I recently made my first visit to Dublin. Being invited to workshops is always nice, and when you get to go somewhere new that’s even better. So this was a real treat for me. It must be a treat for every historian – it’s a city just dripping with history.

Even just on the coach coming into the city, a particular building grabbed my attention. There was just something about it, I was sure I knew it. When I looked it up, the building was the General Post Office that played such a crucial role in the 1916 Easter Rising. What I hadn’t seen from across the road was the bullet holes still visible in the columns.

But the treat for me wasn’t just being in a city of history and Guinness. I spent Friday at an excellent workshop organised by Trinity College, Dublin’s Dr Sean Lucey with Oxford Brookes University’s Professor Virginia Crossman on the theme of ‘healthcare, voluntarism and the state in twentieth-century Ireland and Britain’.

The workshop was hosted by the Centre for Contemporary Irish History and was opened by a few words from its director, Professor Eunan O’Halpin. His sardonic comments on the lack of job opportunities and how it’s only going to get worse had those of us looking for our first post-doc positions laughing as a better option than crying. And then he made the interesting point that comparative approaches are especially important for understanding the history of Irish voluntarism, as we hope to move beyond the idea that papacy explains all failures in care services.

Then on to the papers. There was a range of papers covering British and Irish cases, voluntary and public healthcare, physical and mental health history.

Dr Martin Gorsky from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine gave the keynote address on ‘Voluntary hospital histories: questions, methods and findings’. This gave a comprehensive picture the work of himself and others in the past decade and more, and the various conceptual approaches that have been taken. This gave a great introduction to the British research for an overwhelmingly Irish audience – giving them a platform for comparison as we came on to a series of papers focusing on Ireland.

Dr Ciara Breathnach of the University of Limerick spoke on the Irish history of public health nursing. This was a gap in public provision that was filled by a voluntary network of primarily Anglo-Irish middle-class women under the leadership of Lady Rachel Dudley from 1904. The most interesting aspect of this for me was the way these women were able to occupy a domestic space from which medical professionals were often excluded. This led to a debate during questions on different maternal mortality rates in urban and rural areas. It will be interesting to see where research on that side leads. Dr Breathnach suggested that the depth of poverty in the rural west of Ireland reversed the trends identified by Irvine Loudon.

Dr Oonagh Walsh from University College Cork spoke on the history of Irish District Asylum system and what would today be called intellectual disability in Ireland. Dr Walsh emphasised that this system only treated those deemed curable. Others, including the ‘tranquilly demented’, ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’ and epileptics were largely treated in the workhouses. She discussed the various influences on the Irish system, including British legislation such as the nineteenth-century Dangerous Lunacy Acts, an Irish religious dimension, and a unique legislative system that associated mental ill health with criminality.

Dr Sean Lucey’s paper explored the mixed economy of healthcare in early twentieth-century Ireland. Where Dr Gorsky’s paper had outlined the situation in Britain, Dr Lucey offered us some points for comparison. For example, he distinguished the various types of hospital service provider at the time. Here the public assistance hospitals developing in the 1920s seem to be rather like those former poor law municipal hospitals appropriated by local authorities in Britain in the 1930s. However there were ways in which Ireland was notably different such as the semi-voluntary county hospitals. He went on to a detailed discussion of the place of payment in these different types of hospitals.

That led on nicely to my paper on payment in the British voluntary hospitals. Around the beginning of the twentieth century a number of factors including greater technical capacity and demand for services as well as difficult economic times led the hospitals to turn increasingly to payment from patients. I looked at the various types of payments that operated at the time, emphasising that most provision continued to be focused on working-class patients, while middle-class patients were excluded from free or subsidised admission and could only use the voluntary hospitals on a commercial basis. These private provisions never took over the voluntary hospitals as they did in the US, but remained marginal. The final part of my paper looked the situation in Ireland, or really Dublin – where payment was more common.

