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A Social History of Student VolunteeringThe Students’ Contribution to Victory: Voluntary Work in the Second World War and After

A Social History of Student Volunteering: The Students’ Contribution to Victory: Voluntary Work... [Over the Christmas vacation of 1940 hundreds of students from all over the country played their part in a massive relief effort for the Blitzed cities of London and Manchester. Manchester student C. E. Jones, who organized a party of students to help with the grim task of uncovering bodies from the rubble, described it as “a Christmas of destruction, death and misery.”1 In London, 120 students spent part of their Christmas holidays living in the East End and learning new respect for its people. A pamphlet produced by students involved in “this great and terrible experience” contained an urgent “call to the universities of Britain. The society passing through this ordeal is our society; we must make ourselves ready to play our part.”2 By 1941 the rhetoric of a “student tradition of social work” was being employed by the National Union of Students (NUS) and others to promote war work across colleges and universities, but such coordinated student support for the war effort seemed unlikely in the autumn term of 1939.3 While thousands of students immediately joined the forces, those returning to college faced the multifaceted challenges of evacuation and Air Raid Precautions (ARP) as well as uncertainty over their very future as students. The Communist-dominated NUS leadership launched a robust campaign aimed at defending university education during wartime but its antiwar stance plunged the organization into crisis and shattered the prewar consensus that had been carefully built up across the student world.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A Social History of Student VolunteeringThe Students’ Contribution to Victory: Voluntary Work in the Second World War and After

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan US
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2014
ISBN
978-1-349-47523-0
Pages
135 –153
DOI
10.1057/9781137363770_8
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Over the Christmas vacation of 1940 hundreds of students from all over the country played their part in a massive relief effort for the Blitzed cities of London and Manchester. Manchester student C. E. Jones, who organized a party of students to help with the grim task of uncovering bodies from the rubble, described it as “a Christmas of destruction, death and misery.”1 In London, 120 students spent part of their Christmas holidays living in the East End and learning new respect for its people. A pamphlet produced by students involved in “this great and terrible experience” contained an urgent “call to the universities of Britain. The society passing through this ordeal is our society; we must make ourselves ready to play our part.”2 By 1941 the rhetoric of a “student tradition of social work” was being employed by the National Union of Students (NUS) and others to promote war work across colleges and universities, but such coordinated student support for the war effort seemed unlikely in the autumn term of 1939.3 While thousands of students immediately joined the forces, those returning to college faced the multifaceted challenges of evacuation and Air Raid Precautions (ARP) as well as uncertainty over their very future as students. The Communist-dominated NUS leadership launched a robust campaign aimed at defending university education during wartime but its antiwar stance plunged the organization into crisis and shattered the prewar consensus that had been carefully built up across the student world.]

Published: Nov 4, 2015

Keywords: International Student; Social History; Relief Effort; Student Volunteer; German Student

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