The issue of how governments attract men and women to the armed forces has been a principal concern of historians of propaganda since Harold Lasswell first wrote on the subject in the 1920s. Yet while a great deal has been written about propaganda texts – posters, films, newsreels, radio broadcasts, television programmes, and so on – less attention has been paid to the ways in which these texts were produced and their place within the broader context of 20th century British history. Through an analysis of key institutions and individuals, and drawing on a range of primary and secondary source material, this thesis makes a case for a history of recruitment advertising rooted in the experiences and perspectives of its practitioners. Exploring a number of recruitment campaigns waged in Britain between 1913 and 1963, it studies the business of recruitment not through the medium of individual advertisements, but via the organisations, ideologies and discursive practices that constructed them. Following Liz McFall and Anne Cronin, who argue that advertising can be understood only in relation to the particular historical circumstances that give rise to it, and that advertising is at any one point the sum of the discourses that embody and maintain it, it explores how recruitment campaigns were organised, planned and executed at key moments in British history. Crucial to this approach is an analysis of archival records such as memoranda, minutes of meetings, production logs, memoirs and reports. By examining these records discursively, this thesis encourages a shift from textual readings of recruitment advertising to studies of how relevant organisations and individuals defined and understood recruitment practices as promotional devices intended to exhort and persuade. By examining military advertising through six case studies spanning the wartime, interwar and postwar periods, it explores how ideas about promotion shifted from one era to the next.

Military Service Tribunals were established following the passing of the first Military Service Act, 1916, to consider applications for exemption from men deemed thereby to have enlisted. Given that conscription itself was an entirely novel mechanism to early twentieth century Britons, there existed no criteria or known models against which the function of these bodies might have been measured or standardized. Gifted a marked degree of independence by Government, even to the point of determining the nature and quality of evidence they should consider in adjudicating cases, they represented a uniquely autonomous stage in the processes that took men from civilian to military life. Being comprised entirely of civilians, drawn from the communities upon which this new coercion fell, the Tribunals were also the visible, accessible face of Government policy. Their sittings became in effect the sole ‘official’ forums in which the human cost of industrial-scale warfare might be rehearsed without circumspection. Though charged with keeping the national interests of the country foremost in mind, many tribunalists appreciated, or discovered, that local issues and concerns represented no less fundamental a part of those interests than did the maintenance of the New Armies. This thesis, utilizing a rare, near-complete body of Appeals Tribunal records, examines the minutiae of the exemption process. It considers to what extent the contradictions inherent in a ‘system’ staffed by volunteers, implementing legislation that aimed towards an as-yet undefined manpower policy were, or could be, resolved. It also tests largely negative assumptions regarding the attitudes, motives and preconceptions of tribunalists in discharging their role. Finally, it assesses the validity of two prevalent, though conflicting, judgements upon the Tribunals collectively: that either they were too receptive to localist pressures in exempting far more men than had been anticipated by the architects of conscription, or, that in demonstrating an unswervingly middle-class empathy with militarist values, they fell far short of the judicial impartiality required of them by legislation