'Woodbine Willie': Religion and Politics after the Great War
Gerald Kennedy shows how a fear of revolution and the growing strength of organised labour created tensions in Britain after the end of the First World War. Men such as 'Woodbine Willie' attempted to defuse the situation by preaching the gospel of 'Christian Socialism' at mass meetings across the country.
The Church of England entered the Great War in 1914 like the young Bertolt Brecht, then at school in Augsburg, in a spirit of nationalistic righteousness. National unity, historical responsibility, self-sacrifice and even bellicose anticipation, seemed to be the natural themes for clergy, journalists and others on both sides. Brecht himself never saw action, but a frail and asthmatic English clergyman, the Reverend G.A. Studdert Kennedy, left a slum parish in Rugby in 1916 to become perhaps the best known padre at the Western Front. He was to win the MC at Messines in 1917, and the authorities, though no more so, by all accounts, than many of the men, showed a lively appreciation of his inspirational talks to units passing through the Base Camps. Some of these harangues survive in the discoloured pages of his Rough Talks of a Padre (l918), the Foreword to which was written at the HQ Physical and Bayonet Training, British Expeditionary Force. At the end of one of them, 'Christ or the Kaiser', delivered during Lent of Rouen to a packed audience of officers and men, he was cheered to the echo.
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