Conclusion

Modern scholarship has increasingly challenged and nuanced long-standing narratives which maintain that the First World War stood as a ‘watershed in contemporary history, starkly dividing the modern era from virtually all that had come before’.¹ Yet, while many have pointed to the ongoing presence, and indeed celebration, of ‘conventional ideas of patriotism and glory’ in Britain after 1918, assertions that there was a simple ‘rejection of militarism’, that ‘anti-militarist attitudes prevailed’ or that the British were a ‘uniquely peaceable people’ are remarkably resilient.² Despite a supposed distaste for British militarism, it nevertheless existed and flourished in diverse, vibrant and popular forms – not least through the work of associational bodies such as the Navy League and the Air League of the British Empire.

This is not to deny the presence or power of anti-war voices, or to suggest that pacifism was anything other than a ‘major force’ in Britain.³ However, the cultural legacy of the First World War was far more contested and complex than an outright rejection of war or the straightforward dissolution of militarism and militaristic values. Moreover, militarism was, in many respects, an elusive, amorphous phenomenon which could be ‘placed at the disposal of conflicting forces and ideologies’.⁴ Militarism, like internationalism, could be ‘shaped by impulses that sometimes overlapped or converged, and at other times pushed in opposing directions’.⁵ Notably, liberal internationalist bodies such as the LNU were not pacifist or opposed to rearmament, but were willing to countenance force – and the bomber in particular – to maintain the rule of international law.⁶

Of course, neither the Navy League nor the Air League was immune from post-war currents including disarmament, pacifism and collective security. The Navy League temporarily embraced naval arms limitation and collective security in the early 1920s, leading to internal dissent, then revolt. Some observers even felt that the league’s policy was ‘not merely a rejection of its old tenets, but a repudiation of the whole conception of sea power’.⁷ Yet, while the policy enacted by the Navy League between 1919 and 1922 does indeed demonstrate the challenges faced by a militaristic pressure group in the wake of a ‘momentous event like the First World War’, it is more difficult to sustain the idea that this heralded the ‘collapse of British navalism’.⁸ Similarly, the Air League was aware of its own militaristic and martial appearance, and so briefly concentrated on civil and commercial aviation in the late 1920s and early 1930s, while also being reluctant to comment on issues relating to disarmament due to an apparent lack of technical expertise. Although it was transitory, such a policy was injurious to the league, and so it was not long until it was again lobbying for British aerial supremacy.

Perhaps one of the clearest, and most popular, manifestations of militarism and ‘patriotic excess’ in the interwar period was the broad range of annual military displays such as Hendon, Empire Air Day, the Aldershot Command Searchlight Tattoo, the Royal Tournament, Navy Weeks and Trafalgar Day.⁹ Patriotic, martial and militaristic displays were employed by the state and a range of associational bodies and non-state actors to project images of power and military might. Such events occupied a prominent place in the social and cultural landscape of interwar Britain, attracting hundreds of thousands of spectators – and in some cases over a million visitors – annually. While some condemned military displays as attempts to ‘glorify militarism and school the public mind to war’, as ‘an essential part of the propaganda of war’ and as a way of imbuing the British public with ‘a drop of war fever and patriotic insanity’, others expressed concern surrounding the impact that such displays would have on Britain’s global status.¹⁰ As one letter to the Daily Telegraph in 1933 lamented, ‘Are we to imagine that foreign nations will abandon nationalism when they find England, a nation that is pressing them to disarm, enjoying and enthusing over the panoply and glory of militarism in the shape of Tattoos, Aerial Pageants, Navy Weeks, and mock battles’.¹¹ Despite such opposition, this did little to diminish public appetite for popular manifestations of militarism. As we have seen, the Navy and Air Leagues were key actors in the promotion of the military through visual spectacle, theatre and public ritual. The Navy League used Trafalgar Day to commemorate and celebrate the history and heritage of Britain’s long-standing naval supremacy. Empire Air Day, meanwhile, was an important site of modernity, technological innovation, deterrence and military prestige. Despite limited opposition, naval and aerial theatre represented acceptable ways of promoting popular militarism, rearmament and the military capabilities of the British state to both domestic and foreign audiences. Moreover, events such as Trafalgar Day and Empire Air Day advanced ‘notions of Britain as a historic, martial community’.¹²

