Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity: The Invisibility of Minority Groups 3030878880, 9783030878887

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Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity The Invisibility of Minority Groups

Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity

Manel Herat

Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity The Invisibility of Minority Groups

Manel Herat Department of English Liverpool Hope University Liverpool, Merseyside, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-87888-7 ISBN 978-3-030-87889-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87889-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Sanara and Sanuga

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank my colleagues at Liverpool Hope University, particularly Dr. Lisa Nahajec, Dr. Linda McLoughlin and Dr. Daria Izdebska, who have shared my enthusiasm for this topic from the time I first started and from whose ideas and discussions I have benefitted greatly. In addition, I would like to thank Dr. Zoe Kingsley, Dr. Salman Al-Azami and my friend and former colleague Dr. Barry Heselwood, for their unwavering support. I would like to say a very special thank you to the anonymous reviewers, without whose specialist knowledge and constructive feedback, this book would have contained many more errors than currently exists. I would also like to thank Dr. Patricia Ronan and Dr. Evelyn Ziegler in particular for their excellent editorial help; also Dr. Salmani Nodoushan for editorial help and for giving me copyright permission to reproduce a paper previously published in IJLS. I am also grateful to Peter Lang Publishing, Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics/De Gruyter Mouton and Chicago University Press for granting me copyright permission, and especially, the editorial staff at Palgrave Macmillan for their excellent service. Grateful thanks are also due especially to my former student Emma Campbell for accompanying me to the National Archives and for doing all the photography. The chapters on the pension files would not be possible without her help. I would also like very much to thank Barbara Taylor for her help with the DSM manuals, which inspired me to use them to

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

trace how labels for psychological illnesses have changed after the war. I am very grateful to Liverpool Hope University for funding my trips to the National Archives. I am also indebted to the staff at the National Archives and Writing on the Wall (Great War to Race Riots). I am extremely grateful for all the small blessings that have kept me going during the COVID-19 pandemic and I would especially like to say thank you to my twins, Sanara and Sanuga, for their patience and to Mohan and Kithsiri aiya for the many cups of tea during all the times I was on my computer working, and I can only blame myself for any existing shortcomings.

Contents

1

Introduction

1

2

Compiling the Corpus

5

3

The Letter: Metacommunicative Features in Colonial Correspondence

23

Post-war Letters to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool: Epistolary Constructions of Identity

39

Historical Learning Disabilities: Linguistic Abilities of Ex-Servicemen with ‘Imbecility’, ‘Feeblemindedness’ and ‘Mental Deficiency’ in the Ministry of Pension Files

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Psychological Disability, Word Use and Identity: Language in Ex-Servicemen’s Letters to the Ministry of Pensions

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4 5

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7 8 9

Keywords in the DSM Manuals: An Analysis of Psychological Disorders of Warfare

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Europe Through Indian Eyes: Constructions of Foreignness in Indian Soldiers’ Letters

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Conclusions

155

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CONTENTS

Appendices

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Index

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Abbreviations

APA CO DSM ICD LD MASCND PTSD RCC WHO WWI

American Psychiatric Association Colonial Office Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders International Classification of Diseases Learning difficulties American Medical Association’s Standard Classified Nomenclature of Disease Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Records of the Cape Colony World Health Organisation World War One

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List of Figures

Chapter 4 Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Three-dimensional conception of discourse adapted from Fairclough (1992: 73; see also Wood, 2007: 51) Letter to the secretary of the Lord Mayor’s Office by Alfred Woods (12th May 1919)

45 49

Chapter 6 Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Key domain cloud The percentages of positive and negative emotion words in the data Personal pronoun use in the data

99 102 104

Chapter 7 Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Types, tokens and frequency of the 4 keywords TTR for the 4 keywords under investigation

121 122

Chapter 8 Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Lexical words in the data A collocate graph for country using MI(2), L5-R5, C2

143 144

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List of Tables

Chapter 2 Table 1

Corpora used and the size

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Chapter 3 Table Table Table Table Table

1 2 3 4 5

Letter as evidence Letter features Words that refer to letters as source of information Words for giving and taking instructions Metatextual words in the letters

30 31 33 34 36

Chapter 4 Table 1 Table 2 Table 3

Details of the letters Terms of identification used by British officials Categories of identification

44 54 55

Chapter 5 Table 1 Table 2 Table 3

Yerkes’ intelligence measures in Army a Linguistic characteristics of imbecility in the medical documents Keywords in the corpora

73 78 80

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LIST OF TABLES

Chapter 6 Table 1 Table 2 Table 3

Percentages for selected LIWC categories Negative emotion words Health-related words in the data

99 101 106

Chapter 7 Table 1 Table 2 Table 3

DSM Versions I-V 1952–2013 The ten most frequent keywords in the DSM manuals Frequency of the 4 keywords in the DSM manuals from 1952 to 2013

117 118 122

Chapter 8 Table 1 Table 2 Table 3 Table 4

Total number of letters and original languages they were written in The location and physical condition of the writer Type of words in the data Descriptive words in the data (RN = raw number of occurrences; DR = distribution of words)

141 141 143 145

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This short introductory chapter explores the broad scope of the book by examining three strands of importance to this work: first, it examines why the aftermath of World War I is an important period in British history and details the background to the documents explored in this work; second, it discusses the letters and documents that are the focus of the analyses and details the significant role played by language in constructing identity. Finally, it provides a description of the structure of the book and demonstrates how it adds to the existing field of research, by examining the language used by marginalised groups such as black, disabled, destitute and Indian soldiers, thereby addressing a hitherto unexplored area of research. Keywords World War I aftermath · Psychological and physical disability · Corpus methods · Letters · Linguistic analysis

World War I and its immediate aftermath represents an interesting yet extremely challenging chapter in the history of disability, not simply because of the huge number of injuries both physical and psychological, but because of the inevitable impact it had on society. As World War I officially came to a close in the autumn of 1918, one of the main challenges for Britain was how to absorb the over three million men demobilised © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Herat, Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87889-4_1

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after the war, many of whom had suffered multiple disabilities and came from far flung corners of the British Empire. Among them, approximately 18,596 of all disabled ex-servicemen had been officially recognised by the War Office as suffering from shell shock, neurasthenia and other nervous disorders alone (Jones & Wessely, 2005: 144). Given the large scale of psychological and physical disability, reintegrating veterans back into society was no easy task. As a result, World War I and its aftermath has become an important and legitimate field of academic study. Although there are many works relating to World War I disability, up to now, no collection has brought together the letters and documents that are the focus of this book. This volume consists of different bodies of texts written during the war and in its immediate aftermath by ex-servicemen, medical professionals, clerks of colonial offices, seamen and factory workers from different parts of the world. The main emphasis is on letters written during the post-war period and the linguistic aspects discussed in the letters have to do with ex-servicemen’s construction of identity and disability. The book explores the question of how ex-servicemen from Britain and its colonies who fought in World War I utilised their experiences to express their identities through language. The focus of the letters and documents relate to those who have experienced particular struggles due to mental health issues, learning difficulties and physical impairments because of the war. The linguistic analysis therefore explores the language used to talk about identity, psychological disabilities and diagnosis rather than grammatical variation as in previous studies of letter writing. There were many methodological considerations when writing this book, but one area that clearly loomed large in all of the data was the importance of language. In order to examine linguistic uses in the documents and to get a sense of how language is used in different historical documents, corpus methodology was selected. Although the chapters stand alone, they are all bound thematically through topics related to World War I in one way or another and utilises a number of corpus techniques and software in analysing linguistic data which are detailed in the next chapter. This book will add to the yet limited, linguistic studies of the experience of World War I veterans in different contexts. Ethical clearance to conduct text based research was obtained from the university research ethics. In order to preserve the anonymity of the writers, all names in the Ministry of Pension files have been removed and only reference numbers

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INTRODUCTION

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are provided where relevant. This study attempts to evaluate the language used by veterans in different contexts to express their identity as well as examine how medical professionals diagnosed and labelled disabilities during World War I and how it has changed over the centuries.

1

Structure of the Book

Chapter 2 discusses the compilation of the epistolary corpus and details the data and methodology used in building the corpus. It discusses the corpus techniques and software used in analysing the data. Chapter 3 examines what we understand by the word ‘letter’ by investigating letter writing practices in two colonial offices one hundred years apart: the Cape Colony of South Africa and the Liverpool Mayor’s Office. It focuses on the metacommunicative features used by clerks in the two colonial offices to determine whether the same practices prevail over time and uses Wlodarczyk’s (2013) work as a framework for analysing linguistic practices. The connection between language and identity in letters written to the Mayor of Liverpool, John Ritchie, by destitute soldiers, seamen and factory workers is explored in Chapter 4. The study examines how the writers assert their identity through language as well as the attitudes expressed by the Liverpool Mayor’s Office towards the writers. Chapter 5 discusses the linguistic descriptions of historical learning disability such as imbecility, feeblemindedness and mental deficiency in the PIN26 files using medical reports and medical documents as data. It investigates what linguistic deficits were identified by medical professionals as constituting imbecility and feeblemindedness and whether contemporary thinking regarding intellectual deficits is evident in the medical reports. Chapter 6 continues with the issue of identity through the study of the PIN26 files. It explores the use of language by disabled soldiers writing to the Ministry of Pensions. The letter collection that is used comes from soldiers particularly suffering from the psychological disability neurasthenia and examines how psychiatric breakdown becomes evident through word use. Chapter 7 examines how the labels used in the PIN26 files to describe psychological disabilities have changed over time by looking at how these psychological disabilities are labelled in the DSM manuals. It focuses on

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the cultural and political conditions that led to changes evident in the new nosology of the DSM manuals. In Chapter 8, Indian soldiers’ letters are examined using Edward’s Said’s Orientalism (1978) in reverse in order to examine how Indian soldiers look at foreignness. It is based on translated extracts of letters transcribed from Omissi’s (1999) collection of letters and focuses on how Indian soldiers perceive their identity in comparison with that of Europeans. The final section concludes the study with a short summary of the preceding chapters.

References Jones, E., & Wessely, S. (2005). Shell shock to PTSD: Military psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War. Psychology Press. Omissi, D. (1999). Indian voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ letters, 1914–1918. Palgrave McMillan. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Penguin Books. Wlodarczyk, M. (2013). British colonial office correspondence on the cape colony (1820–1821): Metatextual keywords vs analytic categories. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 49(3), 399–428.

CHAPTER 2

Compiling the Corpus

Abstract This chapter examines the methods of linguistic inquiry used in the book, particularly corpus linguistic methods. It discusses the compilation of the corpora looking at what a corpus is and how it is different from archival material and details the types of data used, the corpus software and the use of corpus techniques. Keywords Corpus design · Corpus software · Corpus techniques · Archive · Corpus

1

Introduction

This chapter introduces and discusses the corpus of letters and documents used in this book. The word ‘corpus’ comes from the Latin word for ‘body’ and is used by researchers to refer to a collection of naturally occurring texts that form the body of their data. A corpus is generally seen as a systematic data set that can be analysed using corpus software and can contain both spoken and written texts. The data sets used in a corpus can range from texts consisting of a few lines to a large body of texts and are usually a collection of texts that is intended to be representative of a particular type of text, such as novels, newspapers, letters,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Herat, Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87889-4_2

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academic writing and emails from a particular period of time, or relating to a particular social group or a particular topic. Letter writing has been extensively studied by Nevalainen and Tanskanen (2007) and Auer et al. (2015) especially focusing on historical corpora such as the corpus of sixteenth-century English and nineteenthcentury poor letters. These studies have concentrated on linguistic variation in the letters. War Correspondence too has been studied by Omissi (1999), Jones and Wessely (2005), Meyer (2011) and Das (2015). These analyses have focused more on the historical, clinical and literary importance of the letters. Up to date, there have been few studies of war correspondence that specifically focus on how language is used in soldiers’ letters; for instance, Neumann (2019) examines soldiers’ letters from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Sowada (2021) analyses French and German letters from World War I. This work is therefore an attempt to address this gap in the research. This chapter aims to discuss some of the methodological issues relating to the compilation of the epistolary corpus of letters used in this study and some preliminary observations arising from this work. The letters come from a variety of sources and include letters written by British ex-servicemen to the Ministry of Pensions, letters written by destitute migrants to the Lord Mayor’s Office in Liverpool, letters written by the Colonial Office in the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa in response to Settler petitions and letters exchanged between the Liverpool Mayor’s Office, War Office, Board of Trade and the Colonial Office, and finally, letters written to friends and family in India and other parts of the world by Indian soldiers in Europe. The epistolary corpus on which this book is based encompasses letters and documents from people of different nationalities, mostly war veterans who had either served Britain on land or sea. Although some of the letters in the corpus have been of interest to historians and have been extensively studied, such as the letters written by Indian soldiers (Das, 2013; Omissi, 2011) and the letters written by ex-servicemen to the Ministry of Pensions (Jones et al., 2002; Leese, 2002; Meyer, 2011; Reid, 2010), they have as yet not been appreciated for their linguistic use and this is the focus of this collection (see Elspaß [2012] for an overview on linguistic studies of letter writing). Historians have tended to look at these letters from a literary or gender perspective examining masculinities portrayed by men of war. This work differentiates itself from these historical analyses by

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COMPILING THE CORPUS

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focusing more on how language is used in the letters to construct identities and, in the case of the letters from the colonial offices, to investigate the ‘metacommunicative clues’ (Wlodarczyk, 2013) used in the letters written one hundred years apart. The letters from the Colonial Office in the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa were written from 1820 to 1823 and the letters by British Authorities were written between 1920 and 1921. It was therefore interesting to compare whether the internal communication between different authorities was the same over hundred years in terms of the use of language. In addition, the study also focuses on other factors such as how the labelling of psychological disabilities of warfare has changed over the last hundred years by examining the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of Psychological Disorders (DSM). Although there is no direct co-relation between the terms used during World War I and the terms used in the manuals, the changes give an insight into the political and cultural motivations for the change in the labelling. The war years 1914–1920 were a crucial period in British history and provide a good insight into the cultural/political use of English at the time. During the war, the British were keen to avoid any action that might undermine the colonial agenda and this led to the censorship of letters written by migrant soldiers serving in the British army. In hindsight, it is the effort to censor letters written by Indian soldiers that enables the preservation of extracts of letters, which gives us an insight into Indian soldiers’ lives during the war and their thoughts about Europe. Although most of the letters were translated by scribes and have different layers of filtration (Omissi, 1999), it is still possible to get an insight into language use, as the thoughts expressed are those of the soldiers. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Britain faced a troubled period including racial tension and shortage of employment, culminating in race riots across different cities in Britain such as Liverpool, Bristol and Cardiff. The racial tensions and lack of employment are what lead to the destitution of British subjects (migrants from different parts of the world) to write to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool to request help either to find a job or to be repatriated to their own country. In relation to her own work, Dossena (2004: 196) observes that it is “especially interesting to investigate such an important genre as letters” in key periods of history. Since World War I was a pivotal historical period in Britain, due to the social and economic changes taking place on the ground, examining letters reveal the social, cultural and economic

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conditions of the writers in the aftermath of the war, highlighting their domestic and social struggles after service in the war. The importance of letters for expressing identity has been noted by Gorlach (1999: 149– 150), who writes that letters “reflect the social and functional relations between sender and addressee to a very high degree”. As the collection of letters that is studied involves correspondence concerning different types of letters, for instance, petitions to the Ministry of Pensions regarding injuries and disabilities suffered during service in the war; letters to the Mayor of Liverpool pleading for help to find a job or to be repatriated and extracts of letters home to families and friends written by Indian soldiers reassuring their families and at the same time talking about some of the dangers and discomforts of their predicament, they provide an understanding of what life was like during the war and in its immediate aftermath. In this respect then, these letters are a good source for examining how language is used in relation to identity and other social and cultural phenomena. Morton and Nesi (2014: 6–7) identify letters using the formal features recommended in writing guides for official correspondence by Nesfield (1917) and Thomson (1972), which consists of features such as a full or partial address, a date, an opening salutation, a closing salutation and a signature. Not all the letters I have used in this collection, however, meet these criteria, as some of the letters are only extracts that have been preserved through censorship and does not contain an opening salutation, closing salutation or signature. The letters used for the chapters in this book are those that describe personal experiences and which have an addressee and a sender. As a result of the broad scope of the book in taking into consideration different types of letters written by different writers for different purposes, the compilation of the corpus followed some of the 3 main steps noted by Kennedy (1998: 80–85) in building a corpus: “corpus design, text collection or capture, text encoding or markup” (Kennedy, 1998: 70). These aspects of corpus compilation will be discussed below. Table 1 illustrates the different corpora used in this book.

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Corpus Design

In terms of the design of the corpus, the corpus that was compiled for the chapters in this book is a written corpus which contains letters written by both ex-servicemen and colonial officials. In compiling her corpus,

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Table 1

COMPILING THE CORPUS

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Corpora used and the size

Corpus dates

The corpora

No. of documents/letters

1917–1944

World War I letters to the Ministry of Pensions written by disabled ex-servicemen Ministry of Pensions medical reports for imbecility, feeblemindedness and mental deficiency World War I censored extracts written by Indian soldiers Post-World War I letters written by destitute soldiers, seamen and factory workers to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool and letters written by the Lord Mayor’s Office Records of the Cape Colony DSM manuals Medical documents on imbecility and feeblemindedness

200

33,537

50

2,201

200

36,917

79

11,094

62 04 11

26,421 659,494 372,957

1917–1924

1914–1918 1919–1920

1820–1823 1954–2013 1850s–1900s

Size

Dossena (2004) used a proportional quantity of personal and business letters from Scotland and the texts included in the corpus were “diplomatically transcribed from original manuscripts” (2004: 197) retaining the authors’ self-corrections, amendments, details and original (non) capitalisation. Similar to Dossena’s (2004) corpus, some of the letters were transcribed from original manuscripts retaining the author’s use of language. However, unlike her corpus, the documents in this collection come from people from different parts of the world rather than from one country. Even though all the letters are written in English, there is, however, a question over the varieties of English used. The letters written by British ex-servicemen can be considered to be written in British English, whereas the letters written by ex-servicemen, seamen and factory workers from the colonies are written possibly emulating British style but sometimes containing non-standard forms. One-fourth of the letters was originally written in different Indian languages and were translated by Censors for purposes of reporting the contents of the letters to the Secretary of State for India, the India Office, the War Office, the Foreign Office, Buckingham Palace and the Commanders of the Indian divisions

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among others (Omissi, 1999: 7). The selection of letters used for analysis comes from the extracts used in these reports by the Censors. The translated texts are in British English. Kennedy (1998: 70) writes that “the optimal design of a corpus is highly dependent on the purpose for which it is intended to be used”. One of the main aspects that is mentioned by Kennedy is the size of the corpora. He suggests that it does not matter if the corpus is small as long as the researcher keeps in mind that a corpus study must enable comparative use. Baker (2014: 7) remarks that “the connected concepts of sampling and representativeness underpin corpus research”. Hunston (2002) elucidates that representativeness has to do with “breaking the whole down into component parts and aiming to include equal amounts of data from each of the parts” (28). What data is included in the corpus therefore depends on what the corpus intends to achieve in terms of the research questions and also what data is available for use. For example, in Baker’s study of language and gender using personal advertisements from Craigslist, although he had intended to collect 1000 advertisements from three countries, due to the archiving of advertisements only going back to a certain point in time, he was not able to collect the full number of advertisements he wanted to (Baker, 2014: 159). As Hunston (2002) explains, the researcher has to negotiate a fine balance between selecting data that is representative and what data is available. Moreton writes that this issue of representativeness is “always problematic” (2012: 621), particularly, when it comes to investigating letters. In terms of size, the corpus of letters I have used includes corpora of different sizes (see Table 1) and texts of different lengths. The compiled corpus is a representative sample of letters written during World War I and its immediate aftermath. The compiled corpus contains 541 letters from four sets of data, which contains letters from British soldiers and soldiers from the British colonies fighting for Britain as well as letters by colonial authorities from Liverpool and the Cape Colony in South Africa. The letters from the Cape Colony are from 1820 to 1823 and I have used these in order to compare how language was used by British colonial authorities hundred years apart. The corpus also contains a sub-corpus of documents containing medical reports, medical documents and the DSM manuals. These documents and manuals are used to examine what linguistic features constitute what we now recognise as learning disabilities and how diagnostic labels for psychological conditions have changed since World War I.

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Text Capture

The texts used for analysis were selected from different sources. Some of the collection of letters is taken from archival sources. There is a difference between corpora and archival material in that whereas corpora generally contain representative samples of text, archival material is sourced in different ways and is not always representative. This is confirmed by Morton and Nesi (2014: 1), who note in their abstract that material in archives is not “collected to be representative, nor are they primarily designed to facilitate linguistic investigation”. Archives contain important historical data but collecting the material for linguistic analysis poses some challenges. To create a World War I epistolary corpus for the purpose of writing this book, it was necessary to have collections of letters from different soldiers spanning the war years and its immediate aftermath. In order to have a balanced corpus of 600 letters, it would be necessary to have 75 letters spanning from 1914 to 1920. However, as Labov (1994: 11) has written, “historical documents survive by chance, not by design, and the selection that is available is the product of an unpredictable series of historical accidents” which makes it difficult to be perfectly balanced. In the case of the selected letters used for the purposes of this book, the surviving correspondence from ex-servicemen, seamen and factory workers in Liverpool is limited to a few surviving documents. Similarly, the Indian soldiers’ letter archive is limited by the extracts of letters that have been selected for censorship by the Censors during the war. Likewise, with the PIN26 files, only a sample has been selected for purposes of archiving. 3.1

Records of the Cape Colony

The letters written by the Colonial Office in the Cape of Good Hope were downloaded from the internet (Mackay, eggsa.org). The Records of the Cape Colony (henceforth RCC) include a number of different official documents that were used within the administration’s internal correspondence such as warrants, proclamations, memoranda and returns (Wlodarczyk, 2013: 407). For the purpose of this work, only letters containing a sender and an addressee were used. Wlodarczyk (2013: 1) observes that “the surviving documents provide fascinating evidence of the social networks connecting the clerks of the institution and they allow for a reconstruction of the procedures involved in its operation”. These

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documents were used to compare with those written by clerks in the internal correspondence within the Liverpool Lord Mayor’s Office. 3.2

The Letters by Ex-servicemen, Seamen and Factory Workers in Liverpool

The letters written by ex-servicemen, seamen and factory workers to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool were collected from the Liverpool Records Office. Scanned copies of the original letters are also available online at Great War to Race Riots. This is a small collection of about 90 documents which includes correspondence from the period 1919–1920, including postcards, telegrams and other documents such as lists of names of (1) coloured men who served in the war; (2) coloured men who did not serve in the war but who were in the merchant marine; and (3) coloured men who had wives and children in the city. The ‘coloured men’ who appear on the lists are all black Africans or West Indians. The list does not provide names of people who are from other parts of the world. Of these 90 documents, I am using 79 documents. The omitted documents are post cards, copies of the same letter and lists of names. 3.3

PIN26 Files Medical Reports and Medical Documents for Imbecility, Feeblemindedness and Mental Deficiency

The letters written by soldiers diagnosed as having imbecility, feeblemindedness and mental deficiency were collected from the National Archives in Kew. There are altogether 38 folders in the PIN26 collection relating to imbecility, feeblemindedness and mental deficiency. Of these I looked at 25 folders; however, only two contained letters from the soldiers themselves. As a result, the medical reports by doctors about the disability of the soldiers were photographed. Some of these reports were the same but appeared in different formats: first as a printed card on which text is written and, second, a typed report of the writing. Some reports also included extracts of patients’ statements about their disability. The medical reports are very short and sometimes only contain a few lines consisting of about 50–100 words. Some patients had reports over two or three years, whereas others only contained one report. I have used 50 reports and 11 medical documents written about imbecility by medical professionals in the nineteenth century as part of the corpus in order to

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see whether lack or deficiency in language use was considered to be characteristic of imbecility and whether the medical reports used the same language that is evident in medical documents. 3.4

Letters to the Ministry of Pensions

The only surviving pension records from World War I are held at the National Archives in Kew. According to Jones and Wessely (2005: 58), the pension files contain every fiftieth file to create a two per cent sample. On this basis, they claim that 22, 756 files were extracted from 1,137, 800 records. An official report calculated that by March 1930, 1,644,000 pensions or gratuities had been granted to veterans of World War I. The letters to the Ministry of Pensions by ex-servicemen were gathered from the National Archives in Kew with the help of my former student, Emma Campbell, who helped to photograph the letters. We made two trips to the National Archives in Kew and collected 657 documents from 52 folders which included letters by ex-servicemen to the Ministry of Pensions, letters of reply by officials at the Ministry of Pensions and medical notes. The letters by ex-servicemen were mostly handwritten letters with a few exceptions where the letters were typed; most of the official letters were typed letters of reply to ex-servicemen. Some folders contained letters up until the 1980s. Of the letters that were photographed, only letters written by ex-servicemen during the war or immediate aftermath were transcribed for analysis. Although 657 documents were collected, not all the letters written by ex-servicemen were useful in examining the language used to describe mental health. The letters were selected on the basis of three criteria: first, only letters written from 1917 to 1944 were selected; second, letters that did not discuss their mental health were discarded. Third, letters that were illegible and difficult to decipher were eliminated. This substantially reduced the number of letters that could be used. From the number of remaining letters, 200 letters written from 1917 to 1944 were selected for purposes of analysis. These letters were then transcribed by me. Using a similar methodology to Dossena (2004), I did not make any changes to the letters and transcribed them as accurately as possible with no changes to spelling or punctuation. The transcribed letters were then converted into plain text format using UNICODE 8, so that the letters could be analysed using corpus software.

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3.5

DSM Manuals

Another corpus collection that was used was the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association. There are five DSM manuals, the first DSM published in 1952 and the last manual in 2013. The nomenclature of mental disorder in DSMI was created to streamline the classification of mental disorders because of the different diagnostic labels being used in the US after World War II. The emphasis in DSM-I was on organic and psychotic disorders. DSMII contains some new categories, particularly relating to anxiety, depressive and personality disorders as well as childhood/adolescent disorders but the nomenclature was kept the same with only a few exceptions. DSMIII is different because it not only reverses the terminology used in the previous manuals but is also more empirically based and includes criteria for defining the categories’ meanings. DSMIV and DSM5 had no significant changes from the previous manuals in terms of nomenclature. Not all five DSM manuals were available for download, so the manuals used for the purposes of this study include DSMI (1952), DSMII (1968), DSMIII (1980) and DSM5 (2013). The DSM manuals were converted in to txt format using AntFileConverter (Anthony, 2017). This corpus is used for examining how diagnostic labels for psychological disabilities used in World War I have changed due to cultural and political forces. 3.6

The Indian Soldiers’ Letters

The Indian soldiers’ letters come from the India Office Records collections which include “Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France” 1914–1918 which contain extracts, translated into English, of several hundred letters written by soldiers of the Indian army serving in France during World War I. I have used 199 extracts from Omissi’s (1999) collection of letters and one extract from Morton Jack (2006). Omissi’s collection contains 650 extracts of which I have transcribed 199. I have adopted the standard terms used by Omissi in annotating the extracts, such as short titles for the regiments which were used by the censor. In his book, Omissi (1999: xxiii) states that taking the Indian army list as his authority, he has on occasion “corrected the spelling of their name”. Where Indian place names are used, Omissi has adopted the standard spellings used in the Imperial Gazette of India. He has also supplied

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“missing information about dates, units and original languages” (1999: xxiii). These are likewise preserved as in the book in the transcriptions. Omissi’s collection also indicated whether the letter was passed, withheld or modified through deletions by the Censor. The letters in the book reproduce the original wording verbatim exactly as it appears in the original typescript, with a few, minor modifications: these include punctuating the letters according to modern English usage, breaking long letters into paragraphs and corrections of obvious grammatical and spelling errors. No changes whatsoever have been made to any letters written in English. In Omissi’s book, the letters are arranged chronologically rather than by theme.

4

Annotation

For the purpose of this book, some “meta-information about the text” (Baker, 2014: 8) for each file such as the name of the sender, the location, the rank, whether the soldier was disabled, injured, wounded or destitute and the disability diagnosis, was recorded as separate files. I did not, however, annotate the texts for Parts of Speech, as the investigation of language was led by the frequency information uncovered by the data analysis. Also, I did not approach the corpus with specific search criteria in mind, and quantitative findings were further examined qualitatively by investigating concordance lines (see Moreton, 2012: 623–624 for a similar approach). Also, the corpus software that I was using annotates the text automatically for Parts of Speech (LancsBox, WMatrix, Sketch Engine) and Semantic Tags (WMatrix).

5

Analysis of the Data

One of the important aspects of Corpus Linguistics as Baker (2014: 11) notes is the availability of “specialised software which can perform complex calculations on the language data very quickly”. Moreton (2012) observes that unlike traditional methods of analysing data, computer software can be used to analyse large amounts of data quickly which would not be possible using manual content analysis. She goes on to note that “computer software allows the analyst to observe recurrent patterns, distributional trends and other statistical features, which would be hard to notice through reading alone. For this reason, it is often the data that will lead the investigation, pointing the analyst to features of the

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texts which s/he may not have noticed otherwise” (2012: 621–622). The software packages used for analysing the data in this book are AntConc (Chapters 3, 4 and 7); Sketch Engine (Chapter 5); LIWC and WMatrix (Chapter 6); and LancsBox (Chapter 8). These corpus tools are all able “to perform calculations and statistical tests on corpus data” (Baker, 2014: 11) although there are functionality differences between the software; for example, LancsBox calculates dispersion, whereas AntConc calculates effect size. 5.1

AntConc

AntConc is a freely available and easy to use software that can be downloaded on to a personal computer and which has a number of different functionalities. It can be used to compare corpora, to search for concordances and to find keywords and N-grams. The Concordance tool enables users to search using words or phrases with a number of wild cards and the KWIC (Key Word in Context) appears in the concordance lines and can be sorted using highlight colours. By clicking on the KWIC results display, a user has the option of looking at the File view. The concordance plot enables the study of how a word is used in a particular corpus by showing the distribution of the word within the corpora (Anthony, 2004: 8–9). The Keywords tool detects which terms appear particularly frequently in a corpus when compared to the same words in a user-specified reference corpus. Chi-squared or log likelihood statistical techniques are used to determine the keyness of words (Anthony, 2004: 10–11). The N-grams tool searches the entire corpus for clusters of ‘N’ length (e.g. one word, two words, etc.) and gives evidence of common phrases relating to a particular search term. Collocations provide the most frequently co-occurring word patterns. 5.2

Sketch Engine

Sketch Engine is a tool that uses algorithms to analyse corpora which are available with institutional access. It is a software that is able to identify typical uses in language as well as rare uses with reference to authentic corpora such as the Entencorpus. Sketch Engine has the following functionalities: it is able to examine collocations and typical combinations of words through a Word Sketch. It can extract keywords using reference

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corpora, and also, it can look at key words in context, generate word lists and construct N-grams. 5.3

LIWC

LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) (Pennebaker Conglomerates, 2015) is a computer text analysis program. It calculates the degree to which various categories of words are used in a text, and can process texts ranging from emails to speeches, poems and transcribed natural language in either plain text or Word formats. It calculates the percentage of words in each of 70 categories as a function of total words in a text file for function word and content categories including linguistic dimensions such as (words per sentence, articles, etc.), psychological processes (emotional and cognitive), relativity (in time and space) and personal matters (health, religion, money). 5.4

WMatrix

WMatrix (Rayson, 2009) is an online corpus software where users can upload their own corpora, which is then tagged for parts of speech and assigned semantic tags using the UCREL semantic analysis system (USAS) (Wilson & Thomas, 1997). The set of semantic tags was originally based on Tom McArthur’s Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English (McArthur, 1981 cited in Baker, 2014: 162) and consists of 21 main fields which are further subdivided into several hundred subfields. For example, Category B - the Body and the Individual is further subdivided into B1 Anatomy and Physiology; B2 Health and Disease; B3 Medicines and Medical Treatment; B4 Cleaning and Personal Care, and B5 Clothes and Personal Belongings. The software can also be used to compare the corpora against a reference corpus such as the written or spoken component of the British National Corpus or other preloaded corpora and integrate corpus tools such as frequency lists, keywords, concordances and collocations. One of the advantages of using WMatrix is that it allows for microscopic analysis of data. 5.5

LancsBox

This was chosen as Brezina et al. (2015b: 141) observe that “collocates of words do not occur in isolation, but are part of a complex

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set of semantic relationships which ultimately reveals their meaning and the semantic structure of a text or corpus”. One of the advantages of using LancsBox (Brezina et al., 2015a) over other available software is that LancsBox has a unique feature not available elsewhere which is the GraphColl function that can be used to investigate collocational networks. Brezina et al. (2015b: 141) write that “GraphColl implements a range of different collocational measures […] and also allows the user to define their own statistics via simple interface. GraphColl can thus be used to uncover meaning connections in text and discourse that may otherwise pass unnoticed”. Another important characteristic of LancsBox is that it automatically tags files using Treetag, so it is not necessary to annotate the corpora separately.

6

Corpus Methods Used

Hunston and Thompson (2006: 3) note that there is no single method of how to ‘do’ corpus analysis, that it can be carried out using some common procedures such as the determination of frequencies—that is, highly frequent words and phrases—and the analysis of collocations—that is, the words with which pertinent terms tend to co-occur. Hunston writes that corpus techniques can be used to manipulate the data and “uncover linguistic patterns which can enable us to make sense of the ways that language is used” (2002: 28). The following corpus techniques are used in subsequent chapters of this book: 6.1

Frequency

Frequency lists as used in corpus linguistics have to do with the number of occurrences of a particular word or phrase. A frequency list is “a list of the most frequent words (or word sequences or tags)” (Baker, 2014: 13). Frequency can be calculated as raw frequency or as normalised frequency. Raw frequency refers to absolute numbers (how many times a particular word or phrase or tag occurred), whereas normalised frequency refers to how many times a word/phrase or tag occurs in relation to an x number of words. Normalised frequencies are particularly useful when there are texts of different lengths. Frequency lists are useful in identifying patterns in the data; however, Baker (2014: 13) argues that, the most frequent words in frequency

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lists at the beginning, for example, words such as determiners, prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns, can tell us something about language in general rather than something about the specific corpus, but as Pennebaker et al. (2003) have noted, function words such as personal pronouns and articles are important indicators of mental states. 6.2

Keyword Analysis

Another corpus method that is used in the book is keyword analysis. Keywords are not necessarily words which are highly frequent in the data but which are more frequent than expected, when compared against a reference corpus (Baker, 2014: 13). Keywords are usually calculated using statistical measures that examine the keyness value in comparison with a reference corpus that is bigger or sometimes similar in size. The reference corpus is used as a standard measure of normal frequency of use in language, so words which occur more often in the other corpus will be identified as key words. Keywords are analysed in Chapters 5 and 7. 6.3

Collocation

Collocation, which is the tendency of words to occur together, is used in Chapters 5 and 8. Baker (2014: 13) notes that “collocates can be useful in revealing how meaning is acquired through repeated uses of language, as certain concepts become inextricably linked together over time”. Collocates are examined in Chapter 5, where I look at Medical Reports pertaining to those who have imbecility, feeblemindedness and mental deficiency, and in Chapter 8, in examining constructions of foreignness. As mentioned before, I used LancsBox, which has the unique feature GraphColl which takes into account collocational networks as well as Word Sketch in Sketch Engine. 6.4

N-grams

N-grams are the most basic multi-word occurrences used in corpus linguistics. The ‘n’ in N-gram stands for any number variable; for example, it is possible to extract two-word N-grams, three-word N-grams, etc. N-grams can be searched using corpus software such as AntConc.

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6.5

Concordances

Another commonly used method in corpus linguistics is the analysis of concordance lines. According to Baker, “a concordance is a table containing all the occurrences of a particular linguistic feature (word, word tag combination, tag or sequence or combination of words or tags) with a few words of the immediate context displayed either side” (2014: 14). Unlike the previous methods discussed, concordances enable a researcher to examine the data qualitatively taking into account the surrounding context of the word. Concordancing is used to analyse data in Chapters 6 and 7. Using concordances provided an opportunity to look at all the occurrences of the selected key words in context and to analyse how they have been used.

