This April saw the European Social Science and History Conference come to Glasgow. The topics covered by speakers were diverse, but there were two panels that especially caught my eye. One was on co-operatives and the other on workhouses. They raised some interesting issues that resonate with the work of VAHS researchers and might be of interest to readers of this blog.

The first panel was chaired by Northumbria University’s Nicole Robertson, author of The Cooperative Movement and Communities in Britain, 1914-1960, with Leeds University’s Martin Purvis as a discussant. The speakers were University of Central Lancaster’s David Stewart and Angela Whitecross, the University of Liverpool’s Rachael Vorberg-Rugh and Antony Webster of Liverpool John Moores. It was stimulating to hear the panel discuss the mutual development of the Co-Operative retail stores, the Co-Operative Wholesale Society (CWS), and the related Co-Operative Party.

1930s adverisement: The People's Museum

The papers and discussion hinged on two particular points. The first was how the CWS managed to convince Co-Ops to purchase their goods when the Co-Ops were completely free to purchase from any wholesaler they wished. This of course became particularly important during the 1930s, when private wholesalers were willing to cut wages and other costs more than the CWS. I particularly enjoyed Martin Purvis’s case study of the behaviour of Co-Operative storekeepers in the 1930s Defiant radio controversy. Co-Op storekeepers were complaining at the price fixing cartels controlled by large manufacturers. So Co-Ops took a stand and decided to stock the CWS-made Defiant radio. Then again, as Purvis pointed out, Co-Ops still stocked the market-dominant brands as well. Customers at the store then had to choose which radio they wanted to buy. So there was more than one level of voluntarism in this case: the Co-Ops had to choose to stock the Defiant, just as the customers had to choose to buy them. The case was made in terms of what we would now call ethical consumerism.

The second important issue was whether cooperators believed that they were a political organisation, a consumer organisation, or a mixture of the two; a balance between values and consumerism. There was of course a Co-Op party but it didn’t become affiliated to the Labour Party until World War One. During this war they were reluctant to get involved in party politics, but realised they had been excluded from all the food boards. This was despite their extensive experience with food distribution. So in World War Two, the Co-Operative Party was much keener to engage with political power to get their point across.

It was interesting to consider why so many people have recently been researching the co-operative movement. I’ve been reliably informed that this was not the case only a few years ago. I think that these historians have set themselves on a quest to explore historical alternatives to the present economy, dominated as it is by distant, nameless financiers as opposed to operating for the good of local communities. It will certainly be interesting to see what other historiographical trends emerge out of this kind of thinking.

The next session of particular interest explored the case of workhouses. In a wonderfully coherent panel, the University of Vienna’s Sonja Hinch, Oxford Brooks University’s Virginia Crossman and the Open University’s Megan Doolittle presented examples of voluntary work, workfare, and forced labour in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The core issue at stake was how policymakers and reformers decided who could work and was genuinely unable to do so. Of those who could work, the important distinction to be made was whether someone could work but lacked the work ethic to do so, or whether they were prevented from working by extenuating circumstances such as unemployment or illness. It was striking how different the solutions were to those who were deemed able to work but unwilling to do it.

Pre-Nazi Winterhilfe, November 1931: German Federal Archive

An interesting issue raised was the stage at which we conclude that cultures of voluntarism (particularly in localised, tight-knit communities) actually produce a moral compulsion to contribute voluntary work. How might we decipher these scenarios with historical hindsight? I am thinking of the example of Winterhilfe – the German culture of helping out the community in harsh winter conditions, which was magnified in the interwar period into larger notions of social responsibility and a collective body politic. By the advent of the Third Reich, most historians agree that there was no semblance of voluntarism to the practice any more, and rejection of it was seen as resistance to the Volk.

Pre-Nazi Winterhilfe, September 1931: German Federal Archive

These discussions overlap a great deal with my own work on British industry, and were well documented in Geoff Brown’s 1977 Sabotage. Brown considered numerous ‘go slow’ methods of working in the twentieth century, such as soldiering and ca’canny, but certainly never accused these workers of laziness. Quite the opposite, he said they were making important political points and it is hard work to sustain such practices in a large group of people with differing priorities under high-stress conditions. In effect, their refusal to work was a kind of voluntary activism in itself. When we consider that this perspective could be applied to our analysis of strikes and protests, this could be a particularly fruitful avenue of research to follow up, and one which I address in my own research into 1930s political activism.

This is one of the issues the VAHS New Researchers event at Southampton in the autumn will address. Anjelica Finnegan and I are putting panels together of historians and social scientists interested in how and why people conduct voluntary work in a variety of circumstances: in the home, the community and in industry, for example. I’ll be delivering a paper on Voluntary Industrial Aid for Spain, a 1930s campaign which brought together a variety of engineers, communists, and intellectuals to contribute their time and skills in making industrial products to aid the Spanish republic. I look forward to it.

To cite this article, please use: Michael Weatherburn, ‘Industrial Co-Operation: Bridging Voluntary Action and Business’, Voluntary Action History Society Blog (13 May 2012). Available online at: http://www.vahs.org.uk/2012/05/esshc-weatherburn/

Comfortably ensconced in Oxford Brookes University for the recent VAHS New Researchers workshop on ‘transnational humanitarianism’, we began our morning’s discussion with Dickens. (We actually began with train journeys, delayed buses, bicycles, a long uphill walk, and a search for caffeine, but that’s all par for the historian’s course, so I won’t dwell on it. Hard times indeed.) The workshop’s title originated in Martin Chuzzlewit – ‘Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door’ – its co-organiser George Campbell Gosling informed us. But George’s opening address preferred to cast our gaze to Bleak House and its contrast between the domestic benevolence of Mr Jarndyce and the ‘telescopic philanthropy’ of Mrs Jellyby. No serious historian would base their analysis on a novel, our host assured us. Yet many had fallen into that particular novel’s trap by writing about domestic and international voluntary action as two separate phenomena. He threw down a challenge to speakers and audience alike: to consider ways of bringing the two into a single narrative – both by adopting transnational frameworks in our research and by recognising the importance of transnational networks in the past.

Prof Patricia Clavin addressing the German Historical Institute in Washington DC in 2011

I had come to Brookes to contribute a paper on NGOs and transnational humanitarianism to the afternoon session in a day-long workshop hosted by the university’s Centre for the History of Welfare. Part of the Making Connections initiative on transnational networks in European welfare history, the event certainly lived up to its name – it was also the first such gathering of the VAHS’s new transnational histories network. Patricia Clavin delivered the keynote after lunch, a fascinating investigation of the transnational networks that shaped the League of Nations. Tom Crook explored the emergence of a transnational language of statistics in the nineteenth century. Virginia Crossman read the absent Julia Moses’s paper on transnational experts and national social problems. I made the case for examining humanitarian NGOs in a transnational framework. And we rounded off the day with a roundtable discussion on linking histories of welfare in a transnational context.

But all that was still the other side of tea and sandwiches as we settled down to our host’s challenge and the morning’s focus on ‘transnational humanitarianism’. I had come armed with a few questions of my own. For the humanitarian sector ‘charity begins at home’ is a well-worn trope, heard on the doorstep, in the media, from elected representatives, and with increasing regularity in these times economic austerity. But how, I wondered, do historians think about transnationalism and its relationship to the non-governmental sector? Do we approach humanitarian NGOs primarily as local, national or international actors? A combination of all three? How should we think of them?

