also called attention to military discipline, announced by
a caption, ‘The Smartest Army in the World,’ followed by smaller text
that explained that this label ‘was the justly earned reputation of the
old British Army which for the past quarter of a century “blanco’d”
itself clean and smart.’75 In this conflict, to be ‘smart’ was not just a
surface quality but, as the previous examples show, a matter of social
respectability. Themes of uniformity and modern military appearance
were recruiting men to the army, but they were also selling products and
generating pro-war sentiments throughout British society.
The First World War represents what was least expected in earlier
constructions of military organization: that the regular army would
be suddenly expanded by a large, undisciplined group of civilians. An
unprecedented level of participation by civilians challenged the rigid
discipline of the regular army. Modernization, which had begun in
the late nineteenth century, was accelerating with mass mobilization.
The soldier’s body was the symbol of choice to depict civilian duty
and patriotism, but a poster from late 1915 that featured disembodied
army clothing was also particularly strong. ‘Come Now – Be Honest
with Yourself’ used text taken from a speech by Lord Kitchener at
Guildhall in July 1915: ‘Your arms, uniform and accoutrements are
ready waiting for you.’76 On the right-hand side of the poster there
is an image of a British soldier’s equipment – uniform and cap, an
ammunition pouch and bag, rifle and bayonet, all hanging from
three pegs – and a pair of boots and rolled puttees lying on the floor.
The invitation, issued directly from Lord Kitchener, suggests that the
civilian recruit who fails to put on the uniform waiting for him is
unpatriotic.
Figure 2.5 ‘Blanco,’ John Bull, 10 November 1917, British Library, 22. © British
Library Board
In wartime Britain, the project to redesign men’s bodies spread

throughout society; images such as this were particularly persuasive
in convincing men of the urgency of taking on a military appearance.
An unworn uniform represented a charge of deviance, calculated to
make random charges of deviance in the public arena. Men were
encouraged to display an enthusiasm for military appearance. As one
subaltern with the 10th Battalion Gordon Highlanders observed of
morale and patriotism in Britain in July 1914, ‘Everywhere there was
enthusiasm at the appearance of men in uniform, and I remember the
crowd at the barrier at Waterloo station singing Tipperary.’77 Khaki
visibly reflected the national enthusiasm for war, but even more
significant, in this utility clothing a man’s body took on an image of
conformity.
Uncomfortable uniformity
One abiding image of the First World War was the mass of civilian men
queuing up at recruiting depots eagerly awaiting their uniforms. The
uniforms could not be supplied quickly enough to meet demand, as the
surge in enlistment placed the army under extreme pressure to recruit,
train, clothe and equip masses of inexperienced men. Wartime clothing
requirements were so great that the peacetime system of supply broke
down. Kitchener’s call to the uniform was so effective that in the
opening weeks and months of the war, regulation dress was in short
supply.
On 6 August 1914, Kitchener, as Secretary of State for War, decided
to raise 100,000 regulars from volunteers between the ages of nineteen
and thirty-one who would be enlisted for three years or the duration of
the war and trained at regimental depots.78 An administrative structure
was set up to mobilize men quickly and easily. On 7 August the War
Office instructed every regular battalion to send one captain, two subal-
terns, two serving sergeants and a further thirteen NCOs to assist with
the formation of Kitchener’s new ‘Regular Army.’79 The new army was
structured in battalions and administered by training centres; recruits
were sent abroad organized in six divisions, one from within each of the
peacetime home commands. New units were designated ‘service battal-
ions’ to distinguish them from regular, Special Reserve and territorial
battalions. Training centres were initially in Aldershot (8th and 9th divi-
sions), Salisbury (13th Division) and Ireland (10th Division). Three for
the Eastern Division (12th Division) were at Shorncliffe, Colchester and
Rainham.80
Given that wartime visual culture sought to recruit men through

the seductive image of a smart military uniform, the failure to supply
enough uniforms was a delicate issue. The War Office did not obtain
enough khaki uniforms in the opening weeks of the war, and many
early recruits were forced to wear replacement uniforms, which became
known as ‘Kitchener blue’. The uniforms were obtained from a variety
of non-military sources: 500,000 suits of blue serge uniforms from post
office stocks and approximately 500,000 greatcoats purchased from
the clothing trade. The War Office ordered a further 1,300,000 jackets
and pairs of trousers as well as 900,000 greatcoats from Canada and the
United States.81
Initially the army was reluctant to accept anything departing too
visibly from regulation, but according to minutes from the directors’
meeting of the Quartermaster-General Department of 29 August 1914,
Kitchener was not too concerned, taking the view that as long as men in
individual units dressed alike, the improvised outfits would be adequate
in the short term.82 However, the correct uniform meant a lot to many
men who had been drawn into the culture of khaki. The recruitment
campaign had exploited their desire for a more powerful and active
body. By failing to produce khaki uniforms, it undermined the cred-
ibility of its own rhetoric.
A description of how battalions of the Leicestershire Regiment coped
with lack of regulation supplies of uniform in the autumn of 1914
reveals much dissatisfaction amongst the men. The 6th Battalion had
khaki uniform, but the 7th had been issued old full-dress parade tunics,
scarlet with colourful facings. and blue trousers from various reserve
stores. The replacement costumes quickly deteriorated under training
conditions, while the 8th and 9th Battalions wore Kitchener blue until
spring 1915:
This was typically an ill-fitting uniform, rushed into production as a

stopgap and made from supplies of blue serge material. Often shape-
less and baggy, the tunic and trousers were topped off with a blue
sidecap. Soldiers complained that the uniform left them looking
more like postmen or tramdrivers than soldiers.83
These ‘shapeless’ and ‘baggy’ styles were clearly at odds with the images
of men in smart uniforms that had prompted many to enlist. If army
clothing was critical to how men performed their new military identi-
ties, then Kitchener blue played havoc with the physical and psychic
transformation from civilian to soldier. Shapeless blue uniforms did not
Figure 2.6 ‘Come Now – Be Honest with Yourself,’ IWM PST 5072, © Imperial
War Museum
conform to the ideal image of the khaki service dress that was circu-
lated in popular culture. In early November 1914 an article appearing
in the Tailor and Cutter described the improvised uniform, mocked up
as a sketch by an artist stationed in a camp in Scarborough. He reported
‘that this is not at all liked, the first men to wear it being mistaken for
inmates of an industrial home’.84 He was careful, though, to defend the
work of the clothing trade, arguing that the urgency of the call for emer-
gency suits resulted in unappealing designs: ‘We suppose some little lati-
tude must be allowed for these emergency arrangements, the attempt
evidently being to produce something extremely simple which could
be made up at small cost.’85 Kitchener’s vision of the new armies was a
professional military force, but this intervention left them, in 1914 and
early 1915, looking like a ragtag army.
Cecil Harper found that the uniforms given to the men from his
battalion for training in 1914 came in an assortment of shapes and
colours: ‘The men were kitted out with red coats of uncertain age with
tartan trews; or when supply of these ran out, blue trousers with a red
stripe down the seam and buff belts.’86 The whole principle of uniform –
to create the illusion of unity, to promote discipline and esprit de corps
amongst the men – broke down with the replacement of the regula-
tion khaki with a range of different colours and shapes. It was clear that
there was no plan for clothing the new armies. As they were recruited,
men were given uniforms that ranged from old standard issue to new
designs in blue serge or to surplus clothing from other official sources.
Harper goes on to describe the humiliations for new recruits: ‘For head-
dress a cap-comforter was rolled up into some semblance of a forage
cap. Later there was an issue of “Broderick” peaked caps, such as were
worn by English line regiments. These offended Highland tradition.’87
The notion that incorrect uniforms could cause offence was built into
the regimental system, where loyalty adhered to the uniform of the regi-
ment, which formed its image and identity.
Sometimes soldiers treated the replacement uniforms with the
contempt they felt they deserved: ‘The recipients promptly dubbed them
“Salvation Army”, and that night a quantity of them was consigned to a
bonfire at the head of the lines ... a stern view had to be taken officially of
this wanton destruction of government property which of course had to
be paid for.’88 Incorrect uniforms were not just an absurdity; new recruits,
who had come to view them as a symbol of their military participation,
found them offensive. The unmilitary appearance of Kitchener’s army
became the butt of jokes. A comical postcard sent by George Wilkinson
in early 1915 to his family shows two soldiers who have just tried on
their new uniforms. One soldier asks the other, ‘What’s the matter with
’em, don’t they fit?’ The other soldier, holding oversized trousers over
his chest, responds, ‘Well, the trousers are a little bit tight under the
arm pits!!’ Khaki uniforms, which were supposed to transform the most
ordinary of civilians into smart military men, were disappointing and
often absurd. The door of the shed behind the soldiers has ‘Kitchener’s
Army’ inscribed on it, mocking the bad fit and ridiculous appearance of
the new army uniforms.89
The absurd appearance of parts of the new armies would have chal-
lenged the fictional images of military perfection circulating in popular
culture. Indeed, the new armies were starting to appear shambolic, which
may account for the aggressive recruitment campaign that determined
to create perfect military bodies for the war effort. In their posters, the
PRC made much of the improving qualities of khaki for civilian men.
Was the focus on uniform in the poster campaign a defence against
anxieties about the ‘unmilitary’ appearance of parts of the British army?
If the recruitment drive overstated the transformative effects of khaki,

then the improvised Kitchener blue uniforms represented the reality of
what a ragtag army of civilian soldiers might look like.
The poor quality and comical appearance of the improvised uniforms
was dispiriting for recruits and must have had an impact on the profes-
sionalism the army sought to engender in them. Poor clothing also
posed the greatest threat to esprit de corps, a subject that was raised
in Parliament: ‘We all of us know that there are camps up and down
this country where the men have been for a considerable time without
uniforms. It does not need any strong imagination to realise that men
drilling in all kinds of clothing ... cannot tend towards a proper feeling
of dignity, respectability, and esprit de corps, and the sooner these men
get into uniform the better.’90 Indeed, recruitment images suggested that
joining up was first and foremost about getting into uniform, the last
stage in the passage from civilian to soldier.
Kitchener’s vision of a new kind of army built a powerful discourse
around an improved and militarized male body. His blue uniforms
were at odds with that vision, exposing industrial inadequacies and
failures in leadership and also undermining the ideology on which
the recruitment drive was built. The reality was that the army failed
in its promise to turn out smartly dressed soldiers. Official interest in
scrutinizing the contours of the wartime male body spread to civilian
society, and the unmilitary appearance of parts of the British army
disappointed recruits, who had placed a high social value in taking on
smart ‘soldierly’ appearance. The problems of inadequate supply punc-
tured a symbolic system built around the invigorating effects of khaki.
David French argues that Kitchener’s decision to raise the new armies
resulted in a mobilization of manpower and economic resources that
Britain had not seen before, but his greatest miscalculation was to rely
initially on voluntary training to find soldiers and on the free market
to supply munitions.91
The story of poor uniform clothing reflected the problems with mobi-
lization; nothing seemed to fit. Civilian men were rushed through
training and given uniforms so unsuitable for combat that the whole
project to raise the new armies defeated itself. A wartime discourse that
sought to popularize military participation through seductive represen-
tations of men in khaki pivoted on the idea that the male body would
be improved by army discipline. Kitchener’s vision to transform civilian
men into professional soldiers and to deploy the industrial might of
munitions proved powerful for recruitment. However, the success of
the recruitment drive meant men were supplied faster than uniforms.
Kitchener’s image of military perfection was exposed as fantasy, and his

improvised blue uniform invited ridicule.
There were those who sought to rescue the image of Kitchener blue.
Rudyard Kipling insisted that the martial spirit of English soldiers could
overcome even the absurdity of the blue improvised uniforms: ‘English
fashion, it has been made honourable by its wearers; and our world in the
years to come will look back with reverence as well as affection on those
blue slops and that epileptic cap.’92 He goes on to explain that the inad-
equacies of the uniform offered soldiers a chance to prove their worth:
‘One far-seeing commandant who had special facilities has possessed
himself of brass buttons, thousands of ’em, which he has added to his
men’s outfit for the moral effect of (a) having something to clean, and
(b) of keeping it so. It has paid.’93
Despite the indignities of an unmilitary blue uniform, Kipling insisted
that the martial bearing of British soldiers shone through because of their
exceptional capacity for self-discipline: ‘The smartest regiment in the
Service could not do itself justice in such garments, but I managed to get
a view of a battalion, coming in from a walk, at a distance which more or
less subdued the – er – uniform, and they moved with the elastic swing
and a little quick ripple that means so much.’94 Idealizing British soldiers
was one solution to the problem of an army losing credibility due to its
unprofessional appearance. A popular culture had promoted the trans-
formative powers of military uniform, but the regulation clothing that
appeared for these recruits neither standardized nor glamorized them.
Of Kitchener’s blue uniform, D. A. Bacon wrote in his memoir:
I do not think that anyone looked even passable in them, as they

were invariably of an awful cut, but of course the funniest part of
all was the cap, and quite a lot had little or no idea as to what size
to wear a cap of the forage description or as to how they should be
worn ... when it rained, all the blue dye in the cap came out and ran
down the face and neck, completing the miserable picture of uncom-
fortable uniformity.95
This uncomfortable uniformity sat uneasily with the seamless image of

military efficiency promised by wartime posters and underpinned by
Kitchener’s pronouncements. Problems with the improvised uniform lay
not just with its shape and colour but also with the failure to give men
a regulation appearance. In his memoir Ian Hay offered an account of
recruits having to be content with improvised costumes, however uncom-
fortable they felt about their motley appearance: ‘As we plodded patiently
Figure 2.7 Postcard sent by George Wilkinson, Pte. 575, 10th Batt Royal Fusiliers,
8th Platoon, B Coy, Windmill Hill Camp, Ludgershall, near Andover, Hampshire;
Card made by Inter-Art Co., Red Lion Square, London WC, ‘K.A.’ series; papers of
G. A. Wilkinson, IWM Con. Shelf, © Imperial War Museum
along the road in our tarnished finery, with our eye-arresting checks and
imitation velvet collars, caked with mud and wrinkled with rain, we
looked like nothing as much on earth as a gang of welshers returning
from an unsuccessful day at a suburban race-meeting.’96 Accounts empha-
sized how chaotic they looked, particularly the sharp contrast between
the replacement outfits and the recruits’ expectations of military finery.
It was not until the beginning of 1915 that the battalions of the
Leicestershire regiment received their khaki uniforms. To the critical eye
of Bacon, with a background in the textiles and garment trade, the first
uniforms were of poor quality: ‘Those first outfits and caps of Khaki were
awful affairs, ranging in colour from yellow-brown to bright green and
one had the greatest difficulty in getting the two garments to match.’97
When khaki arrived, there were problems harmonizing the colour and
cut; as Bacon explained, ‘As regards the cut of the coats in particular,
it was terrible, and the wonder was that any men could be found to fit
them; some of the collars diverged at all sorts of angles and often one
side was as much as an inch lower than the other.’98
As later chapters explore, these problems were partly due to the reliance
upon the civilian clothing trade for uniform manufacture and the inevi-
table inconsistencies in the quality, colour and cut of new khaki uniforms.
Bacon, who knew the trade, was well aware of the problems caused by the
rush to khaki contracts: ‘This was perhaps the expected result of clothes
being made at an unprecedented rate and by people who had largely never
made clothes before.’99 Over a million men were recruited, equipped and
trained by the battle of the Somme in July 1916. Voluntarism meant a large
number of civilians went to war drawn by a whole system of representa-
tion that linked moral manliness with patriotic militarism. Historically,
spectacular appearance recruited men to the British army, but with mass
mobilization a more functional aesthetic was employed, and khaki service
dress appeared to represent the militarized discipline and control that
the state gained over the male body in First World War Britain. Popular
images and official manuals focused on measuring and transforming the
male body. Images of clothing, military appearance and even references
to ‘fitting in’ suggested that the male body was viewed as a resource for
the war effort. Uniform was a critical part of that seduction, and everyday
army clothing helped to form a discourse of military participation.
Conclusion
Images and experiences of uniform were shaped by the official desire to

seize and transform men’s bodies for active service. As I have shown, the
design of the khaki service dress and the modes of its wartime represen-
tation invested the body with a power that presented military service
as a solution to the lack of physical culture amongst civilian men.
Recruitment posters vividly portrayed the correspondence between a
culture concerned with militarizing men and a new economy of the
body that was modernizing the army. The social trend to militarize
masculinity reflected a muscular Christianity that had its roots in the
British experience in the Crimean War. These images made to stimu-
late recruitment had wider meanings that illuminate how masculinity
was being fashioned during wartime and how the appearance of men’s
bodies became a matter of concern for a wide range of social groups.
Given how they explicitly describe the transformation of bodies,
posters made clothing a powerful signifier for the physical renewal of
masculinity. Discursive formations such as recruitment images marked
the body to make it easy to identify shirkers. If clothing became a visible
reminder of who was participating, then dress had powerful resonance
in the recruitment drive. How men performed their military identity was
driven by Kitchener’s image and various other images circulating in the
first part of the war that exploited the politics of masculine appearance.
However, this conflict represented something new, for which nobody
could be prepared, reflected in the struggle to shape a coherent image of
the wartime soldier. It broke down when the army failed to supply enough
uniforms to meet the high demand; the absurd appearance of parts of
the British army early in the war exposed British military efficiency as
a myth. The next chapter explores how the project to produce uniforms
over the course of the war led to compromises being struck between the
civilian trades and the military. The making of army clothing embodied
the complexities of the conflict, the hopes for physical renewal and the
stark contrasts between representation and reality. In wartime Britain a
manly physical culture was harnessed to mobilize men for war. The next
chapter examines who fashioned the British soldier throughout the First
World War.
3
Fashioning the Civilian Soldier
Khaki carried with it a range of positive associations in wartime. For

men it was associated with the physicality of masculine adventure
and apparently made them attractive to women. With khaki came an
implied trust, a sense that it embodied a masculinity that was good
and wholesome. This chapter explores the construction of the civilian
soldier through newspaper articles, War Office documents and tailoring
ephemera. All of these sources concern the construction of the body
of the soldier, and newspapers in particular explicated on new recruits
preparing themselves for war. In one such feature, in the December 1914
issue of The War Illustrated, titled ‘The Tidiness of Mr. Thomas Atkins,’
five photographs traced the typical soldier’s concern for tidiness at the
front. The first photograph shows a group of soldiers engaged in their
daily wash and shave: ‘A tub and the eventual disposal of the Huns is the
eternal question at the front. The one ideal is the essential of the other.
Our photograph depicts some British soldiers “cleaning up” somewhere
behind the firing-line.’1
On home and battle front there was a pre-occupation with how
soldiers cared for their bodies. The story suggested that the typical British
soldier was particularly enthusiastic about his uniform and the care of
his body. Indeed, in one of the photographs a soldier apparently puzzles
the Belgians by improvising a dressing table from a rail truck: ‘A British
soldier shaving in great earnest, while a bearded Belgian regards it as
an unnecessary waste of energy.’2 Disclosed through a series of stages,
the tidiness of the British soldier is presented as a project to carefully
construct an ideal military body. This chapter explores correspondences
between newspapers that illustrated the construction of the civilian
soldier and similar narratives in training manuals, dress regulations and
tailoring drafting guides. All of these texts were fashioning the body of
55
Figure 3.1 ‘The Tidiness of Mr. Thomas Atkins,’ in The War Illustrated, 26 December
1914, British Library, 154. © British Library Board
Fashioning the Civilian Soldier 57
the British soldier, giving it material presence and also constructing a

narrative in the public imagination.
As the western front was not accessible to photographers, many of them
were forced to create domestic images of soldiers ‘getting prepared’ for war.
Mass volunteering saw many men undergoing the change from civilian
to soldier to meet Kitchener’s demand for substantial new armies.3 As the
previous chapter discussed, the process was a challenge for many recruits,
but the tidiness theme from The War Illustrated suggested that British
soldiers displayed unusual enthusiasm for the rule of uniform. These
propaganda images were designed to raise civilian morale. Traditional
views of military spectacle were attractive, but images that presented the
details of the disciplinary regime of army life were even more compelling.
By observing the private acts of dress and grooming, newspaper articles
apparently invited the public into the everyday lives of servicemen, who
were depicted as disciplined, controlled, and ever ready for combat.
These stories made the male body a focus of public discourse, reflecting
the reach the army had into the intimate details of the soldier’s life,
as can be seen in the language of a 1915 training manual: ‘scrupulous
cleanliness of body, clothing, and surroundings is essential for the
health of the troops. ... They must, therefore, be clean, smart, and tidy as
a matter of habit at all times.’4 The official line was that good grooming
was critical to military efficiency. As Joanna Bourke argues, the body of
the private citizen became a matter of public concern; exposing civilian
soldiers to public scrutiny became part of a whole discourse about the
health and efficiency of men’s bodies in wartime Britain.5 Popular
stories concerning their dress and grooming habits claimed to capture
a glimpse of the life of the ordinary soldier. They vividly portray the
drive to idealize military masculinity in wartime, which was narrowly
defined as a body conforming to military discipline. The care taken
to avoid references to ‘fashion’ represented an effort to align a well-
groomed male body with efficiency rather than the display of vanity or
false pride. The British Tommy was constructed as correct, smart, and
wholesome; his body was not an object for his own pleasure but was
portrayed as ideally given over to his country. Arguably, these news-
paper stories about clothing and grooming the troops were part of a
modern discourse that presented the body as a military resource. More
recent studies have considered the link between physical appearance
and status mobility in the army.6 Military service is an embodied prac-
tice strongly identified with masculinity, but studies of soldiering often
ignore how men’s bodies are prepared for war.
This discussion about the image of the wartime soldier cannot deter-
mine the pressures men felt around their military appearance but
considers the role military uniform played in wartime culture. If khaki
represented a specific kind of military masculinity, then I argue that it
did so by drawing attention to the presentation of the male body. As
Laura Ugolini argued, a uniform was a marker of active participation,
and following the war ‘menswear continued to be a matter of public
assessment and a way of constructing and reinforcing collective male
identities.’7 Thus, the ubiquity of the khaki uniform in wartime Britain
shaped masculine identities and made menswear a measure of men’s
conformity to the establishment. Moreover, the range of images and
texts that visually constructed civilian men as soldiers reflected the
impact of patriotic militarism on masculine appearance in wartime.
War and the military are primary sites for the construction of hegemonic
masculinities, beautifully illustrated by the regimented appearance of army
clothing, and the demands it makes on men’s bodies. The ‘social construc-
tionist’ model, widely adopted within gender studies, demonstrates how
norms of masculinity can change over time, and how different social
groups and institutions mediate them.8 Clearly, the army played a critical
role in determining norms of masculinity in wartime Britain. As Rachel
Woodward and Trish Winter argue in relation to the contemporary British
army, gender is a military issue that determines socialization patterns.9
Values ascribed to men’s bodies in military contexts reveal how masculini-
ties are constructed in military cultures. The military ideal that men main-
tain a uniform appearance revealed an aesthetic governing First World War
British army uniform that projected a singular version of masculinity.
The gentle propaganda that appeared in the illustrated weeklies also
appeared in cheaper picture papers depicting men conforming to army
discipline. In April 1915 a feature about army haircuts, ‘Tommy’s Very
“Close Crop,”’ appeared in the Daily Mirror with a photograph of a soldier
getting his hair shorn alongside others waiting their turn. The caption
declared their enthusiasm for a short style: ‘it will be noticed that they do
not favour hair trimming but prefer close crop.’10 By depicting grooming
habits, newspaper stories drew attention to the making of the soldier,
with the understanding that these were essentially civilians performing
a military identity. These visual essays were an ideal pretext through
which to view the bodies of British combatants at close quarters. People
at home were, after all, curious about the civilian who went to war and
eager to discover how he might change. As the popular press gauged
public curiosity for life at the front, it evinced a desire to get close to the
body of the soldier.
Figure 3.2 ‘Uniform Suits You To to a “T,” My Lad,’ The Daily Mirror, 1 October
Khaki embodied the changes that men underwent in wartime, and

there were many stories about getting men into uniform. In 1916 the
Daily Mirror ran a front-page feature titled ‘Uniform Suits You to a “T”
My Lad,’ with a photograph of two soldiers holding up a drawing of
a uniform with a hole left for the faces of eager recruits. This bizarre
recruitment stunt invited civilian men to stand behind the sketch to
pose for a photograph in uniform: ‘Recruiting sergeants invite men to
“try on” a “uniform” by putting their heads through the sketch of a
soldier, which has an opening for a face. The potential recruit is then
led to a mirror and congratulated on his appearance.’11 For Joanne
Entwistle, fashion makes the body socially identifiable through dress.12
Most striking was the drive to ‘fashion’ civilian men, which appropri-
ated references from popular culture, illustrating how civilian values
permeated military discourse during this conflict. Uniform made men’s
bodies available to a military gaze and also fashioned men as patriots
fighting for their country in the eyes of civilians. This chapter explores
a range of texts that fashioned wartime masculinities and considers how
they described the transformation of civilians into soldiers.
Trudi Tate argued that this war shaped fiction, much of which
reflected a modernist anxiety about the power of mobilizing technol-
ogies of representation.13 The immediacy and realism of visual repre-
sentations made images powerful tools to mobilize men for war, and
images that dramatized body transformations were particularly potent.
This discourse around the maintenance of men’s bodies raised civilian
morale by reinforcing the propaganda message that men were indeed
prepared for war. Technologies of representation were mobilizing people,
offering images of body transformations, a project that was successfully
moulding bodies, and minds. Since volunteering challenged the model
of military socialization developed for the regular army, it was changing
the public perception of the British army.14 The military was neither as
insular nor as hierarchical as it had been, and a pattern was emerging
whereby the upper classes no longer dominated army life.15 Despite a
lingering tendency to idealize the officer class, the conflict modernized
the British army, and popular culture played its part in the search for
more democratic images of military life. But it was Kitchener’s experi-
mental mass volunteer army that gave rise to the very concept of the
civilian soldier.16 During the First World War, British soldiers were less
likely to be professional; they were more often civilians temporarily in
uniform, a fact that heightened public interest in domestic images of
ordinary servicemen.
A number of photographs taken by the home front photographer
Horace Nicholls depicted new recruits being measured for a uniform. In
1917 he was appointed as the first full-time official photographer of the
home front. The death of Kitchener in June 1916 and his replacement
by Lloyd George as Secretary of State for War brought changes to the
War Office; the new director, John Buchan, focused on domestic propa-
ganda to address what he perceived as the short supply of images from
the western front for the press. This low-key propaganda work suited
Nicholls, who, rather than attempt to ‘fake’ front-line action, instead
created artful, cinematic photographs that aestheticized the task of
mobilization.
Propaganda directed towards raising civilian morale was ideally built
around the project of mobilization, and photographs showing men
getting into uniform were particularly cheerful and optimistic.
Originally Nicholls’s work was to be used in a series of books and not
released to the press, one of the surviving examples being a twenty-four-
Figure 3.3 Enlistment: Recruits have kit fitted, Photographic Collection, Q30069,
© Imperial War Museum (Horace Nicholls)
page book called From Desk to Trench: The Making of a British Soldier.17 He
produced a series of photographs tracing the journey many men made
from civilian to military roles, and six were used in From Desk to Trench,
his project to build a narrative of the male body in wartime Britain. It
starts with recruits queuing outside the recruiting office. With the turn
of each page, the journey progresses, and the men in the photographs
appear to change. On the next page, two photographs show groups of
young men taking their oaths and getting their papers; a third offers
a glimpse of the medical examination, including the measuring and
weighing of new recruits. The next page announces that the time has
come: ‘Out of civilian clothes into khaki,’ and two photographs find
recruits fitting their uniforms, aided by army personnel, before they leave
with their new outfits. Four recruits try on their uniforms surrounded by
piles of folded clothes, while recruitment officers or regimental tailors
check the fit.
Nicholls’s photographs of men getting into khaki apparently trace the
journey through the various stages of army discipline and training. The
men are not named, neither is their rank given attention. Instead, his
images are more concerned with the larger project to get civilians into
khaki. He saw how photographs of men’s bodies could be dramatized

to tell a story, especially in two photographs from the series that were
omitted from the book. In the first, men stand in line to be measured
by an army officer, while a regimental tailor sits at a sewing machine
adjusting the uniforms on the spot.18 Pattern templates are visible on
the wall behind the men; pressed labelled garments hang conspicuously
on an indoor line, and the new recruits stand in their civilian clothes
wearing military service caps. Perhaps these photographs were too remi-
niscent of the atmosphere of the tailor’s shop or too explicit about the
means of production. The images chosen certainly avoid ambiguity and
present the military environment as a distinctly masculine and disci-
plined space.
From Desk to Trench contains photographs of recruits engaging in drill
and physical exercise, all of which ideally represent the regulation and
control the army instils in new soldiers. However, Nicholls also offers an
intriguing vignette of what the book describes as ‘the domestic side of an
English training-camp.’19 These images concern shoemaking, tailoring,
food preparation and hair cutting. A double-page spread uses six photo-
graphs to depict aspects of the domestic side of military life. The fore-
word explains that ‘the photographs in this book illustrate the training
of the British soldier, from the moment when he enters the Recruiting
Office, to the time when he takes his place in the firing line.’20 One
photograph has newly uniformed and kitted troops standing ready for
inspection when they alight the train at the docks.21 Photographs that
present an image of a disciplined army are favoured, but since this is
largely a volunteer army and these images are made for propaganda
purposes, they focus on how the soldier is actually ‘made.’ The ensuing
aesthetic promotes a uniform and singular version of masculinity.
Most striking is the book title, From Desk to Trench, which suggests that
this publication was directed towards professional men. According to
Jay Winter, enlistment had a social structure with higher rates amongst
non-manual workers and professional men than manual workers, and
the well paid were more likely to serve than working-class volunteers.22
Medical fitness for service by the standards of the day in part accounted
for this, and the photographic record either reflected the official desire
for these men to enlist or followed the prevailing pattern. By 1917, men’s
bodies were central to a popular visual culture of the war due in part to
official anxiety about whether enough fit men could be recruited and
also to the fact that the visual language of recruitment and mobilization
followed a pattern largely associated with civilian rather than military
culture. Men’s bodies were fashioned by military and civilian forces.
Figure 3.4 Enlistment: measuring recruits with kit, Photographic Collection,

Q30060, © Imperial War Museum (Horace Nicholls)
Nicholls dramatized the disciplines that formed the making of the

soldier. His photographs were taken following the push for volun-
teers, but the drama of his images lay in the body transformations that
captured the wartime rush to khaki. This suggested the power of visual
images in promoting the national project of collective discipline and
also the scale of the project to mobilize both men and material for war.
John Horne argues that constructions of masculinity are closely aligned
to the history of politics and war.23 Given the scale of the conflict and the
volunteer make-up of the British army, the visual culture that emerged
reflected the drive for mass mobilization and the necessity to improve
men’s physical fitness and self-presentation techniques. For Chris
Shilling, the body is increasingly viewed as a project transformed by
social participation.24 What makes these propaganda images fascinating
is their concern with body fashioning and also what they reveal about
the mass ritual of constructing civilian bodies as soldiers. The body is
presented as a project. However, these constructions of masculinity also
offer an insight into the nature of the conflict itself. The minutiae of
war reveal underlying discourses in wartime culture, which is why this
chapter goes on to explore the politics of the male body in War Office
documents and tailoring trade ephemera; these official texts further
describe the making of the British soldier. While literary accounts are
widely used to interpret First World War experience, these instructional
texts have aroused little academic interest despite their role in the offi-
cial drive to prepare British recruits for war.
Making the civilian soldier
If soldiers were ideologically constructed by the many images circulating

in wartime Britain, did their uniforms give them material presence? As
Jay Winter and Antoine Prost argue, ‘There has been a de-materiali-
zation of historical study, a turn towards ideas and representations as
independent of material conditions.’25 If popular culture made khaki a
visual symbol of military participation, it was also a material object that
was made, bought, sold and worn. Academic studies on consumption
have not given much attention to military uniforms, an outcome of the
perception observed by Ben Fine that the state is anti-consumption.26
However, the state is a primary producer of commodities, particularly
for war. During the First World War, the British army was producing
commodities, such as uniforms, which were officially regulated and
controlled.
As the standard form of British army uniform, khaki service dress
took a long time to materialize. Coming up to the war, changes to the
uniform made the new khaki ‘service dress’ a more practical and func-
tional outfit. The fact that the new uniform had to be made is often
overlooked in studies of the First World War, but this was a huge project
that drew on the resources of the state and civil society. The next part
of this discussion concerns the system to manage its production, supply
and consumption. Owing to the issuance of large amounts of army
clothing upon mobilization, uniform production had to be centralized.
War Office plans for dealing with an outbreak of war were not sufficient
for the scale of this conflict, and the existing system for provision of
army clothing continued only until the raising of new armies placed it
under unprecedented pressure. In August 1914 reserves were capable of
supplying no more than the original expeditionary force and first-line
units of the Territorial Force for a few weeks, which made them reliant
upon a narrow range of suppliers.27
Clothing an expanding volunteer army became a challenge for the offi-
cial army factories. The Army Clothing Department had establishments
for the production, storage and inspection of clothing at Woolwich and
Pimlico in London, but the Contracts Department was well beyond its
capacity to equip a mass army. By November 1914 a new Director of
Army Contracts was appointed to reorganize the system of supply.28 The
Ministry of Munitions and the Army Contracts Department, two mili-
tary supply departments, had managed distinct areas of provision and
adopted different models of production. The former dealt with the engi-
neering and metal industries, demand for which far exceeded national
capacity and required the means of production to be built for war, the
latter with the textile, leather and food trades, which, by contrast, could
be found within the national capacity and drawn from civilian sources.29
This led to a boom in ‘khaki contracts’ within the tailoring trade.
The origins of a system for state regulation of army supplies lay in
the nineteenth-century reform of army administration. In the early
1700s, following official concern over clothing the army, a Council
of General Officers of the Army had acquired responsibility for regu-
lating army clothing. Reform of administrative structures in the mid-
nineteenth century had addressed concerns about abuse and also
improved the quality of clothing in the field. Reform removed struc-
tures that caused corrupt army leaders to use clothing to profiteer from
their men.30 The nineteenth century saw a gradual improvement of
practices relating to economies in clothing the army, and traditional
abuses were addressed through army reform. The House of Commons
through its Public Accounts Committee monitored the administra-
tion of public funds more closely, and by 1854 feeding and clothing
the troops was centralized. Prompted amongst other events by the
historic 1855 Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Supplies of the
British Army in the Crimea, which made much of the unsuitability of
the clothes for war conditions, this move represented increased state
control over the army.31 Thus, systems for regulation of manufacture
and supply of military uniform had seen significant modernization
prior to the war.
Reorganization of the War Office following the Crimean War impacted
heavily on the organization of uniform manufacture and supply, indi-
cated by the 1897 memo prepared for the Secretary of State for War
on the organization of the Army Clothing Department from 1855 to
1893.32 A growing faith in the organizing effects of centralized produc-
tion and management of clothing gave the military increased control
over the body of the soldier: ‘The principle laid down is, that the Military
authorities should decide what is required for the Clothing of the
soldier ... ’33 This established that all army stores were to be purchased by
the Contracts Department, and the War Office kept a list of contractors
who supplied the army with uniform clothing, regulating the system
by public competition. The army was as concerned with regulating
clothing manufacture and supply as it was with standardizing the
appearance of the British soldier. Regulation was not only an organizing
theme in visual culture, it was also a material reality. Khaki represented
a standardized approach to the production and consumption of military
uniforms. Centralizing production demanded the regulation of uniform
dress, which was enforced through the publication of detailed instruc-
tions in the form of official dress regulations. By setting down rules on
what soldiers should wear, this literature played a decisive role in the
regulation of their appearance.
Traditionally, the typical army recruit was issued with a regulation
uniform of average quality and cut, while the officer was expected to
buy a made-to-measure suit. Officers had more choice about where they
could procure their uniforms.34 Dress regulations for officers included
illustrations of actual garments, a practice well established by the First
World War and reflected in the design of the 1904 and 1911 publi-
cations.35 As argued elsewhere, images of discipline were key to the
ideological construction of soldiers. However, by the First World War
dress regulations were performing a key role in the material construc-
tion of the soldier’s body as a focus for army discipline and control. By
taking on a more rationalized appearance, the British military uniform
reflected the conditions of its production. But khaki could not make the
body invulnerable; fantasies of military efficiency were no protection
for combatants in the field of battle. The symbols of production that
built the image of khaki corresponded with systems of provision that
brought it into being, contributing to the myth that this modernized
military uniform made the body more durable. Manuals that promoted
correct appearance were not concerned with pleasure and vanity; they
offered the means by which to observe discipline. While many news-
paper stories emphasized the fashioning of the soldier, khaki was prima-
rily about the military values of discipline and control, not the civilian
practices of fashion and style.
This was clear from the drive to standardize the British army uniform.
Officers and men wore distinct uniforms, but the complete adoption
of khaki service dress gave the army a more ‘modern’ standardized
appearance than before. Uniform became more integral to modern
warfare and took on a functional appearance. Old hierarchies had a
place, but there was a distinct move to a more standardized appear-
ance. In khaki, officers and men looked more like one another. Michael
McDonagh observed in his book London during the Great War something
new in men’s dress in the West End hotels in London during the last
night of 1914: ‘Khaki has obliterated the differences in class which
are so apparent in civilian attire.’36 The sheer ubiquity of khaki in
British civilian life was transforming ideas about men’s appearance. At
least on the surface, khaki had a levelling effect; consistent with the
demand to ‘streamline’ the civilian body, it suggested that uniformity
was a desirable appearance. 37 As reflected in the photographs chosen
for propaganda, the favoured image was a disciplined army, one that
standardized masculine appearance.
As a result of the new social mobility in the army and wartime changes
in the tailoring trade, rigid differences in the quality of clothing for
officers and men became difficult to sustain. A debate in Parliament in
July 1916 revealed the official attitude, which favoured functionality:
‘We do not want a beautifully fitting tunic to fight the Germans; we
want one that is serviceable and will keep out the wet.’38 This was the
language of modernization. Gwyn Harries-Jenkins found that as far back
as the nineteenth century Field Marshal Wolseley was calling for a func-
tional uniform:
When criticized about the loss of historic regimental numbers and