References Anthony, L. (2004). AntConc: A learner and classroom friendly, multi-platform Corpus Analysis Toolkit. IWLeL 2004: An Interactive Workshop on Language e-Learning. http://www.laurenceanthony.net/research/iwlel_2004_anthony_ antconc.pdf. Accessed 3 September 2021. Anthony, L. (2009). AntConc (Version 3.5.8) [Computer Software]. Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. http://www.laurenceanthony.net Anthony, L. (2017). AntFileConverter (Version 1.2.1) [Computer Software]. Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. http://www.laurenceanthony.net Auer, A., Schreier, D., & Watts, R. J. (2015). Letter writing and language change: Studies in English language. Cambridge University Press. Baker, P. (2014). Using corpora to analyse gender. Bloomsbury. Brezina, V., Timperley, M., & McEnery, T. (2015a). #LancsBox v. 4.x [software]. Brezina, V., McEnery, T., & Wattam, S. (2015b). Collocations in context: A new perspective on collocation networks. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 20(2), 139–173. Das, S. (2013). Writing empire, fighting war: Great Britain and the First World War. In S. Nasta (Ed.), India in Britain: South Asian networks and connections 1858–1950 (pp. 28–45). Palgrave Macmillan. Das, S. (2015). Reframing life/war ‘writing’: Objects, letters and songs of Indian soldiers, 1914–1918. Textual Practice, 29(7), 1265–1287. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/0950236X.2015.1095446 Dossena, M. (2004). Towards a corpus of nineteenth century Scottish Correspondence. Linguistica e Filologia, 18, 195–214.

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Elspaß, S. (2012). The use of private letters and diaries in sociolinguistic investigation. In J. M. Hernandez-Campoy & J. C. Conde-Silvestre (Eds.), The handbook of historical sociolinguistics (pp. 156–169). Wiley Blackwell. Gorlach, M. (1999). English in nineteenth century England: An introduction. Cambridge University Press. Hunston, M. (2002). Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge University Press. Hunston, M., & Thompson, G. (2006). System and corpus: Exploring connections (functional linguistics). Equinox Publishing. Jones, E., & Wessely, S. (2005). Shell shock to PTSD. Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War. Jones, E., Palmer, I., & Wessely, S. (2002). War pensions (1917–1945): Changing models of psychological understanding. British Journal of Psychiatry, 180, 374–379. Kennedy, G. (1998). An introduction to corpus linguistics. Addison Wesley Longman Limited. Labov, W. (1994). Principles of linguistic change, Volume 1, Internal factors. Blackwell. Leese, P. (2002). Shell shock: Traumatic neurosis and the British soldiers of the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan. Mackay, S. (n.d.). Records of the Cape Colony (1821–1822) (Vol. 14). https:// www.eggsa.org/1820-settlers/index.php/records-of-the-cape-colony McEnery, T. (2014). Building a corpus summary. Future Learn Week 4 https:// ugc.futurelearn.com/ Meyer, J. (2011). Men of war: Masculinity and the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan. Moreton, E. (2012). Profiling the female emigrant: A method of linguistic inquiry for examining correspondence collections. Gender and History, 24(3), 617–646. Morton, R., & Nesi, H. (2014). Corpora, catalogues and correspondence: The item-level identification and digitisation of business letters for the British Telecom correspondence corpus. https://www.dhi.ac.uk/openbook/chapter/dhc2014morton Morton Jack, G. (2006). The Indian army on the Western Front; 1914–1915: A portrait of collaboration. War in History, 13(3), 329–362. Nesfield, J. (1917). Junior course of English composition. Macmillan Co. Neumann, M. (2019). Soldiers’ letters from the 18th and 19th centuries: Investigations into syntax and text structure in everyday writing of different military ranks. Universitätsverlag winter Heidelberg. https://www.winter-verlag.de/ en/assets/public/9783825346423/978-3-8253-4642-3_Neumann_Soldat enbriefe_%20Anhang.pdf Nevalainen, T., & Tanskanen, S. (2007). Letter writing. John Benjamins. Omissi, D. (1999). Indian voices of the Great War. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Omissi, D. (2011). India and the Western Front. Retreived from https://www. bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/india_wwone_01.shtml. Accessed 2 November 2021. Pennebaker Conglomerates Inc. (2015). Linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC). https://liwc.wpengine.com/ Pennebaker, J., Mehl, M., & Niederhoffer, K. (2003). Psychological aspects of natural language use: Our words, our selves. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 547–577. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.psych. 54.101601.145041 Rayson, P. (2009). Wmatrix. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/ Reid, F. (2010). Broken men: Shell shock, treatment and recovery in Britain 1914– 1930. Continuum. Sketch Engine. (2021). https://www.sketchengine.eu/ Sowada, L. (2021). Writing in the First World War: French letters and diaries from inexperienced writers from the Franco-German border region (Vol. 456). Heidelberg University. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/ 10.1515/9783110719161/html Thomson, K. G. (1972). The Pan book of letter writing (9th ed.). Pan. Wilson, A., & Thomas, J. A. (1997). Semantic annotation. In R. Garside, G. Leech, & A. McEnery (Eds.), Corpus annotation: Linguistic information from computer text corpora (pp. 53–65). Longman. Wlodarczyk, M. (2013). British Colonial Office correspondence on the Cape Colony (1820–1821): Metatextual keywords vs analytic categories. Poznan´ Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 49(3), 399–428.

CHAPTER 3

The Letter: Metacommunicative Features in Colonial Correspondence

Abstract This chapter compares official/colonial internal correspondence over hundred years apart in order to investigate what they reveal about the metacommunicative features found in the internal correspondence between two colonial offices: the Colonial Office in the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and the other, the Mayor’s office in Liverpool one hundred years later. Official correspondence during World War I has not been studied from a linguistic perspective although official correspondence by the Colonial Office in the Cape of Good Hope has been studied extensively by (Wlodarczyk in Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 49:399–428, 2013). It is this work that was the impetus for this chapter. The study will compare the metacommunicative features in the two data sets using corpus methods, particularly keywords, frequency, concordancing and N-grams. The data will be analysed using AntConc (Anthony in AntConc (Version 3.5.8) [Computer Software], Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, 2009) and WMatrix (Rayson in Wmatrix: A web-based corpus processing environment, Computing Department, Lancaster University, 2009). The results suggest that there

The framework for this chapter including terms and headings belong to Wlodarczyk (2013) and is used with permission from Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, De Gruyter Mouton. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Herat, Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87889-4_3

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are similarities in the practice of letter writing over the different time periods but that the linguistic practices associated with the two colonial offices seem to differ because of the difference in the audience and the purpose of the communication undertaken. The language used by the clerks of the Cape Colony appears to be more formal and to use a wider linguistic repertoire of words, whereas fewer words to do with letter writing practices are used by clerks in the Liverpool Mayoral Office. Keywords Post-war letters · Liverpool Mayor’s Office · Cape Colony · Correspondence · Metatextual communicative features

1

Introduction

This chapter compares the power structures and correspondence conventions used in two institutional settings over hundred years apart. Both institutions that have been selected for comparison are colonial institutions: first, the British Colonial Office (henceforth CO) in the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, which is described by Wlodarczyk (2013: 133) as “a government agency responsible for colonial policies. It aims to reconstruct these structures and networks based on the internal correspondence of the officials” (also see Laidlaw, 2005). The second is the Liverpool Mayor’s Office. Traditionally, the mayor’s office oversees the city’s main departments and is responsible for its citizens. This study aims to examine the metacommunicative features in the two sets of correspondence looking at what metacommunicative features are used in the correspondence from the Liverpool Mayor’s Office and whether they are the same as the metacommunicative features used in the correspondence of the Colonial Office in the Cape of Good Hope 100 years before. Wlodarczyk (2013: 399) notes that “a metacommunicative perspective may be achieved through an analysis of categorical labels (keywords) and metacommunicative clues”. As in Wlodarczyk’s (2013) work, a similar approach is used in comparing the internal correspondence of the clerks of the Mayor’s Office in Liverpool in the years 1919–1920 in the aftermath of World War I with that of the Colonial Office in South Africa when the Cape of Good Hope settlement plan was implemented. Wlodarczyk (2013: 400) suggests that a metacommunicative approach to genre “may to some extent take us closer to the understandings of their users”.

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She notes that at specific points in history, certain attributions of genres are socially shared and that “for efficient communication, producers take user expectations into account and need to rely on specific rules and conventions”. These usually include “a repertoire of items naming and designating a specific communicative activity” (Wlodarczyk, 2013: 400). In relation to the institutional correspondence undertaken by the Colonial Office, she notes that a range of different terms such as memorial and supplication were employed (Wlodarczyk, 2013: 400). She suggests that the range of terms employed by the internal correspondents of institutions indicates “what constitutes a particular communicative action and reflect a specific communal or social understanding of routinised communication”. The correspondence of the Colonial Office in the Cape of Good Hope is regarded by Wlodarczyk (2013: 400) as a historical example of routinised communication. The Colonial Office in the Cape of Good Hope was established to implement the Cape of Good Hope settlement plan, and the correspondence from the Colonial Office reflects the bureaucratic nature of communication between different institutions in settling matters relating to its implementation. With regard to the Liverpool Mayor’s Office, it can be said that, being one of the five largest cities in Britain (King, 1990b: 35) as well as being a major port for seafarers, the city’s business was conducted through the Mayor’s Office. According to Schwarz (2007), the wealth of Liverpool was gained by the profits of the transatlantic slave trade. After the slave trade was abolished in 1808, Liverpool made its money through the cotton trade. According to the Victorian Society (1967: 4 cited in Wilks-Heeg, 2003: 40), “Liverpool handled some eighty-five percent of Britain’s total annual import of 1.75 million cotton bales” becoming one of the principal ports for imports (sugar, cotton, tobacco) and exports (coal and manufactured goods) during the industrial revolution. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Victorian Society (cited in Wilks-Heeg, 2003: 40) notes that it is not an exaggeration to say that Liverpool “with London and New York, was one of the three great maritime commercial centres of the world” (Victorian Society, 1967: 3). King notes that cities such as Liverpool involved in colonial activities, operated ‘within the politically and economically protected circumstances of colonialism’ (1990a: 62). A noticeable difference between the Liverpool Mayor’s Office and the Colonial Office in the Cape Colony is that whereas the letters of the Cape Colony were written mostly to settlers from Britain, the letters written by the Mayor’s Office in Liverpool are

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mainly letters to the Home Office, the Colonial Office, the War Office, the Ministry of Trade or colonial subjects from Africa and other parts of the world such as ex-servicemen, or seamen or other government offices or officials. The letters written by the Liverpool Mayor’s Office also deal with different topics such as matters relating to repatriation, racial unrest and dealing with issues to do with destitute ex-servicemen, compared to letters from the Cape Colony, which according to Wlodarczyk (2013: 400) was devoted “to settling many matters between the metropolitan and colonial clerks”. The operations of the Colonial Office, as noted by Wlodarczyk (2013: 401), required that clerks were well versed in routinised forms of written communication. According to Woods (1968: 5 cited in Wlodarczyk, 2013: 400), clerks in the colonial offices had to undertake both internal and external correspondence. This would be true also of the Mayor’s Office in Liverpool, as the selection of available letters demonstrates that clerks were writing to external parties and organisations as well as internal parties and government organisations such as the War Office, Colonial Office, the Board of Trade, Hospitals and Police. Therefore, it is likely that as in the case of the clerks of the Cape Colony, the clerks in the Mayor’s office would also have been “professional letters writers” (Wlodarczyk, 2013: 401), who would have had to communicate using ‘routinised’ features of communication. Following Wlodarczyk’s (2013) paper, this section investigates the following research questions, examining two sets of internal correspondence one hundred years apart, from the Colonial Office in Cape of Good Hope (1820–1823) when the Cape of Good Hope settlement plan was implemented and the Mayor’s Office in Liverpool (1919–1920) during the immediate aftermath of the War. 1. What routinised communicative features are used in the internal correspondence of the Liverpool Mayor’s Office? 2. How has the language changed over the 100 years and what similarities and differences are evident in the letters? In order to address the above research questions, the chapter will be structured as follows: Sect. 2 will look at metacommunicative features of correspondence in the literature. Section 3 discusses the methodology and selected analytical categories. Section 4 is a discussion of the findings from the corpus analysis and the final section will conclude the study.

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Metacommunicative Features in Letters

Nurmi and Palander-Collin (2008: 30–31) note that “a letter has a specific form, it is sent to a recipient, and its function is to communicate information and to maintain social relations across space and time”. Their work identified high frequencies of linguistic features connected with the situatedness of letters and the social distance between encoder and addressee. These features include the Pronoun “I”, personal names, titles and kinship terms and temporal expressions (Nurmi & PalanderCollin, 2008: 33–34; Wlodarczyk, 2013: 408). They also identify private verbs, such as think and hope, and second person pronouns as characteristic features of the text type ‘letter’. Sonmez (2001, cited in Nurmi & Palander-Collin, 2008: 26) identifies request markers such as pray, desire, and let. On this basis, they note that request types are also a characteristic feature of the text type letter. Similar to work by Nurmi and Palander-Collin (2008), Wlodarczyk’s (2013) study also found that first person pronouns (I, my, me), second person pronouns (you) and other types of references such as selected titles (Sir, Lord, (his) Lordship, (your) Excellency) and temporal expressions (dates, references to specific days, e.g. your letter of the 6th ultimo, yesterday, today) were evident in the correspondence of the Cape Colony with some features such as ‘you’ being used to a much lesser extent than in personal correspondence. This shows that in a professional context the second person pronoun ‘you’ is likely to be replaced by the use of a title suggesting that using titles to refer to addressees is significant. Herat (2020) found that in Liverpool, petitioners would often address the mayor with titles such as Dear Sir, Your Lordship and My Lord Mayor. Another feature that was consistent across the data analysed by Wlodarczyk (2013: 409) was the use of dates, whereas no other temporal expressions were evident. Another finding is that the correspondence in professional contexts is more “recipient oriented” [with a] range of instructions directed to the addressees lower in social rank” (Wlodarczyk, 2013: 409). As noted in the introduction, the clerks at the colonial offices both in Cape Town and in Liverpool would have been engaged in managing the routine clerical work required for the job, and as Wlodarczyk notes, “the clerks […] must have been able to target all their tasks through correspondence” and it is unlikely that they would have “conceived of

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letters as a means of conducting just one well-specified type of professional issues or aims”. By doing a sample analysis of one letter, the following features are identified as ‘genre related terms”: 1. Types of written communication: letters, a memorial and a proclamation (Wlodarczyk, 2013: 410). 2. Acknowledgement of receiving the letter: “of the 25th of April” (Wlodarczyk, 2013: 410). 3. Mentioning the enclosure to the letter “a Copy of a Memorial” (Wlodarczyk, 2013: 411). 4. The encoder reporting the official path of transmitting the above letter (“I have communicated the contents of the above letter”) (Wlodarczyk, 2013: 411). 5. The encoder informs the addressee of new developments (“a wish to take the Oath”) (Wlodarczyk, 2013: 411). 6. Refers to his own letter (Letter of the 14th April last) (Wlodarczyk, 2013: 411). 7. Announces the ultimate recipient (His Excellency the Governor) (Wlodarczyk, 2013: 411) (cited from Wlodarczyk, 2013: 410–411) The above information indicates the connections that the letter has with other institutional correspondence. Wlodarczyk (2013: 411) states that “a single piece of writing, and a fairly short one, is referential with four other written documents, three of which are dated”. From this, Wlodarczyk concludes (2013: 411) that the letter in the Colonial Office is used for two functions: to transmit information and to transmit documents. The language used in this context is mainly verbs such as “communicate”, “transmit” and “report”. The use of language suggests that the letter is “a label used in reference to a wide range of documents”.

3

Data

The data for this chapter is drawn from two corpora: first, 62 letters from the volumes of the Records of the Cape Colony were used that were written by officials working for the British Colonial Office in the colony and its headquarters in London. Although there were hundreds of letters

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available in the records, to keep comparison with the letters available from the Liverpool records office, the same number of letters were used. The selected letters were gathered from a single volume of the Records of the Cape Colony (Theal, Volume 14, Records of the Cape Colony) spanning the years 1820–1823 and consist of 26,421 words. Unlike the letters from the Liverpool Record Office, these letters are much longer in content. Second, 62 letters from the Liverpool Record Office were used, spanning the years 1919–1920. These letters were written by clerks working for the Liverpool Mayor’s Office and contain 8,773 words. 3.1

Framework of Analysis

Following the metacommunicative features discussed above, the data is analysed against the features established by Wlodarczyk (2013), Nurmi and Palander-Collin (2008) for the external features relating to the keyword letter. The following aspects of the word letter will be analysed: (1) the word letter as a piece of evidence; (2) the word letter as a source of information; (3) the word letter as action; and (4) metatextual keywords in both sets of data. The data is analysed using AntConc (Anthony, 2009) and WMatrix (Rayson, 2009).

4 Metacommunicative Features in the Correspondence 4.1

Letter as a Piece of Evidence

Following Wlodarczyk’s (2013) framework, a ‘lexical bundle’ approach was used to analyse the word letter looking at the most frequent threeword N-grams using AntConc. Wlodarczyk (2013: 414) notes that “frequencies of lexical bundles are […] an important general diagnostic of the degree of linguistic fixedness of the analysed form of communication”. In the internal correspondence of the Mayor’s Office for 1919–1920, there are 36 incidences of the word ‘letter’. The results reveal that as in the corpus of letters analysed by Wlodarczyk (2013), in the corpora analysed here too, the way in which the word letter is used is quite similar. As evident from Table 1, the most frequent N-gram for both corpora was letter of the, indicating the “significance of dating the letters to a particular day” (2013: 415). In addition, both sets of data also reveal that

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Table 1 Letter as evidence

Letter of the Your letter of Copy letter from Original letter from Letter from the Letter from Mr The receipt of Office copy letter Of your letter A letter from Am in receipt In receipt of Receipt of your To your letter

Raw number (Freq) Cape Colony

Raw number (Freq) Liverpool

49 43 41 38 35 26 24 23 16 14 0 0 0 0

22 18 0 0 0 0 0 0 8 0 6 6 7 6

designating a letter to a particular addressee on a specific date is seen as important *your letter of . However, a difference from the correspondence of the Cape Colony is that, while this set of data illustrates the importance of attributing particular letters to their senders, this is not evident in the letters from the Liverpool Mayor’s Office, as there are no occurrences in the corpora of the construction ‘a letter from’. Unlike in Wlodarczyk’s corpus of letters, the Cape Colony letter corpus analysed in this study also has a large number of occurrences of the construction copy letter from and letter from the, and letter from a particular named male sender, which are not evident in the written correspondence from the Mayor’s Office. Both corpora, however, use the constructions ‘of your letter’. In considering the letter as a situated activity, the results reveal that encoder identification, addressee identification and date are all aspects that are important in the correspondence from the Colonial Office in the Cape Colony, whereas encoder identification appears less important in the correspondence from the Mayor’s Office, as evident from Table 2. Additionally, the letters from the Cape Colony reveal three-word Ngrams of phrases that frequently occur with the word letter such as A copy of (28), receipt of (28) and acknowledge the receipt of (12). The use of

3

Table 2

THE LETTER: METACOMMUNICATIVE FEATURES …

Letter features

Encoder identification (my letter) Addressee identification Date

Raw number (Freq)

Raw number (Freq)

23

1

54

19

49

21

31

the words acknowledge, receipt of and a copy of is illustrated in examples 1 and 2: 1. My Lord—We have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of a letter from the Colonial Office of the 22nd ultimo, transmitting, in original, a dispatch from the Under Secretary of State for the Colonial Department, covering a letter and its enclosures from Mr. George Anderson, an Inhabitant of this Town, addressed to the Colonial Office in England, complaining of a Sentence of our Court, instituted against him by Attorney Ruysch, and alleging that a positive Law, promulgated by the Earl of Caledon in 1809, had been disregarded in that instance, together with a copy of the reply which has been returned to Mr. Anderson by Earl Bathurst’s direction; and on which subject your Excellency has been pleased to desire an early Report. 2. I am directed by Viscount Milner to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 13th of May with regard to the position of coloured British subjects who are stranded in Liverpool, and to inform you that he is in communication with the Ministry of Labour upon the matter. Lord Milner regrets that owing to pressure of work in this Department your letter was not acknowledged at an earlier date. There are also other key words that are used, i.e. dispatch (18), despatch (35), communication (19), memorial (46) and proclamation (14). Letters are also often enclosed (11) or accompanying (9) and are frequently forwarded (8) and received (84) and contains a copy (76) or copies (18). In contrast, the letters from the Mayor’s office only have phrases such as correspondence (4) and communication (3) that are used alongside the

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word letter and contain words such as attached (4), enclosed (3) and enclosures (1), and are forwarded (2) with a copy (7) or copies (1). These letters do not contain words such as memorial, proclamation, and despatch. This appears to be a result of the differences in the addressees and topic of correspondence. The data analysis, however, illustrates that the way in which the term ‘letter’ is used over hundred years apart has not changed significantly, as one hundred years later, there is still a preference for attributing letters to specific encoders and addressees, using specific dates and references to earlier communications. As in Wlodarczyk’s study, the metatextual clues analysed show “its predominantly evidential value, either as validation of the summary provided by encoders, or it brings to the fore – when enclosed material is referred to – the legal significance of institutional documents described under other labels” (2013: 416). This suggests that the word letter can be interpreted as having ‘more functions’ (2013: 416). 4.2

Letter as Information

When considering the purpose of the letter as evidence, it is clear that letters are also used as vehicles of information whose truth value can be verified with reference to prior communications. There are two ways in which letters are referred to: first, expressions related to the letter functioning specifically as a source of information (2013: 417); second, speech act verbs or expressions that indicate a general purpose. The former is illustrated in the following examples: 3. As soon as Mr. Sutherland’s letter of security above alluded to, arrives, I suppose he will be directed to take ordination, and to proceed to Holland to acquire the Dutch language. 4. Sib,—In compliance with His Excellency the Governor’s directions communicated to me in your letter of the 24th ultimo relative to a Memorial from one Mr. Alexander Macfarlane to His Majesty’s Secretary of State, whereby he has requested to be informed on such points as will hereafter be detailed. 5. Respecting the allegations of Mrs Sterling being confined to the house through fear, this is quite untrue, as she is visiting the Board of Trade Offices daily with a view to receiving the information previously mentioned.

3

THE LETTER: METACOMMUNICATIVE FEATURES …

33

6. I desire to revert to previous correspondence with reference to the case of this alien lunatic, and in particular to the second paragraph of your letter of the 2nd July instance. With regard to the former, the informational function of the letters is evident in the following expressions in Table 3. Of these expressions, only the expressions with reference and respecting were evident in the letters from Liverpool, whereas the letters from the Cape Colony contained more expressions relating to the letter as source of information. Although the expressions do not necessarily show the truth value of the letters, there is an attempt to point to it through expressions such as with reference to, alluded, mentioned and relative. The expression to acquaint also suggests the desire of the encoder to make the addressee aware of the truth. In terms of the latter, the speech act verb suggested was used in the Liverpool letters, but no other words such as asserting, announcing or reporting mentioned by Wlodarczyk (2013: 417) were evident in the data. As she notes, what these two types of metacommentary illustrate is that the letter is used for purposes of providing information. 7. It had been the practice of the Governor to settle all the appeal cases in his private room, with the secretary of that court; and the secretary then wrote to the suitors announcing the sentence. Table 3 Words that refer to letters as source of information Mentioned Relative Alluded With reference to To acquaint In reply to Referring to Adverting to Alluding to Respecting

Raw number (Freq) Cape Colony

Raw number (Freq) Liverpool

34 20 20 16 14 13 2 2 1 0

2 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 3

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M. HERAT

8. I agree with the course suggested in your letter of the 22nd instance but if the Cardiff people still persist how would it do to suggest halving the cost between the two authorities? As Police Forces we mutually assist each other in deporting aliens, and what is Cardiff’s liability today might be ours tomorrow. 4.3

Acting Through the Letter

The ways in which encoders act through letters are evident through a number of expressions that are used in the letters, as in examples 9–10: 9. In reply to your Letter of the 19th Ultimo relative to the grant of Land requested by D. P. Francis near the Assagaai bush, I am directed by His Excellency the Governor to acquaint you that until the Locations become grantable, His Excellency does not mean to make any additional grants. 10. I am directed by the Minister of Labour to refer to your letter of the 6th September addressed to the Home Office and forwarded to this Department relating to the dismissal of coloured men from employment in Liverpool. Table 4 illustrates that the most frequently used verbs for taking and giving instruction in both sets of letters are the words order, directed and requested. The use of the words order and directed in both corpora suggests that letters were used as orders and directives. The high incidence of these words in both corpora suggests that there were specific words Table 4 Words for giving and taking instructions Order Directed Requested Requesting Recommending Warrant

Raw number (Freq) Cape Colony

Raw number (Freq) Liverpool

72 33 18 7 4 0

5 3 0 0 0 1

3

THE LETTER: METACOMMUNICATIVE FEATURES …

35

that were used by clerks in these offices for giving and taking instructions and that these words have not changed over time. The lack of words such as requesting and recommending in the Liverpool letters may have to do with the topic of the letters and the purpose of the communication. With regard to acting through the letter, one of the findings was that the words ‘this letter’ occurred 9 times in the correspondence of the Colonial Office in the Cape Colony, whereas it was not used in the correspondence of the Mayor’s Office in Liverpool. An analysis of the concordance lines relating to this suggests that its uses are similar to the function noted by Wlodarczyk (2013: 418): recommendation. 4.4

Metatextual Key Words

There are metatextual words that are used in both corpora which relate to a set of document labels that appear to be regularly used in official communication. Regardless of whether these documents are different from letters, in terms of whether they are circulated as official communication or appended to letters (as enclosures), they are seen as having a clearly defined purpose (Wlodarczyk, 2013: 420). 11. Sir—I am directed by His Excellency the Governor to acknowledge the receipt of your Letter of the 10th Instant reporting that you have communicated to the Settlers who had declined to take the Oath of Allegiance upon their being enrolled in the Albany Levy, the contents of the Letter on that subject from this Office, and requesting permission to remit to such as have since taken the oath, the Penalties imposed by the Proclamation of the 4th October 1822, and to acquaint you that His Excellency approves of the Penalties and costs in these cases being remitted. 12. It is quite clear from the foregoing that the Alien had been certified as a lunatic, and the fact that one of our Police Surgeons issued a similar certificate whilst the lunatic was in the custody of the Cardiff Police by mutual agreement and with object of assisting your Police Authority in finding a boat on which the lunatic could be deported, does not make the lunatic chargeable to my Authority. The metatextual words in the corpora are listed in Table 5.

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Table 5 Metatextual words in the letters

Instruction Resolution List Memorial Proclamation Proclamations Post Certificates Circular Certificate Resolutions Warrant

Raw number (Freq) Cape Colony

Raw number (Freq) Liverpool

10 6 6 5 4 4 4 3 2 2 0 0

0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 1

As evident from Table 5, only the words list, resolutions, certificate and warrant were used in the letter corpus from Liverpool. Both corpora also allude to returning letters with the use of words such as return and returned.

5

Conclusion

The goal of this chapter was to examine the following research questions: What metacommunicative features are used in the correspondence from the Liverpool Mayor’s Office? Are they the same as the metacommunicative features used in the correspondence of the Colonial Office in the Cape of Good Hope 100 years before? In relation to the former, it is clear that the term ‘letter’ is used as a document that has evidential value and which can be written by a specific encoder to a specific addressee specifying a particular date (see Wlodarczyk, 2013). It is also clear from the results that many of the features used a hundred years before are still used, although in terms of indicating that the letter is a source of information, there is a decline in the number of different words used in the Liverpool letters compared to the letters from the Cape Colony. With regard to how clerks in the different offices act through the letter, it is evident that words such as order and directed are used by both, whereas other words such as requesting and recommending are also used in the

3

THE LETTER: METACOMMUNICATIVE FEATURES …

37

correspondence from the Cape Colony, again suggesting that the number of different words for letter as information is fewer. Similarly, only a few metatextual keywords are used to refer to the circulation of documents in Liverpool compared to the correspondence from the Colonial Office in the Cape Colony, in terms of both whether the letters were officially circulated and whether they were enclosed as part of the letter. The only words used in the Liverpool letters are lists, certificate and warrant, whereas the Colonial Office correspondence uses words such as instruct, post, proclamation and memorial. The type of words used by the two offices may be a result of the expectations of the addressees and difference in subject matter discussed in the letters. The correspondence of the Cape Colony is mainly to do with settler petitions, whereas the Liverpool correspondence has to do with settling disputes of ex-servicemen, racial disputes, unemployment problems and so on, which may have not required the same type of words to be used by the clerks writing the letters as in the Cape Colony. In terms of the changes relating to the latter research question, it can be concluded that the linguistic terms used in relation to routinised communication probably depends on the type of addressee, topic and purpose of communication, as some words such as proclamations and memorials are not used in the correspondence from Liverpool. The letter appears to serve the same purposes as one hundred years before and the words for giving and taking instructions are almost the same with less use of terms in Liverpool than used in the Colonial Office in the Cape Colony. With regard to metatextual words, there are some similarities in the use of words such as resolution and certificate. Overall, though, the clerks of the Colonial Office in the Cape Colony appear to use a wider repertoire of words compared to the clerks from the Liverpool Mayor’s Office. As previously mentioned though, this variability in the use of different words may relate to the difference in the communications and the linguistic practice required for it rather than being an issue of the language repertoires of the clerks at the Liverpool Mayor’s Office.

References Primary Source Theal, G. M. (1897–1905). Records of the Cape Colony (1821–1822) (Vol. 14). Public Record Office. https://www.eggsa.org/1820-settlers/index.php/rec ords-of-the-cape-colony

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Secondary Source Anthony, L. (2009). AntConc (Version 3.5.8) [Computer Software]. Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. http://www.laurenceanthony.net Herat, M. (2020). Post-war letters to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool: Epistolary constructions of identity. International Journal of Language Studies, 14(2), 19–42. King, A. D. (1976). Colonial urban development: Culture. Routledge & Kegan Paul. King, A. D. (1990a) Urbanism, colonialism and the world economy. Routledge & Kegan Paul From World City to Pariah City? Liverpool and the Global Economy 51. King, A. D. (1990b). Global cities: Post-imperialism and the internationalisation of London. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Laidlaw, Z. (2005). Colonial connections 1815–1845: Patronage, the information revolution and the colonial government. Manchester University Press. Nurmi, A., & Palander-Collin, M. (2008). Letters as a text type: interaction in writing. In M. Dossena & I. Tieken-Boon van Ostade (Eds.), Studies in late modern English correspondence: Methodology and data (pp. 21–49). Peter Lang. Rayson, P. (2009) Wmatrix: A web-based corpus processing environment, Computing Department, Lancaster University. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wma trix/ Schwarz, S., Tibbles, A., & Richardson, D. (2007). Liverpool and transatlantic slavery. Liverpool University Press. Victorian Society. (1967). Victorian seaport: 5th annual conference report. Victorian Society. Wilks-Heeg, S. (2003). From world city to Pariah City? Liverpool and the global economy, 1850–2001. In R. Munck (Ed.), Reinventing the city: Liverpool in comparative perspective (pp. 36–52). Liverpool University Press. Wlodarczyk, M. (2013). British Colonial Office correspondence on the Cape Colony (1820–1821): Metatextual keywords vs analytic categories. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 49(3), 399–428.

CHAPTER 4

Post-war Letters to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool: Epistolary Constructions of Identity

Abstract This chapter investigates how ex-servicemen, seamen and factory workers stranded or left destitute in Liverpool after World War I construct their identity through letters written to the Lord Mayor’s Office and the Lord Mayor’s responses to the letters. This was a period when there was racial tension in Liverpool and competition for jobs was fierce. This led to white workers resenting the presence of these men in the community, ultimately leading to the race riots of 1919. Although these petitioners were British subjects fighting for their mother country, they were regarded as outsiders. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, the chapter examines how these veterans negotiate identity through language. The findings show that three identities emerge: firstly, an identity that is strongly tied to their own nationality; secondly, an identity tied to military service or other work in service of Britain’s war effort; and finally, an identity as husbands and fathers who are trying hard to provide for their families and defined in relation to their families and dependents. It is also clear that while the petitioners were treated badly, this was not necessarily by the authorities but by other people in Liverpool.

This chapter was first published in the International Journal of Language Studies. Volume 14, Number 2, April 2020, pp. 19–42 ISSN: 2157-4898; EISSN: 2157-4901. The paper is reproduced with permission from IJLS. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Herat, Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87889-4_4

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Keywords Critical discourse · Identity construction · Minorities in Liverpool · Post-war immigrants · Post-war immigration · World War I

1

Introduction

This chapter investigates an as yet unanalysed collection of letters regarding the difficulties of ex-servicemen, seamen and factory workers1 in Liverpool in 1919 and 1920, who needed help finding employment or help returning to their home countries. The data, which is taken from an archive in Liverpool ‘The Writing on the Wall—Great War to Race Riots ’, contains three types of letters: (1) letters written by immigrants to Liverpool from West Africa, Ireland, India, the Caribbean and Panama, who joined up to serve Britain in the war effort and by organisations or concerned local citizens writing on their behalf; (2) letters from the Lord Mayor’s Office replying to letters written by petitioners or those writing on their behalf; and (3) letters between the Lord Mayor’s Office and other government authorities. Amador-Moreno and McCafferty (2012) observe, with regard to Irish emigrant letters, that “written material of this type is in a sense a window into earlier generations” (26) and these letters are indeed a first step towards an empirical account of an important period in British History. These letters display that the petitioners are from different parts of the world, such as the Caribbean, Africa, India, Ireland, Italy and Panama. From the nineteenth century onwards, Liverpool shipping companies began to dominate UK trade from West Africa, with the Elder Dempster Shipping Line employing thousands of seamen from places such as Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ghana and Gambia. By the late nineteenth century, Liverpool was home to a large number of immigrant communities, including Africans and West Indians, Chinese, Asians, Irish, Scandinavians, Italians, North Americans and many others who lived around the docks commonly known as ‘sailortown’ (Belchem, 2014; Heneghan & Onuora, 2017). The main aim of the chapter is to analyse the form and content of these letters written by petitioners in the aftermath of World War I, and to examine what the language reveals about their expressions of identity and sense of belonging. The chapter 1 Throughout this document, the term ‘petitioners’ will be used when referring to ex-servicemen, seamen and factory workers writing to the Lord Mayor’s Office.

4

POST-WAR LETTERS TO THE LORD MAYOR …

41

will investigate the following research question: What various identities do the ex-servicemen and seamen express and how are these identities negotiated in their correspondence with the Lord Mayor’s office? In Sect. 2, the chapter will describe forms of identity and this will be followed by an introduction to the letter collection written by petitioners and the Lord Mayor’s Office. In Sect. 3, the data and methodology will be discussed. Section 4 will examine the discursive and social practice in relation to the aftermath of World War I and perform a close textual analysis of (1) terms of address and (2) forms of self and other identification. Section 5 will conclude the study.

