‘Writing Home about Mother’: Dominion Soldiers in the United Kingdom, 1914-1919

The unprecedented number of dominion soldiers who found themselves in Europe, Africa and the Near East between 1914 and 1919 is an excellent example of ‘global Britishness’ at work. Rather than undermining the imperial connection this raised the consciousness of many of these men about their role and place in the Empire. This new interpretation challenges a longstanding tenet that the Great War broke or at least severely undermined old imperial ties between the dominions and the ‘old country’, which helped shape the contours of a new, more vibrant independent identity. Recent scholarship has challenged these assumptions suggesting a richer, more nuanced series of interpretations where ‘Britishness’ made up the bedrock of the emerging ‘national’ identities in three of the four self-governing dominions. A key question is: How did the Great War shape or modify these identities, many of which were complex and multidimensional.

Until recently, migration historians have not considered soldiers as a worthy subject or a fruitful field of investigation. What is missing, and which this paper will address through a systematic mining of personal but unpublished soldiers’ letters in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, is to locate and chart strands of this particular element of the British diaspora; a challenging and until now under-studied chapter of this migratory process. For those British-born migrants, and especially the men born in the dominions, their letters home allow the examination of the British connection: their thoughts about their hosts and dominion cousins, their growing sense of imperial pride and their impressions of life and interaction in the UK. It also allows one to explore and gauge the competing imperial and national identities that developed under wartime conditions.

Presenter

Associate Professor Kent Fedorowich

Kent Fedorowich is a specialist in Anglo-dominion relations, and, until September 2021, was Reader in British Imperial and Commonwealth history at the University of the West of England (Bristol). His areas of expertise and interest include the prisoner of war experience, empire migration and the British World. He has published widely on these subjects in learned journals and scholarly collections of essays. Among his publications are (with Bob Moore) The British Empire and its Italian Prisoners of War, 1940-1947 (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002); edited with Andrew S. Thompson, Empire, migration and identity in the British World (Manchester University Press, 2013); and edited with Jayne Gifford, Sir Earle Page’s British War Cabinet Diary, 1941-1942 (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Ken Fedorowich is a current Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU

This series is an opportunity for our HRC Visiting Fellows to present and receive feedback on the research they are working on. In 2022 , Visiting Fellows are exploring the theme of Mobilities