He was an officer in The Sherwood Foresters during the First World War and was killed in action in only his second time in the trenches, after he fell down a shaft which had been used to explode a mine under the German lines.

In the winter of 1913–14 he taught for the WEA in London and impressed his students with his sincere interest in the lot of the common man in the early nineteenth century.

His election to the Langton Fellowship in 1911 provided a small income for three years that allowed him to concentrate on that topic rather than teaching, but throughout this time he continued to struggle to repay the money advanced to him by the Board of Education to fund his earlier studies.

Hovell was probably sympathetic to Lamprecht's theory of Kulturgeschichte ("History of Culture") but found his historical ideas idiosyncratic and the students he was asked to teach, uninspired.

He wrote to Thomas Tout that he was generally impressed by the German way of life, but shocked by the hostility to England that he encountered at every turn, despite receiving warm hospitality personally.

"[2] Hovell received basic training at Hornsea and was gazetted to a "Kitchener" battalion of The Sherwood Foresters in August 1915, joining the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment as a second lieutenant.

I thus become owner of the best dug-out in the line, with a bed (four poles and a piece of stretched canvas), a table, and a ceiling ten feet thick.

Tout sought opinions at the university and sent the manuscript to Julius West whose own A history of the Chartist Movement was in preparation and who discovered that his conclusions were broadly the same as those of Hovell.

[7] In an odd coincidence, West also died prematurely, of a complication of influenza and pneumonia in 1918, and his book also had to be completed by another author, in his case J.C. Squire, before being published in 1920.

[citation needed] Tout wrote a preface, an introduction which consists of a biographical sketch of Hovell, and the concluding chapter which took the story from the failure of the charter in 1842 to the last days of Chartism in the 1850s.