A Popular History of the Great War, Vol. II

Opening

The volume that completes the collection's run of the war's first four years. This is Volume II of the Hammerton Popular History — the Amalgamated Press's red-cloth history — and its year is the one in which a European war became a world one: Extension of the Struggle — 1915.

The Object

Uniform with its fellows: red cloth blocked in black with a heavy field-gun on the front board, the spine gilt-lettered Hammerton at the head and Extension of the Struggle 1915 / Volume 2 at the foot around the rising-sun-and-torch device. The title page repeats the house formula — edited by Sir J. A. Hammerton, “complete in six volumes with about 1000 maps & illustrations,” London, The Fleetway House. Thirty-one chapters of Literary Contents, a List of Plates past sixty images, and a frontispiece of The River Clyde at Gallipoli.

The Editor

As across the set, the editor is Sir John Alexander Hammerton (1871–1949) — the Dictionary of National Biography's “most successful creator of large-scale works of reference in the history of publishing,” knighted in 1932 — turning the war he had chronicled fortnightly for the Amalgamated Press into an affordable retrospective for the interwar household.

Extension of the Struggle

Volume II holds 1915, the year the conflict spread beyond the Western Front. Its chapters cover the Dardanelles and the landings on Gallipoli, through Suvla Bay to the final evacuation; the Second Battle of Ypres, where the Germans first loosed poison gas; the sinking of the Lusitania and the rise of submarine warfare; Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge, Festubert and the Battle of Loos; and the widening diplomacy of the war as Italy joined the Allies and Bulgaria the Central Powers, with Serbia overrun. The plate list — The Sinking of the Lusitania, Gas Attack at “Plug Street” Wood, Anzacs at Gully Beach, Women Munition Makers — catalogues the year the war reached the sea, the air, the factory and the wider world.

The World It Came From

Like its companions, this is popular print culture doing public memory: the war sold volume by volume, bound in bright cloth for the family shelf. It belongs with the collection's Volume I, Volume III and Volume IV of the same set, the Odhams Fifty Amazing Stories of the Great War, and the News Chronicle Gilbert & Sullivan part-work — the interwar Fleet Street machine at work.

This Copy

Honest reading condition — Fair. The red cloth is rubbed and sunned, the spine worn at head and tail, and the paper browned, but the volume is sound and complete with its title page, contents and plate lists. No ownership inscription. From the February 2026 lot of twenty-seven books.

Why It Matters

With this volume the collection now holds four of the six (I, II, III and IV) — an unbroken run from the outbreak in 1914 to the attrition of 1917. Inexpensive individually, together they reconstruct most of the Amalgamated Press's set and stand as a specimen of how interwar Britain remembered the Great War through the mass-market part-work of Sir John Hammerton. Volume II's subject — 1915, the year of Gallipoli, gas and the Lusitania — is the moment the war slipped its European borders and became total.