“Lavender for Lads”: Smell and Nationalism in the Great War

Abstract

In the Great War, home front schemes in support of wartime causes included the making and transportation of what were called smellies: homemade tokens and commercial gifts that invoked supposedly traditional British scents. For volunteers, this entailed the collection and distribution of homemade lavender and verbena bags as an allegedly effective—and practical—means of aiding those injured at the front. For others, like commercial perfumers, this meant the production of scented commodities like lavender water and eau de Cologne for transport to troops overseas. In both cases, supporters mobilized the symbolic power of perfumed items to promote a fictitious version of rural, white, English life that could allegedly be resumed after the conflict. These campaigns obscured the social, racial, gendered, and material realities of war. What resulted was a profoundly limited definition of British smells and, by extension, their idealized British recipients: white, English-born servicemen from across classes. While perfumed gifts were designed to comfort these select recipients and bring a sense of order to the front, accounts of gifts’ production and reception ultimately reveal fractures—and failures—in the deployment of national smells to order the disordered smellscapes of war.