Order of the White Feather

Imagine that as a young boy, you are walking down the streets and all of a sudden you are surrounded by a group of women. They start to call you all sort of names because you are not in the army and to rub salt in the wound they hand you a white feather, a symbol of your cowardice. A lot of men, even some too young to be in the army, were pressured to join the army using this method by the Order of the White Feather.

White Feather

The white feather was already a symbol of cowardice in the British empire since the 18th century. The general consensus is that it originates from cockfighting and the belief that a cockerel with a white feather is more likely to be bad at fighting, as only inferior cross-breeds have white feathers.

Army recruitment

The British army was entirely based on volunteers, so they had to make use of strong recruitment campaigns to grow their army. Various methods were used including movies, recruitment posters, the newspapers, and induce hatred against the Germans with, sometimes entirely fictional, reports about atrocities picturing them as barbarians.

As women were not allowed in the army and were expected to wait at home for their men to return, they tried to help their country in other ways and so they tried to strengthen the army by getting more men to enlist. This type of propaganda was started by Admiral Charles Fitzgerald in Folkestone. He gathered 30 women around him and gave them white feathers and the instructions to give them to men they judged fit for the army and who were not in uniform so they would fulfill their civic duty.

In Britain during the time before World War I, it was considered an insult when a woman would point you out as weak and a coward. Young men could not handle the public shame and the disapproval of any future candidate wive. News of this new recruitment method was rapidly spread nationwide by the press and it became in use all across the country.

Bad press

Over time, the Order of the White Feather got a bad reputation. On more than one occasion they gave a white feather to someone who served in the army and was on leave or to men who were declined by the army. It went even that far that the government issues special badges for the state officials to wear, to indicate that they serve the country.

Private Norman Demuth, who served his country at the Western Front, but was discharged when he got wounded, got a white feather on a bus. He took the feather and cleaned his pipe with it and he replied: "Thank you very much, we did not get pipe cleaners a lot in the trenches".

Multiple reports exist of boys that were too young to enlist that got a white feather and were so impacted by the event that they went to the recruitment office and lied about their age to get in. The recruitment officers often knew what was going on, but enlisted the boys anyway.

British army

In all the recruitment channels that the British empire used, the White Feather Movement had found a simple, yet effective method to get more men to enlist in the army by focusing on their weak points. The British army grew from around 700000 to almost 4 million men at its peak by the end of 1918, which they decreased again after the war to 370000 men in 1920.