the niceties of dress, Wolseley retorted that whilst he respected the
regimental spirit that had created group cohesiveness, he believed
that soldiers should be dressed for work in the field, ‘not to enrich
tailors or to delight nursemaids.’39
Historically, beauty and utility were pitted against one another in the
struggle for control over the design of the British army uniform. The
‘special’ system for dressing the officer class and the value placed in
regimental distinctiveness eventually gave way to a new attitude that
military uniform should be designed for work rather than beauty. Thus,
whatever the importance of images in evaluating wartime discourses
about masculinity, how, why, and where uniforms were made is critical
to understanding their cultural meaning. For understanding how the
production of the khaki uniform was managed, the official documents
produced by the War Office and the tailoring trade offer critical insights
into how the bodies of a mass of volunteers were designed for war.
Vocabulary of clothing
Publications on uniform design favoured the symbols of produc-

tion that described how civilian bodies could be transformed. Official
Figure 3.5 Dress Regulations for the Army, 1911, An an image of sealed patterns:
‘Service Dress Jackets.’ Plate 19, © British Library Board
dress regulations are critical to the study of uniform; their rationalized

language is revealing of their role in the process of uniform production
and the construction of military identities. In 1914 British army officers
went to war in uniforms subject to the 1911 Dress Regulations for the
Army, and uniforms for the rank and file used the 1914 Regulations
for the Clothing of the Army.40 As long as they followed the 1911 War
Office regulations, which included detailed descriptions and illustra-
tions of each item of clothing, officers had the freedom to get their own
uniform.41 Dress regulations, as they were constituted during the First
World War, were instrumental to maintaining regulation appearance in
a mass army.
Regulations reveal an automated system for the supply of uniforms
to privates. They indicate the responsibilities of commanding officers
to clothe their men and to focus supply, disposal, storage, allowances,
marking, making up and fitting clothing.42 Officers were trusted to
maintain adherence to regulation dress, while other ranks were issued
ready-made khaki uniforms. ‘General Instructions and Orders of Dress’
in the 1911 regulations asked only that an officer’s uniform did not
deviate from the sealed pattern. They were ultimately responsible for the
regulation of their clothing. Dress regulations reveal that while khaki
increased the appearance of equality, the distinctions between officers
and other ranks was expressed through the level of choice they were
given as to how they could dress.
Dress regulations were part of a whole system for maintaining
body uniformity. These dress instructions corresponded with sealed
patterns in the War Office: ‘sealed patterns of garments, buttons, lace,
embroidery, badges of rank, special badges, devices, horse furniture
and appointments are deposited at the War Office for reference and
guidance.’43 Duplicates of sealed pattern badges were also deposited in
commanding regiments, battalions and infantry depots. Regulations for
the rank and file used the practice of sealed patterns to regulate army
appearance, but commanding officers were responsible for examining
garments, compiling indents, keeping clothing records and the ‘efficient
custody and turnover of the clothing.’44 Thus, the uniformity of privates
was maintained through systematic monitoring of their regulation
clothing with a system of supply overseen by the Royal Army Clothing
Department: ‘Whenever a change of pattern takes place another sealed
pattern will be sent with the first consignment of the altered article from
the Royal Army Clothing Department. The latest sealed pattern of each
article will be carefully kept for comparison with supplies.’45 Dress regu-
lations for khaki uniforms and the ways in which they were deployed
for mass manufacture gave the project a modern quality in the drive not
only to standardize appearance but also to build a sustainable system of
supply. Critical to that system was the link between dress regulations
and sealed patterns, actual clothing examples made up for examination
by those in the trade.
An elaborate system for manufacture, supply and storage developed
throughout 1914 and 1915. The War Office first depended upon systems
of independent purchase to meet the excessive clothing demands of new
recruits, but by 1915 the Territorial Force and Pal Battalions were even-
tually brought under its direct control, establishing a unified system for
clothing supply.46 The Priced Vocabulary of Clothing and Necessaries, a 1915
War Office guide to clothing costs, also allowed the army to evaluate
loss, damage and neglect by recording details and prices of the articles
issued by clothing depots, rates of pay for soldiers for completed arti-
cles, allowances for upkeep of clothing and rates for making up, fitting,
completing, altering, washing and marking clothing.47 Costing clothing
on a scale required for war gave the army a system for evaluating its
resources. Official dress regulations became part of a whole network of

documentation that included drafting guides developed by the tailoring
trade and a cost-payment system in the form of the military log. A project
to supply khaki uniforms for the war harnessed the means of clothing
production, which also gave the civilian trade a military texture through
the publication of various texts for making army clothing.
A system that relied on War Office literature to regulate and harmo-
nize the production of army clothing kept the project to mass-produce
khaki under official military control. Yet the project to clothe the civilian
soldier spread from official literature to civilian and trade periodicals.
Excerpts from War Office dress regulations were reproduced in trade
papers accompanied by instructions on drafting and cutting for tailors
who sought to exploit war business.48 The War Office maintained tight
control over the army clothing supply by setting out the very rituals
for fitting and measuring men for uniform: ‘Commanding officers are
responsible that the men are measured by the serjeant-tailor once every
six months during the first two years of service, and once a year after-
wards, and that the entries are accurately made in a measurement roll.’49
Instructions for measuring and fitting rank and file uniforms contrasted
strongly with those for officers. A rigid division of labour found the
sergeant tailor measuring men and fitting uniforms, closely supervised
by army personnel, who then outsourced clothing production.50 Each
man was paraded at the quartermaster’s store while the tailor took his
measurements and then selected and fitted his garments in the presence
of the officer commanding the company. Following an inspection of
the full company of men by the commanding officer, alteration require-
ments were noted.51 Once the project to mass-produce khaki uniforms
was underway, it became part of the fabric of civilian life through its
impact on the civilian tailoring trade and the various images of military
masculinities that began to circulate in everyday life. The British public
had been exposed to images of military spectacle throughout the nine-
teenth century, but systems for the provision of army clothing for this
conflict modernized images of military masculinities. Their mechanistic
qualities offer a glimpse of a discourse that emerged specifically due to
the conditions of the production of the khaki uniform itself.
‘Tailoring in the trenches’
The science of measurement impacted the project to clothe a mass of

British soldiers in the First World War. Measurement became a tech-
nique for the army to discipline and control men’s bodies as the civilian
tailoring trade replaced personal measurements with drafting technolo-

gies. Widely available in the trade by the first half of the nineteenth
century, drafting guides largely replaced the less mathematical system
of using unique, notched patterns.52 A subsidiary industry of publishing
drafting systems was stimulated by the introduction of a wide range of
tools for standard measurement.53 Tools for body measurement made the
mathematical approach increasingly evident in the tailor’s view of the
body, as is reflected in the 1914 clothing regulations, which instructed
the soldier tailor to use the tape to measure sizes and to record them in
the measurement roll: ‘The breast, waist, and breech measurements will
be taken by measuring tapes under the tunic, frock and jacket, and over
any underclothing. The exact measurements will be inserted in the meas-
urement roll, as the proper extra allowance is made by the clothier.’54
Systemized sizing made the skills of the trade easier to disseminate, and
drafting guides played a significant role in the mass communication of
tailoring techniques that led to mass production.
Christopher Breward argues that science and technology increas-
ingly governed the production of the male body through the adoption
of these techniques in the tailoring trade.55 They facilitated a division
of labour, which resembled the army approach to clothing production,
and while the traditional hallmark of the tailor was uniqueness, these
new systems used the language of science. These cutting systems made
tailoring easier to teach, which in turn eased the supply of uniforms and
the steady supply of tailors to the army. An article in a 1916 trade paper
entitled ‘Tailoring in the Trenches’ indicated the value of drafting guides
to the soldier tailor:
We are continually receiving a host of communications from soldier

tailors; who are serving their King and Country out in France and
elsewhere, containing requests for patterns ... and evidently they find
full scope for their sartorial activities out in the trenches.56
It is not clear why soldier tailors found use for drafting guides ‘in the
trenches’ since their work was limited to repair and outsizes. However,
by promoting its services through the putative ‘tailor in the trenches,’
the Tailor and Cutter could link the trade with the war effort, to suggest
that drafting guides based on War Office regulations had a role in large-
scale uniform production. During the First World War, however, it was
unlikely that there was a relationship between soldier tailors and the
large trade in uniform manufacture. Soldier tailors were part of the
regular army infrastructure, and in a debate in Parliament in 1916 there
was much concern about the considerable pressure they were under in
the field.57 The practice of issuing tunics in stock sizes, with the provi-
sion that the tailor would alter them, ‘making them fit so that the men
might do credit to His Majesty’s uniform,’58 had worked well, but the
scale of this war and the poor quality and fit of privates’ uniforms placed
soldier tailors under pressure.
There were stories of badly made and poorly fitting uniforms; men felt
the need to alter their own uniforms in response to trench conditions. A
photograph of Henry Williamson, a private in the London Light Brigade,
on leave in 1915 reveals the ragged edge of his greatcoat where he had
used his bayonet to hack off two feet of fabric to lighten the garment
weighed down by wet mud.59 The combined system of regulation issue
clothing and soldier tailors at hand in the trenches offers an image of
well-dressed soldiers, vital to the image the tailoring trade sought to
promote. However, improvisations men made to their uniforms present
a very different picture, exposing the shortcomings of clothing provi-
sion for the trenches.
The challenges of meeting the demand for appropriate, good quality
clothing were not so widely publicized, but innovation in the sourcing
and coordination of war supply was key to the success of the clothing
production project, which saw the British army draw upon civilian
trades in unprecedented ways. The success of Kitchener’s campaign
to create a mass volunteer army placed the system of supply under
pressure, and by the end of 1915 there were difficulties with schemes
for management of war supplies.60 As the previous system of supply
became redundant, contracts went to public competition, and the
tailoring trade was increasingly involved in ‘khaki contracts’ guided
by dress regulations and drafting guides. The Tailor and Cutter regu-
larly reprinted official army dress regulations advocating one of their
publications, the Cutter’s Practical Guide system. This wartime publica-
tion for the tailoring trade demonstrated approaches to cutting various
garments, including frock coats, mess jackets, vests, trousers, and
puttees.61 Typically, instructions for the ‘Universal Service Frock’ indi-
cated the garment’s fabric and colour and the variations for soldiers
of different rank; included was a presentation plate with three views,
front, back, and profile, of a lieutenant-colonel, a major, and a second
lieutenant wearing the jacket. Instructions on buttons, badges and
cuffs corresponded precisely with dress regulations; textual descrip-
tions in visual form explained how pieces were made up. A flat draft
diagram of the officers’ universal service dress jacket indicated all body
measurements.62 The Military Log completed the picture of regulation,
Figure 3.6 W. D. F., Vincent, The Cutter’s Practical Guide to the Cutting and Making
of All Kinds of British Military Uniforms, The John Williamson Co. Ltd., London
College of Fashion Tailoring Archive, University of the Arts London
which meant everything was held to account, from the inspection of

the soldier to the resources of the tailoring trade. Drafting guides that
explored and calculated the limits of the male body effectively mobi-
lized production technologies by conveying army regulations to the
wartime tailoring trade.
To declare an interest in military clothing production, trade papers
became preoccupied with regulation issue. The clothing trade sought
to stake a claim in the project to fashion the civilian soldier. In August
1917 an article appeared in the trade paper Men’s Wear, called ‘Fashions
at the Front,’ which listed fashion ‘stunts’ and unusual garb worn by the
British soldier on the western front.63 The state and the tailoring trade,
drawn together by the clothing requirements of the war, embarked
upon a massive clothing production project. In March 1916 Parliament
debated the clothing of recruits and declared, ‘There are five important
articles of clothing, boots, shirts, socks, jackets and trousers, of which
the normal annual provision was 1,900,000, and we have provided up to
now 117,090,000.’64 Three million goat and other skins were provided
to make fur-lined coats for soldiers. The total expenditure on clothing
since the outbreak of war was calculated to be £65,000,000.65 The
civilian tailoring trade, already part of the national capacity in terms
of the production of goods, became heavily involved in army clothing
production. Keen to exploit the publicity such an ambitious project
could afford the trade, a 1917 supplement declared its role in the Great
War to be a ‘triumph of industrial organization’ and boasted that the
conflict led to British manufacturers completing ‘the biggest clothing
contracts in history.’66
Army requirements compelled the state to use the clothing trade to
meet war requirements, which created the opportunity to advertise
their efficiency: ‘As soon as it was decided to create a citizen army, the
assistance of the wholesale clothing manufacturers became impera-
tive, and it is to the credit of the wholesale and manufacturing firms
that they responded so efficiently to the call for their services.’67 The
supplement had a number of advertisements, all of which appropriated
themes of active participation and patriotic militarism. Demonstrating
their capacity for large-scale clothing production and strong British
credentials, these companies advocated their fitness to fulfil govern-
ment contracts. United by the requirement to supply military clothing,
the army and the tailoring trade were both involved in the analysis of
soldiers’ bodies. Wartime was good for business, and the papers were
not afraid to use the language of fashion to describe the cooperation
between the state and the military, well aware that they were partici-
pating in the national project to fashion men’s bodies for war.
Figure 3.7 ‘Norfolk Jacket,’ the Tailor and Cutter, 14 January 1915, British Library, 23.
© British Library Board
Army clothing production came under increased regulation, but

sources could diversify so long as the War Office kept control of the
systems of supply. State and trade both benefited from the relationship.
By May 1915 an article in a trade paper reported that they were meeting
government requirements and many businesses were making a good

profit.68 The success of this mass clothing project lay in a regulatory
framework that facilitated the cooperation of state and trade. Despite
the lack of adequate provision early in the war, this emphasis on the
evaluation of resources led to success in terms of the scale of army
uniform manufacture. By March 1917 debates in Parliament reflected
the amazement the cabinet felt about the national textile production
since the outbreak of war: ‘We have made 111,000 miles of cloth and
flannel, or to put it in a more simple form, enough to go four and a
half times round the earth at the Equator.’69 Clothing requirements for
a large-scale war had pushed the army to look to the civilian trades to
find the capacity for the production of textiles and the manufacture of
uniforms.
War commodities are not part of consumer culture, but army clothing
is clearly produced and consumed by the state. In 1914, wartime army
supply constituted mass consumption by the state, but the nature of
recruitment and the official regulation of clothing meant that those in
uniform were not regular ‘consumers.’ Soldiers had very little choice as
to what they wore, even when they modified the khaki uniform that
they were given. Indeed, in this conflict systems for the provision of
khaki, from army regulation of uniform production to the co-option of
the civilian trades, raise questions about how far a military project can
reach into civilian society. When images of disciplined military bodies
surfaced in popular culture, they gained a distinctly civilian quality. The
reality was that mass volunteering could not possibly create an army of
perfectly trained and fit soldiers; they were civilians in uniform. Neither
was the supply of army clothing a purely military production, when it
was found within the national capacity and drawn from civilian sources.
The process of khaki consumption was complex. The question of who
made the British army uniform during the First World War is not easily
answered, but neither is it clear who consumed military clothing.
What is clear is that this war commodity was shaped by a range of
social groups in British society, from the readers of popular newspapers
to firms engaged in ‘khaki contracts’ in the clothing trade, from army
officers to members of the British government. The design and visual
presentation of military dress does offer insights into the ownership and
responsibility of this mass clothing production project. A functionalist
aesthetic drew attention to the regulation character of army dress and
suggested that while it clearly was an official project, it was not entirely
controlled by the state. The official desire to retain a functionalist
aesthetic was tested by trade attempts to fashion or glamorize uniform
wearing during wartime. Whatever compromises were made, the body

of the soldier was a site of symbolic struggle, clear from the various ways
in which it was represented in wartime visual culture.
Wartime economy gave army clothing a less than glamorous image.
Such was the flavour of an advertisement in the Military Mail for
Aldershot Stores, whose visual codes reflected the appearance of official
logs and drafting guides. Divided into twelve sections, each garment
or piece of equipment is given a box containing an illustration, text
and description of product and price.70 Recalling illustrations of sealed
patterns in dress regulations, the absence of the body in this promotion
gives the clothing and kit a distinctly manufactured quality. Reflecting
the rationality so central to army culture at the time, the promotion
appears to describe the soldier’s body using the language of science.
Foucault argued that the body has a particular kind of role in modern
institutions, and there are resonances with his idea of docile bodies in
this national project of collective discipline, especially the drive to visu-
alize bodies to ‘be subjected, used, transformed and improved.’71 When
these kinds of advertisements are linked to the widespread use of logs,
drafting guides and dress regulations during wartime, a pattern emerges
to suggest that there was not only a focus on the body of the soldier but
one that could construct it as an object of control and transformation.
Moreover, consistent with the prevailing atmosphere of evaluation and
inspection, military uniform became an ideal technique to fragment the
body. The Aldershot Stores promotion shares with the drafting guides
an impulse to rearrange human actions through a kind of exploration of
the male body. Nothing could be further from the blueprints of mascu-
linity that gave rise to soldier heroes.
Standardizing practices of grading and measuring were a notable and
recurring feature of the literature on uniform in this period. These tech-
nologies gave public access to the transformations that uniform could
effect on the bodies of civilian men and were also critical to mobilizing
the production of army clothing on a vast scale. These commercial
images recall the simplicity and realism of press stories that uncovered
the grooming habits of the ordinary Tommy. This narrative strand was
powerful precisely because it had its roots in the very specific conditions
whereby civilian soldiers were made; images sought to depict the body
as capable, useful and instrumental. What is also clear is the contrast
between these images of men as objects and those that celebrate exem-
plars of military masculinities during this conflict. The use of uniformity
as a narrative device set limits on the agency of recruits, but it was a
powerful symbol of the industrialization of warfare. The mass-production
Figure 3.8 ‘Aldershot Stores,’ Military Mail, 7 January 1916, British Library, 11.
of khaki uniforms and the drive to visualize the disciplines applied to

men’s bodies in popular culture both imprinted wartime British culture.
Despite the mechanistic qualities of many of these images, there was a
sense in which they were evidence of the modernity that the war created
and reflected how the khaki uniform was more than an outfit for active
service, it was integral to new kinds of warfare.
War knitting
As already discussed, clothing the army was a shared project that

involved a range of social groups. A functionalist aesthetic worked
alongside fashioning themes to reflect the struggle for ownership of the
clothing project. Produced through the military uniform and the disci-
plines it embodied, soldiers were in turn shaped by the conditions of
clothing production. This was no less the case with unofficial domestic
knitting projects, which supplied items of clothing to men at the front.
Home knitting brought small-scale and personal forms of production to
the mass clothing project. On 17 November 1914 the matter of supply
was raised in Parliament, and the response was that civilian knitting
was not the result of War Office deficiencies but rather reflected a public
desire to get involved: ‘there was so strong a wish on the part of private
persons desirous of helping the troops to make and send socks that it
became necessary to co-ordinate the efforts, to ensure uniformity of
supply and proper distribution.’72 Gloves and socks, often extra to army
supply, were supplied by outfitters, and clothiers but were also knitted
by female relatives of soldiers at the front.
So widespread was civilian knitting that the state responded by regu-
lating domestic production. An eight-page knitting pattern selling at
the price of a penny, called ‘Women and War,’ spoke directly to British
women, instructing them ‘How to Knit and Crochet Articles Necessary
to the Health and Comfort of Our Soldiers and Sailors.’73 The booklet
contained a pattern for a knitted balaclava helmet, crochet balaclava
helmet, regulation body belt, knitted mitten, bedsock without heel,
knitted sock, knitted muffler, bedsock, kneecap, and sleeveless jersey.
That many of these items are mentioned in soldiers’ letters and diaries
suggests that home knitting followed these regulation patterns.74 Cecil
Harper recalled that in 1914 officers were asked to find voluntary knit-
ters to compensate for army inefficiencies regarding khaki hose tops:
About that time it was announced that Highland troops would have to
be fitted out with khaki hose-tops. The brightly coloured regimental
hose was found to be too conspicuous in the field. Since these things
could not be then supplied by the clothing department all officers
were asked to seek voluntary knitters among their lady-friends.75
There may have been efforts to regulate domestic crafts that might reach
soldiers at the front, but the army was also likely to co-opt civilians
to engage in voluntary knitting projects. These knitted items were the
most fugitive garments made for soldiers, embodying the lack of control
felt by the army and the state over the production and consumption of
army clothing. To begin with, many garments were not even knitted
using khaki wool. The first unregulated knits must have looked absurd
on soldiers. However, knitted garments reflected the surge in volun-
teerism and constituted the most intimate bonds being forged between
home and battle front during wartime.
To reflect the very personal and domestic nature of wartime kitting,
the front cover of the ‘Women and War’ pattern booklet featured a short
sentimental poem:
To women, work of pleasure

Yet earning countless treasure
Of gratitude, forever
from ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’76
Each page of the booklet contains a pattern and illustration and a photo-
graphic representation of the garment showing the stitches and also
offers an impression of how the clothing item might look on the body.
Apart from one view of the balaclava, each presentation of a completed
knitted garment is disembodied, yet the three-dimensionality of the
illustrations fits them on an imaginary body; the text reminds women
to use only the best wools.77 While it is clear that the pattern reaches
out to women in their desire to knit for their loved one, it also has a
very official message for rogue knitters: follow the pattern faithfully so
that comforts for British soldiers comply with regulation issue. Khaki
wools had to be used, and only certain regulation garments could be
made. But the pattern shares a family resemblance with other kinds of
wartime images of army clothing. As discussed, how items of clothing
were depicted in wartime reflected how men were officially viewed.
At worst, they were material for military improvement, something to
be worked on and made. This kind of functionalist aesthetic fulfilled
the official project to amass an army of civilian soldiers. The knit-
ting pattern, as opposed to the knitted garments produced, bore the
Figure 3.9 ‘Women and War: How to Knit and Crochet Articles Necessary to
the Health and Comfort of Our Soldiers and Sailors,’ published by Needlecraft
Ltd., Manchester and London 1914–1918, Acc. no.: 8208–203/3, National Army
Museum, 3
mechanistic qualities so apparent in a range of images and texts that

sought to standardize the bodies of civilian soldiers.
Paul Ward viewed home knitting as a form of active participation in the
war effort, which generated patriotism amongst aristocratic and middle-
class women.78 Indeed, knitting was experienced as a social rather than
solitary practice: ‘Women’s commitment to knitting was voluntary and
could be undertaken individually or in locally and nationally organ-
ized groups.’79 Home knitting was considered a useful public activity,
not only because the supply for fighting soldiers was inadequate but
also because these items were ‘comforts’ that many women wanted
to make.80 The public desire to knit for relatives at the front was an
apparently innocent pastime that became a persistent feature of the war
on Britain’s home front. The mobility of knitting made it the perfect
symbol for the enthusiastic efforts of civilians for the war effort. Official
support for home-front knitting may have been driven by the desire to
use wartime to reconstruct gender roles, but a widespread enthusiasm
for domestic crafts also reflected the rise of volunteering.
Images of cheerful and patriotic knitters was the popular face of the
wartime volunteer project, but Jessie Pope’s 1915 poem Socks is also
haunted by doubts:
Wonder if he’s fighting now

What he’s done an’ where he’s been
He’ll come out on top, somehow –
Slip 1, knit 2, purl 14.81
Poetry and knitting were drawn together in the popular culture of First
World War Britain. If the act of knitting symbolized care of the absent
male body, the romantic connotations of the verse suggest that women
were invited to knit for love. Gloves and socks were coordinated by the
army, but those at home sent them directly to soldiers as an expres-
sion of their duty, care and love. However, the domestic knitting project
could be too personal and often brimmed over with enthusiasm, so
much so that official intervention sought to regulate this private work.
The concern was that, while people should be given an outlet for their
charity, there were problems with the harmonization of the project and
the uniformity of supply. The publication of patterns eventually brought
the civilian knitting project under official control; they instructed knit-
ters to use khaki wool and to confine their creative endeavours to a
narrow range of regulation garments. Eric Lubbock, a private with the
69th MT Company ASC in France, wrote to his mother on 13 October
1914: ‘Thanks so much for the gloves and mittens. It was very nice
receiving them just as I was going on night guard.’82 Two days later he
wrote again about more comforts received from his sister: ‘I received the
gloves and mittens and socks from Weenie.’ Home knitting, a significant
activity on the home front supplied relatives with small intimate items
of clothing but was also an expression of care.
Ward described the ‘outbreak of knitting and sewing in the summer of
1914’ as a spontaneous expression of concern for men on active service
and argued that it represented one of the significant links between
home and the battle front.83 Whilst serving as an NCO with the 2nd/9th
Battalion Hampshire Regiment, Tom Thorpe wrote to his family around
Christmas 1914 from Devon to thank them for various items of food and
clothes and, in particular, his sister for her gift of hand-knitted mittens:
‘Tell Nellie not to despair as the mittens are quite all right and as well as
doing for cycling can be used while on guard when we are not allowed
to wear proper gloves.’84 Later in October 1916 from Wargret Camp
in Wareham he wrote again to Nellie: ‘Thank you very much indeed
for knitting me that helmet, it is very nice indeed and exactly what
I wanted.’85 He later died of wounds from the third battle of Ypres in
September 1917. It would be easy to miss the meaning of such mundane
items, but knits could be seen as private acts of love that reflected the
public desire to care for men at war.
Knitting not only produced real material objects for the fighting troops
but also conjured up images that reinforced gender roles in wartime.
Images of women furiously knitting socks recreated an idealized version
of the past. Exploiting the popular desire for women to knit for male rela-
tives was a neat propaganda trick, one that suggested traditional social
structures were reinforced rather than destroyed by conflict. War knit-
ting contributed to the perception that the home front was a significant
theatre of war, one nonetheless characterized as feminine. The reality
was that war reversed gender roles; women were called upon to work in
munitions factories and on the land. Images that emphasized the femi-
ninity of knitting sought to distort that reality.
However, it is striking that knitting in particular was a practice that
evoked men’s bodies, suggesting that its role as ‘comfort’ worked both
ways; that is, a practice that also allowed women to explore the fragility
of a body they might not recover. In this way home knitting was crea-
tive work that protected and made the soldier, but women also had to
face the reality that a modest intervention of comfort was all they could
provide in this gruesome situation. Domestic crafts were significant to
civilian soldiers in wartime. This unofficial work forged social bonds that
appeared to give women an opportunity to consider the male body and

to long for its safe return. Even Lord Kitchener issued a wartime knitting
pattern in response to his concern with the state of men’s feet in the
trenches. Sock seams were a problem: they rubbed soldiers’ toes until
they bled. A sewing innovation that became known as the Kitchener
stitch allowed socks to be finished off smoothly. In war memory, home-
made knits were not regarded as fashionable items, but neither were
they part of the functional kit for the trenches. Instead knits took on
the status of wartime ‘comforts,’ and knitting itself held the power to
evoke the very body of the soldier lost to war. Wartime knits reflect the
affective value of clothing, the capacity for people to imaginatively and
materially make the body.
War knitting is not part of the official story of the First World War, but
it caught the imagination of the public. If clothing the army was a shared
project involving a range of social groups, domestic crafts were seized on
by the state to popularize the fashioning of the civilian soldier during
wartime. The western front hardly conjures up images of military spec-
tacle, but khaki has become one of the abiding images of the war, which
became strongly associated with the mass army raised for the western
front, a ragtag army cobbled together from a diverse group of civilians.
Created in the image of the machines that dominated the western front,
the functionalist khaki uniform made the soldier’s body available to
the judgements of an official gaze but also solicited the pleasures of an
aesthetic gaze. Whatever pleasure people took in observing the body of
the soldier, the fantasy of a durable military masculinity broke down
in the face of the realities of trench warfare. The crisis, as many have
argued, lay in these stark contrasts between representation and reality.
But khaki tells its own story of the conflict, particularly the fears and
desires that circulated in wartime Britain. Images of men in uniform had
potency and were used to attract volunteers, but the symbols of produc-
tion that characterized images of khaki constituted the hope for physical
renewal that the war appeared to represent.
Conclusion
Whether mobilized to go to the trenches or to work in war-related

production at home, the conflict focused British people on a national
project. The army sought to popularize the project of militarizing
male civilians once the responsibility to make the British soldier
spread to civilian society, seen in the work of the tailoring trade to
mass-produce uniforms as well as in the informal craft projects that
preoccupied those on the home front. It was not entirely clear who
owned the project to fashion civilian men for war: the army, the
tailoring trade, civilians on the home front, or indeed the govern-
ment. They all had a stake in the project, but tensions between these
various groups regularly compromised the image the military desired
for wartime soldiers. The army had some success in regulating the
production and supply of uniforms, but it failed when men appeared
in the trenches wearing lovingly made but unregulated knits or when
inexperienced clothiers supplied badly made uniforms. The range of
firms on ‘khaki contracts’ found the army anxiously monitoring the
clothing production project.
Visual images reflected the official desire for a singular version of mili-
tary masculinity during wartime, but narratives that presented the male
body as a project also gave men’s bodies’ instrumental value. Images
that idealized the British Tommy as an enthusiastic amateur, a coura-
geous and dutiful citizen, were often simplistic in their portrayals of
clean, hygienic and smartly dressed soldiers. Mass army mobilization
drove the emergence of discourses that described the body as an object
to be disciplined and transformed. Indeed, these ideas were pervasive
in civilian society and represented the gentle militarization of British
society. During the First World War fashion had feminine connotations,
but fashioning themes were also clearly useful to popularize regulation
issue; images reveal how uniformity was used as a narrative device in
wartime popular culture to set limits on men’s agency. Photographs or
even a network of ‘instructions’ on dress, grooming and hygiene could
present the recruit’s body as military material.
The achievement for the popular press was to transform the regulation
of men’s bodies into entertaining spectacle. Visual images promoted the
project of collective discipline but also captured the scale of the army
clothing project. It is clear that the army placed great store in the lure
of uniform; the fashion habits of the civilian soldier created gentle
propaganda to suggest that the war rebuilt rather than destroyed men’s
bodies. In this conflict the British army relied heavily on the civilian
trades to produce the required volume of military uniforms. But when
the army looked to the civilian trades, the military lost the control they
might otherwise have had over the bodies of recruits. But for all of the
emphasis on keeping to regulation, there were many instances of men
improvising, such as the khaki shorts that appeared on the western front
in the summer of 1918, worn with puttees. The specific shape of the
systems of provision of army clothing opened up a dialogue between the
military and the civilian tailoring trade. It made the army increasingly
accepting of civilian forms of fashioning and found military styling

more prevalent on the home front.
Khaki tells a unique story about the ideological and material making
of civilian soldiers in First World War Britain. Military uniforms shaped
soldier’s bodies, which were in turn made under the wartime conditions
for clothing production. Wartime knitting became a persistent feature
of the war on Britain’s home front. A perfect symbol for the enthusiastic
efforts of civilians for the war effort, home front knitting was driven by
the desire to use wartime to reconstruct gender roles, but a widespread
enthusiasm for domestic crafts also reflected a growing culture of volun-
teerism. Knitting comforts for the troops was also a form of improvised
clothing. If the soldier was tamed by technologies of representation and
production, his body was also evoked by such unofficial practices as
home knitting. The British soldier on the western front is remembered
as an everyman due to the skilful representation of the new recruit as
a civilian quickly and easily conforming to army discipline. Fashioning
the soldier has become a motif in myths and memories of the western
front, not least because wartime popular culture evoked the making
of the soldier. In this sense, a range of social groups made the civilian
soldier. To refuse to participate was a repudiation of a whole discourse
that advanced military service as a desirable role for men. In Chapter 4,
I explore the symbolic power of khaki through accounts from conscien-
tious objectors who refused to wear military uniform. Clothing became
the focus for a struggle between war resistors and the army; the protest
against militarism adopted the very symbols that had been used to mili-
tarize civilian men in the first place.
4
‘Quakers in Khaki’: Conscientious
Objectors’ Resistance to Uniform
The primary objective of wartime recruitment propaganda was to get

men into khaki, but a significant minority resisted following conscrip-
tion. In a 1927 issue of the Herald of the Folk,1 Reginald Stamp recalled his
wartime imprisonment for resisting military service: ‘For my refusal to
obey a “lawful command of my superior officer to put on a suit of khaki”
I was three times court martialed and sentenced to six months, one year
and 18 months hard labour respectively.’2 Stamp was a conscientious
objector (CO), of which there were many during the First World War,
some associated with the labour movement, while others had Christian
objections to the taking of life.3 The Friends Service Committee was set
up to help British Quakers to resist compulsory military service; the
introduction of conscription gave their position even more prominence,
making membership in the Society of Friends the best-known reason for
objection.
In this chapter I consider the role of khaki uniform to the pacifist
cause of COs in wartime Britain. Did their refusal to wear uniform give
their protest its symbolic power? The COs refused to be defined by a
military agenda and in the process drew attention to the critical role
of uniform in coercing civilian men to take up arms. Personal accounts
from COs recount the drama that ensued when they first said no to
khaki; these episodes were also of interest to newspapers of the day. This
chapter explores how army clothing embodied military participation
and asks whether the refusal to wear khaki signaled a crisis. Amongst
other things it was a crisis in representation. Michel Foucault’s critique
of modernity underlines the political role the body plays in power strug-
gles. As discussed, the project to get men into khaki proved to be more
political that it first appeared, raising questions about whether wartime
recruitment methods were too aggressive. The plight of COs underlines
87
how army uniform got caught up in the struggle over wartime repre-
sentations of peace and conflict. This is not to suggest that those who
agreed to wear khaki necessarily conformed to army discipline, but
outright objection was a special case; refusals created compelling images
of dissent that threatened the government case.
Even though COs were numerically few, as this discussion will show,
their resistance to khaki threatened to undermine a wartime project
that utilized regulation clothing to construct images of transformation
and control. Refusal to wear khaki often marked the beginning of a
CO’s resistance to military service. Following conscription, if a man
failed to respond to the call to military duty, he would be arrested by
the police, taken before a magistrate, fined and handed over to a mili-
tary escort who would then take him back to the local unit. This was
where many COs committed ‘some act of technical disobedience, such
as refusing to salute or to wear khaki.’4 Objectors had an opportunity
to make an official application for exemption to local tribunals, but
they were arrested if they then refused to accept non-combatant duties
or were unwilling to undertake any form of service as a condition of
exemption.5 Treated as enlisted soldiers, their disobedience brought the
full force of the law upon them, and they could then be sentenced to
imprisonment. If a CO continued to disobey orders at the end of his
sentence, he would be returned to the army unit to be subjected to the
whole routine again.
The drive to create a citizen army brought about a culture change in
wartime Britain which resulted in the drafting of the military service
bill.6 The 1916 Military Service Act introduced compulsory military
service in Britain for all men aged eighteen to fifty and also allowed for
applications to be made for exemption on grounds of occupation, hard-
ship, ill health or conscientious objection, if ‘objection genuinely rests
on religious or moral convictions.’7 Nonetheless, government was deter-
mined to force the issue, leading to struggles between the military and
COs. They were particularly keen to resist the material attempts to trans-
form them into soldiers when ‘they refused to undergo a medical exami-
nation, to sign documents, to put on a uniform.’8 Were their refusals a
response to a whole wartime discourse that sought to popularize mili-
tary participation through images of men in khaki?
It was indeed a challenge to normative representations of mascu-
linity, that shifted upon the outbreak of war, when soldiers became
the measure of manliness. As discussed, popular culture incorporated
khaki service dress into a range of images to construct the male body
as a resource to be ‘worked on’ and improved by military disciplines.
‘Quakers in Khaki’ 89
Many recruiters were convinced that uniform was a persuasive tool, as

was reported in 1917 in Men’s Wear, a tailoring trade paper that carried
an article about the psychological effect of the military uniform: ‘A
recruiting officer declared recently that a soldier attired in uniform in
front of his office will attract and interest more young men than an
eloquent speech delivered by a silver-tongued orator dressed in civilian
clothes.’9 Khaki recruited men to the army during wartime as part of a
whole culture to advance military service as a desirable role for men.
While khaki service dress was clearly the signifier of active service, anal-
ysis of COs’ accounts suggest that it also had material significance in
creating a mass army.
Refusing khaki
As discussed in Chapter 2, despite the poor pre-war recruitment patterns,