The two leagues also did much to cultivate martial and militaristic values among sections of the nation’s youth. Both leagues disseminated their messages in schools through lectures and essay competitions, by distributing literature and through organising trips for children to military displays. They were also present at public exhibitions aimed at schoolchildren. Although citizenship and character-building formed an important part of the SCC and the ADCC, service, discipline and duty were also central to the work of the two youth organisations. The SCC provided a reserve of manpower ‘disciplined and imbued with love of country’, while the Air League admitted that the ADCC would ‘afford a very fruitful recruiting ground for the Royal Air Force’.¹³ Both the SCC and ADCC were involved in civil defence at the outbreak of the Second World War and hundreds of thousands of boys were recorded as playing an active role in the services in wartime. While it has been claimed that the ‘youth of Britain had rejected war’ after 1918, children enthusiastically engaged in militaristic and martial activities under the auspices of the Navy and Air Leagues.¹⁴ For instance, as part of mock combats staged during annual SCC camps, children took part in raids ‘[a]rmed with rifles, bayonets and (blank) ammunition’ on an ‘enemy position, in which field and machine guns were brought into use, followed up by an attack by riflemen and a final bayonet charge’. Cadets often took these activities seriously. One report noted that ‘it was a good thing the rifles were not loaded’. Cadets no doubt enjoyed being ‘mown down when they came into the arena of imaginary machine gun nests’ and ‘sho[oting] themselves to pieces’, and such activities clearly point to an ongoing desire among youth to engage with the ‘pleasure culture of war’, but the warlike nature of such training did little to alleviate fears surrounding the militarisation of British youth.¹⁵

Both leagues used more conventional methods to extol the virtues of sea and air power to state and civil society, including staging public meetings and lectures, issuing pamphlets and printed propaganda, publishing articles and letters in local and national newspapers, and disseminating propaganda through their official organs. Alongside their wider propagandistic endeavours, both leagues were involved in a considerable range of charitable and philanthropic schemes and each made important contributions to relief efforts during and after war. Neither league was solely concerned with national defence, however the promotion of naval and aerial supremacy remained at the heart of each organisation’s programme of public education and political lobbying.

The Navy and Air Leagues were male-dominated, although women were active in both organisations. Women took part in charitable, philanthropic, educational and social endeavours, but they were also engaged in propagandistic activities. Patriotism and militarism were popular rallying cries for many women. The Women’s Aerial League, for example, was resolved from ‘patriotic motives that England should build more airships than any other possible combination of countries’ and called for ‘supremacy in the air complementary to, but no less absolute than, that supremacy on the seas which had been England’s boast since navies were’.¹⁶ Such work points to the presence of both ‘gender traditionalism and gender modernity’ which was a feature of broader associational bodies in this period, but it also complicates imagined binary divisions between pacifism and femininity on the one hand and militarism and masculinity on the other.¹⁷

To advance their agenda in political spheres, both leagues were active in lobbying politicians, while senior members of each league were vocal proponents of sea and air power in parliament. Both leagues supplied information to MPs to use in parliamentary debates and each directly pressured parliamentary candidates during general elections. Air League members were present in political pressure groups including the Parliamentary Air Committee, while both organisations formed part of secret deputations sent to Andrew Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin during their respective premierships to express concern on subjects including the independence of the RAF and the condition of the nation’s shipping industry. To ensure the Royal Navy, Merchant Navy and RAF remained within parliamentary consciousness, key figures from the two leagues initiated – or made important contributions – to debates within the House of Commons and House of Lords at significant junctures. Lord Lloyd was particularly active in his support of the Merchant Navy during the late 1930s, while Air League figures were vocal in their anxiety regarding the condition of the RAF during and after the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva. Although the leagues may not have had any decisive impact on the formation of military policy or grand strategy, leading politicians were certainly conscious of the propagandistic influence of each organisation.

In seeking to promote British naval power after 1918, permanence and notions of ‘historic continuance’ were important for the Navy League.¹⁸ The league frequently employed motifs of nostalgia, heritage and tradition, with Nelson and Trafalgar providing a particularly ‘usable’ naval past.¹⁹ Such themes also featured prominently in its broader propagandistic work. For example, the league ‘ever sought to bring home to the nation the lesson of history, that it is by the sea that we have our being, and that to-day, as ever, our security and the future of our race both at home and throughout the world rest, under Providence, upon the British Navy’.²⁰ Despite the increasing technological, strategic and cultural importance of the aeroplane, the Navy League expressed its satisfaction that the ‘inherited sea-sense of the nation has refused to allow itself to be swayed by those who would seek a substitute for the Fleets of the King’.²¹ The league was not anti-modern or anachronistic, however its use and frequent evocation of the nation’s naval past led to derision from some. Philip Noel-Baker, for example, suggested that the Navy League was ‘still living, like Lord Lloyd, in the days of Nelson; they still believe that nations can grow great and can be safe by the methods which their heroes of the eighteenth century applied’.²² The Air League, meanwhile, placed emphasis on technological innovation and modernity, particularly in relation to concerns surrounding future conflict. In 1934, for instance, an article in Air Review asked ‘Will the advance of science in the machine age bring peace?’ The league was far from optimistic:

