The patriotic buoyancy in Britain in the summer of 1914 - the Bank Holiday crowds cheering the declaration of war on 4 August and the rush to enlist in Kitchener's New Army - was soon challenged by the harsh realities of the First World War. In Russia, these realities led to the collapse of the tsarist regime and Communist revolution. In contrast, Britain seemed to endure the hardships of the war with relative equanimity. What was the reality behind this façade?

Britain had been conditioned to meet the challenge of war. Schools, the press and popular literature all encouraged a militarised vision of society in which war was glorified. Pre-war organisations such as the Navy League and the National Service League numbered more than 100,000 and 220,000 members respectively. British popular culture drew heavily on anti-foreign and patriotic sentiments that made easy the demonisation of the German enemy during the war.

Civilian morale, however, could not be sustained in such a long conflict by patriotism alone. It also needed a material basis. Paradoxically, the First World War was a period of rising living standards and new opportunities in Britain. The mass unemployment of the pre-war years disappeared. Women joined the labour market in large numbers for the first time. Life expectancy (outside the trenches) increased and infant mortality declined. Falling levels of alcohol consumption improved general health.

Nonetheless, there were a number of potential breaches in Britain's united home front. The breezy optimism of August 1914 was quickly shattered by the heavy British death toll on the Western Front and by the fears evoked by German Zeppelin and other air raids, which killed more than 2,000 civilians during the war.

Such misfortunes only confirmed the desire of many British people to prosecute the war against Germany to the bitter end. In others, however, they engendered more questioning attitudes about how the war was being run and - in a minority of cases - about the wisdom of the war itself. Grievances that began to emerge in 1915 included the looming prospect of conscription, rising food prices and revelations about war profiteering.

Particularly disturbing for the government was the growth of labour unrest. In 1917, roughly 200,000 workers in 48 different British towns went on strike. Their grievances, however, were largely non-political, relating to such issues as wages, food prices, war profiteering and exemption from military service. The strikes were rarely characterised by explicit anti-war or revolutionary sentiments. By the autumn, they had already passed their peak.