recruitment posters created positive images of soldiers that made mili-
tary participation appear desirable. Throughout the visual culture that
prevailed in First World War Britain, images of men in uniform, whether
in posters or popular newspapers, contributed to a patriotic atmosphere
that stimulated recruitment and generated popular support for war. This
chapter explores one of the ways in which uniform appearance advanced
hegemonic masculinities in wartime and how COs who refused to wear
uniform were labelled criminal and deviant; the discussion also calls
attention to the practice whereby military officials forced army clothing
onto those who were detained.
In her study of deviance in images of wartime COs, Lois Bibbings
contends that the crisis of objection was managed by demeaning
portrayals that questioned their manliness.10 If images of men in
uniform were all about reconstructing masculine values to encourage
men’s participation in the war, recruitment posters harnessed the
symbolic and material power of uniform to persuade civilians to become
soldiers. Lurking beneath these messages was a desire to expose rogue
characters unprepared to wear the uniform, to weed out subversive men
by humiliating them. Without a uniform a man could be regarded as
deviant and unmasculine. A consideration of images of objectors bene-
fits from a perspective on gender due to the ways in which cases illumi-
nate how men carved out identities of their own from those offered to
them.11 The appearance of clothing in propaganda images was a sharp
tactic that conveyed the changes men would be expected to make to
their bodies upon joining the army. The transformation appeared to be
straightforward.
The making of the soldier was presented as a material transforma-

tion that reflected the national project to reconstruct masculinities for
wartime. For some, this might have seemed an extraordinary leap of
faith. Kitchener’s decision to raise the new armies meant training men
from scratch in a short time, leaving many new recruits unprepared for
the challenges of army life. Images created for posters and newspapers
were constructed to ease fears about the difficulty that the move from
civilian to soldier necessarily involved. Recruitment posters were powerful
media texts that invited men to transform themselves, but they also
primed them to fear the disapproval their civilian clothes would attract
during wartime. Some images invited criticism for inducing guilt and
shame amongst men reluctant to fight, but after 1916 there were more
worrying signs of coercion. Early in the war posters had made a very
public claim on the bodies of civilian men and, in line with Foucault’s
critique, located the body as a target of power in a bid to press men into
the service of the state. To build a citizen army, the image of the man in
khaki was useful; it issued a normalizing gaze reprimanding civilian men
reluctant to become soldiers. Later, when men refused to be conscripted,
they were no longer faced with persuasive images but felt the full force
of harsh army discipline.
Many men refused to conform; following conscription in January
1916, 16,000 British men registered as conscientious objectors.12 In
February 1916, the Illustrated London News ran a feature called ‘Quakers
in Khaki,’ which explained that the ‘Society of Friends is, of course,
opposed on principle to fighting, but our photograph is sufficient proof
that its members are prepared to serve their country under the aegis
of the Red Cross.’13 The newspaper feature suggests that while Quakers
may be opposed to fighting, there is no problem getting them into
khaki, or as this article put it, they are ‘prepared to do their duty in the
non-combatant services.’14 The Society of Friends never took an offi-
cial position on the war and supported each member who was directed
by his conscience; popular perception was that there were many objec-
tors amongst British Quakers. Undoubtedly, the incongruous sight of
Quakers wearing khaki made a compelling story, the image showing the
staff of an ambulance train posing for a group photograph just before
the men left for France. Most striking is the faith in the ‘photographic
proof’, as it were, that apparently witnesses military service by men
known to have a moral objection to war.
Quaker absolutists and Independent Labour Party unconditional-
ists made up the majority of COs who went to prison during the First
World War.15 The focus on army appearance in this picture story reflects
the faith placed in the surface qualities of militarism. Implicit is the

suggestion that soldiers can be fashioned from the most unlikely civil-
ians. Khaki became useful to express a general optimism about the war,
but conscription tested the authorities, and it was the COs’ refusal to
wear khaki that represented a significant point of resistance to military
service. A newspaper feature on the front page of the Daily Sketch from
April 1916 called ‘Percy’s Progress in the Army’ sought to take a view
on such refusals.16 An army officer in full uniform accompanies a CO
wearing only a blanket because, as the caption explains, he ‘refuses to
wear khaki.’ His actions are trivialized by the jaunty tone of the article,
which goes on to describe Percy’s apparent ‘progress’ in the army: ‘he
has had his hair cut – unwillingly, even forcibly, it is true – and has
put his feet into Army boots. They may make a soldier of him yet.’17
This form of dissent troubled the state, but the popular press clearly
sought to mediate these episodes with light-hearted stories, many of
which distorted the experiences of objectors while some tipped over
into ridicule.
The media treatment of COs was clearly bound up with the discipli-
nary project aimed at getting COs into uniform. Despite the fact that
objectors were numerically few, portrayals of deviance, criminality and
effeminacy were useful to undermine their moral position.18 The Daily
Sketch makes ‘Percy’ appear foolish by suggesting that khaki is the only
appropriate attire for men during wartime, holding out hope that he will
eventually become a soldier. If women were encouraged to believe that
men wearing khaki were trustworthy, then those who refused it must
have been considered suspect. What happened to those who refused to
be called up? What was the official response to those whose conscience
prevented them from participating in the war? Many newspaper stories
reported the plight of COs, but the popular press rarely departed from
the official agenda of patriotic militarism. The optimistic tone adopted
by the Daily Sketch suggests that ‘Percy’ will inevitably become a soldier,
but the feature has nothing to say about his moral objections to mili-
tarism. Popular images such as these show a particular concern with
preparing the military body – the cutting of hair and the fitting of a
uniform – a tactic that deflects attention from the legitimacy of the CO’s
moral position. Even when protests were small, it is clear that objection
troubled a potent narrative in wartime popular culture that sought to
fashion civilian bodies for war.
Following the introduction of the Military Service Act, the Quaker
response was to avoid a struggle against government policy but to resist
anything that could be construed as advancing the war machinery.19
According to Fred Murfin’s account of his experiences, the police were

called to his home in north London in late March 1916, and when he
reported to Tottenham police a few days later, he was placed in a cell.
He was then taken, along with other COs, to magistrate’s court, where
he and the others were charged with being ‘deserters from the army.’
He declared his faith and was found guilty and given a fine which, if
unpaid, carried a fourteen-day prison sentence. When the men refused
to pay the fine, they were taken under escort to Mill Hill recruiting
station, where the struggle with khaki began. They were told to strip
for a medical examination: ‘We were told that if we didn’t our clothes
would be torn off! We found we would be putting our clothes on again,
so we did strip. But I was as unhelpful as I knew how to be ... ’20 They
were then taken to the stores for uniforms, and kit bags were put around
their necks.
This was when, according to Murfin, he defiantly ‘refused to give the
size of anything and the men had to guess.’21 The position of a CO such
as Murfin was to identify and resist the machinery of war. To relinquish
his measurements was to give himself over to the army. His refusal was
ideological, but his story draws attention to the trouble the army went
to in order to gain control over his body. It was a struggle over meaning,
one that reveals the power of clothing in military projects. To politicize
clothing is to suggest that it has the power to change people. Whatever
symbolism the uniform had, its material force was unmistakeable;
without it, civilians could not be recruited. The complete transformation
of civilian men relied upon the voluntary wearing of military uniform.
Once men were in uniform, it was their army clothing that made them
visible to army command, a system for the recognition, measurement
and evaluation of their bodies.
The visibility of the khaki uniform was taken very seriously by a govern-
ment anxious to militarize a mass of civilians. As the Under-Secretary of
War declared in Parliament in 1916, ‘some definite significance must
attach to the wearing of uniform.’22 For COs the taking of their meas-
urements represented a specific kind of surrender to the army, one that
objectified the body and held it to account. Such was the significance
of that moment for Murfin that he offers a detailed description of the
whole process in his memoir, including the demand made by an army
officer to put on the military uniform: ‘We all refused, I think, and we
each had a soldier to undress and dress us.’23 He goes on to explain that
eventually the uniform was forced on them, but one objector protested:
‘They have got the uniform on but they haven’t got the man!’24 Murfin
adds that upon his arrival in France, he deliberately left his puttees on
the ship. COs politicized clothing to refuse what had become a powerful
symbol of military participation in wartime.
If masculinity is a cultural construction, then, Judith Butler asks, what
are the forces that ‘police the social appearance of gender?’25 Official
responses to cases of conscientious objection during wartime reveal a
drive to ‘police’ masculine appearance, to hide tensions that might other-
wise expose the limits set on men’s agency. It is clear that the military
uniform was an ideal symbol for advancing hegemonic masculinities,
but these cases also offer an opportunity to trace what happened when
the desired transformation from civilian to soldier broke down. First
World War popular culture linked nationalism with masculinity, and as
Joanna Bourke’s study of wartime masculinities recognizes, men’s bodies
came under particular pressure to embody wartime values.26 Exploring
accounts and images of men who had a moral objection to war illus-
trates how the project to reconstruct wartime masculinities relied upon
violence, punishment and humiliation to achieve its goal.
Struggles between individual COs and army officers illustrate how
military clothing promoted the body discipline so central to wartime
British army culture. Image propaganda gave the ‘call to uniform’ a
very natural treatment, something that was becoming a routine part
of civilian social life. However, amongst war resisters at least, there was
a growing consciousness that the khaki service dress was critical to the
military machine. Their disregard for the king’s uniform was considered
by many to be offensive but was rooted in a personal morality. In an
issue of The Friend from 1917, Wilfrid Hinde, who was held at Crown
Hill, near Plymouth, gave a statement to explain that refusing to wear a
uniform was for him a matter of conscience: ‘I have refused for a second
time to wear military clothing because I am convinced that it is wrong
for me to become a soldier.’27 COs refused to be lured by the popular
images of dutiful servicemen that encouraged enlistment. For them
wearing a uniform was embracing the logic of the army institution, a
clear assertion of the power the military had over civilian bodies. Their
protest to defend their liberty was manifested in a physical struggle over
what they could wear.
As Felicity Goodall explains, ‘once they were in the hands of the army,
the uniform was a potent symbol of military jurisdiction.’28 Quakers
who wanted to demonstrate their refusal to perpetuate militarism found
that rejecting the uniform challenged the claim the army had made
on their bodies. While the men sought to resist everything that khaki
stood for, the army responded with tactics that were stark reminders
of the full force of military discipline; they were compelled to behave
like soldiers. Whether they wanted to or not, objectors were physically

pushed to wear the khaki uniform, an echo of the physicality of mili-
tary life. There was little sympathy for pacifism and no appeal to moral
reason. The persistence of physical coercion is the most striking feature
of various accounts. The number of COs in military hands reached its
peak in the summer of 1916; a notebook kept by one describes their
harsh experience at the hands of the army between May and October
of that year.29 Forcing a uniform on what were considered to be enlisted
soldiers became part of the procedure for dealing with COs, but most
conspicuous was the physical nature of the struggle:
The sergeant came in and politely requested Albert and myself to

undress and don our uniforms. On our refusing he started on the
job himself, and after divesting me of all except my underclothes
proceeded to put the uniform on. When he had finished I as politely
as possible informed him that at the first opportunity it would come
off.30
Such was the currency of uniform to transform civilian bodies that

the army forced khaki on men in an effort to discourage dissent. The
PRC posters normalized uniform wearing and the military viewed the
uniform as critical to making soldiers of civilians. Forcing the actual
uniform on men’s bodies had its own power to act directly on them
in time of war. A pacifist stance was rarely taken at face value and was
instead interpreted as ‘shirking’ at a time when considerable pressure
was placed on men to take up military service.31 A dominant view that
military masculinity was the most desirable role for men was challenged
by the CO’s protest but was certainly not destroyed. Their defiant stance
threatened to undermine the government case; the symbolism of their
resistance to khaki challenged the popular belief that all recruits natu-
rally ‘progress’ into army life.
Foucault’s view of history considers how people are materially consti-
tuted as subjects.32 Clothing has material force when fashioning bodies,
but uniform operates to advance the smooth working of a range of
modern institutions such as schools, hospitals and police forces. Nowhere
is this more apparent than the military, where army clothing is used
to discipline and mould the body of the soldier. COs were treated like
any other enlisted soldiers who found themselves in an army barracks;
they were subjected to the harshest army punishment for disobeying
orders. However, during a conflict that saw Britain awash with jingoistic
images of dutiful servicemen, the struggle with uniform was particularly
revealing of how integral army dress had become to the project to mili-
tarize men. The COs took a brave stance but they were not equal to mili-
tary discipline and punishment; once called up, they were deemed to be
in the hands of the army and thus subject to military discipline.33
John Rae argues that in the Quaker community the treatment of objec-
tors caused outrage, but it was not unusual behaviour for regular army
officers to force or deceive any recruits who were reluctant to take their
civilian clothes off.34 However, during the First World War the treat-
ment of men reluctant to wear a uniform took on a different texture.
What had been constructed as something every man would desire – to
fight for his country – was now presented as a matter of compulsion.
These incidences of objection drew attention to the harshness of army
discipline and punishment. They also highlight the role of uniform as a
disciplinary practice in the army, an instance of what Foucault theorized
as ‘corporeal inscription.’ What was unusual was the reach military disci-
pline appeared to have into civilian life post-conscription, and stories
of the harshest punishment given to COs began to circulate in their
communities. The emphasis the army placed on getting recruits prop-
erly uniformed illustrates the military’s faith in khaki’s transformative
potential. The British army was convinced of the symbolism of khaki, as
the examples demonstrate, but they also relied upon its material pres-
ence to win men over or force them into active service.
COs’ resistance to khaki exposed the visual and material tricks that
sought to galvanize public opinion to mobilize civilians to go to war.
Cheerful images of men in khaki might have been circulating in posters
and the popular press, but a more sinister image of uniform was also
emerging from the violent experiences of COs. According to Foucault,
power does not come from ruling elites but lies in the more ordinary
activities and objects that make up everyday life. The effects of discourses
of power can be found in the most everyday objects that reach people
where they are. This is how material things threatened to constitute COs
as soldiers, and their tactic to focus on the technical acts of disobedience,
such as the refusal to wear khaki, reflected their understanding of the
political power that lies in ordinary objects. Foucault’s vision of power is
not fixed but characterized by ongoing struggle, which always contains
the possibility of resistance.35 When COs resisted uniform, they were
protesting against the symbolism of khaki and also what it embodied.
If the poster campaign offered the body as the site of transformation
from civilian to soldier, the COs’ defiance of the rule of uniform exposed
the faulty logic asserted by the military. One objector described his expe-
rience of being held and dressed against his will. When he explained
his objection to war, a group of four soldiers and military police officers
attempted to undress him: ‘my clothes were wrenched off my body, and
a uniform forced on. I took it off again. This time I was tied up in a
blanket, and left for hours until next morning.’36 By leaving him in this
state of undress, the authorities sought to deprive the CO of his dignity,
but these humiliation rituals also implicitly suggest that he would look
foolish without military uniform. An absurd or foolish appearance is
evoked by many accounts, which has resonance with the Daily Sketch
article that constructed objection as an isolated and ridiculous stance.
The number of COs who actually took this extreme stance may have
been relatively small, but their resistance threatened the official agenda
of mass mobilization. Leaving men naked made them unrepresentable,
which was deemed to be suitable punishment; after all, without clothes
they simply could not present themselves as men.
Why did military clothing become central to the struggle between
COs and the army authorities? The answer lies in the reality that ruling
elites have a tenuous hold over individuals and limited power to reach
into everyday activities. Transforming large numbers of civilian men
was critical to the war effort but was predicated on creating illusions.
A strong visual culture played a part in stimulating recruitment, but
khaki also had the power to act directly on civilian bodies. This is not to
suggest that all those who wore khaki were perfectly willing, but many
of these examples demonstrate the sheer power of uniform to seize and
transform civilian bodies. It was not just a propaganda trick; recruitment
also appeared to work through material effects and body disciplines.
The prison blanket
Images emerging of COs wrapped in prison blankets threatened popular

representations of wartime recruitment by disturbing the fantasy that
civilians could be neatly and instantly transformed into working soldiers.
Most threatening to the authorities was the agency that protests gave
COs. Their resistance to war, perfectly expressed in refusals to be ‘fitted
up’ as soldiers, was also embodied in the prison blanket, which was often
used to cover their bodies while they were detained in prison. When
Scott Duckers, chairman of the Stop the War committee, was arrested
and fined by the Marlborough Street magistrate on the charge of failing
to report under the Military Service Act, the authorities insisted that he
was already in the army. However, they avoided subjecting this well-
known CO to the harshest treatment despite his insistence throughout
detention that he was a civilian, not a soldier.37 Having become familiar
with stories of COs being forced to wear khaki, he ‘quite expected two
or three men to come and pull my clothes off by force.’38 He refused to
be medically examined and so was deemed to be fit for general service,
and when he arrived at the rifle brigade barracks at Winchester, he was
treated well. Still fearful that his clothes would be taken away, when he
was taken to sleep in a dormitory, he took the precaution of remaining
partially dressed while he slept: ‘Thinking that my clothes would disap-
pear in the night, I only took off my coat, waistcoat and boots, while
the coat I folded up and put under the bed clothes; they would be quite
safe.’39 Army officers questioned whether he knew he was subject to
military law and was aware of the consequences of disobeying orders; he
was also continually asked to take off his clothes and put on a uniform.40
When he was handed over to the sergeant of the guard, he recounted his
experience, which betrayed his anxiety about losing his clothes: ‘having
gone through the uniform business I felt quite safe in undressing prop-
erly, especially as if anyone did come to take my own clothes I could
wrap myself up in the blankets and remain quite comfortably in my
cell.’41 Losing his clothes would mean relinquishing his civilian iden-
tity, but Duckers knew what was at stake and was content to engage
in a game of ‘cat and mouse’ with the army authorities. He was very
conscious that the humiliation ritual involved scrutinizing his body in
preparation for military service.
As personal accounts convey, COs were caught in the space between
civilian and soldier, and the garment that best reflected their ambig-
uous status was the prison blanket, used by many men to cover them-
selves in place of clothes. A practical solution to the problem of what
to wear while in detention, the blanket might also have represented for
the men the uncertainty of being between a civilian and military iden-
tity. If refusing to wear khaki was critical to the stance taken by COs,
the prison blanket became emblematic of their wartime detention. The
image of the CO wrapped in a prison blanket offers a version of mascu-
linity at odds with the figure of the dutiful serviceman in neat military
uniform. From the perspective of the military, the practice to offer COs a
blanket rather than a suit of civilian clothes was intended to emasculate
them. However, in taking the blanket, the men refused to be objectified
and rejected the forces that ‘policed’ their masculine identities during
wartime.
If modern forms of social control rely on the incorporation of the body
into state projects to maintain power, then refusing to be created in its
image is a large act of defiance. What is clear is that COs resisted the very
disciplines associated with army clothing in a bid to reclaim their bodies
from the forces that normalized active military service. By remaining in

a state of undress, they politicized the act of getting dressed. The image
of the CO in a prison blanket became a corrective to pervasive represen-
tations of the soldier in wartime Britain. A garment improvised to cover
the bodies of COs deprived of their civilian clothes when under army
detention reflected their quiet but firm resistance to the khaki service
dress, thereby issuing an alternative discourse to the official agenda of
military participation. In so far as the everyday ritual of dressing and
undressing can reveal power dynamics, COs created compelling images
of wartime dissent.
Eventually charged with what he described as a ‘No. 2 crime’ (which
was refusing to put on uniform), Scott Duckers was tried and found
guilty of disobeying a lawful command given to him while on active
service. He was sentenced to twelve months hard labour, which was
subsequently commuted to ninety-eight days detention. Before depar-
ture from Winchester he was ‘taken round to the quartermaster’s Stores
to be furnished with an Army kit. I refused to have anything to do with
this, so they collected various articles of clothing, knife, fork and spoon,
needles and thread, extra buttons and different odds and ends, and put
them aside to be marked with the number which had been assigned to
me.’42 He was taken inside at Gosport, where a sergeant and a corporal
made an unsuccessful attempt to order him to put on a uniform. They
went ahead with issuing his army clothes to follow the army rituals
as closely as possible, perhaps in the hope that it might normalize the
situation:
I was weighed in my birthday suit and saw my civilian clothes made

up into a parcel to go back to Winchester. Then, when some particu-
lars had been entered in a book, we proceeded to check the various
articles of kit marked on an inventory. I found that a generous
Government had provided me with two tunics, two pairs of trousers,
one greatcoat, two pairs of boots, three shirts, a Cardigan jacket, iden-
tification disc, and a great many other things.43
The rituals of dressing initiated men into the army, not least because the
military uniform measured, classified and ordered men. By rejecting the
uniform, Duckers refused to be, in his words, ‘handed over’ to the state
and made to participate in a war he did not believe in. Just as he was
assigned a number, he was also given a new identity. The issue of mili-
tary boots, shirts and trousers, as well as an army-issue fork, knife and
spoon were perhaps to lure him in. There were also stories of subterfuge.
When all attempts to force the uniform on men failed, army officers
sometimes replaced civilian clothes with army clothes when the men
bathed or slept. A June 1916 article from the Labour Leader reported
the treatment of three Bermondsey men who refused orders at an army
camp:
The men had refused all orders to put on khaki, but whilst taking a
bath army clothes were substituted for their civilian clothes. They
refused to put on the army uniform and were kept in the bathroom
naked for six hours with no food. They wore only a blanket over
the next few days until eventually they were remanded for court-
martial.44
To take the blanket was for objectors preferable to wearing clothes that
represented the ownership the army had over them. To leave them
naked also made it clear that a military identity was considered the only
option for them. COs’ resistance to military participation pivoted on
the potent symbolism of the uniform; on a practical level it was also a
very difficult task to force men to wear clothing against their will. Failed
attempts present a picture of army officers mystified by the COs’ protest.
Making the change from civilian to soldier clearly involved more than
donning a uniform, but for objectors it proved a useful focal point of
resistance to institutional power. Refusing to wear uniform targeted one
of the most potent signs of militarism, and taking the blanket marked
their lack of interest in making their bodies available to any technocratic
institution.
If uniform wearing locates and punishes deviation and fault, COs
defied that judgement, refused to be militarized and sought to reclaim
their bodies from the designs the military had on them. The COs’
protest displayed an awareness of how critical the uniform was to mili-
tary discourse, but most of all, their protest highlights the fragility of the
discipline and control the state had over conscripted soldiers. Uniform
involves the adoption of a whole new range of habits and skills, linked
to body fitness, hygiene, diet, drill and attention to correctness of dress.
The protest by COs illustrates how much people relinquish when they
conform to the rule of uniform.
As all fit British men were viewed as assets for the war effort, any
refusal to participate threatened the military project. Just as physicality
was a quality associated with the popular representation of military
masculinities, it was also viewed as a resource once men’s bodies were
seized for active service. There was a symmetry to the use of the body
in a wartime visual culture that recruited civilians to the army and in

the corporeal punishment objectors experienced. In First World War
Britain, both practices appeared to be about using discipline to transform
civilian men. Each ritualized form of control subjected COs to discipli-
nary techniques that targeted their individual bodies. It is not surprising
that the official drive to view the male body as a wartime resource led to
resistance taking place at the level of the body, when punishment saw
men’s bodies stripped, isolated and deprived of nourishment. A picture
emerges from COs’ personal accounts to suggest they were neither civil-
ians nor soldiers while detained by the army for disobeying army orders.
Their bodies took on an ambiguous, formless quality, especially clear
from images that depicted COs naked and wrapped in prison blankets.
The cloaking effects of the blanket undermined the visibility of the body,
so critical to the smooth working of the military institution. The blanket
lacked the fitted quality of the khaki uniform that might have made their
bodies measurable and quantifiable. Their refusal to be objectified high-
lighted the official drive to police their bodies. A project that sought to
imprint the bodies of recruits ultimately damaged the case for conscrip-
tion. Clothing became the focus for a struggle between war resisters and
the army and in the process created an image of wartime dissent: a naked
male body wrapped in a prison blanket. Struggles between the army and
COs exposed just how instrumental the wartime male body was expected
to be; those who rejected a uniform during wartime refused to be consti-
tuted as military subjects. The everyday objects of army clothing, which
were first enlisted to encourage military participation, were then subse-
quently appropriated for pacifist protests. Just as the poster campaign
made a direct bid for each civilian man, the CO was labelled a deviant
and isolated for punishment when he refused to wear the uniform.
Conclusion
Personal accounts from COs reveal how clothing practices were used
to militarize civilians during the First World War but also suggest that
the embodied practice of dress has particular resonance in military
contexts. Refusal to wear khaki was a powerful protest, and the penalty
was violence and humiliation, revealing uniform as critical to consti-
tuting military identity. The media treatment of COs followed a similar
pattern, whereby objectors were ridiculed as criminals and deviants. If
khaki signified a good and wholesome masculinity in wartime culture,
then resistors were presumed to be cowards. COs politicized clothing
by exposing the official drive to police masculine appearance, but the
practice of forcing uniforms on the bodies of detained COs reveals the

physical nature of the struggle to make soldiers. The prison blanket
emerges as emblematic of wartime detention, representing the ambi-
guity of those caught between a civilian and military identity.
They refused to be constituted as military subjects; by making the
refusal to wear khaki a symbol of pacifist resistance, they created alterna-
tive images to the Muscular Christianity that defined wartime culture.
Army clothing occupies a central place in this story of wartime protest
against conscription. Although the number of men involved was small,
the symbolism of refusing khaki threatened to damage a potent narra-
tive in wartime popular culture. In Chapter 5, I explore the role of social
class in constructing military masculinities and the measures taken by
state and trade to cope with the complexities of supplying new army
officers with uniforms. Through a range of advertisements and official
documents, the discussion explores the system of providing clothing for
officers during the war, a state of flux that found the wartime trade strad-
dling innovation and tradition as it searched for images that reflected
changing masculine ideals.
Part II
Ranking Men
5
‘Improvised Officers’: Khaki
and Social Class
Military uniforms distinguished British army officers from other ranks

during the First World War. The uniform worn by officers followed
the 1911 regulations, which incorporated a close-fitting tunic ‘cut as a
lounge coat to the waist, very loose at the chest and shoulders, but fitted
at the waist.’1 Bearing an open-neck pattern and worn with a collar and
tie, the tunic was debated in Parliament in 1914, when concerns were
raised about whether distinctive clothing made officers a target in the
field of battle.2 There was already disquiet about conspicuous markings
and their practicality for trench warfare. If khaki was about blending in,
the open collar and tight waist of the tunic gave officers a distinctive
silhouette that made them conspicuous on the battlefield.
Khaki service dress modernized the British army, but tradition dictated
that uniforms would retain the signs of class and rank. Wartime news-
paper stories were complicit; for example, a 1915 issue of The Sphere
ran a feature titled ‘With the British Officer in the Ypres Salient.’3
How people perceived the role of the officer class was to some extent
shaped by popular culture; images were contrived to offer a glimpse of
the domestic habits of the soldier. One artist’s impression of a group of
ten officers at leisure shows men drinking tea, smoking and relaxing
amongst discarded clothing. It contains all the signifiers of upper-class
leisure; the shabby interior is suggestive of the genteel dilapidation of the
English country house, with the addition of maps, a gramophone and
china tea cups. Their clothes underline the elitism of the scene. Their
turndown collars, breeches and boots suggest that the men are British
army officers; one wears the ‘Bedford cord’ and boots with spurs, both
signifying a mounted officer.4 The newspaper story portrays the officer
corps as a distinct social group, which is reflected in their uniforms and
also in their leisured lifestyles.
105
In the Victorian army there were many exclusive rituals that preserved
the culture and identity of the officer class on colonial campaigns, as
Gwyn Harries-Jenkins describes in her account of dining rituals in the
Sudanese desert:
Inside, the life of the regimental mess mirrored that of an English

country house, even though the Fort was 1,200 miles from the source
of its supplies. This was the ritual of integration ... 5
Historically, dining and dressing rituals preserved the exclusive social

status of the officer class. As Denis Winter observed of the life of the
British army officer, his dress and daily living habits closely followed
those of the country house.6 The design of the officer’s uniform was part
of that culture of exclusivity. Representations of privates were often more
concerned with the hardships endured by rank and file soldiers. A 1914
article from The Sphere, called ‘With “Tommy Atkins” at the Battle Front,’
builds a picture of the private; the first photograph, ‘A British Trench
near La Basée,’ shows a group of battle-worn soldiers looking straight at
the camera, amongst them a man in the foreground with an open khaki
tunic.7 In the second, the soldiers wash in the village square, and in the
last photograph, they make an undignified rush for bread.8 These images
contrast strongly with the portrayal of a leisured officer corps.
Did popular images ascribe distinct social values to soldiers of different
rank? Uniform designs appeared to be reinforced by presentational
Figure 5.1 ‘With “Tommy Atkins” at the Battle Front,’ The Sphere, 12 December
‘Improvised Officers’: Khaki and Social Class 107
techniques that promoted distinct wartime economies of the body; the

officer was associated with leisure, the rank and file soldier with work. This
view was echoed by the author of a wartime tailoring guide: ‘The British
Officer is not of such an erect or square shoulder build as the members
of the rank and file, the drill he puts in is less exacting, and the labour
he has to perform is less heavy, so that he does not develop the muscles
of his shoulders or produce so much prominence of chest as those who
are under him.’9 The tailor attributes these discrepancies in body type to
the work habits that divided officers and other ranks. For others, such
as Winter, dressing was one amongst a range of army rituals designed to
shame the rank and file soldier, his discomfort a reminder that he was
not regarded as an individual: ‘Coarse trousers sagging at the waist and
billowing round the buttocks, bound with unevenly laminated puttees.’10
On the other hand, the expense of an officer’s uniform signalled his value
to the army. The tailor T. H. Holding estimated that as early as 1894 the
British officer’s outfit cost between £40 and £200.11 If two distinct body
types were promoted through the design of uniforms, there were also
efforts to ascribe civilian social class values to officers and privates.
Figure 5.2 ‘With the British Officer in the Ypres Salient,’ The Sphere, 5 June 1915,
British Library, 240–241. © British Library Board
The Sphere made distinctions between men of different rank, but the
tailoring trade was also keen to exploit social class to promote its work,
as demonstrated by a 1915 Tailor and Cutter article on the cutting of
officers’ uniforms: ‘There are two outstanding features in the garments
worn by the British officer to-day, namely, the practicability of the style
and a general high standard of workmanship. We attribute this happy
state of affairs mainly to the influence of an educated class backed up by
tailor artists.’12 The trade saw the war as an opportunity to associate itself
with the officer corps, an educated class thought to be in possession of
good taste and leisure. The Sphere illustration describes the war on the
western front through the material culture of the officer class: ‘Afternoon
Tea in a Ruined Farmstead behind the British Lines in the Ypres District.’13
Nine miles wide and projecting four miles into the German line, the
Ypres Salient in Belgian Flanders became emblematic of the struggle: the
unexpected weapons and the heavy losses. It was also characterized by
ruined architecture, and at Ypres the famous Cloth Hall, once an impor-
tant medieval Flemish civic building, was gradually destroyed by artillery
fire during the war.14 If dilapidated interiors referenced the destruction of
age-old Flemish architecture at Ypres, they also alluded to the leisured life-
styles of the officer class and the traditions of the English country house.
During wartime, the countryside was a pervasive image in literature
and popular culture. The historical division between urban and rural
formed through images and associations in English writing found
their way into the literature of the war on the western front. Raymond
Williams saw the artificial literary form of the pastoral as expressing the
interests of a developing agrarian capitalism through the ideology of the
country house.15 In Paul Fussell’s study of First World War literature, he
found that the war intensified positive feelings amongst British soldiers
about the English countryside due to the pastoral in war literature acting
as a defence against the worst horrors of war: ‘it is a comfort in itself,
like rum, a deep dugout, or a woolly vest.’16 Alun Howkins argues that
the First World War was a defining moment for a discourse that linked
rurality with English national identity through rural references in war
poetry, the agricultural ‘work’ of trench warfare and contrasts between
the countryside at war and at peace.17 David Matless also traces English
beliefs about the class ownership of landscape back to the First World
War.18 Thus, not only was the English countryside an image with reso-
nance during wartime, it was also infused with class values.
The leisured lifestyle of the officer class, in referencing the traditions
of the English country house, gave the landscape of the western front
a new meaning to those at home. Pastoral images and ideas defended
traditional values and appeared to reinforce social structures. In his