Eglantyne Jebb (© Shropshire Archives)

As the session got underway, opening speaker Emily Baughan picked up our host’s task and raised an important question of her own: the need to tackle national concerns and debates in these transnational histories of non-governmental humanitarianism. She described the tensions that developed between two British voluntary organisations in the aftermath of the First World War. The politically connected Imperial War Relief Fund (founded in 1920) flew the British flag, ‘competed’ against American influence, and saw itself as a showcase of British leadership and progress. The Save the Children Fund (1919) embraced internationalism and what one of its founders, Eglantyne Jebb, described as ‘wisely directed patriotism’. It became a bone of contention between the two organisations. It also, Emily told us, serves as an important lesson to scholars of non-state humanitarianism. Borders and national priorities shaped the outlook of even these outwardly international organisations, and we must understand their histories in those terms.

Anna Bocking-Welch’s paper on the Freedom from Hunger Campaign made its home at the same crossroads of local, national and transnational concerns. Created by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in 1960 to assist long-term development in the Third World, in Britain the campaign helped to re-imagine benevolent imperialism for a new era. But it also linked anti-colonial rhetoric with UN priorities and a less aggressively strident British world view. And it offered a new means of connecting the British public with the outside world – through its encouragement of ‘people-to-people’ exchange. The important lesson of the campaign, Anna concluded, was to think of transnational action in terms of layers. Personal motivations and personal connections were inseparable from national and transnational action.

In the final paper of the session, Eleanor Davey turned our attention to another vital question: where do our concepts of humanitarian action come from? She described a particularly French take on the concept. Tiers mondisme emphasised the Third World’s progressive, world changing power. Sans frontiérisme begat the world Médecins sans Frontières and its brand of humanitarian action. Droit d’ingérence stressed humanitarianism’s right to intervene. At the heart of Eleanor’s paper was an emphasis on continuity. She described the link between Holocaust memory, the failings of the Red Cross in responding to the atrocities of the Second World War, and deep French mistrust of the aid community’s silence on the politics of the Biafran humanitarian crisis in the late 1960s. But she also emphasised the need to look more closely at the colonial period and imperial attitudes to humanitarian action.

After a break to chat and restore caffeine and blood sugar levels, we returned for the morning’s concluding roundtable debate. Under the direction of our chair Glen O’Hara, Georgina Brewis and I attempted to bring these disparate themes into focus once again (and add a few ideas of our own). There were warnings about the need to explore alternative and informal sources; to be aware of the many social scientists that had trodden this ground before us; and to be sure why we were adopting a transnational framework in our research. The need for recipient narratives was also stressed. And there was a call for the unfashionable – the thousands of volunteers from the global North who served in the developing world – to have their stories accorded attention.

Not that we had it all our own way. An open discussion on the role of history in shaping the policies of the contemporary NGO sector brought warnings of expecting too much but also of the dangers of failing to try. The role of religion too was debated – in a colonial context and in its influence on the modern NGO sector. And then there was the biggest question of all, and a suitable one on which to conclude and encourage comment. Just what, a voice from the floor asked, does transnationalism mean anyway?

For more information on this workshop and the wider Making Connections initiative, please see here.

For information on the VAHS transnational histories network, see here.

To cite this article, please use: Kevin O’Sullivan, ‘Charity Begins at Home? Transnational Histories of Humanitarianism’, Voluntary Action History Society Blog (7 May 2012). Available online at http://www.vahs.org.uk/2012/05/transnational-osullivan/

What’s wrong with the Big Society? It’s dead, that’s what wrong with it. It’s not just resting. I’m an historian, so I know a dead policy initiative when I see one and and the Big Society has definitely passed on. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It has gone to meet its maker. It is a late policy. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If it wasn’t for the recent launch of the Big Society bank, it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It is, we might say, an ex-policy.

After two years of the Coalition, charity is not dead. But the voluntary sector is certainly having a difficult time in Austerity Britain, as the Charity Finance Group’s latest report continues to show. The 4.2% drop in paid staff over the past year contrasts perversely with the fact the sector is more crucial than ever in a time of (now offical) double-dip recession, as seen in the startling growth of foodbanks. Despite this renewed importance for charity, there seems to be little doubt that the Big Society, like Monty Python’s Norweigen Blue, is no longer with us. The influential Conservative Home editor, Tim Montgomerie, suggests the ‘big society’ – which had failed to resonate with the public – should be ditched in favour of a focus on ‘competitiveness and growth’ as a ‘better message’. And his plea has not fallen on deaf ears.

Steve Hilton left Downing Street in March 2012 to take up an unpaid visiting professorship at Stanford University

With the Prime Minister’s media guru, Steve Hilton (who coined the term ‘big society’), having cycled off into the sunset, there seems to be no real effort to keep it alive. This is a vindication for those who always saw the ‘big society’ as little more than a slogan or a cover for cuts. It will not surprise many historians, who have been more than usually sceptical – writing on this blog and elsewhere. Pat Thane has highlighted ahistoricism, making the case that ‘there has always been a big society’. Meanwhile, coming from rather different perspectives, Glen O’Hara and Frank Prochaska have both come to the same conclusion – that the big society project is pitted against some deeply-entrenched long-term historical trends. These are all points well made, and mean we should not have been surprised if the language changed or the whole project ultimately fell short of lofty goals. However, as we mark two years of David Cameron’s premiership, it is a different death that has befallen the ‘big society’.

What, in fact, is most striking is the lack of influence the project has had within Cameron’s own government. As Colin Rochester and Meta Zimmeck noted in their review of 2011:

“The Coalition also demonstrated that its interest in and commitment to the voluntary sector was ‘so over’ by its downgrading of the Office for Civil Society – including budget cuts, high staff turnover, administrative muddle and even the loss of its organogram.”

Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, on Budget Day in 2012

Alongside this downgrading of the area of government responsible for the ‘big society’ were repeated demonstrations that it was an irrelevance to those policies pursued in other departments. The Giving White Paper of 2011 was startlingly contradicted by the 2012 Budget’s cap on tax relief for charitable giving, including Gift Aid. With half of last year’s charitable donations in the UK coming from just 7% of donors, serious concerns were immediately raised on the impact of this cap on large-scale donations. A campaign against what was dubbed the ‘charity tax’ (a sideways reference to the same budget’s ‘granny tax’) was launched under the slogan: GIVE IT BACK, GEORGE! This has included some influential bodies: NCVO, the Charities Aid Foundation, Cancer Research UK and the Samaritans amongst many others. When Big Society Captial chairman Sir Ronald Cohen was questioned on Channel 4 News on the impact of these tax changes, he said: “It could certainly have a bigger negative impact than the amount of money flowing in to us.” Whatever the merits of the policy, this conscious contradiction is more damaging to the ‘big society’ project than the cuts from all sides, because it makes it clear how far it is from the heart of decision-making in the Coalition.

