Zeppelin Nights

As part of its 125th anniversary celebrations Morley College is reviving the Victorian 'Penny Lectures' which led to the setting up of the college.

The first is delivered by Professor Jerry White.

For most of us the very thought of ‘London at war’ means just one thing – the Blitz. That extraordinary drama so dominates the idea of wartime London that it is hard to imagine the city and its people affected in any special way by the war of 1914-18. The truth is much more interesting.

From the moment war was declared at 11pm on Tuesday 4 August 1914 London became the hub of an ever-enlarging leviathan of total war. Londoners almost without exception, were caught up body and soul in its maw.

In this Penny Lecture, Professor White explores how the war utterly dominated the city’s life, changing everything – not just for those four-and-a-quarter years of the most destructive war that human history had ever witnessed but for generations after. Even in the twenty-first century Londoners still live with many of the consequences of the First World War.