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Gerald Howard-Smith’s life is intriguing both in its own right and as a vehicle for exploring the world in which he lived. Tall, boisterous and sometimes rather irascible, he was one of the so-called ‘Lost Generation’ whose lives were cut short by the First World War. Brought up in London, and educated at Eton and Cambridge, he excelled both at cricket and athletics. After qualifying as a solicitor he moved to Wolverhampton and threw himself into the local sporting scene, making a considerable name for himself in the years before the First World War. Volunteering for military service in 1914, he was decorated for bravery before being killed in action two years later. Reporting his death, the War History of the South Staffordshire Regiment claimed that, ‘In his men’s eyes he lived as a loose-limbed hero, and in him they lost a very humorous and a very gallant gentleman.’ As well as telling the fascinating story of Gerald Howard-Smith for the first time, this important new biography explores such complex and important issues as childhood and adolescence, class relations, sporting achievement, manliness and masculinity, metropolitan-provincial relationships, and forms of commemoration. It will therefore be of interest to educationalists, sports historians, local and regional historians, and those interested in class, gender and civilian-military relations – indeed all those seeking to understand the economic, social, and cultural life of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain.
Between 1918 and 1939, 448 men who performed uniformed service in the First World War became Conservative MPs. This relatively high-profile cohort have been under-explored as a distinct body, yet a study of their experiences of the war and the ways in which they - and the Conservative Party - represented those experiences to the voting public reveals much about the political culture of Interwar Britain and the use of the Great War as political capital. Radicalised ex-servicemen have, thus far, been considered a rather continental phenomenon historiographically. And whilst attitudes to Hitler and Mussolini form part of this analysis, the study also explores why there were fewer such types in Britain. The Conservative Party, it will be shown, played a crucial part in such a process - with British politics serving as a contested space for survivors' interpretations of what the war should mean.
Gardens of Hell examines the human side of one of the great tragedies of modern warfare, the Gallipoli campaign of the First World War. In February 1915, beginning with a naval attack on Turkey in the Dardanelles, a combined force of British, Australian, New Zealand, Indian, and French troops invaded the Gallipoli Peninsula only to face crushing losses and an ignominious retreat from what seemed a hopeless mission. Both sides in the battle suffered huge casualties, with a combined 127,000 servicemen killed during the action. Patrick Gariepy has pieced together the battle from combatantsÆ own words. Drawn from diaries and letters and from stories passed down through generations of families, these firsthand accounts offer an honest, heartfelt, and sometimes painful testimony to a doomed campaign fought by the men who lived through the fury, terror, and grief that was Gallipoli. Gardens of Hell is a sensitive acknowledgment of the enormous human cost of military folly and failure.
