Performing for Charity

Throughout the war years the number of military service personnel incapacitated — the blind, limbless and neurasthenic — along with their dependents accumulated at an ever increasing rate; by mid-1915 military casualties in the British forces had risen to nearly 400,000.1 The Government was, of necessity, stirred into taking action, for at the outbreak of war in 1914 the only official fund dealing with ‘allowances and pensions’ for servicemen was that accommodating the veterans at the Royal Hospital for Soldiers at Chelsea. The actual amount of government assistance had not been altered since the Boer War. The Government’s initial inaction regarding allowances was, writes Marwick, ‘marked by a last flowering of grand-scale private charity’.2