2

Background

Hall and Du Gay (1996: 2) state that “[...] identities actually come from outside, they are the way in which we are recognized and then come to step into the place of the recognitions which others give us. Without the others there is no self, there is no self-recognition”. They also argue that identity is never unified, and in late modern times, it is rather increasingly fragmented and fractured (Hall & Du Gay, 1996: 2; see also Chauke, 2020; Salmani Nodoushan, 2013a). This is supported by Thornborrow (1999: 137), who observes that “identity, whether it is on an individual, social or institutional level, is something which we are constantly building and negotiating all our lives through interaction with others. She also notes that people shift identities depending on who they are interacting with, and that the change in identity is accomplished through language use” (see also Salmani Nodoushan & Garcia Laborda, 2014). One of the main ways in which people are identified is through names and forms of address (Golovko, 2011;Guzzo & Gallo, 2019; Salmani Nodoushan, 2006b; Sullivan et al., 2012; Tananuraksakul, 2013). Jorgensen (1999 as cited in Andersen et al., 2009: 39) refers to identity as “something one attempts to create or construct, which takes place when interacting with others, through life experiences by performing something, and during everyday life. The construction of identity is a constant process that never ceases”. Furthermore, Jorgensen (as cited in Andersen et al., (2009: 39) depicts identity as having two dimensions: (1) the personal (internal) and (2) the social (external) identity. “Every construction of identity consists of both dimensions. However, they are not inseparable, but intertwined processes that are continuously in interaction” (Jorgensen, 1999 as cited in Andersen et al., 2009: 39). Thus,

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Andersen et al. (2009: 39) observe that “the construction of identity is highly dependent on society and thereby culture, occurring both within and around the individual”. Identity can be negotiated through interactions with others, and within this relationship, the part played by language is crucial. It is through language that we show others who we are and what we represent, as well as comprehend the ways in which others perceive us (Salmani Nodoushan, 2013b, 2016). In this context, letters are an important means of negotiating identity, as it is through the words on the page that the addressee forms an impression of the writer, and hence the desire on the part of the writers to conform to the conventions of letter writing in using politeness features such as terms of address, valedictions and other vocabulary that show mitigation or deference. Bucholtz and Hall (2005) note labels, implicatures, stances, styles and grammatical structures as linguistic means that perform identity work. Palander-Collin et al. (2013: 292) note, for instance, that address forms at the beginning of letters are one of the clearest ways of indicating the writer-addressee relationship, as address terms can reflect social status, age or gender. We express ourselves and explain who we are through the way that we write or speak; therefore, language is used as a tool, and the way that we use words, our choice of vocabulary and grammar, convergence or divergence of the norms are crucial in identity construction (Andersen et al., 2009: 42). The social group or community that one belongs to also influences the negotiation of identity as noted by Ziehe (2003 as cited in Andersen et al., 2009: 42), who states that “people negotiate how they want to be perceived by indicating what community they belong to”. It is on this ground that the current chapter uses letters as the sources for data on identity construction. As for the data, the enormous archive of soldiers’ correspondence—for instance, letters by disabled ex-servicemen to the Ministry of Pensions during World War I—has been studied by historians of World War I (Meyer, 2011). The archive of letters by coloured ex-servicemen, seamen and factory workers was only made available recently (in 2016) and has not been studied yet by historians or linguists, apart from documentation, workshops carried out in relation to exploring Black settlement in Liverpool and historical research into the archive to investigate its social importance nationally and internationally. In 2017, Madeline Heneghan and Emi Onuora published a book on the letters titled Great War to Race Riots , where the focus is on the growth and development of Liverpool’s black community. Since this is the first

4

POST-WAR LETTERS TO THE LORD MAYOR …

43

analysis of these letters from a linguistic point of view, they provide particularly interesting material for analysis. As Palander-Collin (2010: 661) remarks, “since more contextual information is usually available for letters than for many other written genres, letters are a particularly good genre for linguistic studies where contextualisation is crucial in the interpretation of language use”. Likewise, Wood (2007: 48) observes “letters are part of a dialogue, or a conversation, and interactions between writers and readers develop and build”. Biber’s (1988, 1995) works on register and text type reveal that personal letters represent a more ‘involved’ style of writing. Consequently, writers are more likely to encode their emotions, feelings and attitudes through their grammatical and lexical choices (Biber & Finegan, 1989). However, freedom of expression in letters is limited by the conventionalised form of the genre of letters. Therefore, in investigating these letters, it is essential to consider what the conventions of letter writing at the time were and to contextualise those features—hence, the use of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyse the data.

3

Method 3.1

Data

The data for this chapter consists of (1) letters written by ex-servicemen in the British army, sailors and factory workers or their advocates to the Lord Mayor’s Office, (2) letters of reply written by the Lord Mayor’s Office in response to concerns raised by these petitioners or their advocates and (3) letters exchanged between the Lord Mayor’s Office and other law enforcement agencies in Liverpool, London and Cardiff (see Table 1). The letters are written by petitioners from different parts of the world such as West Africa, Ireland, the Caribbean, India and Panama, who had fought for Britain on land and at sea during World War I, or had worked in factories in Liverpool, and some men had wives or partners and children there. The letters by these petitioners or their advocates are appeals for help from the Lord Mayor of Liverpool to repatriate them or to help them find employment to enable them to support their families. The documents from the Lord Mayor’s Office are either a response to these letters or appeals to the Colonial Office or other authorities such as the police for help on how to deal with the situation of these petitioners. The archive contains correspondence from the period 1919–1920 and consists of about 90 letters, including postcards, telegrams and other

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Table 1

Details of the letters

Type of letters

Number in the data set

Letters by petitioners or their advocates to the Lord Mayor’s Office Letters of reply by the Lord Mayor’s Office to petitioners or their advocates Letters exchanged between the Lord Mayor’s Office and other law enforcement agencies in Liverpool, London and Cardiff Police reports and other documents such as testimonies Total

12 09 53

05 79

documents such as lists of names of (1) coloured men who served in the war, (2) coloured men who did not serve in the war but who were in the merchant marine and (3) coloured men who had wives and children in the city. The ‘coloured men’ who appear on the lists are all black Africans or West Indians. The list doesn’t provide names of people who are from other parts of the world. Of these 90 documents, I am using 79 documents. The omitted documents are post cards, copies of the same letter and lists of names. Altogether, the letters consist of a small corpus of 11,094 words. The letters were transcribed into electronic format and tagged using the CLAWS C5 Tag set.2 The data is divided into three categories: (1) letters, police reports and testimonies by ex-servicemen, seamen and factory workers or their advocates to the Lord Mayor’s Office; (2) replies by the Lord Mayor’s Office to petitioners or their advocates; and (3) letters exchanged between the Liverpool Mayor’s Office and other law enforcement agencies in Liverpool, London and Cardiff. Although this is a small corpus, as letters are a conventional language variety, the small size of the data would still allow linguistic patterns to emerge. 3.2

Framework for Analysis

The main framework used in this chapter is Fairclough’s (1992) model of critical discourse analysis (see Fig. 1). Fairclough (1992) emphasises that text analysis should not be carried out in isolation and advocates the 2 CLAWS the constituent likelihood automatic word tagging system created by Lancaster University.

4

POST-WAR LETTERS TO THE LORD MAYOR …

45

Fig. 1 Three-dimensional conception of discourse adapted from Fairclough (1992: 73; see also Wood, 2007: 51)

use of discursive and social practices in which the text is produced and consumed. His model brings together three analytical strands: social practice, discursive practice and close textual analysis. His theoretical model is an integrated model that looks at all three aspects in analysing and interpreting texts (Amin & Gagaridis, 2019). As Wood (2007: 51) observes “the model represents the concept that a piece of text is simultaneously a social and a discursive act and that there is a dynamic and reciprocal relationship among the three” (see also Scotto Di Carlo, 2020). In this chapter, the letters written by petitioners to the Lord Mayor’s Office will be examined in relation to the time period in which they were written in order to contextualise them to the postwar period. CDA was selected as the main method of analysis as (1) it provides a means of analysing texts systematically within the context, and (2) the method is three dimensional and aims to take into account the discursive practice and social practices of the community in which the text is produced and consumed.

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4 4.1

Analysis Social Practice

In the area of social practice, four domains (i.e. race, colour, social status and gender) were considered. All four appear to be particularly significant in the letters as well as historical records during the aftermath of the war. The reasons for choosing these four areas stem from initial observation of the letters as well as from previous research on World War I. First, a consideration of race is relevant because the questions about immigrant soldiers and seamen specifically relate to their ancestry and place of origin. As noted by Writing on the Wall on their website “in the wake of the First World War competition for jobs led to dissatisfaction among Britain’s white workers, who quickly came to resent the presence of black labour, which ultimately led to the outbreak of race riots in 1919”. However, it must be noted that the ‘resentment’ is not only towards ‘coloured’ workers but also towards white people considered foreigners, especially those from Ireland. According to Bourne (2014) and Belchem (2014), another significant factor was the perceived threat to white masculinity posed by the increasing number of relationships between black men and white women. Second, colour is important as it is the colour of the men that differentiates them as the ‘other’ and leads to racial and verbal abuse and discrimination by employers in Liverpool. Third, with respect to social status, the relationship between the writer and reader is often one of social disparity. They were seen by ordinary white workers in Liverpool as a threat, which translated to British authorities seeing their presence in Liverpool as a ‘problem’ to be solved; however, the letters attest to the fact that the Lord Mayor’s Office was trying to help the men to either find employment or return home given the rising tensions in Liverpool, as seen in the Lord Mayor’s letter sent to the Colonial Office (19th May 1919). The Lord Mayor of Liverpool suggested to the Colonial Office to keep migration costs down by offering payments of £5 to those who wanted to return home to solve the ‘coloured problem’, as a one-time payment to repatriate those immigrants wanting to go home is cheaper than paying out of work donations. This is seen in the following letter written by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool to the Secretary of the Colonial Office, London (13th May 1919), wherein he states:

4

POST-WAR LETTERS TO THE LORD MAYOR …

47

1. The suggestion made is that the Government might consider the question of paying them £5 each with passage and dispose of them as quickly as possible. If the Government could repatriate these black men without delay it would not only be doing them a turn but relieve the irritation which the presence of these men causes to our men.

Given the Liverpool Mayor’s suggestion, it would seem relevant to consider the cost of living in 1919. The Mayor suggests that African soldiers should be offered £5 to take with them on their return home— this appears to be a gift rather than an obligation. In order to gauge whether or not this was a generous amount, it is necessary to consider its buying power in 2019. By calculating the worth of £5 in 1919 in comparison with 2019, it was found that the worth of £5 ranged from £231.50 to £2,074.00. The real price value of £5 is £231.50; the labour value is £849.60; and the income value is £1349.00 (Measuring Worth, 2019). This suggests that this was a generous offer to someone who was destitute, who could make use of the money in their home country. The entire letter depicts a scenario where the Africans in question have no job prospects and are eager to return home, whereas their presence in the city is leading to racial tension. Sending them home quickly is mutually beneficial in averting civic upheaval and satisfying their wishes. There was no obligation on the authorities’ part to pay their return passage or to give them any money at all. Although the Mayor of Liverpool’s letter has been the subject of criticism (Heneghan & Onuora, 2017: 46), seen from a different perspective, the Mayor was genuinely working on their behalf to help them fulfil their wishes and, as he puts it, the government would be “doing them a turn” by giving them money and sending them home. The petitioners were unquestionably ill-treated, presumably by trade unions under pressure from white Liverpudlians, rather than by the authorities. Another instance where the Mayor of Liverpool is working on behalf of the coloured workers can be seen in his reply to Mrs. Janet Parker (8th August 1919) regarding a soldier’s wrecked shop, where he writes: 2. I am in receipt of your letter of the 4th instant enclosing one for a soldier whose shop was wrecked. I will communicate with the Head Constable, and hope he may be able to find the man referred to in your communication.

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As noted above, there are many examples where the British authorities were working on behalf of migrants to Liverpool. One such case is that of Mr. Samuel Dickson, who having paid money to the ship’s Captain Mr. Campbell, arrives in Liverpool in anticipation of employment. The correspondence surrounding Mr. Samuel Dickson (18th October 1920), which is part of a police report from CID Chief Inspector Burgess to his Superintendent, reveals that Dickson was deceived by a ship’s Captain named Campbell. The police report highlights that as a follow up to Dickson’s complaint, formal testimonies from witnesses were obtained, and Campbell was prosecuted. Although the case was dismissed, the police were considering additional charges against Campbell. Dickson was also repaid the money, and Chief Inspector Burgess arranged for Dickson’s return home at the expense of the authorities. Despite Campbell’s unjust treatment of Dickson, it appears that the authorities intervened on his behalf. James Brown (18th October 1920) is another example of someone who was treated in a similar manner by the same Campbell. Those wielding undue power, such as the ship’s captain, are the ‘villains’ in this context, not the authorities. Finally, gender is important, as evidenced from previous research (Meyer, 2011), ‘men’ are expected to protect and provide for their families; the lack of employment and dependence on government charity is a threat to a man’s masculinity. The petitioners are unable to establish themselves as independent people able to support their families through their own work. In the above discussion of the first dimension—social practice—four areas were outlined: race, colour, social status and gender. In the following section, discursive practice is discussed. 4.2

Discursive Practice

According to Fairclough, discursive practice involves text production, distribution and consumption (1992: 78). With respect to the letters, there are two ways of differentiating the letters: (1) whether the letter is on a letterhead or not, and (2) whether the letter is typed or handwritten. The letters written by petitioners contain some non-standard features in terms of writing, but use some conventionalised forms such as giving the address of the writer, date of the letter, address of the addressee and valedictions. Some letters are clearly from those who have had schooling in English (see Fig. 2).

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Fig. 2 Letter to the secretary of the Lord Mayor’s Office by Alfred Woods (12th May 1919)

For example, in the above letter (Fig. 2) by Alfred Woods, he provides his address, the date of writing and the address of the addressee, opening address and valediction. The writing also illustrates the writer’s proficiency in English, as generally, Irish English speakers use differing non-standard dialect forms from English users as seen in emigrant letters studied by Amador-Moreno and McCafferty (2012). This writer, however, does not have any non-standard features in his letter to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. The letter is addressed to the Lord Mayor’s Secretary: In opening this letter, Alfred Woods uses the term ‘Sir’ and in closing he uses the valediction, ‘Yours most truly’, which indicates that he is aware of letter writing conventions. Ireland had become part of the United Kingdom after the Act of Union in 1800, and thereafter English was the language that was used as the medium of instruction in schools. Although English is seen as being learnt through ‘unguided’ learning in

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rural areas, most people in areas such as Dublin would have been exposed to English in school. He opens his letter by talking about his identity as a war veteran: 3. I was connected with the 15th Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment in England and the 115th Battalion of the Regiment from March 1916 to December 1917, and during that time received many insults and unwarrantable treatment from some of the low classes of Liverpool people in the Regiment just because I was Irish.

In this letter, Alfred Woods identifies himself through his affiliation to the Liverpool Regiment in England and through his national identity of being Irish. He is able to use politeness formulae such as ‘I would be much obliged’.3 Interestingly, he also refers to those who insulted him as belonging to the ‘low classes of Liverpool people in the Regiment’. Woods was writing in May 1919; in January that year, Ireland had just declared itself independent; therefore, we could expect antipathy towards the Irish in this situation. In his letter, he claims that the bigotry towards Irishmen in the regiment came from those with ‘Orange leanings’ (i.e. protestants who opposed the Home Rule Bill), so it appears to be his religion (Catholic) that is the issue or possibly the assumption that he was pro Home Rule. The letter shows that Woods is negotiating concepts of identity to do with the military alongside his national identity as an Irishman. Production refers to the manufacture of the actual physical object, namely the letter, and distribution can be recognised as the means by which the letter reaches the addressee. Both these features are intertwined and will, therefore, be discussed together. The letters written by individual men were often handwritten on normal white or coloured paper; if the letters were written on their behalf, e.g. by an organisation such as the African Christian Association, they would be written on letter headed paper; for example, Joseph Hall’s letter (May 31, 1919) is written on a letter head of the Gordon Smith Institute for Seamen, Paradise Street, and says NON-OFFICIAL in uppercase letters. It is possible to distinguish whether the letters were self-authored or not by the type of paper, i.e. whether the paper was letter headed or not. Likewise, institutional 3 For a discussion of politeness, see Ajayi and Balogun (2014), Alfattah and Ravindranath (2009), Allan (2018), Lee (2011) and Salmani Nodoushan (2012, 2019).

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letters from the Lord Mayor’s office or other law enforcement agencies were typed on letter headed paper, which would also include a logo. Also, distribution of letters would have been by postal service, as regular mail had been in operation since 1635, when King Charles I made the postal service available to the public, with the cost of postage being paid by the recipient. In 1840, postage stamps were introduced and from then onwards the sender paid (Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 2009: 2). The correspondence in the archive also consists of telegrams and postcards. Telegrams are used for urgent messages and the telegrams in the corpus consist of messages from the Colonial Office to the Lord Mayor informing him that one Mr. Carlton Hackney will be arriving in Liverpool to investigate the ‘black’ problem. However, there is no further information available about Mr. Hackney or his investigation. The use of the telegram, however, illustrates that the ‘problem’ of racial tension was seen as urgent by the Colonial Office. Finally, in terms of consumption of the letter, the content of the letters is both private and public: private in the sense that the petitioners are talking about their personal circumstance and treatment by people in Liverpool; public because the letters are not only read by the Lord Mayor but by his assistants who are generally the authors of the responses. In addition, the content of the letters is generally made known to other important parties such as officials from the Colonial Offices, police and hospitals. However, the consumption of the letters has continued up to the present day, as they are now a public record and can be read and consumed by the public, as in the research for this study. The social and discursive practices examined above illustrate that there are several interlinked dimensions within the social and discursive practice such as the social status of the author, the form of the message, whether private or public, and the physical form of the letter itself. In the next section, I will discuss the third dimension—i.e. close textual analysis. 4.3

Textual Analysis

Following Fairclough’s (1992) work, the previous sections have set out the social and discursive constructions relating to letter writing in the aftermath of World War I. In relation to Fairclough’s third dimension, he mentions a number of linguistic categories such as vocabulary, grammar, cohesion and text structure. As these categories can be approached in different ways, I will begin by first looking at variation in terms of address within the letters. The terms of address used to address the recipient

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are seen as an ‘integral’ part of letter writing formulae (Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg, 1995; Wood, 2007). 4.3.1 Deference and Identity In social practice, terms of address need to be considered in the context of the norms of 100 years ago. As Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2009) and Cerqueiro (2011) note, from the eighteenth century onwards, when the epistolary form became popular, letter writing manuals were produced to give people guidance on how to write letters. The Complete Letter Writer suggests that those who are superior in rank should be addressed differently to those who are one’s equals or inferiors (1824: 38).4 Since the letters are written by people from different countries, it is difficult to know what the ‘norm’ is. It is not surprising that people from various parts of the British Empire (including Ireland) could read and write English and have some competence in English language letter writing conventions—if they had had schooling at all, it will likely have been in English. Graddol et al. (2007: 118) argue that the colonisation process first took place within the British Isles starting with the colonisation of Ireland in the twelfth century and that English spread outside the British Isles in the late sixteenth century. Thus, English has a long history in the British colonies and, as a result, even people with very basic literacy skills would have been aware of conventional letter writing practices such as how to open and close a letter; although the writing is occasionally non-standard, with forms such as ‘I am distress’ (Joseph Hall, 31st May 1919), the letters are generally written in the conventions used in the 1900s. It is also possible that some letters were written on behalf of the men by other people or organisations, as in the letters written to the Lord Mayor by the African Christian Association in Liverpool on behalf of black ex-servicemen. 4.3.2 Power Differentials in the Letters Petitioners’ letters to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool comprise one set of letters where the power differential is greatest. There are 12 letters and 5 other documents from petitioners and 9 replies to those petitions. These letters are written to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool, John Ritchie. The Lord Mayor is recognised as “the chief citizen of a UK city—the title 4 For a discussion of politeness, see Ajayi and Balogun (2014), Alfattah and Ravindranath (2009), Allan (2018), Lee (2011) and Salmani Nodoushan (2012, 2019).

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being an honour bestowed on a limited number of cities by the sovereign” (Debrett’s London). The terms of address and salutations used by petitioners writing to the Lord Mayor’s Office appear to vary depending on the writer. The letters attest to the use of forms such as Dear Sir, Honourable and Dear Sir, Your Lordship and My Lord Mayor showing the formality of the relationship between petitioners and British authorities. The term ‘Honourable’, which, at the time, was used to address the Lord Mayor of London, refers to the office not the person. This may be why the term of address ‘Honourable’ is used in the letters with the salutation ‘Dear Sir’. The name of the Mayor could only be used during a speech, but it is not seen as appropriate in letters. The use of the term ‘Honourable and Dear Sir’ is used in letters to the Mayor by the African Christian Association, whose language is excessively formal ending with the valediction ‘Your Lordship’s most humble servants’. The fact that the petitioners use the forms Sir, Dear Sir, Most Honourable and Dear Sir, My Lord Mayor, etc., rather than the name of the Lord Mayor, shows that in formal letters it was not seen as correct to address the Mayor by name. The Complete Letter Writer (1824) suggests that the use of the name was appropriate in speech and not in writing. The fact that the writers do not use the mayor’s name shows that they perceive the Mayor as having a higher social status. The formal language forms used in the letters show that the petitioners negotiate their identity as humble British subjects, with valedictory words such as I would be much obliged, I remain your humble servant and Yours most truly. In all the letters, the most frequently used term is Dear Sir (4) or Sir (2), which would have been the most common form of address in letters in the 1900s as it is now. There are also some uses of My Lord Mayor and My Dear Sir, My Dear Lord Mayor, etc., by petitioners where the use of the first person possessive pronoun ‘My’ suggests their allegiance and could indicate that they identify themselves as part of the community for which he is responsible. There is no mention in the manuals as to when the possessive pronoun would be appropriate and its use here suggests that the petitioners are using the term to show their belonging to the community headed by the Lord Mayor. The terms of identification used by the Lord Mayor’s Office and other law enforcement agencies to identify the petitioners were also studied. In letters by British officials, the following terms (see Table 2) are used to describe immigrants; these letters when compared against the letters of

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Table 2 Terms of identification used by British officials

Names

Raw number (Freq)

Coloured men Aliens Coloured British subjects Coloured crews Coloured stoker/stokers Negroes West Africans African British subjects Black labour Black men Vagrant Lunatics Those West Indians Soldier Alien lunatic Coloured Persons Coloured population Subjects

19 04 03 03 02 02 02 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01

petitioners show that the Mayor’s office mainly used the terms ‘coloured men’ (19), ‘coloured crews’ (3) and ‘coloured British subjects’ (3) to talk about the writers. The OED online defines ‘coloured’ as denoting a member of any dark-skinned group of peoples, especially a person of sub-Saharan African or (in Britain) South Asian origin or descent. The designation ‘coloured’ suggests that the authorities were using the word as an umbrella term to refer to a diverse group of people who were of non-white descent. Although the term is now offensive, the OED alludes to the fact that it was the accepted term for black, Asian or mixed-race people until the 1960s. This suggests that it was normal for people to use the term ‘coloured’, but the fact that the petitioners are referred to by their colour rather than their names shows that there is some bias in the letters. In the use of the terms ‘coloured British subjects’ and ‘African British subjects’ in which a distinction is made between coloured and African, the term ‘African’ refers to a specific location rather than skin colour and suggests that the petitioners were identified by place of origin. The Lord Mayor’s Office appears to use the term ‘coloured’ rather than the term ‘black’, to refer to petitioners, which is only used in the two phrases ‘black men’ and ‘black labour’. In the use of the phrase, ‘Those

4

Table 3 Categories of identification

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Categories

Terms used

Gender Social position Nationality

Men alien, vagrant Subject, West African, British, African, West Indian, Irish, Coloured, Black, White Negroes, African, West Indian Soldier, factory worker, sailor, labour

Colour Race Occupation

West Indians’, the use of deictic distal determiners and pronouns could indicate a distancing strategy. The terms of identification used above reveal the different categories that the terms allude to: gender, social class, occupation, ethnicity, social position, race, etc. As Table 3 illustrates, the terms of identification can be categorised according to different groups such as gender, race, colour and social position. Immigrants are often referred to in terms of being coloured or in terms of their geographical location, gender and occupation. Since Africa is a continent, but not really a nationality, it appears that the Lord Mayor’s Office appears to categorise people as Africans without differentiating countries, as the petitioners are from different parts of Africa. Apart from the terms ‘African British Subjects’ and ‘West Africans’, all other terms and modifiers used to describe immigrants are terms that mainly identity them in terms of being non-white males. Terms of identification used by petitioners to describe themselves were also studied. As Jorgensen (1999 as cited in Andersen et al., 2009) has shown, “identity is something one attempts to create or construct, which takes place when interacting with others, through life experiences by performing something, and during everyday life”. In terms of constructing their own identity, the writers argue that the British Government, in the form of the Lord Mayor’s Office, had a responsibility to protect them because they had served in the war or because they are British subjects like any other person in Britain. This is often achieved through the use of ‘military vocabulary’ or vocabulary that shows their allegiance to Britain. For example, they encode their service in the war by talking about the ‘Royal Air Force’, or being in a particular ‘Regiment’,

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‘Battalion’ and so forth. It is possible that ex-servicemen see their regiment or battalion as part of the ‘family’ that they belong to after serving in the war, which gives them a particular identity as members of that family. These demonstrations of allegiance appear to be used to portray a particular identity of the person as someone worthy of attention. The letters show the petitioners negotiating everyday concerns such as their ability to provide for their families and dependents.

5

Discussion

The discussion presented in this section addresses identity in terms of (1) outsider status, and (2) allegiances and nationality. The financial hardship suffered by soldiers who contributed to the war effort is one of the main issues raised in the letters. The language they use to construct their identity is not just as men that have fought in the war with the English and/or contributed to the war effort but as fathers and husbands who are trying hard to provide for their families—and who are unable to do so. There are occasions when they identify themselves as coloured men, or British subjects but they mostly identify themselves in relation to their nationality as West African, Jamaican, Irish, British Indian, etc., which shows that, although they are British subjects, their identity is in opposition to the native population of Liverpool. As British subjects who contributed to protecting and supporting Britain during World War I, these petitioners show their suffering due to lack of money received for their efforts and second class citizenship (i.e. outsider status) that prevailed after demobilisation. After the war, some petitioners appear to be in ‘Bridewells’ in Liverpool—a house of correction for prisoners (OED online). Pironti (2017) states that only Britain had pre-war unemployment insurance, and that the British National Insurance Act of 1911 was utilised to cover a restricted number of about 2.3 million workers. It is claimed that during demobilisation, the system was extended to cover ‘out of work’ donations for soldiers and civilians. The fact that the petitioners discussed here were destitute suggests that this help was not available to them and that they received no ‘out of work’ pay, which might have helped them to provide for their families; the only help they seem to have received is from organisations working on their behalf such as deputations from the African Christian Association and the Federation to the Employers of Coloured Labour. However, as evident from the lists of names in the archive, even these organisations

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were only working on behalf of Black workers, but not other white or coloured workers who were destitute. Joseph Hall (31st May 1919), who writes to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool to ask for assistance, uses words such as ‘distress’, ‘penniless’ and ‘homeless’ showcasing the suffering that he is undergoing as a married man with two children. 4. I am distress [sic], penniless and homeless and I am simply asking for assistance as I am a British subject. During the war it was alright for us coloured men but at present it is very bad. So if there is any way you can give me a helping hand I will be very much obliged. I am a married man with two children.

Joseph Hall was from Colon in Panama and was writing to the Mayor to request him to arrange with the Board of Trade a passage on a ship that was leaving for his home city in six days’ time. The Lord Mayor, however, replies on 3rd June 1919, stating his inability to interfere “as he has no control over matters of this kind”. Although this is one instance where help does not appear to be forthcoming, it could be said that it is not because of racial prejudice but because the ship passage was arranged by the Board of Trade. The lack of money and financial hardship are also seen in A. E. Oakley’s letter to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool (26th October, 1919) who talks of ‘money troubles’ and high ‘credit’. He writes to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool to ask for a “private interview” to discuss his financial status. He starts off by saying “You may think it very forward of me writing to you in this manner” but declaring that he has no choice and that he is doing it not just for himself but on behalf of his ‘comrades’. He then goes on to talk about the length of time he has been in England, and how he came to be there. He also notes that he is West African, and that he came to England after “15 months of hard work in the Desert”. He talks about his belonging as a British Subject fighting in the war with the “Royal Flying Corps” and says: 5. I am waiting to start work at any moment of the day, I cannot start for the simple reason I cannot get my civilian clothes from the tailor shop.

Here, A. E. Oakley is identifying himself as someone willing to work hard and the emphasis on the phrase ‘simple reason’ suggests that the lack of ability to work is not because of his unwillingness but due to the

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lack of money to retrieve his clothes from the tailor shop. He identifies himself as a hardworking West African soldier living in Liverpool. When living in a country with specific norms and values, one is, according to Wood (2007), identified by these and will make these a fundamental part of one’s identity—which may be why A. E. Oakley talks about how hardworking he is. In his reply to Mr. Oakley, the Lord Mayor writes “In reply to your letter of the 28th instant your case seems to be altogether one of delayed payment of back pay and gratuity, and is a matter entirely for the war office”. This reply shows that the Mayor was not singling Mr. Oakley out for discrimination because of his nationality or colour but that there was a delay in paying all ex-servicemen who had fought in the war. However, although the Lord Mayor is aware of Mr. Oakley’s poverty, he does not make an attempt to help or to get him the ‘out of work’ donations available to ex-servicemen. As in Mr. Hall’s case, he states, “I therefore regret I cannot interfere in the matter”. Despite the polite use of the word ‘regret’, this appears to be a conventionalised reply5 rather than genuine regret; if the Mayor was genuine in his regret, he probably could have helped Mr. Oakley financially at least to redeem his clothes. One of the features that is clear from the letters in the archive is the sense of patriotism and allegiance to the Crown (i.e. the issue of allegiances and nationality) expressed by those writing letters to the Lord Mayor. Heneghan and Onuora (2017: 25) see this as being a result of the “powerful establishment propaganda” that portrayed Britain as “the defender of liberty and equality” in the British Empire. On 28th September 1919, a British Indian factory worker writes to the Lord Mayor’s Office with regard to his unemployment: 6. God Save the King Dear Sir I think it is as little as you can do to try and get me work. I have been a long time in Liverpool and I got sacked of Fairy’s Sugar Factory and I have again tried in the same place and they said they were going to start but they telephoned to the Bridewell and said they were not going to start coloured men again… but I am under the same government. God gave your job try and get me one, as I have my wife and child to keep and I have got no place to sleep in but the streets and I am near dying with hunger god made me to work in country same as you.

5 This is what Salmani Nodoushan has referred to as communicative staged acts (in 2014) and ostensible acts (2006a).

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The salutation ‘God save the King’ shows his allegiance to the British government and this is reinforced later on by talking about being British Indian and “under the same government”. This could be comprehended as a feeling of national identity. He considers himself a British Subject and believes that it is the least that the authorities can do to get him a job. He argues that the Lord Mayor’s Office has a responsibility to see to his well-being in the same manner that they see to the welfare of other British citizens. His identity is influenced by his position as a family man, being a husband and father who is unable to provide for his family. Like A. E. Oakley, he refers to the second class citizenship (i.e. outsider status) that he is experiencing by being sacked from Fairies Sugar Factory in preference of white workers and by talking about his length of stay in Liverpool. He links the question of being treated differently, by negotiating his identity as being the “same as you” a British person. His description in the letter is emotive; there is a sense of desperation where he is made to feel an outsider, with no sense of belonging despite being in Liverpool “a long time”. The fact that he says “I have got no place to sleep” and “I am near dying of hunger” attests to his alienation from the community that he lives in. This is further emphasised when he claims “I have got no one hereto [sic] speak fore [sic] me”. From an identity perspective, this appears to be a result of social conditions—lack of employment, destitution and being unable to support his family.

6

Conclusion

The main aim of this chapter was to examine the form and content of the letters and to examine what the language of the letters revealed about the petitioners’ sense of identity and belonging. The application of Fairclough’s (1992) model has shown that identity is expressed through many linguistic features such as the use of terms of address, salutations and vocabulary for identification. Although the petitioners were derided and were destitute, the letters show them to be loyal subjects who genuinely wanted to return home if they were unable to work and take care of their families in Liverpool. The respect with which the petitioners regard the Lord Mayor of Liverpool is evident through the salutations used in the letters such as ‘Most Honourable Sir’ and Dear Sir, which show that the petitioners saw the Lord Mayor as a superior, who had the power and authority to help them overcome the hardships they were facing during a time of racial tension

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and employment shortage. Likewise, the terms of identification used by the Lord Mayor’s Office show that petitioners were identified by the word ‘coloured’ and through place of origin. The analysis reveals that the petitioners identified themselves through three different means: firstly, they identify themselves through their nationality revealing their outsider status; for example, A. E. Oakley, talks about his poverty by stating that he is unable to work for the ‘simple reason’ that he is too poor to even redeem his clothes from the Tailor shop. Secondly, they identify themselves in terms of their contributions to the war effort, especially service in the military or merchant marine. They use vocabulary that is related to the military such as their regiment, showing that they see their regiment as a ‘family’ that they belong to. This identity seems to be stronger than the identity that they have as British subjects, as it is only occasionally, they identify themselves through their ties to Britain. For example, Alfred Woods, an Irishman, talks about his mistreatment in relation to his military service, which we can interpret in relation to the political climate at the time. They also talk about their sense of belonging in relation to their allegiances to King and Country and their feelings of national identity as in the case of the British Indian factory worker. As Heneghan and Onuora (2017: 2) state, these petitioners see themselves as “patriots still willing to serve, God, King and Country”. Finally, they negotiate their identity in relation to their status as husbands and fathers who are trying hard to provide for their families but are not able to establish themselves as independent workers. The war was a driver for migration bringing people from the colonies to fight in the war effort. The language used by the petitioners demonstrates their sense of loyalty and allegiance to Britain. At the same time, the letters written by the Lord Mayor’s Office demonstrate that in spite of the criticism that the Lord Mayor has received, he was actually working on behalf of the petitioners and trying to find a solution that was beneficial to them as well as to the population of Liverpool during a time of employment shortage and economic crisis. This in itself is an important finding, as although it can be argued that the petitioners, particularly, coloured people in Liverpool were badly treated, it was not necessarily by the Lord Mayor’s Office or by the police but by people out of work, by the unions or by employers rather than by the authorities. There are many important issues raised with regard to equality of treatment and opportunity. It is interesting to note that in all the letters that

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I have focused on, the petitioners convey their feelings that the government, in the form of the Lord Mayor’s office, has “a duty of care to look after their welfare and the language they use is one of state responsibility” (Meyer, 2011: 104) which in Meyer’s words “emphasise [...] their heroic sacrifice” (2011: 104) to Britain. The letters demonstrate the trust they have in the Lord Mayor’s Office to resolve their situation. The tensions in Liverpool in the aftermath of the war, the lack of jobs, the sense of bitterness towards immigrants during the immediate aftermath of the war is reflected in these letters and gives a sense of the period and the hardship undergone by the petitioners writing to the Lord Mayor’s Office.

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Salmani Nodoushan, M. A. (2006a). A sociopragmatic comparative study of ostensible invitations in English and Farsi. Speech Communication, 48(8), 903–912. Salmani Nodoushan, M. A. (2006b). Greetings forms in English and Persian: A sociopragmatic perspective. International Journal of Language, Culture, and Society, 17 . Salmani Nodoushan, M. A. (2008). Conversational strategies in Farsi complaints: The case of Iranian complainees. International Journal of Language Studies, 2(2), 187–214. Salmani Nodoushan, M. A. (2012). Rethinking face and politeness. International Journal of Language Studies, 6(4), 119–140. Salmani Nodoushan, M. A. (2013a). The bilingual self or selves? Annals Universitatis Apulensis - Series Philologica, 14(2), 503–510. Salmani Nodoushan, M. A. (2013b). The social semiotics of funerary rites in Iran. International Journal of Language Studies, 7 (1), 79–102. Salmani Nodoushan, M. A. (2014). Speech acts or language micro- and macrogames? International Journal of Language Studies, 8(4), 1–28. Salmani Nodoushan, M. A. (2016). Rituals of death as staged communicative acts and pragmemes. In A. Capone & J. L. Mey (Eds.), Interdisciplinary studies in pragmatics, culture and society (pp. 925–959). Springer. Salmani Nodoushan, M. A. (2019). Clearing the mist: The border between linguistic politeness and social etiquette. International Journal of Language Studies, 13(2), 109–120. Salmani Nodoushan, M. A., & Garcia Laborda, J. (2014). The bilingual self or selves? International Journal of Language Studies, 8(3), 107–116. Scotto Di Carlo, G. (2020). The ‘Trumpusconi’ phenomenon: A comparative discourse analysis of US president Trump’s and former Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi’s political speeches. International Journal of Language Studies, 14(2), 43–72. Sullivan, N., Schatz, R. T., & Lam, C.M.-H. (2012). The (re)nationalization of Hong Kong: The nexus of language and social identity in 2002 and 2009. International Journal of Language Studies, 6(4), 41–70. Tananuraksakul, N. (2013). Power distance reduction and positive reinforcement: EFL learners’ confidence and linguistic identity. International Journal of Language Studies, 7 (1), 103–116. The Complete Letter Writer. (1824). https://books.google.co.uk/. Accessed 12 December 2018. Thornborrow, J. (1999). Language and identity. In S. Thomas & S. Wareing (Eds.), Language, society and power: An introduction (pp. 135–149). Routledge. Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (2009). An introduction to late modern English. Edinburgh University Press.

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Wood, J. (2007). Text in context: A critical discourse analysis approach to Margaret Paston. In T. Nevalainen & S.-K. Tanskanen (Eds.), Letter writing (pp. 47–71). John Benjamins. Writing on the Wall. (2016). From Great War to race riots: Document Gallery. http://www.greatwar-to-raceriots.co.uk/Liverpool, Records Office.

