British Home Front during World War I

The British home front was transformed by total war after August 1914. Millions entered military service, women moved into munitions and other essential industries, and families lived with casualty lists, separation and the long uncertainty of the conflict.

The state expanded its control through censorship, emergency regulations, conscription, rationing and surveillance. Pacifists, conscientious objectors, trade unionists and people whose private lives challenged prevailing sexual conventions could all become targets of suspicion.

This context supports fiction about wartime London and provincial Britain, military intelligence, munitions work, anti-war activism, bereavement and the conflict between public duty and private conscience.