In What Ways If Any Did Life On the Home Front Change As a Result of the First World War and In What, If Any Sense Were These Changes of Benefit To British People?

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In what ways if any did life on the Home Front change as a result of the First World War and in what, if any sense were these changes of benefit to British people?

This essay will discuss the effect of the war on the different sectors of Britain. It's public, economy and the effect that the Government had on it.

An analysis of the effects of Government intervention will be followed by, a discussion of the effects of war on women and their social standing. This will be followed by Investigation of the war time economy and the effect that it had on the cost of living during the war. Then it will discuss people's attitudes to the war. Then it will analyze people's attitudes to the war. After that it will go on to discuss the People who benefited from the war and who didn't and why.

The government was a cause of great change on the homefront during World War One. It is reasonable to expect changes because the government had to mobilize the country for war as well as the army. The government had to make changes according to what the situation was in the war. They couldn't foresee what would happen so they had to make many changes at many times. For example the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). This was made so that the government could intervene in private lives and businesses to help the war without it being illegal. The effect of this act was that the government could censor what the media said about the war, this meant that the papers only printed good things about the war, so that the public were not dissuaded from joining the army and also the morale would be higher because they didn't see all of the death and misery that was the reality of the war.

DORA also enabled the government to take control of peoples homes, businesses and factories, this meant that the army could just come and demand that you give your factory to the army so that they could make munitions they could even take your house to house workers for this new munitions factory. It also took away the freedom of the people. This was a cause of trouble in the government, which at the time was liberal; their policy in peacetime was almost the complete opposite of the idea of DORA.

All the reports of the war were censored they didn't give out the correct numbers of men dead. Censorship shielded the people's views. Then the government decided that a film of the Somme would boost morale on the homefront, the film disgusted some people but also boosted the morale of some. The censorship of the coverage of the war changed the way that people saw the war. This is shown in source M1 where Mr. A.J.P. Taylor says that their lives were shaped from above this is true because their lives and the way they thought were drastically changed due to the censorship of the coverage of the war. Mr. Taylor also says that people were for the first time having to help the state and for the first time be 'active citizens.'

The government also intervened when they gradually introduced conscription. At first single men between the ages of 18 and 40 years were obliged to sign up then the government needed even more men so they made it all men between the ages of 18 to 40 married or not. This changed a lot of young mens' lives this is shown In source A2 which is about a reluctant soldier who has been forced to join up due to the Conscription Act. This caused a lot of trouble in the Government because it was against the general policy of the Liberal Party to interfere in some then people's lives and therefore taking away their freedom. Source G3 helps us to understand the Conscription act and the effects that it had on certain social sectors in Britain especially women

At the beginning of the war the British only had a small professional army, which wasn't big enough to go into a world war so to try to encourage people to join up the Government put up posters on walls and tree trunks. This seemed to do the trick within a month half a million men had signed up. But in 1916 the Government needed more men, to replace those lost in battle and to generally increase the size of the army which was to fight in the battle of the Somme to get these men they passed the 1916 Conscription Act. At first it was only men between the ages of 18 and 40 who weren't married. But when this didn't give the Government enough people the government passed an act saying that all men between the ages of 18 and 40 had to go to war. Some were in favour of this but some weren't, the conchies for example said that they didn't want to go to war because it would be against their conscience, they were either sent to war as hospital workers or put in jail for cowardice.
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With most of the men in battle due to conscription this left our munitions factories badly understaffed, so the government employed women for the first time in the factories that they had taken control of due to DORA. They also tried to persuade other factory owners to do the same. This caused a lot of trouble because the men who were still working there thought that the women would work for less and therefore their wages would also go down. But the wasn't the case because the women and other unskilled workers were paid per product but the ...

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