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Siegfried Sassoon described the war as
an adventure in the English countryside: ‘For me, so far, the War had
been a mounted infantry picnic in perfect weather.’19 His vision of the
war – early on at least – resembled the leisure pursuits of the country
gentleman. The army relied upon the officer gentleman tradition to form
an officer corps to defend the values and interests of the ruling class.20
Military and political elites were attached to the idea of the officer as a
gentleman, to preserve the army as a tool for government; the purchase
of commissions gave army command an economic stake in the country.21
Only propertied men were accepted as officers through the purchase of
commissions, a practice abolished in the 1880s.22 Pastoral images and
ideas proliferated precisely because the link between the officer class and
the English countryside ran so deep in the collective psyche.
The drive to idealize the officer class was politically motivated, particu-
larly with reference to the English landscape. Before the war, officers had
been a homogenous group who shared a common education and training;
by 1913 they were pivotal to maintaining ‘country house’ values in the
officers’ mess.23 The army preferred gentlemen amateurs who remained
loyal to their social class rather than professional soldiers, whom they
regarded as potential military adventurers.24 However, Kitchener’s ‘new
army’ swelled the regular army to four times its original size so that by
Christmas 1914 there was a noticeable shift in patterns of recruitment
to the British officer corps.25 High casualties amongst officers found the
army recruiting from non-traditional sources.26 The term ‘temporary
gentlemen’ was a reminder that many officers commissioned specifically
for the duration of the war did not follow the officer gentleman tradi-
tion. Over half were not from the traditional ‘officer class’ but from a
range of middle-class, manual and non-manual occupations.27 Casualties
and army expansion accounted for a significant alteration in patterns
of recruitment and changed the social and educational background of
British officers during the First World War.28 This set the scene for signifi-
cant changes in the provision of military clothing for British army officers
in the war and also demanded a new iconography that updated the tradi-
tional image of the military. Social class continued to have currency but
with mass mobilization took on a whole new texture.
Class war
Clothing was the most visible marker that distinguished officers from
other ranks during the war. Challenges to the established class system
in the British army shaped the image and experience of khaki for
soldiers of all ranks. Officers were not always gentlemen; army expan-
sion, class shifts in civilian society and heavy losses broke the traditional
class pattern in the British army. In his war memoir Siegfried Sassoon
described the appearance of his companion Mansfield, whose shabby
dress was taken to reveal his class origins: ‘His good-humoured face
was surmounted by a cap, which was as soft as mine was stiff. His shirt
and tie were more yellow than khaki. And his breeches were of a bright
buff tint. His tunic was of the correct military colour, but it sat uneasily
on his podgy figure.’29 Many stories circulated about the assortment of
shades men passed off as khaki. There were bad tailors, but a range of
clothiers were also willing to supply uniforms to officers who could not
afford a good tailor.
Sassoon’s observations illustrate how those of the established
officer class greeted the new army officers. Sassoon’s judgments about
Mansfield’s lack of social capital, such as his failure to find a good
tailor, reveal dressing rituals as significant class markers in the wartime
British army. His doubts about Mansfield’s figure are particularly reso-
nant; Sassoon cruelly judged it to be unsuited to the officer’s uniform.
Mansfield’s manners and accent made Sassoon recoil, but he was partic-
ularly uneasy about his clothes. He recalls the reaction of the adjutant
when Mansfield first reported to the orderly room: ‘Finally he leant
back in his chair and exclaimed, with unreproducible hauteur, “Christ!
Who’s your tailor?”’30 In contrast, Sassoon was sure that his own dress
confirmed him in the eyes of his superiors as officer material: ‘My own
reception was in accordance with the cut of my clothes and my creden-
tials from Captain Huxtable.’31 Not only did officers have to obtain their
own uniforms; they were expected to possess the social capital, experi-
ence and connections to turn up dressed correctly, whereas the rank and
file were issued with regulation uniforms.
Officers failing to meet expectations were frequently taken to task for
not knowing how to dress. In his memoir, Robert Graves recalled his
company commander dismissing him as ‘unsoldierlike and a nuisance’:
I had not only gone to an inefficient tailor, but also had a soldier-
servant who neglected to polish my buttons and shine my belt and
boots as he should have done. Never having owned a valet before, I
did not know what to expect of him. Crawshay finally summoned
me to the Orderly Room. He would not send me to France, he said,
until I had entirely overhauled my wardrobe and looked more like a
soldier.32
Other ranks did not have the finance or cultural capital to reach the
standard of dress expected of army officers. However, expectations of
officers were such that dressing correctly could cause them financial
difficulty, and Graves worried about the pressure it would place on his
family: ‘But my pay only just covered the mess bills, and I could hardly
ask my parents to buy me another outfit so soon after assuring them
that I had everything necessary.’33 Uniform had been a visible signi-
fier of class difference in the army, and many ‘temporary gentlemen’
struggled to meet the exacting standards of dress traditionally expected
of the higher ranks. Later in the war Graves was delighted to accom-
plish the correct military appearance: ‘Myself in faultless khaki with
highly polished buttons and belt, revolver at hip, whistle on cord, deli-
cate moustache on upper lip, and stern endeavour a-glint in either eye,
pretending to be a Regular Army captain.’34 The duplicity of appearances
expected of new army officers is clear from Graves’s description. Dressing
rituals in the officer corps had been a matter of taste and tradition, the
preserve of a homogenous group who shared a common education and
maintained ‘country house’ values. Changes in the social make-up of
the officer corps and the expansion of outfitters and clothiers supplying
them created a great sense of mobility that impacted the experience and
perception of social class in the British army.
Like Graves, a soldier could find himself out of his depth due to the
demand that he become something he neither had the means nor the
social capital to achieve. Popular images that referenced the traditional
material culture of the upper classes were not reflecting the shifts that
found the officer corps drawn from a range of social classes in wartime
Britain. Graves fantasized about how he would look in ‘faultless khaki,’ but
he was also aware of the ‘pretence’ that clothing could give him entry to
the military elite. This narrative ran through a range of newspaper stories.
A front-page article in the Daily Mirror in 1915 expressed delight in the new
mobility that saw officers behaving more like privates: ‘The Young Officer
Has to Learn His Business Just Like a “Tommy.”’ The caption reads, ‘Like
the ordinary “Tommy”, the newly joined subaltern has to go through the
elementary drills, from “foot slogging” to learning the use of the rifle. The
teachers are “non-comms” who do not hesitate to “slate” their superiors if
things are not done exactly to their liking, for sergeants are an autocratic
race.’35 This newspaper feature illustrates the new social mobility that was
gripping the British army, which promised to put subalterns to ‘work,’
thereby altering the image of a leisured officer corps.
Likening the officer to the Tommy reflected the desire to level out
social class and rank distinctions. In 1915 John Bull printed a cartoon
called ‘The Two Classes,’ which depicted an officer shaking hands

with a rank and file soldier in the trenches with a caption reading,
‘The Working-Man (to the Aristocrat): ‘We understand each other at
Last!’36 These images sought to illustrate the reconciliation of men from
different classes in the trenches of the First World War. Systems of class
distinction were breaking down due to the increasing number of officers
commissioned from the ranks.37 Officers were not as exclusive as they
had been; neither was it practical to expect all officers to get a uniform
made at their own expense. Sassoon used the phrase ‘improvised officers’
to describe the social contrast between service battalion officers and
Special Reserve commissions, ‘whose manners and accents were liable
to criticism by the Adjutant in an attempt to get them to conform to
the “officer and gentleman pattern.”’38 British military elites had relied
upon gentlemanly officership to maintain the stability of the army and
were, as Deborah Avant states, ‘threatened by promotion by merit.’39
The First World War was altering the landscape, and the popular press
was rapidly interpreting these profound social changes in the army.
Drawing officers from a range of social classes created problems
for many, as Graves found, to meet the expense of getting a uniform
made. The label ‘improvised officers’ could have accurately represented
botched attempts to dress correctly, but it was also likely to be a refer-
ence to the practice of issuing outfit grants to less-well-off men recruited
to the rank of officer. As the war progressed, it became clear to British
army authorities that the officer’s uniform would have to be subsidized,
a situation recalled in an official paper on outfit grants from the 1920s:
‘Prior to the late War no outfit grants were made to Officers except those
Commissioned from the ranks.’40 A grant meant that an officer could be
commissioned from the ranks without concern as to how he might meet
the cost of his uniform. It went towards the provision of the service dress
uniform and the mess kit.41 Clothing officers was expensive, and the
introduction of an outfit grant was a measure to ensure their continued
recruitment.
The tragic loss of life in the trenches drove the urgent replacement of
men and the establishment of efficient systems for the provision of army
clothing. The same paper went on to say that the ‘cost of providing the
initial outfit of an Infantry Officer (excluding Full Dress) is estimated
roughly at £100.’42 However, officers of the Household Cavalry and the
Foot Guards had more expensive requirements than other branches of
the service and were specially treated with a grant of £150 for compul-
sory full dress.43 The result was an army order on 4 December 1914 that
increased the outfit allowance from £20 to £50.44 If the military could
not purchase the uniforms in full, it subsidized army officers for whom
cost could be a barrier. An account of the various changes illustrates the
attention the issue demanded of the War Office and the reluctance to
rely on the traditional practice of gentlemanly soldiering to form an
officer corps:
An outfit allowance for other officers was first authorized in 1914, and
the £20 for dismounted officers then approved was later increased to
£30 and then to £50 which applied to all officers from 4th August,
1914. This amount did not purport to cover the full cost of a wide
range of uniforms, including S.D. (2 suits) and tropical kit, and was,
therefore, only a grant-in-aid.45
This grant-in-aid represented a significant move on the part of the army

toward financing social mobility and a response to the demand for
officers in a war that saw heavy losses in the upper ranks. Early in the
war, in December 1914, a letter from the War Office to all commanding
officers stated that ‘it has been decided to increase the rate of outfit
allowance to £50 (fifty pounds), including camp kit.’46 This represented
official acceptance that the officer class was no longer an exclusive
group and that the army could no longer rely on those recruited to
the rank of officer to meet the full cost of their uniform. A summary
of army orders relating to outfit allowance during the war shows that
the grant was adapted to medical and veterinary personnel and chap-
lains, which was then extended to permanent commissioned officers in
1917.47 The move to issue outfit grants not only illuminated just how
costly the uniforms had been for officers but also reflected how this war
was changing the experience of the soldier. The grant could not solve
problems men might have had with getting the right colour or cut, but
it certainly meant that more men could afford access to the rank of
officer in the British army.
The problem of means experienced by soldiers surfaced in Parliament
in May 1915 when the Under-Secretary of State for War was questioned
about whether the allowance made to gentleman cadets on leaving the
Royal Military College was sufficient: ‘in view of the fact that gentleman
cadets are now frequently the sons of parents in less affluent conditions
than formerly he will reconsider this decision, with a view to making
an allowance that will more nearly represent the cost of essential arti-
cles of clothing and equipment.’48 The provision of outfit grants to
officers and the continued pressure to consider subsidy to adequately
equip officers reveal a levelling effect of the war and suggest that army
authorities were responsive to the greater mobility that the raising of

the new armies demanded. Far from the country house, many new army
officers were not born into a class wedded to taste, tradition, property,
sport and tailoring. Neither were visible distinctions particularly desir-
able in trench warfare, where khaki gave the British army an advantage.
Indeed, traditional uniform distinctions of the officer class, which had
once been a point of pride, became a problem on the battlefield, leading
many to discard features that made them the target of enemy fire:
Officers, who went to France in uniforms of distinctive cut with their

rank shown conspicuously in ‘slashes’ on their sleeves and with Sam
Browne belts and swords, soon discarded the more obvious features,
wore private soldier’s equipment and placed their badges of rank less
noticeably on their shoulder-straps.49
A conflict that brought soldiers’ bodies under intensified scrutiny also

gave their clothing new meanings. If khaki was about standardization
and camouflage, then the traditional marks of distinction became less
useful in British army uniforms. The experience of the war to some
extent broke down traditional divisions, specifically through the prac-
tice of front-line officers adopting other ranks’ equipment and jackets to
confuse enemy snipers. Khaki appeared to gain force during the war; its
standardizing and camouflage effects were particularly suited to trench
warfare and a fitting symbol of modernity, whether to describe the
industrialization of warfare or civilian life.
Subsidy made khaki even more accessible but upset the trade, which
had been organized around traditional divisions. The war blurred the
dress distinctions of officers and men and also caused confusion, as
various groups got involved in supplying uniforms. An article from a
1914 tailoring trade paper bemoaned the changes in demand:
Previous to the War, Tailors in general were called upon to make

only officers’ garments, but of late we have had a very large number
of queries put to us, and also received extensive orders for patterns
of service dress for officers and men in both the regular Army
and the Territorials. Consequently one naturally assumes that the
contractors find some difficulty in coping with the needs of the
Army.50
There was confusion and resentment in the trade. As discussed in

previous chapters, the pressure to clothe a mass army drove the War
Office to seek relief in the civilian tailoring trade. An article in the same
issue gave details of a letter of complaint issued from the Master Tailors’
Association of London and Journeymen Tailors to the president of the
local government board. It explained the unfair situation whereby a
large proportion of officers’ outfits were being made in the government
factory at Pimlico, depriving skilled tailors of gainful employment.51
The trade, which had learned to structure its business around traditional
army divisions, was upset by the expansion in the officer corps and
the issue of outfit grants. Its collapse forced the trade to adapt to new
circumstances, but there were also casualties:
Officers who obtain preferential treatment, and a large bounty, are

obtaining their outfit on the same scale as the rank-and-file; made by
employees who are at present earning large sums by means of over-
time. The regular tailors are walking the streets unemployed, when
by a reasonable and judicious arrangement they might be relieving
Pimlico of some of its excess of work.52
A generous outfit allowance made to officers for their uniforms accel-

erated already dramatic changes to the tailoring trade. ‘New tailoring’
also impacted upon the production of military uniform for officers,
as this new approach to clothing production for men lay somewhere
between made-to-measure and mass production. New tailoring offered
consumers clothing that was less expensive than the Savile Row suit but
did not have the poor quality of outfits from mass-production chains.53
Production of British army uniforms in wartime followed this pattern of
new tailoring, which meant a wider range of firms were prepared to try
‘khaki contracts.’ The trade had once relied upon tradition but became
more flexible due in part to the new mobility in the army following
1914. The range of social classes considered for officer recruitment
generated a restlessness that brought both opportunities and casualties
to the wartime tailoring trade.
Most of all, the changing situation altered perceptions of the relation-
ship between class and clothing, and in a conservative institution such
as the British army, there were clear examples of how the provision of
military clothing on a vast scale contributed to that changing landscape.
Outfit grants were an indication of an official willingness to depart from
traditional arrangements and to some extent demystified the material
production of the soldier. Sassoon’s anecdotes dramatize how soldierly
appearance reflected the rupture of the traditional system and his
unease with this changing image of social class in Britain. The sight of
a ‘temporary gentleman’ in untypical uniform encapsulated the break-

down of old certainties built around class. This resulted in the tone of
near outrage from the tailoring trade, which described officers obtaining
outfits in just the same manner as the rank and file. This powerfully
illustrates how military clothing had been a significant marker of social
class, preserved by distinct systems for provision. The tailor’s business
had traditionally been officers’ clothing, but during the war the trade
was called upon to get involved in a range of ‘khaki contracts.’ The result
was that the upper end of the trade could no longer claim to be exclusive
suppliers of military clothing.
Tailoring and elite masculine lifestyles
The collapse of distinct systems of provision for army clothing expanded

the trade in military uniforms and also impacted promotional tech-
niques adopted by firms that sold army clothing. If popular wartime
culture depicted the officer as a country gentleman, then many firms
sought to incorporate the countryside into their promotional images to
romanticize the war on the western front. As Caroline Dakers contends,
the ‘return to the land’ in the period leading up to the war made the
countryside even more precious to the English people.54 Associations
between the figure of the officer, the upper classes and country life were
reassuring, particularly when sporting clothing echoed the cut and
styling of the officer’s uniform, such as the fitted jackets and high boots.
By 1914 formal physical training programmes and organized sport char-
acterized army life.55 During the First World War khaki may have been a
poor substitute for the spectacle of former uniforms, but army clothing
could retain that sense of adventure through a strong association with
sport.
The rise of amateur sport did not faithfully follow the model of the
country gentleman but instead fused with the new vogue for healthy
athleticism. As Richard Holt observed of the rise of amateur sport in the
late nineteenth century, ‘competition and a ‘cultivated’ style, the fusion
of old and new values, was at the heart of amateur sport.’56 Sport became
more accessible and so did clothes that signified active leisured lifestyles.
As the subsequent discussion will show, wartime images that promoted
clothing displayed a concern with fusing these old and new values. The
blurring of the boundaries between civilian and military dress saw army
uniforms become more like civilian working clothes, while military
details attracted new consumers on the home front. Sport was an impor-
tant reference point for both civilian and military clothing. In line with
developments in new tailoring, many wartime firms promoted affordable

men’s clothes utilizing the signifiers of gentlemanly leisure. By retaining
the traditional image of the officer as gentleman, many wartime compa-
nies who advertised clothing for men successfully exploited the link
between active service and sport. If war was imagined as a sport and an
exclusively masculine adventure, clothiers drew on images of the coun-
tryside to suggest the masculinity of leisured lifestyles.
Figure 5.3 ‘Fox’s F. I. P. Puttees,’ The Sphere, 17 July 1915, British Library, 52.
There were necessary contradictions in this strategy to incorporate

modern clothing into images that referenced traditional military mascu-
linities. In a 1915 advertisement for Fox’s F. I. P. puttees, a soldier sits
in a countryside scene peering through his binoculars; the slim-fitting
tunic, the cut of his breeches, and the decoration of the cuff suggest that
he wears an officer’s uniform.57 Placed by Fox Brothers of Wellington in
Somerset, the advertisement states that they were the patentees and sole
manufacturers for puttees at this time.58 Sitting on the ground in a rural
landscape amongst grassy hills, the image of the soldier could equally be
a country gentleman enjoying sport on his estate. By evoking the lifestyle
associated with the country house, military uniform and kit are given
civilian meanings. Drawing on the masculinity and the social prestige
of outdoor pursuits gave army clothing a desirable image, particularly
attractive when clothiers linked them to the lifestyle of the gentleman
amateur. However, there is something distinctly modern about the mass
production of puttees to supply an expanding officer class.
According to Christopher Breward, in the nineteenth century scien-
tific developments in tailoring and the variety of clothiers and outfit-
ters providing ready to wear did not eliminate traditional tailoring,
which still held connotations of ‘gentlemanliness.’59 The image of
the gentleman was attractive to men from a range of social classes in
wartime Britain, and as Laura Ugolini explains, the tailor’s shop retained
the appearance of a gentleman’s club or the interior of a country house,
a social rather than commercial space, suggestive of ‘leisured and elite
male lifestyles.’60 Clothes associated with leisure were frowned upon
in recruitment campaigns, but these kinds of aspirational images were
so established in the pre-war trade that the functionalism of khaki
was unlikely to eliminate this kind of aesthetic. In Sassoon’s memoir
he recalls visiting Craven and Sons on a friend’s recommendation to
get fitted for a uniform for a Special Reserve commission. He felt reas-
sured by the tailor, who ‘must have known the Army List from cover to
cover, for he had called on nearly every officers’ mess in the country.’61
Tailoring and officering went hand in hand or so the tailoring profes-
sion wanted people to believe.
Clothing men for the trenches in the western front may have been a
serious matter, but it also generated popular fantasy. War and play were
linked in the public mind through what Graham Dawson describes as
a ‘pleasure-culture of war.’62 Propagandists, advertisers and the tailoring
trade exploited the potential for war to be constructed as entertainment
or sport. In wartime consumer culture, popular images of men were
organized around social class distinctions, but clothing choices were
driven by social aspirations. Class determined cultural habits around

sport and popular entertainment but also shaped how people negotiated
fashion and style. Traditional tailoring was vanishing, but the luxury of
elite lifestyles and the image of the gentleman had currency when selling
men’s clothes attractive to a range of social classes. Elite masculine life-
styles had symbolic force, but as Kuchta suggests, work became central to
images of new middle-class masculinities in the late nineteenth century
expressed by simple, durable clothing.63 Thus, leisured and elite male
lifestyles endured as an image if not a reality, not least due to a flexibility
in the wartime trade that could claim both exclusivity and efficiency.
Fantasies of adventure and the promotion of active, healthy masculini-
ties were consistent with the construction of war as play. Commercial
images vividly portrayed how both advertisers and the public negotiated
the social changes brought about by war.
Burberry, a British clothing firm, sold ready-made coats that made a
virtue of new tailoring techniques but also exploited its long-standing
military connections. Endorsements from the War Office, such as the
reference made to the design for the 1902 British army field uniform in a
wartime Burberry catalogue, drew in male consumers.64 Its approach was
current but built a distinctive image by incorporating traditional military
masculinities with references to healthy athleticism. For instance, the
firm incorporated an endorsement from Lord Kitchener for the Burberry
weatherproof coat into a wartime promotion: ‘Lord Kitchener describes
it as a most valuable addition to campaigning kit.’65 Burberry traded
on more traditional links between officering and sport but were partici-
pating in Kitchener’s project of mass mobilization. Burberry’s advertise-
ments reflect the delicate balance between tradition and modernity that
many firms made in order to exploit wartime business.
Burberry reflected the image of a modernizing British army but also
drew attention to traditional links with the officer corps. Line draw-
ings for advertisements that established Burberry’s signature style
was the work of Major George Conrad Roller (1856–1941) a friend of
Thomas Burberry, who served in the Boer War and the First World War.66
Their shared interest in sport led Burberry to give Roller a horse called
Gabardine, and he ‘threw in a raincoat of that material for luck,’67 both
of which Roller took to South Africa, where he fought in the Boer War
with the 34th Company (Middlesex) Imperial Yeomanry.68 These men
personified the officer as sporting gentlemen, which made war seem
like a natural extension of their leisurely pursuits. Burberry conveyed
the exclusivity of its garments through the traditional signifiers of
tailoring.
As Judith Williamson has argued, in advertisements material things

are made to represent non-material things, and meaning is created at
the point of exchange between them.69 Mixing the physicality of sport
with the heroics of military adventure gave Burberry’s coats a dynamic
quality. In a supplement to Country Life on 22 August 1914, Burberry
promoted its active service kit offering a range of regulation garments,
including khaki uniforms, the Burberry khaki weatherproof, pea jackets,
service caps, greatcoats and knickerbockers breeches.70 After the war the
firm recounted its role in wartime uniform supply, a task that appeared
to involve mass manufacture but retained the mark of exclusivity:
‘Between 1914 and 1918 over 500,000 military Burberry overcoats were
worn by combatant officers, in addition to vast numbers of other of
Burberry’s exclusive models.’71 War business eased Burberry’s transition
from civilian elite sportswear to modern army clothing. Many firms
made trench coats during the war, but Burberry’s coats became strongly
associated with the war in the trenches.72
Figure 5.4 ‘The Tielocken,’ The Bystander, 25 July 1917, British Library, 195.
In 1917 an advertisement in The Bystander revealed the Tielocken, which

was the most successful Burberry wartime coat, a flexible garment without
buttons, which was easy to adjust once weather conditions changed.73
The practicalities of the coat are conveyed by the text, while the illustra-
tion displays the details, such as the shoulder epaulettes and the belted
waist. The double-breasted front that fell to below the knee had an inno-
vative fastening system. The success of the coat was a direct outcome of
the wartime trade, if not the actual trenches of the western front.
Burberry sought to straddle practical and aesthetic concerns by
describing the qualities of the garment with ‘Security – Comfort –
Distinction’ emblazoned across the top of the promotion. Burberry was
particularly good at creating images that incorporated the past and the
present. The countryside linked old and new: rural images expressed the
modernity of a new healthy athleticism but also referenced the material
culture associated with the country gentleman set. Class references were
critical to their advertising campaigns, as a 1920s promotional publica-
tion illustrates:
A Burberry weatherproof has come to be associated – no doubt largely

through the celebrity of early converts – with the idea that its wearer
is not only a good sportsman, but adept with rod, club or gun.74
However, sport was not entirely about traditional pursuits, and Burberry
sought to capture the image of a healthy athleticism associated with a
rising middle class. In a bid to capture the new enthusiasm for amateur
sport, these advertisements were driven by the ‘pleasure-culture of war’,
a popular enthusiasm for war-related entertainment that energized mili-
tary masculinities. Social class distinctions continued to sell clothes
to men, but the reality of mass manufacture refocused campaigns to
embrace a dynamic and functional style.
Burberry and other firms sold mass-produced coats but stressed exclu-
sivity by continuing to associate its clothes with elite masculine lifestyles.
The war gave its images of the countryside fresh impetus whose leisurely
qualities distracted from the reality of blood and mud in the trenches. If
Burberry retained the traditional image of the officer as gentleman, it also
exploited the trend for active and healthy lifestyles amongst the middle
classes. Its distinctive image made much of its long-standing military
connections. Most striking were the images; the countryside evoked war,
but it was presented as a sport and a masculine adventure. The fantasy
that the battlefield was a playground for leisured masculine lifestyles gave
way to the reality that trench warfare held real dangers for combatants.
If the war on the western front evoked images of virtuous rural work
and healthy outdoor pastimes, these British values were projected onto
the battlefields of Belgium and France. Burberry’s advertising campaigns
sold men’s clothing by appropriating the values of the British country-
side, but its incorporation of work and leisure reflected real wartime social
changes.75 In the process the firm sold a romantic idea of the war on the
western front reminiscent of the English countryside. Its wartime adver-
tisements had a modern twist, notable in its faith that clothing would
promote the health and durability of men’s bodies.76 The war on the
western front was wet and muddy, and outerwear offered men’s bodies
protection from the most forbidding weather conditions. However,
hard-working clothes had a symbolic as well as a physical role in the
war. Burberry’s references to the ‘lasting’ and ‘healthful’ qualities of its
clothes are evocative of the popular desire to preserve men’s bodies from
wounding and death. Like many other material objects, clothes stood in
for all of the fears and desires of those left behind on the home front.
In her work on soldiers’ wartime writing, Jessica Meyer maintains that
uniforms were a visual symbol of war that failed when measured against
the actual experiences of war.77 Burberry’s innovation, developing a breath-
able fabric for officer’s coats, became part of a whole discourse that claimed
to transform and improve the wartime male body.78 Advertising messages
were thus complicit with the official agenda to idealize khaki as a tool to
transform and protect men’s bodies on the battlefield. Meyer’s view that
the visual symbolic life of the uniform was doomed to fail has poignancy,
considering how the countryside was constructed through a fantasy of
social aspiration, rather than the reality of trench warfare. The combined
myth of healthy athleticism, hygiene, physical activity and functionality
was an appealing mix in constructing new military masculinities.
The innovations made by Burberry were significant and involved a
serious engagement with testing new technologies. In this sense the
firm was modernizing clothing for men. Thus, it built its image on a
compromise between tradition and innovation. Wartime economy
drove advertisers to employ the visual language of utility to sell clothing,
promotions that did not always idealize the male body through the
traditional symbols of class. For Burberry, the war modernized its whole
aesthetic, which referenced elite masculine lifestyles but also embraced
a more democratic healthy athleticism; its strategy reflected the new
social mobility both inside and outside the army. Perhaps clothiers
were responding to social changes created by the war, but they stood to
gain by incorporating images of leisure with statements about afford-
ability. Elite lifestyles were attractive, but new middle-class masculinities
advocated a simple, more durable kind of clothing that modernized

gentlemanly style. The transitional nature of the wartime trade was
reflected in promotional messages that described innovative manufac-
turing techniques but kept with the virtues of tradition.
Popular images of soldiers were infused with this atmosphere of social
mobility. Firms keen to tap into the social aspiration of their customers
exploited the traditional link between tailoring and officering; but playing
war was also a popular fantasy that clothiers utilized to sell their clothes.
However, the restlessness of social class conflicts at home and the anxie-
ties associated with a bitter war abroad were both realities distanced from
commercial images selling consumer goods. The officer as gentleman
image was critical to creating continuity at a time when tailoring firms
were experiencing change and uncertainty. By retaining the strong asso-
ciation with sport, Burberry and other such firms sought associations
with the traditional tailoring trade but nonetheless were innovating
with outdoor waterproof fabrics. Incorporating all of the virtues of the
country gentleman with the new vogue for healthy athleticism created a
durable image that sold men’s clothing at a time of change. The question
of whether Burberry invented the ‘trench coat’ remains to be answered.
Many other firms, including Aquascutum, were also producing these
smart waterproof coats styled for military tasks. The trench coat symbol-
izes not only the pull of traditional military values but also the attractions
of industrial innovation during the First World War. In addition, garments
worn by soldiers and civilians, such as the trench coat, brought working
clothes to war and also embodied the militarizing of the home front.
New military masculinities
Wartime economy altered approaches to advertising, but great care

had to be taken with media messages about clothing at a time when
sartorial excess could arouse suspicion and censure. Arguably, images of
leisured men were more acceptable if they were militarized. According
to Jay Winter, wartime conditions subsumed local agendas to state
requirements, fundamentally altering the balance of power away from
civil society.79 However, the war did not interrupt commercial growth;
rather, many firms successfully adapted to the many business opportu-
nities it presented. Inflationary pressures, never a factor before 1914,
caused retail prices to more than double in the four years of the war.80
What the private sector lost to the war effort, it gained by capitalizing
on war requirements, which were the best source of business in a lean
wartime period. Many firms had to consider how they might promote
goods using the language of wartime economy; those promoting army

clothing were particularly responsive to wartime conditions. Retailers
got involved by supplying officers with uniform and kit.
For British army officers, getting fitted out with a uniform usually
involved a visit to their tailor, but when this established practice was
broken, many men purchased items from clothiers. In turn, many cloth-
iers and outfitters wanted to benefit from the modern image of khaki
and so sought to capitalize on the traditional link between officering
and tailoring. A promotion such as that of Whiteleys, of Queen’s Road,
London, which ran a small advertisement in the Daily Mail for officers’
field service uniforms early in the war, claimed that it ‘made to order in
48 hours.’81 Its business was new tailoring, where images of leisured and
elite male lifestyles sold clothes that were neither tailored nor mass-pro-
duced. It suited many wartime firms, particularly those keen to supply
new army officers. Images also reveal some ambiguity about social class.
In a Daily Mail advertisement a stylish illustration of an army officer,
complete with moustache and service cap, offers an image of a firm
prepared for wartime business. The Daily Mail was a mass-circulation
popular daily aimed at the lower-middle-class and middle-class markets –
white collar workers, local government officials, clerks, bank tellers and
retailers. Its circulation peaked in 1916.82 Advertisements in this popular
wartime newspaper reached the classes from which new army officers
were recruited. Officers commissioned specifically for the duration of the
war were not necessarily well off, but, as discussed, clothiers employed
the figure of the officer to attract consumers.
The status afforded by elite military styles may have been a critical
recruiting agent, but the reader of the Daily Mail was also expected to
have an eye on price, as was clearly illustrated in a front-page adver-
tisement in October 1914 for Frederick Gorringe, of Buckingham Palace
Road in London, ‘for Warm Clothing for Men on Service.’83 An illustra-
tion of a man retiring on an easy chair in pyjamas, slippers and robe
references a more traditional view of the officer, but the bald quota-
tion of prices and the listing of stock quantities undermines the sense
of privilege associated with gentlemanly leisure. The reader is assured
that the firm has War Office approval, but they also claim high-quality
fabrics along with low prices.84 Advertisements such as these suggest
that during wartime army clothing promotions such as those in the
Daily Mail aimed to reconcile the desire for upper-class aspirations with
lower-middle-class concerns about value for money.
Images of elite military lifestyles sold clothing to a range of social
groups recruited as new army officers, but care had to be taken with
connotations of sartorial excess, which were considered undesirable

in wartime. Many consumer goods could be constructed as patriotic,
including clothing and kit for the front, material things that made men
ready for active service. Socks, overcoats and shirts for men were all
consumer items that gained a more functional image in wartime and
were constructed as patriotic in advertising images. In wartime Britain,
advertising techniques for men’s clothing reflected complex shifts in
patterns of social class.
In the run-up to the first Christmas in the trenches, the sixpenny
illustrated periodical Illustrated War News ran an advertisement in
December 1914 offering the reader ‘Useful Gifts for Officers at the Front,’
a promotion for military goods available at Debenham and Freebody,
of Cavendish Square in London.85 Drawings illustrated each garment,
worn by men in fashionable poses, and some technical detail is also
given for the khaki shirt, fur waistcoat, British warm coat, quilted silk
under-jacket, sleeping bag and sleeping helmet. Gamage, of Holborn,
in London, also promoted Christmas gifts for ‘Britain’s “Blue” and
“Khaki” Boys’ on their second Christmas at war, and their advertisement
included a leather waistcoat, sleeping caps, cardigan jackets and ‘the
Flanders waistcoat.’86 These promotions mix fashionability and wartime
economy through illustrations of fashionable men alongside garment
descriptions and plain prices. This reflects the business of the innovative
retailer Gamage, an outlet that exploited wartime business so effectively
that it resembled the quartermaster’s store.
Clothing for new army officers had various firms competing for busi-
ness; the challenge was to hit the right note concerning men’s fashion
and style at a time when the whole country was practicing wartime
economy. Thomas Richards argues that commodity spectacle is insep-
arable from the conditions of production, distribution and consump-
tion.87 In wartime Britain, advertising techniques had to avoid the worst
excesses of spectacle, and there was a drive to integrate commodities
into existing hegemonic formations. In this case, incongruous state-
ments were being made about soldiers’ bodies, particularly the officer
class, a reflection of the complexity of social class during wartime and
the ways in which various social groups were involved in the production
of both army clothing and images of military masculinities.
What is clear is that khaki enjoyed a fashionable image but was also
a military construction. Promotions such as these were not just for
soldiers; clothes with military details were also desirable to the British
public. John Bull, the opinionated penny weekly whose circulation soared
to over one million during the First World War, ran an advertisement
in August 1915 that offered breeches in ‘military khaki, cords and

drills’ from the Bedford Riding Breeches Company, of Oxford Street in
London.88 The service included self-measurement, and the promotion
promised, ‘No matter in what part of the world you are, we can fit you
perfectly from your own measures.’89 Typical of the new tailoring flex-
ibility, practicality and fashionability are found in a promotion aimed
at both military and civilian men. The breeches are promoted through
a stylistic illustration of an officer wearing the distinctive ‘riding’
breeches, with puttees fitted close to the leg. His silhouette is accentu-
ated by his stance; he gazes downwards in a ‘fashioned’ pose placing
his hands firmly on his hips. A touchstone for fashionability and an
object of gentle ridicule, the image of the officer appeared to have elas-
ticity. Sporting references gave the military body fashionability, but a
functional aesthetic played down what could have been interpreted as
an image of leisure. Many promotional images gained from referencing
both military and civilian identities to promote leisure clothing with a
hint of military adventure.
Consumer messages stimulated wartime consumption when they had
both leisure and economy in mind. When placed alongside promotions
for men’s clothes, a feature such as ‘Tommy’s Troubles,’ in John Bull,
could somehow undercut the luxury and privilege associated with sarto-
rial pleasure. Taking out a half-page advertisement in the popular paper,
Gamage of Holborn declared its ‘Cardigan and Shirt Value Extraordinary’
for soldiers, prisoners of war, miners, munitions workers, carpenters and
plumbers.90 On either side of the promotion stood illustrations: on one
side a stiff ‘gentlemanly image’ wearing the cardigan, on the other ten
bales of garments stacked on top of one another. The transformative
powers of industrial production, the unique qualities of the gentleman
and the functionalism of British military discipline all have a part to
play in this symbolic exchange: ‘The chill terrors of the trenches in
winter must be met, and there are no better garments than the cardigan
jacket and a good shirt for providing the soldier with extra protection
and warmth.’91 The promotion also reveals something of the compe-
tition between firms for khaki trade, which led to price lowering for
regulation clothing: ‘This is the same quality jacket as supplied by other
contractors to the Army at 5/- each.’92 Their giant claim that it is the
‘most useful garment ever invented’ resembles Burberry’s approach to
highlight innovative techniques and their use of new technologies.
Tradition was a significant factor in the making and the representa-
tion of men’s military clothing, but during the war firms were equally
concerned with describing their adoption of new technologies to offer

consumers innovative products. The story of khaki illuminates shifts
in cultural constructions of masculinity, how changing ideas about
militarism drove the aesthetic strategy of many wartime clothing
firms. Burberry incorporated images of the countryside to cope with
the contradictions of a new social mobility in army and civilian life
in wartime. By capitalizing on the desire to idealize English land, the
nostalgia for the certainties of class divisions, and the concern to
regenerate a rugged masculinity, their images mobilized a national
identity that was modern but also bore the marks of tradition. The
promotion of clothing, particularly army dress, was rarely imagined
through the body of the ordinary Tommy. A visual language of social
aspiration held currency, but the language of wartime economy also
penetrated consumer culture. Many firms chose to straddle tradition
and innovation, which reflected the rise of new tailoring techniques
and the drive to advertise good prices and swift services and also
the currency of traditional outdoor sporting pursuits and leisured
lifestyles.
The clothing trade was modernizing but retained traditional images.
What emerged were advertisements with a leisurely aesthetic alongside
statements about ‘value for money.’ As discussed, a range of ideas circu-
lated to describe men’s bodies but the combination of healthy athleti-
cism, hygiene, physical activity and functionality were particularly
appealing to the home front. Burberry knew that to embody the civilian
at war functionality and gentlemanly leisure must be given equal value.
Both had currency to describe a war fought by civilians temporarily in
uniform. Wartime economy troubled the pattern to idealize the male
body through the traditional symbols of class, and Burberry, amongst
other firms, modernized its image by referencing elite masculine life-
styles that incorporated healthy athleticism.
The realities of war threatened to dismantle many of the fantasies
of military masculinities; amongst them were the class differences
in civilian life, often expressed through rank in the army. However,
Sassoon thought that the trend for ‘improvised officers’ meant that men
no longer ‘knew their place’:
For to put it plainly, they weren’t mobile men, although they had
been mobilized for the Great War. They were the products of peace,
and war had wrenched them away from their favourite nooks and
niches.93
He sums up the class confusion caused by mass mobilization and

the feeling of uncertainty that it brought. If the battlefields of the
First World War later found many mourning the end of civilization,
there is no doubt that the changes it wrought could be detected in
its images and symbols, not least the image of the man in khaki. To
supply uniforms and men for a seemingly endless war altered tradi-
tional army culture and also reconstructed British masculinities along
military lines. That exchange characterizes the collapse of old certain-
ties and explains why the war was good for business. When distinct
systems of provision for officers and other ranks were relaxed, it
impacted on whether army clothing could continue to be a reliable
indicator of social class.
Conclusion
Khaki represents the industrialization of the battlefield and the home

front during the First World War. Representations and rituals associ-
ated with the wearing of uniform were infused with class meanings but
gave way to a standardized and camouflaged dress that gave the British
army tactical advantage. The problem was that the levelling effect of
khaki clashed with outward forms of class distinction in the army. If
some firms made a virtue of straddling tradition and innovation, then
their advertising messages reflected the wartime cultural shifts that
modernized soldiering. The countryside was pivotal to the formation
of discourses about military masculinities. If images of the gentleman
reflected nostalgia for an elite masculine lifestyle, there was also a desire
to militarize leisurely clothing during wartime. The trench coat was a
particular case in point; these waterproof coats became synonymous
with the war because the design incorporated War Office requirements
with traditional aspects of leisurewear. It is clear that the wartime trade
was beset with contradictions, which some firms sought to resolve by
making functional, mass-produced clothing that bore the marks of
sporting leisure.
Wartime civilian trades responded with enthusiasm to the new social
mobility in the army and the opportunities created by new tailoring tech-
niques. The result was a lucrative business built on selling social aspira-
tion through modern clothing. Retailers, clothiers, outfitters and tailors
who were innovative could exploit the cultural exchange between mili-
tary and civilian images. The derogatory term ‘improvised officers’ sums
up the approach to reconstructing military masculinities for wartime.
It reflects the curious mix of flexibility, pragmatism and fashionability

that characterized the making of new army officers. Chapter 6 examines
another perspective on national identity: it explores how the military
uniform shaped ethnic and racial divisions in the British army on the
western front. I consider distinctive styles of presentation and uniform
designs to consider what they reveal about the role of colonial troops
and their perceived contribution to the war effort.
6
Fitting In: Race, Ethnicity,
and Army Dress
The First World War may have been a civil war fought amongst European
nations, but Britain drew men from all over the colonies to defend the
empire.1 The story of racial diversity on the western front is barely
remembered in accounts of the First World War. However, many soldiers
were neither British nor white; they may have worn khaki but looked
nothing like the servicemen popularized in posters and advertisements.
This chapter explores how race and ethnicity shaped the appearance
of the British army, uniform design and the popular image of colonial
troops. Employing non-white troops boosted the strength of the British
army on the western front, but image sources suggest that they were
treated as a curiosity. Ethnic diversity, however, was not confined to
the British army. African troops also participated in important battles
throughout the war as part of the French efforts.2 Indeed, the participa-
tion of colonial troops was one of the global features of this European
conflict.
So far studies on race and ethnicity in the British army have not
considered images, despite their critical role in interpreting the work of
colonial troops in the war. Images are a rich source for historians, partic-
ularly those whose work concerns the politics of the body at war. During
the First World War news of the participation of colonial troops often
reached the public through images, but their distinct military habits
and traditions were best conveyed through clothing. Military uniforms
appeared to embody racial and ethnic differences, apparently offering a
system for the expression of various cultural allegiances, which bore out
in the visual representation of colonial troops in the First World War.
The question is what kinds of feelings did the social appearance of colo-
nial troops mobilize amongst the British public during wartime? And
did these images set colonial troops apart from the khaki-clad British
130
Fitting In: Race, Ethnicity, and Army Dress 131
white soldier in the minds of those on the home front? Their presence
was hardly hidden; the visual evidence shows that non-white soldiers
on the western front generated a lot of interest, and they were remark-
ably visible throughout wartime popular culture.
In this chapter, I argue that racial and ethnic differences shaped ideas
about what constituted military appearance on the western front, the
design of the uniforms worn by colonial troops and the popular percep-
tion of their bodies. Photographs, drawings and press reports reflect how
ethnicity and racial differences were embodied and negotiated on the
home front and the battle front. There is much material to draw from.
Novel appearances on the western front caught the interest of artists,
photographers and writers. In 1914 a young artist, Massia Bibikoff,
noted her impressions of the arrival of the Indian Expeditionary Force
at Marseilles. She was permitted to follow the Indians right into their
camps to draw and take notes; her work was later published as a book.
Her sketches and impressions of the Indian camp at Marseilles from
September to October 1914 betray a fascination with the bodies of the
Indian men, whose distinctive features she was keen to note: ‘the gallant,
bronze-faced soldiers who marched by with dignified yet swinging
gait, and smiled with a flash of dazzling teeth when people threw
them flowers and children gave them flags. It was a delirious scene.’3
Her impulse was to treat sepoys as exotic creatures. In 1914 images of
Indian lancers and Sikh infantry also appeared on the front page of the
Daily Express when the paper published photographs of Indian soldiers
on their way to battle in France. Images of turbaned men gave picture
papers an exciting and novel image of war and also issued a challenge to
normative representations of the typical British Tommy. Indeed, these
soldiers might have been viewed negatively had papers not been so posi-
tive about their presence on the western front. Their exotic appearance
was critical to constructing the narrative that Britain had access to the
best in global military manpower, as the paper boasted, ‘no finer troops
exist in the world.’4
Imperialism and military masculinities
In the First World War the British army used visible markers to distin-
guish its colonial troops. Visibility was a key concern in the move to
khaki for the British army, but as maintained elsewhere, it was also
critical to new perceptions of the uniform in wartime civilian life.5
Distinctive forms of military dress heightened ethnic differences and
created potent forms of military spectacle. In the 1980s thinkers such
as Edward Said and Guyatri Spivak demonstrated how Western mascu-

