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Private Godfrey, The Four Feathers, & Britain's Coward Shame

The History Chap

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Chris Green is The History Chap; telling stories that brings the past to life.

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You know him as Private Godfrey — the gentle, softly-spoken medic of Dad's Army, the man who made the tea.

But the actor who played him, Arnold Ridley, was a real Somme veteran, so badly wounded that his left hand never fully recovered. And in Torquay in 1917, a woman stopped him in the street and handed him a white feather — branding him a coward.

Ridley was not alone.
In this video I tell the forgotten story of the Order of the White Feather — the First World War campaign in which women handed white feathers to men not in uniform, publicly shaming them into enlisting.

The white feather is best known today from A.E.W. Mason's classic 1902 novel The Four Feathers, filmed seven times, from the celebrated 1939 Korda version to the 2002 film starring Heath Ledger and Kate Hudson. But the real campaign was older, stranger and far darker than any film.

It began on the seafront at Folkestone on 30 August 1914, orchestrated by a retired admiral, Charles Penrose-Fitzgerald, who had long argued that Britain's volunteer system could never match the conscript millions of France and Germany.

Within weeks it had spread across the country, taken up by figures as different as the novelist Baroness Orczy, the leading anti-suffragist Mrs Humphry Ward, and — astonishingly — the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst and her WSPU.

I explore the bitter irony at its heart: women without the vote shaming men who, in many cases, had no vote either.

But the campaign struck men it was never meant to touch. Wounded veterans. Men in reserved occupations. Boys too young to serve. And in one extraordinary case, George Samson — awarded the Victoria Cross for his courage aboard the River Clyde at V Beach, Gallipoli — handed a white feather in his own home town of Carnoustie.

For some men, the shame proved fatal.

Finally I return to Arnold Ridley, and the remarkable Dad's Army episode "Branded" — which echoed his own wartime experience more closely than viewers ever knew.

How did the government act to protect the men being wrongly shamed? And why did the white feather all but vanish when war came again in 1939?

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:00 White Feathers
1:41 The Four Feathers
2:43 World War 1
3:56 An Angry Admiral
5:32 Order of the White Feather
7:24 Suffragettes & White Feathers
9:17 Out of Control
11:23 VC Hero Targetted
13:37 Suicides
14:20 Government Acts
16:44 The Silber Badge
17:22 Arnold Ridley
19:51 "Dad's Army"

#dadsarmy #britishhistory #militaryhistory #fourfeathers

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thehistorychap

My name is Chris Green and I love to share stories from British history. Not just because they are interesting but because, good or bad, they have shaped the world we live in today.

History should not be stuffy or a long list of dates or kings & queens.
So rather than lectures or Youtube animations, I tell stories that bring the past to life.

My aim is to be chat as if I were having a coffee or meal with you. Jean in Maryland, USA recently wrote: "Chris, is the history teacher I wish I had at school!"

Just for the record, I do have a history degree in Medieval & Modern history from the University of Birmingham and am a member of the Royal Historical Society.
I am also a member of the Victorian Military Society, the Anglo Zulu War Society and the Military Historical Society.

Disclaimer: All opinions and comments expressed in the 'Comments' section do not reflect the opinions of Chris Green Communication Ltd t/a The History Chap. All opinions and comments should contribute to the dialogue. Chris Green Communication Ltd does not condone written attacks, insults, racism, sexism, extremism, or otherwise questionable comments or material in the 'Comments' section, and reserves the right to delete any comment violating this rule or to block any poster from the channel.

The History Chap is a trading name of Chris Green Communication Ltd, a company registered in England & Wales (Co No: 05025587)

20 Comments

@yugforks-p4c 4 months ago

women handing out white feathers knowing that they themselves would never be asked to go to war !

@borisacat9182 4 months ago

I was told that my grandad was upset in WW2 when he got a white feather in the post. He had a whole life full pension having been gassed at the Somme. He said he woke on the side of a mass grave. Someone had noticed he wasn't quite dead. He was 17.