Professors Virginia Crossman of Oxford Brookes University and Greta Jones of the University of Ulster led a roundtable discussion at the end of the day. One question that rolled over from the two payment papers was how much we should be comparing British and Irish situations, or alternatively looking at Dublin and London as different from the rest of Ireland and the rest of Britain. Dr Breathnach’s paper had also raised urban/rural distinctions, while Dr Walsh left us thinking about Anglo-Irish networks, both of policy and care.

Professor Crossman widened out the discussion, saying the papers had made her think about the frameworks for how change takes place and how we think of and analyse that change. While Professor Jones asked some more specific questions, such as what the impact of the 1911 National Insurance Act had been in Ireland. There were, she said, many topics much discussed in the British historiography, where we know very little about the Irish experience.

In last month’s VAHS blog ‘Voluntary sector archives: A hidden casualty of the cuts?’ Georgina Brewis pointed to the threat posed to charity records by financial cuts and more practical considerations of space. While the full impact of the financial and practical difficulties affecting charity archives is yet to be felt, it appears that many records of historical interest available (at least in theory) to earlier researchers of voluntary action may not be at the disposal of future scholars.

At a time when ‘Big Society’ is at the heart of the government’s political rhetoric and stimulates new work amongst historians exploring previous incarnations of voluntary action, an issue discussed by George Campbell Gosling’s blog, researchers will require an ever more resourceful approach when carrying out research. This blog highlights the potential usefulness of locally available business archives to the researchers of voluntary action.

© Teesside Archives

In my own experience, I have found Teesside Archives’ British Steel Collection a fertile resource for exploring the role Middlesbrough’s iron and steel manufacturers played in the wider community through philanthropy. The wide-ranging character of voluntary action, responses to poverty and cyclical trade depression, the role of philanthropic elite networks and the mechanisms involved in decisions to support voluntary movements can all be better understood through scrutiny of the minute books, log books, annual reports and even photographic collections of the various firms.

At a most basic level, the minute books and annual reports provide data on the causes supported by the companies and the amount of money or type of support given to various enterprises. Bodies supported ranged from churches, hospitals, schools and sports clubs to civilising institutions such as the Cleveland Literary and Philosophical Society, Constantine College and Middlesbrough Boys’ Club. The archives reveal examples of partnership between the municipal authority and voluntary associations as seen in support of the town’s Guild of Help and Juvenile Organisations Committee. Moreover, the variety of action taken in response to temporary issues can also be gauged, with war-time donations and subscriptions having included donations to the Zeppelin Raid Compensation Fund in the mining districts and contributions to ‘the fund being raised in London for the relief of the Belgian wounded and sick’.

© Teesside Archives

Company minute books also provide an insight into the mechanisms involved in deciding whether to support an appeal, an area inevitably not covered in the surviving minutes of the small local charities involved (of which many of the records are incomplete or lost in their entirety). Minute books detail how individuals or groups made the decision to support a cause, recording instances where it was considered ‘unnecessary to make a grant’ and even providing examples of directors and chairman debating whether to support a voluntary venture organised by their own wives and daughters, as occurred in the case of Sir Hugh Bell and Lady Florence Bell.

Today, as increased emphasis is placed on voluntary financial support of those institutions and organisations serving the community, business records also serve as a warning against an over-reliance on such practices. Just as economic decline has threatened charitable contributions by corporations in recent years, the impact of strife on charitable support by firms in the inter-war manufacturing town can be found amidst the various steel companies’ accounts and directors meeting records. For instance, steel manufacturer Bolckow Vaughan’s decline in the mid 1920s coupled with distress in the locality, which had seen the firm’s £1000 allocated for ‘religious and charitable institutions’ having ‘almost been exhausted’, led to the directors agreeing only to ‘pay the more urgent of the annual donations’. Similarly, the post-crash depression influenced rival firm Dorman Long’s outlook on giving. As the main financial contributors to the Juvenile Organisations Committee and Boys’ Club, the firm wrote to both bodies informing them that ‘subscriptions at their present level must not be counted upon if more general support was not forthcoming’.