linity maintained its power by mobilizing racial and ethnic differences.
Images have a special place in that system of representation; they offer
a visual medium through which to normalize and justify inequalities.
Images are compelling representations of the social order; at best they
reflect social conditions, at worst they create them.
Regulation clothing maintains hegemonic masculinities in the army
by embodying power and hierarchy; if uniform is designed to rank
soldiers according to social class, in the British army it also signified
ethnic differences. Benign views of empire might suggest that variation
in uniform designs were a concession to ethnic minorities, a means
by which colonial troops could express alternative cultural or ethnic
allegiances. However, such distinctive clothing also marked out colo-
nial troops. Cynthia Enloe claims that military planners do not reflect
ethnic conditions but shape them for their own purposes when they
‘deliberately foster new ethnic identities for the sake of achieving mili-
tary goals.’6 To some extent, military uniform can signify cultural differ-
ences, but for Enloe ethnic identities are fostered by the military in the
pursuit of more strategic objectives. One of the most visible means by
which the military can ethnically design its armies is through the design
of regulation clothing. As I will show, this is the sense in which uniform
design was critical to perpetuating a racially and ethnically divided army
on the western front.
Military uniform, in both the visual and material sense, was part of
the social project to ‘design men for war.’ Khaki formed an idealized
image of wartime masculinity; it also had the material force to transform
men from civilians to soldiers. However, images that reflect the ethnic
and racial diversity of British army soldiers on the western front are
absent from the collective memory. Whatever currency images of Sikh
and black soldiers had during the war, they were less than desirable in
the post-war context. If the story of racial and ethnic diversity on the
western front was told through the prism of imperialism, it had no place
in the politics of remembrance, which appeared to adopt a much more
local flavour. The late Victorian British public school system, which had
the task of creating men to run the empire, ascribed high social value to
white masculinities.7 It established the hierarchy of men, a culture that
was replicated in the British army.
Imperialist discourse, in particular its racist images, maintained and
justified unequal power relations between men in a range of institu-
tions, including the British army. Up until the Second World War, the
regular British army found its officers from a narrow social class, which
excluded men who were not white.8 Until after the First World War,
entry to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and the Royal Military
Academy, Woolwich, was restricted to men of ‘pure European descent.’9
Indian officers held only local commissions granted by the viceroy or
governor; they were not granted a king’s commission.10 However, during
the First World War demands for change emerged, and in 1918 a few
Indians became officers. Military uniform, which was instrumental to
designing social hierarchies, also maintained racial and ethnic inequali-
ties in the British army.
Strangely, of all the British soldiers who wore ‘ethnic’ dress during
the First World War, the most celebrated was a white Englishman.
T. E. Lawrence embodied the ideal image of the soldier hero, but his
adventures led him to adopt the sartorial habits of a Bedouin Arab
on the eastern front in the First World War. Rather than detract from
his heroism, this exotic dressing was celebrated on the home front.
Lawrence’s imperialist escapades were coded in his appearance, which
was arguably much more attractive to young men than the drudgery
colonial troops experienced on the western front. People on the home
front may not have expected ethnic dress on the body of an Englishman,
but it was a powerful and compelling image of colonial adventure. For
Graham Dawson, the soldier became the model figure of masculinity
in the late nineteenth century, when heroic narratives were fused with
representations of British imperial identity.11 Lawrence embodied the
idea of the soldier hero. Of all the images of British soldiers wearing
‘ethnic’ costume, that of Lawrence dressed in flowing robes endured in
the public imagination. First World War images of colonial troops were
less conspicuous. If Sikh soldiers were oddities on the western front, why
then did the British public accept Lawrence’s appearance so readily? The
answer lies in the hierarchies that consigned colonial troops to lowly
occupations in the war. No matter what they wore, white men were
associated with heroic military adventure, not least due to the barring of
non-white soldiers from a king’s commission.
In Britain, First World War popular culture forged strong links between
nationalism and masculinity.12 The true British soldier was thought to be
white. However, as discussed previously, Joanna Bourke’s study of men
during the First World War established how men’s bodies were fashioned
by ‘the disciplines applied to masculinity.’13 During this conflict soldiers
were not born but made. One of the disciplines applied to masculinity
was military uniform, which was significant to those who saw how khaki
had taken hold in wartime British culture and had transformed countless
men from civilians to soldiers. This is the sense in which the male body
was ‘designed’ and reflects the greater attention given to clothing in

recent debates on the construction of masculine identity.14 Clothing was
a powerful visible marker that distinguished colonial troops from other
regiments during the war. Khaki not only designed men for war but also
ranked them according to social class and ethnicity. By encoding social
inequalities, distinct forms of military dress were performing a function
far beyond the expression of cultural allegiances.
Ethnicity and race
Race and ethnicity are cultural categories, and while most academic
studies focus on how this impacts non-white ethnic groups, Richard
Dyer observes that the reluctance to ‘race’ white people limits our
understanding of the issues.15 Race is a social construction used to clas-
sify people, one that has led some thinkers to focus on racism rather
than race, particularly to consider how it determines the distribution
of resources.16 Racist ideology justifies exploitation. Racism reproduces
unequal power relations, but images offer a unique insight into how
racial inequality is structured. First World War images of Indian and
black soldiers suggest a visual economy that maintained and justified
the low social status of colonial troops. Clearly race determined rank
and social mobility in the army, but was race a factor in the utilization
of their labour power? The currency of images of colonial troops during
the war and absence thereafter suggests that visual culture was critical to
establishing their military roles in the conflict.
Central to this discussion is the question of whether military uniform
was part of that project to manage ethnic and racial divisions in the
British army. The incorporation of local allegiances in British army
uniform design was part of a nineteenth-century drive to invent tradi-
tions that gathered support for military campaigns. Eric Hobsbawm
contends that invented traditions derive their cultural authority from
a perceived connection with the past.17 When reform came in the late
1800s, localism drove the redesign of the British army, which saw the
value of incorporating features in its military clothing to reflect local
allegiances. When county regiments were formed, the qualities of each
county were articulated through the image and ideology of each regi-
ment, a move that integrated localism into national interests in what
has been described as the ‘garrisoning of the Empire.’18 An attractive
and well-designed uniform not only could recruit men, it also forged
loyalty between soldiers and generated support amongst civilians for
the war. Uniform details and insignia were often designed with local
allegiances in mind, but the distinction made between colonial troops

and white soldiers was striking. Colonial soldiers wore uniforms that
reflected traditional forms of warfare rather than the modern techno-
logical conflict that was fought on the western front.
In Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities he states that nation-
alism is historically recent, formed by how people think of their
belonging to a nation; in particular, how communities are distinguished
‘by the style in which they are imagined.’19 To consider how distinc-
tive military uniforms functioned in the British army, the clothing for
colonial troops must be viewed in the context of imperialism. They
were designed to promote a sense of belonging to place and nation, but
uniforms were also infused with an imperialist idea of ethnic difference.
Army clothing may have offered soldiers opportunities to express their
military identities through established ethnic, national and racial tradi-
tions, but this ethnic coding also served military purposes. Appearance
has been singled out in discussions of race; in particular, how imperialist
discourse used oppositions of beautiful/ugly to support racist ideas about
the body. In his discussion of hair, Kobena Mercer notes that scientific
racism, which developed in Europe alongside the slave trade, sought to
identify racial characteristics through the ‘variations in pigmentation,
skull and bone formation, and hair texture ... [which] were seized upon
as signs to be identified, named, classified and ordered into a hierarchy
of human worth.’20 The assumption that whiteness was the measure of
true beauty bore out in popular culture.
This has particular resonance for military appearance, predicated not
on ideals of beauty but on the disciplinary benefits of seeking bodily
perfection. If taking up khaki service dress was for the British army an
attempt to adopt a standardized version of masculinity, it also styled
the army as a disciplined force. Marcia Kovitz posits that military
discourses hide internal tensions and inequalities in the drive for ‘a
singular and uniform military masculinity.’21 Did ethnic diversity upset
that image of standardized masculinity? Elsewhere I have suggested that
khaki was a visible symbol of standardization; its uniformity sought to
diminish physical differences between men. Did the various forms of
khaki embody the diversity of ethnic identities on the western front?
Although it is David Morgan’s view that the uniform was part of the
project to standardize wartime masculinity, Gabriel Koreas asserts
the urgency of post-war reconstructions that sought to find forms of
commemoration that relied not only on uniform ‘but more importantly
on posture, gestures and bodily memory to present a timeless version of
masculinity.’22 Reconstructing the war in the popular imagination drew
on the most standardized version of masculinity available, one that was

decidedly British.
If imperialist discourse classifies and orders racial characteristics to
present whiteness as the measure of true beauty, this drove the reasser-
tion of a standardized image of British military masculinity. No matter
what colonial troops did during the war, their presence on their western
front was largely erased afterwards in an effort to reconstruct British
national identity. The pictures of non-white soldiers on the western
front are compelling, but images of ethic diversity are not favoured in
First World War remembrance. Undoubtedly, when men of various ages
and ethnicities were called upon from all over the empire to fight in the
war, they presented a clumsy image of military beauty. What is clear
is that the visibility of non-white soldiers throughout wartime popular
culture did not make their image desirable to the reconstruction of
national identity following the war.
Indian soldiers
Early in the war the Illustrated London News ran a feature on Indian troops
who were brought in to reinforce the army in France.23 Reporting an
announcement made in 1914 by Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War,
to increase the army fighting in France by ‘high-souled men of first-rate
training and representing an ancient civilization,’ the feature stressed
that Indian troops would fight ‘side by side’ with the British.24 A series of
eight photographs surround a reproduction painted in the centre of the
page. The photographs illustrate the appearance and military bearing of
the Indian troops and present a visual guide to recognizing them. Two
photographs offer a side view of individual soldiers in full uniform: the
first, a sepoy of the Indian line and, the second, an officer of the 18th
Bengal Lancers. Below these photographs are two more images, this time
front views of Indian soldiers: the first, a non-commissioned officer from
the 2nd Lancers and, the second, a non-commissioned officer from the
14th Lancers. Except for the Bengal Lancer with a dark uniform, all the
other soldiers wear a long light-coloured tunic that falls to the knee,
puttees, a wide cummerbund and an undecorated turban.
Rituals associated with the colonial relationship, often acts of incorpo-
ration, resulted in the ethnic design of the military. If authority was estab-
lished by inventing a past, ‘native’ costume was one of the techniques
by which India appeared to incorporate the complex traditions, customs
and practices into a colonial future. Celebrated in an imperial assem-
blage in Delhi in 1876, the dress of Indian troops demonstrated loyalty
to imperial masters while referencing cultural tradition, a mix which

delighted Lord Lytton, the new viceroy of India, when he recounted
their ‘most striking and peculiar appearance,’ in particular, the sight of
their ‘strange uniforms.’25 By the First World War, the Illustrated London
News feature was clearly trading in colonial spectacle, describing the war
on the western front in terms of the ‘exotic’ troops enlisted to reinforce
the British army. Pictures of Indian soldiers in ‘strange’ exotic dress were
a huge attraction to British readers; adopting a visual presentation that
scrutinized individual Indian soldiers’ bodies gave dress prominence
when illustrating ethnic differences on the western front.
In the First World War 1.3 million colonial soldiers fought for the
British, of whom 800,000 were Indian; 135,000 colonials went to France.26
By November 1914 one-third of the British army on the western front
came from India and fought with the Indian Army Corps, serving from
September 1914 to December 1915.27 Each Indian unit had a British
officer with a thorough knowledge of the sepoys’ language, customs,
food and religious arrangements to promote loyalty and contentment
amongst the Indian soldiers.28 The forbidding weather on the western
front made clothing an issue for all soldiers, but recruits to the Indian
Army Corps had to buy their own uniforms.29 However, on the western
front they were supplied with clothes through the Indian soldiers’ Fund,
a London charity established early in the war, part of a British effort to
keep the sepoys warm in response to reports that weather proved a chal-
lenge for them.30 In an official war photograph Indian troops are shown
at bayonet exercise in a field covered in what appears to be a blanket
of snow; the incongruous image was perfect for a popular press that
sought to exploit the exotic appearance of colonial troops to convey the
novelty of a global war.31
Uniform design is prescribed by code and regulation, but army
clothing is also an aesthetic practice inscribed in everyday life; images of
soldiers are forged through the various practices established in the field
of battle. Stuart Hall thinks that identity is not transparent and unprob-
lematic but a ‘production’: ‘never complete, always in process, and
always constituted within, not outside, representation.’32 Elsewhere, Hall
argues that race is historically specific in that ‘racial structures cannot
be understood adequately outside the framework of quite specific sets of
economic relations.’33 Uniforms worn by colonial troops were designed
by the army but experienced by the soldiers themselves. As Kevin Adams
contends in his study of race and ethnicity in the frontier army in the
United States of America in the late nineteenth century, black regulars
in particular were under pressure to meet the same military standards as
white soldiers while dealing with racism directed at their military behav-
iour.34 Their appearance was regulated by the army but was also created
by soldiers’ war experience.
The everyday experiences of colonial soldiers were captured in draw-
ings, paintings and photographs; those images were also used to convey
a narrative to the home front, one that is critical to understanding how
their experience was constructed for collective memory. Paul Gilroy states
that ‘race,’ as well as the politics of community, affect and kinship that go
with it, demonstrate how tradition is created in the present, not the past,
out of the everyday conditions in which people live.35 Material cultures in
the army, therefore, were not just a matter of the clothing and kit supplied
to men but how they used and experienced them. What is clear is that
cultural practices formed around material objects on the western front.
Studying clothing offers insights beyond the process of design and also
affords access to the minutiae of people’s everyday lives. To Carol Tulloch,
dress is of value to the study of issues of race and ethnicity due to its prox-
imity to the body, a material object that can reveal stories about a group,
a society and a culture ‘physically, visually and psychologically.’36
Amongst those who witnessed the presence of the Indian troops in
France was the young artist Massia Bibikoff, who sketched Sikhs in their
camp in Parc Borély. Keen to note what she described as the superior
beauty of the bodies of Sikh soldiers, her focus on their appearance is
striking: ‘There was not one less than some five feet eleven in height,
slender, beautifully proportioned, while many are of real beauty.’37 Her
focus on the health and beauty of their bodies reflects the prevailing
concern about whether civilian recruits were up to standard for mili-
tary service. The war gave people permission to observe the male body
in new ways but Bibikoff’s description exoticizes the bodies of the
sepoys in the French camp. Religious practices also caught her interest,
particularly those that shaped their distinctive military appearance; she
recounts what a French interpreter explained about the iron ring on their
turbans: ‘It is the distinctive mark of their caste, which is forged from a
dreadful weapon of old times, and is given them by the Guru or High
Priest. ... This is the special warrior caste.”38 Sikh soldiers wore a pagri
badge, which carried the emblem of the Sikh quoit or chakkar. Their
skin colour and distinctive appearance were of interest to onlookers,
who also marvelled at the oddities of their dress.
In the case of Sikhs, it drew attention to their ‘warrior’ status within
Indian culture. Upon their arrival in Marseilles, Gurkhas were issued
woollen vests and pants for the December cold, which they put on over
their uniforms.39 Rather than standardizing the appearance of the army,
Figure 6.1 ‘Stalwart Indians being decorated,’ Q.70214, © Imperial War Museum
the clothing of colonial troops made clear ethnic and racial distinctions.
Regulation clothing promoted uniform appearance in the army, but
here it distinguished men of different races, nationalities and ethnici-
ties. Indian soldiers in France were recruited according to the policy
of the ‘martial races,’ which was also used to decide how these troops
were utilized on the western front; they had distinctive military roles.
Recruited according to the martial race theory, a British colonial idea
that shaped army recruitment in the pre-war period, Indian soldiers
were taken from the few races declared to be fit to bear arms. Before
1914 recruitment was restricted to the so-called martial classes: Rajputs,
Jats, Dogras, Pathans, Forkhas and Sikhs; ‘the policy of segregation of the
different “martial classes” led to the formation of the pure class or caste
units in the army.’40 This system changed by 1917 to meet manpower
demands of the war, but by that time the martial race theory was firmly
established in the popular imagination and was shaping the image of
the Indian soldier on the western front.41
An official photograph taken in France depicts Indian troops marching
along the road while young women rush up to pin flowers on them as
they pass.42 They wear turbans and in common with most other Indian
soldiers also have long tunics falling to their knees, with belts and
puttees that resemble the kit of the regular British soldier. Their swords
are exposed and held up ready for battle. These images draw attention
to the martial aspects of their Sikh origin, and exotic clothes heighten
their military distinctiveness. For Sikh soldiers, their social position in
the army was reflected in a ‘native’ costume, one invented to describe
their colonial status. Dress had been an established colonial ritual, an
act of incorporation into the empire, so that uniform could accurately
represent the social position of the Sikh soldier in the British army.
The story of khaki, however, offers a different perspective on the social
importance of colonial soldiers. Thomas Abler writes that incorporating
the exotic dress of soldiers on the frontier of empire was part of the
project to ‘Indianize’ the British army.43 Khaki was a primary example.
Exploiting the fighting style of frontier warriors, who were scouters and
skirmishers, resulted in the adoption of some aspects of their uniform
design. Apart from the adoption of khaki, Abler also suggests that the
authorization of turbans for sepoys throughout the army and the use
of looser clothing reflected the regard the British army had for their
approach to warfare.44 Denis Winter also claims that the puttees worn
by British soldiers were of Indian origin and that the officers’ breeches
were copied from the Rajputs.45 So while Sikh soldiers were wearing
what could be viewed as native dress on the western front, their British
counterparts wore a uniform that had its origins in the Indian Mutiny.
This does not, however, account for the clear visual distinctions made
between these soldiers, nor does it explain why ‘native’ costume was
retained if not to describe the social position of the Sikh soldier in the
British army, one shaped by a colonial history.
The artist Paul Sarrut made drawings of Indian troops in northern
France, many of which caught the men at ease, away from the harsh
eye of military discipline. Here khaki is not an instrument of standardi-
zation; his visual treatment of sepoys finds in the creases and folds of
the fabric of their clothing something of their humanity. A sketch from
October 1915 of a turbaned soldier in France is a sensitive portrayal of
a man wearing a resigned expression as he crouches forward, his hands
resting on his knees.46 Sarrut captures the reality that soldiering is work
and conveys the exhaustion the soldier might have felt in the trenches.
A similar kind of aesthetic in a Sarrut sketch depicting the Sikh Pioneers
resting in full battledress offers a wealth of detail on their distinctive
uniforms.
Surratt’s image of the front is bleak and uncompromising; his subjects
stare into the distance while settling their weary bodies.47 There is no
Figure 6.2 ‘113th Ambulance, British and Indian Troops in Northern France,’ Print
(from 70 War Sketches), Artist: Paul Sarrut, 22 October, 1915, © British Library
Board
military spectacle, nor did he create triumphant images of exotically

dressed soldiers. His portraits of Indian troops offer an authentic depic-
tion of life on the western front. This has somehow been lost, as Gabriel
Koreas suggests, in the post-war drive to build an image of timeless
Figure 6.3 ‘Sikh Pioneers, British and Indian Troops in Northern France,’ Print
(from 70 War Sketches), Artist: Paul Sarrut, 3 August, 1915, © British Library Board
military masculinity. These portraits emphasize the loose clothing worn

by Indian troops, and their attention to detail shows how their turbans
were tied and worn. However, while the colonial relationship subordi-
nated Indians within the army structure, propaganda images exploited
the peculiarities of their exotic dress to advertise their fighting efficiency
in a show of support for the British war effort.
Their appearance was ‘military’ in the subordinate sense; Indian troops
were valued for their labour power, not their leadership. When the situ-
ation demanded it, Indian troops were used for combat roles. But the
unusual appearance of Indian troops on the western front was exploited
as military spectacle within popular culture. In July 1915 The Graphic
newspaper ran a feature to celebrate Indian soldiers waging a ‘panoply
of war against the Hun.’48 Appearance is presented as a potent weapon
in this newspaper feature; the accompanying image is a dazzling display
of military might in the form of hundreds of exotically dressed Sikh
men marching to battle. With some pictured on horseback and others
on foot, the men’s exaggerated facial features, long beards and large
turbans conspire to form an image of military vigour. The Union Jack
is prominently carried by a splendidly dressed, proud and what appears
Figure 6.4 ‘Battles of the Somme, 1916. Indian cyclists at the cross roads on
Fricourt-Mametz road. July 1916,’ Q. 3983, Photographic Collection, © Imperial
War Museum
to be a high-ranking Sikh soldier. All combine to offer an unexpected

image, one that, the newspaper reports, intimidated the Germans, who
‘themselves admit their surprise at this rally of India.’49 It is a powerful
spectacle but nonetheless so far removed from the reality of what Sikhs
did in the war that it begs comparisons with official war photographs of
Indian soldiers.
An official photograph from July 1916 presents Indian lancers
marching on horseback dressed in ‘exotic’ military garb, which extends
to the decoration of their horses.50 On the western front, they appear
overdressed, with helmets balancing on turbans and overcoats impro-
vised to protect them from forbidding weather. Their exotic appearance
is not the spectacle promised by the propaganda. Aspects of traditional
dress cut an awkward image in another official photograph of Indian
cyclists – despatch riders – at the crossroads on Fricourt-Mametz Road
from July 1916, their khaki service dress sitting uneasily with traditional
Sikh turbans.51 Their clothing had something in common with other
British troops at the time, but the Indian soldiers wore a uniform that
reflected aspects of their ethnic difference, not necessarily something
that met the soldiers’ personal needs on the western front but that
contributed to the ethnic design of the British army. The drudgery of
their logistical roles exposed the fiction of an autonomous and formi-
dable Indian rally. Rather than reflect a proud military tradition, the
clothing that Indian soldiers wore symbolized their lowly rank on the
western front.
Cynthia Enloe is sceptical of the reasons given for building the military
along ethnic lines and argues that creating martial races was a strategy
to produce reliable upholders of the state system by cultivating military
vocations within specific ethnicities.52 An apparent ethnic pluralism
could be interpreted as an attempt to seize upon the power of ethnic or
racial differences to recruit and train subgroups of soldiers for specific
military tasks. Accounts of the Indian army on the western front suggest
that this strategy was failing to produce the expected fighting types,
which led some to blame the weather for their poor performance.53
Others, such as General Sir James Willcocks in a letter dated 1915,
explained why Indians could never make suitable officers: ‘The Indian
has not the instincts which make leaders in modern war’; he explains in
colonial terms that ‘the European and the Indian are built on different
lines, the one to command men, the other to wait for guidance before
he issues his commands.’54 It is clear from Willcocks’s attitude that while
certain races were constructed as ideal fighting types, this was paradoxi-
cally used to create barriers to them holding higher military positions.
Racism relied upon social Darwinism to explain and justify the ethnic
and racial structure of the British army, which determined the fate of
colonial troops. This ethnic pluralism created the Gurkhas, a distinc-
tive British military type and the largest racial grouping on the western
front.55 Maurice Barrès captured the tendency to exoticize their military
prowess in his introduction to Our Indians at Marseilles from 1915: ‘These
sturdy little men were drawn up under the trees by the roadside. Their
faces were of bronze, and nothing in them moved except the eyes. I
should have taken them for Japanese.’56 Their value to the British in the
war on the western front derived from perceptions that their local mili-
tary habits had much to offer trench warfare: ‘The author spoke to the
Colonel who remarked that they are wonderful fighters, their “natural
tactics” being to glide across the slopes of the Himalaya so as to surprise
their enemy and cut out his tongue.’57 Unlike much of the rhetoric of
the time that relied on theory and doctrine to create working soldiers,
the attitude to Gurkhas was one that sought intrinsic ‘fighting’ qualities
or looked to their local military habits as evidence of their suitability for

warfare. If this rhetoric traded in colonial images, it was an inversion of
the more familiar racist trope of barbaric otherness, where a perceived
lack of sophistication guaranteed their grit and fearlessness.
Like any mobilizing myth, it was predicated upon the idea of perfec-
tion, in this case not the kind that training or remoulding creates, but a
perfection ‘found’ by exploiting ‘natural’ martial characteristics. Exotic
clothing that visibly distinguished colonial troops in the field reinforced
essentialist ideas about them. Popular perceptions of colonial soldiers
supported the official view that they were best confined to lowly ranks
and non-combatant roles. If their military qualities were thought to be
characteristics natural to their race, in a modern war it installed them
in functional rather than strategic or leadership roles. The martial race
theory was only meaningful in the context of imperialist discourse that
could justify dividing the army along ethnic lines. Myths about their
innate fighting qualities suited the popular press and could construct
exotic images of exciting, brave and wild soldiers. The reality was that
many colonial soldiers were confined to non-combatant roles. In Our
Indians at Marseilles the author’s description of the Gurkhas reflected the
prevailing attitude that colonial soldiers brought with them a flexibility
and fearlessness that could not be tamed by training: ‘To-day they take
pleasure in it [cold weather], and having got used to the Flemish climate,
they creep at night through the mud towards the enemy’s patrols like
dripping tigers.’58 They may have gained a reputation for being fearless
on the battlefield, but when placed side by side with British soldiers, the
status of colonial soldiers such as the Gurkhas was downgraded.
Black soldiers
The British West Indies Regiment (BWIR) was an all-black unit estab-
lished by the War Office in 1915 in response to the growing demand by
Afro-Caribbeans to serve in the British army.59 The BWIR was intended
as a non-combatant body and initially was led by white officers owing to
a colour bar that prevented black men from holding commissions. The
origins of this bar lay in the War Office view in 1870 that the army was
racially exclusive.60 Officially both the volunteer army and the post-1916
conscripted army excluded blacks, but by mid-1918 the Army Council
agreed that British blacks and black recruits from the colonies could be
enlisted into the ranks of the British army. Small numbers of black men
also enlisted due to varying policies in different recruiting offices.61 The
Manual of Military Law, 1914 did allow for what it described as aliens
to be enlisted in the forces but prohibited any more than one in fifty to
serve together at any one time.62 Racial exclusivity was consistent with
the tendency to distrust working-class men for positions in the British
army. The directive from the War Office was that black men should either
serve in tropical campaigns or be confined to non-combatant duties in
temperate zones; these rules led to the British West Indies Regiment
and the South African Native Labour Contingent, raised in 1916, being
employed on the western front.63 Racist ideas that shaped recruitment
policy during the war were also prominent in many regiments.64 Reports
of verbal and physical attacks on black soldiers were common, and
the sight of a black soldier wearing the king’s uniform incensed white
soldiers so much that they devised an ugly taunt that summed up the
racism that pervaded the British army at the time: ‘Bloke, see a monkey
in khaki.’65
Not only were there restrictions to the numbers of black men, but their
roles left them without any prospects in the British army. There were
exceptions. During the First World War, Walter Daniel Tull became the
first black officer commissioned in the British army. A famous footballer,
Tull died in France during the second battle of the Somme (March–April
1918).66 As Phil Vasili explained, Tull was invalided out of France with
trench fever in 1916, and upon recovery he entered the officer cadet
training school at Gailes in Scotland; while he was the first black man
to do so, it probably worked in his favour that his battalion was made
up of professional footballers.67 When the 17th (1st Football) Battalion
of the Middlesex Regiment was disbanded in 1918 due to heavy losses,
those remaining migrated to other battalions; Tull was commissioned as
second lieutenant on 30 May 1917 in the 23rd (2nd Football) Battalion
of the Middlesex Regiment.68
Black soldiers were either ignored or dismissed, were often distrusted
in their military roles and were seen as a danger to women. Once black
soldiers made an appearance on the western front, their movements
were monitored. Philippa Levine declares that during wartime, due to
a concern for working-class British women, there was tight control over
the mobility of black soldiers when they were away from the battlefield;
such were the fears about their rampant sexuality.69 This view was also
reflected in descriptions of black men in popular culture, which was
where their bodies were put on display and scrutinized. On 10 January
1917 a feature appeared in the Daily Sketch with an image of a ‘smart boy
of a West Indian regiment.’70 The paper constructs the image of a young
black man in uniform as a figure of vanity and self-interest; the caption
explains that he wears the ‘King’s khaki’ and ‘accounts himself quite the
lady-killer.’71 In the photograph the boy appears in full military dress

with his army cap worn at a jaunty angle, which, the feature suggests,
is evidence of his cheeky attitude to the uniform. Indeed, the implica-
tion is that he will abuse the uniform by using it to seduce women. This
anxiety, represented by a description of his army clothing, is expressed
with some surprise that the ‘dusky lady-killer’ is permitted to wear khaki
at all. The incongruity of his clothing attracts accusations of false pride
and duplicity. Elsewhere, khaki was mobilized to transform civilians to
working soldiers; here, on the body of a young black soldier, it is thought
to cloak hidden dangers.
The notion that black soldiers were sexually exciting or even dangerous
resulted in an unusual level of interest directed at their bodies and
clothing habits. This focus pervades an account by Alfred Horner, padre
to the 6th and 9th battalions of the British West Indies Regiment, who
had much to say about the men he watched drill on the parade ground.
His comments on their physique suggest that he thought them unsuited
to the uniform and that ordinary khaki could not adequately show off
the natural beauty of their bodies:
I have often wished that our men could have worn something
different from the ordinary khaki fighting kit of the soldier – it does
hide their splendid physical proportions so. ... They look sometimes
a little heavy and ill-built in their heavy winter kit, but remove that
and – well, it makes all the difference.72
For a black man to wear khaki was for him an incongruous sight.
Meanwhile, in the Caribbean the king’s uniform was actively used to
recruit black men to the army.73 Richard Smith contends that descriptive
accounts and visual material reflect the extent to which black soldiers
were regarded as objects of curiosity.74 Images were an important means
of communicating ideas during wartime; distorted images could perpet-
uate falsehoods both inside and outside the army. Black soldiers on the
western front were considered to be a threat; they were controlled on
the one hand by a popular media that trivialized the image of black
men in uniform and on the other by an army that deployed them in
labour units and excluded them from military or front line duties.75
Visual representations promoted the popular belief that black soldiers
were unequal to the demands of modern soldiering.
Most striking are how essentialist ideas about the black male body gave
legitimacy to the notion that they could not be taught military tech-
niques, which resembled the official attitude toward the Gurkhas; the
military qualities of both groups were valued only as innate characteris-

tics, not learned behaviour.76 By fostering ethnic identities, as Cynthia
Enloe claims military planners do, there was a desire to divide the army
along ethnic lines to achieve military goals. If those goals changed over
time, it was clear that even groups that had been ascribed with martial
characteristics could now be relegated to non-combatant roles. Ethnic
identities are fostered by the military in the pursuit of strategic objectives,
and distinctive uniforms that amplified those differences contributed to
justifying racist ideology. Uniform design was critical to perpetuating a
racially and ethnically divided army on the western front. Images that
racialized the bodies of colonial soldiers were part of the social project
to ‘fashion’ white British men for war. By giving people an idea of what
constituted military appearance, the various images that ‘exoticized’
colonial soldiers made it clear that they were not entirely ‘military,’ but
supplementary troops.
Colonial soldiers were a big wartime story, but this appeared to be part
of an effort to control them. The focus on their bodies raised questions
about whether their image fitted with the British army ideal. Clothing
may seem to innocently convey distinct military habits and traditions,
but it also neatly marked ethnic and racial differences in the army. The
social appearance of colonial troops and the representation of military
uniform mobilized certain kinds of feelings amongst the British public
and played a part in maintaining the racial exclusivity of the British
army. However, it is also clear that the labour power of colonial troops
was immensely useful to the war effort; so their racial and ethnic differ-
ences were mobilized in support of that story. A popular perception built
up that shaped ideas about what constituted military appearance, which
is how military uniform managed certain kinds of ethnic and racial
divisions in the British army. On the western front, there were soldiers
whose costumes seemed more suited to traditional warfare, and yet they
were not deemed fit to learn the disciplines of modern soldiering, which
suggests that ethnic and racial differences were coded in army clothing
to serve military purposes.
Yet the official photographs from the Imperial War Museum of the
British West Indies Regiment do not reflect the excesses of popular
culture. Instead, they soberly emphasize the discipline and training of
black soldiers. In two of the images men clean their rifles on the Albert-
Amiens Road in September 1916; one shows a large group in full uniform
smiling at the camera, while the other captures three men who appear
to be caught unawares by the photographer.77 Their khaki trousers fall
to just below the knee, and one soldier wears a knitted sweater rather
Figure 6.5 ‘Men of the British West Indies Regiment cleaning their rifles; Albert-
Amiens Road, September 1916.’ Q. 1202, © Imperial War Museum
than a tunic. They wear regulation service caps. The typical uniform
of soldiers serving in the British West Indies Regiment consisted of a
khaki tunic belted at the waist with two breast pockets, khaki trousers
and puttees worn over boots. In others the photographer offers images
of military inspection and physical training. An aesthetic of uniformity
structures the image of the inspection of the full 2nd contingent of
British West Indies troops before departure from Kingston in January
1916.78 In line with many similar images of white soldiers during the
First World War, the theme of synchronized bodies conveys the desire
for perfection, discipline and control.
In another photograph British West Indies troops engage in physical
training wearing white costumes, while civilians look on with interest.79
Nothing about these images suggests that black soldiers were viewed any
differently than their white counterparts, but their labour roles certainly
tell a different story. However, Richard Smith asserts that the evolution of
black men’s military dress supports his claim that their bodies were exot-
icized. In 1868 the West Indies regiments got a more distinctive uniform
when Queen Victoria, who had ‘an eye for the exotic,’ adopted a Zouave-
style uniform for them. Giving the regiment a more ‘native’ status made
Figure 6.6 ‘Men of The the British West Indies Regiment cleaning their rifles;
Albert-Amiens Road, September 1916.’ Q. 1201, © Imperial War Museum
it more useful as a ceremonial symbol of empire than a fighting force.80

