A hundred years ago Britain was in trauma: there was hardly a family in the land that had not been left bereaved by the First World War. Also haunted by the memory of those who did not return were the men who did, guilty at having been spared, almost all of them unable to talk about what they had seen.
The decades after the War saw not just economic recession, but also a decline in religious practice, as the teaching in many faith communities now failed to answer new questions. The “rampant omnibus” of the First World War, to use the historian Trevor Wilson’s arresting expression, killed the Liberal Party and the myth of progress; it may also have dealt a serious blow to the Church of England as well.