CHAPTER 5

Historical Learning Disabilities: Linguistic Abilities of Ex-Servicemen with ‘Imbecility’, ‘Feeblemindedness’ and ‘Mental Deficiency’ in the Ministry of Pension Files

Abstract During World War I, soldiers suffering from mental disabilities that were associated with lack of intelligence, that are now regarded as learning disabilities, were treated as having ‘imbecility’, ‘feeblemindedness’ or ‘mental deficiency’. Historically, learning disability has been perceived as a problem. This chapter will explore historical learning disabilities in the PIN26 folders by investigating medical reports by doctors assessing patients for pensions and medical documents of the time. The medical notes and documents are used to investigate what linguistic deficits were identified as constituting ‘imbecility’, ‘feeblemindedness’ or ‘mental deficiency’. The study is based on 50 medical reports from the PIN26 files and 11 medical documents from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The data is analysed using corpus methods such as word sketch, keywords and collocations. The results suggest that linguistic factors were an important criterion in determining the level of intelligence and severity of the condition. Keywords Imbecility · Feeblemindedness · Mental deficiency · World War I · Learning disability

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Herat, Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87889-4_5

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1

Introduction

This chapter delves into the history of what is today referred to as learning disabilities and examines how intellectual impairments were labelled by medical professionals during World War I. Diagnostic conditions communicate a set of symptoms associated with a particular condition and this chapter seeks to uncover which of these symptoms were characteristic of the patients diagnosed as having imbecility and feeblemindedness in the PIN26 files. Digby (1996: 12) asserts that despite concern over mental deficiency, there was no adequate measurement of the severity of mental defect in the UK. Thus, the enigma of veterans diagnosed with imbecility and feeblemindedness has tended to be left out from research on the PIN26 files. There is no research to my knowledge of the lives of veterans diagnosed with these mental disabilities and the nature of provision for them during the aftermath of World War I. Reid (2007) focuses on mentally wounded veterans after World War I and examines how shellshocked veterans were distinguished from pauper lunatics. Bramby (2015) examines letters from institutionalised veterans with mental disabilities and evaluates the difference between policy and experience, but her research too is focused on shell shock rather than veterans with imbecility or feeblemindedness. Digby notes that throughout history, there has been more medical interest in lunacy than idiocy or imbecility (Digby, 1996: 7) and that “the states of idiocy and imbecility in medico-legal terms were only gradually distinguished from lunacy”. This is evident in Chapter 3, where clerks from the Liverpool Mayor’s Office refer to an ex-serviceman as an ‘alien lunatic’ (see example 12). Historically, these conditions were associated with hereditary tendencies and perceived as constituting “a permanent and unimprovable feature of an individual’s life” (Jackson, 1996: 170). He, however, argues (2000: 110–111, 215) that “medical officers did not share the eugenic or hereditarian view that prevailed in […] departments of Government or wider civil society and that far from insisting on a biological explanation for mental deficiency, these officials worked to promote the notion of educability and attempted to delay classification”. However, a different view is expressed by Snyder and Mitchell (2005) who note that medical professionals constituting themselves as ‘experts’ aided and abetted the eugenicist move towards “confirming intelligence as hereditary, desirable and manipulable” (cited from Barden, 2019: 6), which suggests that these arguments need to be treated cautiously. With these views in mind, it was interesting to see what

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linguistic deficits were deemed to be characteristic of those diagnosed as having ‘imbecility’, ‘feeblemindedness’ and ‘mental deficiency’. This chapter will therefore shift the focus from previous research in two important ways: first, it will attempt to redress the gap in research on the PIN26 files by focusing on veterans diagnosed with imbecility and feeblemindedness than those with other psychiatric conditions such as shell shock, and second, instead of focusing on letters to the Ministry of Pensions, this chapter will focus on medical reports in the files and published medical documents. The concern here is to see how important linguistic abilities were in diagnosing these conditions in World War I veterans. From the eighteenth century onwards, perceived mental disabilities or people with intellectual impairments were represented as being ‘risky Others’ and were considered a ‘problem’ (Barden, 2019: 1). During World War I, soldiers suffering from cognitive or intellectual impairments or what is now commonly termed as ‘learning disabilities’ were diagnosed as constituting ‘imbecility’, ‘feeblemindedness’ or ‘mental deficiency’ by the Ministry of Pensions. At the time, these terms existed as medical diagnostic labels and were used to diagnose ex-servicemen who were mentally weak. However, when these conditions carry a social stigma, the diagnostic labels themselves become stigmatising (mental help) and the original medical term loses its intended neutral meaning. The concept of intellectual disability has been variously termed ‘mental retardation’, ‘mental handicap’, etc., and has even been used in the DSM manuals demonstrating that the stigmatisation of mental disabilities has continued down the centuries. The starting point when addressing the problem of imbecility and feeblemindedness is the question of how ex-servicemen were recognised as having these disabilities and what criteria were utilised in diagnosing their condition. Hence, I examine the following research questions: • What linguistic deficits do doctors identify as constituting ‘imbecility’, ‘feeblemindedness’ and ‘moral deficiency’? • Are these deficits consistent with the linguistic deficits identified in medical documents of the time? The data is drawn from 25 PIN26 folders entitled ‘Imbecility’, ‘Feeblemindedness’ and ‘Moral Deficiency’. Although several of the PIN26 files have been studied extensively (Barham, 2004; Jones & Wessely, 2005;

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Meyer, 2011; Reid, 2010), the study of the files denoting imbecility and feeblemindedness represents a completely neglected area in the pension files. As Jones and Wessely (2005) mention, although the medical notes in War Pension files are in most cases extensive and cover the serviceman’s history from enlistment until death (60), in the case of the files pertaining to imbecility and feeblemindedness, there was not much information and some folders did not include medical reports. In practice, the pension files had been used to determine whether a veteran was entitled to financial compensation (Jones & Wessely, 2005: 61), and therefore, expert opinion was sought from medical professionals, who were “instructed to test the veracity” (Jones & Wessely, 2005: 61) of the claims made by ex-servicemen. This is confirmed by Bettinson (cited in Meyer, 2011: 100), who observes that “the rate of compensation derived solely from scientific/medical factors […]”, which as Meyer writes “meant that the opinions of the doctors who assessed pensioners through medical boards had a great deal of influence in determining an individual’s pension” (2011: 100). The chapter is organised as follows: the next section will consider the definition of terms and theories of imbecility from the nineteenth century to World War I. Following this, the data and methodology will be discussed. This will be followed by an analysis of the medical documents and reports to identify what linguistic and cognitive deficits were perceived as characteristic of mental deficiency and the final section will conclude the chapter.

2 2.1

Theoretical Perspectives

Definitions of Imbecility, Feeblemindedness and Mental Deficiency

When classification systems were introduced in the nineteenth century, the term ‘imbecile’ was used to denote the medium rank of intelligence and functional ability among people with learning disabilities, between ‘idiot’ and ‘moron’ (The History of Disability Glossary). This is similar to what is defined as a severe learning disability today. Likewise, the term was also used to describe a person with mental illness. The original term, for instance, ‘imbecility’ has become pejorative and is now used as an insult, for instance, ‘imbecile’ (see Digby, 1996: 3, History of Disability Glossary).

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The term ‘feeblemindedness’, on the other hand, is a term first borrowed from American writing in the 1860s (Digby, 1996: 2) to describe people who would be identified today as having moderate or mild learning disabilities or, as it was also known at the time, ‘high grade mental deficiency’ (History of Disability Glossary). Similarly, the term ‘mental deficiency’ was used in the first part of the twentieth century with the same meaning as the current term learning disability. In the twentieth century, another term that was used which broadly has the same meaning as learning disability is the term ‘mental handicap’. Barden cites the following definitions adopted by the 1908 Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded, as suggested by the Royal College of Physicians of London and notes that a similar taxonomy was used in the US that was based on mental age. His assertion is that the terms were used to denote what is now referred to as learning disabilities or perhaps degrees of mental retardation (2019: 7): 1. A feebleminded person is one who is capable of earning a living under favourable circumstances, but is incapable, from mental defect existing from birth or from an early age, (a) competing on equal terms with his normal fellows; or (b) of managing himself or his affairs with ordinary prudence; 2. The imbecile is one who, by reason of mental defect existing from birth or from an early age, is incapable of earning his own living, but is capable of guarding himself against common physical dangers. 3. An idiot is one so deeply defective in mind from birth or from an early age, that he is unable to guard himself against common physical dangers (1908: 324 cited from Barden, 2019: 7). As Barden (2019: 4) argues, these classifications are given in terms of “‘risk’ of harm to the person (and, as today, with explicit reference to competitiveness or fitness and ‘productivity’), in spite of the fact that the chief aim of the relevant institutions was to protect the ‘normal’ from the ‘abnormal’, and vice versa”. Another term that appeared during this time and which was used to label ex-servicemen is the term ‘moral imbecility’. A moral imbecile, also called moral defective in Britain, is a person, who, “by reason of an innate defect, displays an early age vicious or criminal propensities which are of an incorrigible or unusual nature, and are

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generally associated with some slight limitation of intellect” (1908: 325 cited from Barden, 2019: 7). The Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, according to Digby (1996), “provided for a division of those with congenital defects or impairment from a very early age, into idiots, imbeciles and the feebleminded” (11): a. Idiots. Those so deeply defective as to be unable to guard themselves against common physical dangers. b. Imbeciles. Whose defectiveness does not amount to idiocy, but is so pronounced that they are incapable of managing themselves or their affairs, or, in the case of children, of being taught to do so. c. Feebleminded persons. Whose weakness does not amount to imbecility, yet who require care, supervision or control, for their protection or for the protection of others, or, in the case of children, are incapable of receiving benefit from the instruction in ordinary schools. d. Moral Imbeciles. Displaying mental weakness coupled with strong vicious or criminal propensities, and on whom punishment has little or no deterrent effect [9]. As seen in Digby’s (1996) work, children who were diagnosed with idiocy and imbecility were not necessarily regarded as having learning difficulties; instead, they were perceived as being mentally ill. Cognitive deficiency has been seen as a failure to learn only recently. Digby’s work elucidates that regardless of the full meaning of imbecility and feeblemindedness, there was possible overlap between mental enfeeblement and lunacy. 2.2

Imbecility and Feeblemindedness During World War I

During World War I, those suffering with mental conditions were the most affected, as conditions such as ‘feeblemindedness’ were seen as “an inherited defect that drained public resources and threatened humanity” (Shepherd, 2000: 126–127). Shepherd (2000) notes that the lack of concern expressed towards ‘nervous troubles’ of war was because there were no specialist neurologists or psychiatrists in the Army Medical Corps in 1913. He writes (2000: 17) that at this time there were fears of ‘genetic dilution’ due to rising levels of lunacy, alcoholism and mental deficiency,

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confirming to doctors such as Frederick Mort at Claybury Asylum that the “racial stock was declining”. He says Mrs. Tweedie, of the newly founded Eugenics Education Society, declared that “the brain of this country is not keeping pace with the growth of weak-minded imbecility and vice”. In line with this thinking, the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act set up a new ‘Board of Control’ (History of England website). It specified that ‘mental defectives’ should either be closely supervised in the community or kept in a new type of institution, the ‘mental deficiency colony’. This is confirmed by Reid (2007: 347–348), who writes that in 1915, the War Office made a commitment to make a clear distinction between shell-shocked soldiers and ‘ordinary lunatics’, as it was believed that lunatics suffered from “hereditary factors which indicated a level of degeneration”. In Britain, according to Shepherd, particular attention focused on the question of mental retardation. Winston Churchill, the then Home Secretary in 1912 is said to have written that “the multiplication of the Feeble-minded” was a terrible danger to the race (cited from Shepherd, 2000: 17). Shepherd (2000: 127) writes that “overall, the Americans were more successful in eliminating the mentally deficient than the British”. This is due to the vetting of recruits: “they went over each man, testing pupillary and tendon reflexes, co-ordination and station, looking for tremors and for scars suggestive of epilepsy, and asking a few questions as to heredity, environment, schooling, convulsions, or nervous breakdown”. It is fears such as racial degeneration that led French psychologists to introduce intelligence tests. The eugenics archive notes ‘the ranking of mental deficiencies’ was dependent on the ability to create objective measures in evaluating an individual’s intelligence. According to Barden (2019: 4), the ‘most influential’ was the Binet-Simon test, which he states was adopted with zeal by medical professionals in the US. Kline states that, “original intelligence assessments of mental deficiency by Binet and Simon included tests that determined an individual as mentally deficient if that individual’s mental age was considerably lower than his or her actual (chronological) age. The ratio of mental age and actual (chronological) age, when multiplied by 100, would form an intelligence index. The intelligence index was gradually replaced by a statistically defined intelligence quotient test score, which is a method of IQ testing still in common use today” (Kline, n.d.). The same year, the Binet-Simon scale was translated into English by Henry H. Goddard (1866–1957), and according to Barden (2019), he rose to prominence through his position as superintendent at the

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Vineland Training School for Feebleminded Boys and Girls, in New Jersey, which “enabled him to publish scholarly papers and newspaper articles combining his interest in heredity, intelligence and social hygiene”. He proposed to use individuals’ test scores to identify the ‘feebleminded’. In 1910, Goddard introduced a hierarchy of feeblemindedness that became the standard nomenclature for decades (Roige, n.d.). It included the grades of ‘idiot’ (mental age of up to 3 in adults), ‘imbecile’ (3–7), as well as the new grade ‘moron’ (8–12) for those who were only mildly mentally defective, and could “dangerously” be mistaken for normal individuals (Roige, n.d.). In the early 1880s, the details of how children were assessed for imbecility in Britain were described by Pycroft (cited from Gladstone, 1996: 150), but there is no record as to how adults suffering from imbecility were tested nor what criteria were used in diagnosing these conditions for military personnel. On 29th April 1917, Robert Yerkes began a formal campaign to persuade the US military to establish a program of army wide intelligence testing. According to Carson (1993: 284), the plan that Yerkes developed adhered closely to practices and presumptions of American psychology. His plan “abandoned civilian mental testing’s preoccupation with school children and the feebleminded and proposed instead the development of an instrument to measure adult intelligence” (Carson, 1993: 284) that reflected the particular influence of the military. The first intelligence scale, which was measured on ten criteria was described as Army a (see Table 1) and included linguistic and numerical abilities in measuring intelligence. Initially, Yerks’ Army a was used to test recruits deemed mentally deficient but it was later adopted for deploying personnel more efficiently in military tasks rather than for the sole purpose of excluding those with mental deficiency (Carson, 1993: 284–285). The Army Mental Tests (1918) published by the US provide three different types of mental tests administered to veterans in order to assess their intelligence: alpha (for recruits who were literate in English); beta (for illiterates and foreigners); and individual tests (which included the Yerkes-Bridges Point Scale, the Stanford-Binet Scale and the Performance Scale). No such tests appear to have been employed in Britain, but evidence suggests that the British army was influenced by the advances made in the US on intelligence testing. Shepherd (2000: 188) asserts that, “during World War I, many soldiers had passed through training and come under fire once their inadequacy became apparent, often when they developed hysterical symptoms”. He

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Table 1 Yerkes’ intelligence measures in Army aa

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Criteria

Testing

Percentage

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Following oral direction Displaying memory span Rearranging sentences Solving arithmetical problems Answering general info questions Giving synonyms or antonyms Displaying practical judgements Solving number series Giving analogues Doing number comparisons

4 5 8 8 16 16 4 6 16 16

Adapted from Carson (1993: 286) a Reproduced with copyright permission from Chicago University Press

says two different issues had been juxtaposed together and never really separated—the relationship between stress and mental disorder and that between mental deficiency and mental disorder. Barden writes about the intervention of the term ‘moron’ to the mix, introduced by Goddard, which he sees as particularly noteworthy because “it was driven by overt ablenationalist, eugenicist concerns about perceived threat presented to the health of nations by ‘undesirables’ passing as ‘normal’ within the general population” (2019: 7). As evident from the pension files, some soldiers were perceived as ‘moral defectives’ but unlike children diagnosed with mental deficiency, soldiers do not appear to have been segregated from the ‘normal’ population and appear to have been treated in the Ministry of Pensions’ hospitals rather than in mental asylums. Brumby’s research (2015), however, suggests that war veterans diagnosed as ‘lunatics’ were incarcerated in special hospitals with little chance of recovery. Similarly, Muir notes that in 1916, The Medical Journal of Australia warned that as “carriers of psychic contagion [psychiatric casualties] were a source of danger in the ward”. She shows that after World War I three states in Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia, provided segregated accommodation for mentally ill veterans. In 1929, the Victorian Inspector General of the Insane, in his report on mental deficiency in Australia, suggested that mentally ill veterans should be segregated from the rest of society in “residential homes”. Snyder and Mitchell (2006: 104) confirm this history of how disabled people were treated by asserting that scientific and cultural unanimity on the

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threat of ‘defectives’ extended beyond the battlefield even among countries that were military adversaries at the time. They argue that people with intellectual disabilities became synonymous with incapacity (2006: 84) and were restricted, confined and deposited against their will (2006: 112–113), which they state “exists largely at odds with collective and individual well-being of disabled people” (2015, 3–4 cited in Barden, 2019: 2). This appears to have been applied to civilians rather than military personnel in Britain, although as evident from Muir’s (2002) work, this practice was followed in some commonwealth countries with the detrimental terms ‘imbecile’, ‘feebleminded’, ‘mental’ or ‘moral defective’ used to define those with psychological problems “to discourage malingerers from falsifying a mental illness” (45). 2.3

The Use of the Terms ‘Imbecility’, ‘Feeblemindedness’ and ‘Mental Deficiency’ in the DSM Manuals

There is an extraordinary consistency throughout history in the basic terminology and definitions of mental disability. In DSM1, which was published in 1952, the term ‘mental deficiency’ is regarded as “a legal term, similar to insanity that has little meaning in clinical psychiatry” (DSM-I, 1952: 10) and is still used, with symptoms ranging from mild to severe, to diagnose individuals who did not have an organic brain defect at birth or in childhood, but had a disturbance in intellect, and diagnosis was made as to the degree to which the patient was suffering: mild, moderate or severe, with no IQ limit set to determine this (DSM-I, 1952: 10–11). The term ‘idiocy’ was included in Appendix I under Mental Deficiency/Idiopathic or Hereditary. The terms ‘imbecility’ and ‘moron’ were used in the sections mental deficiency/includes severe mental deficiency (IQ under 20) and includes severe mental deficiency (IQ under 50). The terms ‘idiot’, ‘imbecile’ and ‘moron’ were objected to since they were based only on psychological testing, and these terms were eventually replaced (DSM-I, 1952: 10). Also in the section on mental deficiency was the phrase borderline intelligence (DSM-I, 1952: 100), which was under moderate mental deficiency (IQ from 50–69) and under mild mental deficiency (IQ from 70–85) the term ‘mongolism’ was used. In DSMII, the term ‘mental deficiency’ was replaced with mental retardation with degrees of severity: mild, moderate or severe. The term ‘mental retardation’ was still being used in DSM-III (1980: 36–40)

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and DSMIV (1994: 39–48) under Axis II. In DSM5, the term ‘mental retardation’ is changed to ‘intellectual disability’ because of Rosa’s Law (DSM5, 2013: 33). The term ‘intellectual disability’ now appears Under Neurodevelopmental Disorders. According to DSM5 (2013: 66–67), the following symptoms are included in the diagnosis of a specific learning disorder: • Persistent difficulties in reading, writing, arithmetic or mathematical reasoning skills during formal years of schooling. Symptoms may include inaccurate or slow and effortful reading, poor written expression that lacks clarity, difficulties remembering number facts or inaccurate mathematical reasoning. • Current academic skills must be well below the average range of scores in culturally and linguistically appropriate tests of reading, writing or mathematics. Accordingly, a person who is dyslexic must read with great effort and not in the same manner as those who are typical readers. • Learning difficulties begin during the school-age years. • The individual’s difficulties must not be better explained by developmental, neurological, sensory (vision or hearing) or motor disorders and must significantly interfere with academic achievement, occupational performance or activities of daily living (APA, 2013: 68–69 cited in Boat and Wu, 2015: 180). As stated by Boat and Wu (2015: 180) it is worth noting that the fourth edition of the DSM (i.e. DSM-IV-TR) did not specify the different categories of learning difficulties (LD); instead, it listed many diagnoses pertaining to reading, mathematics and written expression deficits (APA, 2000 cited from Boat and Wu (2015: 180). According to DSM-IV-TR, LD is characterised as significantly low individual performance on standardised tests predicted for age, education and level of IQ (APA, 2000 cited from Boat and Wu, 2015: 180). Boat and Wu (2015) add that there is a ‘residual’ category that is not further described, and that, in general, these labels are used interchangeably with the term ‘learning disability’ in government dictates.

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3

Methodology 3.1

Data

The data for this chapter was collected from the PIN26 files held at the National Archives. The PIN26 files contained 38 folders in total: 6 folders entitled ‘Imbecility’, 9 folders entitled ‘feeblemindedness’, ‘feeblemindedness’ or ‘feebleminded’ and 23 folders entitled ‘mental deficiency’. Of these I examined 25 folders. Only 2/25 folders included letters from ex-servicemen or their families writing on their behalf. Also, some of the ex-servicemen who were identified as having imbecility, feeblemindedness or mental deficiency were also diagnosed as suffering from other conditions, such as deafness. Of the 25 folders examined, only 20 contained medical reports of the doctor’s assessment of the patients’ condition and some folders contained written statements of verbal remarks given by exservicemen at Medical Boards. Although I photographed all the reports that were available, when I was transcribing it became clear that some medical reports were duplicates. Therefore, these were excluded and one or more reports from each of the folders, which discussed the symptoms relating to either imbecility, feeblemindedness or mental deficiency was used as data for this chapter. This data consists of 50 medical reports consisting of 2,021 words. As the medical reports are short notes made by doctors, the word count of each report was different constituting between 50 and 100 words, as in the sample report given below: 1. PIN26/5434 Imbecility Medical report 22.01.1915 Man stares straight in front. Imbecile smile always. Able to give a connected account of himself but answers in short, straight sentences. Has had suicidal tendencies. Used to have delusional feelings and electrical feelings in his legs. He admitted that at first eight men were trying to catch him but that they did not bother him now. Heart condition normal (60 words). As the reports are very short, the data was supplemented through medical documents available at the time. Eleven texts from the Wellcome Trust were utilised that were medical documents written specifically on imbecility and feeblemindedness between 1877 and 1907 by medical

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professionals such as William Ireland (1877) and George Shuttleworth (1886) (see primary sources for full list of documents used). 3.2

Data Analysis

The data was analysed using SketchEngine. One of the reasons for using SketchEngine rather than manually analysing the data is because it can be used to analyse a word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour. SketchEngine’s Word Sketch function processes collocations and other grammatical combinations such as the modifiers used with the word, the verbs that go with it when it is used as an object and subject, prepositional phrases, the search word and/or adjective predicates, pronominal possessors and so on. By looking at the word sketch, it is possible to see how the search word is used with other surrounding words. A Word Sketch analysis was carried out on the following search terms: speech, speak* spoken, talk* language, tone, pronunciation, words, vocabulary, express, expression. These words were used to examine whether linguistic features are seen as characteristic of imbecility and feeblemindedness. The words were then examined through concordance analysis in order to examine how the words are used in context. In addition, the corpus was also compared against the Entencorpus in order to look at the key words in this particular corpus.

4

Results

As Table 2 illustrates, the most important linguistic features evident in the medical documents are speaking/speak/spoken, words, speech, language and talk/talking. This shows that in terms of language use, the ability to speak is an important criterion in determining mental deficiency. 4.1

Language

The pre-modifiers used with the word ‘language’ in the documents show that the language of those diagnosed with imbecility and feeblemindedness is seen by professionals as ‘parrot like’, ‘echoic’, ‘obscene’ and ‘little’. The pre-modifiers give an impression of language as being more imitative than spontaneous with the words ‘parrot like’ and ‘echoic’, whereas the word ‘obscene’ suggests violence and ‘little’ suggests lack of language.

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Table 2

Linguistic characteristics of imbecility in the medical documents

Linguistic characteristics

Raw frequency

Speak/speaking/spoken Words Speech Language Talk/talking Expression Utter Express Tone Pronunciation Vocabulary

321 269 103 86 53 48 33 30 22 17 5

Normalised frequency per 100,000 words 86.06 72.12 27.61 23.05 14.21 12.87 8.84 8.04 5.89 4.55 1.34

This illustrates that lack of language is regarded as a measurable deficiency in cognitive function. 4.2

Words

As Table 2 illustrates, the word ‘word’ was used 269 times in the medical reports and documents, showing that words are an important aspect of the diagnosis. The predicate adjectives used with words are difficult and sufficient showing that this is an aspect that people diagnosed with imbecility struggle with. The word ‘word’ was also modified by few, short, several, last, isolated, single, easy, only as in the following phrases from 2 to 7: 2. Asked to repeat several words 3. Can only use short words 4. repeat the last words said to them 5. say a single intelligible word 6. Understand a few easy words 7. The only words he uses. The verbs used with words as object consist of vocabulary that is illustrative of what abilities are present such as being able to speak, repeat, read, say, utter and shorten as in examples 8–19:

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8. Speak a few words 9. To repeat words 10. Use words 11. To read words of 12. To say a few words 13. Utter a word 14. Spell a few words of three letters 15. Learn a few words 16. Understand a few easy words 17. Shorten words 18. Combine words of one syllable 19. Pronounce the desired word. 4.3

Speech

The results indicate that speech is regarded by medical professionals as a “complex faculty” and an “endowment”. An analysis of the word ‘speech’ demonstrates that a characteristic of imbecility is some disruption in how speech is used. The adjective predicates of speech include words such as imperfect, variable, defective, deficient, sharp and abrupt, which all point to speech being disrupted in those diagnosed with feeblemindedness and imbecility suggesting that linguistic measures play a role in assessing the level of intelligence. The inability to comprehend language appears to be one of the measures used to diagnose imbecility or feeblemindedness. Speech is thus modified by words that reveal difficulties with understanding and using language such as examples 20 and 21: 20. nor understand speech 21. incomplete speech. The verbs used with speech consist of words such as exercise, understand, conduct, recover, lose, possess, use, affect and have. Examples 22–27 further confirm that speech impairment is a characteristic feature of imbecility. 22. To hear and understand speech 23. In this case speech is conducted in a whisper 24. And at length lost speech

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25. They neither use speech or phrases 26. Speech is affected 27. He had no speech. 4.4

Speak/Speaking/Spoken

An analysis of the word ‘speak’ showed that a large number of adverbials were used to describe the speech of those diagnosed with imbecility. These are words such as only, aloud, freely, plainly, imperfectly, correctly, suddenly, flippantly, still and seldom, as seen in examples 28–32. There are three adverbials here which provide evidence of a more positive outlook with words such as freely, plainly and distinctly. 28. Only speaks a few words 29. But could speak freely when he chose 30. Young man now speaks very plainly and distinctly 31. Sometimes imbecile mutes commence to speak suddenly without anybody knowing why 32. He still speaks imperfectly like a child of two years old. 4.5

Keywords

The keyword analysis of the medical documents and medical reports in Table 3 illustrates the top ten keywords in the corpora. The keywords Table 3 Keywords in the corpora

Medical documents

Raw Number (Freq)

Medical notes

Raw Number (Freq)

Insanity Insane Asylum Epileptic Lunatic Idiocy Imbecility Idiotic Mania Hereditary

512 477 412 330 267 248 248 118 107 102

Deficiency Dull Stammer Childish Degenerate Apathetic Defective Illiterate Neurasthenia Bellicose

11 06 04 04 03 03 02 02 02 02

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in the medical documents indicate that imbecility was seen as a mental illness with keywords such as insanity, insane, asylum, lunatic and idiocy, which confirms Digby’s (1996) and Shepherd’s (2000) theories that there was no clear delineation between imbecility and lunacy, nor between mental disorder and mental deficiency, as well as Barden’s (2019) argument about those with imbecility being seen as ‘risky others’ (see Table 3). In contrast, the keywords in the medical reports have more to do with the characteristics of imbecility with ‘deficiency’ being the most frequent keyword. Some linguistic characteristics such as stammering and illiteracy are evident, but the majority of keywords point to the condition of the patient with words such as dull, degenerate, childish, apathetic, defective and bellicose, which highlights deficiency in terms of intelligence. This further demonstrates that imbecility is seen as constituting a loss of intellectual abilities that decrease an individual’s capacity to function normally. The keywords from the medical documents illustrate that the basic framework of ideas developed over the centuries, conflating imbecility with lunacy, remains unchanged alongside ideas of imbecility and idiocy being hereditary and part of family histories. The appearance of asylum as a keyword also points to consensus among medical professionals as to the importance of segregation. During the time these documents were written, the social concerns were to do with whether those with imbecility and feeblemindedness might lead to the hereditary degeneration of race, and this is reflected in the lack of any keywords that identify the characteristics of the disability. In contrast, the top ten keywords in the medical notes suggest that there are some linguistic characteristics associated with imbecility such as stammering and illiteracy. Even though most of the keywords in the medical notes have to do with the condition of the veteran, overall, however, the doctors’ notes demonstrate that most patients diagnosed with imbecility can speak but have speech impairments, with only one ex-serviceman identified as being able to speak coherently in PIN26/13129 (example 33). Here, the doctor writes: 33. No grounds for mental deficiency. Memory is good. Speaks coherently. This implies that the ability to speak and a good memory are important criteria in determining whether someone has mental deficiency; this patient, although “incapable of arithmetical calculation”, is recognised

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as having “no grounds for mental deficiency”. As evident from Table 1, certain linguistic abilities appear to play an important role in diagnosing those identified as having imbecility or feeblemindedness, as in examples 34–36: 34. PIN26/4889 Mental deficiency Medical report He speaks with a stammer and will answer simple questions with much hesitation as if he did not understand them. 35. PIN26/2008 Medical report Mentally deficient and not likely to become an efficient soldier. Has a very bad stammer. 36. PIN26/5287 Imbecility aggravated Medical report Degenerate appearance, illiterate but answers questions intelligently. Simple in manner. Speech rather slow. A part of the medical diagnosis appears to include words relating to the patients’ appearance and personality characteristics such as degenerate, dull, apathetic, childish, bellicose and demented. The use of these words suggests that the patients’ level of intelligence is also measured by their appearance, as it shows the person is not ‘normal’. This invokes the idea that cognitive abilities are based on what attributes and characteristics are expected by medical professionals in specific circumstances. As shown in Table 1, similar to Yerks’ Army a, a display of memory span also appears to have been a consideration in the diagnosis. The results suggest that soldiers with imbecility, feeblemindedness and mental deficiency have symptoms such as difficulties with speaking/answering questions, doing simple calculations and poor cerebration in addition to memory problems. Some of the cognitive deficits apparent in the medical notes include those in examples 37–50: 37. little memory 38. has little memory 39. memory very bad 40. memory is defective 41. memory poor 42. very simple and childish

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43. is simple and childish in his manner and is lacking in general knowledge 44. A childish somewhat weak willed man 45. his methods of amusement are childish 46. Lacks initiative 47. Lacking in general knowledge 48. Has an amnesia for ordinary school knowledge 49. the boy’s appearance and mental attitude are decidedly peculiar 50. cerebration poor. As examples 37–50 illustrate, the negative words used such as little, poor, defective, lacking, simple, childish, weak willed, and decidedly peculiar imply both deficiency and abnormality. There are only a few linguistic characteristics mentioned overall in the medical notes; nevertheless, it does display that language is used as an important measure in diagnosing whether a veteran had imbecility, feeblemindedness or mental deficiency as noted by Carson (1993). Unlike in the medical documents, there is no reference to the use of the word ‘language’ or the use of ‘words’ in the medical notes. Of the linguistic characteristics given in Table 2, only the word ‘speaks’ is used. The characteristics identified suggested that the speech of those veterans diagnosed as having imbecility or feeblemindedness was variable and used as a measure of the level of severity for purposes of financial compensation with notes such as in examples 51–62: 51. speaks coherently 52. speaks with a stammer 53. speaks slowly 54. answers questions partially and readily 55. answers questions slowly 56. answers in short, straight sentences 57. answers questions intelligently 58. answers all questions sharply and intelligently 59. answers intelligibly 60. will answer questions with much hesitation as if he did not understand them 61. Laughs and smiles immediately without adequate cause 62. His reactions to interrogation is unsatisfactory and hesitating.

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The above examples suggest that the patients’ ability to answer questions was an important consideration in assessing their condition, with some veterans’ ability to answer questions being recorded as sharp, intelligent and intelligible and others as hesitant or slow. This shows that these ex-servicemen do not for the most part suffer from an inability to do language, as some veterans are able to understand and answer the doctor’s questions but they appear to suffer from some ‘lack’ or other mental deficiencies such as loss of memory, hallucinations, anxiety and insomnia, also characteristics identified as symptoms of war neurosis. This is confirmed explicitly in one of the reports in which the doctor states “Think there is some neurasthenia” (PIN26/6073), whereas in others imbecility is identified as a ‘constitutional condition’, as in example 63, which identifies the patients’ non-specific symptoms as very general and having the possibility of being associated with other conditions. 63. PIN26/16668 Imbecility Medical report Mentally simple and childlike but answers questions intelligently. Imbecility is a constitutional condition. The medical notes therefore appear to provide a picture of imbecility and feeblemindedness in ex-servicemen that is somewhat different to how the conditions have been identified for children in the medical documents from the nineteenth century, which appear to treat imbecility as related to other mental illnesses such as lunacy. An analysis of the collocates of imbecility shows that the most common characteristics associated with imbecility in the medical documents from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were nervousness, anxiety, anger, fury, misery, frightened, quarrelsome, sullen, formidable, alarmed, wild, dissatisfied, threatening, barbarous, sly and malicious. These words carry connotations of aggression and abnormality and confirm the characteristics of moral imbecility. The suggestion here is that imbecility is tied to insanity and abnormality, corroborating Shepherd’s argument (2000) and thereby seeing those with mental deficiency as ‘risky others’ (Barden, 2019: 1).

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Discussion

A comparison of the medical notes in the PIN26 files with the medical documents on imbecility and feeblemindedness demonstrates that in the case of ex-servicemen diagnosed with imbecility, there seems to be no conflation between mental deficiency and mental disorder, with imbecility being identified as constituting impairments in language, memory and problems in arithmetic. The soldiers diagnosed as having imbecility, feeblemindedness and mental deficiency have characteristics of learning disability, described in the DSM manuals, such as difficulties in speech, literacy and arithmetic but in relation to the characteristics identified in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, none of the ex-servicemen with imbecility appear wholly incapable of managing themselves or in need of constant supervision. Some features of moral imbecility such as mental weakness and the propensity for aggression are evident through the collocations of imbecility. The literature also suggests that those with imbecility and feeblemindedness are intellectually impaired and in veterans’ intelligence appears to be measured through linguistic and numeric ability, general knowledge and memory span, which suggests that imbecility and feeblemindedness were perceived somewhat differently to nineteenthcentury conceptualisations. For instance, in PIN26/5287, the doctor notes, “Says he has been a sailor but is very ignorant about the parts of a ship and of the sea”, where the ex-serviceman is assessed on his ability to recount general knowledge of the parts of a ship and the sea, which requires a knowledge of specific vocabulary. In the case of this veteran, the doctor goes on to state that the “patient is completely illiterate. According to his statement, he attended school until he was 15 years old”. He is diagnosed as ‘imbecility aggravated’ suggesting that an existing condition may have worsened due to service in the war. As discussed above, the medical documents identify intelligence as an important criterion of imbecility, but this appears to be measured differently in the PIN26 files with some ex-servicemen being identified as ‘intelligent’ depending on various abilities to do with linguistic, mathematical, general knowledge and memory capacity contrary to symptoms identified for these conditions in the literature. It is clear that for pension purposes, medical professionals used various tests to gauge the severity of a veteran’s condition, in order to make an assessment as to whether they should receive financial compensation or not. The results suggest that although the veterans diagnosed with imbecility, feeblemindedness

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or mental deficiency can sometimes answer questions intelligently and are able to do simple calculations, there are some who are lacking in intelligence; for example, in PIN26/7303, the doctor writes “appeared not to realise his position nor to understand either orders given or word of command”. Here, intelligence is akin to ability to understand ‘his position’ and comprehension of orders/commands. In PIN26/10577, it is said the patient has “intellectual attributes of a poor grade. He is a man of extreme ignorance and absolutely no education”. The medical notes also suggest that some veterans suffer from deeper psychological issues pertaining to memory loss, nightmares and delusions which shows that there is a low probability of these veterans being able to work successfully either within the armed services or in other responsible positions in society. For example, in PIN26/10110, the doctor notes that the patient is “unfit for any responsible work”; in PIN26/11882, the physician states that the patient “takes very little notice of his surroundings”. In PIN26/6073, it is said “his reaction to interrogation is unsatisfactory. Further mental improvement is not expected”. The reports therefore give an assessment of the veterans’ ability to perform their role. Sometimes there are indications of the effect of war service: for example, in PIN26/13129, the patient is identified as having ‘no grounds for mental deficiency’, yet, the doctor still notes that he is “not up to normal standard”. Those who are slow in speaking, childish in manner, lacking in general knowledge and intelligence, and having poor memory on the other hand are assessed as ‘unlikely to become an efficient soldier’(PIN26/2008); or as ‘useless’ [or likely to] ‘spend most of his time in school list or in hospital’ (PIN26/6073). This validates Snyder and Mitchell’s (2006: 81) argument that “feebleminded persons found themselves incapable [my emphasis] of fairly competing with their fellow citizens for jobs, food, housing and education”.

