White feather campaigns

[Guest webbhead]

In Canada it was common for women on the home front to distribute white feathers to able-bodied young men in civilian clothes, as a euphemistic way of calling them a shirker for not volunteering. Women in home front patriotic societies were behind the campaign. From accounts I've read, many young men who had legitimate reasons for not volunteering (outwardly inconspicuous ailments like asthma, etc) received feathers, and it was taken to be a serious insult. How prevalent were the white feather campaigns in Britain? Also: why a white feather?-what's the symbolism? Any other insights...?

Cheers

[Tom Morgan]

The white feather represented cowardice and a weakness of character which we would now call a genetic weakness - not up to the "true character of the breed. " The symbol derives from cock-fighting. No pure-bred game-cock has white feathers. Any gamecock which has white feathers is a cross-breed, inferior, and unsuitable for the cockpit. No use for fighting. No use for breeding. This kind of association made handing white feathers to young men a serious insult.

Tom

[Guest webbhead]

Tom:

Fascinating. Your response implies a link between the white feathers and the pseudo-science of eugenics (an offshoot of Social Darwinism which favoured selective breeding of populations). I had no idea the white feather was such a powerful and suggestive symbol. I can see why men saw it as an insult in those days when "manliness" was equivalent to self-esteem. Interesting that women should be the agents of this message, or am I implying too much?

Cheers

[BeppoSapone]

From accounts I've read, many young men who had legitimate reasons for not volunteering (outwardly inconspicuous ailments like asthma, etc) received feathers, and it was taken to be a serious insult. How prevalent were the white feather campaigns in Britain? Also: why a white feather?-what's the symbolism? Any other insights...?

Cheers

I posted something on this topic last November. A search using keywords, such as the name of the clown who thought it up, ought to find it.

Here is one paragraph from my original post.

"On 30 August 1914, less then a month after the declaration of war, a retired Admiral, Penrose Fitzgerald, announced in Folkstone that he had formed a band of 30 women to present a white feather - a danger 'far more terrible than anything they can meet in battle' - to young men 'of public school and university education...found idling and loafing' instead of setting an example to working men."

[paul guthrie]

Tom I never would have guessed you knew so much about fighting chickens! Perhaps you should get theevilandymax! to bring you to his old Kentucky stomping ground where there has been a cockfight or two!

[mcderms]

There are two excerpts from 'Tommy' that spring to mind: one of an underage soldier wounded and discharged in 1915. He walks across Tower Bridge and gets presented with a white feather despite telling the girls he's only 15. The lad was so upset he walked to the HAC and re-enlisted.

Another is of a VC winner who was convalescing at home when presented with his white feather. When he'd been to get his VC, he went to see the supplier of said feather and harangued her for sending boys to their deaths!

Hard to believe we were ever this stupid!

[Max]

to bring you to his old Kentucky stomping ground where there has been a cockfight or two!

....and on occasion it can develop into full blown fisticuffs

Andy

[Tom Morgan]

Paul - they say that Wednesbury, where I live, used to be the cockfighting capital of England in the 19th Century. Although the sport was banned in England in about 1850, it hung on here well into the 1900s with cellars or empty railway-trucks being used as makeshift cockpits. The lectern in the Parish church is in the form of a fighting-cock, rather than the more usual eagle. When I was a small boy a neighbour kept gamecocks and he told me about the white feather - it was part of cockfighting lore.

Webhead - it's hard for us to really understand the social values which caused such a sense of shame in those days but I agree that it must have been a very potent insult. I don't think you're implying too much - the idea of women chastising under-performing warriors has a very ancient pedigree.

Tom

[healdav]

White feathers were still being handed out during World War Two.

My father was given one. He was in a job from which he was forbidden by law to resign in any way.

He worked for the RN supply service - the equivalent of the RAOC in the army, and was deemed to be in employment equivalent to active service. Indeed, quite a few members of the same department were killed when at sea on support ships and during the fall of Singapore and Hong Kong. I knew one guy who was in malta during the siege and had a Lewis gun mounted on his desk on the roof!

Just shows how utterly stupid the people were who handed out these things.

I have come across several short stories (all fiction as far as I know) which were written during the war, about men who came home on leave being handed white feathers by the sort of woman who would have cowed the Kaiser at a glance.

[DrB]

Tom Morgan is exactly right!

