Paul Rambali, a music journalist during the 1970s and 1980s, explained that popular music had ‘suggested a range of possibilities in life that nobody ever told me at school nor my parents.’1 For young people like Rambali, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s popular music was the most significant cultural form that entertained, informed and influenced them. The music press was where, every week, they found out what was going on and why it mattered. Any young person with a small amount of disposable income could walk to almost any newsagents in Britain and find a copy of a weekly music paper – one of the so-called inkies due to their cheap printing methods which left ink on the readers’ fingers. Even if someone did not have the money to buy a copy, it seemed that music press readers were a generous sort and would share: the National Readership Survey recorded that over nine people read each copy which translated into a potential readership, combining those who read the Melody Maker, New Musical Express (NME) and Sounds, of around 3,000,000 people per week.2 These papers, made in metropolitan London – the hub of the music industry and the press, offered a window into popular music, the people who made it and other fans. Copies piled up in bedrooms, living rooms, university and sixth form common rooms telling not only a story of the happenings in music, but that of social change and the way we as a society understood youth.

Among the dramatic events that marked the start of the First World War, British political and military decisions and actions are particularly well documented and researched. These well-known events include the complex political balancing act conducted by Prime Minister Herbert Asquith in the crisis of July-August 1914, in his successful attempt to minimise resignations from his Cabinet and revolts within his Liberal Party, and to lead both Parliament and the country united into the war. They also include the creation before the war and the deployment in August 1914 of the British Army’s Expeditionary Force (re-designated the British Expeditionary Force or BEF before the end of the month, which is how it is usually known), and the confirmation of Field Marshal Sir John French as its Commander-in-Chief. Equally well-known is the appointment of Field Marshal Earl Kitchener to the post of Secretary of State for War on 5 August, his call for volunteers to create a new mass British Army, and the unexpectedly large popular response. Yet another well-known story is the BEF’s first battles at Mons and le Cateau, the successful retreat from Mons, and the decision to turn the BEF to participate in the decisive Battle of the Marne in September. Most accounts that follow the British military story that far (and many do not, preferring to stop with the first declarations for war), also acknowledge the importance of the Amiens Dispatch (sometimes called the Mons Dispatch), a sensational account of the battles of Mons and le Cateau published in a special Sunday edition of The Times newspaper on 30 August, which also features in most accounts of British propaganda in the war, and of the British Home Front. It is often stated as fact both that Kitchener’s personal call to arms was the principal motivator of British military volunteerism in 1914 (often if incorrectly called ‘the rush to the colours’), and that it was Kitchener’s personal animosity towards war reporters that largely determined British policy towards the national press’s reporting of the BEF’s actions in this period. It is the purpose of this present account to assemble a narrative chronology of these events, so revealing the critical interaction between politics and strategy, military operations and battles, social and cultural responses at home including volunteerism, and both the nature and apparatus of British propaganda.

The year 1915 was a difficult one for the British Army. The Official Historian, Sir James Edmonds, lamented that the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of 1915 consisted of ‘partly trained’ officers and men who suffered ‘awful slaughter and pitiably small results’ on the Western Front. This was demonstrated at the Battle of Loos, when the novice 21st and 24th Divisions were prematurely committed to action with disastrous consequences. Edmonds acknowledged the courage of these formations but was critical of their lack of field craft and felt that the exertions demanded of them were ‘small as compared with the original five divisions of professional soldiers of the B.E.F.’

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. On the back of recent and significant new debates on the use of history within business and management studies, we consider the perception of historians as being anti-theory and of having methodological shortcomings; and business and management scholars displaying insufficient attention to historical context and privileging of certain social science methods over others. These are explored through an examination of three subjects: strategy, international business and entrepreneurship. We propose a framework for advancing the use of history within business and management studies more generally through greater understanding of historical perspectives and methodologies.