Re: The Pages of Punch
Hello JBR! You could be right. It doesn’t tie in with my experience of National Service. My corps affiliation was already decided before I reported to at my Basic Training depot. However I can’t be certain that this applied to everyone – particularly a generation earlier.
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1918: Repetitive Strain Injury
There was an urgent need for ever more munitions to feed the war machine. Factory owners became rich and were labelled war profiteers by the upper middle classes who read Punch. Their wealth had not increased at all. Factory workers who were prepared to work a lot of overtime also became richer than ever before. This also dismayed the readers of Punch who now saw a threat their ‘superior’ status.
The cartoon shows that a recent piano owner really thought that you played the instrument with just one finger! How ignorant was that. The world had gone topsy-turvy.
After the war things soon got back to ’normal’ for the workers but profiteers continued to be satirised in Punch during the 1920s and 30s.