Business records have much to offer the researcher of voluntary action in both establishing the extent and nature of community support in previous decades and in providing an insight into the networks and mechanisms at play where ‘charity’ is concerned. Of course such records merely represent a snapshot of philanthropic engagement and are likely to have only limited relevance to those interested in voluntary action beyond the immediate locale. Thus it is vital that both business and charity archives are not sacrificed as a result of the cuts currently faced across public, private and voluntary sectors and instead can be used to complement one another by future generations of historians.

In July 2011 the British Records Association / Charity Archives and Records Management Group (CHARM) had to cancel a training day on charity archives for of lack of registrations. The reported reasons were that charities and archivists are currently so pushed there is virtually no money or time to attend networking events or training days. As the Vice Chair of the British Records Association Julia Sheppard notes, ‘it is ironic really as the day was designed to address some of those issues raised by such problems faced by the charitable sector’.

One of the earliest causes which the Voluntary Action History Society (founded in 1991) took up was the case of charity archives. It conducted a survey of several hundred voluntary organisations and drew up ambitious plans to launch a new voluntary action archive, to be housed at the then University of North London, which would take in the papers of organisations unable to look after these for themselves and open access to researchers. At the time, the suggestion met with support and approval from colleagues across the voluntary sector, although ultimately a failed Lottery funding application put an end to the idea. Valuable work was done more recently by the DANGO project at Birmingham University in creating a database of archives of post-1945 NGOs. It is also welcome news that the National Archives is currently preparing some new guidance for small and medium organisations, much of which will be particularly relevant for the third sector. Philip Gale, working on this project at the National Archives, says a key problem is the ‘very diverse network of external archive repositories that makes it difficult for a charity to easily identify an institution that might be interested in receiving their archives.’

I know only too well how financial cuts can threaten the records of even the largest national charities. In 2010/11, faced with large cuts to its strategic partnership funding from the Office of Civil Society, the national infrastructure agency Volunteering England needed to reduce the costs of housing its archives and papers off site. With the shredders menacing, I gained the support of CEO Justin Davis Smith, to start a project to preserve the collection and make it available to researchers. In March 2011 the Volunteering England Collection was transferred to the London School of Economics Archives. This important collection, with papers dating from the Aves Commission of 1966-69, is now housed in ideal archive conditions, preserved for the long term and open to researchers, while Volunteering England retains overall copyright.

All this was achieved at no cost to the charity, apart from expenses for a PhD student volunteer – Anjelica Finnegan from Southampton University – whose hard work in helping to create a rough catalogue of the collection was invaluable. Another casualty of the cuts was the Volunteering England library, collected since the 1970s and containing bequests from leading figures in the history of volunteering including Alec Dickson, founder of volunteering charities VSO and CSV.

Understandably with daily news of public and private sector job losses, devastating cuts to funding for social care and pensions, and the highest youth and graduate unemployment in a generation, the fate of the records and papers of voluntary associations seems the last area of concern. But in the voluntary sector, we forget our history at our peril. Not least, such archives contain valuable stories of the resilience of voluntary organisations in past recessions, their roles in alleviating subsequent poverty and hardship and accounts of the often troubled voluntary sector-government relationship. The Volunteering England Collection, for example, contains important papers of the Drain Commission which drew up guidelines to manage relations between trade unions and volunteers during the industrial disputes of the 1970s.

There is currently strong research interest in the history of voluntary organisations and in volunteering, fundraising, campaigning and activism. The advent of the Big Society concept has encouraged a range of scholars to seek to demonstrate that there has always been a Big Society, even as they have shied away from the idea of letting politicians dictate the terms of the debate, as George Campbell Gosling argued in the last VAHS blog post. Indeed there are several books and articles in press that address the history of the Big Society. Yet I have heard numerous reports of large national voluntary organisations struggling to keep hold of their papers, let alone open or maintain access to these for researchers. What then of the papers of the smaller, local and volunteer-run organisations which make up our diverse voluntary sector? What about the related papers of individuals and movements housed precariously in lofts, basements and garages? Now, more than ever before, is the time for all those involved in using or preserving the papers of voluntary organisations to come together to help ensure their survival.