Bernard Jenkin MP chairing the Public Administration Select Committee

At the end of 2011, the parliamentary Public Administration Select Committee reported on the ‘big society’, noting that the government seemed to have ‘no coherent plan’ to deliver on the rhetoric. Perhaps most critical has been the sheer lack of such thinking in the high-profile health and education reforms, despite the fact Cameron used to call public service reform one of the three strands of his big society ‘mission’ (the other two being social action and community empowerment). The talk was of charities and employee-owned mutuals and social enterprises to play a bigger role. However, it is notable that the newly ‘mutualised’ civil service pensions scheme is a lonely example and that it is only 25% controlled by staff. We have moved from the buried idea of charities running forests to the proposed privatisation of the roads, with little evidence of mutualism being seriously considered for public sector reform. What we are witnessing is not the failure of big society policies failing to deliver, but rather a government failing to inact policies in line with a now-abandoned philosophy.

It has certainly not helped that Steve Hilton’s exit followed so many others. It was unsurprising that Lord Wei lasted less than a year in the role of ‘big society tsar’, after being parachuted into the House of Lords to take on the role. It was reported that only after agreeing to take up the position did he find out it would be unpaid. He had then reduced his hours partly in order to secure an income only three months before leaving the role altogether. It was more shocking when A4e founder Emma Harrison stepped down from her role, variously described as ‘family champion’ or ‘back to work tsar’, amidst arrests and accusations of fraud associated with government contracts. Perhaps most characteristic, however, was the rejection from Lierpool. The city had been named as a big society vanguard area in July 2010, along with Eden Valley in Cumbria, Windsor and Maidenhead in Berkshire and the London borough of Sutton. However, after six months it withdrew from the pilot scheme, with City Council leader Joe Anderson writing to the Prime Minister:

“How can the city council support the big society and its aim to help communities do more for themselves when we will have to cut the lifeline to hundreds of these vital and worthwhile groups?”

Asked if he was worried Liverpool would now lose out, he said withdrawing from the scheme ‘won’t make an iota of difference’. And this is the overwhelming sense after two years of the Cameron’s premiership. According to the CFG, half of the voluntary sector now sees government policy as irrelevant and 82% of the rest as having a negative impact. It may have sat ill within the Conservative Party, it may have been an agenda cynically adopted by some and there may have been problems of communication, but the ‘big society’ did represent an opportunity to remould citizenship as something more than consumerism. There were many reasons why various specific policies would have struggled in the current economic and political climate, but the potential was there. As such, for all the launches and relaunches, what the ‘big society’ now represents is a missed opportunity.

Cllr Joe Anderson, Lord Wei and Emma Harrison

To cite this article, please use: George Campbell Gosling, ‘Charity and the Coalition: Whatever Happened to the Big Society?’, Voluntary Action History Society Blog (30 April 2012). Available at: http://www.vahs.org.uk/2012/04/coalition-gosling/

The following is an edited extract from Glen O’Hara, Governing Post-War Britain: Paradoxes of Progress, 1951-1973, which was published this month by Palgrave Macmillan.

International policy transfer can be seen in many areas of British social administration in the post-war era. One of these is social housing. Sweden’s housing policies were thought to be particularly attractive in terms of industrialised building, partly because Stockholm had long led the way in standardisation and efficiency. Interest in Scandinavian housing was a constant theme in private policy discussions. But in the early 1960s this pervasive esteem coalesced into something more – literally – concrete, as Ministers and officials found one answer to Britain’s pervasive housing shortages in the Scandinavian co-operative movement.

This was yet another middle way solution with attractions similar to Shonfield’s enthusiasm for state-supervised but privately-run corporations. Government White Papers at the time were quite explicit about this, referring to ‘the “joint ownership” housing associations which have been so successful in Scandinavia’. Following these White Papers, £28m was provided for ‘pump-priming’ operations under the 1961 Housing Act, and £100m for a new Housing Corporation, set up to encourage these developments, in 1964. Two types of co-operative housing were provided for in the 1961 Act:

• ‘Cost rent’ societies would be formed by builders and administrators who would then let the flats to the general public at cost prices, without making a profit.
• ‘Co-ownership societies’ were a type of collective owner-occupation, which would be formed by proprietors who would form themselves into a co-operative and then lease their dwellings back from the society.

Academic, political and media attention had been focussed on just this solution for some time. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw pamphlets and reports praising housing co-operatives the Fabian Rosalie Alford, the Co-Operative Party, the London School of Economics academic John Greve, as well as Lewis Waddilove, the Director of the Joseph Rowntree Trust who was extremely well-connected in the housing policy community, and the UN. They did only praise the Swedish schemes, but also those of Denmark and Norway. However, Sweden was most commonly cited. For example, in the UN’s 1959 housebuilding report, which noted that more than one-third of Swedish building was being conducted by not-for-profit societies, linking their large-scale effort to Sweden’s relatively rapid adoption of standardised building techniques.

Sir Keith Joseph (1918-1994)

The Central Housing Advisory Committee (CHAC), set up to advise the Minister of Housing in the mid-1930s, was one settled institutional arena through which these ideas were communicated. Here Lewis Waddilove, along with other influential members of CHAC including Sir Parker Morris from the National Federation of Housing Societies, expressed their concern that ‘private enterprise building is concentrated almost exclusively on building to sell, and so does not meet the needs of those who can afford an unsubsidised rent, but have no wish to buy’.

The response was the creation of a Ministry of Housing working party on buildings to let, which recommended the creation of a new type of not-for-profit ‘housing trusts’. A number of its members had been to Norway and Sweden to look into this idea during August and September 1958. Waddilove, Coventry’s City Treasurer A.H. Marshall, and two Ministry civil servants submitted a long memorandum on this subject to CHAC on their return. They praised those countries’ ‘valuable third partner’, which provided for tenants who ‘are unwilling to face the full responsibility of home ownership… who up to now have not looked beyond rented accommodation… these advantages are highly regarded in Scandinavia and should be equally welcomed here’.

This scheme was not, however, designed to play the same role as Scandinavian co-operatives. This was due, in part, to the fact that politicians never intended it to. The entire rationale was to encourage more private renting, rather than to develop the type of large-scale co-operatives that the Government enthused about in public. The 1963 White Paper setting up the Housing Corporation was quite clear about this:

Since the war there has been almost no building to let other than by public authorities. Fear of rent control, and of the problems associated with management, maintenance and repair, has discouraged private investment. The result is a gap in housing provision; and this the Government intend to see filled.

In private, Ministers were even more aggressively ideological. Housing Minister Keith Joseph and Scottish Secretary Michael Noble told the Cabinet in 1963 that the main problem with the housing market was that private investors were difficult to find. Furthermore, they argued:

The main reason for this is the Opposition’s declared intention to reimpose rent control. This has done much to undermine confidence… Given this situation, either we have to accept it, thus letting our policy be dictated by the Opposition, or find some means of remedying it. And that is what our proposals do.

The Conservatives had been very badly damaged by the political repercussions of their attempt to decontrol rents fixed, in some cases, since the Second World War. Ministers were searching urgently for a way of encouraging housebuilding without further attacking rent controls, or returning to the general council house building that Labour had always advocated. They were not interested in any attempt to embed co-operative societies in the British housing system, but rather Joseph suggested the transfer of bad housing to housing societies as a way to reclaim the issue from Labour. When the Chancellor, Reginald Maudling, refused to contemplate tax concessions, Joseph told him angrily that ‘you cannot want to contemplate an endless vista of extending municipal ownership any more than I. But that is what we do contemplate if we cannot set up an alternative’.