5

Conclusion

This chapter set out to interrogate what linguistic criteria were used by medical professionals employed by the Ministry of Pensions in diagnosing war veterans as having imbecility, feeblemindedness or mental deficiency. The results suggest that although language was not the only important criterion, it was a vital measure alongside other symptoms such as memory capacity, cerebration, awareness of surroundings and ability to do simple calculations. The results have shown that while hereditary factors

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were considered, the concerns of the eugenics movement were not at play during the aftermath of the war and that veterans with imbecility, feeblemindedness and mental deficiency were not necessarily perceived as ‘lunatics’ nor segregated from the ‘normal population’, and were treated in hospitals belonging to the Ministry of Pensions rather than in mental asylums. The medical reports suggest that in most cases, the imbecility, feeblemindedness or mental deficiency in soldiers were pre-existing conditions not attributable to war service. The identified medical symptoms generally conform to evidence in the medical documents, particularly in relation to linguistic abilities and behavioural characteristics. These documents, which were written at the height of the eugenics movement, tend to concentrate mostly on questions relating to lunacy and segregation, not seen in the medical reports. The medical notes also indicate that some of the patients who were diagnosed with imbecility were also suffering from other psychological and physical conditions such as neurasthenia and deafness and there is some evidence that their condition was possibly aggravated by the stresses of war. The medical notes indicate that the doctor’s assessment takes into consideration the effect service in the war has had on a soldier’s ability to make a further contribution either in the military or in any other responsible position. From the doctors’ reports, it is clear that most ex-servicemen diagnosed with imbecility and feeblemindedness were not in a position to undertake further responsibility due to linguistic deficits in speaking, illiteracy, inability to do simple arithmetic, memory problems and lack of awareness of surroundings. They are not, however, perceived as a threat to society. Overall, the findings of this chapter are consistent with previous studies (Carson, 1993), which emphasise the importance of language as a measure of intelligence. The language used in the medical reports also implies that those diagnosed with imbecility, feeblemindedness and mental deficiency appear to manifest some overt signs of physical or mental deformity as seen through their inability to function normally. This suggests that both visible signs and diminished intellectual capacity were important in detecting imbecility and feeblemindedness. This section has therefore demonstrated the promise of using this type of novel data—medical notes and medical documents to analyse the importance of language in determining what kind of linguistic deficits were regarded as learning disabilities in war veterans. The results support some claims made by medical professionals in the nineteenth century about imbecility and feeblemindedness, particularly with regard

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to their linguistic abilities and behaviour. In addition, these results also support the notion that in Britain, language was an important measure in determining an ex-serviceman’s intelligence and ability to undertake responsible work in society.

References Primary Sources: Medical Documents Beach, F. (1882). On types of imbecility (paper read before the Harveian Society). Pardon & Sons, Printers. Crothers, T. D. (1895). Inebriety and imbecility: A medico-legal study. Press of the Case, Lockwood & Brainard. Greenlees, T. D. (1907). The etiology, symptoms and treatment of idiocy and imbecility [publisher not identified]. Haslam, J. (1823). A letter to the ... Lord Chancellor, on the nature and interpretation of unsoundness of mind, and imbecility of intellect. R. Hunter. Howard, H. (1882). A rational materialistic definition of insanity and imbecility: With the medical jurisprudence of legal criminality, founded upon physiological, psychological and clinical observations. Dawson. Ireland, W. W. (1877). On idiocy and imbecility. J. & A. Churchill Ireland, W.W. (1898). The mental affections of children: idiocy, imbecility and insanity. J. & A. Churchill. Oliver, C. A. (1890). An analysis of the motor symptoms and conditions of the ocular apparatus, as observed in imbecility, epilepsy and the second stage of general paralysis of the insane [publisher not identified]. Ray, I. (1839). A treatise on medical jurisprudence and insanity: Containing chapters on imbecility, nervousness, mental deficiency, drunkenness, delirium, and mental diseases in general. G. Henderson. Shuttleworth, G. E. (1886). Clinical lecture on idiocy and imbecility: Delivered to students of Owens College, Manchester (Dr. Ashby’s class for diseases of children). British Medical Association. Telford-Smith, T. (1898). The paralytic type of idiocy and imbecility [publisher not identified].

Secondary Sources American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Text revision. APA. American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Highlights of changes from DSM-IV-TR to DSM-5 [online]. AP Publishing. Available from: www.dsm5.org/.../cha nges%20from%20dsm-iv-tr%20to%20dsm-5.pdf. Accessed 20 January 2018.

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Army Mental Tests: Methods, Typical Results and Practical Applications. (1918). Washington, DC, USA. Barden, O. (2019). Demanding money with menaces: Fear & loathing in the archipelago of confinement. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 13. Barham, P. (2004). Forgotten lunatics of the Great War. Yale University Press. Boat, T. F., & Wu, J. T (2015). Mental disorders and disabilities among low income children. National Academies Press. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ books/NBK332886/#:~:text=The%20DSM%2DIV%2DTR%20approach,oth erwise%20specified%2C%20is%20also%20provided. Accessed 8 January 2021. Brumby, A. (2015). ‘A painful and disagreeable position’: Rediscovering patient narratives and evaluating the difference between policy and experience for institutionalised veterans with mental disabilities, 1924–1931. First World War Studies, 6(1), 37–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/19475020.2015.1047891 Carson, J. (1993). Army Alpha, Army Brass, and the search for Army intelligence. The University of Chicago Journals: History of Science Society, 84(2), 278–309. https://www.jstor.org/stable/236235 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. (1994). (Fouth Edition) DSM-IV [online]. USA: American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (1952). (First Edition) DSM-I [online]. American Psychiatric Association. Available from: www.tur kpsikiyatri.org/arsiv/dsm-1952.pdf. Accessed 20 January 2018. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (1968). (Second Edition) DSM-II [online]. American Psychiatric Association. Available from: https://www.madinamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSM-II. pdf. https://archive.org/details/DiagnosticAndStatisticalManualOfMentalD isordersDsm2. Accessed 20 January 2018. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (1980). (Third Edition) DSM-III [online]. American Psychiatric Association. Available from: https:// archive.org/details/pdfy-85JiVdvN0MYbNrcr. Accessed 20 January 2018. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (2013) (Fifth Edition) DSM-5 [online]. American Psychiatric Association. Available from: http:// repository.poltekkes-kaltim.ac.id/657/1/Diagnostic%20and%20statistical% 20manual%20of%20mental%20disorders%20_%20DSM-5%20%28%20PDFD rive.com%20%29.pdf. Accessed 20 January 2018. Digby, A. (1996). Contexts and perspectives. In D. Wright & A. Digby (Eds.), From idiocy to mental deficiency (pp. 1–21). Routledge. Gattie, W. H., & Holt-Hughes, T. H. (1914). Note on the Mental Deficiency Act, 1913. The Law Quarterly Review, 30, 202. History of Disability Glossary. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclus ive-heritage/disability-history/about-the-project/glossary/#cat_I_word_Imb ecile. Accessed 8 January 2021.

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Jackson, M. (1996). Institutional provision for the feeble-minded in Edwardian England: Sandlebridge and the scientific morality of permanent care. In D. Wright & A. Digby (Eds.), From idiocy to mental deficiency (pp. 161–183). Routledge. Jones, E., & Wessely, S. (2002). War pensions (1900–1945): Changing models of psychological understanding. British Journal of Psychiatry, 180, 374–379. Jones, E., & Wessely, S. (2005). Shell shock to PTSD: Military psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War. Psychology Press. Mitchell, D. T., & Snyder, S. L. (2015). The biopolitics of disability. Neoliberalism, ablenationalism, and peripheral embodiment. University of Michigan Press. Muir, K. (2002). ‘Idiots, imbeciles and moral defectives’: Military and government treatment of mentally ill service personnel and veterans. Journal of Australian Studies, 26(73), 41–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/144430502 09387764 Myers, K. (2011). Contesting certification: Mental deficiency, families and the state in interwar England. Paedagogica Historica, 47 (6), 749–766. Reid, F. (2007). Distinguishing between shell-shocked veterans and pauper lunatics: The ex-services’ welfare society and mentally wounded veterans after the Great War. War in History, 14(3), 347–371. Reid, F. (2010). Broken men: Shell shock, treatment and recovery in Britain 1914– 1930. Continuum. Roige, A. https://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/tree/53480acd132156674b 0002c3. Accessed 7 January 2021. Shepherd, B. (2000). A war of nerves: Soldiers and psychiatrists in the twentieth century. Harvard University Press. Sims-Schouten, W. (2021). Safeguarding and mental health support in contemporary childhood: How the deserving/undeserving paradigm from the past overshadows the present. Routledge. Snyder, S. L., & Mitchell, D. T. (2005). Cultural locations of disability. Chicago University Press. Snyder, S. L., & Mitchell, D. T. (2006). Cultural locations of disability. Chicago University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Psychological Disability, Word Use and Identity: Language in Ex-Servicemen’s Letters to the Ministry of Pensions

Abstract Letters from war pension records are used to examine what the language reveals about ex-servicemen’s psychological disabilities during World War I. A random selection of 200 extracts of letters by disabled exservicemen suffering from neurasthenia is used to investigate the psychological impact of disability. These letters have been extensively studied by historians and clinicians who have been interested in their historical value in providing evidence of masculinity during World War I and also clinical data relating to psychological and physical disability. Although the linguistic value of letters has been appreciated by many scholars, up to date, no studies have been done that particularly look at this data set using letters by ex-servicemen to the Ministry of Pensions. This study attempts to fill this research gap by examining a sample of letters in order to investigate how language is used to describe psychological disabilities. The data will be analysed using LIWC (Pennebaker Conglomerate, Linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC), 2015). (Pennebaker et al. in Annual Review of Psychology 54:547–577, 2003) have found that personal pronouns, emotion words and words do to with cognitive processes are an important measure of psychiatric conditions. Therefore, this study examined the use of personal pronouns, positive and negative emotion words, cognitive processes and social and health-related words. The findings indicate that the language used by veterans is symptomatic of underlying

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Herat, Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87889-4_6

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psychological conditions and provide an insight into how the trauma of war has impacted on their current physical and mental condition. Keywords Psychological disability · Identity · World War I · Pension files · LIWC

1

Introduction

During World War I, although the majority of ex-servicemen survived their war experience, many bore its scars both physically and mentally in the form of bodily injuries and psychological damage. By 1929, 1,600,000 men had been awarded disability pensions (Mitchell & Smith, 1931: 21) and of these 71,483 (27% of those who served in the British military) were for psychological disabilities either attributable or aggravated by the war (Mitchell & Smith, 1931: 21). As Meyer (2011: 99) notes, nowhere can the conflicts about disability be more clearly seen than in the records of the Ministry of Pensions. The Ministry was established in 1917 to coordinate the “diagnosis and treatment of war disabilities as well as administering the assessment of payments and gratuities of pensions” (Meyer, 2011: 99). Their sole purpose was to coordinate the medical treatment and economic integration of men discharged from war service due to disability. Ex-servicemen’s disabilities were “assessed with sole reference to the effect of war service on the condition” (Barham, 2004: 64–66; Shepherd, 2000: 111). Pension awards were granted to those who had either incurred disability during their war service or to those who could prove that an existing disability was aggravated by their service in the war. The disabilities were assessed according to percentage ranges: 1– 5% for a minor, temporary disability through to 100% for permanent, total disability (Meyer, 2011: 100). As the Ministry of Pensions was responsible for assessing disabilities, the pension records provide a rich source of data in the form of letters by ex-servicemen to the Ministry of Pensions describing their disabilities. The chapter queries what the language of the letters reveals about the writers’ mental health and their struggles to reintegrate into society in relation to their responses to the Ministry of Pensions. The PIN 26 files, which are held at the National Archives, are letters and medical records

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of ex-servicemen’s appeals to the Ministry of Pensions during the aftermath of the war. Among the disabled, Meyer (2011: 98) notes that “no one was more isolated than those suffering psychological disabilities”. She further notes that during the aftermath of the war, the situation was not very clear for those suffering from any of the “numerous symptoms associated with the condition known as shell shock”. As Cohen (2001) observes, reintegration into society was particularly challenging for exservicemen with mental problems and those with physical deformities, because they were frequently isolated from their family and loved ones. She notes that the British Government failed to adequately retrain disable people to become active members of their community; therefore, they had to rely on a network of voluntary organisations providing treatment and shelter, and that by doing this, the British Government put disabled ex-servicemen in the stigmatising position of being recipients of charity (see also Meyer, 2011: 98). In their letters to the Ministry of Pensions, they detail their mental and physical disabilities and challenge their treatment by the Ministry of Pensions. Meyer writes that “many letters are incoherent, angry or simply badly written” (2011: 99). The letters from the PIN26 files have been extensively studied by historians and clinicians, so this chapter shifts the focus to a more linguistic perspective by investigating how word use reflects psychological breakdown. The language used by ex-servicemen is used to investigate their struggles with mental health, which has implications for understanding word use by those who have experienced trauma. Ex-servicemen’s declarations about the disabilities they have suffered are crucial for purposes of self-identification, and as Meyer’s research highlights “a necessary part of their application or appeal process” (2011: 104). The chapter is organised as follows: in the next section, the theoretical underpinnings to language use in traumatic situations are examined. This is followed by a discussion of the data and methodology in Sect. 3. Section 4 focuses on the analysis of the data examining language use in the PIN26 files; the final section concludes the study.

2 Background to Mental Illness During World War I According to Jones and Wessely (2005a: 150), in December 1918, the number of veterans receiving disability pensions was estimated to be 521,697, of which 32,091 (6.3%) were for neurasthenia and other forms

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of war neuroses. They state (2005a: 150) that in 1920, the Southborough committee was founded to deal with the pressing issue of pension eligibility. In their report, they concluded that shell shock or neurasthenia had a particular appeal to servicemen. The general sentiment of the public during the war [was]… that every man apparently physically capable should be sent to the Front, but at the same time there was much solicitude as the incapacitated, and, such was the appeal of the term ‘shell shock’ that this class of case excited more general interest, attention, and sympathy than any other, so much so that it became a most desirable complaint from which to suffer (Southborough, 1922: 6 cited from Jones & Wessely, 2005a: 150–151).

As Jones and Wessely (2005a: 151) observe, shell shock elicited widespread sympathy among the public, making it impossible for the Ministry of Pensions to deny demands for financial compensation. This was because “patients suffered from a range of unexplained symptoms and disabilities” (Jones & Wessely, 2005a: 23). Typically, those suffering from shell shock and neurasthenia, according to Jones and Wessely (2005a: 23) complained of “fatigue, poor sleep, nightmares, jumpiness, and had a variety of somatic symptoms such as palpitations, chest pain, tremor, joint and muscle pains, loss of voice or hearing and functional paralysis”. In a breakdown of pension awards by diagnosis for neurasthenia, shell shock, anxiety neurosis and nervous debility, Jones et al. (2002: 376) observe that they account for 4.2% as a single diagnosis and 5.7% as a multiple diagnosis, respectively, in contrast to the official figure of 7.5%. 2.1

Theories of Word Use During Traumatic Situations

Those fighting in World War I were affected by unprecedented psychological trauma that was manifested long after the war through various forms of mental breakdown. Jones and Wessely (2005b) note that war affects society. Wastell writes that “witnessing such horror, let alone being personally threatened by it, would leave a psychological mark on any healthy person. Such was the psychological impact on civilian and military personnel involved that, for the first time, there was recognition that many ‘casualties’—while not physically injured—were nevertheless incapacitated” (2005: 9–10). The trauma that soldiers suffered during the war is revealed through their letters to the Ministry of Pensions through

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the language they use to convince the authorities that their disabilities are a result of their service in the war or was aggravated because of it. This means that it is possible that on occasion, symptoms were exaggerated for showing the severity of the condition. Meyer’s research (2011: 105) confirms that one of the tactics used by ex-servicemen was to make the state responsible for the disabled by attributing disability to war service. Unlike physical disabilities, for example, the loss of a limb, presenting evidence of psychological disabilities presents much more difficulty, because the symptoms are ambiguous and not visible to others. In the context of trauma, Pennebaker et al. (2003) have shown that people’s use of words can reveal their unconscious mental, social and physical condition. They state that language is the most common and reliable technique for communicating internal thoughts and emotions to others. This study showed that the use of words can subtly change in situations where people are collectively experiencing a traumatic or personal situation (Gortner & Pennebaker 2003; Pennebaker & Lay, 2002; Pennebaker et al., 2003; Stone & Pennebaker, 2002). Pennebaker et al. (2003) suggests that there is a positive correlation between an individual’s use of personal pronouns and their mental state. They found that people with mental health problems tended to use more first-person singular pronouns. Pennebaker et al. (2003) show how language users make subtle changes to the words they use depending on the environment and social situation. This is confirmed, for example, by Boals and Klein (2005) who also found that distress has a significant impact on language use. In one study, they examined people’s use of language after the breakup of a relationship and found that there was a significant difference in word use depending on how distressing the ending of the relationship had been (Boals & Klein, 2005). They conclude that how people perceive a situation has an impact on the type of word use. They also found that those who were heavily distressed tended to use more firstperson pronouns, affective and cognitive words. Boals and Perez (2009: 1320–1321), on the other hand, analysed interviews conducted with 20 holocaust survivors and compared how they talked about events related to traumatic events (the holocaust) as opposed to non-traumatic events, (non-holocaust related) to see whether there were differences in the use of first-person singular pronouns, use of emotion words and cognitive process words. Unlike Pennebaker et al.’s (2003) study, they found that people used more first-person plural words rather than first-person singular words when talking about holocaust related events compared to

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non-holocaust related events. They attribute this to experiencing the traumatic event collectively rather than on their own (Boals & Perez, 2009). The use of cognitive words was seen as reflecting a coping strategy, as well as being an indicator of “non-avoidant behaviour related to the traumatic experience.” Typically, past research has found that when discussing a traumatic event, there will be a higher incidence of first-person singular words, more negative emotion words and words to do with cognitive processes (Boals & Klein, 2005; Pennebaker & Lay, 2002). These studies provide evidence of how word use greatly depends on the subject matter and the temporality of the event, as well as the circumstance of the traumatic situation. Anderson et al. (1985) see illnesses such as depression and anxiety as being causally implicated in a large number of minor and major health problems. These studies suggest that the words people use to describe their disabilities can reflect how they think about and organise their experiences.

3

Data, Framework and Method 3.1

The Data

The data for the study was collected from the National Archives in Kew. Two trips were made to the National Archives over several days with my former student, Emma Campbell to go through the PIN26 folders relating particularly to mental disorder. The PIN26 files contain 22,756 records; in order to determine which files to examine, the database of war pension records at the National Archives Discovery Catalogue was used and I examined each of these records in the catalogue one by one in order to build a picture of the different descriptions of psychological and physical disability. I made a note of the folders that I wanted to look at and did a bulk order in advance of my visits. The records from the PIN26 files consist of various military documents including letters and medical records, sometimes over several years. Most ex-servicemen’s records at the National Archives contain a description of their mental and/or physical disabilities, however, there are some records, which have ‘no disability stated’, whereas in other cases, the nature of the disability is described as ‘lost with ship’ (PIN26/20778). Not all folders contained the same number of letters and some letters do not specifically refer to disabilities but are straightforward enquiries regarding an application. 657 documents including letters and medical records from the PIN26 files

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were collected from the National Archives in Kew by photographing the letters written by ex-servicemen, medical professionals and officials from the Ministry of Pensions. These documents were then transcribed into word and converted in to plain text format using UNICODE UTF8. Of these documents, 200 letters written by ex-servicemen to the Ministry of Pensions were selected from 52 folders excluding all letters that were duplicates, not relevant or written by someone else. In all, I have used between 1–5 letters from each folder spanning the years 1917–1944. The total corpus of letters includes 33,537 words. Ethical clearance to use the data was obtained from the university ethics committee. In order to maintain the anonymity and confidentiality of the letter writers, all names have been removed. 3.2

Data Analysis

Two types of corpus software were used to analyse the data. The first method used to analyse the letters is the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count programme (Pennebaker Conglomerates, 2015). It “reads a given text and counts the percentage of words that reflect different emotions, thinking styles, social concerns and even parts of speech. Because LIWC was developed by researchers with interests in social, clinical, health and cognitive psychology, the language categories were created to capture people’s social and psychological states.” Resnik et al. (2013) who use LIWC to analyse neuroticism in their paper notes that, “Neuroticism is of particular interest as a personality measure because higher scores on neuroticism scales are consistent with increased distress and more difficulty coping; individuals with high levels of neuroticism may also be at higher risk of psychiatric problems categorized as Axis I in the DSM-IV (APA, 2000), including the internalizing disorders (depression, anxiety).” The second type of software used was WMatrix (Rayson, 2009). This was used to examine key domains in the data in comparison with written data from the BNC. A screen shot of the key domain cloud is given in Fig. 1. The specific research questions that were investigated are: (1) What words are used to convey the psychological struggles? (2) What does the language reveal about psychiatric breakdown in the letters? In order to answer these research questions, the analysis focused on the use of personal pronouns, positive and negative emotion words, cognitive processes and health and social words.

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The letters and other documents held in the PIN26 files document the struggles both medical and financial and involved feelings of injustice and stigma (Meyer, 2011: 99). The pensioners examined in the chapter, “suffered various forms of disability ranging from complete lack of mobility to complete mental collapse” (Meyer, 2011: 99). In the previous studies discussed, the perception of an event is shown to alter biological and communication functions. It is then logical to assume that the trauma of war could have had a significant impact on ex-servicemen. Thus, it is possible to infer that writing about conditions relating to the war will trigger emotions. The present study therefore examines what ex-servicemen’s letters to the Ministry of Pensions reveal about their disabilities through the words they use. It is hypothesised that exservicemen will use more first-person singulars and references to the self (Newman et al., 2008; Pennebaker et al., 2003) that show their identity. Secondly, it is hypothesised that more negative emotion words and healthrelated words will be used when describing their present condition as a result of highlighting their disabilities as attributable or aggravated due to the war. In order to examine whether mental outcomes are evident through linguistic characteristics, written characteristics in the letters such as the use of personal pronouns, the ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions, health-related words and cognitive process words (such as words to do with insight and causation) were examined.

4

Results

The summary of the results of the LIWCcategories is given in Table 1. Table 1 illustrates that in terms of words use, there is a high use of first-person pronouns (3.70%), cognitive processes (3.54%) and healthrelated words (1.60%). The number of health-related words outnumbers words of affect (1.23%); there are also more negative emotion words (0.94%) than positive emotion words (0.29%). Social words have the lowest percentage score (0.13%), suggesting that there is less interest in social words in this type of correspondence. The summary variables demonstrate a very high score for authenticity (86%), followed by analytic (41.50%). The high score for clout suggests that ex-servicemen are confident in their demands and believe that they should be financially compensated for their service in the war. There are no tentative words in the letters and the high score for clout correlates with the high score for cognitive processes. In addition, the score

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is also high for authenticity. Pennebaker found that there is a strong link between first-person pronoun use and authenticity. The analysis also demonstrates the density of the letters with 30.01 words being used per sentence. Of these, 20.07 were six-letter words. Table 1 Percentages for selected LIWC categories

LIWC

Score

I/me words Health-related words Social words Positive emotions Negative emotions Cognitive processes Summary variables Analytic Clout Authenticity Words per sentence Six letter words

3.70 1.60 0.13 0.29 0.94 3.54 % 41.50 52.34 86.75 30.01 20.07

Fig. 1 Key domain cloud

4.1

Keywords

The most immediate finding to emerge from the key domain cloud is that the top 100 words in the letters include words to do with disease, damage, destruction, inability, unintelligence, medical treatment, health and disease, cause and effect and money/pay, which are statistically significant at the p < 0.01 (LL 6.63) level. Semantically, the words give an insight into

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the states of mind of the writers and the results show that more negative emotion words were used in the letters than positive emotion words. These results are consistent with Newman et al. (2008) and Pennebaker et al.’s (2003) findings that demonstrate that word use is indicative of underlying psychological processes. This is evident from examples 1–3 given below: 1. I wanted to tell the utter failure, and the difficulty I have had in trying to surmount the many obstacles my disability caused me, but somehow, I just could not. (PIN26/6591) 2. I had to give up my medical practice when I lost my memory and I found I was quite unable to find any work owing to having been in a mental asylum. (PIN26/21764) 3. I was compelled to give up my Business in London and come down to the country for the Benefit of my health, my Nervous System being shattered (PIN26/21655). The total number of positive emotion words in the corpus was 0.29% compared to negative emotions which consisted of 0.94%. The positive emotion words used in the data included words such as confidence, rest, satisfaction, lived with, preferred, going for, like, appreciate, cheerful, gratefully, appreciative, happier, peace, gratification, appreciation, happy. Although these words have positive connotations, a closer analysis of the concordance lines revealed that they were mostly used in a negative context in the letters, as in the following concordance lines: 4. make this very unhappy life more cheerful. Forgive my mentioning the matter from the point of view of enjoyment and earning capacity (PIN26/21728). 5. very ill man with hardly enough confidence to help myself let alone manage (PIN26/21728). Only a few words were used to actually express positive emotions: 6. I have the comforts of children and am happy when I am with them (PIN26/21728).

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As evident from the concordance lines presented in examples 7–9, these words come from one writer and even the positive emotion words take on a negative connotation in this ex-serviceman’s letters. However, at the same time, the writing also displays instances of positivity, such as when he talks about being with his children. This confirms Bolt’s (2015) theory that despite the tendency to equate disability with unhappiness, that disabled people have moments of happiness. So, although the positive emotion words are few, it captures brief moments of contentment. In contrast, the negative emotion words (see Table 2) illustrate that depression/depressed, suffered/suffering, distressed, shock/shocked and worry/worried are among the most frequently used words in the letters, which amplify ex-servicemen’s self-focus on their own problems which is further seen through the correlation between negative emotion words and the use of first-person pronouns similar to Newman et al.’s (2008) findings. Table 2 Negative emotion words

Negative emotions

Raw frequency

Depression/depressed Suffered/suffering/suffer Distressed Shock/shocked Worry/Worries/worried Anxious Trouble/troubles Anxiety Upset Regret Unhappy Care Violent Malicious Outbursts Burst into tears Do nothing for Frightened Fears Phobias Irritability Dazed Quarrel

70 55 45 42 26 24 10 09 08 08 05 03 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01

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Fig. 2 The percentages of positive and negative emotion words in the data

Figure 2, shows the percentages of positive and negative emotion words and demonstrates that negative emotion words are more prevalent in the letters compared to positive emotion words. As mentioned previously, the negative emotion words belong to the semantic categories of disease, damage, destruction, inability, health. Some examples from the text are given below: 7. When called upon by my employers for an explanation for my absences from duty, I never urged that my war service was responsible, because I did not wish it to be known in the district that I suffered a mental disability (PIN26/21580). 8. Previous to the war I was considered one of the brightest apprentices in the employ of my firm. I passed numerous examinations in Mathematics, Mechanics etc. I was the headboy at school and a good debater… Now I have lost confidence and in spite of my anxiety to get on I cannot keep a job requiring any brain effort (PIN26/21766) 9. I was hoping that my last Medical Board (Sept 15th) would result in my pension being made permanent, I cannot express the mental strain that causes me; whence I cannot sleep and depressed it becomes an obsession, perhaps I am silly (PIN26/21728).

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The high frequency of the negative emotion words demonstrates how the trauma of war has affected the current psychological conditions of exservicemen. This is made more poignant by the large number of words that relate to a semantic field of shock, anxiety and worry. It is significant that the negative emotions show the hopelessness of their predicament and exemplify the resignation they feel towards their current condition. As Newman et al. (2008) have shown, emotional self-expression is a good measure of psychological wellbeing. Although as mentioned before, the letters are ‘angry’, surprisingly, there are no words of anger or bitterness. The negative emotion words showcase the identity of ex-servicemen as different from the brave, heroic soldier, with words such as ‘burst into tears’, ‘distressed’ and so on, which paint a picture of personal trauma. In terms of word choice, as mentioned before, individuals who have experienced a traumatic event (Boals & Perez, 2009; Pennebaker et al., 2003) have been shown to use more negative emotion words. One of the limitations of using word counts is that not all the negative emotion words refer to the feelings of ex-servicemen, for example, the word ‘frightened’ in example 10 is used to talk about a third person rather than a reference to self. 10. My wife was at the time of our marriage only 19, and I must confess that she was at times, frightened, although I must emphasise, I never lifted a hand…her fears being based on my periodical outbursts of temper and morbid fits of depression which overcame me, to say nothing of the insomnia to which I was a martyr (PIN26/21728). The letters also give an indication of the personality traits of the writers with the use of words such as foolishly, kindly, silly, considerate, reasonable, grateful and introspective.

5

The Use of Personal Pronouns

The use of personal pronouns used by ex-servicemen shows that the highest number of personal pronouns are first-person pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘my’ and ‘me’ (see Fig. 3). Although other pronouns such as second person and third-person pronouns are used, these are considerably less compared to the use of first-person pronouns. The preoccupation with

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Fig. 3 Personal pronoun use in the data

first-person pronouns has been shown to be indicative of both depression and mental trauma; Pennebaker and King (1999), Pennebaker and Lay (2002), Pennebaker et al. (2003), Rime (2007, 2009) found that people suffering with depression are more likely to use more first-person singular pronouns and Bucci and Freedman (1981) interpreted the high use of first-person singular pronouns to be related to difficulties in making connections. The writers’ concern with first-person pronouns as opposed to other personal pronouns also indicates the authenticity of the texts, as Tausczik and Pennebaker (2010) note that the first-person pronouns are an indicator of honesty, and this is reflected in the results. 5.1

Cognitive Processes

The category for cognitive processes includes words to do with causation (e.g. because, effect, hence) and insight words (e.g. think, know, consider). According to Tausczik and Pennebaker (2010), using these type of cognitive process words to describe past events can suggest a ‘reappraisal’ of an event. In relation to the use of words for cognitive processes, the results show that more insight words were frequent (relative frequency 0.81%) compared to words of causation (relative frequency 0.50%). This difference is statistically significant at p > 0.01 (X2 =

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50.46184 ***Corpus Frequency Wizard). The words of insight include words such as think, know, understand, surmise, consider, aware, knew, impression. A possible explanation for this phenomenon could be because the writers are actively constructing and finding explanations for events that they have experienced. The high use of cognitive process words (3.54%) in the letters corroborates Boals and Perez’s (2009) idea of cognitive orientation as a coping mechanism, which involves analysing and evaluating the situation in addition to describing their disabilities and emotions. The high use of words for cognitive processes also correlate with the use of the first-person singular pronoun I and is statistically significant at p < 0.01. Examples 10–11 illustrate the active processing of the cognitive words know and understand. 11. I find I cannot express the handicap on my lips even though I know it to be in my own interest (PIN26/21728) 12. On account of these papers being missing I can readily understand being taken off the pension list (PIN26/21188). 5.2

Social and Health-Related Words

The number of health-related words (1.60%) in the corpora exceed the number of words related to affect (1.23%). Ex-servicemen’s proclivity to use a high incidence of health-related words may have been triggered by the motive for which the letters were written i.e. to convince the Ministry of Pensions of the disabilities suffered as a result of service in the war. The high incidence of health-related words identifies the writers as being debilitated from their experience of war. As previously mentioned, the high number of words may reflect the desire to impress upon the Ministry of Pensions the affect that service in the war has had on their post-war lives. As financial compensation in the case of psychological disabilities was granted on the basis of whether a disability was attributable to war service or a pre-existing disability was aggravated because if it, the writers have to use the written word to negotiate their identities through talking about how their lives have been affected. The words used in Table 3 suggest that the war is attributable not only to mental scars but also to aspects of physical impairment. As evident from the following concordance lines, the word ‘health’ strongly collocates with the first-person

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Table 3 Health-related words in the data

Health-related words

Raw frequency

Health Unfit Insomnia Illness Concussion Symptoms Ill Disablement Wheezing Ailments Recover Injuries Handicap Fits Paralysis Injury Headache Disease Mental disability Cold Bronchitis Convalescent Sunstroke

74 66 58 55 10 27 43 59 43 44 31 55 52 30 20 11 12 45 15 02 04 10 1

pronoun ‘my’ and negative words such as shattered, strain, condition, serious, poorly, declining. 13. For the Benefit of my health, my nervous system being shattered (PIN26/21655) 14. My health would not stand the strain (PIN26/21555) 15. The serious problems in my health (PIN26/21728) 16. If I was at present in good or improving health I could perhaps appreciate the position(PIN26/21285). The health words in Table 3 provide an abundance of evidence that the traumatic experiences of war have led to different types of psychological and physical disabilities including but not limited to disablement, handicap, paralysis and mental disability. There is also reference to frequent everyday illnesses such as headache and cold and more severe conditions

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such as bronchitis. By looking at the health-related words, it is easy to understand how health issues could exacerbate emotions of distress as seen in Table 2. It is clear from the results that the writers associate their service in the war as having adverse consequences on their health leading to handicap and disablement. By attributing their disabilities to war service, they are also foregrounding their identity as soldiers (Meyer, 2011: 105). The results support Anderson et al.’s (1985) finding that elevated levels of anxiety, depression etc., are causally linked to a wide range of both minor and more serious health issues. In comparison with other categories of words, social words used by ex-servicemen in the letters were disproportionate (0.13%). Generally, these relate to words pertaining to family; wives and children. Usually, wives and children are mentioned when ex-servicemen feel aggrieved about not being able to take care of their families. This fits Meyer’s (2011: 105) theory that loss of masculinity in the domestic sphere was one of the main reasons why some ex-servicemen were reluctant to reveal their disabilities to the Ministry of Pensions.

6

Conclusion

The purpose of this analysis was to examine the following research questions: (1) What words are used to convey the psychological struggles? (2) What does the language reveal about psychiatric breakdown in the letters? The results indicate that the language used in correspondence by war veterans to describe how their domestic and professional lives have been affected by service in the war is related to mental health, which suggests that word use is an effective measure for exploring psychological distress. In addition, the results from the analysis also extend knowledge on word use by individuals who have experienced trauma. The results suggest that, word use in correspondence relating to a traumatic event such as World War I, can be indicative of how much psychological distress individuals are experiencing. The first hypothesis that there will be more first-person singular pronouns and references to self was supported. These results corroborated previous research of high incidences of pronoun use in traumatic situations (Boals & Perez, 2009; Pennebaker et al., 2003). Past research has shown that coping mechanisms can be indicated through the use of cognitive process words and this is also confirmed through this study. Previous studies have suggested that how words are used can change depending on the type of trauma experienced and whether it was

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experienced collectively or alone. Given that ex-servicemen were writing to the Ministry of Pensions about their personal trauma in anticipation of gaining financial compensation, unlike previous studies e.g. Boals & Perez, 2009), there is no indication of the trauma being experienced collectively and, as a result, there is a preoccupation with the self and more first-person singular pronouns rather than first-person plural pronouns are used. Since, letter writing can be considered a reflective mental process, given the circumstances of the correspondence, the high use of cognitive process words and affective words is logical for the purpose of expressing identity. Likewise, the limited use of social words and references to others apart from a few words for members of their families is indicative of an attempt at self-reliance. The high incidence of health-related words is also consistent with previous studies which suggest that affective disabilities can increase distress and unhappiness. The strong tendency to use certain types of words in the letters indicate ex-servicemen’s preferred method of processing their experiences in the war and constructing their identity as soldiers. The results from this study show that psychological conditions can impact on word use. Future work can focus on letters written by individual ex-servicemen to interrogate how specific conditions can affect word use in traumatic situations and to demonstrate how the use of various linguistic categories is related to self-awareness and recognition of the goal of communication. Future work could also look closely at moments of happiness expressed in letters by disabled individuals. Acknowledgements I would like to express my grateful thanks to Liverpool Hope University for funding the visits to the National Archives in Kew and to Emma Campbell for an excellent job of photographing the letters.