Have you ever noticed that when politicians are asked ‘What is the big society?’ they tend to begin their answer ‘The big society is about…’? The term was coined by the Prime Minister’s media guru, Steve Hilton, and it has intelligent and eloquent supporters including Jesse Norman and Phillip Blond. Yet, for all the relaunches, answering that simple question seems to be an endless struggle.

In the Commons debate on the topic in February 2011, various MPs offered contrasting and sometimes contradictory definitions. The big society was said to be a cover for Tory cuts, a revival of civil society as an alternative to the nanny state, by Jon Cruddas a welcome return to thinking about rights and responsibilities, by Paul Flynn ‘a millionaire’s view of helping society’, and perhaps most bizarrely by Charlie Elphicke a solution for the fear of being sued stopping someone jumping in a river to save a drowning child.

Part of the difficulty is that the big society is two things at once. It is both social commentary and political agenda, both description and prescription.

David Cameron has described the big society agenda as having three strands: social action, public service reform and community empowerment. The debates around the best way to approach or support these three will not be settled on this or any other blog. Furthermore, as historians, it is not our place to support or oppose them – at least not in our research and teaching.

What we should do, however, is recognise that they are part of a longer trend, and one that has defined much of British politics and governance in recent decades. The 1960s and 1970s saw the onset of widespread disillusionment with the postwar settlement that had not abolished poverty and could not guarantee prosperity. A simple explanation (perhaps too simple) took hold: the state had failed because too much was asked of it.

The 1978 report of the Wolfenden Committee on the Future of Voluntary Organisations brought this into focus and proposed a greater role in future for the private and voluntary sectors. It was an agenda that sat well with Mrs Thatcher, but it was not a narrowly Thatcherite one. We saw this, for example, in New Labour’s attitude of ‘partnership’ with what it called the ‘third sector’.

In the past three decades this has been the direction of travel: away from statist provision, with ever greater networks and contracts for the private and voluntary sector to provide public services. Historians and students of modern Britain should be as aware of this trend as they are of the growth of public welfare in the early-mid twentieth century.

This is the latest chapter in the history of the British welfare state. Despite the recent PR disasters of the AHRC, this is a major theme for researchers wanting to understand this area of Britain’s recent history and current political and social landscape. The real problem is not the use of one or another phrase, but letting the politicians define the debate.

Steve Hilton coining the term ‘big society’ so David Cameron could talk about it without risking his detoxification of the Conservative Party is a footnote in this story. However, we should not shy away from the term. We should bring the phrase and the debate into our discussions of recent British history and society, not least in teaching. The place of voluntarism within the governance of this country is a major political debate. If history graduates are not able to understand and engage with it critically, then who?

By entering the discussion on the big society, we can place it within this trend away from statism in recent decades. It is only once that is done that we can challenge the ahistoricism of the big society commentary. Here we can follow the leads of the University of Birmingham’s post-1945 NGO research group that civic participation has increased in recent years, and Pat Thane who has made the case the case that “there has always been a ‘big society’”.

For as well as the political agenda, the big society is a social comment – and one that is heavily value-laden. As historians we will see a resonance with Alexis de Tocqueville’s argument that civil association is an essential element of a functioning democracy. However, the description is poorly defined, despite Cameron’s contribution that he wants to see ‘communities with oomph’.

What is not clear is whether the Cameroons want to revive some past golden age of voluntary action or whether they think there never was one and therefore want to create it. Either is certain to make historians shuffle uncomfortably in their chairs. As Lawrence Black has noted, Anthony Crosland was active in the co-operative movement even while he said the following in 1956:

“We do not want the entire population to ‘participate’ or feel responsible for all the world’s ills … constantly attending meetings. An evening, for the ordinary citizen, is something which should be spent at home or with friends, private and quietly drinking. An active minority of 3 per cent is quite sufficient. Let the rest of us cultivate our gardens.”

Despite the unwillingness of most academics to engage with the topic of the big society, there has been an impressive amount of quality work in recent years that undermines the idea that civil society was crowded out by the rise of the welfare state. The Voluntary Action History Society’s seminars, and the podcasts of them, are an excellent starting point for anyone interested in this growing body of work.