By the First World War standard issue replaced the Zouave uniform, but
this former uniform must have impacted on the popular image of the
West Indian soldier in Britain. Simultaneously, the ‘black dandy’ was
constructed as a threat to women and wartime patriotism; his appear-
ance both expressed an excessive sexual appetite and broke with sarto-
rial codes around wartime frugality.
Another negative characterization of the dress of the black soldier
was his fastidiousness, which was thought to reflect a dubious femi-
ninity and a lack of bravery: ‘the insinuation was that the West Indian
volunteer or war worker applied himself rather too enthusiastically
to what were ultimately feminine diversions, rather than directing
his full energy into the more purposeful activity for the war effort.’81
Black soldiers, it seems, could participate in active service only if they
could fit the image of the colonial subject. A popular culture worked
to control not only their movements but also their prospects in the
army. Images were particularly successful in undermining them. The
distinctive appearance of Caribbean men was exploited to ridicule and

belittle them. In many ways this strategy was more successful than
outright hostility; it ensured that black soldiers would have no social
mobility in the British army while fighting the war on the western
front.
Racial and ethnic differences shaped ideas about what constituted
military appearance, which was encoded in uniform design for colo-
nial troops, the popular perception being that their bodies were unfit
for modern soldiering. Clothing marked colonial troops out from other
regiments during the war; thus khaki was not only a system for the
standardization of men’s bodies but also a means to differentiate men
according to social class and ethnicity. Army clothing played a part in
perpetuating social inequalities, as distinct forms of military dress were
used to justify the labour roles both black and Sikh soldiers were forced
to undertake as part of the war effort. First World War images of Indian
and black soldiers suggest a visual economy that maintained and justi-
fied the low social status of colonial troops. The currency of images of
colonial troops during the war and their absence thereafter suggests that
visual culture was vital to the maintenance of these social inequalities.
Military uniform was part of that project to manage ethnic and racial
divisions in the British army; it also directed attention to the bodies of
soldiers in ways that could ascribe one set of values to men from Britain
and another to men from the edge of empire.
What had currency during the war fell from view when the conflict
was over. That the story of ethnic diversity on the western front was
no longer useful to the reconstruction of national identity reveals the
visibility of non-white soldiers throughout wartime popular culture as a
strategy of social control. However, other images challenge both official
and popular narratives, revealing army clothing as an aesthetic practice
inscribed in everyday life, where images of soldiers are forged through
practices established in the field of battle. Everyday experiences of colo-
nial soldiers were captured in drawings, paintings and photographs,
but the lack of prominence given to these images in public war remem-
brance suggests that an ethnically diverse army became inappropriate to
the collective memory of the war.
Jewish soldiers
Groups who sought to gain a military identity despite the barriers

to participation contested the racial exclusivity of the British army.
If military appearance was deployed to incite guilt and shame about
some men’s failure to ‘fit in,’ this was particularly poignant for Jewish
men. In wartime Britain the popular desire to harness a manly physical
culture to mobilize men for war was manifested in the project to raise
a British-Jewish regiment. The language of national pride employed by
propaganda messages was exclusive. Men were recruited to be part of an
army that viewed itself as homogenous. The part played by Jewish men
was complicated by questions about whether their faith and culture
could be accommodated by the army. A response was to set up a Jewish
regiment, a project that involved reconstructing the image of Jewish
masculinity.
On 5 February 1918 The Times newspaper reported on a Jewish soldiers’
march on the city and the East End of London: ‘four companies of
the Jewish Regiment returned yesterday to London from their training
camp and marched through the streets amid scenes of enthusiasm.’82
The report focuses on the sense of military spectacle that caught the
attention of many along the route: the men’s ‘sturdy physique and
martial bearing were favourably commented on.’83 But this display of
Jewish military masculinity was a long time coming. The report hinted
that Jewish men were sidelined in the war; the newspaper reporter
used the masculine appearance of this new Jewish unit to refute the
popular myth that these men were unsuitable for the British army. He
commented on their appearance as evidence of their fitness for military
service.
The image of the Jewish serviceman went against the muscular
Christianity that had built up the very image of the British Tommy.
The Jewish experience demonstrated that mass mobilization was not a
simple matter of getting every man into khaki. The raising of a Jewish
unit was to some extent a response to the treatment Jewish servicemen
experienced from the recruiting office to the barracks, where their
foreign-sounding names caused them to be refused for enlistment or to
be singled out for what was called ‘chipping.’84 As far back as 1915 there
were complaints about the lack of provision for serving Jewish soldiers
to observe their faith, as was conveyed in a letter to the Jewish Chronicle:
‘Surely the Jew serving his King and country ought to be treated in regard
to his religion just as well as the Protestant or Roman Catholic.’85 Their
vision for a distinct Jewish unit to fight for Britain was one that offered
soldiers opportunities to practice their faith.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Russian journalist and writer who became an
ardent Zionist in response to the pogroms of 1903, which also renewed
his interest in Jewish self-defence, instigated the scheme for a Jewish
legion in the First World War.86 The desire amongst British Jews to raise
a military unit lay in the belief that the restoration of Palestine involved
breaking up the Ottoman Empire. The British Jewry Book of Honour,
created as a permanent record of the services of the fifty thousand Jews
who served in the Great War, declares on the first page that British Jews
vindicated their right to British citizenship through their participation
in the war, when they were given an opportunity to repay Britain for
emancipating them in 1854: ‘The opportunity to justify that emanci-
pation did not come for sixty years, but when it did come – in August,
1914 – the opportunity was seized with a spontaneity and enthusiasm
that surprised even those who knew the loyalty of the British Jews.’87
The unit was imagined to create an image of British Jews that was both
loyal and distinct.
Most of all, though, it renovated the image of Jewish masculinity,
which community leaders were keen to transform; as the Chief Rabbi
gave the men his benediction, he reminded them that they would be
‘worthy successors of the ancient Jewish warriors – the Maccabeans.’88
Drawing on Jewish military heritage became part of the project to
convince the establishment that they had a part to play in the war.
The raising of a Jewish regiment drew some criticism from Kitchener,
who did not like ‘fancy regiments.’89 It went ahead, despite concerns
from British anti-Zionists; in July 1917, when the War Office was to
give its approval for the formation of a Jewish regiment. such was
its opposition to any overt displays of Jewish nationalism that the
emblem of King David’s shield was dropped and the regiment’s name
changed to the Royal Fusiliers.90 However, the East End recruits
who were popularly known as the ‘Judeans’ were given the nick-
name ‘Schneiders’ (a Yiddish word for ‘tailors’).91 The Daily Mirror,
which had a photograph of the battalion marching past the mansion
house, reported that it was made up mainly of British-born Jews.92
Constructing an image of Jewish military masculinity was important;
it represented a challenge to the ethno-religious exclusivity of the
British army of the time.
Photographs and newspaper reports of the march on London focused
on the image of the Royal Fusiliers as both British and distinctively
Jewish, but certain papers, among them the Jewish Chronicle, were keen
to convey the sense of pride for ‘these fine and soldier-like fellows ...
trampled down in their progress a host of Jewish fears and fictions.’93
The raising of a Jewish military unit in the British army was conceived
as a corrective to negative images of Jewish men, in particular those that
Figure 6.7 Royal Fusiliers tailoring for the war effort, who referred to themselves
as ‘the King’s own Schneiders.’ Jewish East End Celebration Society
slighted their physical capacities. The trappings of military appearance

were vital to the spectacle: the men carried full service battle kit and
packs, with helmets slung behind them; they were even granted the
special privilege of marching with fixed bayonets.94 The Jewish Chronicle
described the military spectacle of Jews in khaki as transformative: the
men, ‘from the workshop and factory, have been turned into a body of
smart troops’ to meet the British public.95 There was reason to overstate
the case, as anti-Semitic reports were circulating, including an article
in the Pall Mall Gazette that deployed grotesque physical descriptions
of the bodies of these young Jewish men: ‘the heavy, high cheeked-
boned countenance of the Russian predominated, though there were a
few stubby round-headed figures which looked as though they had got
into khaki by mistake.’96 While there was a national project to mobilize
men for war, there were also questions about whether Jewish men would
make suitable recruits.
It was clear that certain bodies could never ‘fit in’ despite the opti-
mism of a popular culture that maintained khaki could perform mira-
cles on civilian bodies. There was still an essentialist view of what kinds
of male bodies constituted military material in wartime Britain. During

the First World War the focus on the male body in the national poster
recruitment campaign betrayed how military discipline was thought
to be a matter of corporeal transformation and control. If khaki repre-
sented a new kind of military body, it was one constructed through
images. Those who sought to reconstruct the idea of the Jewish soldier
saw the value of images to counter the exclusivity of that discourse,
extending the meanings associated with wartime masculinity. As
the article in the Pall Mall Gazette suggested, physical attributes were
singled out to exclude Jewish men from military service. The task was to
convince people that Jewish men could be taken from workshops and
factories and transformed ‘into a body of smart troops.’ Visual culture
was central to altering the perception of Jewish masculinity since it was
largely image propaganda that established the normative idea of the
British Tommy.
Although a Jewish regiment challenged that perception, the spec-
tacle of Jewish soldiers marching the streets of London was reported
as a triumph of Anglo-Jewish military masculinity, one that did not
rely on exclusive ideas of muscular Christianity. Images and textual
descriptions that described their physique and martial bearing reflected
the drive for the opportunities that the war created to assert ethno-
religious identities hardly imagined in the initial recruitment drive.
First World War recruitment in Britain was all about visual transfor-
mations. For Jewish soldiers khaki was an ideal image to lay claim to
their right to participate in the masculine project of war. The simplicity
and drama of recruitment messages that appropriated the body caught
the popular imagination, even though an oppressive visibility char-
acterized the prevailing attitude toward civilian men. However, this
normalizing gaze was hardly focused on the spectacle of Jewish soldiers;
these images were constructed against dominant ideas about what the
British soldier should look like. They were part of a campaign to revisu-
alize Jewish masculinity. All of these transformations had a peculiarly
visual texture, which gave army clothing a central role in both official
recruitment and in the various images that soldiers created to describe
their experience.
Conclusion
The story of khaki was a War Office propaganda tool that took on strange
and unexpected directions during the course of the war. The various
stories and ideas that emerged reflect the very pliable qualities of cloth
itself and its capacity for artifice and illusion. Some portrayals of Indian
soldiers were sensitive to the complexity of their tasks in the trenches.
But racial structures were constructed within the framework of specific
sets of economic relations, and it is clear that popular visual representa-
tions of black soldiers were promoting the view that they were unequal
to the demands of modern soldiering. Essentialist ideas about the black
male body resembled the official attitude toward Indian soldiers; both
groups were given lowly roles in the war on the western front. Images
were critical to racializing the bodies of colonial soldiers, but their success
lay in their capacity to ‘fashion’ white British men for war. By giving
people a clear idea of what constituted military appearance, images that
‘exoticized’ colonial soldiers described bodies that could never meet
‘military’ standards. In this way the images constructed a standardized
version of military masculinity in wartime. Indeed, clothing became the
ideal metaphor to describe the bad fit colonial soldiers made fighting a
white man’s war.
Like no other, the wartime story of colonial soldiers was shaped by
a popular culture that appeared to be excited by their presence on the
western front. By focusing on their social appearance, particularly their
military costume – in the case of black soldiers, its apparent ‘bad fit’ –
popular culture mobilized certain kinds of feelings amongst the British
public about what made an ideal soldier and as such consolidated the
racial exclusivity of the British army. On the other hand, the setting up
of a British Jewish regiment demonstrated that the war was also viewed
as an opportunity to assert specific racial or ethno-religious identities.
Marching in uniform constructed an overtly Anglo-Jewish military
masculinity that sought to challenge the exclusivity of the British army
of the time. Khaki was seized upon as an ideal image, and the spectacle
the regiment created extended ideas of what constituted wartime mascu-
linities. Chapter 7 considers how men were demobilized and the process
to return them to civilian suits. It also reflects on khaki as an emblem
of war memory. Undoubtedly, khaki had come to represent a range of
identities and was no longer simply a tool of the army or the state, It
had, through the experience of the war, become part of the fabric of
life in Britain; after undergoing a series of transformations, it was set to
become part of the mythology of the war on the western front.
7
Conclusion: Demobilization
and Reconstruction
From the idealized recruitment images to the bad fit of uniforms, from
the impact of the war on the tailoring trade to the sight of Sikhs wearing
khaki on the western front, what emerges is the sense that clothing an
ever-expanding army involved compromise, resistance and improvisa-
tion. Khaki became part of the collective memory of the First World
War, but many post-war images conceal the transformations that British
army clothing underwent during the conflict. Images that drove the
militarizing of men in the early war now seem full of poignancy; their
fervent patriotic militarism amplifies the futility of war and what many
have described as a loss of innocence.
It became clear that modern technologies, instead of reinforcing and
protecting the bodies of combatants, had made them vulnerable; during the
war they suffered death, disfigurement, lost limbs and senses. Ten million
died, and twenty million suffered severe casualties in a war that deployed
modern technologies on a scale not been seen before. It is estimated that
900,000 soldiers from Britain and the colonies died and 1.6 million were
wounded. If technology symbolically strengthened the image of the British
soldier, once people were forced to reflect on the reality of war, it became
a destructive force. Nothing was quite so haunting as the sight of a disem-
bodied uniform. In Vera Brittain’s war memoir she describes the scene at
her fiancé Roland’s home following his death. In January 1916 when his
family received his returned uniform and kit, she witnessed the sight of
the material objects that came closest to Roland during his last moments.
The army authorities had returned his military uniform, a dubious relic of
the Great War given to his family as an object of memory:
The garments sent back included the outfit that he had been wearing
when he was hit. I wondered, and I wonder still, why it was thought
157
necessary to return such relics – the tunic torn back and front by the
bullet, a khaki vest dark and stiff with blood, and a pair of blood-
stained breeches slit open at the top by someone obviously in a
violent hurry. Those gruesome rags made me realise, as I had never
realised before, all that France really meant.1
Brittain’s description bears all of the signs of war despair, which she directs
at the army, who sent home the uniform of the deceased to his family.
The khaki uniform that lay on the floor of her fiancé’s family home in
the winter of 1916 bore the marks of the circumstances of his death. Her
detailed description of the tunic torn by a bullet, a bloodied khaki vest and
blood-stained breeches evoke the reality of war but also call direct attention
to the brutality and suffering of bodies in military conflicts. Her account
powerfully exposes the illusions of war, particularly the myth of disem-
bodied warfare. Struck by the gruesome mix of mud, cloth and blood on
the uniform lying motionless on the floor, Brittain found in his returned
clothes reflections of the widespread disillusionment with the war:
For though he had only worn the things when living, the smell of
those clothes was the smell of graveyards and the Dead. The mud of
France which covered them was not ordinary mud; it had not the
usual clean pure smell of earth, but it was as though it were saturated
with dead bodies – that had been dead a long, long time. ... There was
his cap, bent in and shapeless out of recognition – the soft cap he
wore rakishly on the back of his head-with the badge thickly coated
with mud. He must have fallen on top of it, or perhaps one of the
people who fetched him in trampled on it.2
Brittain struggled to remember how she had felt when it all started. She
appears to register loss for the optimism and innocence of the early war,
a glimpse of which is revealed in her bitter description of Roland’s cap,
‘bent in and shapeless out of recognition.’ His military appearance that
had once excited her attention was now beyond recognition. Brittain
recalls Roland’s cap that he ‘rakishly’ wore at a jaunty angle, implying
that his masculinity was enhanced by a uniform that had seen the
trenches; his cheerfully war-worn appearance was what she remembered
most. Her account evokes the pain of war experience, but the uniform
powerfully conveys the crisis of the body at war. In her description of
the service cap that he apparently destroyed by stumbling on it, she
cannot conceal her grief, as if his falling was the moment when all of her
hopes were ‘bent out of shape.’
Conclusion: Demobilization and Reconstruction 159
A war that promised to make men also destroyed them. The misguided
militarism that had sustained popular support for the war appeared to
Vera Brittain in the clothes lying on the floor as dubious ‘remnants of
patriotism.’ To her the khaki uniform represented all that was dishonest
and destructive about the war. Once symbols of patriotic militarism, the
khaki clothes became pathetic reminders of a war gone wrong, remnants
she dismisses in her grief as ‘gruesome rags.’ Army clothing that had so
powerfully enhanced Roland’s body in life, in death became symbolic of
the futility and tragedy of the struggle. Like the mud of France, the banal
uniform clothes took on a new significance in death.
War experience disfigured the military spectacle that had symbolized
the perfection applied to civilian bodies, but for Brittain this fantasy was
obliterated by the dark reality of a pile of muddied, blood-stained clothes.
There were other personal ways in which uniform clothing became a
touchstone for remembering the war dead. Portrait photography, a very
mobile form of war memory, was kept after death to retain the image of
the man in uniform. The photographs captured a moment in time when
seemingly the whole of society was caught up in the excitement of war.
As Catherine Moriarty writes, portrait photographs were part of a mode
of representation of servicemen that involved ‘dressing-up’ to create a
fiction of masculine appearance.3 Once the fever of patriotic militarism
faded, old photographs were remnants of an earlier optimism, objects
bearing witness to the dignity of the fresh-faced recruit.
During the war, there were efforts by the popular media to visualize
the effects of combat on changes to how the uniform was worn. ‘From
Khaki to Goatskin: The Evolution of Our Soldiers’ Dress,’ a 1915 article
from the Illustrated London News, sought to trace the apparent effects
a harsh winter campaign had on military clothing worn by British
combatants on the western front.4 The evolution, as the article put it,
was from ‘service uniform to a garb more resembling that of an Arctic
explorer,’ and a series of images moved from a conventional one of a
soldier in full infantry marching order to costumes that involve such
strange new items as goatskins, runner boots and woollen helmets.5
The article contrives to describe how war alters the appearance of the
soldier’s body. Clearly the experience of the trenches gave rise to addi-
tions and improvisations that shaped the appearance of servicemen,
but this article emphasizes the military bearing of men who, despite
great hardships in a long winter campaign, ‘presented at the inspec-
tion to which I have referred, a most soldier-like, splendid, though
somewhat war-worn appearance.’6 Army clothing, an aesthetic practice
inscribed in everyday life, was ever-changing, and those who wore it
in the trenches transformed the meanings originally designed into the

uniform. Whatever real changes were made to the uniform, this article
was keen to register the attractions of the swaggering veteran whose
rakish disregard for regulation could excite public interest as much as
the neat readiness of a fresh-faced recruit. The efforts appear awkward
when examining the reality of the destructive effect war had on men’s
bodies.
Jay Winter observes that ‘memory’ has become a significant focus in
historical research.7 One of the most enduring versions of war memory,
according to Paul Fussell, is that the First World War destroyed romance
and innocence, leaving a modernist legacy of rupture and crisis.8 At the
time, Fussell’s view that war experience shaped much twentieth-century
war writing and his formulation of ‘modern memory’ anticipated new
directions in the social history of the war.9 However, not all studies of
war memory view it as a modernist legacy. Winter’s important book Sites
of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
argues that the human catastrophe of the First World War was mediated
by images of the dead, by an attempt to recover them through sacred
themes in prose and poetry and in communal expressions of remem-
brance.10 Less convinced that war made past cultural formations irrel-
evant, he argues instead that people reconfigured the past to mourn loss
and to begin recovery. However, for Winter, it was significant that the
war made it more difficult to uphold distinctions between popular and
artistic visual forms, a view that offers a compelling picture of what held
people together during and after the war.11
Whatever competing versions of war memory entered into the
post-war culture, Samuel Hynes sees the First World War as ‘a powerful
imaginative force.’12 The extent to which this is due to the huge interest
in the literary interpretation of war is debatable, but academic attention
has also been given to the impact of the war on the visual arts. To return
to Winter’s argument that wartime contributed to a breaking down of
distinctions between high and low culture in Britain, this is particu-
larly significant where the body is represented. Ana Carden-Coyne, in
Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War,
declares that post-war reconstruction was characterized by medical,
cultural and commercial responses that drew on both modernism and
classicism.13 Her focus on the aesthetics of bodily reconstruction as a
form of healing underlines that visualizing bodies was not confined to
art but became a popular practice that enhanced demobilization and
reconstruction projects. The visualizing of men’s bodies has been central
to my discussion of the khaki uniform: that the culture of mobilization
was so strong and the scale of the project so vast that it eventually
involved the cultural work of a wide range of social groups in British
society. Visual forms, powerful tools to mobilize people to the war effort,
cannot be underestimated when exploring the legacy of the war, nor can
cultural histories be confined to artistic responses. Thus, the involve-
ment of various social groups in the war effort led to a range of aesthetic
practices memorializing the dead once it was over.
Part of the mobilization project was to convince people that war
would transform men. A range of media presented the soldier as a
civilian rapidly conforming to army discipline. The ubiquity and beauty
of these images suggested the desirability of active service for British
men, but they also made dissent unthinkable. As Chapter 4 has shown,
conscientious objectors were left naked and given no option but to
take on a military identity. Refusing to wear uniform was greeted with
outrage and aggression against objectors, who were stripped, isolated
and deprived of nourishment. COs politicized clothing; their protests
exposed the rhetoric around uniform as coercive rather than persuasive.
Scientific innovation and industry might have created the means of
production for army clothing, but they were also deployed as ideas and
images to symbolically fortify the body. The control the army required
over men’s bodies, a control that heightened upon enlistment, broke
down in the face of the realities of trench warfare. If, as many have
stressed, the crisis lay in the stark contrasts between representation and
reality, then wartime experience exposed myths of collective discipline.
Khaki uniform was presented as transformative, as an object to erase
the natural body, to replace it with an improved military model. This
kind of project Michel Foucault thought characteristically modern in its
desire to make bodies docile through corporeal inscription. Yet much
of the evidence suggests that wartime experience of army practices also
involved improvisation, resistance and negotiation.
Recruits waiting for regulation khaki had to improvise military appear-
ance, and a new social mobility in the wartime army upset traditional
hierarchies. All this suggests that wartime culture involved collective
disciplines – but also their dispersal into the various subcultures that
did their own creative work, albeit mostly for the war effort. Official
ideals designed into the khaki service uniform were transformed by war
experience. To this extent, it is worth considering whether uniforms
were designed for war or by war. In the making of civilian soldiers,
there were many tensions and contradictions between official repre-
sentations seeking to militarize men’s bodies for active service and the
drive to aestheticize the soldier in popular culture. The former pattern
is consistent with the language of regulation, the latter with discourses

concerning fashion and style. British army practices were popularized
by the mobilization project, which exposed the military institution to
a public gaze. As Chapter 3 argued, images of servicemen in tailoring
texts, advertisements and the press made military habits a wider social
concern.
If the war created modern memory, it did not privilege fixed images.
Instead, what emerges is a mutating and fluid picture of wartime British
culture. The story of khaki captures that sense of change: army clothing
production was achieved through a range of public and private means;
the fluidity of advertising images reflected the new social mobility in the
army; subcultural groups appropriated military spectacle to their own
ends; clear tensions emerged between conformist images of Christian
soldiers and the dissent of Christian pacifists who resisted uniform.
Foucault’s theories on corporeal inscription are useful to consider how
uniform disciplined the male body in wartime; it was not a simple
matter of bodies made docile by the army. There were many ways in
which the shared project of the war effort reflected the complexity of
relationships and negotiations between civilian and military institu-
tions and individuals. The war effort cannot be fully explained in terms
of docility; it involved collective disciplines as well as compelling exam-
ples of resistance. If the image of khaki uniform was critical to wartime
images and practices, it was often to increase homogeneity in army and
civilian life. However, there were evident tensions between reality and
representation in the shared project to make the civilian soldier, in the
resulting ownership civil society felt over the soldier’s body and in the
range of responses to images of soldiering. With so many aspirational
images of servicemen in public culture, the symbols of militarism were
seeping into civilian life, often transformed in ways unimagined by offi-
cial groups that created them. Despite efforts to regulate war supply and
fashion the male body in wartime in terms of active participation, the
war effort forged new relationships between state and trade, civil society
and the military.
Demobilization
When images of standardized men stimulated army recruitment, the suit

was their conventional dress. The civilian suit was an expression of moral
manliness, the dominant code for middle-class British men coming up
to the war. These men aimed at modesty and simplicity in their dress
and appearance. For David Kuchta the suit was the embodiment of a
manliness that emerged in the middle classes, reflecting an ‘ideology

of inconspicuous consumption.’14 Khaki, designed for modesty and
uniformity, an aesthetic that expressed military discipline and self-
control, had some similarities with the civilian suit, worn to convey
a masculinity suited to business and politics. Men who wore the suit
distanced themselves from the femininity of fashion and sought to
display a capacity for discipline, restraint and authority.
Upon demobilization, the British army issued civilian suits to
discharged soldiers. When men made the transition back from warriors
to civilians, they were supplied with official clothing by the Royal Army
Clothing Department. Legally a man could not wear his uniform more
than twenty-eight days after discharge. At the end of December 1918,
the department formed the discharged soldiers’ suit section at Battersea
Park, which was to close at the end of August 1920, its task being to
issue a suit of plain clothes to all discharged men.15 The drive to clothe
men returning to civilian life reflected the sense of both ownership and
responsibility the army felt over men’s bodies. The process also mirrored
the project of mobilization. The Illustrated London News declared that the
project was underway to transform men from warriors to civilians once
again, and in a 1919 article a visual narrative traced what they called
‘The Transition from Khaki to “Civvies”: Demobilization in Full Swing at
the Crystal Palace.’16 The images employed offer a glimpse of the process
in the Crystal Palace depot, described by the paper as a place ‘where the
soldiers last few hours in the army are made pleasant.’ The visual narra-
tive of demobilization follows masses of uniformed men relinquishing
their military identities and getting fitted up with new suits. Before he
left his unit each man was given a plain clothes form and a certificate
of employment. Upon arrival in England he went to a dispersal centre,
where he received a protection certificate and a railway ticket to get
home. He got a pay advance and a fortnight’s ration book, along with a
voucher for the return of his greatcoat.17 He was given the option of a
clothing allowance or a suit of plain clothes.
Demobilization appeared to represent a return to business as usual.
However, sending men back to civilian life with a suit of clothes issued
by the War Office in effect gave them a civilian uniform. The approach
to manufacture and distribution was not dissimilar to wartime army
clothing schemes. The army issued a total of 1,413,760 suits to demo-
bilized men at the end of the war.18 The project was reported in the
clothing trade press. One paper commented, ‘steps had to be taken to
divert cloth and yarn intended for military purposes to the new suits.
Large quantities of khaki cloth in the piece have been redyed to various
shades of brown and grey.’19 If the original project to clothe a mass

army had been good for business, so too the manufacture and supply of
demob suits was of interest to the tailoring trade.
Clothing the rank and file during wartime involved systems for
measurement and the careful keeping of records, but the demobiliza-
tion clothing scheme also made use of a form with measurements and
involved a system of checking by master tailors at the depot and the
keeping of records for each man clothed by the army.20 The War Office
promised to each man discharged from the army ‘a ready made suit of a
size to accord with measurements given by the soldier and of the colour
(dark blue, brown, or grey) selected by him prior to dispersal, was sent to
his private address by post or issued personally if he preferred to call for
it.’21 Demobilization suits clearly gave the army considerable influence
over what men wore.
There was some criticism of the quality of the suits in the trade
press, many accusing the war office of severe economy. One in partic-
ular interpreted the shabby suits as the official mistreatment of war
heroes: ‘thousands of gallant men are turned out from the barracks,
discharged through wounds or otherwise from the service, like a crowd
of scarecrows.’22 Official responsibility for managing the appearance
of discharged men was an important issue, particularly since those
who were at the front had been enthusiastically promoted as soldier
heroes. The weight of propagandist images that seized men’s bodies
for active service shaped the post-war view that they should be physi-
cally reconstructed by the state. Men who had seen active service did
not necessarily have clothes that fit them. The values and principles
that saw khaki emerge as the modern form of military uniform made
it natural for men to opt to be clothed by the army once they were
discharged. If khaki had a uniform aesthetic to standardize men’s
bodies, a similar discipline and self-control was conveyed in civilian
life by the suit. Demobilization suits and the means of their distribu-
tion reflected the responsibility the state assumed for the appearance
of men returning from war, but the readiness of discharged men to
accept these suits was a sign that they were largely content to wear a
civilian uniform.
War commemoration
As images constructed military masculinities in wartime, so too they

played a critical role in post-war reconstructions. There were formal
ways in which war memory was expressed, and images of servicemen
that highlighted their clothing appeared in some of the more unusual

monuments. Post-war commemoration in Britain was divided into two
main activities, performing ceremonies and constructing memorials.23
Monument making, a significant official activity following the war,
played a political role in reconstructing pre-war values and stemming
the flow of antiwar feeling.24 Realistic depictions of servicemen were
problematic. Gabriel Koureas, questioning the extent to which trau-
matic bodily memories were actually worked through in certain forms
of commemoration, argues that normative masculinities continued to
be called upon to perpetuate military discourse in the commemoration
of the First World War.25 There are debates about whether there was a
drive to reconstruct pre-war values through commemoration rituals and
monuments. The faith shown in the utility of the male body during
wartime and a belief in its endless reproduction were clearly challenged
by post-war reflections on the vulnerability of the male body at war.
Jay Winter argues that official inadequacies left commuities to shape
commemoration rituals.26 In public war memorials there was reluctance
to include realistic portrayals of weapons, which were either trans-
formed or removed. Images of servicemen also avoided a triumphant
attitude; instead they employed the ‘cult of the fallen’ to shape the
public memory of the war. Any turn to representations of servicemen’s
bodies was in an effort to convey mourning and loss.
After the First World War the question of whether to aestheticize
weaponry exercised memorial committees keen to stifle radicalism and
to reflect the prevailing mood of mourning. George Mosse argues that
while weapons were problematic, uniformed bodies were a concession to
realism; he observes that ‘the realism that did exist on war monuments
was in the battle dress of the soldier.’27 The treatment of clothing in war
monuments saw the khaki uniform undergo another fascinating trans-
formation. Catherine Moriarty notes that sculptors who memorialized
the war found in the greatcoat an opportunity to exploit the dual asso-
ciations of abstraction and intimacy.28 Instead of drawing attention to
the body, the greatcoat, like the cloak, covered its vulnerability to make
its symbolic potential serve ceremonial purposes.29 By working against
the dominant representation of the uniformed body as mechanical and
durable, the post-war representation of the greatcoat reflected the matu-
rity of hindsight but also became a touchstone for ex-servicemen who
had worn them.
The Royal Artillery Memorial, executed by the sculptor Charles Sargeant
Jagger and unveiled in 1925 at Hyde Park Corner in London, was partic-
ularly attentive to uniform clothing.30 It was the most controversial
Figure 7.1 Royal Artillery Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, 1925 (detail 1)
monument discussed by municipal war committees in the period.31 The

memorial, conceived around the theme of war rather than peace, was
dedicated to ex-servicemen.32 The realism of the figures, particularly the
use of the dead gunner, became the subject of controversy within the
Royal Artillery War Commemoration Fund Committee and featured in

press commentaries at the time.33 Many large-scale memorials sought to
represent the convergence of the various social groups that were mobi-
lized for the war effort. The large-scale of the Royal Artillery Memorial,
its prominent location in London, the grand gestures and heavy figures
of servicemen, all gave it an oddly realistic quality. The monument
attempted to forge a version of war memory that reached a wide range of
people. The east face inscription, commemorating the mass of soldiers
who died in the war, represented a move away from the traditional focus
on army leadership in public war memorials:
In Proud Remembrance Of the

Forty-Nine Thousand & Seventy-Six
Of All Ranks of the Royal Regiment of Artillery
Who Gave Their Lives for King
And Country in the Great War
1914–1919
The inscription conveys a message that insists upon the humanity of

those that fought and died, and the sculpture, offering raw images of
servicemen, gives them a real, fleshly presence. The realism of the figures
departs from the all-pervasive mechanistic views of men’s bodies preva-
lent during the war, in particular the representation of the dead soldier,
which made the memorial controversial.34 Jay Winter argues that the
public desire to express indebtedness to servicemen kept pacifism out of
most commemorative monuments.35 A realistic focus on the bodies of
soldiers, avoiding sentimentality and insisting upon the human dimen-
sion of a brutal war, defiantly challenged death.
The Royal Artillery Memorial used the image of servicemen to memo-
rialize the war. Clothing was given attention in the rendering of figures;
drapery and gestures were configured to make classical and religious
references. A male figure with outstretched arms wears a waterproof
cloak, part of the soldier’s kit developed for Kitchener’s new army. Boots
and puttees are graphically depicted; Jagger’s approach to the cloak is
to render the drapery so as to lend the soldier a classical appearance.
The face and body of the dead soldier is covered by his greatcoat and
helmet. Every detail is carefully observed. His bulky figures express the
physicality prominent in military discourses during the war, but Jagger’s
attention to detail transcends the moment of combat and elevates the
figure of the soldier beyond the material circumstances of the trenches.
Despite the classical and religious references, the monument’s realism
roots the servicemen in a specific time and place but redeems their
bodies from the nightmare of the trenches.
The substantial body of the dead soldier reveals Jagger’s interest in
secular symbols. His approach to commemoration centres on the quali-
ties of clothing, which bears witness to the lived reality of the trenches.
Public remembrance was a group activity, tending towards the small-
scale and localized, that emerged from values of civic pride and collec-
tive responsibility.36 The tendency to fuse popular and artistic forms
is perfectly encapsulated in this truly modern monument to the war
dead. In the 1880s war monuments were the local focus for the cult
of the fallen; monuments, not the graves of servicemen, memorial-
ized their sacrifice.37 The First World War’s dead were honoured by a
unique inscription on local war memorials.38 The more official monu-
ments memorialized the materiality of war through uniformed soldiers.
Bodies became an emblem for war memory, but it was mass slaughter
that brought their fragility into focus. In the Artillery Memorial there is
a sense that the focus on the material reality of clothing, amongst other
things, embodies and celebrates the real human effort of the British
people during the First World War.
Figure 7.2 Royal Artillery Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, 1925 (detail 2)
There was disquiet about the representation of servicemen in the Royal

Artillery Memorial. War commemoration was frequent throughout the
1920s and 1930s, and architects who were well positioned to exploit
the market for memorials received the bulk of the memorial business
and left the less well organized sculptors behind.39 However, when the
members of the Royal Artillery Memorial committee raised concerns
about whether the costume of the servicemen was representative, Jagger
used his occupational status as a sculptor to justify the use of bulky
clothing. Reluctance to interfere with an artist’s work led them eventu-
ally to accept his claim that his choice of forms was shaped by tech-
nical concerns: ‘he made the question of costume one which properly
belonged in his field of expertise as a plastic artist, rather than a ques-
tion of accuracy in the representation of military details, which was
the expertise of his clients.’40 Less likely to be in a position to dictate
the mode of representation, the committee members were prepared to
respect Jagger’s artistic freedom. His defence of the unusual approach
to commemoration was technical but novel: he deployed clothing in
interesting ways, ways that nonetheless evoked the khaki uniform as a
touchstone for war memory.
The legacy of khaki
Forces from the past, as well as those anticipating the future, shaped First
World War popular culture. Amongst other things the story of khaki
reflects the drive in wartime British culture to mix popular and artistic
forms, the old and the new, tradition and modernity, aesthetics and
science. Throughout wartime, there were cultural exchanges between
military and civilian values. Khaki uniform and its meanings were not
static throughout the war; their fluidity was reflected in how they were
represented, used, worn, exchanged, circulated, rejected or transformed.
Official efforts to convey a singular uniform masculinity were, by the
end of the war, compromised by experiences that challenged idealized
images of soldiers in popular culture.
Khaki became meaningful during wartime, but its proximity to
soldiers’ bodies gave uniforms an emotional charge that saw it appropri-
ated by a range of interest groups. The bodies of British combatants were
highly politicized, were targeted in recruitment messages and became
the site of resistance to militarism. A soldierly aesthetic designed for
simplicity was instrumental in advancing mass mobilization, but this
agenda was troubled by the input of civilians who created their own
interpretations of men’s bodies. Khaki uniform was not spectacular but
neither was it benign, despite design features that suggested simplicity

or created the illusion of invisibility. Khaki, an expression of the official
desire for utility in military design, represented the move to integrate
army clothing into modern warfare. This departure from fashionable
dress represented a huge shift in the rationale for army uniform design,
but the new functionality came to reflect much about the wartime expe-
rience of men faced with technologies that threatened to destroy them.
Their military uniforms were inspired by the dynamics of visibility,
which was characteristic of the modern battlefield and the risks faced by
combatants. Khaki uniform, a functional camouflage outfit designed for
soldiers facing a chaotic battlefield, came to represent the vulnerability
of combatants caught up in mechanized warfare in its failure to shield
them from bullets and shrapnel.
Khaki represents a cultural paradigm, one that captured the imagina-
tion of the military and civilians that modernized the appearance of
men on the battlefield and militarized the home front. However, khaki
also became a point of exchange and negotiation. Its culture reveals a
complex network of official and popular sources to build a picture of
how the First World War gave khaki meaning in British culture.
When the war ended, Robert Graves recalled the moment when he
parted with his uniform to return to his civilian clothes: ‘I discarded my
uniform, having worn nothing else for four and a half years, and looked
into my trunk to see what civilian clothes I still had. The one suit, other
than school uniform which I found, no longer fitted.’41 Graves, who
had gone to considerable trouble to perfect his soldierly image when
he was first recruited, was faced with the painful search for his pre-war
identity once the conflict ended. He struggled to remember who he had
been, to find clothes to express his former civilian self. As his observa-
tions suggest, the war that had made him a man gave him a military
identity that was difficult to discard. All of the images and ideas that
had frenetically mobilized the fantasies of the British people were ready
to be consigned to memory. The uniform no longer bore the image of a
spanking new outfit for active service, but now carried gruesome memo-
ries of the trenches.
Supplying British troops with khaki uniforms was a huge undertaking,
which is why this book has given over much discussion to themes of
mobilization – not only industrial projects but also how themes of tech-
nology and efficiency seeped into common parlance. The war created
commercial opportunities, and mobilizing the civilian economy led to
post-war improvements in living standards for the lower social groups
in Britain.42 New weapons and improved uniforms on the battlefield
reflected a progressive modernity experienced on the home front.