References Anderson, K. O., Bradley, L. A., Young, L. D., McDaniel, L. K., & Wise, C. M. (1985). Rheumatoid arthritis: Review of psychological factors related to etiology, effects, and treatment. Psychological Bulletin, 98, 358–387. American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Text revision. APA. Barham, P. (2004). Forgotten lunatics of the Great War. Yale University Press. Boals, A., & Kline, K. (2005). Word use in emotional narratives about failed romantic relationships and subsequent mental health. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 24, 252–268.

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Boals, A., & Perez, A. S. (2009). Language use predicts phenomenological properties of holocaust memories and health. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23, 1318–1332. Bolt, D. (2015). Not forgetting happiness: The tripartite model of disability and its application in literary criticism. Disability and Society, 30(7), 1103–1117. Bucci, W., & Freedman, N. (1981). The language of depression. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 45, 334–358. Cohen, D. (2001). The war come home: Disabled veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939. The University of California Press. Gortner, E. M., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2003). The archival anatomy of a disaster: Media coverage and community-wide health effects of the Texas A & M bonfire tragedy. Social and Clinical Psychology, 22, 580–603. Jones, E., Palmer, I., & Wessely, S. (2002). War Pensions (1917–1945): Changing models of psychological understanding. British Journal of Psychiatry, 180, 374–379. Jones, E., & Wessely, S. (2005a). War syndromes: The impact of culture on medically unexplained symptoms. Medical History, 49(1): 55–78. https:// doi.org/10.1017/s0025727300008280 Jones, E., & Wessely, S. (2005b). Shell shock to PTSD: Military psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War. Psychology Press. Jones, E., & Wessely, S. (2014). Battle for the mind: World War I and the birth of military psychiatry. The Lancet, 384(9955), 1708–1714. Kircher, T., & David, A. S. (2003). The self in neuroscience and psychiatry. Cambridge University Press. Meyer, J. (2011). Men of war: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. Mitchell, T. J., & Smith, G. M. (1931). Medical services: Casualties and medical statistics of the Great War. History of the Great War, Based on Official Documents. HMSO. Newman, M. L., Groom, C. J., Handelman, L. D., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2008). Gender in language use: An analysis of 14,000 text samples. Discourse Processes, 45, 211–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/01638530802073712 Pennebaker, J. W., & King, L. A. (1999). Linguistic styles: Use as an individual difference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1296–1312. Pennebaker, J. W., & Lay, T. C. (2002). Language use and personality during crises: Analyses of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s press conferences. Journal of Research in Personality, 36, 271–282. Pennebaker, J. W., Mehl, M. R., & Niederhoffer, K. G. (2003). Psychological aspects of natural language use: Our words, our selves. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 547–577. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101 601.145041

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Pennebaker Conglomerates Inc. (2015). Linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC). Available from: http://liwc.wpengine.com/ Rayson, P. (2009). Wmatrix: A web-based corpus processing environment. Computing Department, Lancaster University. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wma trix/ Resnik, P., Garron, A., & Resnik, R. (2013, 18–21 October). Using topic modelling to improve prediction of neuroticism and depression in college students. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 1348–1353). Seattle, Washington, DC. Association for Computational Linguistics. Rime, B. (2007). The social sharing of emotion as an interface between individual and collective processes in the construction of emotional climates. Journal of Social Issues, 63(2), 307–322. Rime, B. (2009). Emotion elicits the social sharing of emotion: Theory and empirical review. Emotion Review, 1–89. Rude, S. S., Gortner, E.-M., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2004). Language use of depressed and depression-vulnerable college students. Cognition and Emotion, 18, 1121–1133. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930441000030 Shepherd, B. (2000). Awar of nerves: Soldiers and psychiatrists 1914–1994. Jonathan Cape. Stone, L. D., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2002). Trauma in real time: Talking and avoiding online conversations about the death of Princess Diana. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 24, 172–182. Tausczik, Y. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2010). The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29, 24–54. Wastell, C. (2005). Understanding trauma and emotion: Dealing with trauma using an emotion-focused approach. Allen and Unwin.

CHAPTER 7

Keywords in the DSM Manuals: An Analysis of Psychological Disorders of Warfare

Abstract This chapter sets out to analyse some mental health keywords of warfare in the DSM manuals published between 1952 and 2013 from a diachronic perspective. The chapter examines the cultural shifts in mental health labels and demonstrates that cultural and political reasons lead to the change in certain terms. By using corpus linguistics to analyse statistical keywords, four of the DSM manuals are explored (excluding DSM-IV) in order to see how cultural and political changes have influenced the statistical keywords in the manuals. Three statistically significant words are chosen for further analysis in order to see what changes have taken place and why. Keywords Mental health labels · Diagnostic labels · Statistical keywords · DSM manuals · World War I · Vietnam War · World War II · Gulf War

1

Introduction

The aim of the chapter is to examine how diagnostic labels used during World War I have been used in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) I-V and to examine what has led to the changes that have taken place in the labelling of psychological disabilities since © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Herat, Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87889-4_7

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World War I. The diagnostic labels used in the DSM manuals are not necessarily related to World War I but the primary task of this chapter is to examine some key terms that are used to label psychological illnesses in the diagnostic manuals and to investigate how those same illnesses were described during World War I and to explore how the terminology has changed and why. The terms discussed in this section were first recognised in other words during World War I in Britain but not necessarily used in the US. The reason that the DSM manuals are examined is because they now set the standard around the world for diagnosing mental illness. The DSM manuals describe a mental disorder as follows: [A mental disorder] is conceptualised as a clinically significant behavioural or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress or disability. In addition, this syndrome or pattern must not be merely an expectable and culturally sanctioned response to a particular event, for example, the death of a loved one. Whatever its original cause, it must currently be considered a manifestation of a behavioral, psychological or biological dysfunction in the individual. (DSM-III-R and DSM-IV, xxi–xxii)

The data is the DSM manuals I–5. The DSM manuals were compiled in to a corpus and then keywords in the manuals were analysed using AntConc (Anthony, 2009). Baker (2010: 26) identifies key words as “words which occur statistically more frequently in one corpus than in a second corpus”. He sees keywords as useful ‘signposts’ in identifying the “lexical focus or preoccupation of a corpus (for specific text)” and notes that they can be useful in spotting “important sites of linguistic variation and change” (2010: 26). Similarly, McEneryet al. (2012: 5) state that “keywords can show changes over time where texts from two different periods are compared with one another.” According to Ben Shepherd (2000: 364), “all naming systems embody the values and experiences of their time.” With this in mind, the chapter examines the following research questions: 1. What new terms are used in the DSM manuals to label psychological disabilities identified during World War I? 2. Why have the changes in labelling taken place?

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The chapter is organised as follows: Section 2 is a discussion of the background and political context relating to how mental health conditions were labelled during different wars. This will be followed by a discussion of the data used and the methodology for analysing keywords in Sect. 3. Section 4 presents the results of the study and a discussion of the ‘keywords’ in the DSM manuals. Section 5 will conclude the study.

2

The Background and Political Context to War-Related Mental Health Words 2.1

World War I

Psychological disabilities first came to the forefront during World War I because of the sheer scale of servicemen with mental health problems; however, they had long been recognised in previous wars. According to Jones and Wessely (2005: 23), during World War I, soldiers traumatised by combat presented with various psychological problems which were barely understood by medical professionals. They note that many new labels were created for disorders that were seen as well established. For instance, the term ‘shell shock’, which was first used in 1915 in a medical journal, was not in itself a new concept, and early on it was understood in relation to hysteria and other nervous conditions (Jones & Wessely, 2005) are said to have caught ‘the popular imagination’ (Jones & Wessely, 2005, 2014; Leese, 2002) and became a metaphor for the suffering of soldiers during World War I. “Shell shock, battle fatigue, war stress and other diagnoses” (Lindee, 2020: 76) are seen by Lindee as “forms of male weakness” rejected by the British government. By 1916, the term that people were using was combat stress reaction, whereas war neuroses were recognised first as ‘irritable heart’ which later came to be known as ‘disordered action of the heart’ and ‘gas hysteria’. In 1917, the nomenclature shifts to ‘neurasthenia’ which according to Leese (2002: 123) “signified an attempt to downgrade wartime traumatic neurosis and its post-combat consequences”. In Britain, shell shock thus came to be associated with men’s character that was holding the country back. In order to avoid what was seen as the ‘shell shock problem’ in Britain, the US sent a reserve army doctor, Major Thomas Salmon to Europe in May 1917, to gain knowledge of British and French methods of dealing with war neuroses (Jones & Wessely, 2005). His report which was published in Mental Hygiene (October 1917) highlighted organisational

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and treatment guidelines for the American Expeditionary Forces. Jones and Wessely (2005: 32) remark that in contrast to the British, “Americans attempted to address the issue of shell shock with a range of clinical interventions”. During this period, servicemen suffering from mental health issues were considered to be ‘psychoneurotic’. 2.2

World War II

Jones and Wessely (2005: 87) remark that during World War II, planners wrongly assumed that screening programmes at enlistment would identify any recruits with psychological problems. Drayer and Glass (1973 cited in Jones & Wessely, 2005: 86–87) claim that a US Army Captain, Frederick Hanson is reported to have returned 70% of 494 psychiatric war veterans to combat duty after 48 hours in the North African war. In the last phase, 50% of psychiatric patients were seen as being returned to combat. During this period, the shell shock diagnosis had changed, and those suffering psychological problems from combat were seen as having either ‘combat fatigue’ or ‘battle exhaustion’. In 1943, a directive issued by General Omar Bradley allowed war veterans suffering from psychological disability a holding period of seven days and further prescribed the use of the word ‘exhaustion’ as an initial diagnosis for all psychiatric disability from combat (Jones & Wessely, 2005). Investigations into ‘combat exhaustion’ in France in 1945 found that over 40% cases with psychological problems were returned to duty. Jones and Wessely (2005: 87) observe that returning men to duty was a denial of their mental state and that this was an attempt to disguise reality because of morale among the troops. They say that “contemporary accounts provide little evidence that the primary motivation was therapeutic.” The idea of researchers was to assist veterans to overcome ‘exhaustion’ rather than ‘uncovering’ it by referral to hospital. In 1943, a memorandum was issued by General George Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff detailing the shortcomings of neuropsychiatrists for failing to understand the psychological effects of a nation at war. The appointment of William Meninger was important in efforts to find effective treatment for those suffering from psychological disability. As Shephard (2000) notes, Meninger commissioned a documentary film, Let There be Light, from John Houston to show the suffering of war veterans with ‘battle exhaustion’ and what was being done to bring them back to their normal condition.

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The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War is seen as playing a crucial role, even if sometimes misunderstood, in “altering popular ideas about war and psychological trauma” (Jones & Wessely, 2005: 128). Shepherd (2000) writes that the issue of post-Vietnam first made it to the public conscience in 1961, after a veteran who had received honours in the war was killed while robbing a liquor store. The Vietnam War is the longest conflict in the history of the US, and Jones and Wessely (2005: 128) state that the war can be divided into three phases in relation to military psychiatry: the first phase with almost no psychological casualties, the second with low psychiatric problems and the third with psychiatric problems other than the traditional forms. Jones (2005: 129) writes that the ‘most spectacular was the low rate of identified psychiatric casualties’ during the war which was seen as a success story and that this view changed dramatically from 1968 to the mid-1970s. Shepherd (2000) identifies the use of drugs such as marijuana (at first) and then heroin as being one of the reasons for the low number of psychiatric casualties during the Vietnam War. During this period, small scale studies were carried out on war veterans who blamed their symptoms and difficulties with reintegrating into society on their war experience. This eventually led to questioning the idea that Vietnam was indeed a psychiatric success. Recognising the mental cost of war on returning veterans, anti-war campaigners lobbied for the end of the war. The disorders arising from the Vietnam War were initially referred to as ‘post-Vietnam syndrome’ and thought to have been caused by ‘delayed massive trauma’. Jones and Wessely (2005: 130) note that anti-war campaigners, aware that the American Psychiatric Association was compiling a new edition of the DSM manual, presented their final report, which was evidence based, for the classification of the syndrome under the section on anxiety disorders, although as Young (1995) notes, their suggested term ‘combat stress reaction’ was not seen as favourable. Shepherd (2000) notes that the labelling system that psychiatrists were using during World War II was based on mental conditions experienced in hospitals and did not correspond to the actual experience faced by war veterans on the battlefields. As a result, these conditions were largely ignored, and fresh terms were invented instead. The publication of DSM-I in his view was an effort by the American Psychiatric Association to resolve the problem. Both DSM-I and later DSM-II in 1968 were based on the Freudian model of psychoanalysis.

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This changed in the 1970s due to advances in Pharmacology. The move towards ‘biological psychiatry’ is seen as leading to further revisions on the DSM manual towards a classification based on symptoms. As Jones and Wessely (2005) note, the validation of the existence of the disorder in DSM-III (1980) was important in undermining the government’s agenda and recognising the long-term effects of combat on US servicemen (Jones & Wessely, 2005). Thus, the inclusion of the disorder is seen as ‘one of the most politically driven psychiatric diagnoses’ (Jones & Wessely, 2005: 131). 2.4

The Gulf War

Jones and Wessely (2005: 198) state that during World War II, no war syndrome had been explained in terms of ‘toxic exposure’ except for cases of men who were gassed. They go on to state that during the Vietnam War, a significant change occurred, in that a chemical called ‘Dioxin’ which became known as ‘Agent Orange’ was sprayed from aircrafts over the jungle. According to them, “the name Agent Orange was derived not from the chemical itself but from the colour of the drums that it was stored in”. Exposure to this toxic substance was described by the Vietnam Veterans Association in Australia as ‘toxic neurasthenia’ (Hall & MacPhee, 1985 cited in Jones & Wessely, 2005: 198). Jones and Wessely (2005) remark that the symptoms of exposure to Agent Orange were comparable to symptoms normally linked to other war syndromes. The terms ‘Desert Storm Syndrome’ or ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ similarly came to be associated with exposure to a toxic agent that was unseen and undetectable. The descriptions of the condition evident within the political context such as smoke from oil fuel fires, depleted uranium shells, chemical and biological warfare (David et al., 1997 cited in Jones & Wessely, 2005: 199) reflect “powerful cultural themes” and concerns of civilians during the Gulf War.

3

Procedure 3.1

The Data

The data is the DSM manuals (see Table 1). As Table 1 illustrates the number of diagnoses (or terms for diagnoses) has increased three-fold since 1952 from 106 to 300. The increase in

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DSM Versions I-V 1952–2013

Version

Year

Total number of diagnoses

Total number of pages

I II III V

1952 1968 1980 2013

106 182 265 300

130 134 494 947

Total number of words 36,441 69,930 171,523 381,600

the diagnoses is matched by the increase in the number of pages in the manuals with DSM 5 containing 947 pages in 2013 compared to the 130 pages in 1952. The diagnoses in the DSM manuals do not directly map on to the diagnoses that were made during World War I and World War II, as the DSM manuals were produced long after the war had ended. As a result, it was difficult to decide which keywords to select in looking at the manuals or whether the keywords identified would be of any use. As this was a major challenge in using the manuals as data, I decided to only examine 4 keywords from the manuals that had some relevance to the mental illnesses identified in World War I literature. Although the selected keywords do not directly map on to mental illnesses diagnosed during the war, they have relevance to the psychological disabilities identified during the two World Wars (see Table 2). In order to answer the first research question, statistical keywords from the DSM manuals were generated by corpus comparison (see Table 2). Jeffries and Walker (2012) observe that “the reduction of a long list of keywords to a manageable shortlist raises questions of rigour and systematicity” (2012: 15). Using AntConc (Anthony, 2009) keywords for four of the manuals were identified (except for DSM-IV, which was not available for download) by using three of the manuals at a time as a reference corpus, and compiling four lists of keywords. For example, DSM-I was compared with DSM-II, DSM-III and DSM5 as a reference corpus, DSM-II was compared with DSM-I, DSM-III and DSM-5 as a reference corpus, and DSM-III was compared with DSM-I, DSM-II and DSM-5 and finally DSM-5 was compared with DSM-I, DSM-II and DSM-III. Jeffries and Walker (2012) note that the first stage in reducing a keyword list to a manageable size is to use a statistical cut off point. As in Baker et al.’s (2013) study, the cut-off point was the top 100 key words of each list; this generated the top 100 statistically significant keywords.

Keyness

2077 1571 750 644 515 455 299 285 242 204

Reaction Brain Chronic Syndrome Mental Reactions Deficiency Neurotic Psychoneurotic Psychiatric

Psychosis Brain Alcoholic Psychotic Syndrome Neurosis Chronic Retardation Schizophrenia Syndromes

DSM-II 237 205 104 88 57 47 44 42 27 32

Keyness Organic Dementia Mental Paranoid Disorders schizophrenia Depression Impairment Alcohol Neurotic

DSM-III

The ten most frequent keywords in the DSM manuals

DSM-I

Table 2

1211 602 406 209 289 249 191 145 144 63

Keyness

Comorbid/comorbidity Risk Induced neurocognitive Medication Sleep Medical Sleep Bipolar Distress

DSM-5

313 300 275 273 220 143 171 134 124 76

Keyness

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Of these, the focus was on war-related keywords that were unique to a particular manual. For example, as noted above, the key word list for DSM-I was obtained by comparing DSM-II, DSM-III and DSM-5. Among the top 100 keywords that had the highest loglikelihood scores were word parts such as e, xe, g, f, xf which had to be omitted, as well as some grammatical words which also had to be excluded. In DSM-I for instance, words such as reaction, brain, chronic, syndrome, neurotic, deficiency, psychophysiologic were in the top 100 keywords list. However, some words such as chronic were also key in the other wordlists, so only 10 words which were unique to each list and which were useful for identifying diachronic changes from 1952 to 2013 were considered. These were selected based on the 10 most statistically significant keywords with the highest keyness value (see Table 2). This helped to distinguish the words which were salient to one manual when compared to the other manuals. However, as mentioned by Jeffries and Walker (2012: 16), even among a list of statistically significant keywords, there can be words which are not as frequent. Therefore, for purposes of analysis, only words with a frequency of over 50 were selected to trace across the manuals. This resulted in 10 words from DSM-1, 5 words from DSM-II, 10 words from DSM-III and 10 words from DSM-5 giving a total of 35 keywords. Of these 35 keywords, I selected one keyword from each manual, which had particular significance in relation to psychological distress during the war, to trace back through time. These 4 words are reaction, neurosis, neurotic and distress. The term ‘reaction’ was selected because in 1952, DSM-I identifies psychological disorder arising from combat as Gross Stress Reaction, which loosely maps on to the label ‘combat stress reaction’ that was used in 1916 to talk about shell shock. I selected ‘neurosis’ on the same basis, as again, the term ‘war neurosis’ was one that was used to talk about psychological conditions relating to combat during World War I. During World War I, those suffering from shell shock were also recognised as being ‘psychoneurotic’, which is why this word was selected. The term ‘distress’ is very broad and does not map on at all to any particular psychological disorder but was used to talk about mental illness in general during the war, which is the reason for its selection. Jones and Wessely (2005: 172) write that “distress is not disorder or dysfunction and suffering cannot be reduced to a diagnosis”. Although the selected keywords are problematic in terms of not relating to direct labels used to describe mental illness during the war, I will attempt go back in time and

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illustrate how these words link to psychological disabilities that were identified during the war and examine how the terms have changed and why. The selected words will be analysed by looking at concepts from corpus linguistics(McEnery & Hardie, 2012) such as frequency, collocation and type token ratio (TTR) and discussing the cultural and political context in order to investigate how the words for psychological disabilities have changed since World War II. McEnery and Hardie (2012) describe collocation as words that keep company with other words. A collocate is a word “which occurs within the neighbourhood of another word, usually in a span of five words to the left and five to the right” (McEnery et al., 2012: 4). They (2012: 4) further note that Anthony’s (2009) AntConc software enables the user to specify a window within which the frequency of collocates can be calculated. The program calculates collocation strength by using a mutual information score or log likelihood. In this chapter too, a span of + or −5 is used in searching for collocations of the search term. As pointed out by McEneryet al. (2012: 5) collocations are useful “for determining the existence of bias or connotation in words”. Examining collocational patterns can provide an insight into how a particular word is used, and by looking at collocations in the different manuals, we can find evidence as to how labels for psychological disabilities have changed over time. Another measure that is used is Type Token Ratio (TTR). TTR is a measure of lexical density and is calculated by dividing the types (the different types of words in a text) by the number of tokens (the total number of running words in a text). A high TTR score attests to a high degree of lexical density whereas a low TTR score attests to a low degree of lexical variation. Evidence for how the words are used in the present day will be also drawn from the British National Corpus.

4 4.1

Discussion of Findings

Diachronic Variation in Mental Health Keywords

Examining key terms in the DSM Manuals beginning with DSM-I, it is clear that by 1952, some keywords used to describe psychological disabilities in England were not used in the USA. Analysing statistically significant keywords in the manuals (see Table 2) highlight the way in which the DSM manuals have changed over time. Examining the keywords unique to each manual highlights the diachronic changes in

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the vocabulary used to describe mental health words in general and warrelated words in particular. The change in the focus of the labels can be seen through the keywords with DSM-I more focused on reaction(s) to illnesses, whereas in DSM-II, the focus is more on psychotic illnesses with words such as psychosis, schizophrenia, neurosis, etc. DSM-III appears to focus more on impairments with references to disorders, dementia, alcohol, depression, etc. In DSM5, the focus changes more to medical aspects with words such as medical, medication, sleep, risk, etc. The data in Fig. 1 illustrates that in terms of the TTR, neurotic and neurosis have the highest TTR, with 0.42 and 0.319, respectively. Token counts are usually pushed higher by repeated use, whereas the different types of words are pushed higher by less repetition. The high number of tokens for the words ‘reaction’ and ‘distress’ compared to the types show that these words are used repeatedly in the texts and do not occur with a great number of different types of words, whereas neurotic and neurosis have a larger variation in vocabulary in terms of the different types of words with which they collocate. The TTR for the 4 keywords is shown in Fig. 2. Types, tokens and frequency of the four keywords 6000 4000 2000 0

TTR collocaon types

collocaon types

reacon 630

neurosis 53

neuroc 265

distress 706

tokens

4550

170

630

4150

TTR

0.138

0.319

0.42

0.17

455

17

63

415

collocaon types

tokens

frequency

Fig. 1

TTR

frequency

Types, tokens and frequency of the 4 keywords

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1.2 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0

reacon

neurosis

neuroc

distress

TTR

Fig. 2 TTR for the 4 keywords under investigation

As Table 3 illustrates, the word ‘reaction’ is used across all four diagnostic manuals with a normalised frequency of 172.6 per 10,000 words, as it is a word that is used generally in association with mental health conditions, whereas the word ‘neurosis’ only has a normalised frequency score of 5.1 per 10,000 words and appears in DSM-I, DSM-II and DSMIII. It is interesting that the word is not used in the latest DSM manual published in 2013. Neurotic seems to be most prominent in DSM-I and DSM-III, with no tokens at all in DSM-II and just one token in DSM-5, yet it has a higher normalised frequency score of 20.02 per 10,000 words. Table 3

Frequency of the 4 keywords in the DSM manuals from 1952 to 2013

Keyword

DSMI

DSMII

DSMIII

DSM5

Total number of occurrences

Reaction Neurosis Neurotic Distress

455 11 77 01

22 17 0 0

132 59 63 48

20 0 01 415

629 89 140 464

Normalised frequency (per 10,000 words) 172.6 5.1 20.02 12.15

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In DSM-I, the word ‘neurotic’ collocates with words such as manifestations, disturbance, excoriations, fear, features, illness, etc., being used to modify various forms of illnesses, whereas in DSM-III, neurotic is mainly used for purposes of classification and sub-classification of mental disorders and collocates with words such as somatization, psychotic, statement, state, dread, disorders, debility, ambiguity, neurasthenia and modern. Although the word ‘distress’ occurs 464 times, the normalised frequency score shows that it is only used 12.15 times in the texts. As mentioned previously, none of the keywords in the manuals are specifically used to describe war-related illnesses. The terms reaction, neurosis and neurotic are discussed in the following pages. 4.2

Reaction

One of the hallmark features of the DSM-I was the use of the qualifying phrase reaction (De Young, 2012). The OED Online (2019) defines ‘reaction’ as “the body’s physiological or pathological response to infection, trauma, medication, etc.” This is the sense in which the word is used in DSM-I. It is not specifically linked to war-related mental illness but by being used to describe mental illness arising from ‘trauma’ links to mental illness related to combat. In DSM-I, the collocates for the nominal phrase ‘reaction’ shows that it is mainly associated with words to do with psychological disorders such as neurotic and psychotic on the left-hand side, being used for purposes of pre-modification. Apart from these uses, the word is also used with grammatical terms such as with and of both on the left-hand side and the right-hand side indicating what type of reaction can happen. As Scott (1990: 295) observes, before 1952, the editors of the DSM1 had concluded that the mental health conditions experienced by soldiers during combat could be halted by removing those affected from the stressful condition. They distinguished the illness as being different from a neurosis or psychosis, instead seeing it as a temporary reaction to an exceedingly stressful situation. This idea is evident in the DSM manuals, as it recognises what was earlier identified as shell shock or combat exhaustion, as gross stress reaction; this is categorised under ‘transient situational personality disorders’ (DSM-I, 1952: 7). The replacement of Combat Exhaustion Disorder with Gross Stress Reaction was the most contentious aspect of DSM-I, which shifted the focus away from “identifying the negative reactions that many individuals had after experiencing combat” (Houts, 2000 cited in Deyoung,

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2012). As noted previously, in 1916, shell shock was referred to as a reaction with the use of the label ‘combat stress reaction’. Combat stress was initially regarded as a condition arising from exhaustion (Jones & Wessely, 2005: 12). Shepherd (2000: 364) comments that ‘Gross Stress Reaction’ was thought to occur even in emotionally sound soldiers, which eventually went away and which was seen as quite different from a neurosis or psychosis”. According to Houts (2000 cited in Deyoung, 2012), one of the first systems to embrace the idea that stressful life events could lead to mental illness in so called ‘normal’ people was in the Medical 203 (1943) which was later incorporated into DSM-I. The APA (2021), also states that the use of this specific nomenclature was inspired by Adolf Meyer, who believed that chemistry and physiology could explain mental illness, but later concluded that mental illness was caused by the reaction of the personality to psychological, social and biological circumstances. Although Gross Stress Reaction was a major inclusion in DSM-I, stress did not come up as a collocate that had a high co-occurrence with reaction. Scott (1990: 295) notes that DSM-I failed to take into consideration evidence from two important research studies that had investigated reactions of soldiers to combat on the battlefield, which suggested that many reactions were delayed and not evidenced during combat. This lack of failure to acknowledge research, is evident from the collocations and clusters, which associate reactions mainly with symptoms of emotional distress such as neurotic, schizophrenic, depressive, alcoholic, etc. It showed that those who agreed with this view, saw a soldier’s psychological distress as subsidiary to the start of their illness. Those who were against this idea, saw the same symptoms in soldiers during battle as being a result of ‘war neurosis’ (Scott, 1990: 308). In DSM-I, Gross stress reaction is related to war in the following way: Under conditions of great or unusual stress, a normal personality may utilise established patterns of reaction to deal with overwhelming fear. The patterns of such reactions differ from those of neurosis or psychosis chiefly with respect to clinical history, reversibility of reaction, and its transient character. When promptly and adequately treated, the condition may clear rapidly. It is also possible that the condition may progress to one of the neurotic reactions. If the reaction persists, this term is to be regarded as a temporary diagnosis to be used only until a more definitive diagnosis is established. This diagnosis is justified only in situations in which the individual has been exposed to severe physical demands or extreme emotional

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stress, such as in combat or in civilian catastrophe (fire, earthquake, explosion, etc.). In many instances, this diagnosis applies to previously more or less “normal” persons who have experienced intolerable stress. The particular stress involved will be specified as (1) combat or (2) civilian catastrophe. (DSM-I, 1952: 40)

As Shepherd notes, the DSM manual specifies that the reaction is to be regarded “as a temporary diagnosis […] until a more definitive diagnosis is established.” As the APA (2021) notes, in the DSM-I, the central diagnosis of combat exhaustion was reduced to an afterthought, and in the DSM-II, it was completely eliminated. Combat exhaustion, while not identical to the contemporary understanding of PTSD, was a major worry for the army during World War II. From DSM-I, it is clear that “no provision existed for diagnosing psychological reactions to the stress of combat, and terms had to be invented”, as 90% of the cases seen could not be diagnosed (DSM-I, pp. vi–vii). As a result, the US army needed to develop a new nosology to incorporate those servicemen who were psychologically damaged due to the stress of combat and diagnosed with mental illness which did not fit the diagnoses set out in MASCND (Houts, 2000, cited in Deyoung, 2012). Following World War II, research by Meninger had led to a recognition that the mental health of war veterans and others could be improved by assessment and treatment (Houts 2000 cited in Deyoung, 2012). Around the same time, WHO published their sixth edition of International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which included a section for mental disorders for the first time (APA, 2017). However, the classification of mental disorders in the ICD6 was also deemed unsatisfactory both in the US and outside, and the widespread dissatisfaction with the ICD6 led to the development of a new classification system that attempted to rectify the inadequacies of the IDC6 and to establish a baseline that recognised psychological disorders as an international concern. 4.3

Neurosis

The second key term that I have chosen to examine is the term ‘neurosis’. The OED defines neurosis as “any disease or disorder characterized by abnormal nervous or mental function, esp. when unaccompanied by other systemic or local disease; a primary or functional neurological disease or disorder (now hist.). Later: psychological disorder in which there is

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disabling or distressing anxiety, without severe disorganization or distortion of behaviour or personality (cf. psychosis n.1); an instance or type of this”. During World War I, the term ‘neurosis’ was used as a collective term ‘war neuroses’ in military psychiatry to label different nervous and traumatic psychological conditions such as neurasthenia, traumatic neurosis and hysteria. It was thought that even soldiers who had never been in combat situations could show the symptoms of the psychological disorders mentioned above. In Britain, the term shell shock was first used in 1915 and was particularly associated with the horrors of trench warfare suggesting a direct relationship between combat and symptoms of shock. The left collocates for neurosis in DSM1 are words such as traumatic, rectal, vocal, gastric and cardiac suggesting that at the time DSM-I was written, it was not restricted to mental psychosis but used to describe different clinical manifestations considered a type of neurosis, where an anxiety is evident. This is evident from the different types of neuroses being categorised under psychophysiologic autonomic and visceral disorders (DSM-I, 1952: 29). The DSM notes that “these disorders are here given a separate grouping between psychotic and psychoneurotic reactions, to allow more accurate accumulation of data concerning their etiology, course, and relation to other mental disorders” (DSM-I, 1952: 29). The nomenclature used in DSM-II is different to DSM-I where the term ‘neurotic’ is used as an adjectival phrase alongside other collocates such as anxiety, compulsive, depressive, depersonalisation, hysterical, neurasthenic, hypercondriacal, other, phobic and unspecified. The word ‘neurotic’ suggests that someone has a neurosis as well as the connotation that they are unstable and constantly worried about things that other people consider to be trivial and unimportant. The most frequent collocates that the word ‘neurotic’ is associated with in everyday life, for example, anxiety, conflicts, symptoms, etc., (BNC web) shows that it has a negative semantic prosody. In his paper entitled ‘Where have all the neurotics gone?’, Carey (2012) notes that during the post-war period, neurotic meant “something more than merely being anxious, and something other than exhibiting hysteria or other disabling mood problems”. The change in the vocabulary from neurotic to neurosis is a change from adjective to noun, and although words such as anxiety and obsessional (BNC web) are used with neurosis, these are used to premodify the word on the left-hand side and suggests the different dimensions that are incorporated within the word. The word ‘neurosis’ does not have the same negative semantic prosody as the word ‘neurotic’. Although both

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words are used to denote similar symptoms, the word ‘neurotic’ is used more loosely. In DSM-II, neurasthenic neurosis is a new diagnosis that is different from Gross Stress Reaction used in DSM-I. Neurasthenia, which was the most frequent diagnosis for World War I veterans in Britain from 1917, is included under psychophysiologic nervous system reaction in DSM-I, where the predominant complaint is said to be ‘general fatigue’ (1952: 31). In Britain, neurasthenia was defined as “a disease of the nervous system, without organic lesion, which may attack any or all parts of the system, characterised by enfeeblement of the nervous force, which may have all degrees of severity” (Wessely, 1995: 10 cited in Jones & Wessely, 2005: 15). In DSM-II, it is referred to either as neurasthenic neurosis or neurasthenia, where it is described as being different from anxiety neurosis and the psychophysiologic disorders described in DSM-I. The DSM-II describes neurasthenic neurosis as follows: This condition is characterised by complaints of chronic weakness, easy fatigability and sometimes exhaustion. Unlike hysterical neurosis, the patient’s complaints are genuinely distressing to him and there is no evidence of secondary gain. It differs from Anxiety neurosis (q.v.) and from the Psychophysiologic disorders (q.v.) in the nature of the predominant complaint. It differs from Depressive neurosis (q.v.) in the moderateness of the depression and in the chronicity of its course (In DSM-I, this condition was called “Psychophysiologic nervous system reaction”). (1968: 4)

This is one instance where an actual term that was used during World War I to label psychological disability is used and which directly maps on to the time period. DSM-I notes (1952: 31) in relation to psychoneurotic disorder that “the chief characteristic of these disorders is ‘anxiety’ which may be directly felt and expressed or which may be unconsciously and automatically controlled by the utilization of various psychological defense mechanisms (depression, conversion, displacement, etc.).” Soldiers exhibiting neurotic symptoms as a result of war stress (but who were not ordinarily psychoneurotic) and men with modest personality abnormalities were classified as having a psychopathic personality in a military situation. Neurosis is no longer used as a stand-alone medical condition, as it was completely abandoned in DSM-III as part of a revamp to standardise the criteria for psychological illnesses. The DSM manuals also do not recognise the description shell shock and DSM-I,

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as seen previously, instead uses the category called gross stress reaction, which is abandoned in DSM-II. It is only in 1980, that DSM-III formally recognises the trauma arising from combat situations by using the term post-traumatic stress syndrome for the first time to refer to what was recognised as shell shock or war neuroses. In Britain, shell shock was perceived as a condition experienced by traumatised soldiers, who presented with a range of ‘unexplained symptoms’ (Jones & Wessely, 2005: 23). Although there was an acceptance of the psychological trauma experienced by soldiers during combat, as seen by the term shell shock being adopted into common usage (Meyer, 2011: 98), “men who continued to suffer symptoms after several years of treatment were cast not as sufferers of wartime traumas but rather as lazy indigents attempting to rely on the state for support” (Meyer, 2011: 98–99). Despite the start of the Vietnam War, one of the main puzzles in DSMII is the abandonment of the category referred to as Gross Stress Reaction in DSM-I (Crocq, 2000: 53). From 1964 to 1973, an estimated 700,000 soldiers required some form of psychological help, which according to Crocq (2000: 53) was a ‘rude awakening’ which resulted in changes to DSM-III. Shepherd (2000: 164) attributes the non-inclusion of the category ‘gross stress reaction’ to the idea that by 1968, there were not many psychiatrists who had experienced warfare and as a result this category was abandoned. He goes on to say that instead symptoms associated with the disorder were classified as a “catchall term ‘adjustment reaction to adult life’”. The developers of DSM-III created a list of criteria for each disorder so that a person had to surpass a certain number for them to be diagnosed (Deyoung, 2012). Mayes and Horowitz (2005: 250) write that its success could be attributed to “the power of scientific knowledge”. What is significant about DSM-III is the new labels for war neurosis and manic depression. Crocq (2000: 50) observes “in the British military, patients presenting with various mental disorders resulting from combat stress were originally diagnosed as cases of shell shock”. The use of the term PTSD to describe the effects of combat (DSM-I) is the biggest change in DSM-III. This diagnosis is associated with the legacy of the Vietnam War and is “recognised as a specific syndrome in individuals who have experienced a major traumatic event” (Crocq, 2000: 53). DSM-III is also seen as an ‘explosion’ in terms of the quality and number of pharmacological treatment for a variety of severe mental illnesses e.g. schizophrenia and bipolar (First, 2010 cited in Deyoung, 2012). One of the main changes

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seen in DSM-III is the change of focus “of the disorders caused from the particular details of the individual soldier’s background and psyche to the nature of war itself” (Scott, 1990: 308). As Scott (1990: 308) further states, the proponents of this view believed that soldiers who are affected by their experience in the war, are not in any sense, abnormal, and that it is normal to be affected by the horrors of war. There were no major changes from DSM-III to IV, except that DSMIV clearly distinguishes PTSD, a chronic syndrome related to war from acute stress disorder, which is short- lived and appears soon after the trauma. DSM-5 acknowledged that mental disorders are related to issues such as ‘social, psychological and biological factors’ (2013: 19). In the last two decades, since DSM-IV, the science of mental disorders has evolved and advances have been made in cognitive neuroscience, brain imaging, epidemiology and genetics (2013: 5). During the Gulf War, the terms Desert Storm Syndrome and Agent Orange were commonly used to describe symptoms experienced by Gulf war veterans. These conditions are medically diagnosed as PTSD. No new diagnosis is available in DSM5. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) suggests that PTSD among Gulf war veterans arises from “a traumatic event beyond the limits of “normal”: war, rape, assault, and torture, for example. After the severe stress, the individual relives the traumatic event repeatedly, becomes uninterested and uninvolved in work or social activities, and is hyperalert, anxious, and irritable”. This is supported by studies that suggest that over 35 symptoms were experienced by Gulf War veterans in comparison with other military populations including threat of biological weapons, anthrax, etc. Understanding the true nature of war syndromes as Jones and Wessely (2005: 208) assert, requires not just acknowledging “the debt to shell shock and the legacy of trauma”, but also looking at how they manifest as reflections of current views of health and illness outside the field of PTSD.

