The Voluntary Aid Detachment provided basic care in support of trained nurses. They tended to come from upper middle class families. The cartoon tramp clearly feels outclassed. Many well-known women had served in the VAD. Vera Britain was the most famous. It was she who wrote that famous W.W.1 book Testament of Youth.
Various other years have contained burglary jokes but for 1918 there have not been any. This is the sole instance of a tramp joke.
During World War Two some jokers used to say that V.A.D stood for ‘victims always die’. I am sure that it was said with a twinkle of the eye.
Peter is trying to understand what is happening in his world. He has been taught to pray. He wrestles with the morality of praying for peace when he is really interested in eating an apple.
Again the issue is that a factory worker has more disposal income than a middle class woman customer at the fishmonger’s. £14 takes some getting though. Does he really intend to spend it all? This seems unlikely though the readers of Punch might well have wanted to think so. After the peace things would soon return to ‘normal’.
State of the art submarines in 1918 would hardly be a suitable place for Grandma to visit however brief the stay. I would imagine that the point of the joke is that Grandma thinks that you need to hold your breath all the time that the sub is under water. That wouldn’t work, would it?
The meaning is quite clear. Has the Canadian soldier been a war casualty or has he (or she) just moved on? Is the kangaroo the best symbol for Australia? The Australian flag features the Southern Cross – a constellation only seen from south of the Equator.
Wartime rationing has been a consistent theme in 1918. Mabel understands the issue. How much ham to balance against the egg? Weighing up the balance seems quite bizarre to us but this cartoon suggests that this was quite normal at the time. The persons present in the cartoon are all upper middle class yet they need to make calculations like this. That, of course, is the point of rationing.
The profiteer’s wife shows all the defects of her status: badly dressed, badly spoken and richer than she ought to be. Even until well after the war profiteers continued to feature in the pages of Punch. The message was always the same: they ‘ought’ not be so wealthy. They don’t know how to behave. The upper middle class readers of Punch know better.
I assume that this reflects the end of the war. Hating all things German, including German music, had been the order of the day. This cartoon suggests that this hatred is not easily turned off.
I have a problem. I can’t show Punch cartoons which is the whole point of this thread. Each link to the hosting site, photobucket, isn’t showing up. When I click on the link I just get the message saying
It then suggests that I clear my cookies. I have done that. No success. Then I switched off and on again. Still no success. Can anyone suggests what I need to do? I am completely stuck.
Well that’s a shame, and I hope you can sort it out.
I don’t know much about Photobucket, but is there a limit to how much you can upload to it? Is it possible you have exceeded a limit and, if so, perhaps you can delete some of the older pictures.
