Spectators

A cartoon in The Passing Show in June 1915 shows a young man about town, monocled and smoking a cigarette through an exaggerated holder, standing in front of a shop window. The window carries a poster of soldiers going into battle and, underneath, the slogan ‘Don't stand looking at this, Come and Help.’ The caption, referring to the young man, is: ‘Who's looking?’

It was a complicated joke. The poster exhorts the move from spectatorship to participation, yet the ‘knut’ is not even engaged as a spectator. The line between spectatorship and participation could be blurred. In May 1915, the weekly issued a heavily ironic ‘Six don'ts for patriotic civilians’. Advice included: ‘be phlegmatic … The Press Bureau will tell you when to get excited: till then forget there is a war on’; when troops go by, ‘don't take your hat off … it is liable to distract attention from shop windows’; civilians shouldn't cheer: ‘Cheering is only permissable at horse races, football matches, strike meetings and in the trenches’; civilians shouldn't go out ‘without a plentiful supply of White Feathers’; they should ‘cultivate an upright and military bearing’, so that even if they were not in the volunteer reserve, people would think they were.