Gentle readers, Downton Abbey, Season 2 will be shown on PBS, Sunday, January 8, at 9 PM local time. I will be writing a series of posts to help illuminate some historical details that might help the viewer who is not familiar with the events of this era. World War I’s connection to Jane Austen is poignant: soldiers in the trenches and those who were shell-shocked or recovering from injuries read Jane Austen’s novels to escape the horrors of war and relive a gentler, more civilized time. Here then is meaning of the white feathers. In the interest of not spoiling the plot, certain facts will not be revealed.
Handing a white feather to an unlisted man.
World War 1 was meant to last only a few months in the eyes of Great Britain, who entered the war to support its allies, France and Belgium. The mighty British empire had an army second to none, and had resoundingly defeated the Boers in South Africa using battle tactics that had been finely tuned by generals since the Napoleonic wars a hundred years before. At the start of the Great War, Englishmen enlisted in droves. Men were not conscripted at the time and enlistment was wholly voluntary.
Almost from the very beginning, British Admiral Charles Cooper Penrose-Fitzgerald created the “Organization of the White Feather’ as a means to pressure men to enlist in the army. At first able bodied men served willingly, but as the war dragged on and the staggering losses of life and limb added up in vast unforeseen numbers, the need for fresh troops became vital.
Admiral Charles Penrose-Fitzgerald
There were perfectly good reasons for men not to enlist: many were needed at home to oversee crucial jobs, such as farming; others had medical conditions that precluded them from serving. This was the case with Rudyard Kipling’s son, Jack, who was so short-sighted that he needed glasses to see clearly. (Vehement in his patriotism, Kipling was able to cut through red tape so that his 18-year-old son could serve. Sadly, Jack was reported missing in action and his body was never found. Kipling found solace in reading Jane Austen’s novels to his wife and daughter as they awaited word of Jack’s fate and penned a short story about the Janeites, who found respite from that terrible war by reading Jane’s books.)
In Downton Abbey, two able-bodied characters were officially exempt from serving: William Mason, the footman, and Moseley,Matthew Crawley’s butler/valet. Two women rose from their seats in the middle of a concert at Downton Abbey to benefit the hospital; they began handing out white feathers to the men not in uniform, starting with William.
The expression of the woman at right (above) is one of disgust at those who they thought shirked their responsibilities to serve. This scene occurs in 1916, when it became clear that the war could only be won through slow stubborn attrition and by the side that lasted longest with men, ammunition, food, and sheer will power. Men were hunkered down in miserably uncomfortable circumstances in the trenches and died by the tens of thousands in order to claim a few hundred shell-pocked yards of enemy territory. The slaughter was immense and of a proportion never before seen in civilized society, for new horrific weapons had been designed to kill and maim from a distance (flame throwers, mustard gas, machine guns, bombs dropped from airplanes). Fresh troops were needed to replace those who were killed or wounded.
As early as 1915, a mere year after the war started, pressure began to be placed on able bodied men who did not serve, and the practice of handing out white feathers stepped up. The pacifist Fenner Brockway quipped that he had enough feathers to make a fan.
Men who wore no uniform, including soldiers on leave, were targeted to receive white feathers. Home Secretary Reginald McKenna authorized a badge that bore the words “King and Country,” which told onlookers that the man wearing it was excluded from the pressure to enlist. – First World War.com
Reginald McKenna
Read my posts for Downton Abbey, Series One in the sidebar.
Jane Austen's World 
Thanks for another incredibly interesting post. I’m sure you’ll enjoy season two :-)
Very interesting. The worst thing about this is that the women passing out feathers could be quite indiscriminate and careless, handing out feathers to men who absolutely did not deserve to be recipients of them under any construction. There were some really sad scenarios.
I’m looking forward to Season 2, so I thank you for explaining about WWI and what people were feeling at the time.
Thanks for explaining the White Feather thing. I recall seeing it in another period drama, which may have been called The White Feather. Imagine being a soldier out of uniform or home for recuperation and he gets handed one. Imagine the pacifists who couldn’t go because of their consciences or the ones that were not qualified to go because of some condition? What an appalling way for one to be treated. I’m looking forward to seeing that on DA Season 2.
Wonderful post. Thank you for sharing such detailed information which sheds a lot of light on the era.
And the ones that came home after being gassed were never the same again. Something that my grandparents talked about due to the difference in their siblings for their whole lives.
