World War One Series

India, Empire and First World War Culture: Words, Image, Music

Dr Santanu Das, Reader in the Department of English, King’s College London

India joined WW1 as part of the British empire, contributing nearly one and half million men, including 900,000 combatants and 600,000 non-combatants, who served in places as far-flung as France, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, East Africa, Egypt and the Far East.

Drawing from archives in Europe and India – letters, diaries, original sound-recordings from German POW camps, photographs, paintings, and literary representations by both British and Indian writers – this lecture will investigate the Indian war...

Tell England (1931)

Running time: 85 minutes Certificate: UK Language: English

Director: Anthony Asquith, Geoffrey Barkas Cast: Fay Compton, Carl Harbord, Dennis Hoey. Introduction by Dr Simon Topping, Plymouth University

Tell England is set before the outbreak of WW1 and shows the friendship between two men before they enlist. Both directors had close memories of Gallipoli, as did Fay Compton's brother, Compton Mackenzie. Asquith's father H. H. Asquith had been Prime Minister at the time of the Gallipoli Landings, a fact which drew press attention to the film, while Geoffrey Barkas...

The Peace Ship 1916: Henry Ford's Bid to End the Great War

Dr Kristofer Allerfeldt, Lecturer in American History, University of Exeter

Dr Kristofer Allerfeldt is an expert on modern American history from the end of the Civil War to the bombing of Pearl Harbour, and specialises in deviancy and bigotry, working on all aspects of crime and racism, nativism and prejudice. He has published works on anti-immigrant sentiment, visions of Americanism, the Ku Klux Klan and crime in general. His lecture looks at the Henry Ford Peace Expedition which carried a delegation of Americans to Norway, Sweden, and Holland to meet with fellow European...

Forgotten or Misremembered? The First World War in Africa and its Cultural Legacy

Dr Daniel Steinbach, King's College London

In this lecture Dr Steinbach will explore the campaigns in Africa where German and Allied troops fought for the entire duration of WW1. This conflict not only challenged the colonial balance of power, but had severe economic, political, and social effects on the local population – colonised Africans and colonising Europeans alike. However, while the war in Africa is not entirely forgotten, the selective way in which this complex conflict is remembered highlights the challenges to integrate the non-European aspects of the First World...