© Glen O’Hara and Palgrave Macmillan

For more on the spread of ideas about housing in the past, see our blog article by Dr Thomas Adam: Intercultural Transfer and the History of Social Housing

To cite this article, please use: Glen O’Hara, ‘Scandinavian Housing and Britain’s ‘New’ Co-Operatives in the 1960s’, Voluntary Action History Society Blog (23 April 2012). Available at:  http://www.vahs.org.uk/2012/04/housing-coops/

Gender is central to an understanding of voluntary action history, as it confronts us the moment we ask the question of who does what to whom.  In one respect, gender will be well-known territory to readers of this blog.  A now canonical body of work on the history of charity and campaigning in modern Britain points to the creation of the public sphere in the eighteenth century, and the exclusion of women from certain kinds of participation in the public realm.  Philanthropy was a vital tool in the gradual emancipation of British women from the mid to later nineteenth century, as it provided a legitimate space for activity beyond the home, if the action undertaken tended to be within areas seen as ‘feminine’ – the care of the sick and children, for example.  This may be a well-established field, but historians have far from exhausted the field.  I was therefore delighted to be invited by Eve Colpus and Tosh Warwick to speak at the VAHS New Researchers workshop on the Gendering the History of Voluntary Action at the University of Huddersfield, as this promised to reveal some of the new directions taken in this area by postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers.

'Church of England Waifs and Strays Society' Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse, Museum of Norfolk: Photograph by Leo Reynolds

The first panel of the day was given over to charitable institutions and gender.  Stephanie Codd opened this panel with her study of friendly societies in Scunthorpe between 1890 and 1910, presenting the ways in which the men involved in these societies used them as a means of celebrating their working class identities.  Anne Hughes offered two case studies of Jewish youth clubs in London between 1886 and 1914, one for boys and one for girls.  Identity figured strongly here, in the tensions between religion, culture and a drive towards assimilation. The theme of parenthood was introduced by the next paper, given by Claudia Soares.  Soares used the case of the Waifs and Strays Society to illustrate the ways in which institutions could create ‘families’ and how the managers of children’s homes could become institutional ‘parents’.

Frances Cobbe (1822-1904)

After lunch, Marian Flint explored middle-class recipients of welfare, those whose circumstances had dramatically changed, forcing them to approach charities for support.  Something which emerged strongly from this paper was the element of performativity in the relationship between donor and recipient.  Sarah Young’s paper on discourse in the writings of Josephine Butler, Frances Cobbe and Ellice Hopkins drew attention to the ways in which philanthropy is articulated.  Mark Crosher followed this paper with an examination of oral history interviews with people connected with the Wood Street Mission as volunteers/staff and recipients, again evoking the question of performativity.  The final speaker in the panel, Angela Grainger, considered activism by the medical profession as a form of voluntary action/stimulation of voluntary action by women’s groups, through the efforts of medics to make women aware of the threat of cervical cancer.

British Red Cross Society Kenya Branch, 1953 Report

The third panel took these considerations beyond the British Isles.  Deanne van Tol spoke about the ways in which white housewives in the British colonies in East Africa between the 1920s and 1960s were involved in volunteering.  Andrea Pass resumed the theme of institutional families through her discussion of how the Church was the family business for many middle-class women, whose contribution was going out into the Empire to serve as missionaries.  Marie-Luise Ermisch looked at how the British Red Cross operated in and engaged with British colonies, before and after decolonization, and particularly how they engaged children with their work.  Finally, Rose Holmes explored personal letters between Quaker women involved in helping refugees from fascism in the 1930s.

The roundtable at the end – led by Dr Dan Weinbren, Dr Julie-Marie Strange and myself – drew out the themes of the day, and addressed questions that participants in the day had put forward.  One observation was that men and masculinity are perhaps still under-researched.  Eve Colpus raised the question of whether emotion had a role to play in the analysis of gender, which it certainly does, along with the idea of embodiment, a sense of the physicality of social experiences.  Space and place might also be explored in this regard, in terms of the way in which locality and movement are things that are identified with (or not), that also shape one’s engagement with the community around them.  Another important question to emerge from the participants was the need to think critically about such terms as ‘charity’, ‘philanthropy’, and ‘voluntary action’, and to test the meanings and assumptions.  George Campbell Gosling recounted a conversation he had with the founders of VAHS about the name of the society, and the way in which ‘voluntary action’ was chosen to reflect a broad field of endeavour, as outlined in William Beveridge’s book, Voluntary Action, published in 1948.  We should think critically, but also fluidly, about what voluntary action is, what is has been, and where it might be found.

Formally and informally, the workshop illuminated some important lines of enquiry that both new and more established researchers need to consider. I am looking forward to updating my bibliography on gender and voluntary action when journal articles, books and the like start coming though from the workshop’s participants!  I headed back to Huddersfield railway station full of inspiration about the field in general, and my own work in particular.  This is what an excellent workshop or conference should do: set you off raring to go.

My final word is on the importance of new researchers taking responsibility for their own intellectual development.  VAHS has been outstanding as a learned society in the way in which it has provided a means for new researchers to become active, but new researchers need to be proactive about opportunities.  If there is something that you think there needs to be a workshop on, then it is up to you to make it happen.  You don’t need to be a senior academic to run a workshop or to set up peer-based training in a new area.  If you have a good idea, take ownership of that idea and make it come alive. It is not only empowering to do something like that, but you learn a tremendous amount along the way, be that in terms of expanding your subject knowledge or honing your skills.  You also meet people you might not otherwise have met.  I am pleased that I am in the position at the moment, as grants officer of the Social Policy Association, to be able to help new researchers get their ideas off the ground – and whilst this is a social policy group, historians of social policy should consider applying to our grant schemes.  So a word of thanks must go to Eve and Tosh on this occasion for taking this workshop forward, not forgetting everyone else who has been involved with the new researchers workshops, and the institutions/groups who have funded and supported them.

For more information on Social Policy Association grants, see here.

To cite this article, please use: Kate Bradley, ‘Gendering the History of Voluntary Action’, Voluntary Action History Society Blog (16 April 2012). Available at: http://www.vahs.org.uk/2012/04/gender-bradley/

Easter is an apt time to consider the women of Victorian Britain who used their religious world view to enter the field of charity. For example, from 1830, 80 Catholic women’s congregations, mostly from France, Belgium and Ireland, made foundations in England and Wales. They made a small but significant contribution to the development of healthcare in Britain, yet have been largely forgotten. What was the impact of their charitable work and why, we might ask, has it not been remembered in the same way as much other medical charity in our history?

