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‘Lowther's Lambs’: Rural Paternalism and Voluntary Recruitment in the First World War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 June 2009
Extract
On the outbreak of war in August 1914 landowners in Sussex immediately started to employ their local leadership roles in the cause of voluntary recruiting and in doing so demonstrated the continuing utility of paternalistic social relations and the traditional rural structure to a nation preparing for war. The slow decline in social prestige provided by landownership was far from visible in the military sphere. As members of the military establishment – regular and territorial, past and present – landowners with clearly identifiable local economic, political and leisure interests attended to the search for recruits with the age old expectation that the deferential labourers would follow their ‘betters’ to war. As Alun Howkins has written,‘men were urged to go as much as part of their duty to the social structure of rural areas as to King and Country’.
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References
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