‘When the Boys Come Home’

Abstract

J.H. Dowd’s 1917 cartoon for Punch predicts that after the war, men will have been changed by their experience of the trenches.¹ The change depicted is both physical and psychological. It is not as visible as a lost limb or as dramatic as ‘shellshock’, nevertheless it has the potential to threaten the social status quo, putting a particular strain on categories of class and of gender. These men are impeccably attired in the uniforms of their class (Figure 4.1). However, following the entrenched habit of the Western Front, they do not stand upright, but instead lounge on the pavement in an uneasy visual echo of the unemployed and disabled ex-servicemen observed by Beverley Nichols begging in the Strand.² Laura Doan offers a detailed discussion of a similar set of images of martial women who had acquired the ‘war work habit’ in the same issue of Punch. Upper-class ex-ambulance drivers and ex-munitionettes set about domestic tasks with military precision and a mechanical know-how acquired during wartime service, while their chauffeurs and butlers look on in confusion. Doan warns against over-emphasizing the gender connotations of those images, suggesting that for the cartoonist, ‘gender is more the veneer and class is the substance’.³ The Piccadilly setting of Dowd’s cartoon does nevertheless suggest a space fraught with questions about the boundaries of masculine behaviour.