5

Conclusion

The evidence uncovered suggests that at the time DSM-I was written, stress from combat was regarded as a temporary condition that would eventually go away and not seen as a serious mental health condition, which is why it is referred to as a reaction to trauma labelled Gross Stress Reaction. By the time DSM1 was revised in 1968, as Shepherd (2000) noted, the political context had changed, and World War II was

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to some extent a distant memory, and, as a result, the new nosology did not have a specific listing for psychological disorders arising from warfare. As discussed by both Shepherd (2000) and Jones and Wessely (2005), the cultural context and understanding of mental health issues were redefined by the Vietnam War, and for the first time, attention focused on mental trauma suffered by those going into combat. Initially, although the Vietnam War was seen as a success story, the delayed effects of trauma experienced by veterans returning home from Asia began to be foregrounded. The use of the term ‘Post Vietnam Syndrome’ by the New York Times which was detested by both veterans and psychiatrists at the time, eventually lead to anti-war veteran groups campaigning for the trauma of battle to be recognised. During this period, as Shepherd (2000) has noted, there was also a move away from Freudian psychoanalysis to a more ‘biological’ classification based on advances in pharmacology. As a result, emphasis in labelling started to be based on symptoms. It is only in DSM-III published in 1980 that the trauma from battle is finally recognised as ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’. This recognition comes not because of scientific advances but because of political motivation by anti-war campaigners. The social and political atmosphere leading up to the revision of DSM Manual III, for example, also saw gay rights campaigners, protesting the inclusion of homosexuality as a mental health condition. However, the exploration of keywords related mainly to warfare points to some of the features of the political landscape at that time, not least the idea that the effects of some mental conditions are temporary and that individuals are able to recover from them within a short period of time. The research has indicated so far, that the values that certain labels develop are a result of the meanings that they have assumed within the culture in which they exist, for example, Gulf War syndrome being seen as an effect of a toxic agent such as fuel oil fire. Cultural responses, as well as advancements in therapies, the discovery of new diseases, new diagnostic techniques and the changing nature of conflict, all play a role in influencing diagnostic labels for pathologies of war (Jones & Wessely, 2005: 208). The DSM manuals are therefore very important in giving an insight into change in diagnostic labels for mental health due to the political changes that have taken place in the USA. The DSM manuals provide important new data on the different types of labels used to diagnose mental health problems from 1952 to 2013 and the popular perceptions and ideas towards mental health. Through analysing new

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data, this chapter has attempted to bring a historical perspective to the ever-changing nomenclature of war-related psychological disability labels.

References American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Highlights of changes from DSM-IV-TR to DSM-5 [online]. AP Publishing. Available from: www.dsm5.org/.../cha nges%20from%20dsm-iv-tr%20to%20dsm-5.pdf. Accessed 20 January 2018. American Psychiatric Association. (2017). DSM: History of the manual [online]. APA. Available from: http://www.psychiatry.org/practice/dsm/dsm-historyof-the-manual. Accessed 20 January 2017. American Psychiatric Association. (2021). History of DSM [online]. APA. Available from: https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm/historyof-the-dsm. Accessed 30 October 2021. Anthony, L. (2009). AntConc (Version 3.5.8) [Computer Software]. Waseda University. Available from http://www.laurenceanthony.net/ Baker, P. (2010). Sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. Edinburgh University Press. Baker, P. (2014). Using corpora to analyse gender. Bloomsbury. Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., & McEnery, T. (2013). Discourse analysis and media attitudes: The representation of Islam in the British Press. Cambridge University Press. Barnes, C. (2010). What a difference a decade makes: Reflections on doing ‘emancipatory’ disability research. Disability & Society, 18(1), 3–17. BNC Web. (2019). Lancaster University. http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk/cgi-bin bncXML/BNCquery.pl?theQuery=search&urlTest=yes. Accessed 02 January 2017. Carey, B. (2012, April 1). Where have all the neurotics gone? The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com Crocq, M. (2000). From shell shock and war neurosis to posttraumatic stress disorder: A history of psychotraumatology. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 2(1), 47–55. David, A., Ferry, S., & Wessely, S. (1997). Gulf War illness. British Medical Journal, 314, 239–240. Deyoung, N. (2012). History of the DSM [online]. Available from: https://sites. google.com/site/psych54000/b. Accessed 2 January 2017. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (1952). (First Edition) DSM-I [online]. American Psychiatric Association. Available from: www.tur kpsikiyatri.org/arsiv/dsm-1952.pdf. Accessed 20 January 2018. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (1968). (Second Edition) DSM-II [online]. American Psychiatric Association. Available from: https://www.madinamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSM-II.

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pdf. https://archive.org/details/DiagnosticAndStatisticalManualOfMentalD isordersDsm2. Accessed 20 January 2018. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (1980). (Third Edition) DSM-III [online]. American Psychiatric Association. Available from: https:// archive.org/details/pdfy-85JiVdvN0MYbNrcr. Accessed 20 January 2018. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (2013) (Fifth Edition) DSM-5 [online]. American Psychiatric Association. Available from: http:// repository.poltekkes-kaltim.ac.id/657/1/Diagnostic%20and%20statistical% 20manual%20of%20mental%20disorders%20_%20DSM-5%20%28%20PDFD rive.com%20%29.pdf. Accessed 20 January 2018. GOV.UK. (2014). Definition of disability under the Equality Act 2010 [online]. GOV.UK. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/when-mental-health-condit ion-becomes-disability. Last accessed 20 January 2016. Holland, K. (2012). The unintended consequences of campaigns designed to challenge stigmatising representations of mental illness in the media. Social Semiotics, 22(3), 217–236. Jones, E., Palmer, I., & Wessely, S. (2002). War pensions (1900–1945): Changing models of psychological understanding. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 180(4), 374–379. Jones, E., & Wessely, S. (2005). From shell shock to PTSD: Military psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War. Maudsely Series. Psychology Press. Jones, E., & Wessely, S. (2014). Battle for the mind: World War 1 and the birth of military psychiatry. The Lancet, 384(9955), 1708–1714. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/S0140-6736(14)61260-5 Jeffries, L., & Walker, B. (2012). Key words in the press: A critical corpus-driven analysis of ideology in the Blair years (1998–2007). English Text Construction, 5(2), 208–229. Leese, P. (2002). Shell shock: Traumatic neurosis and the British soldiers of the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan. Lindee, S. M. (2020). Rational fog: Science and technology in modern war. Harvard University Press. Lindon, C., & Jones, E. (2014). ‘Shell shock’ revisited: An examination of the case records of the national hospital in London. Medical History, 58(4), 519– 545. Mayes, R., & Horwitz, A. V. (2005). DSM-III and the revolution in the classification of mental illness. Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, 41(3), 249–267. McEnery, T., Potts, A., & Xiao, R. (2012). London 2012 Games: Media impact study. ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, Lancaster University. McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2012). Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge University Press.

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Meyer, J. (2011). Men of war: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. Oxford English Dictionary. (2015). [Online]. Oxford University Press. Available from: http://www.oed.com/. Accessed 25 April 2017. Scott, W. J. (1990). PTSD in DSMIII: A case in the politics of diagnosis and disease. Social Problems, 7 (3), 294–310. Shepherd, B. (2000). A war of nerves: Soldiers and psychiatrists 1914–1994. Jonathan Cape. Young, A. (1995). Reasons and causes for post-traumatic stress disorder. Transcultural psychiatric research reasons and causes for post-traumatic stress disorder. Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review, 32(3), 287–298.

CHAPTER 8

Europe Through Indian Eyes: Constructions of Foreignness in Indian Soldiers’ Letters

Abstract This chapter is based on a corpus of letters taken from the India Office records collections which contains extracts translated into English, of several hundred letters written by soldiers of the Indian Army serving in France and wounded in hospitals in England during World War I. Using corpus linguistic methods, the nouns and adjectives used by Indian soldiers to construct the foreignness of Europe and Europeans are analysed on the basis of 200 extracts published in Omissi’s (1999) Indian Voices of the Great War by applying Edward Said’s (1979) notion of ‘orientalism’ in reverse to look at how Indian soldiers construct the ‘other’. This chapter examines the words used to describe exotic landscapes and exotic beings. The findings illustrate that the comparison of Europe with India leads to India coming off badly and Europe coming off as a heavenly place with magical and kind beings. Keywords Indian soldiers’ letters · Migration · Othering · Foreignness · World War I

1

Introduction

This chapter is based on extracts of letters originally written in Indian languages by Indian soldiers in Europe during World War I. These © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Herat, Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87889-4_8

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letters written by Indian soldiers have long been of interest to historians, who have analysed the Indians’ sojourn in Europe during World War I. Although they have been studied extensively by scholars such as Omissi (1999, 2007), Morton Jack (2006), Koller (2008, 2014), Das (2014, 2018), Singh (2015), these studies have been from either a historical or literary perspective. So far, no studies have examined these letters from a linguistic perspective. This chapter, therefore, is an attempt to address this gap in the literature and reverse existing perspectives of ‘orientalism’. As the letters were written by different Indian soldiers, this chapter explores the lexical strategies used by different authors and, particularly focuses on the following research question: How do different authors of the letters use lexical features to construct the foreignness of Europe and Europeans? To answer the research question, this study investigates how the lexical category of nouns is used to depict foreignness, in a context of war time migration, using corpus linguistics methodologies, especially frequency and collocation analysis. The investigated corpus consists of 200 extracts of letters written in Indian languages, mainly Urdu, and translated into English by the British censorship office in France. The letters are of interest because the survival of the letters is a result of censorship. Historians (Omissi, 1999; Singh, 2015) document that the letters were written mostly by scribes who were literate in Indian languages and that the letters were then translated into English to ‘remove any information of military value’ (Omissi, 1999: 5). It is extracts of these letters translated into English that survive through reports written by British Censors. These reports are now archived at the British Library in London.1 Omissi (1999: 2) and Koller (2008: 114–115) note that the British colonial authorities, especially recruited soldiers from remote parts of India who were regarded as the ‘martial races’ and who were unlikely to be affected by political ideologies. Koller (2008: 113) writes that some 150,000 Indian soldiers migrated from India to Europe to serve the mother country in its war effort. For these soldiers, letters were the only form of communication with loved ones in India. As Omissi (1999) notes, although attempts were made by the British authorities to conceal the censorship of outward mail from the troops, soldiers soon became aware that their letters were undergoing surveillance, even though it is not clear how they knew. Although the threat of censorship may have led soldiers to 1 Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France 1914–1918 (27 volumes microfilm); Shelfmark: IOR/L/MIL/5/825–828.

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‘overemphasise what is socially acceptable’ (Omissi, 1999: 5), and may have curtailed what they were willing to say, they still constitute an invaluable resource, as they reveal multiple perspectives about the war and about their new surroundings, beyond those permitted by British authorities. Thus, it is possible to examine linguistic features, as Indian soldiers were neither ‘silent witnesses’ (Omissi, 1999: 1) of the war, nor apolitical, as perceived by the British, but were indeed very much involved in shaping and giving voice to the cultural experiences in their new surroundings, and presenting those at home with ‘exotic’ and ‘bizarre’ images (Riggins, 1997: 1) of the other through their letters. The chapter is organised as follows: Sect. 2 examines the concept of otherness and previous studies of foreignness, particularly focusing on Said’s work on Orientalism and the construction of the Orient and looks at the language used in the construction of the other. In Sect. 3, the data and the methodology of the study are discussed. Section 4 presents the results, and the discussion of the construction of foreignness and the final Section concludes the study.

2

Theoretical Background 2.1

The Concept of Othering

Pandey uses the term ‘othering’ to describe “the manner in which social group dichotomies are represented via language” (2004: 155). She notes that “it is through linguistic choices that writers encode their semantic or more specifically critical stance” (Pandey, 2004: 155). In actual linguistic terms, Riggins (1997: 8) writes that “expressions that are most revealing of the boundaries separating self and other are inclusive and exclusive pronouns and possessives such as we and they, us and them, and ours and theirs”. According to Fairclough (1989: 118, cited in Pandey, 2004: 164), the “evaluation of the practices described is implicit in the vocabulary” used by speakers and writers, which reveal their expressive function in the texts. Pandey (2004: 158) argues that “it is in the linguistic practices of othering (Riggins, 1997) that we can understand the social, cultural, historical and political divisions and asymmetries”. The salience of the linguistic categories used to construct the other is crucial to this chapter, since meaning in letter writing is evoked in and through language.

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Riggins (1997: 1) observes that travel reports are particularly interesting sites for examining the rhetoric of othering because writers tend to assume their readers expect ‘exotic’ and ‘bizarre’ features in foreign countries, which are encoded through language. This is also valid for letter writing. As Pandey (2004: 157) argues, “more than anything, readers react to the strategies of othering” inscribed by writers. In relation to the opposition constructed between them and us, Said (1978) observes that in comparison with Europeans, orientals tend to see their own identity as subordinate, uncivilised, inferior or backward. For example, in relation to her own experience of visiting China for the first time, Ang (1993: 3) writes that she had a “rather irrational anger towards China itself—at its backwardness, its unworldliness”, in comparison with the US, suggesting, as Said (1978) has argued, that the way in which ‘orientals’ perceive their own identity is negative in comparison with a more Europeanised, or in this case Western, identity. This is contrary to the ethnocentric tendency to view one’s own group as superior to others. As evident from the literature, discourses of otherness generally take a negative perception of the other. The research presented in this chapter shows that otherness can be articulated positively by marginalised groups such as the Indian soldiers, although as Riggins (1997: 6) observes “most research concentrates on the discourses of othering constructed by majority populations”. 2.2

Previous Socio-Historical Studies of Foreignness

In their letters home, Indian soldiers were not only talking about their experiences of the war on the western front but also engaged in constructing the ‘foreignness’ of Europe and Europeans in contrast to their own experience in India in their own mother tongues. However, the soldiers migrating from India to Europe would not have arrived there with a blank slate. Their knowledge of the countries they were visiting would have been conditioned by their position as imperial subjects of British colonialism. They would have seen and heard the European sahibs in their own country prior to arriving in France or Britain (Omissi, 2007: 377). To some extent, this prior experience of the British Raj would have influenced their own attitudes towards the Europeans and would have also provided them with a vocabulary to describe their experiences in Europe to their friends and families back home. In his book, Orientalism, Said

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(1978: 1) draws attention to the idea that “the Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies” and that “in addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (1978: 1). He writes that “[t]o speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enterprise” (Said, 1978: 4). He suggests that the relationship between Europeans and the Orient is “a relationship of power, of domination” (Said, 1978: 5). This relationship always appears to position Europeans as superior in comparison with the other. Another aspect of the relationship is the position of strength held by Europe, which leads to a partnership between strong and weak, which is expressed through words such as the “Oriental is irrational, depraved, childlike (fallen), ‘different’; [in contrast] the European is rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal’” (Said, 1978: 40). The construction of ‘foreignness’ can be referred to as a representation of the other, and the OED describes it as “alienness in character, dissimilarity”. As mentioned by Said (1978), the existing colonial relationship between Europeans and Indians would have influenced their perceptions and ideas about the Europeans. He writes that for Europeans, “the orient [is] a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (1978: 1). As mentioned before, this positions Europe in contrast to the Orient, reiterating the idea of “European superiority over Indian backwardness” (1978: 7). 2.3

Language Used to Describe Foreignness

Hall (1997: 17) describes the representation of the other as the “production of meaning of the concepts in our minds through language”. As Pandey has argued, meaning about the other can only be performed through the use of linguistic strategies. She identifies the following linguistic strategies in her data as a means of othering (2004: 161): a. Lexical strategies: overt denigration (O’Barr, 1994; Riggins, 1997) b. Distance markers: voice and speaking space (Fairclough, 1994, 1995) c. Declaratives: constructing semantic overgeneralisations in and through syntax: stereotypes (Essed, 1997; Karim, 1997; Riggins, 1997)

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d. Linguistic contrasts and qualifications: positive self-representation vs. negative other presentation (Bhabha, 1994; van Dijk, 1997) e. The use of passive voice and other syntactic strategies: mitigated and disguised othering (Simpson, 1993; van Dijk 1997) (cited from Pandey 2004: 161) As in Pandey’s (2004) study and Riggins’ (1997) work, the lexical strategies employed to describe the other show ethnocentrism in describing the dichotomies between self and other. For instance, Koller’s (2008) work compares the European perception of non-white colonial troops as reflected in memoires, diaries and letters. In examining the German perception of colonial troops, his work illustrates the linguistic strategies used by the German troops to ‘overtly denigrate’ (Pandey, 1997: 161) the military abilities of colonial soldiers through the use of racist terms such as ‘a motley crew of colours and religions’; ‘devils’; ‘dehumanised wilderness’ (2007: 128). In relation to European perceptions of the other, he notes that “while such perceptions were shaped by the prevailing colonial racist ideology that stressed European superiority, […], there was also an element of exoticism about the unfamiliar” (2007: 128). Additionally, he also examines the non-white colonial troops’ perceptions of Europeans and writes that unlike the Europeans, the colonial troops were always very conscious of the existence of the other, constantly reflecting on their own culture in comparison and contrast with the Europeans (2007: 138). As Indian soldiers were writing about their experiences of the other, the focus of this chapter is on the lexical strategies used to describe the out-group on the basis of nouns and adjectives, as these are salient in creating social categories and showing Indian soldiers’ perceptions of Europeans.

3

Data and Method 3.1

Text Sample

Because of the nature of the letters being censored English extracts, an equal number of letters were not available for the years 1914–1918. There were only 3 letters from 1914 and the majority of letters (4– 206) were from 1915. The number of words in each letter also differed depending on what the censor wanted to preserve. 199 extracts from Omissi’s (1999) book mainly from 1915 to 1916 and one extract from

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Table 1

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Total number of letters and original languages they were written in

Letters

Urdu

Gurmukhi

Hindi

Garhwali

Mixed with English

English, Other or Bengali, unknown Gujarati

Total

1914 1915 1916 1917 Total

2 105 17 3 127

1 20 3 1 25

– 25 1

– 9 –

– 5 –

– 5 –

– 1 2

26

9

5

5

3

3 170 23 4 200

Table 2

The location and physical condition of the writer

Where the letter was written from

England France Other

Total number of letters

81 83 36

Physical condition of the writer Wounded

battlefront

X X

X

Unknown

X

Morton Jack (2006: 357)2 were transcribed for purposes of analysis as evident from Table 1. Although the letters were originally written in different Indian languages, the majority of letters, 63.5% were originally translated from Urdu into English. Only 36.5% of the letters were translations into English of other Indian languages such as Gurmukhi,3 Hindi, Garhwali and Marathi (see Table 1). The corpus consists of 36,917 tokens and 4374 types and 4007 lemmas (see Table 1 for details of the letters and Table 2 for the number of letters written from different locations and the physical condition of the writer). The data in Table 2 illustrates that an almost equal number of letters were written by soldiers in France and England and that these writers were either in hospitals in France or England or were writing from the battlefront. Their physical condition and location could affect the perspective that they have of the other. 2 Jemadar Ghulam Muhiydin, Kitchener Hospital Brighton, quoted in PRO, WO 32/5110, private letter, Lawrence to Kitchener, 27 May 1915. 3 Gurmukhi is the official script of the Punjabi language; the alphabet used for the Sikh scriptures.

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3.2

Framework

The framework used for the data analysis was Said’s (1978) Orientalism. I use his framework in reverse in order to see how Indians construct foreignness. Initial observations suggested that Indians ‘exoticised’ Europe, seeing it as “more advanced, civilised, and superior” in contrast to India. The analysis therefore focused on constructions of foreignness, particularly examining nouns and adjectives to do with “place of romance/exotic landscapes, exotic beings, remarkable experiences”. In analysing the data, the following analytical procedures were used. 3.3

Data Analysis

3.3.1 Corpus Software Used The letters were analysed using LancsBox.4 The key functionalities that were used were the Words tool, Whelk and GraphColl. The words tool “allows in-depth analysis of frequencies of types, lemmas and POS categories as well as comparison of corpora using the keywords technique” (Brezina et al. 2015b: 24), whereas the Whelk tool “provides information about how the search term is distributed across corpus files” (Brezina et al. 2015b: 16). The GraphColl tool “identifies collocations and displays them in a table and as a collocation graph or network” (Brezina et al. 2015b: 18) (see Fig. 2, which provides the collocates for country).5 One of the main functionalities of LancsBox is the ability to calculate collocates using the desired statistical significance measures. It allows the possibility to set the frequency measure and threshold measure. 3.3.2 Frequency and Threshold To begin with, I used the Words tool to examine the frequency of descriptive words in the data. These are presented in Table 3 and Fig. 1.

4 Lancsbox was used as it automatically tags the data for parts of speech and enables the researcher to look at which words belong to a particular category. 5 The GraphColl graph shows three different dimensions of the collocational relation-

ship: (1) the strength of the relationship; (2) frequency of the collocate and (3) the position of the collocate in the text (Brezina, 2018: 76). First, the strength of the relationship between the words is shown by the distance between the nodes. Second, frequency of the relationship is shown by the shading of the dots and finally, the position is shown by where the collocate appears on the graph (left, middle or right) (Brezina, 2018: 76).

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Table 3

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Type of words in the data

Type of word

Raw frequency

Normalised frequency per million words

Nouns Adjectives Adverbs Verbs

4582 2267 2126 635 536

1199.99 614.80 575.89 369.75 (Present tense verbs) 145.19 (Past tense verbs)

Fig. 1 Lexical words in the data

Figure 1 shows that out of the lexical words, the most common are nouns and adjectives followed by adverbs and verbs. For the purpose of this chapter, I focus on the most frequent category, nouns, and I am interested in all collocates which occur with words that showed foreignness in some way, so for instance, nouns and adjectives occurring with the search terms ‘country’, ‘France’, ‘England’, ‘Paris’, ‘land’, ‘buildings’, ‘people’, ‘women’, etc. were considered even if they occur only once, the reason being that even a single occurrence could contribute towards an overall impression of how different authors were constructing foreignness (see Baker, 2014: 110 – 111).

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Fig. 2 A collocate graph for country using MI(2), L5-R5, C26

Following Baker (2014: 111), I examine all words that collocate with the search terms with a minimal threshold of one occurrence. The collocates have been searched using Lancsbox’s default observation window of five words to the left and five words to the right. Also as a large number of the collocations are grammatical words, the analysis is restricted to collocates which contain lexical items such as adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs. All other collocations are excluded.

6 This measure leaves out low frequency words such as heaven, fairyland, etc. and therefore was not used in the collocation analysis. The threshold used was 1.

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Table 4 Descriptive words in the data (RN = raw number of occurrences; DR = distribution of words) Type of foreignness described

Nouns

RN

Adjectives

RN

Landscape

Paradise Heaven

6 13

Fairyland Plenty Beauty Fairies Houries Ladies Flowers Fruits Pepper

2 10 9 4 1 5 4 5 14

Fine Beautiful Excellent Splendid Perfect Fresh great Good Kind Best Educated Fair Pleasant Nice Handsome Different Honest Clean Greatest Wonderful Indescribable civilised

24 17 12 4 4 4 102 77 13 10 5 5 3 3 3 4 3 3 3 2 2 1

People

Experiences

I then analyse how the words are used in relation to describing foreignness using the GraphColl function (example in Fig. 2). These collocation results are given in Table 4. I then select seven words from the total number of hyperbolic words emboldened in Table 4,7 and the Whelk tool is used in order to see how each word is used in the text. The results section only examines the selected descriptive nouns using qualitative analysis due to constraints of space.

7 The nouns fruit and pepper although hyperbolic in this context and is illustrative of foreignness, were not selected for analysis due to constraints of space. Also as Omissi (1999: 119) notes, the word fruit was used as a simple code to elude censorship when referring to European women, whereas the words red pepper and black pepper were used to refer to British and Indian troops, respectively (Omissi, 1999: 49).

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4 4.1

Results

Place of Romance/Exotic Landscapes

Considering that for most of the Indian soldiers, it would have been their first trip to Europe, it is not surprising to see them commenting on the new landscape and people, and as they would have arrived with preconceived ideas of Europe, their impressions are very positive. Said (1978: 7) argues that “the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent” and initial observations of the data, as mentioned before, indicated that Europe and Europeans were perceived as more advanced, civilised and superior. This is evident from the analysis, as the Whelk tool showed that words such as paradise, heaven and fairyland were used in describing Europe. In contrast to India, they perceive Europe as a land of beauty and comfort. This reverses the colonial perception of ‘exotic’ in the way that soldiers describe Europe. The descriptive nouns paradise, heaven and fairyland have a quality of other worldliness, i.e. they are so good that they are beyond mere worldliness. The word paradise had 46 collocates associated with words to do with the social environment of the soldiers, which illustrates that they are strongly correlated with the idea of comfort and beauty. The lexical collocates include houries, house, party, people, country. The semantic groupings of the collocates suggest that the word paradise is associated with people, places, buildings and entertainment suggesting that all these things in Europe have a kind of other-worldliness. 1. […] today is an ample realisation of the paradise of which we have read in books and heard from Mullahs. I cannot attempt to describe it. (France/3rd January/1916/207/Urdu)

The writer knows that the addressee will expect him to give an account of what paradise is like and he tries to show how impossible this is by saying I cannot attempt to describe it. His use of the negative form exemplifies the inability to put into words the realisation of the experience of paradise, thereby implying that it is even better than what they had heard or read about in books. The word heaven had 81 collocates and, as with the word paradise, the high number of collocates suggests associations of heavenly perfection.

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The lexical collocations of heaven include the words approaches, compared, listen, frequently and country. 2. One gets such service as no one can get in his own house, not even a noble…These are no fables, this country compared with others is like heaven. (England/27th May/1915/Unknown)

As evident from example 2, the writer uses the word heaven almost as a superlative in that this country reaches the pinnacle to the point that it cannot get any better. The description of England as heaven draws into the ideology that Said (1978) mentions of seeing the landscape of Europe as superior to any other. This ideology is reinforced through the use of the words no fables which seems to project the reader’s thoughts, particularly that the reader thinks that his description is a fable—there is a sense in which these places, people, events are so great that the writer knows that the reader will think he is making it up. The concept of heaven is reinforced in several letters, for instance, in example 3, the soldier remarks that there is no country in the world like England. 3. Since I came to this country, I have enjoyed excellent health […]The climate is very healthy. The people are all of respectable family. They treat the Indians with courtesy and kindliness. There is no country in the world like England. (England/1st September/1915/134/Urdu?)

In example 3, a number of descriptive words are used to describe the country and its people showing the way in which the country is idolised by Indian soldiers: excellent, healthy, respectable, courtesy, kindliness. The use of the negative form in the phrase no country in this instance defeats the expectation that there are other countries in the world like England and evokes the sense that England is beyond expectation. In relation to the use of negatives, Nahajec (2019: 29) writes that ‘negation is presuppositional, in that it treats the negated information as if the hearer expected it’. Another term that is similarly used to describe Europe is the word fairyland. The word fairyland was used twice and had 20 collocates again suggesting that the attitudinal meanings are positive. The lexical collocations included words such as Paris, satiated, supplied, plenty and heart. Again, the use of these terms connote Europe as a heavenly place

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with the semantic associations of great quantities, the complete satisfaction with food and pleasure, intimacy/love and this is reinforced by the use of the word wonder in example 4, which together with fairyland creates an image of Europe as a magical place. 4. Paris is fairyland. In fact, if there is any place on earth which approaches heaven, it is Paris. The roads and gardens are so beautiful that [in] contemplating them a mortal man becomes overwhelmed with wonder. (France/6th August/1916/374/Urdu)

By using the third person and the adjective mortal with man, the writer is creating a mental representation of the impossibility for a mere human being to contemplate such beauty. The use of the words heaven, paradise and fairyland shows the wonderment with which soldiers perceived Europe and their tendency to exoticise the landscape in a way that is very different to the colonial view of exoticising the orient. Morton Jack (2006: 360) notes that when Indian soldiers first arrived in France in September 1914, they ‘exploited’ their new environment. This is ironic considering it was the British who were engaged in ‘exploiting’ the colonies. Some of the descriptions used by soldiers suggest how overwhelmed they were with the beauty of the landscape—that they saw it as either a paradise or heaven. This is reiterated through the use of intensifiers as in example 5, which describes Europe as exceedingly pleasant so much so that India is forgotten. 5. [Europe] is exceedingly pleasant. In it India is forgotten. I do not wish the war to end soon … I have found a good opportunity. (France/4th January/1916/209/Urdu)

4.2

Exotic Beings

The soldiers were not only describing the landscape but also the people, especially women. The soldiers’ arrival in France during World War I would have brought them into contact with European white women for the first time. As a result of this experience, soldiers often commented on the beauty, kindness, educatedness and generosity of women. One of the terms used to describe European women is the term fairies. The word fairies occurred 4 times and had 37 collocates which included the lexical collocates beautiful, women, country, good, happy, houries, land,

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paradise, robes , forget, never. These collocations belong to a semantic field of place with words such as country, land, paradise, where the inclusion of the word paradise gives a sense of something extraordinary/supernatural, whereas the collocates good and happy are associated with physical attributes of people and robes with clothing. The collocate forget belongs to a semantic field of cognitive processing with never referencing time. The use of the word fairies with the above mentioned collocates connotes a sense of magic and enchantment and suggests that Europe is a realm containing magical, supernatural beings again creating an image of other-worldliness. 6. There is no country like the country of France. It is the most beautiful country and the women of this country are women like the good fairies. (France/27th June 1915/85/Urdu and Pashtu)

The sense of other-worldliness mentioned before is brought out through words such as good fairies (example 6) land of fairies, beautiful as fairies, like Houries of Paradise. The OED defines the word houries as “a nymph of the Muslim Paradise. Hence applied allusively to a voluptuously beautiful woman”. Another aspect is that the description of European women in the letters also often leads to a poor evaluation of Indian women. This is evident in some letters which compare how ladies in Europe and how women in India tend the sick. The word ladies is used 6 times and consists of 50 collocates including the lexical words, tend, attend, carry, bestow, nice. These words belong to a semantic field of attention/helpfulness that is perceived as absent in India. It is stated that ‘kindnesses’ by families in India are motivated by money whereas kindness by the English is without any further motive. 7. My father and mother, brothers and sisters, you call those your sons and daughters who give you money. Those who do not, you refuse to look upon and you even drag them before the law courts. Here the ladies tend us, who have been wounded, as a mother tends her child. They pour milk into our mouths, and our own parents, brothers and sisters, were we ill, would only give us water in a pot. There you see the brotherhood of religion, here you see the brotherhood of the English, who are kind to us without any further motive. (England 20th February/1915/24/Gurmukhi)

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Example 7 implies that Indian families are motivated by money, whereas this is seen as completely different in Europe where people are kind without any ulterior motive. The imagery is exoticised in that women in Europe pour milk whereas Indian women give us water. The words create a perception of European women as more intimate and nurturing in comparison with Indian women who are perceived as more detached. The writer also uses parallel structures of conventional and constructed opposition, which are foregrounded such as there you see and here you see in which the use of deixis, there is psychologically distancing, thereby adding to a poor evaluation of home. The brotherhood of the English is perceived as kindness and this is seen as different and better than the brotherhood of religion. 4.3

Discussion

As the results have revealed, one of the most noticeable aspects of the writing is the use of hyperbolic words to describe the landscape and the people. In contrast to typical othering, here, the out-group is perceived favourably and it is the in-group which is viewed negatively. This suggests that some Indian soldiers value the Europeans without ethnocentric bias, which is rare in studies of othering. This could be because they were writing in different languages which were translated into English. For example, the word aflak in Urdu written in the Roman Alphabet has many synonyms which include ‘fairyland’, ‘paradise’, ‘nirvana’, ‘wonderland’ and ‘rapture’ (Urdu Dictionary). This could illustrate why the translators might have used words such as paradise, heaven and fairyland; these words all have a similar meaning in English in that they all refer to an imaginary place of supreme bliss or comfort. Hahn and Riaz (2014: paragraph 14) note that ‘Urdu […] is an urban language that lends itself well to formal expressions’. However, as the writers themselves came from rural areas, it is likely that the exoticing language they used is a result of assumptions about reader expectations about foreign countries (see Riggins, 1997). As these letters aggrandise the status of Britain/Europe, the translators would have literally translated the Urdu language into English, thereby illustrating reasonable evidence of the positive states of mind of the writers.8 8 As Omissi (1999: 7) notes ‘the main task of the censors was to supply information about the morale of the soldiers to those responsible for their well being’.

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Another linguistic feature that is highly used is negation. The negative forms appear to be used for foregrounding what is absent and for highlighting contrasts between Europe and India. As Boase-Beier (2006: 19) has demonstrated, foregrounding makes the reader re-think their perceptions of the world. The quoted extracts illustrate that the use of negation often leads to India coming off badly in comparison with Europe. The comparisons that are made give an insight into the soldiers’ home lives and show their attitude to both. The results therefore support Said’s (1978) notion that Orientals have internalised the ideological notions of European superiority in comparison with Indian backwardness. This is most noticeable in the following example (8), where negation is used to foreground India’s inability to rise to the ‘pitch of perfection’ of Europe: 8. The creator has shown the perfection of his beneficence in Europe, and we people [Indians] have been created only for the purpose of completing the totality of the world. In truth, it has now become evident that the Indian is not fit to stand in any rank of the world. You may be sure that India will not rise to the pitch of perfection for Europe for another two thousand years. The French nation is highly civilized. (France/1st September/1915/135/Urdu)

5

Conclusions

The results show that the way foreignness is constructed through the use of exotic nouns is consistent in terms of its difference from the colonial concept of exotic. The soldiers look favourably on Europe and construct foreignness in very different terms to colonial perceptions of exoticism noted by Said (1978). They show the contrast between Europe and India through the descriptive words and by foregrounding the absences. The results support Morton Jack’s (2006: 360) statement that “many Indian troops regarded European service as a chance to broaden their cultural horizons”. Using Said’s (1978) framework has shown that in terms of how the Indian soldiers investigated here construct foreignness, they draw on internalised colonial ideologies of European superiority but that their perception of exoticism is very different to the European dehumanisation and contempt for Orientals (Koller, 2008; Singh, 2015). They perceive Europe as a heavenly place—the pinnacle of supreme bliss, which is indescribable; and the people as having ‘excellent’ qualities; women as magical beings of kindness, kinder even than their own mothers and sisters. The

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experiences with ‘excellent’ European people also broaden their cultural horizons in relation to honesty, kindness, class differences, education, cleanliness and manners; these are contrasted through the creation of a shared understanding of what home is, which exemplify that in the context of the ‘perfectness’ of Europe, India has failed to match up. Although the survival of the data is thanks to the censors and translators, the palimpsestic nature of the texts itself is a limitation in the study. Also this chapter has only examined a very small set of data, therefore, future research could examine a bigger corpus and analyse other words that express foreignness that have not been examined in this work. It would also be interesting to look at what unfamiliar cultural metaphors were used by soldiers to circumvent the censorship, especially in relation to sensitive topics forbidden by British authorities and to examine how these cultural meanings in different Indian languages were interpreted and translated by the censors. Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful reviews and detailed comments on the draft. I would also like to thank Patricia Ronan and Evelyn Ziegler for their invaluable help with all my questions and editing, and finally, I am indebted to my colleague and friend Lisa Nahajec, for the many beneficial conversations and ideas. This chapter is forthcoming in Patricia Ronan and Evelyn Ziegler (eds). Language and Identity in Migration Contexts. It is republished with permission from Peter Lang.