Manchester University Press, 2008

Anglican and Catholic women found an outlet for their faith and energies in religious institutes in the nineteenth century, taking the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and more often than not entering the world of voluntary action.  The communitarian life-styles they participated in were not looked upon by the vast majority of the Victorian public with great enthusiasm. Women-managed institutions were considered breeding grounds for all sorts of authoritarian women without, so the anti-nun vitriol noted, the guidance of male family members, fathers and husbands.  In addition, these women were not were not traveling the hallowed path of motherhood.  Victorian Britain gave few women opportunities to follow both personal and professional goals – but religious life had a special characteristic in that it that allowed women, both Catholic and Protestant, unprecedented prospects to escape the typical patriarchal norms of society and manage as well as work in charitable ventures oftentimes without the need for men to manage or oversee the institutions. Yes, clergy and bishops often needed to approve such undertakings, but day-to-day operations and management were often in women’s hands.

So the special places for women in philanthropic and religious worlds have been recognised as important Victorian phenomena, but their place in the hospital, beyond nursing, has rarely been acknowledged. This is perhaps because much of their efforts were channelled into specialist hospitals. The Victorian growth of which has largely been explained as providing ‘fame and fortune’ to medical men, pioneering cutting-edge research and treatment in emerging specialisms. This is a sharp contrast to the religious hospitals, with their focus on ‘care’ over ‘cure’. So what of our Catholic women’s congregations?

Most contributed to the infrastructure of educational institutions; almost all of them provided some sort of health care service, often in the form of home visiting where they provided food, clothing and basic medical care while instructing Catholics in their religious duties. They operated 29 medical institutions in the nineteenth century, including:

• 4 general hospitals: Providence Free Hospital in St Helens, the Italian and the French Hospitals in London and the Cottage Hospital in Aberdare, Wales;
• 9 convalescent homes;
• 9 institutions caring for the chronically ill and dying ;
• 4 providing medical care for children; and
• 3 mental asylums.

Providence Free Hospital, St Helens

The nine institutions that cared for those suffering from chronic or incurable diseases and the dying are of particular importance. They varied hugely, including in size (between 12 and 110 beds in 1914). Only one, St Joseph’s Hospice for the Dying in Hackney, specialised in the medical care of the dying – although even here some patients left ‘cured’.  Some inmates remained in these hospitals for their lifetime, others returned home after months or years of medical care.  Most catered to women and children, although three also admitted men.  All had honorary medical staff that attended to patients.  The nursing staff comprised mostly religious sisters, although many institutions included paid staff that did nursing or domestic work in the hospitals.  In the 1850s, most sister-nurses were trained informally, with experienced sister-nurses training the inexperienced or doctors giving lectures on the wards.  But, by the early twentieth century, many, like the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth, touted their certificated nurses and dispensers. And all, like most voluntary hospitals, were reliant on a mix of subscriptions and bazaars as well as the generosity of benefactors.  The quest for larger premises meant unending pleas for funds.

St Joseph's Hospice, Hackney

What differentiated these Catholic institutions was that they were developed for explicitly religious and humanitarian purposes. They were never intended to improve the status of medical professionals or create a national or international reputation for medical care or become leading centres of medical treatment.  Many of their organisers publicised their up-to-date medical facilities as well as the holistic nature of nursing care, but this was meant to show an integrated approach to the needs of the body and the soul.  Their efforts focused not only on those marginalised by poverty, but also on those marginalised by a voluntary hospital system that was constantly chasing funding, cures and ‘interesting’ patients.  For many voluntary hospitals, providing utility to demanding subscribers meant avoiding care for the chronically sick, the incurable and the dying, as these were bodies that could not be easily or quickly cured. What the religious mission of the Catholic hospitals could offer instead was essentially palliative care – medically as well as physically comforting the incurable patient and possibly slowing the progress or severity of the disease was important. Though palliative care is a relatively new specialist field, its leading lights, including Cicely Saunders, were aware of the earlier work of the sisters and other religious groups whose spiritual and philanthropic energies led them to the marginalised and less ‘useful’ members of society.

Though these institutions remained relative unpublicised, and met the needs of relatively small patient communities often in their local environment, their modest beginning were influential in the development of palliative care and influenced the wider health care model. Perhaps instead of asking why women religious could not keep up with ‘the well established hospital system’, we should be looking at the health care institutions they created.  The health care institutions they built and managed filled an unmet need that was somewhere in between the medicalised space of the voluntary hospital and the stigmatized space of the workhouse infirmary. Their focus on ‘care’ may not fit with a narrative built around the rise of modern medicine, but there was an important social value to the work of these communities of women. And that is something we should remember when writing the history of medicine and charity.

Dr Mangion has written more on this topic for Christopher Bonfield, Teresa Huguet-Termes and Jonathan Reinarz (eds.), Hospitals and Communities, 1100-1960 (Oxford: Peter Lang, forthcoming 2013).

To cite this article, please use: Carmen Mangion, ‘Women, Religion and Medical Care in Victorian Britain’, Voluntary Action History Society Blog (9 April 2012). Available at: http://www.vahs.org.uk/2012/04/religion-mangion/

History has traditionally been written in the form of national history. From its establishment as an academic discipline at the beginning of the nineteenth century, historians absorbed the romantic notions of nationalism and accepted the nation as the quasi natural skin of history. The focus on politics and great men contributed to the nationalization of history and the creation of national narratives that sought to connect distant and ancient pasts of the Greco-Roman, Germanic, or Slavic antiquity with the attempts of nineteenth-century intellectuals and politicians to produce national identities and national narratives.

Yet, industrialization, urbanization, and social reform – to name just a few examples – were not developments that could have been forced into the straitjacket of nation states since these were global changes which connected various spaces and places across the world. Even if we accept the nation state as an important actor in the nineteenth century, we are still forced to accept that even the most isolated of nation states was affected by movements and influences that originated far beyond its borders and its control. The recent establishment of the VAHS’s transnational histories network, discussed on this blog by Gosling and Oppenheimer, is the latest case of historians searching for new ways to understand this wider picture.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

The concept of intercultural transfer can provide a counter-model to the concept of national history. It acknowledges the interconnectedness of human experience and the cross-cultural influences in the development of societies. This field of historical inquiry focuses on the processes of exchanging ideas and concepts beyond and below the level of the nation state. Moreover, it does not consider diplomatic history or the adoption of public policies by one government following the example of another. Instead, the main actors of intercultural transfer were citizens who acted on their own account or in connection with associations of the receiving society. These agents of intercultural transfer were central to the process of exchange. The fact that they almost always belonged to the receiving society clearly distinguishes this concept from models of cultural colonialism or missionary work.

The concept of intercultural transfer replaces older notions of Europeanization or Americanization. The latter concepts were based on the assumption that regions and states copied the cultural, social, and political organization of either European societies or the United States. However, these concepts were unable to explain the differences in interpretation that emerged in the process of transfer. Americanization suggested that the world would just become like the United States. Yet, as it turns out, while non-Americans adopted the American language of cultural and commercial products from jeans to coca cola, they assigned different meanings and interpretations to these American idioms.

The connection of two societies by intercultural transfers – which always resulted in transfers that went both ways and affected both societies to a similar degree – did not result in making both societies identical. This is due to the crucial role agents of intercultural transfer played in the process. These agents found a particular idea in the giving society they considered for integration into their home society. Cultural and linguistic barriers contributed to misunderstandings of these concepts by the agents involved. Furthermore, each idea had to be integrated into the receiving society, thus requiring modifications to the original idea. In the process of intercultural transfer, its agents became the authors of a model which often included elements of various institutions from the giving society. Intercultural transfer is therefore characterized by a conundrum. It contributed to making societies more similar and at the same time also more dissimilar.

