Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

‘Britishers
first’ was the
overriding
sentiment
during
disorder in the
ports
Post-war mass protest and riot often involved organized ex-service
groups out to draw attention to perceived injustice in the
treatment of returning troops and their dependents. Many former
soldiers and sailors were left disillusioned by their lot on demobilisation.
The National Federation of Discharged and Demobilised
Sailors and Soldiers staged a range of co-ordinated campaigns
and demonstrations throughout the country in 1919 and 1920. Their
‘monster’ demonstration outside parliament in May 1919 descended
into violence and was broken up by a police baton charge. 4 In
Luton in July 1919, rioters, including many ex-combatants, burned
down the town hall. 5 There were also riots involving recently demobilised
troops in London in March and in Edinburgh in July 1919. 6
The prominence of service and ex-service personnel in social unrest,
mass protest and rioting across Britain in the twelve months after
the end of the First World War was a sign of the times. It is hardly
surprising that individuals in uniform or sporting service ribbons would
be visible in gatherings of people in the weeks and months after the
Armistice given that Britain’s combined armed forces totalled 6.6
million at war’s end. The violent participation of troops and former
service personnel in the seaport riots was frequently highlighted in
contemporary press reports.7 However, recent combatants were not
the prime movers in the port rioting. The riots in Britain’s seaports
mainly involved white local civilians, some of them merchant sailors.
The myth that military service had brutalized those who served
in the First World War leading to post war rioting and mass protest
was used by contemporaries and later writers to account for
the violence of this period. There was a widespread belief that the
trauma of war led to uncontrolled aggressive tendencies. It was a
truism that innocence had been irretrievably lost through wartime experience.
This assumption follows the so-called ‘brutalization’ theory
in which battle-hardened, war- weary men and women brought
a tendency to violence into the domestic sphere. The work of Joanna
Bourke has convincingly refuted this theory by examining the
impact of war on the psyche of ex-combatants. Bourke suggested
that contrary to promoting violent tendencies in a domestic setting,
the leading desire among ex-combatants was for a return
to domesticity and an urge to forget their recent experiences. 8
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