References Ang, I. (1993). To be or not to be Chinese: Diaspora, culture and post-modern ethnicity. Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, 21, 1–17. Baker, P. (2014). Using corpora to analyse gender. Bloomsbury. Boase-Beier, J. (2006). Stylistic approaches to translation. Routledge. Brezina, V. (2018). Statistics in corpus linguistics: A practical guide. Cambridge University Press. Brezina, V., Timperley, M., & McEnery, T. (2015a). #LancsBox v. 4.x [software]. Brezina, V., Timperley, M., & McEnery, T. (2015b). #LancsBox 4.0 manual. http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/docs/pdf/LancsBox_4.0_manual.pdf Das, S. (2014). The Indian sepoy in the First World War: Race, empire and colonial troops. https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/. Accessed 03 February 2020.

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Das, S. (2018). India, empire and the First World War culture: Writings, images and songs. Cambridge University Press. Hahn, D., & Riaz, F. (2014). What makes a good literary translator? https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/what-makes-good-lit erary-translator. Accessed 03 February 2020. Hall, S. (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Sage. Koller, C. (2008, March/July). The recruitment of colonial troops in Africa and Asia and their deployment in Europe during the First World War. Immigrants & Minorities, 26(1/2), 111–133. Koller, C. (2014). Representing otherness: African, Indian and European soldiers’ letters and memoirs. In S. Das (Ed.), Race, empire and First World War writing (pp. 127–142). Cambridge University Press. Morton Jack, G. (2006). The Indian army on the Western Front; 1914–1915: A portrait of collaboration. War in History, 13(3), 329–362. Nahajec, L. (2019). Song lyrics and the disruption of pragmatic processing: An analysis of linguistic negation in 10CC’s ‘I’m Not in Love.’ Language and Literature, 28(1), 23–40. OED online. https://www.oed.com/. Accessed 3 February 2020. Omissi, D. (1999). Indian voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ letters, 1914–1918. Palgrave McMillan. Omissi, D. (2007). Europe through Indian eyes: Indian soldiers encounter England and France, 1914–1918. The English Historical Review, 122(496), 371–396. Pandey, A. (2004). Constructing otherness: A linguistic analysis of the politics of representation and exclusion in freshmen writing. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 14(2), 153–179. Riggins, S. H. (1997). The rhetoric of othering. In S. H. Riggins (Ed.), The language and politics of exclusion: Others in discourse (pp. 1–30). Sage. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Penguin Books. Singh, G. (2015). The testimonies of Indian soldiers and the two world wars: Between self and sepoy. Bloomsbury. Urdu Dictionary online. https://www.urdupoint.com/dictionary/roman-urduto-english/pari-roman-urdu-meaning-in-english/37961.html. Accessed 3 February 2020.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusions

Abstract The final chapter examines what conclusions can be drawn from the work by reflecting on how the letters and documents analysed in the book highlight the identities and perceptions of different marginalised groups during the post-World War I period. It highlights the purposes for which language is used in the letters and documents and demonstrates the importance of studying historical documents in advancing our understanding of communication practices and current thinking during World War I. It shows the different identities expressed through language during a traumatic period in history whilst at the same time showing that there were moments of positivity that transformed ex-servicemen’s identities. Keywords Communication · Historical documents · Expressions of identity · Marginalised groups · Post-war

As the preceding chapters have shown, since the beginning of World War I in 1914, our understanding of communication, war syndromes and particularly psychological disabilities has undergone massive changes. During the war and afterwards, letter writing was the only means of communicating with government officials and with loved ones, therefore, examining epistolary constructions during the war is crucial in understanding how language was used to express various identities during a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Herat, Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87889-4_9

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traumatic era. Many of the letters and documents selected for analysis in this volume have not been examined from a language perspective previously, and although the corpus is not based on big data sets, the selected samples are representative of the archival material available, and therefore enabled the possibility to explore language use in letters written by marginalised groups such as disabled war veterans, destitute soldiers, seamen and factory workers and Indian soldiers. When considering exservicemen’s expressions of identity over the period of World War I, it is striking that their identities were contingent on their particular social and cultural circumstances and affected specifically by their culture, disabilities, health and financial security. The letters exemplify that the experience of the war means that in one way or another, they were changed men, who were unable to return to pre-war normalcy. They had been transformed by their war experience in unimaginable ways. Likewise, the medical reports, medical documents and manuals, further add to our understanding of historical disabilities such as shell shock, imbecility and feeblemindedness, and how they have been perceived through the centuries. Despite the fact that the letters and documents investigated are constrained by writers from different parts of the world and in some cases gone through layers of filtration and translation, they do nevertheless provide illustration of the ways in which language is used to express identities in different post-war contexts; similarly, the historical documents exhibit contemporary thinking and perceptions regarding psychological and intellectual disabilities. Given these fundamentals, the following conclusions can be drawn about language use during and in the aftermath of World War I: How ex-servicemen conveyed their identities depended to a large extent on whom they were addressing, similar to the language of the clerks in Colonial Offices, which also depended on the addressee and the purpose of the communication. The letter writing practices over one hundred years apart revealed that the less formal language used by clerks in the Liverpool Mayor’s Office than used by clerks in the Colonial Office in the Cape Colony in South Africa was constrained by the dissimilar audience and purpose of communication, which required a different vocabulary compared to the concerns being dealt by the Liverpool Mayor’s Office. These concerns are illustrated unambiguously in the letters written by destitute war veterans to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool explaining their predicament upon demobilisation. Their letters are to a large extent, influenced by the addressee. Through their writing, they reinforce the respect

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CONCLUSIONS

157

they have for the Lord Mayor, and at the same time, reassures him of their loyalty and allegiance to Britain, which is illustrative of why they should receive his beneficence. In considering identity, an important finding in this chapter is that the racism that ex-servicemen faced in Liverpool was not necessarily institutional but more from the public. For British ex-servicemen, who had sacrificed their health to serve their country, a main consideration was to carry on with their domestic and professional lives after returning from the war, and the language used in the letters is influenced by the expectations of the Ministry of Pensions. At a time when the British government was forced to cut public spending, granting pensions to those with psychological disabilities was perceived as rewarding cowardice, and few were granted a full pension, therefore, exservicemen had to use their letters to assert their individual identity and to convince the Ministry that they were deserving of financial assistance by highlighting their military identity and showcasing how service in World War I has affected them both psychologically and physically. The analysis of word use in the letters illustrate that in the main, ex-servicemen were suffering from depression, anxiety and worry, as reflected through the high incidence of first person pronouns, cognitive process words and health related words. For instance, in PIN26/21089, the writer attributes his stutter to war service and maintains that “he had to give up one job as motor driver owing to my nerves being unable to stand the strain of driving”. The cognitive process words also attest to the writers’ desire to withstand their personal struggles with their disabilities. The letters written by Indian soldiers, on the other hand, reflect an identity of soldiers who were fighting a war in a new culture attempting to understand and adapt to cultural difference between Europe and their own home. Their letters to friends and family revealed their own sense of dislocation, and at the same time, the admiration with which they regard the landscape, the women and the manners of Europeans in comparison with their own country. Although the letters are palimpsestic in nature, they show what a different view of exoticism Indian soldiers have in comparison with negative colonial perceptions of Orientals. With regard to intellectual disabilities, the chapter makes clear how historical learning disabilities were regarded by medical professionals assessing ex-servicemen for mental disability. The medical reports give an idea of the linguistic aspects that constituted a soldier being diagnosed as having imbecility or feeblemindedness. The reports show that there were cultural shifts taking place, as physicians were not seen to condone the

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race degeneration theories attested in the medical documents written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike with shell shock, the shifts in the terminology reflect cultural shifts, particularly in relation to ideas of hereditary degeneration and segregation, as today, instead of seeing these intellectual disabilities as a handicap or retardation, they are now recognised as learning disabilities. In the past, imbecility in children was a cause for segregation as they were considered a danger to society as evident from the medical documents; however, this was not the case with war veterans. An analysis of the DSM manuals revealed the extreme consistency in how labelling of psychological disabilities has been reinterpreted in the DSM manuals. As we saw, the term PTSD is only used in DSM-III for the first time in 1980. The change in language, as was evident, was partly affected by the political campaigning of anti-war groups rather than purely because of better understanding of psychiatric conditions and medical advances. The emerging pattern was illustrative of the negative language that has persisted in describing and labelling psychological and intellectual disabilities. Although only small data sets have been utilised due to the letters being archival collections with limitations on the number of letters, handwriting legibility and the requirement of transcribing, the analysis of the material, nevertheless, portray how language has been used by ex-servicemen and colonial officials in different parts of the world to express their personal identities in the post-war period. Through this collection of texts, I have attempted to analyse language use in historical letters and documents and to bring a linguistic perspective to bear on existing, new and neglected data. They are illustrative of the way in which the memories and experiences of World War I shaped ex-servicemen’s post-war identities. While the long-term impact of World War I, as argued, has inevitably had a debilitating effect in most cases, what is also evident from the letters is that even amidst horrific experiences and insurmountable personal struggles, some writers expressed their identity through moments of happiness; these small moments of happiness attest to ‘positivity’ that has the potential to transform ex-servicemen’s identities.

Appendices

Appendix I: Details of the PIN26 Files This appendix contains information regarding the PIN26 folders from which ex-servicemen’s letters were drawn for the corpus used in Chapter 6. The information includes the reference number, the rank of the ex-serviceman, the disability suffered and the dates of the folder. PIN

Rank

Nature of disability

Dates

1 2

PIN26/12578 PIN26/12689

Private Lance Corporal

1913–1924 1912–1921

3

PIN26/12823

Private

4

PIN26/14208

Private

5

PIN26/14220

Pioneer

6 7

PIN26/14386 PIN26/14813

8 9 10

PIN26/15390 PIN26/15634 PIN26/21067

Private Staff Quartermaster Sergeant Private Lance Corporal Officer

Neurasthenia Neurasthenia and valvular disease of heart Neurasthenia, debility and disease of action of the heart Neurasthenia and gun-shot wound to buttock Rheumatism and Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia and deafness

1914–1923

1916–1923

1917–1925 1915–1920 1916–1923 1915–1923 1915–1924 1915–1935 (continued)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Herat, Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87889-4

159

160

APPENDICES

(continued) PIN

Rank

Nature of disability

Dates

11 12

PIN26/19943 PIN26/19945

Lieutenant Lieutenant

1919–1948 1919–1941

13

PIN26/19946

Captain

14

PIN26/19949

Lieutenant Colonel

15

PIN26/21089

16 17 18 19

PIN26/21097 PIN26/21098 PIN26/21116 PIN26/21142

Flying Officer Lieutenant Lieutenant 2nd Lieutenant Temporary Captain Second Lieutenant

20 21 22

PIN26/21146 PIN26/21156 PIN26/21162

Commander 2nd Lieutenant 2nd Lieutenant

23 24 25 26

PIN26/21173 PIN26/21188 PIN26/21205 PIN26/21230

Captain Officer Second Lieutenant Lieutenant

27 28 29 30

PIN26/21239 PIN26/21271 PIN26/21282 PIN26/21285

Lieutenant Captain Lieutenant Lieutenant

31 32 33 34 35 36

PIN26/21314 PIN26/21460 PIN26/21506 PIN26/21555 PIN26/21570 PIN26/21593

Lieutenant Lieutenant Captain Second Lieutenant Second Lieutenant Captain

37 38 39 40 41

PIN26/21636 PIN26/21651 PIN26/21655 PIN26/21666 PIN26/21672

Lieutenant Lieutenant Lieutenant Second Lieutenant Second Lieutenant

Neurasthenia Arthritis of the spine and neurasthenia Gunshot wound to the spine Anxiety neurosis and abdominal problems Neurasthenia and deafness Neurasthenia and diabetes Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia and dyspepsia Neurasthenia Dementia praecox Disease of action of the heart and neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia and asthma Neurasthenia Neurasthenia and defective teeth Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Gunshot wound to face and right hand and neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Exhaustion psychosis Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia and loss of right eye Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia

1919–1950 1920–1944 1917–1972 1917–1969 1918–1954 1918–1950 1918–1938 1921–1959 1917–1979 1915–1921 1916–1968 1917–1923 1916–1956 1915–1967 1915–1948 1919–1942 1918–1969 1916–1940

1917–1977 1916–1981 1918–1947 1916–1933 1918–1935 1918–1947 1916–1940 1914–1963 1915–1961 1917–1921 1918–1921 (continued)

APPENDICES

161

(continued) PIN

Rank

Nature of disability

Dates

42

PIN26/21675

Lieutenant

1919–1946

43

PIN26/21684

44

PIN26/21697

Surgeon Lieutenant Commander Lieutenant

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

PIN26/21705 PIN26/21718 PIN26/21728 PIN26/21764 PIN26/21766 PIN26/21777 PIN26/21791 PIN26/19794

Flight Lieutenant Officer Second Lieutenant Lieutenant Colonel Lieutenant Honourary Major Second Lieutenant Mercantile Marine

Neurasthenia and multiple contusions and burns Psychasthenia and neurasthenia Neurasthenia and tuberculosis Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia Neurasthenia

1921–1955 1918–1981 1916–1978 1920–1943 1918–1973 1916–1922 1915–1974 1915–1924 1918–1948 1918–1937

Appendix II: Details of the PIN26 Files on Historical Learning Disabilities This appendix consists of information regarding the PIN26 files from which medical reports were obtained for the corpus used in Chapter 5. The information includes the reference number, the rank of the exserviceman, the diagnosed disability and the dates of the folder. Medical reports for Imbecility, Feeblemindedness and Mental deficiency 1 2 3 4 5

PIN26/13129 PIN26/407193 PIN26/16128 PIN26/16959 PIN26/5434

Private Gunner Private Trimmer Private

6

PIN26/5287

Private

7 8 9 10 11

PIN26/6073 PIN26/5923 PIN26/7303 PIN26/7178 PIN26/10577

Royal Navy Private Driver Rifleman Driver

Mental deficiency Mental deficiency Mental deficiency Mental deficiency Imbecility and cardiac affection Imbecility aggravated Mental deficiency Imbecility Imbecility Feeblemindedness Feeble-mindedness

1916–1921 1916–1922 1915–1920 1916–1969 1914–1917 1915–1922 1920–1922 1915–1920 1915–1917 1915–1920 1918–1920 (continued)

162

APPENDICES

(continued) Medical reports for Imbecility, Feeblemindedness and Mental deficiency 12 13

PIN26/10110 PIN26/11895

14

PIN26/11882

15 16 17

PIN26/11662 PIN26/19803 PIN26/4889

18 19 20 21 22 23

PIN26/4641 PIN26/3481 PIN26/3363 PIN26/2008 PIN26/2590 PIN26/16668

24 25

PIN26/20783 PIN26/2505

Private Rifleman

Feeble-mindedness Mental deficiency and rheumatism Private Mental deficiency and melancholia Private Feeblemindedness Chief Engineer Mentally deficient Private Mental deficiency and secondary spartic passplegia Private Feeblemindedness Able Seaman Mental deficiency Driver Mental deficiency Private Mental deficiency Private Feebleminded Private Imbecility and epilepsy Gunner Moral imbecility Private Stricture of urethra and mentally deficient

1917–1921 1915–1920 1915–1920 1916–1921 1920–1945 1917–1920

1914–1922 1914–1922 1914–1920 1916–1922 1918–1923 1916–1921 1916–1950 1918–1921

Appendix III: Details of the Indian Soldiers’ Letters This appendix contains information regarding the corpus of letters used in Chapter 8. The following information is given below: year in which the letters were written, the number of the letter in Omissi’s (1999) book, the place where the letter was written from, the original language used and the soldier’s condition. Letters 1–83 (column 1) were written from France. Letters 84–175 (column 1) were written from England. Letters 176–200 (column 1) were written from other parts of the world.

APPENDICES

1 (1914) 2 (1915) 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

The letter number in Omissi (1999) book

Place

Original language

1 6 28 29 32 35 54 56 59 65 67 71 85 87 101 102 104 107 112 115 121 127 129 131 132 135 136 140 142 153 154 155 157 159 163 166 167 171 172 173 174 175

France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France? France France France France France France France France France France

Urdu Garhwali Urdu Garhwali Urdu Hindi Urdu Urdu Urdu Gurmukhi Urdu Urdu Urdu and Pashtu Urdu? Urdu Urdu Urdu Garhwali Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu and Punjabi Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu? Urdu Urdu Urdu Gurmukhi Urdu English Gurmukhi cipher Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu

163

(continued)

164

APPENDICES

(continued)

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 (1916) 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 (1917) 81 82 83

The letter number in Omissi (1999) book

Place

Original language

176 177 178 179 188 192 194 195 196 200 202 203 204 205 207 209 212 213 219 226 247 255 273 334 358 359 363 365 367 368 369 371 372 373 374 377 398 470 505 523 524

France France France? France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France France

Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Hindi and Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Hindi Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Gurmukhi Gurmukhi Gurmukhi Urdu Urdu Unknown Urdu Urdu Urdu? Unknown Urdu Urdu Hindi Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Gurmukhi Urdu (continued)

APPENDICES

165

(continued) The letter number in Omissi (1999) book

Place

Original language

84 (1915)

4

Hindi

85 86 87

7 8 11

88

12

89 90

13 15

91

18

92 93 94 95 96 97

19 22 23 24 25 31

98

33

99 100

34 36

101

41

102

43

103 104 105

44 45 46

106

47

107

48

108

49

England Hospital Brighton England Hospital England ship England Brighton Hospital England New Milton Hospital England England a hospital ship England a hospital ship England England a hospital England England a hospital England England Bournemouth Indian General Hospital England Brighton Hospital England England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Brighton England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Brighton England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Brighton England a hospital England a hospital England New Milton Hospital England New Milton Hospital England Brighton Hospital England Milford-on-Sea

Gurmukhi Gujarati Gurmukhi Gurmukhi Urdu Hindi and Urdu some English Urdu Hindi Gurmukhi Hindi Gurmukhi Hindi Marathi and English

Urdu Urdu Garhwali

Garhwali

Hindi

Urdu Gurmukhi Marathi Gurmukhi Gurmukhi Hindi (continued)

166

APPENDICES

(continued) The letter number in Omissi (1999) book

Place

Original language

109

50

Urdu

110 111

51 52

112

57

113

58

114

60

115

61

116

62

117

63

118

64

119

66

120

68

121

70

122

72

123

73

124

76

125

78

126

79

127

80

England Brighton Hospital England England Milford-on-Sea England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Bournemouth Hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Lady Harding Hospital England Lady Harding Hospital England Indian General Hospital England Brighton Hospital England Brighton Hospital England Milford-on-Sea England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Indian Military Hospital Milford-on-Sea England Bournemouth Hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Brighton England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Brighton England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Brighton

Urdu Gurmukhi Urdu Marathi

Hindi Hindi Hindi Gurmukhi Marathi Urdu Roman Urdu Urdu Hindi Hindi

Hindi

Hindi

Bengali

Urdu

(continued)

APPENDICES

167

(continued) The letter number in Omissi (1999) book

Place

Original language

128

81

Urdu

129

82

130

83

131

84

132

88

133 134

89 90

135

91

136

93

137

94

138

95

139 140

96 97

141 142 143

98 99 100

144 145

103 105

146

106

147

108

148

110

England General Hospital for Indian Troops Brighton England Brighton Hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Brighton England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Brighton England Barton Hospital England a hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Brighton England The Pavilion Hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Brighton England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Brighton England The Pavilion Hospital Brighton England a hospital England The General Hospital for Indian Troops England a hospital England? A hospital England the hospital Barton England England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital

Garhwali Urdu and Hindi

Hindi

Hindi Urdu Urdu

Urdu Urdu

Urdu

Urdu Urdu Urdu

Gurmukhi Urdu Gurmukhi Urdu Gujarati Urdu Garhwali Hindi (continued)

168

APPENDICES

(continued) The letter number in Omissi (1999) book

Place

Original language

149

111

Urdu

150

113

151

114

152

118

153

120

154

123

155

126

156

128

157

130

158

133

159

134

160

137

161

138

162

148

163

150

164 165

164 168

166

169

167

170

168

180

169

184

England Brockenhurst England Pavilion Hospital Brighton England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Pavilion Hospital Brighton England a hospital Brighton England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Indian Military Hospital Milford-on-Sea England Lady Hardinge Hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Kitchener’s Indian Hospital England Indian Military Depot Milford-on-sea Brighton Pavilion Hospital Brighton Indian Military Depot Milford Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Brighton Indian Military Depot Milford Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Brighton

Urdu Gurmukhi Marathi Urdu Gurmukhi Urdu Urdu Urdu Hindi

Urdu? H indi Urdu English Garhwali

Gurmukhi Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu English (continued)

APPENDICES

(continued) The letter number in Omissi (1999) book

Place

Original language

170

189

Urdu

171

190

172 173

193 198

174 175 176 (1914) 177 178 (1915) 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188

215 From Morton Jack (2006) 2 3 5 9 14 16 17 20 21 26 27 37 38

189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200

39 40 42 69 74 75 77 92 143 183 462 478

Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Kitchener’s Indian Hospital Brighton Brighton Indian General Hospital Brighton Kitchener’s Indian Hospital, Brighton China Punjab Hongkong India India Colombo India India India India Punjab India Indian convalescent home Muscat Karchchi Punjab Punjab Kashmir India India Punjab Persia India Punjab Punjab

Urdu Urdu Hindi Urdu Unknown Gurmukhi Urdu Urdu Urdu Gurmukhi Urdu and Pashtu Garhwali Urdu Urdu Urdu Gurmukhi Urdu Hindi Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu? Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu Urdu

169

Index

Note: Page numbers in bold refer to figures and those in italic refer to tables. A African Christian Association, 50, 52, 53, 56 Amador -Moreno, C., 40, 49 American Psychiatric Association, 115 Andersen, D., 42 Anderson, K.O., 106–108 Ang, I., 138 AntConc, 16, 29, 112, 117, 120 Archival material, 11 Auer, A., 5–6 B Baker, P., 10, 15–20, 117, 143, 144 Barden, O., 74, 81, 84 Belchem, J., 46–47 Bettinson, H., 68 Biber, D., 43 Biological psychiatry, 116 Boals, A., 103 Board of Trade, 6 Boase-Beier, J., 151 Boat, T.F, 75

Bolt, D., 101 Bourne, S., 46–47 Bradley, General Omar, 114 Brezina, V., 17–18 Britain, racial tensions, 7, 43 Brumby, A., 73 Bucci, W., 104 Bucholtz, M., 42 C Carey, B., 126 Carson, J., 72, 87 Censorship, 7, 8, 11–12, 135–137 “Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France” 1914–1918, 14 Cerqueiro, F., 52 Chemical warfare, 116 Churchill, Winston, 71 Cognitive processes, 97, 98, 104, 105 Cohen, D., 93 Collocation, 16, 17, 136 Colonialism, 51, 150–152

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Herat, Epistolary Constructions of Post-World War I Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87889-4

171

172

INDEX

Colonial Office, 6, 7 The Complete Letter Writer, 52 Concordances, 20 Corpus compilation and methodology, 8 annotation, 15 AntConc, 16, 29, 120 Cape colony records, 11 collocation, 19 concordances, 20 corpora used and size of, 9, 10 corpus design, 8–10 data analysis, 15–16 definition of corpus, 5 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 14 epistolary corpus, summary of, 18 frequency, 18, 19 Indian soldiers’ letters, 14–15 keyword analysis, 19 LancsBox, 15–16, 19, 142, 144 letters by ex-servicemen, seamen and factory workers in Liverpool, 9–13 letter writing, 5–7 LIWC (Linguistic Enquiry and Word Count), 17–18, 98 medical reports and documents for imbecility, feeblemindedness and mental deficiency, 12 methodology, 13 Ministry of Pensions letters, 13 N-grams, 19, 29, 30 Sketch Engine, 15, 19 text capture, 11–12 Type Token Radio (TTR), 120, 122 war correspondence, 6 WMatrix, 15, 16, 97 Critical discourse analysis (CDA), 43–45, 45 Crocq, M., 128–130

D Das, S., 6, 136 Dates, 27–28 Deference, 53 Denby, A., 66, 69–71 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 7, 10, 14, 67, 116–131 chemical warfare, 116 collocation, 124 corpus comparison, 117–120 corpus linguistics, 120 data, 126–129 diachronic variation in mental health keywords, 121, 122, 122, 127 distress, 121, 122, 122, 124, 126, 127 gross stress reaction, 124, 127, 128–130 Gulf War, 129–131 keywords, 120, 121 mental disorder, definition of, 123 neurosis, 121, 122, 122, 125–128 neurotic, 121, 122, 122, 126, 127 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 125, 128, 129 reaction, 121, 122, 122, 126, 129 Type Token Radio (TTR), 121, 122 Vietnam War, 115–116, 128, 130 war related mental health words, background and context, 113–116 World War I, 119, 126, 127, 135, 136 World War II, 123–125 Digby, A., 66, 81 Disabled ex-servicemen, 2, 42 identity, 2, 3, 8 Dossena, M., 7, 9, 13 Drugs, 115 Du Gay, P., 41

INDEX

E Emotions, 43, 95, 96, 98, 100–107, 101, 102 Encoder identification, 30–32, 31

F Fairclough, N., 44, 45, 48, 51, 59 Federation to the Employers of Coloured Labour, 56 Feeblemindedness. See Learning disabilities First World War, 2–4 Foreignness. See Indian soldiers Freedman, N., 104

G Garron, A., 97–98 Gender, 48 Genre related terms, 27–29 Goddard, Henry H., 71–73 Gorlach, M., 8 Graddol, D., 52 Great War to Race Riots (online archive), 12–13

H Hahn, D., 150 Hall, Joseph, 50 Hall, K., 42 Hall, S., 41, 139 Hanson, Frederick, 114–116 Hardie, A., 120 Heneghan, Madeline, 42, 47, 58, 60 Horowitz, A.V., 128 Hunston, M., 10, 18

I Identity, 2, 3, 8, 40–61, 157–158

173

and allegiances and nationality, 56–58 analysis framework for Lord Mayor, Liverpool study, 49 authorities working on behalf of immigrant ex-servicemen, 43–45, 58 categories of, 55 consumption of letters, 52 data for Lord Mayor, Liverpool study, 43–45, 44 deference and identity, 52 discursive practice, 44–47, 45 and gender, 46 of husbands and fathers, 59–61 identification terms used by British officials, 54 identification terms used by petitioners, 55, 59–61 and language, 40, 61 letter production and distribution, 48–50 meaning and dimensions of identity, 41–43 non-standard and conventionalised features in letters, 43–51, 52 oriental views of, 138 and outsider status, 56–58 payments for repatriation of immigrant ex-servicemen, 46–47 power differentials in letters, 52–56, 54, 55 and race, 46–47 social practice, analysis of, 44–47 and social status, 42, 46, 48 textual analysis, 51–56 Imbecility. See Learning disabilities Immigrant communities, 40, 46, 53, 55. See also Identity authorities working on behalf of, 47–48

174

INDEX

‘coloured’ as a term, 54, 55 financial hardship, 56–60 payments for repatriation of, 46–47 police involvement, 48 Indian soldiers, letters of, 6–7, 11–12, 14–15, 135–152, 156 censorship, 7, 8, 11–12, 135–137 colonial relationship between India and Europe, 139–140 comparisons of India with Europe, 150–151, 157–158 corpus software used, 142 data analysis, 142–148 data and method, 140–148 Europe as a place of romance/exotic landscapes, 139–145 exotic beings, 139–140 fairyland, use of, 146–148 foreignness, 136–138, 142 framework, 151 frequency of descriptive words, 142–148, 143, 143, 144, 145 heaven, use of, 147–148, 150 hyperbolic words, 143–146 identity, perceptions of, 140 language used to describe foreignness, 139–141 negation, 151 orientalism, 137–140 othering, 137–139, 140 paradise, use of, 148–150 results, 146–150 text sample, 140–142, 141 women, 148–150 International Classification of Diseases (ICD), 125 Irish people, 49, 50 J Jeffries, L., 117, 119 Jones, E., 2, 6, 13, 67, 68, 93, 94, 113–116, 119, 124, 127, 128

Jorgensen, P.S., 41–43, 55

K Kennedy, G., 8, 10 Keyword analysis, 19, 80–84, 80 metatextual key words, 35–37, 36 King, A.D., 25 Kline, K., 71 Koller, C., 136, 140, 151

L Labelling. See Psychological disorders of warfare Labov, W., 11 LancsBox, 15–16, 18, 142, 144 Language, 2–3, 6, 7, 95. See also Learning disabilities cognitive processes, 96, 97, 104, 105 emotion words, 95, 97–101, 101, 102 English, proficiency in, 49–51 and foreignness, 135–138 and identity, 40 and learning disabilities, 66–69, 87 and othering, 135–138 pronouns, 19, 95–96, 103, 104, 104 and psychological distress, 107–108 and purpose of communications, 155–157 social and health-related words, 105–107, 106 varieties of, 8–10 Learning disabilities, 3, 10, 66–81, 157, 158 Army Mental Tests (USA), 72 children, 70, 72 data analysis, 77 data collection, 76–77

INDEX

definitions of imbecility, feeblemindedness and mental deficiency, 66–68 diagnosis and symptoms, 66–68, 72 DSM manual use of the terms feeblemindedness, imbecility and mental deficiency, 74–75 idiocy, 70 imbecility and feeblemindedness during the First World War, 69–72 imbecility, linguistic characteristics in the medical documents, 78 intelligence/intelligence tests, 66, 68, 71–77, 79, 73, 82 keyword analysis, 80–85, 80 language, 77, 79, 83–85 linguistic deficits, 67 measurement of, 66 medical interest in lunacy, 66–68 memory, 81, 82, 84, 85 mental retardation, 69 moral imbecility, 69, 84, 85 morons, 68, 72, 73 negative terminology, 75 neurasthenia, 84, 87 pension files, 68 results of the study, 113 ‘risky others’, 67, 81, 84 segregation, 81, 87, 158 social concerns, 81 speak/speaking/spoken, 80 speech, 79–80, 81 stammering, 81–84 and stigma, 67 terms of reference for, 83 verbs used with words and speech, 77, 78 words, 78–79 Leese, P., 113 Letters, 2. See also Indian soldiers, letters of

175

acting through letters, 34–35, 34 censorship, 7, 8, 11–12, 135–137 consumption, 48–50 conventionalised and non-standard features, 48 as information, 28–32, 33 letter as a term, 29, 30, 34, 35 letter headed paper, 50, 51 letter writing, 3–4 metacommunicative features, 26, 34–36 as pieces of evidence, 27–28, 30 power differentials, 52–57, 54, 55 production and distribution of, 50–51 request markers, 27 routinised communication, 25, 37 situatedness of, 27 war correspondence, 6 writing guides, 7–8 Lexical bundles, 29 Lindee, S.M., 113 Liverpool as a commercial centre, 25 immigrant communities, 40, 46, 53 racial tensions, 47, 52 LIWC (Linguistic Enquiry and Word Count), 17, 97 Lord Mayor’s Office, Liverpool, 6, 7, 156, 157 acting through letters, 34, 34, 35 analysis framework, 26–27 data, 28, 29 letters as information, 32–35, 33, 37 letters as pieces of evidence, 27–28, 30 letters by ex-servicemen, seamen and factory workers, 13 metacommunicative features in correspondence, 29–37 metatextual key words, 35–37, 36

176

INDEX

nature and recipients of correspondence, 24–26

M Marshall, General George, 114 Mayes, R., 128 McCafferty, K., 40, 49 McEnery, T., 17–19, 112, 120 Medical 203 system, 124 Medical reports and documents, 10 Mehl, M.R., 95 Meninger, William, 114, 125 Mental deficiency. See Learning disabilities Mental Deficiency Act 1913, 69–71, 85 Meyer, Adolf, 124 Meyer, J., 6, 61, 93–95 Ministry of Pensions, 2, 3, 6, 8, 13, 42, 67, 73, 86, 87, 92–94, 97, 98 language used in letters of psychologically disabled servicemen, 93–95, 158 Mitchell, D., 66, 73 Moreton, E., 10, 15 Morton Jack, G., 136, 141, 148–151 Morton, R., 8–11

N Nahajec, L., 147 Nesi, H., 8–11 Neurasthenia, 2, 3, 84, 87, 93, 94, 113, 123 neurasthenic neurosis, 127 Nevalainen, T., 6–7 Nevala, M., 42 N-grams, 19 Niederhoffer, K.G., 19 Nurmi, A., 27

O Oakley, A.E., 57–59 Omissi, D., 4, 14, 15, 136–138 Onuora, Emi, 40, 42, 47, 58 Orientalism, 136–138 Ostade, I.T.-B.Van, 51 Othering, 137, 138

P Palander-Collin, M., 27, 43 Pandey, A., 137–140 Pennebaker Conglomerates Inc., 17, 97 Pennebaker, J.W., 95, 96, 100, 103, 104, 107 Perez, A.S., 95, 96 Postal service, 51 Postcards, 51 Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 125, 128, 129 Potts, A., 112 Power differentials, 52–56, 54, 55 Pronouns, 19, 55, 95, 103–108, 104 Psychological disabilities, 7, 92–108 cognitive processes, 96–98, 104 convincing the Ministry of pensions about war disabilities, 105–108, 106 data analysis, 97–98 data collection, 96–97 disability pensions, 92, 93 emotions/emotion words, 43, 95–104, 101, 102 key domain cloud, 99 keyword analysis, 80–86 labelling of, 7 mental illness during World War I, background to, 93–95 neuroticism, 97–98 personal pronouns, use of, 103–106, 104

INDEX

post-war reintegration into society, 105 results summary, 99, 100 social and health-related words, 105–108, 106 word use during traumatic situations, theories of, 95–96 Psychological disorders of warfare, 130 chemical warfare, 116 collocation, 120 corpus comparison, 117–120 corpus linguistics, 120 data, 116–120, 117, 118 diachronic variation in mental health keywords, 120–129, 121, 122, 122 distress, 119, 121, 122, 122 gross stress reaction, 119, 123–125, 128, 129 Gulf War, 116–117, 129, 130 keywords, 112, 113 labels, 113, 119, 120 mental disorder, definition of, 112 neurosis, 121–127, 121, 122, 122 neurotic, 121–124, 121, 122, 122 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 125, 129, 158 reaction, 119, 121–125, 121, 122, 122 Type Token Radio (TTR), 121, 122 Vietnam War, 115–116 war related mental health words, background and context, 120–123 World War I, 113, 117, 119, 126, 127 World War II, 113–114 R Racial tensions, 47, 50–51

177

Racism, 157 Reid, F., 66, 68, 71 Request markers, 27 Resnik, R., 97–98 Riaz, F., 150 Riggins, S.H., 137–140, 150 Rime, B., 104 Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded, 69 S Said, Edward, 4, 137–140, 142, 146, 147, 151 Sairio, A., 42 Salmon, Major Thomas, 113 Schreier, D., 5–7 Schwarz, S., 25 Scott, W., 123, 124, 129 Shell shock, 2, 66, 67, 71, 93, 94, 113, 114, 119, 123, 124, 126–129 Shepherd, B., 70–72, 81, 84, 92, 112, 115, 124, 125, 128–131 Singh, G., 136 Sketch Engine, 15, 16 Snyder, S., 66, 73 Social status, 42, 46 South Africa, Cape of Good Hope Colonial Office, 6, 7, 11 acting through letters, 34–35, 34 analysis framework, 29–31 data, 27 letters as information, 32–35, 33 letters as pieces of evidence, 29–32, 30 metacommunicative features in correspondence, 24–37 metatextual key words, 35–37, 36 records, 11 routinised communication, 25, 37 Stigma, 67, 98

178

INDEX

T Tanskanen, S., 5–7 Tausczik, Y.R., 104 Telegrams, 51 Thompson, G., 18 Thornborrow, J., 41 Titles, 27 Trauma, 101, 115, 123, 129, 130. See also Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Type Token Radio (TTR), 121, 122

Wlodarczyk. M., 3, 11, 24–30, 32 WMatrix, 15–17, 97 Wood, J., 43, 45, 58 Woods, Alfred, 49–51, 49, 60 Woods, T.P., 26 World Health Organisation (WHO), 125 World War I, 1, 2, 156, 157 The Writing on the Wall—Great War to Race Riots (archive), 40, 42 Wu, J.T., 75

U Unemployment insurance, 56

X Xiao, R., 112

W Walker, B., 117, 119 Wastell, C., 94 Wattam, S., 17–18 Watts, R.J., 5–7 Wessely, S., 2, 6, 13, 67, 68, 93, 94, 113–116, 119, 124, 127–130

Y Yerkes, Robert, 72 Young, L.D., 115 Z Ziehe, T., 42