Order of the White Feather

In August 1914, Admiral Charles Penrose Fitzgerald founded the Order of the White Feather. (1) He deputized thirty women in Folkestone to give out white feathers to any men not in uniform. The concept was based on the old cock-fighting lore that a cockerel with a white feather in its tail is a coward. (2)

With the support of leading writers such as Mary Ward and Emma Orczy, the organisation encouraged women to give out white feathers to young men who had not joined the armed forces. Lord Kitchener gave his support to the campaign: "The women could play a great part in the emergency by using their influence with their husbands and sons to take their proper share in the country's defence, and every girl who had a sweetheart should tell men that she would not walk out with him again until he had done his part in licking the Germans." (3)

The Daily Mail enthusiastically reported the activities of the Order of the White Feather, hoping the gesture "would shame every young slacker" into enlisting. "The generally female white feather distributors achieved much notoriety by frequently misjudging their targets, stories of men on leave, wounded, or in reserved occupations being handed down these odious symbols abound." (4)

One young woman remembers her father, Robert Smith, being given a feather on his way home from work: "That night he came home and cried his heart out. My father was no coward, but had been reluctant to leave his family. He was thirty-four and my mother, who had two young children, had been suffering from a serious illness. Soon after this incident my father joined the army." Frederick Broome was only fifteen years of age, when he "accosted by four girls who gave me three white feathers." (5)

Army Recruitment Poster

The government became concerned when women began presenting state employees with white feathers. It was suggested to Reginald McKenna, the Home Secretary, that these women should be arrested for "conduct likely to disrupt the police". McKenna refused but he did arrange for state employees to be issued with badges testifying that they were serving "King and Country".

Although he was a serving soldier, the writer, Compton Mackenzie, complained about the activities of the Order of the White Feather. He argued that these "idiotic young women were using white feathers to get rid of boyfriends of whom they were tired". The pacifist, Fenner Brockway, claimed that he received so many white feathers he had enough to make a fan. (6)

Another man was given a white feather on the same day he had been presented with the Victoria Cross at Buckingham Palace. (7) However, Lucy Noakes has defended these women by explaining that their actions were "more expressive of the desire amongst many women to be doing something, anything to help the war effort, rather than as evidence of a widespread jingoism amongst the female population." (8)

James Lovegrove, was only sixteen when he received his first white feather: "On my way to work one morning a group of women surrounded me. They started shouting and yelling at me, calling me all sorts of names for not being a soldier! Do you know what they did? They struck a white feather in my coat, meaning I was a coward. Oh, I did feel dreadful, so ashamed." He went to the recruiting office and at first he was rejected for being too young and too small: "You see, I was five foot six inches and only about eight and a half stone. This time he made me out to be about six feet tall and twelve stone, at least, that is what he wrote down. All lies of course - but I was in!".

Private Harold Carter was on leave from the Western Front. "On the Saturday I went to a music hall in civilian clothes and as I lined up outside a lady came along and put a white feather into my hand. I looked at it and felt disgusted, but there wasn't much I could do about it. I felt small enough over the white feather incident outside, but as I went into the gallery a chap came out in naval uniform and said that no girl should be sitting with a chap unless he was in uniform." (9)

"The White Feather: A Sketch of English Recruiting", Collier’s Weekly (1914)

William Brooks was also given a white feather at the age of sixteen. "Once war broke out the situation at home became awful, because people did not like to see men or lads of army age walking about in civilian clothing, or not in uniform of some sort, especially in a military town like Woolwich. Women were the worst. They would come up to you in the street and give you a white feather, or stick it in the lapel of your coat. A white feather is the sign of cowardice, so they meant you were a coward and that you should be in the army doing your bit for king and country.... In 1915 at the age of seventeen I volunteered under the Lord Derby scheme. Now that was a thing where once you applied to join you were not called up at once, but were given a blue armband with a red crown to wear. This told people that you were waiting to be called up, and that kept you safe, or fairly safe, because if you were seen to be wearing it for too long the abuse in the street would soon start again."

James Cutmore had attempted to volunteer for the British Army in 1914 but was rejected because he was short-sighted. "But in 1916, as he walked home to south London from his office, a woman gave him a white feather.... He enlisted the next day. By that time, they cared nothing for short sight. They just wanted a body to stop a shell, which Rifleman James Cutmore duly did in February 1918, dying of his wounds on March 28. My mother was nine, and never got over it. In her last years, in the 1980s, her once fine brain so crippled by dementia that she could not remember the names of her children, she could still remember his dreadful, lingering, useless death. She could still talk of his last leave, when he was so shell-shocked he could hardly speak and my grandmother ironed his uniform every day in the vain hope of killing the lice." (10)