I recall the story of the Spartan women who instructed their husbands, lovers and etc who went off to battle to "Come back carrying your shield or lying on it."

DrB

[Matt Dixon]

Just shows how utterly stupid the people were who handed out these things.

I think this is a fairly sweeping statement.

Society was a different animal in those days, and morals and values existed then that do not exist now.

The onset of war was greated with such fervent patriotism that men felt it was their duty to go to war. Of course there were those who objected, but on the whole the mood of the nation was that men should go off and fight.

I am not saying it was right to harass men in the street, or to present them with white feathers, but you are ignoring the culture, society and morals of the age.

[BatterySergeantMajor]

Just shows how utterly stupid the people were who handed out these things.

I think this is a fairly sweeping statement.

Society was a different animal in those days, and morals and values existed then that do not exist now.

The onset of war was greated with such fervent patriotism that men felt it was their duty to go to war. Of course there were those who objected, but on the whole the mood of the nation was that men should go off and fight.

I am not saying it was right to harass men in the street, or to present them with white feathers, but you are ignoring the culture, society and morals of the age.

I do not agree completely.

Studying history means of course putting things in their context, or in their period. The shot-at-dawn discussion is a good example of a case in which many people are judging early 20th century with the principles of early 21th century.

But you can not cover up everything with the statement that these things happened 90 years ago and everything was different then.

There where also people questioning the war, for example Jean Jaurès in France, who was certainly not a marginal politician. I am convinced a lot of people went to war because social pressure was so strong that they felt there was no other option, even if they where not very convinced to go.

Mass behaviour doesn't change that much, even if we pretend to be smarter now. Similar situations are happening today, luckily enough not on the same scale. I won't give examples because I don't want to start discussions about actual situations.

It reflects the ancient ( and eternal?) rules of human behaviour. If something exciting happens, a lot of people lose their common sense and are swept by a kind of mass hysteria. At the other side there will be always a minoritary group who tries to bring the masses "back to normal".

In 1914 emotions ran so high that this was almost impossible ( as Jaurès experienced).

I am convinced that, if the same things are happening today, there will be again a lot of intellectual lazy people who will run around with white feathers (maybe symbolic) without trying to reflect critically. There hasn't changed that much in 90 years.

Erwin

[Matt Dixon]

Good post Erwin, well put.

I have simply offered my opinion, some people may agree, some may not, that's the way these things go.

[BatterySergeantMajor]

Good post Erwin, well put.

I have simply offered my opinion, some people may agree, some may not, that's the way these things go.

And I'm happy things are going like this. If not, it would be a boring world.

[Guest webbhead]

So far most of the responses on this topic have been from men (I think, judging from the user names). I'm curious what women think, as I imagine there is a dimension to women's experience of war that the thread has overlooked so far. What would it have been like, in 1914, to be someone denied many basic voting/ property rights and yet trying to do something to support the war effort? Were the white feathers a kind of symbol of women's powerlessness, not just men's alleged cowardice at the time?--i.e. "I cant do much about the war, but YOU can: here's a white feather."

Cheers

[healdav]

The trouble was that the white feather campaign (started by an admiral, I think) was totally unfair.

Men who were forbidden to join the forces were given them, men on leave who happened to be in civvies were given them.

They were just handed out at random by people who were not going to be affected themselves in anyway (I wonder just how many of the women who were busy hadning out these things went into the factories themselves? Precious few, I would think given that the white feathers campaign seems to have been a middle class/upper class thing and the factory workers were mostly working class in WW1).

In WW2 it was even more stupid. In theory barnes Wallis could have been given a white feather. He only designed the Whtiley and the bouncing bombs and Tallboy and many other things, so was obviously a shirker. OK, he was too old for the army, but you see the point.

I have seen a letter sent by the Director of Naval Recruiting to the Director of Naval Stores (as it was at the time) saying that .... is to be informed that under no circumstances is he to again volunteer for the RN. His work is equivalent to being in the RN (and on board an RN ship would be done by an officer).

He got a white feather after he came back from Malta having been there during most of the siege.

To add insult to injury people in the RN supply services were not allowed to use any NAAFI facilities when travelling around the country as these were reserved for 'fighting men'. The fact that a lot would be exactly the same job but just happened to wear a uniform was irrelevant.

As I said before the man I knew who was in Malta was a Lewis gunner during raids.

