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Abstract

The Royal Navy sailors of the First World War (FWW) lived and worked in the distinct heterotopic spaces of their ships at sea in a time of conflict. This singular ethnographic environment shaped their memories and how they saw themselves through the lens of shipboard loyalties; local and national identities; expressions of war; and the wider narratives of imperial and masculine endeavour. This naval world was recorded and collected by the sailors, and shared by them with their families through the popular medium of photographic postcards. The postcard, with its unique visual-textual format, has a growing historiography as an artefact through which to examine and better understand socio-cultural groups. This trend has informed recent analyses of FWW photograph albums and postcards to furnish new understandings of the experiences of soldiers and civilians as part of the cultural turn in military history. The equivalent lives of sailors have largely by-passed these techniques and have predominately been interpreted to date through oral and written histories, including diaries and letters. This dissertation fills this historiographical gap by researching and interpreting a private, unpublished collection of sailors’ photographic and illustrated postcards of the FWW era.
The interrogation of this photographic source notably adds to the historiographical knowledge of the lived experiences of the sailors of the lower-deck by allowing a focussed access to the sailors’ war recorded by them through their own words and pictures. It depicts their interpretations of daily routines, and interactions with families and home and strongly argues for the importance of personal micro-histories to understand how ordinary sailors brought their identities and points of view to the war at sea. This study synthesises these themes with other contemporary sources and relevant historiography to place those visually narrated stories at the heart of any consideration of the role and lives of Royal Navy sailors in the FWW.

Course: Naval History - MA - C2457P

Date Deposited: 2023-11-01

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis14246.html