How the World War I Era Broke Down the British Aristocracy

When World War I erupted in 1914, young aristocrats—many heirs to vast estates—rushed to enlist. Although officers no longer purchased commissions, the British gentry still dominated their ranks.

Trained to lead from the front, junior officers embraced tactics that had worked in earlier wars but proved catastrophic in a newly mechanized era of warfare. “The officers led the charges out of the trenches and into no man’s land because that’s the tactic they’d been trained to do,” says Christopher Warren, vice president and chief curator of the National World War I Museum and Memorial. “But leading from the front was a terrible tactic based on the weaponry being used against them.”

Mowed down by machine guns and long-range artillery, junior officers were often the first to die in battle in the war’s early years. More than 33,000 British officers—many of them scions of aristocratic families—died in combat. The war dead included more than 1,100 former students from the upper-crust enclave of Eton College, some as young as 17.

Low inheritance taxes prior to World War I allowed eldest sons to retain most of the wealth from sprawling estates when patriarchs died. Britain’s richest citizens faced unprecedented taxation, however, with the 1910 passage of the People's Budget. To fund social welfare programs and redistribute wealth, the Liberal government hiked land and inheritance taxes (also called death duties) and hit high-income Britons with a steeply progressive tax. The policy triggered 800,000 estate sales between 1909 and 1914.

The war piled new financial burdens on the wealthy. Standard income tax rates soared from 6 percent in 1914 to 30 percent in 1918, while the number of taxpayers nearly tripled. In 1919, budget added another blow: Death duties on estates valued over 2 million British pounds rose by 40 percent.

For aristocratic families already reeling from battlefield losses, the financial toll proved crushing. Inheritance taxes stripped wealth, and the high cost of maintaining centuries-old country houses became untenable. Many estates were sold off or razed. In 1919 alone, about a million acres in England and Wales hit the market; sales were even greater in 1920. By 1921, the Estates Gazette speculated that one-quarter of England’s land had changed hands since the war’s end.

An even bigger driver than death duties in the estate sales came from tenant farmers buying out their landlords, says Adrian Gregory, author of The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War. Wartime demand for food had swelled farmers’ pockets, while landowners—barred from hiking rents—saw little benefit. “Tenant farmers and their sons were to some extent also protected from conscription,” Gregory says.

As land values spiked, many landlords saw the quickest profit in selling to their tenants, who seized the chance to become owner-farmers. “There was a real shift in land ownership,” Gregory says. “This played into a longer-standing trend where aristocrats and gentry move away from reliance on agriculture into urban property, industry, commerce and professions.”

Before the war, the aristocracy relied on cheap, plentiful labor to operate their vast estates. The wartime mobilization of 6 million men, however, upended the traditional labor market for Britain’s upper classes.

Many male servants marched off to the front, while many women abandoned traditional domestic work for new opportunities on the home front. They staffed munitions factories and filled roles vacated by men serving in the trenches—often with better pay and working conditions than in the old country estates. After the armistice, many soldiers reclaimed their old posts, but women encountered fewer postwar barriers to employment than before. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 made it illegal to exclude women from jobs because of gender, ensuring that the wartime shift left a lasting legacy.

“Before World War I, domestic service was the number one employer of young and unmarried women,” Warren says. “After the war, many didn’t want to return. It was six days a week. It was low-paid, backbreaking work.” Those who stayed demanded higher wages. The exodus of women from domestic service left estates chronically understaffed, hastening their decline into disrepair.

For centuries, the British gentry wielded political power through wealth, land ownership and hereditary seats in the House of Lords. That grip began to loosen after unelected landowners vehemently opposed the People’s Budget, prompting the 1911 Parliament Act, which stripped the Lords of most veto powers. The law also authorized salaries for members of Parliament, enabling middle-class professionals to replace aristocrats in government’s top ranks.

Landowners’ political power shrank further with the passage of the Representation of the People Act in 1918, which extended the vote to all men over 21 and women over 30 who met property or educational requirements. The law nearly tripled the size of the electorate from 7.7 million to 21.4 million. A decade later, full suffrage came when all women over the age of 21 gained the franchise.

These reforms empowered the working class. Trade unions, which gained greater bargaining power during the war, doubled their membership from 4 million in 1914 to 8 million in 1920. The Labour Party, bolstered by its inclusion in the wartime Cabinet of 1916 gained legitimacy and emerged as the chief rival to the Conservative Party—displacing the Liberal Party and further sidelining the aristocracy.