Henry Ingersoll Bowditch (1808-1892)

When, in 1870, the Boston physician Henry Ingersoll Bowditch travelled to London to study social housing, he found a rich landscape of social housing enterprises. Bowditch was interested in these schemes since Boston, witnessing increased Irish migration to this city, faced a tremendous growth in population and the emergence of slums. Amongst the most significant projects of the time was the pure philanthropy of George Peabody’s housing trust. However, while Bowditch recognized the improvement of living conditions for the tenants of the Peabody buildings, he remained skeptical that such a purely philanthropic housing trust could be of any help for the problems Boston experienced.

Sir Sydney Waterlow (1822-1906)

The concept of using market forces to produce social housing left a greater impression on Bowditch – in particular the idea of ‘philanthropy and five per cent’. This was seen in Sydney Waterlow’s Improved Industrial Dwellings Company, which had several investors but the shareholder profit was limited to a maximum of five per cent. Profit in excess of this was to be used for the maintenance of the enterprise and its future expansion.

Meanwhile, Octavia Hill’s house management system operated on the principle that the poor needed first guidance before their housing conditions could be improved. The idea that improvements of housing needed to follow the improvement of the tenants’ character appealed to Bowditch. Hill was convinced that if the poor were not been taught how to appreciate an improved environment, the new homes would quickly be turned into new slums. The centrepiece of her house management system was the work of friendly visitors: upper-class ladies who would visit the apartments of tenants once a week to collect rent and to provide advice for the improvement of the living conditions (cleanliness, relations between tenants, etc.)

Octavia Hill (1838-1912)

The two concepts (Waterlow’s ‘philanthropy and five per cent and Hill’s house management system) merged in Bowditch’s mind. And upon his return to Boston, he convinced fellow citizens to create a limited dividend company but limited the profit to seven per cent. Further, using Hill’s idea about house management, he hired rent collectors. Bowditch argued that volunteers would not be appropriate in Boston, since while Hill’s volunteers dealt with civilized English people his rent collectors faced uncivilized Irish tenants.

Bowditch occupied a central position in introducing Hill’s ideas to an American audience which was very susceptive to them. American society was faced with an increasing number of migrants coming to the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. Irish, German and Eastern European migrants appeared alien to the Anglo-American population. In this context social reformers sought out various tools of turning migrants into Americans, from the adaptation of the kindergarten model to the introduction of Hill’s house management system. However, limited dividend companies in American cities were conceived of in quite different terms as in England. Housing in apartment buildings was still seen as transitory and a high fluctuation of tenants was expected. Behavioral modification through friendly visiting was turned over to paid rent collectors, thus creating a new profession.

This example demonstrates perfectly the nature of intercultural transfer. Bowditch encountered in London various concepts of social housing. Based upon his observations, he integrated two concepts and created a model in his mind which he the praised to his fellow citizens in Boston as the best way to approach the improvement of housing for migrant families. Because of his advocacy, this ‘model’ quickly found followers in cities across the United States.

For more on this topic see Thomas Adam, ‘Transatlantic Trading: The Transfer of Philanthropic Models between European and North American Cities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Journal of Urban History (2002).

To cite this article, please use: Thomas Adam, ‘Intercultural Transfer and the History of Social Housing’, Voluntary Action History Society Blog (2 April 2012). Available at: http://www.vahs.org.uk/2012/04/intercultural-transfer/

In September 1947, amidst ‘the vast horror of fear and suffering’ in post-Partition Delhi, Dr Ruth Roseveare, an Anglican missionary of St Stephen’s Community, drew comfort from her knowledge of ‘a new Kingdom’ of Heaven in contrast to the ‘littleness of the present time’. She wrote at the time: ‘It is we who are on the march to the promised land, who here on earth find no permanent dwelling place, whose loyalty is not here but whose citizenship [is] in heaven’. Dr Roseveare’s allegiance, and that of her missionary colleagues, was not to the departed British Raj, nor indeed to the newly-independent Indian government: it was to Christ Himself.

St James' Church in Delhi - official church of the British Raj until 1931

Whether they liked it or not, however, missionaries’ service of the divine Empire of Christ in the decades before 1947 was influenced by their position under the temporal British Empire. While we can learn much from studying their responses to the Raj, an investigation of imperial attitudes to their work can also inform us about the nature and priorities of missionary voluntary action in the subcontinent.

Forster’s depiction in A Passage to India of isolated missionaries ‘out beyond the slaughterhouses’ in Chandrapore, and Scott’s portrayal in The Raj Quartet of poor Barbie Bachelor, shunned by imperial society in Pankot, are both somewhat misleading. As De Caro and Jordan have shown, missionaries were certainly partial outsiders in the imperial communitas in India, distinguished by their white, rather than khaki, pith helmets. Women missionaries were particularly different from imperial norms. They subverted the ideal role of the white woman in India as an ‘incorporated wife,’ emblem of imperial honour and guardian of her race. They were usually single and professionally employed, and lived and worked in close association with Indians of all castes, classes, and creeds.

Lady Willingdon

Yet, while they were hardly ‘pukka’ guests at memsahibs’ soirées, missionaries were nevertheless patronised, celebrated, and even directly employed by the British Raj. Viceroys, Governors, other important personages from the civil station and their wives attended fetes and Guide rallies, opened new buildings, and distributed prizes in mission hospitals and schools. They also donated money. In 1934, for example, Alice Steward, Principal of the CMS Girls’ School in Jeyi, reported a donation of £500 from the Vicereine, Lady Willingdon, which not only cleared the Mission from debt, but paid for an annual supply of drugs for the dispensary.

Missionaries were frequently honoured by the imperial regime for their work. Between 1917 and Independence, at least six of the missionary doctors at St Stephen’s Hospital in Delhi received the Kaiser-i-Hind, Emperor of India’s medal, as did Sister Wilkinson, the Nursing Superintendent. Dr Charlotte Houlton, Medical Superintendent between 1927 and 1933, received not only the Kaiser-i-Hind first class, but also the Coronation Medal of 1937, and was appointed a Commander of the British Empire in 1939. Clearly, these women were perceived to have rendered the Empire service.

Imperial benefactors supported mission precisely because its voluntary action was useful. Like lower-caste and casteless Indians who converted to Christianity in the ‘mass movements’ of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, they recognised that missionaries were effective resource-providers. Medical work enjoyed especial imperial approval. This is shown by the responses to a questionnaire sent in the 1970s to wives of former government officials, army officers, planters and businessmen by Mary Thatcher, the archivist of the Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies. The memsahibs were asked whether they considered missionaries to have done any good in India. Only two of the fifty-four respondents expressed hostility to missionary endeavour. The majority were of the opinion that missionaries had done good work, singling out medical mission as the area in which the most, or indeed, the only good had been done.