Images that invited people on the home front to see British men trans-
formed by grooming, hygiene and dressing habits sought to convey
the process of militarizing masculinities. But it was through shopping,
domestic crafts and the work of military outfitters and tailors that the
British public participated in ‘making’ the British soldier. It was thus a
project shared by state, army and civilians. Though critical to mobiliza-
tion in real material ways, the project militarized British society, so that
men’s bodies were routinely re-imagined through military discourse.
With so many images standardizing military masculinities, it is not
surprising that questions arose about who was entitled to wear the king’s
uniform. If khaki visualized a new kind of military body, then those that
sought to reconstruct the idea of the Jewish soldier could equally see
the value of exploiting images. How could Jewish men be transformed
into smart troops, given that they did not fit the image of the typical
Tommy? Due to the incommensurability of Anglo-Jewish identity with
muscular Christianity, the image propaganda that had constructed the
normative idea of the British soldier created barriers for public accept-
ance of a Jewish regiment raised during the First World War. So, too,
colonial troops were excluded from this normative idea; their various
uniform designs were distinctive reminders of what constituted true
military appearance. Clothing, conspicuously marking colonial troops
out from other regiments during the war, was a key part of a system of
representation validating the lowly status of black and Indian soldiers.
The currency of images of colonial troops during the war and absence
thereafter suggests that visual culture, but military uniform in particular,
managed ethnic and racial divisions in the British army.
Visual culture ascribed one set of values to men from Britain and
another to men from the colonies. Essentialist ideas about the black
male body resembled the official attitude to Indian soldiers: both were
racialized through a popular discourse about their bodies. Most striking
was their visual presence and how it offered an image of what consti-
tuted correct military appearance. Colonial troops, whose appearance
was predicated on exoticism rather than conformity, were its opposite.
The fantasy of standardized military masculinities were also exposed
by the early but creeping realization that the manufacture of khaki
uniforms was beyond the capacity of the state. Official narratives were
troubled by the chaos of army clothing supply. The absurd appearance
of parts of the new armies threatened to spawn an alternative discourse
that characterized them as shambolic and made a mockery of the much-
vaunted improving qualities of khaki. Kitchener blue uniforms made
the situation even worse, creating an image of a ragtag army of civilian

soldiers that undermined the poster rhetoric that had made smart
dress one of the attractions of active service. The story of khaki was
not confined to the drama of propaganda images, but the strange and
unexpected directions it took during the war’s course reveal the artifice
and illusions of dress. This was most visible through the transformations
Figure 7.3 ‘Ready to Start, Self Portrait,’ 1917, Oil on Panelpanel, Sir William
Orpen (1878–1931), IWM ART 2380, © Imperial War Museum
that khaki underwent – from an attractive outfit that mobilized men to

images and traces that mourned their loss. Clothing a mass army was
so ambitious that the project to get all civilian men into khaki uniform
echoed the changes and transformations in British wartime society,
which became a story of compromise, resistance and improvisation.
‘How the War May Influence Men’s Fashions’
In William Orpen’s 1917 painting Ready to Start, Self Portrait, the artist
takes the minutiae of war very seriously.43 As Orpen takes the first
tentative steps to adopting an army identity, it is the material objects
of soldiering that vividly portray the private act of reconstructing the
self. Mundane objects – bottles, a glass, a tin, a box of matches, letters,
manuals – lend authenticity to a scene of war preparation. He wears
khaki, and his stern gaze looks out from under his steel helmet. In this
domestic setting war is an experimental game of trying on the accesso-
ries of soldiering. The artist turns to the mirror to consider his military
image, to evaluate whether he is ‘ready to start.’ The painting offers
an alternative image of mobilization, not to stimulate recruitment, but
to reflect on questions of how men are designed for war, what making
the leap from civilian to soldier involves. Material things are employed
to perfect Orpen’s soldierly image, to somehow bring this new self
into being. The painting‘s multiple perspectives undermine the integ-
rity of the two dimensionality of the image to reflect the complexities
of adopting a military appearance. Estranged from his body, Orpen’s
mirror reflection reveals his shock of recognition upon discovering his
new image.
Uniform is seductive precisely because it tempts us to experiment with
untried parts of our identity. This authentic portrait of corporeal trans-
formation has none of the duplicity of recruitment propaganda. The
disparity between the interior in the foreground, scattered with remnants
of his dressing up, and the glimpse through an open window of the
street below suggests that a world of military adventure waits outside.
Orpen hides indoors preparing himself for war, but for the moment he
is consumed by the domestic tasks of dressing and grooming.
Khaki, enlisted during the war to advance war values, became part
of popular culture and formed lasting images of the First World War
in Britain. Uniform was activated by various social and cultural prac-
tices: during the war through images and texts, industrial production
processes, military manuals, official documents, trade organization and
official regulations; after the war through monuments, memoirs and
Figure 7.4 ‘How the War May Influence Men’s Fashions,’ Daily Mirror 18 March,
1915, 7, MirrorPix
regimental histories. A whole network of practices set the khaki uniform

to work to become part of the collective imagination. As an object of
visual representation and material experience, the service dress worn
by the British soldier on the western front shaped the consciousness of

those on home and battle front.
Such was the concern with the war’s role in fashioning the male body
that a cartoon in 1916 playfully predicted that the war would influence
men’s fashions.44 This comical diversion saw the war as the transforma-
tion of social experience in Britain. The caption read, ‘Nothing will be
the same, people tell us, after the war. Even those apparently unalter-
able things, men’s fashions, will be influenced by the great struggle.’45
The cartoon predicted that war experience would change everything.
Fascination with khaki was shorthand for the abiding interest shown in
the malleability of men’s bodies during and after the war. Much of the
visual culture obsessively monitored men as they journeyed from home
to battle front and back again. The khaki uniform worn on the western
front formed myths and memories, whether they were shaped in the
trenches or the collective imagination.
Notes
1 Introduction: Khaki and the First World War

1. A. C. Whitehorne, ‘Khaki and Service Dress,’ Journal of the Society for Army
Historical Research, vol. 15 (1936), 181.
2. Whitehorne, ‘Khaki and Service Dress,’ 181.
3. Selwyn Hodson-Pressinger, Khaki Uniform First Introduction 1848 (Battle Use
1849) & Hodson’s Memorial (London: Sandilands Press, 2000), 5.
4. Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Allen Lane,
1978), 51.
5. Thomas Abler, Hinterland Warriors and Military Dress: European Empires and
Exotic Uniforms (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 111–129.
7. Friedrich Carl Theis, ‘Khaki’ on cotton or other textile material (Berlin: Krayn,
1903), 1.
9. ‘Report of the Director of Clothing for the Year 1882–3,’ National Archives,
WO 377/44, 9.
10. Diana De Marly, Working Dress: A History of Occupational Clothing (London:
Batsford Books, 1986); Jennifer Craik, Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to
Transgression (Oxford: Berg, 2005), for discussion of the institutional role
of uniform to convey power, authority, status and role; Phillis Cunnington
and Catherine Lucas, Occupational Costume in England (London: Adam and
Charles Black, 1976), on the enthusiastic adoption of uniform by the railway
companies in the late nineteenth century, which, believed to promote loyalty
to the company and foster morale, was by the early twentieth century subject
to clothing regulations and catalogues, 215–231.
11. Tim Newark and J. Miller (eds), Camouflage (London: Thames and Hudson,
2007), 53–88, on First World War camouflage and its development in the
context of aerial reconnaissance; Thomas Abler, Hinterland Warriors and
Military Dress: European Empires and Exotic Uniforms (Oxford: Berg, 1999).
12. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(New York: Verso, 1983).
13. Peter Childs, Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000), 18.
14. Abler, Hinterland Warriors and Military Dress, 15.
15. Edward M. Spiers, The Army and Society 1815–1914 (London: Longman,
1980), 210.
16. ‘The Thin Khaki Line Repels the Corps d’Élite of the German Army: The
Defeat of the Prussian Guards,’ Illustrated London News, 28 November 1914,
742–743.
17. Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘For Critical Visuality Studies,’ in The Visual Culture Reader,
3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2013), xxx.
18. Dora Apel, War Culture and the Contest of Images (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2012, 1.
176
Notes 177
19. James Laver, British Military Uniforms (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948).

20. Harold E. Raugh, The Victorians at War, 1815–1914 (California: ABC-CLIO,
2004), 279.
1978), 16.
22. Jeremy Black, War and the Cultural Turn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).
23. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977).
24. Leonard V. Smith, ‘Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory: Twenty-
Five Years Later,’ History and Theory 40 (May 2001), 241–260.
25. Adrian Caesar, Taking It like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).
26. Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War: Witnessing, Testimony and
Remembrance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
27. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
28. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: First World War and English Culture (London:
Pimlico, 1992), 433–434.
29. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams:
Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987); Ulrich
Lehmann, Tigersprung (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2000).
30. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987), 9.
31. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1985), 223.
32. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso,
2000).
33. Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, 230.
34. Cecil Gordon Harper, A Subaltern’s Memoir of the 10th Battalion Gordon
Highlanders from July 1914 to July 1915, Beryl and Stuart Blythe (eds), Jan.
1998, 28, IWM 98/2/1, Dept. of Documents.
35. G. R. Carter, ‘Clothing the Allies’ Armies,’ Economic Journal 25, 97 (1915), 98.
36. Roger Chickering, ‘World War I and the Theory of Total War: Reflections on
the British and German Cases, 1914–1915,’ in Great War, Total War: Combat
and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, eds Roger Chickering and
Stig Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 35–36.
37. Dennis E. Showalter, ‘Mass Warfare and the Impact of Technology,’ Great War,
Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, eds Roger
Chickering and Stig Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 80.
38. John Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World
War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
39. Jeremy Black, The Age of Total War, 1860–1945 (Westport, CT: Praeger,
2006), 82.
40. Ben Fine, The World of Consumption, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002), 98.
41. Katrina Honeyman, Well-Suited: A History of the Leeds Clothing Industry 1850–
1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 11.
42. Alastair Reid, ‘Dilution, Trade Unionism and the State in Britain during
the First World War,’ in Shop Floor Bargaining and the State: Historical and
178 Notes
Comparative Perspectives, ed. Jonathan Tolliday, Steven Zeitlin (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press,1985), 46–74.
43. Jon Lawrence, ‘The transition to war in 1914,’ in Capital Cities at War: Paris,
London, Berlin 1914–1919, eds Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 161.
44. Jeremy Black, The Age of Total War, 1860–1945 (Westport, CT: Praeger,
2006), 74.
45. Christopher Breward, ‘Cultures, Identities, Histories: Fashioning a Cultural
Approach to Dress,’ Fashion Theory 2, 4 (1998), 301–313; Lou Taylor, The
Study of Dress History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 70;
Amy de la Haye and Judith Clark, ‘One object: Multiple interpretations,’
Fashion Theory 12, 2 (2008), 137–170.
46. Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 11.
47. Jim Sharpe, ‘History from Below,’ in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed.
Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 25.
48. Daniel Roche, ‘The discipline of appearances: The prestige of uniform,’ in
The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the ‘Ancien Regime’ (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 1994), 229.
49. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London:
Penguin, 1991), 135–136.
50. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135.
51. Tim Newark, Brassey’s Book of Uniforms (London: Brassey’s, 1998), 60.
52. Penelope Byrde, The Male Image: Men’s Fashion in England 1300–1970 (London:
Batsford, 1979), 74.
53. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, ‘Peeking under the Black Shirt: Italian Fascism’s
Disembodied Bodies,’ in Fashioning the Body Politic, ed. Wendy Parkins
(Oxford: Berg, 2002), 145–165.
54. Jacqueline Durran, ‘Dandies and Servants of the Crown: Sailors’ uniforms in
the early 19th century,’ Things 3 (1995), 6–19.
55. Durran, ‘Dandies and Servants of the Crown,’ 16–18.
56. Gabriel Koureas, Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual
Culture 1914–1930 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
57. Michael Roper, ‘Maternal Relations: Moral manliness and emotional survival
in letters home during the First World War,’ in Masculinities in Politics and
War: Gendering Modern History, eds Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and
John Tosh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 302.
58. Jennifer Craik, Uniforms Exposed (Oxford: Berg, 2005).
59. Quintin Colville, ‘Jack Tar and the Gentleman Officer: The Role of Uniform in
Shaping the Class- and Gender-Related Identities of British Naval Personnel,
1930–1939,’ Transactions of the RHS 13 (2003), 105–129.
60. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (first published 1949) (London: Penguin,
1983).
61. Linda Nochlin, Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1994), 1–36; Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’
Screen 16 (3) (1975), 6–18.
62. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (St Albans: Paladin, 1971); Kate Millett,
Sexual Politics (London: Virago, 1977); Rosalind Coward, Female Desire:
Women’s Sexuality Today (London: Paladin, 1985).
Notes 179
63. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (first published 1990) (London: Routledge,
2007), 45.
64. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (first published 1899) (London:
Dover, 1994), for discussion of the theory of ‘conspicuous consumption,’
a term that explains how a gendered division of labour in the nineteenth-
century middle-class household constructed consumption as a woman’s
role; Penny Sparke, As Long As It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (London:
Pandora, 1995), discusses the different values assigned to men’s and women’s
material culture.
65. Joseph Pleck, The Myth of Masculinity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981);
Harry Brod (ed.), The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies (Boston:
Allen and Unwin, 1987); Michael Kaufman, Beyond Patriarchy: Essays by Men
on Pleasure, Power and Change (Toronto: Oxford University Press of Canada,
1987).
66. Paul R. Higate (ed.), Military Masculinities: Identity and the State (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2003); Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies,
Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion, 1996).
67. Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 30.
68. David H. J. Morgan, ‘Theater of War: Combat, the Military, and Masculinities,’
in Theorizing Masculinities, eds Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (London:
Sage, 1994), 168.
69. Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture (London:
Reaktion Books, 2000).
70. Farid Chenoune, A History of Men’s Fashion (Paris: Flammarion, 1993); Jennifer
Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London: Routledge,
1994); Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and
City Life 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); David
Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850
(London: University of California Press, 2002).
71. John Carl Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 113.
72. Chenoune, A History of Men’s Fashion; Craik, The Face of Fashion.
73. Breward, The Hidden Consumer.
74. Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity, 164.
75. Christopher Breward, ‘Cultures, Identities, Histories: Fashioning a Cultural
Approach to Dress,’ Fashion Theory 2, 4 (1998), 301–313.
76. Judy Attfield, ‘Beyond the Pale: Reviewing the Relationship between
Material Culture and Design History,’ Journal of Design History 12, 4 (1999),
373–380.
77. ‘Tunics-Patterns Adopted’ [68] 426, 18 November 1914, Parliamentary Debates,
British Library.
78. ‘Tunics-Patterns Adopted’.
79. ‘Grievances As to the Kilt’ [69] 634, 10 February 1915, Parliamentary Debates,
British Library.
80. Ivan Gaskell, ‘History of Images,’ in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed.
Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 187.
81. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies, 2nd edn (London: Sage, 2007), 4.
82. Margaret Dikovitskaya, The Study of Visual Culture after the Cultural Turn
(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005).
180 Notes
83. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual

Material (London: Sage, 2012), 146.
84. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason (London: Routledge, 2001); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1991).
85. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 198–202.
86. John Rajchman, ‘The Story of Foucault’s History,’ Social Text 8 (Winter
1983–1984), 3–24.
87. Charles Taylor, ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth,’ Political Theory 12, 2 (May
1984), 164–165.
88. John Rajchman, ‘Foucault’s Art of Seeing,’ in Michel Foucault: Critical
Assessments, ed. Barry Smart (ed.), vol. I (London: Routledge, 1994), 224.
89. Rajchman, ‘The Story of Foucault’s History,’ 8.
90. Michel Foucault, ’Return to History,’ in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology,
ed. James D. Faubion (London: Allen Lane, 1994), 419.
91. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (first published 1969),
(London: Routledge, 2004); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1
(London: Penguin, 1990).
92. Joseph Rouse, ‘Power/Knowledge,’ in Gary Cutting (ed.), Cambridge
Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 93.
93. Rouse, ‘Power/Knowledge,’ 94.
94. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (first published
1977) (London: Penguin, 1991).
95. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
96. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832): English philosopher, jurist and social
reformer who planned a school as well as a prison and founded University
College London.
97. Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism,’ in Rethinking Architecture, ed. Neil Leach
(London: Routledge, 1997), 361.
98. Brian McVeigh, ‘Wearing Ideology: How Uniforms Discipline Minds and
Bodies in Japan,’ Fashion Theory 2, 1 (1997), 195.
99. Daniel Purdy, ‘Sculptured Soldiers and the Beauty of Discipline: Herder,
Foucault and Masculinity,’ in Body Dialectics in the Age of Goethe, eds
Marianne Henn and Holgar A. Pausch, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren
Germanistik, Amsterdam, vol. 55 (2003), 23–45.
100. Purdy, ‘Sculptured Soldiers and the Beauty of Discipline,’ 45.
101. Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and
Saying (London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 302 (citing Foucault,
Discipline and Punish, 217).
102. ‘Khaki As It Appears against a European Landscape: Natural Colour
Photographs of the British Service Uniform as Worn in the War,’ Illustrated
London News, 9 September 1916.
2 The Kitchener Image and First World War Recruitment

1. Scott Hughes Myerly, British Military Spectacle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996), 53–66.
Notes 181
2. John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme
(London: Penguin, 1983), 220.
3. Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914–16
(Manchester: Manchester University Press), 104, for recruitment figures from
October 1914 and February 1915.
4. Cate Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War
(London: Allen Lane, 1977), 53.
5. ‘Which Ought You to Wear?’ IWM PST 7664.
6. ‘If the Cap Fits You Join the Army Today,’ IWM PST 5146 (date unknown).
7. Laura Ugolini, Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain 1880–1939
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 71–98.
8. Harry Harding, From the City and the Plough: A Memoir of the 1914–18 War,
unpublished memoir, Department of Documents, IWM 80/28/1.
9. Arthur Marwick, Britain in the Century of Total War (London: Pelican, 1970),
95–110.
10. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (London: Pimlico, 2004), 14–15.
11. Philip Warner, ‘To Those about to Enlist by one who has tried it,’ Army Life in
the ’90s (London: Country Life, 1975), 12.
12. Gwyn Harries-Jenkins, The Army in Victorian Society (University of Hull Press,
1993), 9–10.
13. John Keegan, ‘Regimental Ideology,’ in War, Economy and the Military Mind,
eds Andrew Wheatcroft and Geoffrey Best (Croom Helm: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1976), 7–15.
14. John Keegan, ‘Regimental Ideology,’ 3–18.
15. Keith Simpson, The Old Contemptibles (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1981), 24–25.
16. Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, 6–24.
17. Simpson, The Old Contemptibles, 25.
18. Simpson, The Old Contemptibles, 26.
19. Major R. M. Barnes, Regiments and Uniforms of the British Army (London:
Seeley, 1950), 30 (Plate XX, 51).
20. Hew Strachan, ‘The Origins of the 1855 Uniform Changes – an Example of
Pre-Crimean Reform,’ Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research LV, 222
(summer 1977), 117.
21. Rachel Woodward and Trish Winter, Sexing the Soldier: The Politics of Gender
and the Contemporary British Army (London: Routledge, 2007), 23.
(Manchester: Manchester University Press), 256.
23. Martin van Creveld, ‘World War I and the Revolution in Logistics,’ in Great
War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, eds
Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 59.
24. Cited in Malcolm Brown, Tommy Goes to War (Gloucestershire: Tempus and
Imperial War Museum, 1999), 46–47, but originally taken from the 1915
notebook of Elmer Wilfred Cotton, Private, Lance-Sergeant and Sergeant of
the 5th Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers, to illustrate the weighty pack
carried by infantrymen usually totalling over 60 pounds.
25. John Morton Osborne, The Voluntary Recruiting Movement, 1914–1916
(London: Garland, 1982), 7. The regular army recruiting service, unprepared
182 Notes
for the civilian response, relied on a voluntary recruiting movement to

manage the process during 1914.
26. ‘Your King and Country Need You – a Call to Arms,’ IWM PST 0581.
27. ‘Britons Join Your Country’s Army,’ IWM PST 2734.
28. Morton Osborne, The Voluntary Recruiting Movement, 16; Keith Surridge, ‘More
than just a great poster: Lord Kitchener and the image of the military hero,’
Historical Research 74, 185 (2001).
29. Paul Jobling and David Crowley, Design: Reproduction and Representation since
1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 107–136.
30. Morton Osborne, The Voluntary Recruiting Movement, 21–31.
31. Philip Warner, Kitchener: The Man behind the Legend (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1985), 140.
32. Warner, Kitchener, 173–196.
33. Trevor Royle, The Kitchener Enigma (London: Michael Joseph, 1985), 254.
34. Surridge, ‘More than just a great poster,’ 307.
35. John MacKenzie, ‘Heroic Myths of Empire,’ in Popular Imperialism and the
Military 1850–1950, ed. J. M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1992), 109–138.
36. MacKenzie, ‘Heroic Myths of Empire,’ 134.
37. John Tosh, ‘Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain,’ Journal of
British Studies, 44 (2005), 340.
38. Trevor Royle, The Kitchener Enigma (London: Michael Joseph, 1985), 255.
39. Court dress jacket of a privy councillor worn by Field Marshal Lord Kitchener
when Secretary of State for War, 1914–16, exhibit no.17, First World War
permanent collection, Imperial War Museum.
40. Allan Peterkin, One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair
(Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001), 156–158.
41. Hughes Myerly, British Military Spectacle, 148–149, on the view of commen-
tators in the early 1880s who saw the military moustache as a product of
French taste, an unnecessary luxury and very un-English.
42. ‘Moustache Now Optional,’ Military Mail, 13 October 1916, 2.
43. Warner, Kitchener, 153–154. Warner illustrated Kitchener’s eccentricity by
describing a wilful flouting of dress regulation. In March 1907 Kitchener had
a disagreement with the Duke of Connaught, at that time Inspector-General
of Overseas Forces. Having arrived in Calcutta, his reception stipulated a
dress regulation of ‘full dress-white,’ and he turned up wearing white gloves
and a crimson sash, both incorrect, but insisting that everybody else was out
of step, and attracting the suspicion of the Duke, who felt that he was well
aware of the dress regulations.
44. ‘Our Fashion Plate,’ Tailor and Cutter, 8 Oct. 1914, 800.
45. ‘Your King and Country Need You,’ Daily Mirror, 27 August 1914, 6.
46. Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning, 50.
47. Michael L. Sanders and Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda during the First
World War, 1914–18 (London: Macmillan, 1982).
48. ‘Why Aren’t You in Khaki?’ IWM PST 5153.
49. Dress Regulations for the Army 1911 and Regulations for the Clothing of the
Army 1914, HMSO Imperial War Museum, Department of Books.
50. Hughes Myerly, British Military Spectacle, 30–52.
51. Field Service Regulations, Part 1, Operations, 1909 (reprinted with amend-
ments, 1914), 13–14, Department of Printed Books, Imperial War Museum.
Notes 183
52. Spiers, The Army and Society 1815–1914, for discussion of the dominance of
the human factor in nineteenth-century beliefs in the British army about
military success. Harries-Jenkins, The Army in Victorian Society, for discussion
of the culture of the Victorian Army and particularly the emphasis placed on
‘character’ as a feature of heroic behaviour, which persisted up to the First
World War.
53. Health Memoranda for Soldiers, in papers of A. E. Schulz, IWM 06/121/1,
Department of Documents, Imperial War Museum, 4.
54. Woodward and Winter, Sexing the Soldier, 61.
55. Health Memoranda for Soldiers, 5.
56. Deborah Avant, ‘From Mercenary to Citizen Armies: Explaining Change in
the Practice of War,’ International Organization 54, 1 (Winter 2000), 54.
57. Tim Travers, The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the
Emergence of Modern War 1900–1918 (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2003), 43.
58. Waldemar Kaempffert, ‘War and Technology,’ American Journal of Sociology
46, 4 (1941), 441.
59. ‘To the Young Women of London,’ IWM PST 4903.
60. Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning, 56.
61. Olive Anderson, ‘The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian
Britain,’ English Historical Review 86 (1971), 46–72.
62. Anderson, ‘The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain,’ 46.
63. Michael Adams, Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).
64. Maurizia Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth
Century (Oxford: Harper Collins, 1996), 84.
65. Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh, 85.
66. Allen Warren, ‘Popular Manliness: Baden-Powell, scouting and the develop-
ment of manly character,’ in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity
in Britain and America, 1800–1940, eds J. A. Mangan and James Walvin
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 200–201.
67. Warren, ‘Popular Manliness,’ 213.
68. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War
(London: Reaktion, 1996), 30.
69. ‘Kitchener! The Secret of His Death Revealed,’ John Bull, 9 June 1917, 10.
70. Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning, 54–55.
71. ‘There Is Still a Place in Line for You,’ IWM PST 11509.
72. ‘Be Ready!’ IWM PST 5139.
73. ‘Blanco,’ John Bull, 10 November 1917, 22.
74. Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That (first published 1929) (London: Penguin,
2000), 106.
75. ‘Blanco,’ John Bull, 10 Nov. 1917, 22.
76. ‘Come Now – Be Honest with Yourself,’ IWM PST 5072.
77. Papers of Cecil Gordon Harper, ‘A Subaltern’s Memoir of the 10th Battalion
Gordon Highlanders from July 1914 to July 1915,’ by Beryl and Stuart Blythe
(eds), January 1998, 2 IWM 98/2/1 Department of Documents.
78. Charles Messenger, Call to Arms: The British Army 1914–18 (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005), 94.
79. Messenger, Call to Arms, 95.
80. Messenger, Call to Arms, 95.
81. Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, 257.
184 Notes
82. Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, 257. Minutes of directors meeting quoted in discus-
sion of uniforms and equipment, with source from National Archives quoted
as WO 107/21.
83. Matthew Richardson, The Tigers: 6th, 7th, 8th & 9th (Service) Battalions of the
Leicestershire Regiment (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2000), 51.
84. ‘Uniform for Lord Kitchener’s Army,’ Tailor and Cutter, 5 November
1914, 877.
85. ‘Uniform for Lord Kitchener’s Army, 877.
86. Papers of Cecil Gordon Harper ‘A Subaltern’s Memoir,’ 11.
89. Sent by George Wilkinson, Pte. 575, 10th Batt Royal Fusiliers, 8 Platoon, B
Coy, Windmill Hill Camp, Ludgershall, near Andover, Hampshire; card made
by Inter-Art Co., Red Lion Square, London WC, ‘K.A.’ series, papers of G. A.
Wilkinson, IWM Con. Shelf.
90. ‘Delay in Providing Uniforms,’ 26 November 1914 [68], 1453, Parliamentary
Debates, British Library.
91. David French, ‘The Strategy of Unlimited Warfare? Kitchener, Robertson, and
Haig,’ in Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front,
1914–1918, eds Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 289.
92. Rudyard Kipling, The New Army in Training (London: MacMillan, 1915), 5–6.
93. Kipling, The New Army in Training, 5–6.
94. Kipling, The New Army in Training, 5–6.
95. Richardson, The Tigers, 51.
96. Ian Hay, The First Hundred Thousand (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood,
1920), 83.
97. Richardson, The Tigers, 57 (quoted from D. A. Bacon, unpublished typescript
memoir, Leicestershire Record Office [LRO], 14).
98. Richardson, The Tigers, 57 (quoted from D. A. Bacon, 14).
99. Richardson, The Tigers, 57 (quoted from D. A. Bacon, 14).
3 Fashioning the Civilian Soldier

1. ‘The Tidiness of Mr. Thomas Atkins,’ The War Illustrated, 26 December
1914, 154.
2. ‘The Tidiness of Mr. Thomas Atkins,’ 154.
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
4. Captain E. John Solano, Drill and Field Training, Imperial Army Series (London:
John Murray, 1915), 7.
(London: Reaktion, 1999).
6. Allan Mazur, Julie Mazur and Caroline Keating, ‘Military Rank Attainment of
a West Point Class: Effects of Cadets’ Physical Features,’ American Journal of
Sociology 90, 1 (1984), 125–150.
7. Laura Ugolini, Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain 1880–1939
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 98.
Notes 185
8. Harry Brod, ‘Some Thoughts on Some Histories of Some Masculinities,’ in

Theorizing Masculinities, eds Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (London: Sage,
1994), 82–96; Michael Kimmel and Michael Messner, Men’s Lives (7th edn)
(Boston: Pearson, 2007), use this model to explore how male identity is devel-
oped through cultural practices and variously experienced by men histori-
cally, geographically according to class, age, race, nationality and sexuality.
9. Rachel Woodward and Trish Winter, Sexing the Soldier: The Politics of Gender
and the Contemporary British Army (London: Routledge, 2007).
10. ‘Tommy’s Very “Close Crop,”’ Daily Mirror, 27 April 1915, 3.
11. ‘Uniform Suits You To a “T” My Lad,’ Daily Mirror, 1 October 1916, 1.
12. Joanne Entwistle, ‘‘Power Dressing’ and the Construction of the Career
Woman,’ in Buy This Book: Studies in Advertising and Consumption, eds M.
Nava et al. (London: Routledge, 1997), 11.
13. Trudi Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1998).
14. John M. Bourne, ‘The British Working Man in Arms,’ in Facing Armageddon:
The First World War Experience, eds Hugh Cecil and Peter Liddle (Barnsley: Pen
and Sword, 1996), 336–352.
15. C. B. Otley, ‘The Social Origins of British Army Officers,’ Sociological Review
1970, 229.
16. John M. Bourne, Britain and the Great War 1914–1918 (London: Edward
Arnold, 1989), 199–214, for a discussion of sources of morale and discipline
in an army made up largely by volunteer recruits.
17. From Desk to Trench: The Making of a British Soldier, Library of Congress,
Washington DC, Stamford, printed by J. E. C. Potter, 1918 (approx);
‘Enlistment: Recruits have kit fitted,’ Photographic Collection, Imperial War
Museum, Q30069; ‘Enlistment: Serving out kits to recruits,’ Photographic
Collection, Imperial War Museum, Q30059.
18. Q30060, ‘Enlistment: Measuring recruits with kit,’ Photographic Collection,
Imperial War Museum.
19. From Desk to Trench, 6–7.
20. From Desk to Trench, 1.
22. Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People (London: Macmillan,
1985), 37.
23. John Horne ‘Masculinity in politics and war in the age of nation-states and
world wars, 1850–1950,’ in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, eds
Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2004), 22–40.
24. Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage, 1993), 5.
25. Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History (Cambridge: Cambridge
26. Ben Fine, The World of Consumption (2nd edn) (London: Routledge, 2002),
176–186.
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 256–257.
28. E. M. Lloyd, Experiments in State Control (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1924), 19.
29. Lloyd, Experiments in State Control, 24.
186 Notes
30. Lloyd, Experiments in State Control, for a fuller discussion of the history of
supply of clothing and other equipment of the British Army.
31. J. McNeill and A. Tulloch, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Supplies
of the British Army in the Crimea (London: Harrison & Sons, 1855).
32. ‘Memorandum on the Organization of the Army Clothing Department,
1855–1893,’ National Archives WO 377/44.
33. ‘Memorandum on the Organization of the Army Clothing Department,
1855–1893.’
34. W. Y. Carman, Dress Regulations for the Army 1900, (Arms and Armour series,
1980; facsimile of War Office, Dress Regulations for the Officers of the Army,
London: HMSO, 1900), 1.
35. Carman, Dress Regulations for the Army 1900, 1.
36. Michael MacDonagh, In London during the Great War: The Diary of a Journalist
(London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1935), 46–47.
38. ‘Sums Paid to Master-Tailors for Alteration of Tunics,’ 25 July 1916 [84], 1549,
Parliamentary Debates, British Library.
39. Gwyn Harries-Jenkins, The Army in Victorian Society (Hull: University of Hull
Press, 1993).
40. There were some minor changes to official regulations, the most notable
being the collar for officers introduced in 1912, which altered the original
1911 dress regulations.
41. Dress Regulations for the Army 1911, HMSO, Imperial War Museum,
Department of Printed Books.
42. Regulations for the Clothing of the Army 1914, HMSO, Imperial War
Museum, Department of Printed Books.
43. Dress Regulations for the Army, 5.
44. Regulations for the Clothing of the Army, 42.
46. Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, 256–277.
47. Priced Vocabulary of Clothing and Necessaries, 1915, HMSO, Imperial War
48. ‘British Military Service Dress Uniforms,’ Tailor and Cutter, 18 November
1915, 834–837.
50. Regulations for the Clothing of the Army, 156–159.
52. W. Aldrich, ‘The Impact of Fashion on the Cutting Practices for the Women’s
Tailored Jacket 1800–1927,’ Textile History 34, 2 (2003), 135.
53. Aldrich, ‘The Impact of Fashion on the Cutting Practices for the Women’s
Tailored Jacket,’ 135.
55. Christopher Breward, ‘Manliness, Modernity and the Shaping of Male
Clothing,’ in Body Dressing, eds Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson
(Oxford: Berg, 2001), 165–181.
56. ‘Tailoring in the Trenches,’ Tailor and Cutter, 6 April 1916, 241.
57. ‘Sums Paid to Master-Tailors for Alteration of Tunics,’ 25 July 1916 [84], 1549,
58. ‘Sums Paid to Master-Tailors for Alteration of Tunics.’
Notes 187
59. Anne Williamson, A Patriot’s Progress: Henry Williamson and the First World
War (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 48–49.
60. Stephen Pope and Elizabeth A. Wheal (eds), The Macmillan Dictionary of the
First World War (London: Macmillan, 1997), 206.
61. W. D. F. Vincent, The Cutter’s Practical Guide to the Cutting and Making of All
Kinds of British Military Uniforms, The John Williamson Co. Ltd., London
College of Fashion Tailoring Archive.
62. Vincent, The Cutter’s Practical Guide, 51–55.
63. ‘Fashions at the Front,’ Men’s Wear, 18 August 1917, 143.
64. ‘Provision of Clothing and Equipment’ 14 March 1916 [80] 1939 and 1972–
1974, Parliamentary Debates, British Library.
65. ‘Provision of Clothing and Equipment.’
66. ‘The Clothing Trade and the Great War,’ supplement to Men’s Wear, 1
September 1917, i.
67. ‘The Clothing Trade and the Great War,’ ii.
68. ‘The Strength of the Clothing Industry,’ Men’s Wear, 1 May 1915, 133.
69. ‘Equipment and Clothing – Provision for Cleaning and Repair,’ 1 March
1917 [90], 2192, Parliamentary Debates, British Library.
70. Aldershot Stores advertisement, Military Mail, 7 January 1916, 11.
71. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1991), 136.
72. ‘Socks Supplied by Private Enterprise,’ 17 November 1914, [68] 326,
73. ‘Women and War: How to Knit and Crochet Articles Necessary to the Health
and Comfort of Our Soldiers and Sailors,’ published by Needlecraft Ltd.,
Manchester and London 1914–1918, acc. no: 8208–203/3, National Army
Museum.
74. Papers of Captain Hon. E. F. P. Lubbock 1914–1917, IWM PP/MCR/406 &
97/12/1, Dept. of Documents, Imperial War Museum; papers of George A.
Wilkinson, IWM Con Shelf, Dept. of Documents, Imperial War Museum;
‘Letters of Gratitude from Soldiers, First World War,’ IWM Misc. 215, Dept. of
Documents, Imperial War Museum; papers of Tom Thorpe, IWM Con Shelf,
Dept. of Documents, Imperial War Museum.
75. Cecil Gordon Harper, A Subaltern’s Memoir of the 10th Battalion Gordon
Highlanders from July 1914 to July 1915, Beryl and Stuart Blythe (eds), Jan.
1998, 12, IWM 98/2/1, Dept. of Documents, Imperial War Museum.
76. ‘Women and War,’ front cover.
77. ‘Women and War,’ 2. Illustrations of the completed knitted garments appear
to be adapted from photographs. In all but one illustration (balaclava on
p. 3), parts of the body have been omitted, but garments take on the shape of
the human body.
78. Paul Ward, ‘“Women of Britain Say Go”: Women’s Patriotism in the First
World War,’ Twentieth Century British History 12, 1 (2001), 23–45.
79. Ward, ‘“Women of Britain Say Go,”’ 31.
80. ‘Winter Clothing for the Troops,’ 17 November 1914, [68] 325, Parliamentary
81. Catherine Reilly (ed.), The Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry and Verse
(London, Virago, 1997), 89–90.
82. Papers of Captain Hon. E. F. P. Lubbock 1914–1917, IWM PP/MCR/406 &
97/12/1, Dept. of Documents, Imperial War Museum.
188 Notes
83. Ward, ‘“Women of Britain Say Go,”’ 30.

