IN DEFENCE OF THE REALM
WARTIME RESTRICTIONS
This 11 November will be the centenary of the Armistice of World War I – an occasion when our ordinary ancestors took the day off work to celebrate the end of a four-year-long conflict that had irrevocably changed millions of lives. For those members of our families who had remained on the Home Front, the war years would be remembered as a period of darkness, quietude and sobriety, an anxious time in which people kept a watchful eye on the doings of their neighbours to ensure that no-one stepped out of line.
For our ancestors who hadn’t been allowed even the simple pleasure of buying their friends or work colleagues a round of drinks without facing a fine for nearly four years, the Armistice, when it finally came, must have been an immense relief not only because it saw the cessation of hostilities with Germany, but also because it marked the end of a large number of restrictions that had greatly affected the normal workings of domestic life.
Did you know?
Almost a million arrests were made for breaches of DORA during the war years. Our ancestors lived with the anxiety of knowing that punishments ranged from fines and imprisonment to execution
Regulations published in the
Defence of the Realm Manual (5th edition), February 1918. Download the manual to read from the Internet Archive at
https://archive.org/details/defenceofrealmma00grearich