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This thesis analyses the significance of oil to British strategy during 1914-1923. It shows that by 1923 Britain had a coherent oil policy, which affected naval strategy, diplomatic relations, policy towards the oil industry and post-war aims in the Middle East. Previous works have looked at only part of the picture and have not appreciated the extent to which oil affected all these areas. This work brings all these different facets together into a single study. The most important British user of oil was the Royal Navy, which was replacing coal with oil as its principal fuel even before the First World War, which saw great growth in the use of oil. Aircraft and land vehicles powered by oil fuelled internal combustion engines transformed both warfare and civilian life, but their overall usage of oil was much less than that of the RN. British industry was slower than the RN to adopt oil because coal was cheaper; the RN put the technical advantages of oil ahead of cost. Britain's power and prestige was based on its naval supremacy; British dominance of naval fuel bunkering was a key factor in this. Britain had substantial reserves of coal, including Welsh steam coal, the best in the world for naval use, but little oil. Britain's oil strategy in 1914 was to build up reserves cheaply in peacetime and to buy on the market in wartime. An oil crisis in 1917 showed that this was flawed and that secure, British controlled supplies were needed. The war created an opportunity for Britain to secure substantial oil reserves in the Middle East. Attempts to obtain control of these affected the peace treaties and Britain's post-war relations with its Allies. The USA was then the world's largest producer and was the main supplier to the Allies during the war. It believed, wrongly, that its output would decline in the 1920s and feared that Britain was trying to exclude it from the rest of the world. France also realised that it needed access to safe and reliable supplies of oil. The largest available potential oilfield was in the Mosul vilayet, part of the Ottoman Empire in 1914, and now part of Iraq. The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement allocated about half of Mosul to France, which in 1918 agreed to include all of it in the British mandate territory of Iraq in return for a share of the oil and British support elsewhere. Other disagreements delayed an Anglo-French oil agreement, but one was finally signed at San Remo in 1920. It was followed by the Treaty of Sèvres with the Ottoman Empire, which appeared to give Britain all that it wanted in the Middle East. The resurgence of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal meant that it had to be re-negotiated at Lausanne in 1923. Sèvres angered the USA, since it appeared to exclude US oil companies from Iraq. For a period Britain focused on the need to have a large, British controlled oil company, but it was eventually realised that control of oil bearing territory was more important than the nationality of companies. This allowed US oil companies to be given a stake in Iraqi oil, improving Anglo-American relations. Britain's need for oil meant that it had to ensure that the Treaty of Lausanne left Mosul as part of the British mandate territory of Iraq. Turkey objected, but the League of Nations ruled in Britain's favour. Britain had other interests in the region, but most of them did not require control over Mosul. Mosul's oil gave Britain secure supplies and revenue that made Iraq viable without British subsidies. By 1923 Britain had devised a coherent strategy of ensuring secure supplies of oil by controlling oil bearing territory.

During the First World War, thousands of Welsh women became involved in the production of munitions and food for the war effort. This thesis examines attitudes towards and experiences of women workers employed in munitions and agricultural production in Wales during the war. It explores the organisation and recruitment of women in these areas, the employment of women in both fields, the organisation of welfare and leisure within and outside the workplace, and women’s experiences of demobilisation. Throughout, it considers women’s motivations for undertaking war work, as well as their experiences, including their involvement in strike action and in sporting activities, and how these were affected by class, age, and locality. The thesis argues that while the war lasted, women gained greater self-confidence and started to forge a collective identity as workers, but their contribution to the labour market was always viewed as temporary and valued less than men’s work. After the Armistice, women were forced back to the home or to traditional ‘feminine’ occupations. This thesis therefore contributes to long-standing historiographical arguments about the extent to which the war brought about lasting social change for women. It makes a significant contribution to the under-researched field of Welsh women’s experiences in the First World War.

This thesis explores the economic, social and political changes in society of the largely rural Welsh county of Pembrokeshire during the First World War to establish to what extent war conditions were a major agency of change and whether that change was of short duration or long lasting. Regional and local studies of particular counties and towns provide for a micro-historical test of national hypotheses. The methodology of this thesis has been to extensively engage with all existing primary sources, for evidence of social change. The potency of a conservative reaction seeing custom, tradition and hankering after pre-war certainties has been identified as a factor successful in limiting the scope of social change. The introduction places the thesis in its historiographical frame and presents the national debate of continuity verses war-generated change. Chapter one investigates state expansion and regulation of everyday life through the Defence of the Realm Act. Chapter two discusses changes to the Pembrokeshire economy and the implications of wartime price rises. Chapter three discusses voluntary military enlistment, the operation of conscription at the local level through Military Service Tribunals, conscientious objection and female paramilitary military service and the gender implications which it raised. Chapter four considers the changing identities of individuals and the rich diversity of expression of patriotic wartime forms. Religious and cultural changes are analysed in chapter five with the effects of carefully choreographed propaganda expressed in public events. The vicarious experiences of war on a distant rural population, including spy and war scares, expressions of the psychology of wartime, are reviewed in chapter six in the v context of Pembrokeshire being a coastal county. The thesis concludes with an assessment which detects limited social change and greater long-term continuity than war exceptionalism as the Pembrokeshire experience.

119 Brigade, 40th Division, had an unusual origin as a 'left-over' brigade of the Welsh Army Corps and was the only completely bantam formation outside 35th Division. This study investigates the formation's national identity and demonstrates that it was indeed strongly 'Welsh' in more than name until 1918. New data on discipline and the social background of men and officers is added to that generated by earlier studies. The examination of the brigade's actions on the Westem Front challenges the widely held belief that there was an inherent problem with this and other bantam formations. The original make-up of the brigade is compared with its later forms when new and less efficient units were introduced. Training is identified as key to success in battle. The controversial Frank Percy Crozier commanded the unit for most of its active service and the study examines the often-quoted books by Crozier putting them into context and concluding that they must be used warily as source material. The study advances the view that Crozier, while not an easy man to like, was an efficient and effective commander during the Great War and not the 'callous and overbearing martinet' often portrayed.

