All quiet on the Western Front – but not in racy letters home
Messages reveal emotions, and erotic desires, rather than a stiff upper lip
FEW ideas better encapsulate the national mythology of the stiff upper lip than the popular image of Britain’s First World War officers, stoic and unrattled by the hardships they endured.
The reality, new research has revealed, is that the Edwardian, upper-class officers of the period were just as prone to tenderness and sentimentality as any modern-day Britons stuck thousands of miles away from their family.
Dr Aimée Fox, a senior lecturer in defence studies at King’s College London, has examined the private letters and archives of four wartime couples during the Gallipoli and Palestine campaigns and overturned the idea of a stuffy or repressed elite.
“We think about senior generals and staff officers as being stiff upper lip, blackand-white, kind of emotionless photographs. But in these letters are actually talking about quite intimate things,” Dr Fox told The Sunday Telegraph.
The four couples Dr Fox focused on for her study were Jean and General Sir Ian Hamilton; Blanche and Lieutenant George Lloyd, later a Cabinet minister and chairman of the British Council; Cis and Major General Guy Dawnay; and Linnet and Brigadier General Philip Howell.
Their private letters reveal deeply modern relationships, insecurities that would be familiar to any married couple and, said Dr Fox, genuine efforts to develop new forms of affection and intimacy in defiance of distance.
The letters are also more erotic than might be expected of buttoned-up officers.
“They’re not quite sexting – these letters went through military censors so there would have been reticence about how much to put in there – but there’s a lot about wanting to be held, to be held in bed especially,” Dr Fox explained.
“It’s not explicit in the way that we would expect now. But the fact that they are talking about wanting to be together, wanting to enjoy sexual relations with one another again is actually quite modern.
“And the fact that it is committed to paper, at the time would have been considered quite risky, particularly among that social class.”
The officers and their wives also discussed in surprising detail timing of menstrual cycles and spells of home leave in efforts to become pregnant.
Reading the letters reveals that some familiar habits have a long tradition, although other war film tropes are perhaps wide of the mark.
The couples would often wonder if their partner was staring at the sky at the same time as them or reading the same passage in a book. Fathers, writing in their free evenings, would ask that their wives kiss their sons goodnight for them.
“It shows them trying to close the distance between home and war front, but also how important it was for them to keep their non-military identities,” said Dr Fox.
The classic image of the young wife at home sending her husband a photo as a keepsake, however, was less common than might be thought.
Many expressed anxiety about doing so, in case they no longer looked like the photo on their husbands’ return.