In fact, people in the RN supply services do go into uniform when in places where they are liable to capture and are now and have been for many years, in the Navy List. Clerks become CPOs and executives take up their rank equivalent. I was a Higher Executive Officer when I left (Deputy Supply and Transport Officer) and was thus a Lieutenant Commander.

[Ali Hollington]

Family history has one of my grandma's uncles receiving a white feather during WW1, at the time he was under age but did the expected, lied about his age, joined up but was posted to Ireland. During his time there he was injured (by an IRA bomb as family legend has it) and spent the rest of his life in what has been described to me as a mental home. I wonder what the future held for the person who gave him the feather.

Ali

[Christina Holstein]

Interesting question about why it was women who gave them out: could it have been a surpressed frustration at not having the freedom that men had at the time and not going off to do 'something exciting' like going to war. A lot of women did volunteer for war service, of course, and I would think that they wouldn't have given anyone a white feather, because they'd have known what the men were really facing. Perhaps the women who gave them out were the ones whose families/ social pressures prevented them from volunteering for nursing, truck driving or whatever. I don't suppose anyone has looked into the reasons behind it, so we will probably never know anyone's rationale.

Christina

[Terry]

I may have mentioned this on an earlier thread, but a friend of mine (now deceased) told me of something which happened to him in WW2 here in Canada. In 1944 he was standing in front of a clothing store looking at the items in the display window when a lady came up and began berating him for not being in uniform. She ranted away for several minutes before stomping off.

My friend, who was just getting used to his artificial leg courtesy of a German mine in Italy (a Bouncing Betty I recall he said), slowly stomped off in the other direction.

[NIGEL]

"" Just shows how utterly stupid the people were who handed out these things. ""

Maybe so, but in WW2, i know of one man who got his father to get him a job down the pit and become a Beven Boy. He survived the war, and you could say he had his head screwed on, but still a COWARD.

[Guest Ian Bowbrick]

(a Bouncing Betty I recall he said),

A pressure switch APM - you step on the plate which arms the mine, you remove your foot and the mine goes off. You are alright until you take your foot off the mine. Similar devices were used in Vietnam (I believe) and Bosnia (I know).

[Guest Ian Bowbrick]

Just shows how utterly stupid the people were who handed out these things.

I think this is a fairly sweeping statement.

Society was a different animal in those days, and morals and values existed then that do not exist now.

The onset of war was greated with such fervent patriotism that men felt it was their duty to go to war. Of course there were those who objected, but on the whole the mood of the nation was that men should go off and fight.

I am not saying it was right to harass men in the street, or to present them with white feathers, but you are ignoring the culture, society and morals of the age.

Perhaps in the earlier years of the war but after 1916, the mood was certainly different. There was a difference in motivation between the volunteers of 1914/15 and the conscripts of 1917. The later were not prepared to throw away their lives.

The South London press of February 1917 carries an interesting story about a well to do woman handing out white featers in Southwark who had a bucket of excrement poured over her from a window. There are other contemporary stories in the Press of how upper class women handing out feathers were treated in the lesser properous areas of London which indicate that this was not an isloated case. One thing to remember here is that in the late Victorian age, revolution was bubbling under the surface and the monarchy was highly unpopular.

[Paul Nixon]

A WW1 vet told me many years ago how a well meaning woman had approached him, prior to enlistment, and placed something small and round in his jacket pocket. On reaching inside he pulled out an army button and was told by the lady to "now go and sew it on your khaki".

[NIGEL]

I dont know Ian, if everybody is needed and you have the real cowards, not the genuine ones who cant, then i think there is no place for them during wartime or afterwards, its almost a parasite living of the rest of us. Even though the wars are terrible, you cant expect a few to go and do everybodies work, nobody wants to die, but why should some decide its not for them and scoff at the ones who died and serve their country.

[DirtyDick]

Ah, but does the State have a right to demand that you fight for them on pain of imprisonment (or even capital punishment), especially when experience tells us that any Govt. will give you short shrift some years down the line, especially if you are wounded - either mentally or physically - and can no longer contribute economically to society?

How can we differentiate (or should we?) between those who claim allegiance to some pacifist philosophy and refuse to fight for seemingly high moral or political ideals, and those who refuse to fight because they simply don't want to, since it would interfere with their lifestyle or cause them discomfort?

I can fully understand a significant part of any community shunning them for 'shirking' in these circumstances, but should there be any official sanctions?

Ricardo