In Downton Abbey, male servants are taunted with feathers by women for not going to war. So what's the truth about such cowards and their tormentors, the Feather Girls?



The young British soldier was on a four-day leave from the horrendous fighting at Ypres on the Western Front, and arrived home in a uniform crawling with the lice that infested the grim trenches of World War I.

The first thing his mother did was strip it off him to give it a good clean and press. So when Private Harold Carter went to the music hall that night in 1915 for a knees-up and a bit of much-needed light entertainment, he put on his civilian suit.

He was standing in a queue outside when ‘a lady’ - his description, though some might question it - pushed towards him and thrust a white feather into his hand, a symbol of cowardice. Told he was a ‘worm’ and a ‘skunk’ for not doing his duty, he said he left and ‘went home, disgusted’.

Humiliation: A scene from the television drama Downton Abbey in which a young man is accused of cowardice by being presented with a white feather

Carter was a victim of one of the most insidious side-effects of the war fever that gripped Britain between 1914 and 1918. The first episode of the new series of Downton Abbey, on ITV last night, had two of the family servants subjected to this public humiliation.

Although Julian Fellowes’ drama is fiction, such scenes really did happen.



When the war began, recruitment was massive and enthusiastic as millions of young men responded to Lord Kitchener’s poster appeal: ‘Your country needs you’. But not every man rushed to join the colours, so girls brandishing white feathers were organised by a retired sailor, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald, to shame ‘slackers’ into joining up.

Persuasive: The World War One army recruitment poster featuring Lord Kitchener was incredibly effective

The first foray of his Order of the White Feather was on the seafront at Folkestone, where 30 of them pounced on any man not in uniform.



‘Are you deaf or indifferent to your country’s needs?’ the girls demanded to know, before reminding the men that British soldiers were fighting and dying while they took their leisure.

‘Here’s a gift for a brave soldier,’ they said sarcastically as they handed out the feathers. Fuelled by newspaper reports, the movement quickly spread.

The white feather was a potent symbol. Its origin as the mark of a coward came from the defunct ‘sport’ of cock-fighting, but a popular novel of 1902, The Four Feathers, had introduced the idea to a new generation.

In that book by A. E. W. Mason, an officer who resigns from the Army rather than fight with his regiment in the Sudan is sent feathers by brother officers and his fiancee. Their jibes spur him into action to redeem his honour.

Here was a bandwagon for patriots and bullies alike to jump on. And it became more prevalent as the war dragged on, casualty lists lengthened and more cannon fodder was needed for the front line.

Siren voices were always part of the recruiting drives. From music-hall stages, busty burlesque singers belted out, ‘On Sunday I walk out with a Soldier/On Monday I’m taken by a Tar...’



The song went through the days of the week ending with the resounding, ‘But on Saturday I’m willing/If you’ll only take the shilling/To make a man of any one of you.’

Over the top: British troops on the attack during the Battle of the Somme in 1916

The suggestiveness brought choruses of raucous laughter. Here was a not-very-subtle appeal to men to assert their manhood. The white-feather girls were doing the same thing, but in a much more menacing way.

Some said recruiting sergeants worked hand-in-glove with white-feather girls. A 17-year-old was upbraided by two of them in Camden High Street, in North London. As they walked away, a sergeant appeared from the doorway of a drill hall and invited him in.

‘We’ll prove you’re not a coward,’ he reassured the boy, whose pride had been wounded. The next thing the lad knew he’d taken the King’s Shilling and was in khaki.

Some feathers were presented to specific targets. One girl remembered tying one to her uncle’s coat. ‘It was disgraceful that he had failed to enlist,’ she declared, while the writer Compton Mackenzie complained that ‘idiotic young women’ were using them as a means of dumping boyfriends they had tired of.

But generally the feathers were handed out indiscriminately and anonymously, and the girls were often woefully off target.



In the firing line: But for many young men, the horrors of trench warfare were preferable to being branded a coward

Fred Broome had joined up as soon as the war began, convincing a not-very-fussy recruiting sergeant he was 18 when in reality he was 15. He was at Mons and Ypres before being sent back sick from France, at which point his father intervened with his birth certificate and had him discharged.

Fred was walking across Putney Bridge when four girls accosted him with feathers. His explanation that he had already been in the fighting and was still only 16 was laughed at.



‘I felt humiliated,’ he recalled. But their callous treatment worked. He marched straight into a recruitment office, lied about his age again and joined up for the second time.

In the East End of London, girls added insult to injury by using feathers plucked from chickens’ bottoms and letting the recipients know where they had come from.

One soldier, who had returned badly wounded, was on a bus when a woman gave him a white feather to him ‘because you’re a coward’. He showed her his damaged leg and invited her to look for the missing part, ‘lying on a battlefield somewhere’.

For men who stayed at home because they were needed for industry and war work, the embarrassment became so acute that they insisted on having a badge or armband to indicate a legitimate reason not to be in khaki.

But the abuse went unabated. In the East End of London, girls added insult to injury by using feathers plucked from chickens’ bottoms and letting the recipients know where they had come from.

Similar sentiments drove the Active Service League, founded by the formidable Baroness Orczy, author of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Its 20,000 female members pledged not to be seen in the company of any man who had not answered ‘his country’s call’. A small ad in The Times read: ‘Jack, If you are not in khaki by the 20th, I shall cut you dead - Ethel M.’

Who were the women goading men in this way? Some may have been suffragettes. They found their voice campaigning for votes for women and now brandished their girl-power on other matters. Others were war widows and mothers with sons at the front aggrieved that other young men were out of harm’s way.

But it is hard to resist the conclusion that a large contingent were young women enjoying a sense of empowerment the war brought.

Flappers was how some victims described the girls who humiliated them, which, in those days (before its better-known use in the Twenties) denoted what The Times called ‘a young lady who has not yet been promoted to long frocks and the wearing of her hair ‘up’.

In other words, a teenager, sassy and full of herself, a breed not unknown today. Then, as now, they often hunted in packs and can have given little thought to the deadly consequences.

A South London woman recalls her brother being out with a local scout group when he was handed a white feather and told to ‘go and fight’. Deeply embarrassed, he enlisted in the Navy that night, went to sea and was drowned in the battle of Jutland. He was 17.

The grandfather of historian Francis Beckett was exempt from military service because he had three small daughters. But after being ‘white-feathered’ in the street, he volunteered as a rifleman and died of wounds in 1918.

Beckett’s mother, one of those three daughters, never forgave ‘that unknown woman who gave him a white feather, and the thousands of brittle, self-righteous women all over the country who had done the same’.

Girls with white feathers may have believed they were being patriotic. The problem was that few had any idea of the realities of the war they were bullying the country’s young men to join.