I see other commentators expressed what I was thinking about this ‘white feather’ campaign. I look forward to all your Downtown Abbey supplementary posts.
Thanks!
Those handing out white feathers were not looked upon with much favor by those on the Home Front.
One of the best accounts of this Kipling and Jack matter is a book of the letters exchanged in the Kipling family called “O Beloved Kids”. Try it, it will put you off all wars forever and catch the extreme poignancy of a gulity father’s emotions: after writing jingo patriotic verses Kipling finally had to lose his beloved Jack to a possibly freak accident (see Daniel Radcliffe in the movie “Jack” about this ). His wife and he never quite recovered, and they tried for years to find out aboiut the last moments of Jack’s life in the trenches.
A Maisie Dobbs mystery (#2, I think) deals with this issue, and the handing out of the feathers to young men and the aftereffects. I do not understand what motivated these young women…
There is a similar scene in Anne of Green Gables The Continuing Story (Anne 3). It’s a good movie about WWI though not at all faithful to the books. My Boy Jack is an excellent and very moving story. It’s well-acted too.
Laura Sass. some people suggest it gave young women who felt powerless a feeling of power (even though it wads rather misdirected). And goodness knows there certainly was a lot of (misguided) patriotism in those days.
Curtiss Evans wrote: “And goodness knows there certainly was a lot of (misguided) patriotism in those days.”
There certainly was and no fault of the ordinary soldier, or even officer. Knowledge of what was actually going on on The Western Front was limited.. Those who came home on leave or to recuperate from injuries didn’t really let on in case they were seen as traitors and of course , in those days people were very jingoistic. War was a noble thing. It put those who participated on a higher level, apparently.As soon as they got there they learned the realities pretty quickly.
Nowadays, with the internet and mobile phones no government could get away with that sort of thing. Apart from North Korea of course.
On Armistice Day , 11th November, I posted a poem by Wilfred Owen.
Here it is.
DULCE ET DECORUM EST(1)
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen
8 October 1917 – March, 1918
Thank you so much, Tony. Sadly, Wilfred died in that terrible war. His poems, thank goodness, were saved as a witness to that horrible slaughter.
LOVE the show! Love this info. Thanks for what you do!
Vic, thank you for the information about this sad practice. It will add immensely to my enjoyment of the show. I so look forward to following your posts about it.
It is Jacqueline Winspear’s second Maisie Dobbs novel, “Birds of a Feather,” that has the white feather movement as a main plot point. http://jacquelinewinspear.com/birds-of-a-feather.php
The cruelty of this is in the same league as modern-day cyber bullying. Sign up or be labeled a coward. The things people have done, and still do, in the name of patriotism never cease to amaze me.
On a related topic,in Downton Abbey series 2, when Thomas raises his hand with a lighter above the trenches, desiring an injury that would send him home from the front, which side would have shot at his hand, one of his own fellow soldiers on watch, or the Germans?
German snipers.
one of the best comments on the War was Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting”, somehow Laura’s comment reminded me of that.” I am the enemy you killed,, my friend” says the young soldier who was killed the day before, to the poet-persona who meets him in a nightmare vision.
Thank you, I had wondered if the white feather was unique to WWI or if it had older roots. You have answered my question nicely.
Thanks to the blogger and the commenters alike. I’ve learned so much from this post, and the Owen poem is one I’ll always remember. I’ve had the good fortune to work with people from many countries who work to prevent and end war, including conscientious objectors from wars as far back as WWII. The post here mentions Fenner Brockway who helped found War Resisters International, an organization that continues to this day. The US branch is War Resisters League.
A book I’d like to read, Adam Hochschild’s “To End All Wars,” looks at WWI and those who refused to fight. From an NPR interview: “‘By conflict’s end,” Hochschild says, “more than 20,000 British men of military age refused the draft. … More than 6,000 served prison terms under harsh conditions: hard labor, a bare-bones diet, and a strict ‘rule of silence.'” Men (and women) who’ve refused to fight in wars have often been called cowards, but they’ve often taken great risks to stand by their principles. They’ve also often been the people who work with the wounded and traumatized.
Thank you for the post, really interesting to read the great responses. There is an organisation you may be interested in, TheSRF. It brings feathers back to their angelic/pure/uplifting references by enabling service personnel, from any country that is part of the United Nations, to provide a silver feather to family and friends in recognition of the support that those family members have provided. (www.thesrf.com).