A lark for the sake of their country tells the tale of the upper and middle-class ‘volunteers’ in the 1926 General Strike in Great Britain. With behaviour derived from their play traditions - the larks, rags, fancy dress parties, and treasure hunts that prevailed at universities and country houses - the volunteers transformed a potential workers’ revolution into festive public display of Englishness. Decades later, collective folk memories about this event continue to define national identity. Based on correspondence and interviews with volunteers and strikers, as well as contemporary newspapers and magazines, novels, diaries, plays, and memoirs, this book recreates the context for the volunteers’ actions. It explores how the upper classes used the strike to assert their ideological right to define Britishness as well as how scholars, novelists, playwrights, diarists, museum curators, local historians, and even a theme restaurant, have continued to recycle the strike to define British identity.

Preface
1. Introduction: folklore, memory, and the volunteers of 1926
2. Building Jerusalem: The General Strike as social drama
3. Social distinctions, social actions among the upper and middle classes
4. Fides est servanda: keeping the faith
5. Images of the volunteers: media versus memory
6. Humours of the Great Strike
7. The volunteers’ farewell: closing rituals, genteel ironies
8. From ethos to mythos: the General Strike and Britishness
9. 1926 and all that . . . : Britishness and the volunteers
Bibliography
Index

Awards won by Rachelle H. Saltzman Winner, 2012 Wayland D. Hand Prize for Outstanding Book in Folklore and History (A lark for the sake of their country)