The evolution of infantry battalion commanders in the First World War progressed from a pre-war system based mainly on promotion by seniority to one largely based on merit. It remained a weighted process, however, favouring the professional officer, particularly during the first two years, and biased against the Territorial. The quality of the pre-war officer appears higher than has been estimated. Average command lasted 8.5 months. Eleven per cent of COs were killed, ten per cent promoted, and 18 per cent invalided. The army practised quality control, removing 38 per cent from command, although reduction in removals as the war progressed indicates a refinement of quality. The army committed itself to professional development, teaching technical aspects of the CO role, as well as command and leadership. Citizens of 1914 with no previous military experience rose to command, this progress taking on average three years. Despite the social opening-up of the officer corps, these men tended to be from the professional class. By The Hundred Days, infantry battalion commanders were a mix of professional soldiers, pre-war auxiliaries and citizens - younger, fitter and richly experienced; many being quick thinkers, self-assured, and endowed with great personal courage and well-developed tactical ability.

This thesis examines the conceptual origins of the control of the air in Britain between 1911 and 1918. It concludes that military and naval aviators possessed an innate understanding of the concept, informed by the wider operational and organisational context of their respective parent services. For the Royal Flying Corps, the control of the air was understood in terms of providing auxiliary support to the British Army in the field. For the Royal Naval Air Service, the concept possessed an inherently strategic slant. Pre-war theorising, developed during the First World War, has been the subject of some controversy in the literature. The overtly tactical focus of the Royal Flying Corps and its concept of the control of the air, praised in the first instance, is now widely criticised. In contrast, naval aviators, highlighted as lacking focus and direction, are now hailed as progressive innovators. By examining various facets affecting the conceptual origins of the control of the air, including doctrine, education, and relations with allies, this thesis attempts to reinvigorate the traditional interpretation of military and naval air power in Britain during this period.

Infantry brigades have been described as the ‘building blocks’ of the British army. Despite this, their role and that of their commanding brigadier-generals have been labelled as being concerned primarily with the provision of ‘training and administration’. The conventional criteria used to evaluate the performance of brigades and their commanders, however, has been their battlefield performance. This study challenges these orthodoxies. The Battle of Arras 1917 was the first offensive action which provided the British army with an opportunity to implement the lessons derived from its experience drawn from the Battle of the Somme. A cohort of one hundred and sixteen brigadier-generals commanded cavalry and infantry brigades involved in the battle. Collectively they are the subject of analysis. Five of these brigadier-generals, their battalion commanders and principal staff officers, are the subject of case studies over the period mid-October 1916 until mid-May 1917. These studies reveal a number of threads, in addition to battlefield performance, that are argued to be essential elements in understanding the role and functions of brigadier-generals. Their most significant contribution was to ensure, despite the unglamorous treadmill of building and rebuilding their brigades, that they retained the capacity and capability of their brigades for battle.

Following Britain’s entry into the First World War, the foreign spy became a particularly poignant image in popular culture as well as broader political discourse. Although espionage had featured regularly across British society during the preceding decade, with the outbreak of war the depiction of the spy took on a new significance. This thesis analyses British fears of German espionage between August 1914 and December 1915, in order to assess how popular spy phobias shaped wartime experiences. This recrudescence of spy fever, as these fears are commonly known, was facilitated by national policies and encouraged by local authorities. Pre-war strategic planning had determined that agents of the Kaiser were likely to target vulnerable infrastructure essential to Britain’s mobilisation. With this in mind, authorities responded to the declaration of war by conducting an erratic search for potential spies within their respective communities. These ostensibly official measures combined with scaremongering in the press to establish the danger of foreign espionage. Early rhetoric defined the appropriate response; popular suspicion and enhanced vigilance became essential to the national war effort. Defence panics had been an intermittent feature of Victorian and Edwardian discourse, and spy scares reflected a continuation of this tradition. Fears of espionage were far more prolific as collective anxieties rather than individual qualms. While some elements of society were caught up in this spy fever, others appeared unaffected by such concerns. As this thesis will show, emotional responses to spies appeared most pervasive in staunchly conservative communities that believed liberalism was ill-equipped to deal with national security and imperial defence. As a result, liberal ideals created a conflicting set of emotions that opposed radicalism and the feelings that it promoted. Spy fever was thus not a ubiquitous panic, nor was it particularly irrational, despite the fallacy of the espionage threat. Although anti-alienism has often been identified as the cause of such trepidation, spy phobias were multifaceted, and individuals who developed such fears did so for a variety of reasons.

This thesis charts the military education of junior Edwardian army officers, moving chronologically through key aspects of the process. It examines the detail of curricula at Sandhurst and Woolwich, the prevalence of entry via auxiliary forces and the military knowledge of men who gained commissions by that route, the training and study officers undertook after commissioning, and the education available at Camberley and Quetta. It thus offers a holistic examination of officer education. It concludes that there was a strong and growing professionalism among the junior commissioned officers, founded on their acquisition of skilled expertise and their expectations of advancing in their careers on the basis of professional merit. This thesis contributes to broader debates in three ways. Firstly, by going beyond existing studies which focus heavily on the upper echelons of the officer corps, it allows a more complete examination of the competence and military capacity of the Edwardian army. Secondly, it contributes to discussions on professionalism and processes of professionalization at the beginning of the twentieth century. Thirdly, it considers the nature of the training and education that the Edwardian Army undertook and seeks to locate this within discussions on the proper form and objectives of officer education.