Forgotten Philanthropy: The British League of Help

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Sally White recalls the efforts of the British League of Help, launched in the wake of the First World War by Lilias, Countess Bathurst, to raise funds to support devastated areas of France.

Visitors to the ruins of the cathedral at Arras in 1919Most studies of the First World War concentrate, understandably, on military history. Little attention is paid to the effects of the conflict on the people who lived in the war zone of northern France. When we do consider the impact of the war we have a comfortable way of talking as though all the damage was done by the Germans. Obviously this was not true. British shelling inflicted widespread destruction on the region. This is not just a recent attitude. During the conflict and in the years immediately following the Armistice, few British people knew about, or paid much attention to, the struggle that was being waged to maintain and reclaim some semblance of a normal life in northern France.

A few statistics give a hint of what the French had to cope with. At the end of the war the population of the main battle zone had been reduced by 57 per cent and half the men aged between 19 and 32 and many non-combatants had died. A third of the dead left widows and orphans. Barbed wire covered nearly 400 million square metres to a depth of over one metre. Over 330 million cubic metres of trenches needed to be filled in. Industry had been decimated, with 75 per cent of French mines and 20,500 factories destroyed. Almost 2,000 settlements had been obliterated or badly damaged.

Read the full text of this article in the June issue of History Today, which is out now, or get the digital edition for your iPad, Android tablet or Kindle Fire.