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In May 1915 British soldiers stationed near Victoria instigated a retaliatory riot against the local German community for the sinking of the RMS Lusitania. The riot spanned two days, and many local residents eagerly took part in the looting and destruction of German owned businesses. Despite its uniqueness as the city’s largest race riot, scholars have under-appreciated its importance for Victoria and British Columbia’s racial narrative. The riot further signals a change in how Victorians understood Germanness. From the 1850s onwards, Victoria’s British hegemony welcomed Germans as like-minded and appropriate white settlers. I argue that race and colour shaped German lives in Victoria, for the most part positively. During the war however Germanness took on new and negative meaning. As a result, many Germans increasingly hid their German background. Germans maintained their compatibility with the British hegemony, largely thanks to their whiteness, well after German racial background became a liability. / Graduate

This dissertation argues that the origins of civil defense are to be found in pre-World War II Britain and that a driving force of this early civil defense scheme was fear of poison gas. Later iterations of civil defense, such as the Cold War system in America, built on already existing regimes that had proven their worth during WWII. This dissertation demonstrates not only that WWII civil defense served as a blueprint for later civil defense schemes, but also that poison gas anxiety served as a particular tool for the implementation and success of civil defense. The dissertation is organized thematically, exploring the role of civilians and volunteers in the civil defense scheme, as well as demonstrating the vital importance of physical manifestations of civil defense, such as gas masks and air raid shelters, in ensuring the success of the scheme. By the start of World War II, many civilians had already been training in civil defense procedures for several years, learning how to put out fires, recognize bombs, warn against gas, decontaminate buildings, rescue survivors, and perform first aid. The British government had come to the conclusion, long before the threat became realized, that the civilian population was a likely target for air attacks and that measures were required to protect them. World War I (WWI) saw the first aerial attacks targeted specifically at civilians, suggesting a future where such attacks would occur more frequently and deliberately. Poison gas, used in WWI, seemed a particularly horrifying threat that presented significant problems. Civil defense was born out of this need to protect the civil population from attack by bombs or poison gas. For the next five years of war civil defense worked to maintain British morale and to protect civilian lives. This was the first real scheme of civil defense, instituted by the British government specifically for the protection of its civilian population.

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