British Life and Leisure and the First World War
During the war years the English way of life underwent a far-reaching transformation. While shortages reduced the gaiety of existence, women achieved a new freedom, wages rose and labour increased its bargaining power.
"No cricket, no boat race, no racing", R. D. Blumenfeld, editor of the Daily Express, sadly confided. to his diary after twelve months of war. Eighteen months later a working man in Lancashire, harassed by the Government's new licensing regulations, was heard to murmur grimly as news filtered in from Russia, that: "Russia was never troubled by revolution till she went teetotal." By the end of the war, Evelyn Wrench noted, the country had become so "accustomed to restrictions of every sort... that we found it difficult to jump back in our minds to the pre-war world in which we lived in July 1914."
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