Wales in England, 1914-1945

Abstract Wales in England 1914–1945: A Social, Cultural, and Military History unearths a vast array of English people with parental, ancestral, diasporic, affinity, affective, and elective connections with Wales in the first half of the twentieth century for whom a sense of ‘Welshness’ held meaning. It considers the ways in which Welshness was imagined, performed, and self-fashioned in England in the period from 1914 to 1945 and argues that this diasporic construction of Welshness held a wide urban appeal which had significant implications for military enlistment, cultural production, suburban transculturality, and commemorative practices. In particular, it addresses the heightened expression of dual identifications with both Wales and England during the First World War and Second World War, making use of individual English Welsh case studies from the worlds of art, literature, politics, and soldiering. It argues that, for English men and women of Welsh origin, the idea of being in some part ‘Welsh’ both informed and reaffirmed their own understanding of what it meant to ‘be British.’