Missionary medical work appealed to imperial authorities as its practical results and benefits were immediately apparent in neat statistical tables of patients cured, babies delivered, operations performed, and nurses trained. Together with missionary educational work, it supplemented the imperial government’s minimal welfare provisions, allowing it to indirectly pursue a ‘civilising mission.’ In 1931, Jeffrey Cox has found there were thirty-eight mission hospitals in the Punjab, North West Frontier and Kashmir, twenty-one of which were staffed by women. In the same area, there were only five government hospitals.

Seal of the Society for the Propogation of the Gospel

On occasion, mission was directly co-opted as a ‘moral arm’ of the imperial regime. Missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) were paid by the Raj to run the so-called ‘Criminal Tribes Settlement’ at Hubli in the Bombay Presidency. Here, the mission’s aims of teaching cleanliness, moral responsibility, and self-support to tribesmen identified by the government as hereditary ‘criminals’ coincided with imperial desires to reform and educate apparently unsavoury elements in Indian society.

While imperial support is testimony to the effectiveness of missionaries’ educational and medical work, it is also evidence of their evangelistic failings. As Gerald Studdert-Kennedy and Clive Dewey have demonstrated, despite the declared religious neutrality of the Raj, Christian notions of self-sacrifice, duty, and service underpinned the imperial regime. Yet, government officials were wary of aggressive attempts to change India’s religion for fear unrest would be provoked.

By the 1920s, however, missionary evangelism was neither threatening nor controversial. Village ‘mass movements’ appeared to be indigenously-motivated rather than a result of missionary coercion or evangelistic effectiveness, and mission institutions were hardly radical harvesters of souls. A report of 1925 from St Stephen’s Hospital in Delhi admitted: ‘We do not have most of the patients long enough to see results in the ways of conversions…’ Instead, missionaries hoped by preaching and setting an example of Christian service in their hospitals and schools, seeds would be sown which would bear future fruit. This gentle evangelism and focus upon selfless voluntary effort appealed to imperial sensibilities.

Missionaries may have regarded themselves as devoted servants of an extemporal Raj, but, to many imperial officials, their useful and unthreatening humanitarian service seemed also to benefit and to promote the ideals of the earthly British Empire. Mission and the Raj did not sing from dissimilar hymn sheets after all.

To cite this article, please use: Andrea Pass, ‘Empire and Mission: Singing from the Same Hymn Sheet?’, Voluntary Action History Society Blog (2 April 2012). Available at: http://www.vahs.org.uk/2012/03/empire-and-mission/

As Benjamin Disraeli once said, Britain is ‘a very difficult country to move’.  But over the past century it has gradually moved to become a highly centralized state, a trend that all the political parties now say they regret and wish to reverse.  As discussed on this blog before, David Cameron will find measures to do so are likely to prompt disappointment and lead to unexpected consequences.

On the face of it, the big society described by Cameron has much to recommend it.   In so far as it enlivens local communities and reduces the burdensome regulations on charities it will be of social benefit.  Charitable partnerships with local government have advantages in spreading participation and educating the central state about the pressing issues that matter to people on the periphery.  But we should not assume that they will reduce the role of government or encourage volunteering or voluntary donations.  What we may be undergoing is a further stage in the perfection of the state monolith under the guise of partnership, a process that one charitable director calls ‘a cultural takeover by stealth’.  Paradoxically, the big society may result in more government rather than less.

Baroness Thatcher visits David Cameron at Downing Street in June 2010

Since the War, both major parties have wished to co-opt rival centres of authority.  In the voluntary sector, they have done so through subsidy and regulation. Margaret Thatcher, for her part, often talked about voluntarism, but under the guise of Victorian liberalism she further centralized and carried forward the very collectivist agenda that she disavowed.  There is a good deal of Mrs Thatcher in Cameron’s vision, though he dare not speak her name for fear of frightening the children and the Liberal Democrats.  Only time will tell whether the Prime Minister’s version of Victorian values will simply lead to greater government intervention and spending, as happened in the past.

For decades, charities have been, as I put it years ago, ‘swimming into the mouth of Leviathan’.  Their steady absorption by the state has blurred the boundaries of charitable and government provision, which has created much of the current confusion over the big society.  Historically, the two had different philosophies and purposes, which led to a productive tension between them.  Such tension is both desirable and invigorating, for one of the roles of a voluntary association, undermined by this merger, is to act as a critic of government policy. As one charitable official admits, ‘no one is rude to his rich uncle’.

Charity should be seen not as the ‘junior partner’ in the welfare state, but as an alternative to statutory or collective provision. The essence of voluntarism is its independence and autonomy. Government provision depends on compulsory taxation; it is not altruistic but materialist in conception. In a benign social democratic state, it is largely about furthering equality. Voluntary provision, on the other hand, cannot be extorted by force; historically, its proponents were driven by individualist motives, though they may also be egalitarian. The myriad charities of the nineteenth century typically grew out of a religious ethos and a liberal polity and were chary of government.

Today, leading charities rush to shelter with the state like creatures in a storm.  Consequently, the balance of power in the voluntary sector has tipped in favour of large, publicly funded institutions, which often act more like lobbyists than charitable campaigns.  The many letters and articles in the press from institutions pleading with the government for further money suggests the nervousness among the 35,000 societies that presently receive state funding.  The 130,000 or so charities that do not receive state support, typically small institutions, rarely have a voice in the media and are largely outside the debate, though they will be influenced by its results.  What is the government planning to do for them, apart from offering them contracts?

Nick Hurd MP, Minister for Civil Society

It is telling that the first thing the government did when it said it wanted to ‘roll back the state’ was to expand the ministry that deals with the voluntary sector, in this case the Ministry for Civil Society.  Such a ministry would have seemed a contradiction in terms to a Victorian.  What is Nick Hurd doing as Britain’s Minister for the voluntary sector?  Well, he is spending taxpayer money on more government administration and doling out public funds to co-opted, client charities, which he will regulate and control, if only because of the need for government accountability.  It is worth noting that a much touted £100 million fund will simply encourage charities to compete for government contracts, which is hardly scaling back the state.

What is little recognized is that ‘charities’ in receipt of state funding are hardly independent or voluntary.  Laughably, the more they take the more they proclaim their independence.  As they are brought into the orbit of government, they take on a view of welfare inherited from the state, whose contracts set their agenda.  Once on the payroll of the taxpayer, they have less incentive to raise funds privately.  Indeed, some ‘charitable’ directors are embarrassed to be seen as such, for they think of themselves as employees of government.  The leader of one prominent society told this writer privately that he thought charity ‘demeaning’, yet his institution enjoys the tax benefits that charitable status provides.

Most of the commanding institutions of the voluntary sector see links with government as highly desirable, keeping them in the mainstream of national policy while easing their funding problems. It may seem contradictory, but the charitable establishment has been decidedly collectivist for decades. Charitable officials, who often have a background in government service, do not want to return to a time when voluntary institutions were responsible for essential services. Talk about rolling back the state makes them nervous.  They are content to take state funding and serve as welfare providers in a devolved form of collectivism.  Many of them have simply run out of good campaigning ideas; otherwise they would be able to raise money elsewhere.