If the present world systems continue there will be more world wars, wars that will be on vaster scales than anything yet dreamed of. Disarmament will avail nothing, because as science advances, an industrial nation can turn quickly to converting machines into the instruments of destruction … Peace in the next few generations of the machine age, at least, will be had only by those equipped to maintain it.²³

British responses to modernity – particularly in the form of naval and aerial theatre – were characterised by ambivalence, with excitement and enthusiasm merging with fear, anxiety and a growing recognition throughout the 1930s that the advance of science and technology was, in fact, unlikely to herald peace in the ‘machine age’.

For the Navy League, the Royal Navy remained central to the preservation of Britain’s islandhood and security – despite suggestions that the aeroplane heralded an end to British insularity – and to the maintenance of trade and commerce. It also remained an important emblem of pride, patriotism and Britishness, with the league deeming ‘sea sense’ and ‘sea spirit’ as central components of the British national character. Contrastingly, the Air League pointed to the feats of pioneering aviators and the modernity and technological prowess of British machines in air races, demonstrations and expeditions to foster pride and national identity. For the Air League, it was the aeroplane which was crucial to preserving the nation, empire and imperial communications. To forge imperial unity and foster links between Britain and the self-governing dominions, the two leagues formed a network of overseas branches (albeit on a smaller scale in the Air League’s case). Such branches were important in disseminating the work of the two leagues on an imperial level, while also providing important spaces for Britons to engage with homeland identity and culture while overseas. However, if there was an emergence of a ‘kinder, gentler version of imperialism’ after the First World War, this did not prevent either league from underlining the ways in which the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force could be used as tools of imperial policing and as a means of reinforcing control over sections of Britain’s empire – particularly through gunboat diplomacy and aerial bombardment.²⁴

In carrying out their work on a local, national and imperial scale, each organisation mobilised broad public and political support throughout much of the interwar period and boasted an array of influential political and military figures among its supporters. Individuals such as Winston Churchill, Leo Amery, Lord Curzon, Stanley Baldwin and even Ramsay MacDonald supported the two leagues in a range of activities. So, too, did the most senior members of the royal family, who attended Trafalgar Day and Empire Air Day proceedings and spoke in favour of the SCC and ADCC. Although neither organisation ever abandoned its non-party status, Liberal and Labour engagement was minimal throughout the period. This is not to suggest that the two leagues were mere auxiliaries of the Conservative Party, but each had extensive links. Each organisation also had strong financial and personal connections to the far right and armament manufacturers, with the latter attracting particular controversy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, associations with the ‘merchants of death’ did little to dispel accusations of militarism.

Alongside support from the political and social elite, the Navy and Air Leagues largely had the backing of the Admiralty and Air Ministry, respectively. Earls Jellicoe and Beatty, Sir Roger Keyes, Sir Samuel Hoare, Lord Londonderry, Lord Swinton, Sir Kingsley Wood and Sir Hugh Trenchard all spoke in support of the leagues and promoted their work. The Admiralty and Air Ministry undoubtedly saw the propagandistic value of each organisation and assisted their educational activities, youth organisations and promotion of naval and aerial theatre. Neither league acted as a conduit for the dissemination of official views, but as many members had served in the Admiralty or Air Ministry – and due to numerous shared aims and objectives – neither league was a persistent critic of the service departments. Clearly, assessing the legacy of each league through membership numbers alone would be to ignore the significance of both organisations in the social, cultural and political landscape of the interwar period.