84. Tom Thorpe, letters to family while serving as an NCO with the 2nd/9th
Battalion Hampshire Regiment, IWM Con Shelf, Dept. of Documents,
85. Tom Thorpe, letters to family.
4 ‘Quakers in Khaki’: Conscientious Objectors’

Resistance to Uniform
1. The Herald of the Folk was a quarterly review of the cooperative woodcraft
fellowship, which was set up after the First World War with a distinct anti-
military agenda.
2. Reginald Stamp, ‘A War Resister in Prison,’ Herald of the Folk 1, 1, March
1927, 4.
3. John Rae, Conscience and Politics: The British Government and the Conscientious
Objector to Military Service 1916–1919 (London: Oxford University Press,
1970).
4. Constance Brathwaite, Conscientious Objection to Various Compulsions under
British Law (York: William Sessions, 1995), 156.
5. Rae, Conscience and Politics, 101.
6. Rae, Conscience and Politics.
7. A government circular issued under the 1916 Military Service Act defined
conscientious objection. Military Service Act, 1916, WO 32/9348, National
Archives. Also, see ‘First World War: Conscientious Objectors and exemp-
tions from service 1914–1918,’ National Archives, www.nationalarchives.
gov.uk/records/research-guides/first-world-war-conscientious-objectors.htm
(accessed 21 August 2011).
9. ‘The Military Uniform: Its Psychological Effect,’ Men’s Wear, 14 July 1917, 32,
EMAP archive, Special Collections, University of the Arts, London.
10. Lois S. Bibbings, ‘Images of Manliness: The Portrayal of Soldiers and
Conscientious Objectors in the Great War,’ Social and Legal Studies 12, 3
(2003), 335–358.
11. Lois S. Bibbings, Telling Tales about Men: Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors
to Military Service during the First World War (Manchester: Manchester
12. Felicity Goodall, A Question of Conscience: Conscientious Objection in the Two
World Wars (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 1.
13. ‘Quakers in Khaki,’ Illustrated London News, 5 February 1916, 163, British
Library.
14. ‘Quakers in Khaki,’ 163.
15. Peter Brock (ed.), These Strange Criminals: An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by
Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2004).
16. ‘Percy’s Progress in the Army,’ front page, Daily Sketch, 15 April 1916, British
Library.
17. ‘Percy’s Progress in the Army.’
18. Bibbings, ‘Images of Manliness,’ 335–358.
Notes 189
19. Thomas C. Kennedy, British Quakerism 1860–1920: The Transformation of a

Religious Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 338.
20. Prisoners for Peace: An account by Fred J. Murfin of his experiences as a conscien-
tious objector during the 1914–18 war, Temp MSS 772, 3, Library of the Religious
Society of Friends, London. Emphasis in original.
21. Prisoners for Peace.
22. ‘Uniform of Officers,’ 17 May 1916 [82], 1521, Parliamentary Debates, British
Library.
23. Prisoners for Peace, 3.
24. Prisoners for Peace, 3–4.
25. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (first published 1990) (London: Routledge,
2007), 45.
27. The Friend, 30 March 1917, 242, the Library for the Religious Society of
Friends, London.
28. Goodall, A Question of Conscience, 13.
30. ‘Persecution in England (under the Military Service Act) 1916’ (A notebook
compiled by H. J. Hosmer Boorman), Labour Leader, 15/6/16, IWM Misc 2614,
Dept. of Documents, Imperial War Museum.
31. Bourke, Dismembering the Male.
32. John Rajchman, ‘The Story of Foucault’s History,’ Social Text 8 (1983), 11.
33. Goodall, A Question of Conscience, 11.
35. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), 95.
36. ‘Persecution in England.’
37. J. S. Duckers,‘Handed Over’: The Prison Experiences of Mr. J. Scott Duckers,
Solicitor, of Chancery Lane, under the Military Service Act, London: C. W. Daniel,
1917, 29, Library for the Religious Society of Friends, London.
38. Duckers,‘Handed Over.’
44. ‘Persecution in England.’
5 ‘Improvised Officers’: Khaki and Social Class

1. Dress Regulations for the Army 1911, HMSO, 9, Imperial War Museum.
2. ‘Tunics – Pattern Adopted,’ 18 November 1914, [68] 426, Parliamentary
3. ‘With the British Officer in the Ypres Salient,’ The Sphere, 5 June 1915,
240–241.
4. Dress Regulations for the Army, 6.
5. Gwyn Harries-Jenkins, The Army in Victorian Society (Hull: University of Hull
Press, 1993).
190 Notes
1978), 67.
7. ‘With “Tommy Atkins” at the Battle Front,’ The Sphere, 12 December
1914, 260.
8. ‘With “Tommy Atkins” at the Battle Front,’ 260.
9. W. D. F. Vincent, Cutter’s Practical Guide to the Cutting and Making of All Kinds
of British Military Uniforms (London: Williamson, ca. 1914–18), 2.
10. Winter, Death’s Men, 51.
11. T. H. Holding, Uniforms of the British Army Navy and Court, 1894, 5, British
Library.
12. ‘British Military Service Dress Uniforms,’ Tailor and Cutter, 18 November
1915, 834.
13. ‘With the British Officer in the Ypres Salient,’ 240–241.
Press, 1975), 40.
15. Williams, The Country and the City, 22, for a full discussion on the use of
pastoral metaphors in late-17th-century writing, which started in Williams’s
view of adopting a moral attitude to imply escape from increased social prob-
lems. He locates the neopastoral in the country house and its estate, which
seemed to him a decisive moment in relations between urban and rural in
British culture.
16. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 235.
17. Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England,’ in Englishness: Politics and
Culture 1880–1920, eds Robert Coles and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm,
1986), 62–88.
18. David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion, 1998), 25–61.
19. Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (London: Faber and Faber,
1937), 266.
20. Edward Spiers, ‘The Officer Corps,’ in The Army and Society 1815–1914
(London: Longman, 1980), 1–34.
21. Deborah Avant, ‘From Mercenary to Citizen Armies: Explaining Change in
the Practice of War,’ International Organization 54, 1 (2000), 57.
22. John Keegan, ‘Regimental Ideology,’ in Andrew Wheatcroft and Geoffrey Best
(eds), War, Economy and the Military Mind (London: Rowman and Littlefield,
1976), 7–8.
23. Gary D. Sheffield, Leadership in the Trenches: Officer-Man Relations, Morale and
Discipline in the British Army in the Era of the First World War (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 2000), 2.
24. C. B. Otley, ‘The Social Origins of British Army Officers,’ Sociological Review
18, 2 (1970), 215.
25. John M. Bourne, ‘The British Working Man in Arms,’ in Facing Armageddon:
The First World War Experience, eds Hugh Cecil and Peter Liddle (Barnsley: Pen
and Sword, 1996), 338.
26. Sheffield, Leadership in the Trenches, 29; Sheffield draws on the work of J. M.
Winter, The Great War and the British People (London: Macmillan, 1987), to
contend that more officers were commissioned during the First World War
from non-traditional social classes than in any previous war. High casualties
and heavy junior officer losses forced the army to search out officer material
beyond its traditional sources between 1914 and 1918.
Notes 191
27. Martin Petter, ‘“Temporary Gentlemen” in the Aftermath of the Great War:
Rank, Status and the Ex-Officer Problem,’ Historical Journal 37, 1 (1994),
127–152, describes the make-up of the British officer corps in the First World
War, pointing out that more than half were middle class; the manual working
class made up around 15 to 20 per cent, leaving a quarter from the public
school–educated landed and professional elite.
28. Keith Simpson, ‘The Officers,’ in A Nation in Arms: A Social Study of the
British Army in the First World War, eds Ian F. W. Beckett and Keith Simpson
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 70.
29. Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, 285.
32. Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That (London: Penguin, 2000), 65.
33. Graves, Good-bye to All That, 65.
34. Graves, Good-bye to All That, 150.
35. ‘The Young Officer Has to Learn His Business Just like a “Tommy,”’ 1.
36. ‘The Two Classes,’ John Bull, 11 September 1915, 17.
37. Charles Messenger, Call to Arms: The British Army 1914–18 (London: Cassell,
2005), 288–334.
39. Avant, ‘From Mercenary to Citizen Armies,’ 58.
40. ‘Outfit Grants,’ 48/Gen/6066, approximately 1927, uncatalogued document,
Department of Uniforms, Badges and Medals, National Army Museum.
41. ‘Outfit Grants.’
44. ‘Letter dated 14th December 1914 from the War Office to all General Officers
Commanding at Home, Channel Islands, Central Force and Expeditionary
Force and to Secretary, National Rifle Association,’ uncatalogued document,
Department of Uniforms, Badges and Medals, National Army Museum.
45. ‘Officers’ Outfit Allowance Current Regulations – Allowance Regulations,
Section 11, Act 72 of 1961,’ uncatalogued document, Department of
Uniforms, Badges and Medals, National Army Museum.
46. ‘Letter dated 14th December 1914 from the War Office to all General
Officers.’
47. ‘Army Orders Affecting Outfit Allowance Issued during 1914–1919,’ uncata-
logued document, Department of Uniforms, Badges and Medals, National
Army Museum.
48. ‘Uniform and Equipment Allowance,’ 17 May 1915 [71], 1975, Parliamentary
49. Major M. Barnes, A History of the Regiments and Uniforms of the British Army
(London: Seeley, 1950), 236.
50. ‘Territorial Dress,’ Tailor and Cutter, 3 September 1914, 725.
51. ‘An Urgent Matter for Tailors,’ Tailor and Cutter, 3 September 1914, 731.
52. ‘An Urgent Matter for Tailors,’ 731.
53. Catherine Horwood, Keeping Up Appearances: Fashion and Class between the
Wars (Stroud: Sutton, 2005), 26.
54. Caroline Dakers, The Countryside at War 1914–18 (London: Constable,
1987), 78.
192 Notes
55. J. D. Campbell, ‘Training for Sport Is Training for War’: Sport and the
Transformation of the British Army, 1860–1914,’ International Journal of the
History of Sport 17, 4 (2000), 21–58, for a discussion of the role of sport in
the transformation of the British army and how it was used in training and
morale building. Competitive games fostered upper-class identity and were a
useful class marker and a form of social indoctrination.
56. Richard Holt, ‘The Amateur Body and the Middle-Class Man: Work, Health
and Style in Victorian Britain,’ Sport in History 26, 3, December (2006), 363.
57. ‘Fox’s F. I. P. Puttees,’ The Sphere, 17 July 1915, 52.
58. ‘Fox’s F. I. P. Puttees,’ 52.
59. Breward, The Hidden Consumer, 246–253.
60. Laura Ugolini, ‘Ready-to-Wear or Made to Measure? Consumer Choice in the
British Menswear Trade, 1900–1939,’ Textile History 34, 2 (2003), 198.
62. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes (London: Routledge, 1994), 233–258,
for the original use of the term ‘pleasure-culture of war’; Michael Paris,
Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture (London: Reaktion,
2000).
63. David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–
1850 (London: University of California Press, 2002), 169–172.
64. Coracias Garrulus (ed.), Open Spaces (London: Burberry, 1926), 170, Burberry
Heritage Archive.
65. Burberry catalogue, ca. 1915, Burberry Heritage Archive.
66. Tadley and District Society Project News, 8 June 2005, 1–3.
67. Open Spaces, 245.
68. William Corner, The Story of the 34th Company (Middlesex) Imperial Yeomanry
from the Point of View of Private no. 6243 (London: Unwin, 1902).
69. Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising
(London: Marion Boyars, 1978), 14.
70. ‘Active Service Kit,’ supplement to Country Life, 22 August 1914, xx, Burberry
Archive.
72. Aquascutum called itself a ‘military tailor,’ and a wartime advertisement that
described its military clothing as ‘Aquascutum Active Service’ offered ‘khaki
uniforms,’ ‘service waterproofs’ and ‘field coating.’ The Times, 6 October
1914, 11.
73. ‘The Tielocken,’ The Bystander, 25 July 1917, 95.
75. Jane Tynan, ‘Military Dress and Men’s Outdoor Leisurewear: Burberry’s Trench
Coat in First World War Britain,’ Journal of Design History 24, 2 (2011).
76. Burberry also made charitable gestures during and after the war. The firm
reproofed Burberry military weatherproofs free of charge to officers so as
not to impose a ‘tax’ on them. In 1918 Burberry also operated a scheme,
the Blighty Tweed Scheme, for disabled war veterans; it provided them with
looms and instructions to make tweeds, each of which were marked with the
name of the craftsman.
77. Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 149.
78. Tynan, ‘Military Dress and Men’s Outdoor Leisurewear,’ 139–156.
Notes 193
79. Jay Winter, ‘Popular Culture in Wartime Britain,’ in European Culture in the
Great War: The Arts, Entertainment and Propaganda 1914–18, eds A. Roshwald
and R. Stites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 308–348.
80. Peter Dewey, War and Progress: Britain 1914–1945 (London: Longman,
1997), 31.
81. ‘Whiteleys,’ Daily Mail, 26 September 1914, 7.
82. J. M. McEwan, ‘The National Press during the First World War: Ownership
and Circulation,’ Journal of Contemporary History 17, 3 (1982), 459–486.
83. ‘Frederick Gorringe,’ Daily Mail, 19 October 1914, 1.
84. ‘Frederick Gorringe,’ 1.
85. ‘Debenham and Freebody,’ Illustrated War News, 2 December 1914, iii.
86. ‘A. W. Gamage,’ John Bull, 20 November 1915, xi.
87. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England 1851–1914
(London: Verso, 1991).
88. ‘Bedford Riding Breeches,’ John Bull, 28 August 1915, 25.
89. ‘Bedford Riding Breeches,’ 25.
90. ‘A. W. Gamage,’ 21.
91. ‘A. W. Gamage,’ 21.
92. ‘A. W. Gamage,’ 21.
6 Fitting In: Race, Ethnicity, and Army Dress

1. Melvin E. Page, ‘Introduction: Black Men in a White Man’s War,’ in Africa and
the First World War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), 1.
2. Page, ‘Introduction: Black Men in a White Man’s War,’ 8.
3. Massia Bibikoff, Our Indians at Marseilles (London: Smith, Elder, 1915), 11.
4. Daily Express, 14 October 1914, 1.
5. See Ch. 1 on khaki (camouflage) and Ch. 2 on the reaction to khaki on British
streets during wartime.
6. Cynthia H. Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in a Divided Society
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 25–26.
7. Jonathan Rutherford, Forever England: Reflections on Masculinity and Empire
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997), 19.
8. David Killingray, ‘Race and Rank in the British Army in the Twentieth
Century,’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 10, 3 (1987), 276.
9. Killingray, ‘Race and Rank,’ 276.
11. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of
Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994).
12. George Mosse, The Image of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 110.
14. Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life
1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); David Kuchta,
The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850 (London:
University of California Press, 2002); Laura Ugolini, Men and Menswear:
Sartorial Consumption in Britain 1880–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
194 Notes
15. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 7.

16. Winston James and Clive Harris (eds), Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora
in Britain (London: Verso, 1993), 3.
17. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
18. John Keegan, ‘Regimental Ideology,’ in War, Economy and the Military Mind,
eds Geoffrey Best and Andrew Wheatcroft (London: Rowman and Littlefield,
1976), 7
19. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 6.
20. Kobena Mercer, ‘Black Hair/Style Politics,’ in Black British Culture and Society,
ed. Kwesi Owusu (London: Routledge, 2000), 113.
21. Marcia Kovitz, ‘The Roots of Military Masculinity,’ in Military Masculinities:
Identity and the State (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 1–14.
22. David Morgan, ‘Theatres of War: Combat, the Military and Masculinities,’
in Theorizing Masculinities, eds Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (London:
Sage, 1994), 166; Gabriel Koureas, Memory, Masculinity and National Identity
in British Visual Culture, 1914–1930 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 118.
23. ‘To Fight Side by Side with the British in France: Indian Troops,’ Illustrated
London News, 5 September 1914, 361.
24. ‘To Fight Side by Side,’ 361.
25. Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India,’ in The Invention
of Tradition, eds Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge
26. Philippa Levine, ‘Battle Colors: Race, Sex and Colonial Soldiery in World War
I,’ Journal of Women’s History 9, 4 (1998), 104.
27. George Morton Jack, ‘The Indian Army on the Western Front, 1914–1915: A
Portrait of Collaboration,’ War in History 13, 3 (2006), 329–362.
28. Morton Jack, ‘The Indian Army on the Western Front, 1914–1915,’ 335.
31. ‘Indian troops at bayonet exercise,’ Q.33336, Photographic Collection,
32. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora,’ in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.),
Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1990), 222.
33. Stuart Hall, ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance,’
Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 308.
34. Kevin Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West,
1870–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 164.
35. Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London: Routledge,
1992), 339.
36. Carol Tulloch, ‘“Out of Many, One People”: The Relativity of Dress, Race and
Ethnicity to Jamaica, 1880–1907,’ Fashion Theory 2, 4 (1998), 359–82.
37. Bibikoff, Our Indians at Marseilles, 17.
39. Chris Bellamy, The Gurkhas: Special Force (London: John Murray, 2011), 161.
40. DeWitt C. Ellinwood and S. D. Pradhan, India and World War I (New Delhi:
Manohar, 1978), 56.
Notes 195
41. Ellinwood and Pradhan, India and World War I, 57.

42. ‘Stalwart Indians being decorated,’ Q.70214, Photographic Collection,
43. Thomas Abler, Hinterland Warriors and Military Dress: European Empires and
Exotic Uniforms (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 120.
44. Abler, Hinterland Warriors and Military Dress, 120.
1978), 51.
46. ‘113th Ambulance, British and Indian Troops in Northern France,’ print
(from 70 War Sketches), artist: Paul Sarrut, 22 October 1915, SSB Collection,
www.sikhmuseum.com/artofwar/portraits/index.html (accessed 1 August
2012).
47. ‘Sikh Pioneers, British and Indian Troops in Northern France,’ print
(from 70 War Sketches), artist: Paul Sarrut, 3 August 1915, SSB Collection,
www.sikhmuseum.com/artofwar/camp/index.html (accessed 1 August
2012).
48. ‘Fight: The Indian Empire and the Panoply of War against the Hun,’ The
Graphic, 31 July 1915, 151.
49. ‘Fight: The Indian Empire,’ 151.
50. ‘Indian Lancers on the March: Carnoy, 14 July 1916,’ Q856, Photographic
Collection, Imperial War Museum.
51. ‘Battles of the Somme, 1916. Indian cyclists at the cross roads on Fricourt-
Mametz road. July 1916,’ Q3983, Photographic Collection, Imperial War
Museum.
52. Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers, 25.
53. Jeffrey Greenhut, ‘The Imperial Reserve: The Indian Corps on the Western
Front, 1914–15,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History XII, 1
(1983).
54. Willcocks to Crewe, 31 January 1915. C/54; cited in Greenhut, ‘The Imperial
Reserve,’ 66.
55. Gordon Corrigan, Sepoys in the Trenches: The Indian Corps on the Western Front
1914–1915 (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 1999), 5.
60. David Killingray, ‘All the King’s Men? Blacks in the British Army in the First
World War, 1914–1918,’ in Under the Imperial Carpet: Essays in Black History
1780–1950, eds Rainer Lotz and Ian Pegg (Crawley: Rabbit Press, 1986), 166.
61. Killingray, ‘All the King’s Men?’ 170.
62. Manual of Military Law, 1914, 471.
65. Glenford Howe, Race, War and Nationalism: A Social History of West Indians in
the First World War (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2002), 122–123.
66. Phil Vasili, ‘Walter Daniel Tull, 1888–1918: Soldier, Footballer, Black,’ Race
and Class 38, 2 (1996), 51.
67. Vasili, ‘Walter Daniel Tull, 1888–1918,’ 64.
68. Vasili, ‘Walter Daniel Tull, 1888–1918,’ 65.
196 Notes
69. Levine, ‘Battle Colors: Race, Sex and Colonial Soldiery in World War I,’
104–130.
70. ‘A Dusky Lady Killer,’ Daily Sketch, 10 January 1917.
71. ‘A Dusky Lady Killer.’
72. A. E. Horner, From the Island of the Sea: Glimpses of a West Indian Battalion in
France (Nassau: Guardian, 1919), 8.
73. Howe, Race, War and Nationalism, 46.
74. Richard Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity
and the Development of National Consciousness (Manchester: Manchester
75. Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War, 79.
77. ‘Men of the British West Indies Regiment cleaning their rifles; Albert-Amiens
Road, September 1916,’ Q1202, Photographic Collection, Imperial War
Museum; ‘Men of the British West Indies Regiment cleaning their rifles;
Albert-Amiens Road, September 1916,’ Q1201, Photographic Collection,
78. ‘Inspection of 2nd Contingent British West Indian troops before departure,
Kingston January 1916,’ Q52423, Photographic Collection, Imperial War
Museum.
79. ‘British West Indian troops, physical training, 1916.’ Q52429, Photographic
Collection, Imperial War Museum.
80. Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War, 110–111.
82. ‘Jewish Soldiers’ March: An enthusiastic reception,’ 5 Feb. 1918, 41705, The
Times, 3.
83. ‘Jewish Soldiers’ March,’ 3.
84. ‘In the Communal Armchair: Jews and Recruiting,’ Jewish Chronicle, 26
November 1915, 9.
85. ‘Jews and Recruiting,’ Jewish Chronicle, 19 November 1915, 23.
86. Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine, 1914–1918: British-Jewish-Arab
Relations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 44.
87. Rev. Michael Adler (ed.), British Jewry Book of Honour (London: Caxton,
1922), 1.
88. ‘Jewish Soldiers’ March,’ 3.
89. Friedman, The Question of Palestine, 1914–1918, 44.
90. Friedman, The Question of Palestine, 1914–1918, 46.
91. Adler, British Jewry Book of Honour, 64.
92. ‘The March of the “Judeans” through the City,’ Daily Mirror, February 1918.
93. Michael Wallach, ‘Royal Fusiliers Monument,’ Jewish Chronicle, supplement
1988. Source: Jewish Military Museum, London.
94. Martin Sugarman, ‘The March of the 38th Royal Fusiliers: When the Spirit of
Judah Maccabee Hovered over the Whitechapel Road,’ Jewish Virtual Library
2, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/sugar38rf.html (accessed on
18/06/2012).
95. Jewish Chronicle, 8 February 1918, 5.
96. Pall Mall Gazette, 5 February 1918, 3. Quoted in Sugarman, ‘The March of the
38th Royal Fusiliers,’ Jewish Virtual Library 7, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/
jsource/History/sugar38rf.html (accessed on 18/06/2012).
Notes 197
7 Conclusion: Demobilization and Reconstruction

1. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–
1925 (London: Fontana, 1979), 251–252.
2. Brittain, Testament of Youth, 251–252.
3. Catherine Moriarty, ‘“Through a Picture Only”: Photography and
Commemoration,’ in Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the
Impact of 1914–18, ed. Gail Braybon (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), 43.
4. ‘From Khaki to Goatskin: The Evolution of Our Soldiers’ Dress,’ Illustrated
London News, 27 February 1915, 279.
5. ‘From Khaki to Goatskin,’ 279.
6. ‘From Khaki to Goatskin,’ 279.
7. Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the
Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
Press, 1977).
9. Leonard V. Smith, ‘Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory: Twenty-
Five Years Later,’ History and Theory 40, 2 (2001), 241–260.
10. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European
Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
11. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 227.
12. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture
(London: Bodley Head, 1990), 469.
13. Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the
First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
14. David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–
1850 (London: University of California Press, 2002), 164.
15. ‘Demobilisation Clothing 1918–1926,’ National Archives, WO 32/5541.
16. ‘The Transition from Khaki to “Civvies”: Demobilisation in Full Swing at the
Crystal Palace,’ Illustrated London News, 25 January 1919, 116–117.
17. ‘“Demobilisation and Discharge,” Long, Long Trail: The British Army of
1914–18,’ www.1914–1918.net/demobilisation.htm (accessed 10 August
2012).
18. ‘Demobilisation Clothing 1918–1926,’ National Archives, WO 32/5541.
19. ‘From Khaki to Mufti: The War Office Organisation for Supplying Civilian
Suits to Demobilised Soldiers,’ Men’s Wear, April 1919, 32.
20. ‘From Khaki to Mufti,’ 33.
21. ‘Demobilisation Clothing 1918–1926.’
22. ‘Discharged Soldiers’ Suits,’ Men’s Wear, 29 September 1919, 304.
23. Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of
Remembrance (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 20.
24. Hynes, A War Imagined, 282.
25. Gabriel Koureas, Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual
Culture 1914–1930 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 88.
26. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 29–30.
27. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 102.
28. Catherine Moriarty, ‘“Remnants of Patriotism”: The Commemorative
Representation of the Greatcoat after the First World War,’ Oxford Art Journal
27, 3 (2004), 291–309.
198 Notes
29. Moriarty, ‘“Remnants of Patriotism,”’ 291–309.

30. Royal Artillery Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, London, 1925.
31. Jonathan Black, ‘“Thanks for the Memory”: War memorials, spectatorship
and the trajectories of commemoration 1919–2001,’ in Matters of Conflict:
Material Culture, Memory and the First World War, ed. Nicholas J. Saunders
(London: Routledge, 2004), 141.
32. Black, ‘“Thanks for the Memory,”’ 141.
33. Black, ‘“Thanks for the Memory,”’ 141–143.
34. Royal Artillery Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, London, 1925.
35. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 95.
36. Jay Winter, ‘Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the
Great War: War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century,’ in War and
Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, eds Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 40–60.
39. Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain, 107.
40. King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain, 118.
41. Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That (London: Penguin, 2000), 235.
42. Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People (London: Macmillan, 1985).
43. Ready to Start, Self Portrait, 1917, oil on panel, Sir William Orpen (1878–1931),
IWM ART 2380.
44. ‘How the War May Influence Men’s Fashions’ Daily Mirror, 18 March
1915, 7.
45. ‘How the War May Influence Men’s Fashions,’ 7.
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Index
Abler, Thomas, 4, 140 collar, 53, 105

advertisements, 10, 18, 20, 44, 74–77, collective disciplines, 12, 20, 40, 161
118–127 colonial spectacle, 137
American Civil War, 10 colonial troops, 130–151
Army Clothing Department, 64, comforts, 80–86
69, 163 commemoration, 135, 164–169
Army Contracts Department, 65 Conscientious Objectors, 87–101
army factories, 64 conscription, 87, 90, 95, 100
athleticism, 116, 119–127 consumption, 8, 16, 64, 126
attestation form, 33 countryside, 108, 116, 121, 122
craft, 10, 19, 80, 82–84, 171
Baden-Powell, Robert, 35, 41 Crimean War, 5, 12, 40, 65
balaclava, 12, 79, 80 criminal, 89, 91, 100
barracks, 94, 97, 152, 164 Cutter’s Practical Guide, 72, 73
battlefield, 2, 4, 8, 33, 114, 121,
145, 170 dead, 158, 160, 167, 168
Bedford cord, 105, 126 Debenham and Freebody, 125
Belgium, 122 demobilization, 157, 160, 162–164
belt, 33, 44, 49, 79, 111, 114, 149 Derby Scheme, 5
blue serge uniform, 47, 49 design, 3, 7, 10, 16, 67, 106, 161, 169
body type, 107 discipline, 3, 12, 41, 44, 77,
Boer War, 34, 119 148–149, 161
boots, 33, 44, 74, 91, 98, 105, 110, discourse, 11, 21, 50, 57, 132, 145
149, 159 domestic, 13, 57, 62, 79, 80, 105, 173
Bourke, Joanna, 15, 41, 57, 93, 133 drab, 2–4, 23, 29
Boy Scout Movement, 41 drafting guides, 70–77
Breward, Christopher, 16, 71, 118 dress committee, 18
British Jewry Book of Honour 153 dress history, 11, 15
British West Indies Regiment, 145–149 Dress Regulations, 38, 40, 66–77
British-Jewish regiment, 152–155 dye, 9, 51, 163
Brittain, Vera, 157–159
Burberry, 123 Enloe, Cynthia, 132, 144, 148
Butler, Judith, 14, 93 Entwistle, Joanne, 11, 59
ethnicity, 130, 131, 134, 138, 151
Camouflage, 1–8, 23, 114, 128 exotic dress, 133, 137, 140, 142
cardigan, 12, 33, 98, 125–126
citizen army, 74, 88, 90 fashion, 7, 8, 11, 15, 16, 22, 51, 66,
citizen soldier, 5 79, 148
civilian suit, 20, 156, 162–163 fashion history, 6, 16
cleanliness, 19, 44, 57 fashionable consumption, 11, 15–16
clothes, 18, 22, 29, 39, 61, 65, 90, Flanders waistcoat, 125
96, 137 Foucault, Michel, 12, 21–23, 29, 39,
clothing allowance, 163 77, 87, 90, 94–95, 161
211
212 Index
France, 9, 40, 44, 71, 90, 110, 114, Kitchener, 27–38, 44, 46, 119, 136,
122, 131, 136, 158, 194 153, 171
Friends Service Committee, 87 Kitchener Blue, 19, 47–51
Fussell, Paul, 6, 108, 160 Kitchener stitch, 84
knitting, 14, 20, 79–85
Gamage, 125, 126
gaze, 21, 22, 35, 59, 84, 90, 154, 162 Lahore, 2
gender, 13, 15, 40, 58, 82, 86, 89, 93 Lawrence, T. E., 133
gloves, 79, 82, 83 lieutenant, 2, 72, 146
goatskin, 159 Loos, Battle of, 5, 29
Graves, Robert, 6, 44, 110–112, 170 Lumsden, Sir Harry, 1
greatcoat, 32, 33, 47, 72, 98, 120, 163,
165, 167 Manual of Military Law, 145
grooming, 38–39, 57–58, 77, 85, manuals, 10, 38–40, 53, 55, 66
171, 173 martial race theory, 139, 144, 145
Gurkhas, 138, 144, 145, 147 martial spirit, 35, 51
masculinity, 10, 14, 20, 35, 41, –42,
hair, 30, 58, 62, 91, 96, 110, 124, 135 55, 58, 62, 100, 117, 136
Haldane reforms, 32 measurement, 70–72, 92, 126, 164
hegemonic masculinities, 15, 58, 89, media, 1, 90, 100, 147, 161
93, 132 menswear, 16, 29, 58
helmet, 33, 44, 79, 83, 125, 143, 154, military lace, 69
159, 167 Military log, 70, 72
Holding, T. H., 107 Military Service Act, 5, 88
hygiene, 19, 38–39, 85, 99, 122, Ministry of Munitions, 65
127, 171 mobilization, 9, 32, 44, 63, 85, 96,
119, 152, 160
Imperial War Museum, 35, 148 modernism, 18, 160
imperialism, 131, 132, 135 modernity, 3, 4, 21, 44, 87, 114, 121,
improvised officers, 107, 112 169, 171
Indian army, 136–145 monument, 165–168
Indian Lancers, 131, 136, 143 moustache, 35–36, 111, 124
Indian mutiny, 2, 140 mud, 2, 7, 53, 72, 121, 145,
industry, 71, 161 158–159
muffler, 79
jacket, 18, 33, 35, 47, 71–75, 98, 114, Multi-Terrain Pattern, 1
120, 126 Muscular Christianity, 19, 41, 54,
Jagger, Charles Sargeant, 165, 167, 101, 152, 171
168, 169 Myerly, Scott Hughes, 27
jersey, 79
Judeans, 153 Napoleonic Wars, 5, 10, 40
naval uniform, 14
Keegan, John, 27 NCO, 83
khaki new army, 36, 49, 57, 114
contracts, 53, 65, 72, 85, 115, 116 officers, 124–125, 129
origins, 1–3 new tailoring, 115, 117, 119, 124,
kit, 1, 2, 19, 30, 61, 84, 92, 113, 118, 126, 128
120, 125, 138, 147, 167 newspapers, 10, 19, 23, 55, 76, 87,
bag, 92 89, 90
Index 213
Nicholls, Horace, 60–63 Royal Artillery Memorial, 165,

Norfolk jacket, 75 167–169
Royal Fusiliers, 52, 153
Officer and gentleman, 109, 112,
117, 123 Saïd, Edward, 132
Officer-gentleman tradition, 109, 117 Sarrut, Paul, 140–142
Officers, 3, 9, 18, 38, 65, 80, 95, Sassoon, Seigfried, 6, 109, 110, 112,
105–129 115, 118, 127
Order of the White Feather, 14, 40 science, 9, 70, 71, 77, 169
Orpen, Sir William, 173 sealed patterns, 17, 69, 77
Outfit allowance, 113, 115 service cap, 27, 29, 32, 33, 62, 120,
Outfit grants, 112, 113, 115 124, 149, 158
service dress jacket, 18, 33, 114
Panopticon, 22 sexuality, 6, 146
Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, shaving, 33, 55
27, 34 shirkers, 29, 30, 36, 40, 54
patriotic militarism, 34, 40, 53, 58, 74, shirts, 33, 74, 98, 125
157, 159 shorts, 85
patriotism, 27, 30, 41, 44, 82, 150, 159 Sikh Infantry, 131
Peshawar, 2 Sikh pioneers, 140, 142
photographs, 18, 23, 36, 55, 60–67, soap, 33
85, 131, 138, 148, 153 Society of Friends, 87, 90
pleasure-culture of war, 118, 121 socks, 33, 74, 79, 82, 84, 125
popular culture, 8, 23, 34, 40, 42, 51, soldier, 3, 5, 11, 27, 35, 47, 57, 76,
59, 64, 86, 101, 136, 154, 169 100, 118, 131, 155
portrait, 36, 141, 159, 173 Somme, Battle of, 5, 53, 146
postcard, 49, 52 Special Reserve, 32, 46, 112, 118
prison blanket, 96, 98, 100, 101 spectacle, 7–9, 15, 30, 125, 131, 137,
production, 10, 16, 47, 62–79 143, 154, 162
progress, 11, 91, 153 Spivak, Guyatri, 132
propaganda, 7, 14, 38, 60, 63, 83, 93, sport, 114–128
152, 171 standardize, 3, 32, 51, 67, 135, 156
puttees, 33, 44, 72, 85, 92, 107, 118, status, 30, 57, 106, 134
126, 136, 140, 149, 167 surveillance, 3, 8, 22, 33
Quakers, 87, 90 tailor, 10, 48, 62, 70, 108, 116–126,

153
race, 130–151 tailoring trade, 10, 14, 65, 70, 74, 89,
rank, 32, 39, 61, 69, 72, 105, 108, 127, 108, 116, 118
144, 167 tape measure, 71
recruitment, 19, 27–50, 62, 76, 96, tartan, 9, 49
146, 162 temporary gentlemen, 109, 111
recruitment posters, 19, 29, 34, 40, 54 territorial force, 32, 64, 69
red coat, 4, 30, 48 textiles, 53, 76
regimental depot, 33, 46 textiles trade, 53, 76
regimental ideology, 30 Theis, Friedrich Carl, 2
regimental tailor, 61, 62 tidiness, 44, 55, 56, 57
Regular army, 32, 34, 60, 71, 95, 111 Tommy, 19, 57, 85, 106, 126,
rifle, 4, 33, 44, 97, 111, 148 131, 155
214 Index
training, 12, 36, 46, 50, 57, 61, 109, Virilio, Paul, 8, 23
116, 145, 149, 152 visibility, 2–9, 21, 92, 100, 131, 136,
manual, 39, 55 155, 170
trench coat, 120–123, 128 volunteer, 32–34, 46, 62, 72, 82,
trench warfare, 105, 114, 122, 86, 145
144, 161
trenches, 10, 70, 84, 112, 160, 175 waistcoat, 33, 97, 125
trousers, 32, 33, 47, 49, 72, 74, 98, war literature, 6, 18, 108
107, 148 war memory, 7, 17, 84, 156, 159, 160,
tunic, 29, 47, 67, 71, 72, 105, 110, 162, 164, 168
118, 136, 140, 149, 158 War Office, 46, 55, 60, 65, 69, 70–80,
turban, 131, 136, 138, 139, 142, 143 119, 145, 164
weather, 109, 119, 121, 137,
underclothes, 33, 94 144, 145
uniform, 4, 18, 30, 46, 55, 61, 67, 77, weatherproof coat, 119, 120
88, 106, 124, 130 Winter, Jay, 62, 64, 123, 160, 165, 167
utility, 3, 46, 67, 122, 165, 170 wool, 80–82, 138, 159
vest, 33, 72, 108, 138, 158 Ypres, Battle of, 5, 83, 105, 108
Victorian army, 27, 30, 33, 106
Vincent, W.D.F., 73 Zouave uniform, 149, 150

British Army Uniform and The First World War - Men in Khaki (PDFDrive)

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British Army Uniform and the First World

War: Men in Khaki

List of Figures viii

1 Introduction: Khaki and the First World War 1

Part I Making Men

2 The Kitchener Image and First World War Recruitment 27

Part II Ranking Men

5 ‘Improvised Officers’: Khaki and Social Class 105

2.1 ‘Which Ought You to Wear?’ IWM PST 7664 28

5.1 ‘With “Tommy Atkins” at the Battle Front,’ The Sphere,

as a lieutenant at Peshawar, he raised the Corps of Guides in 1846, and

State directing commanding officers of regiments at home to give the

It is necessary to trace developments in uniform that led to the emergence

standardized up to the twentieth century.19 Uniform dressing started

dominance of this perspective on the war has also distracted atten-

Khaki and visibility

This book is about the military uniform worn by British combatants on

Military uniform and fashionable clothing serve very different

subaltern with the 10th Battalion Gordon Highlanders, was mobilized

of society. According to Ben Fine, conflict was pivotal to standardization

Designing bodies for war

ethic. Daniel Roche argues that the discipline of appearances, which

shirt of Italian fascism, were part of the regime’s construction of citizen-

Khaki and gender

to military punishments meted out to conscientious objectors who

the nineteenth century.71 A renunciation of sartorial excess, taken by

Fashion history and theory has shown the benefits of a convergence

ephemera that trace the specific shape of the systems of provision of

Foucault was concerned with exposing illusions, but he looked to the

this conflict now edges into popular memory, how it is memorialized

This poster appears to construct shirkers as men with a taste for

We wore a tunic, a drab khaki tunic

shirkers from what were taken to be the more desirable recruits. If

Reform and modernization

Historically, visible military spectacle was valued to display the disci-

army reorganization consolidated the identity of the British forces

Military spectacle may have embodied the business of soldiering in the

On his body: 1 pair of boots, 1 pair of braces, 1 service cap, 1 pair

Each recruit reported to the regimental depot to be given a medical

‘Your King and Country Need You’

moustache should now no longer be compulsory in the Army may come

Khaki uniform and new masculinities

action as heroic sacrifice.61 By re-evaluating the soldier, Christian interest

in John Bull in characteristically excessive fashion termed him a ‘War

‘Be Ready! Join Now’

Recruitment images throughout wartime described how military disci-

example, a wartime advertisement for Blanco, a cleaning agent for

In wartime Britain, the project to redesign men’s bodies spread

Given that wartime visual culture sought to recruit men through

This was typically an ill-fitting uniform, rushed into production as a

If the recruitment drive overstated the transformative effects of khaki,

Kitchener’s image of military perfection was exposed as fantasy, and his

I do not think that anyone looked even passable in them, as they

This uncomfortable uniformity sat uneasily with the seamless image of

Images and experiences of uniform were shaped by the official desire to

Khaki carried with it a range of positive associations in wartime. For

the British soldier, giving it material presence and also constructing a

Khaki embodied the changes that men underwent in wartime, and

khaki. He saw how photographs of men’s bodies could be dramatized

Figure 3.4 Enlistment: measuring recruits with kit, Photographic Collection,

Nicholls dramatized the disciplines that formed the making of the

Making the civilian soldier

If soldiers were ideologically constructed by the many images circulating