Abstract
In one sense this book is narrower in scope than its title suggests, being a study of war widows’ pensions (or more exactly, of two women named Bayliss whose repeated applications were rejected), rather than a cultural history of war widows. However, what it loses in scope it gains in theoretical and methodological rigour, bringing critical discourse analysis (aka ‘CDA’) to bear on the official and private correspondence relating to 200 pension applications. This correspondence stretched over the half-century from the royal warrant of 1916 which laid out the terms of war widows’ pensions to the 1960s, and provides a fascinating standpoint from which to view changes in attitudes towards social welfare, as provision based on distrust, parsimony, and moral judgements gave way to a universal rights-based model. The war widows’ pension sat square in the middle of this transformation: awarded to women whose husbands or de facto husbands had died because of their military service, at a pound a week (around half the minimum wage) it was widely envied at the time and served as a benchmark for later pension legislation, including the Widows’ Pensions Act of 1926. Equally, however, it reflected the patriarchal and nationalist ideologies of its time. It was granted by proxy to widows in recognition of their husbands’ sacrifice, and only to women married before the soldier’s discharge from military service where the cause of death could be proved to be directly due to the war. It did not extend to the many women who were encouraged by the church, press, and other agencies to marry sick and disabled ex-servicemen. It also came with moral strings attached. War widows’ pensions could be withdrawn if women remarried, were discovered to be in de facto relationships, or were otherwise deemed unfit recipients. The Ministry of Pensions set up a Special Committee to adjudicate claims, and regularly sought information from neighbours and local officials to confirm their suspicions that claimants were ‘unworthy’.
Smith reveals the subtle and intimate workings of patriarchal and nationalist ideologies within the pension legislation and its official machinery. She demonstrates the de-personalized character of the post-war pension bureaucracy, which employed standard forms wherever possible and did not name its officials. The Ministry of Pensions soft-ened its approach in the wake of the ‘People’s War’ and the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948, with later officials couching their letters to widows in more respectful language and signing letters in their own name. We also get fascinating glimpses of how widows themselves negotiated this bureaucratic machinery, appealing to their rights as the wives of men who had served their country and for whom they had cared, and wielding the very moral discourses that were being used against them.
Louisa – the first Bayliss case study – had four children aged under seven at the time of her husband’s death in 1915. Her pension was removed when it was discovered that a fifth, illegitimate, child had been born in 1917, which eventually led Bayliss to place the four older children in the care of the Birmingham Local War Pensions Committee. Though barely literate, she insisted on her fitness for the pension, writing a robust defence of her conduct which explained that she needed money for food and had not been drinking or going out with men. ‘I all kieep my selfe to selfe I donte go out at night time,’ she wrote, and pointedly referred to neighbours whose moral transgressions had gone unpunished (p. 102).
The case study of Florence Bayliss is no less moving. Her husband died in 1930 from heart failure, and in the three years leading to his death was unable to work and suffered from great pain, according to Florence. Despite some evidence of heart problems in his service records, her husband’s case was never formally reviewed by a disability board, which meant that Florence was unable to claim a war pension. At various points in the subsequent four decades she wrote to MPs and the pension office demanding financial help to ‘compensate us for what we have all suffered’ (p. 123). Here we see the gap between the perceptions of the widows – that the war pension was the right of all those whose ex-servicemen husbands had died – and the ministry’s tight definition of death as directly attributable to war service. This definition was revised in 1938 to include causes of death ‘wholly or materially’ due to war service, and enlarged again after 1945 to include deaths ‘mainly’ due to war service, but Florence Bayliss never got her war widow’s pension. This ‘still rankles with me’, she wrote in 1968. The appendix to the book contains copies of the correspondence relating to the two Bayliss women, including their own letters. These allow the reader to form their own insights into the cases and are fascinating documents in themselves.
Some historians will find this book top-heavy in theory. The analytically driven approach of CDA means that readers must reconstruct for themselves the historical narrative of pension provision, and the lives of the two Bayliss women, from details dispersed throughout the book. The secondary sources date from before 2007, and so do not include relevant work by Julie Anderson, Marina Larsson, Fiona Reid, Adrian Gregory, and others. There is also a curious tension in the book. Smith sets out to retrieve the experience and agency of these war widows from the abstract discourse of the pension officials. She remarks that, in official documentation, applicants were ‘reduced to the woman’s character’ (p. 100), yet the focus on language, however theoretically cogent, means that the women’s social circumstances and emotional experiences do not become objects of historical enquiry in their own right. Consequently at points the analysis threatens to repeat the very depersonalization it sets out to counter. At the same time, the book sheds a powerful light on the micro-politics of citizen–state relations in twentieth-century Britain, and in this sense it is broader than its title suggests, contributing not only to the history of the First World War, but to histories of care and welfare across the twentieth century.