The influence of the Navy and Air Leagues can, in part, also be measured by the level of opposition they faced. The LNU and key liberal internationalist figures – chiefly Philip Noel-Baker, Robert Cecil, Gilbert Murray, David Davies and Norman Angell – were particularly hostile to both leagues. Figures on the political left such as Fenner Brockway, Clement Attlee and Harold Laski were similarly critical, while anti-war, pacifist and other left-leaning organisations – including the ILP, UDC, PPU and the Communist Party of Great Britain – all objected to the policies and activities of each league. Newspapers such as the Daily Herald and the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Daily Worker were also condemnatory on a number of occasions. The Navy and Air Leagues were accused of being militarists, scaremongers, alarmists, jingoists, appendages to the ‘merchants of death’ and even warmongers by their detractors. In the context of the peace-mindedness of the interwar years, such opposition is unsurprising. However, the fact that such a broad and eclectic array of anti-war, pacifist and liberal internationalist actors and organisations deemed it necessary to persistently counter Navy and Air League propaganda highlights that, despite a supposed hostility towards, and indeed rejection of, British militarism, popular, cultural and institutional forms of militarism resonated with large sections of society. If one accepts that the ‘forces of organized patriotism and imperialism were part of a continuity within British political culture’ from the Edwardian into the post-war period, then the same is undoubtedly true of organised militarism.²⁵

By 1939, the Air League was satisfied that Britain ‘need now fear no military competitor in the air’, with the Duke of Sutherland suggesting that this resulted, at least in part, from the ‘campaign which has been unremittingly carried on by the Air League since those dark days when the air forces of this country were cut down almost to vanishing point’.²⁶ Speaking at the league’s AGM in July that year, Sutherland reflected that the league ‘has done a great deal to awaken the public and the government to a full recognition of the fact that the greatest threat to our security comes from the air’. He regarded the increased support for aerial power in the 1930s as ‘the greatest success that the Air League has, or could have, achieved’ which resulted from ‘steady and unspectacular propaganda’. Sutherland further noted that Britain’s military preparedness was particularly remarkable ‘in a democratic nation wedded to the cause of peace’.²⁷ While Sutherland’s verdict may have overstated the Air League’s influence, through aerial theatre and pageantry in particular, its propaganda was often spectacular, characterised by modernity and the technological sublime.²⁸

Only a month earlier at the Navy League’s GCM, Lord Lloyd was similarly self-congratulatory. Addressing those in attendance, Lloyd stated that ‘the name of the Navy League carries a particular weight in the country to-day. I doubt if there is any other patriotic organisation to-day that has such a solid and respected name in its own sphere.’ Despite this, Lloyd stressed that the league’s work was not complete and that it must continue to remind the government and the British public that ‘on naval defence, fundamentally, primarily and finally depends the security of these islands … the work of the Navy League is required as much to-day as it ever has been before’.²⁹ While Lloyd’s address was slightly less sanguine than Sutherland’s respective speech, he was nevertheless satisfied with the Navy League’s work. He felt that the league had played a crucial part in awakening the British public to the significance of seapower, concluding that it had contributed ‘something solid to this awakening, and the further security of the country, and the people, and the Empire’.³⁰ In many respects, the Navy League helped to ensure that the ‘importance of the sea remained an article of faith’ in Britain after the First World War.³¹

As in 1914, Britain in 1939 was one the most modern and most heavily militarised states in Europe.³² As David Edgerton notes, Britain could claim to ‘be the most powerful of the great powers’. Its armament industry was ‘at least as large as any other in the world’, its navy, while sacrificing its pre-eminence to non-European powers, was ‘still the strongest’ and in ‘air armament it was as strong as any other country’.³³ Although the two leagues may not have directly influenced the rate or shape of rearmament, both leagues were among the principal exponents of the warfare state and did much to keep issues of naval and aerial power within public and parliamentary consciousness throughout the interwar period.

Organised Militarism has provided the most comprehensive institutional account of the Navy League and the Air League of the British Empire to date. In doing so, it has revealed that each league occupied an important place in the political and associational culture of post-war Britain, despite the competing work of anti-war, pacifist and liberal internationalist bodies. More broadly, tracing the conduct and contours of the two leagues provides a valuable lens through which to explore and advance our understanding of key issues of the period including naval heritage and commemoration; modernity and technological innovation; nation and empire; youth and education; disarmament, collective security and national defence; and British attitudes to war, conflict and peace. Militarism not only endured the First World War, but enjoyed significant resonance in the post-war period. While there may not have been a ‘lust for war’ – which for scholars such as A.J. Coates marks the ‘hallmark of militarism’ – among most Britons after 1918, neither was British society entirely, or uniquely, peaceable.³⁴ As international tensions increased in late 1939, organised militarism once again faced the ‘crucible’ of global conflict.