@horsterer77 4 months ago

It goes to show, there were self-righteous morons even before social media. But at least those vultures didn't have keyboards.

@UnclearFizzyCyst 4 months ago

My Mum's Dad was shot in the hand, he made the hospital train 5 mins before it left (2 a day). He rather let the side down by not agreeing to have his hand amputated there and then. He spent two years recovering but his hand was saved. Back in the world again he was harassed by these women until the govt. issued a special medal for the invalids to wear because it was causing friction at home.

@welshwarrior5263 4 months ago

Some people really boil my piss. War is dreadful and I have suffered constantly since then. No person should ever go through that, and no one should be humiliated for not wanting to join up for the psychopathic pen pushers who will have no thought in sending thousands of people to their deaths while they are safe behind a desk.

@snakes3425 4 months ago

So what earned a white feather for cowardice: being mustered out after being blinded by poison gas, cut to ribbons by shrapnel, and machine gun fire, hospitalized from sickness or wounds, shell-shock from watching your comrades cut to pieces, spending leave time with your family and friends, and not wearing your uniform in public, being too young, or too old to enlist, being unfit for service.
Seems to me Admiral Fitzgerald and his supporters were the ones who really deserved the white feathers, not the men being sent into a meat grinder, and the men and women working themselves to death in factories and tending the sick and wounded.

@tommytraddles 4 months ago

The Dad’s Army episode where Godfrey’s story is revealed is one of the best in the series. Godfrey is a wonderful character superbly played by Arnold Ridley.

@Henreys 4 months ago

The Silver War Badge is the detail most historians skip entirely. That the government needed an official emblem just to protect wounded veterans from civilian shaming reveals a profound moral failure within the home front.

@trevorpom 4 months ago

Who were these women to make judgements on a mans' courage while having no requirement to prove their own? Disgusting.

@zyzor 4 months ago

I’d make a public apppeal that any woman carrying a white feather shall have her nose cut off, she can’t smell a coward nor a hero.

@richardbradley2802 4 months ago

The casual cruelty of those women - unbelievable!

@stuartwhelan233 4 months ago (edited)

Disgusting way to treat men back then to quick to judge considering women didn't have to fight . Thanks for bringing that history to light Chris a subject l know very little about..

@robertjordan3901 4 months ago

William Dunstan VC of the AIF was also famously given a white feather in St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia in 1916. He'd been severely wounded at Gallipoli earning his Victoria Cross.

@jackdelaney6633 4 months ago

nothing like young priviledged women to be the most deranged in following an ideology

@cdobeson 4 months ago (edited)

I remember hearing about the VC chap getting his white feather. God bless. I’d have had some very choice words to say. Imagine being a woman wanting your boys and men to go and get maimed and slaughtered. Shameful. My mother cried when I told her I was joining the Army.

@lauriestlyon8773 4 months ago

My grandfather served in WW1. He came home on leave in uniform and jumped I to a canal to rescue someone who was drowning. He went home and swapped his uniform for dry civvies.
He then went out and while waiting for a bus a woman came up and gave him a white feather.
My brother has the wallet he carried when he went back to the front. In it is the white feather, a German flag he aquired and two pennies bent in half along with the bullet that put a hole in the wallet and bent the pennies!
He survived, and in WW2 was a firewatcher on the top of his office in the City of London. My father often went with him when he was serving as an Air Cadet, acting as a messenger for the wardens and/or the Home Guard.

@TheCatBilbo 4 months ago

People are so quick to judge, so keen to attack others, that they can trip over themselves in the process. No thought, no pause to consider - just bullies.

@bob23301 4 months ago

My grandfather who was born in 1900 and lived until 1989 told me a story once about his friend who was shot in the leg and was sent home, but 3 weeks after arriving home he was given a white feather as he went down the road on crutches, and 2 weeks later his foot had to be removed due to gangrene......so yes these women just blindly literally labelling men cowards for no other reason other than they were not dying in a trench in another country.