Veteran MPs and Conservative Politics in the Aftermath of the Great War ─ The Memory of All That

Between 1918 and 1939, 448 men who performed uniformed service in the First World War became Conservative MPs. This relatively high-profile cohort have been under-explored as a distinct body, yet a study of their experiences of the war and the ways in which they - and the Conservative Party - represented those experiences to the voting public reveals much about the political culture of Interwar Britain and the use of the Great War as political capital. Radicalised ex-servicemen have, thus far, been considered a rather continental phenomenon historiographically. And whilst attitudes to Hitler and Mussolini form part of this analysis, the study also explores why there were fewer such types in Britain. The Conservative Party, it will be shown, played a crucial part in such a process - with British politics serving as a contested space for survivors' interpretations of what the war should mean.

Richard Carr has lectured at the University of East Anglia and served as a By-Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. His academic work has primarily explored the links between the Great War and British politics after 1918. He currently is a Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University, and is co-authoring a biography of the 1960s Labour Party minister Alice Bacon.