In the 1980s, about 10% of overall charitable revenue came from government; today the figure is approaching 50%, while individual contributions are in decline.  We may be reaching a tipping point, when individuals will assume that charities are essentially government agencies paid for by taxation and consequently no longer feel the need to contribute as individuals – a problem universities have had for decades. From the point of view of the charities, those that work closely with local and central government are more likely to shape their priorities to suit available grants, to create their own bureaucracies, to distance charitable campaigners from beneficiaries, and to play down religion, which has been the taproot of charity in the past.

Dr Frank Prochaska

Presumably, the big society is not simply about the delivery of social services, but about civic democracy and personal contribution. It is a call for scaling back government in favour of greater self-determination, self help, and welfare pluralism. This is what the government says it wants. But if our politicians really believed in such principles they would dramatically increase the tax incentives to giving and further reduce the unnecessary regulations on those local institutions that receive no state assistance and which are the backbone of civic life.  There has been little sign of this to date, for it would reduce government revenue and control.

The charitable establishment seems to be content with further government intervention, seeking only to extract ever-greater sums from the taxpayer.  Cameron’s commitment to provide government contracts worth billions to charities and social enterprises suits their purposes.  But if voluntary institutions cherish their independence they need to be saved from themselves, and the government would be doing them a favour if it reduced the subsidies and removed the charitable status of institutions that receive the bulk of their revenue from government.

Much charity works within classes rather than between them.  Why not use some of the money to award prizes without strings attached to innovative institutions in working-class and ethnic communities?  Arguably, invigorating the rich tradition of working-class and ethnic philanthropy is the best hope of the big society.  But such charity is largely outside the purview of central government.  Nor is it of much interest to the media, which is largely insensitive to the charitable grass roots and continues to equate philanthropy with social hierarchy.  This is not the way it is viewed on the housing estates and in ethnic communities, where charity, both formal and informal, is a way of life.

In ‘a very difficult country to move’, the big society does not foreshadow the end of the welfare state as the naysayers predict. It looks set to reshape it in the guise of devolution.  But it would be ironic if it simply led to more government responsibility, however devolved, and not to the greater personal responsibility that all the political parties say they desire.  A debate about the respective boundaries of charity and the state, between the ‘virtue’ of charity and the ‘right’ to welfare, is urgently needed.

This is an amended version of a talk given at a conference on the ‘Big Society’ at Christ Church College, Oxford, in February 2011.

To cite this article, please use: Frank Prochaska, ‘Is the Big Society Collecitivism in Disguise’, Voluntary Action History Society Blog (19 March 2012). Available at: http://www.vahs.org.uk/2012/03/big-society-prochaska/

The settlement movement, which originated in London in the 1880s and spread across Britain and America in the following decades, has long been considered an important aspect of the history of social policy before the First World War. Many historians have considered the best known settlement, London’s Toynbee Hall, which was founded by Canon Samuel Barnett in Whitechapel in 1884, and which still stands, on Commercial Street, and functions as an important centre of voluntary social action. Other foundations from this period, such as Oxford House in Bethnal Green (also 1884), the Manchester Settlement (1895) and the Bristol University (now Barton Hill) Settlement (1911), are also still in existence, while others, such as the Edinburgh University Settlement, have recently closed.

Toynbee Hall rendering from 1938

In the late Victorian and Edwardian period, settlements were residential ‘colonies’ of education men, or women, or both, in a deprived area of a city, often associated with an Oxbridge college or other educational institution. Graduates or others with the means to do so would come into residence for a period of time, and engage in community-based activities, including youth work, adult education, social work and the provision of legal advice. Today there are few residential settlements, but the institutions survive as centres of welfare provision and social support. Settlements are interested in their own history: when I presented a paper to the VAHS seminar series at the Institute of Historical Research in December, a number of current and former settlement workers were in the audience. A brief glance at some settlements’ websites demonstrates the depth of this interest, for example that of the Barton Hill Settlement.

Historians of voluntary action, while quick to acknowledge the influence of the settlements before 1914 – William Beveridge and Clement Attlee, to name just two pioneers of the welfare state, were residents at Toynbee Hall in this period – have mostly downplayed their significance during the interwar and postwar periods. In his recent book Squires in the Slums, Nigel Scotland has examined the settlement movement in London before the First World War, and has suggested that after 1914 the movement contributed little to social policy and welfare debates. Even by 1900, he argues, ‘there were already signs that the initial energy and enthusiasm was beginning to wane’. This approach to the history of philanthropy reflects a long-standing tendency to emphasise the growth of statutory service provision at the expense of the voluntary sector: as the welfare state expanded, voluntary action was ‘crowded out’.

Barton Hill Settlement in Bristol, 1965

Most historians today would reject this emphasis. Voluntary action was never eclipsed by statutory welfare provision, and indeed often evolved in connection with it, with the emergence of welfare partnerships. Such partnerships existed during the interwar period, and were described in Elizabeth Macadam’s important book, The New Philanthropy, published in 1934. This book recognised the importance of settlements and many other organisations in welfare delivery at a local level. This was recognised at the settlements themselves. The warden of Toynbee Hall, James Mallon, remarked in 1935 that, since the First World War, ‘the Settlement has had the most vigorous years of its life’. International conferences of settlements, held in 1922, 1926 and 1929 indicate that the ‘movement’, as it was usually called, flourished in many parts of the world.

The most sustained treatment of the history of settlements in Britain after the First World War is Kate Bradley’s book, Poverty, Philanthropy and the State, published in 2009. Bradley focuses on London, and there remains considerable scope for further research on the provincial dimensions of the settlement movement. Despite the existence of many excellent local studies, we know little of the settlement movement in the north of England or Scotland, and about the important role that educational settlements played in promoting adult learning, during the interwar period in particular – although my own work in the history of education has begun to address this question.

Edinburgh University Settlement was declared bankrupt in 2010

Of particular interest to me has been the relationship between local settlements and the national bodies that have emerged to guide the ‘movement’. Two institutions were created after the First World War: the Federation of Residential Settlements (FRS) and the Educational Settlements Association (ESA). Both are still in existence: the FRS became the British Association of Settlements and Social Action Centres, which is now the less cumbersomely named Locality, formed in 2011 after merging with the Development Trusts Association. The ESA is now the Educational Centres Association, a practice-based organisation focusing on the needs of adult learners and educators. My paper on the relationship between the two organisations during the interwar period, and on the often difficult relationship between each organisation and its members, is available as a podcast.

There remains, however, considerable scope for examining the history of voluntary action through the lens of the settlement movement. Many settlements have their own archives, and the FRS records can be consulted at the University of Birmingham. The ESA archives, of which I have made considerable use, are at the Institute of Education, London, and provide insights into the history of many individual institutions as well as the organisation itself. There are also many online resources, which provide an excellent starting point for anyone interested in this topic. Especially useful may be the Encyclopedia of Informal Education, for which I have written an overview of Educational Settlements and various articles on individual settlements and similar institutions. It also features an excellent article on University and Social Settlements and Social Action Centres by Mark K. Smith.

For information on listening to this and other VAHS seminars, see the podcasts section of this website.

To cite this article, please use: Mark Freeman, ‘The Settlement Movement since 1918′, Voluntary Action History Society Blog (12 March 2012). Available at: http://www.vahs.org.uk/2012/03/settlements-freeman/