Event Details

The CWD Research Seminar continues with Professor Alaric Searle, Academic Director and Head of the Research Department of the German Armed Forces Centre for Military History and Social Sciences, Potsdam.

CWD Research Seminar: Professor Alaric Searle (Bundeswehr Centre of Military History and Social Sciences), 'The Symbology and Cultural Impact of the Tank on Britain’s Home Front, 1916-1918'

Tuesday 9th December, 17.00-18.30, Cavendish Colloquium

An explanation as to why the tank made such a huge cultural impact on the home front in Britain during the Great War requires the employment of ‘entwined methodologies’, weaving together visual history, material culture, textual analysis and social history. In addition to photographs and articles in newspapers, company and regional archives contain a wealth of unusual sources which highlight the immense psychological impact of the tank. The phenomenon of ‘tank euphoria’ culminated in the early reporting on the Battle of Cambrai, but throughout the war a series of ‘tank tropes’ appealed to the British public. Further evidence of the fascination, enthusiasm and excitement which the tank unleashed was the ‘Tank Bank’ campaign in 1917/18 when ‘battle-hardened’ tanks toured the country as part of the appeal to invest in War Bonds. The tank was also part of an inflamed class consciousness which saw the metropolitan elites being viewed as extravagant and degenerate, with the tank symbolising a new ‘wartime aesthetic’. An examination of a range of different sources reveals the tank tropes which emerged and demonstrates, likewise, the usefulness of the ‘science of symbology' in understanding public opinion and emotions in wartime.

Professor Alaric Searle is Academic Director and Head of the Research Department of the German Armed Forces Centre for Military History and Social Sciences, Potsdam, where is also Honorary Professor at the University of Potsdam. He is the author of numerous journal articles on British and German military and political history in the twentieth century, as well as other works, including Armoured Warfare: A Military, Political and Global History (Bloomsbury, 2017). A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is also a member of the Governing Board of the International Commission of Military History. Following teaching at the University of Munich, he was Professor of Modern European History, School of Arts and Media, University of Salford, from 2015 to 2023.