You Can Help Your Country
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You Can Help Your Country You Can Help Your Country English children’s work during the Second World War Revised edition Berry Mayall and Virginia Morrow First published in 2020 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk © Berry Mayall and Virginia Morrow, 2020 Images © as noted under each figure. Berry Mayall and Virginia Morrow have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Mayall, B. and Morrow, V. 2020. You Can Help Your Country: English children’s work during the Second World War. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/ 111.9781787356726 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons licence unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to re-use any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978-1-78735-684-9 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-678-8 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-672-6 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-78735-690-0 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-78735-697-9 (mobi) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787356726 In memoriam v Contents List of figures and tables vii List of abbreviations ix About the authors xi Preface to the revised edition xii Acknowledgements xvi 1. Starting points 1 2. Children in social thought between the wars 23 3. Earners or learners? Work and school 1900–1939 48 4. Children in wartime 70 5. Younger children’s work: Doing their bit 97 6. Bringing in the harvest 122 7. Older children’s work: Serving their country 149 8. Children in organisations: Working for freedom 176 9. Closing points 201 Appendix 223 References 237 Index 249 vi List of figures and tables Figure 2.1: Truby King’s guidelines for infant welfare included this clock face prescribing exact times for food, bath, sleep and exercise. 37 Figure 2.2: Women and toddler raking the garden at the ‘Peckham Experiment’. 41 Figure 4.1: Ministry of Information poster: ‘Dig for Victory’. 84 Figure 4.2: How to take a blackcurrant cutting. From the notes (25 September 1944) accompanying the BBC’s The Practice and Science of Gardening weekly programmes for schools. 85 Figure 4.3: Ministry of Health Evacuation Scheme poster. 92 Figure 5.1: Knitting for the RAF. Cover of a book of knitting instructions, depicting people of all ages contributing. 106 Figure 5.2: Paper-salvage campaign. 115 Figure 6.1: Boy picking peas, wearing protection against the sun. 124 Figure 6.2: Sketch of Holman’s Farm by 11-year-old John Waters. 135 Figure 6.3: Laying out herbs. 136 Figure 7.1: The King with the boy munition worker. 150 Figure 7.2: Young people sorting the mail, 1942. 173 Figure 8.1: Boy Scouts National Service and War Service badge and armband. 183 Figure 8.2: Girl Guides take up Forestry Work in the West Country. 188 vii Table 6.1: The school harvest camps scheme, 1941–1945 125 Table A.1: Percentage who mentioned the following as one of their spare-time activities 227 viii LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES List of abbreviations ACF Army Cadet Force ARP Air Raid Precautions (Department) ATC Air Training Corps BBC British Broadcasting Corporation CCSB Central Council for School Broadcasting CORB Children’s Overseas Reception Board DES Department for Education and Science FBI Federation of British Industries GGA Girl Guides Association HMSO Her Majesty’s Stationery Office IOE Institute of Education, University of London IQ Intelligence Quotient JTSs junior technical schools LEA local education authority MERL Museum of English Rural Life, Reading University NEF New Education Fellowship NUT National Union of Teachers PP Parliamentary Papers SCF Save the Children Fund SHCAC Schoolboy Harvest Camps Advisory Committee SLA School-leaving age TES Times Educational Supplement TUC Trades Union Congress UNCRC United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics VE Day Victory in Europe Day VJ Day Victory over Japan Day ix WAAF Women’s Auxiliary Air Force WAEC War Agricultural Executive Committee WEA Workers’ Educational Association WI Women’s Institute WVS Women’s Voluntary Service YAC Youth Advisory Council x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS About the authors Berry Mayall is Professor Emerita of Childhood Studies at the UCL Institute of Education, London. She has worked for many years on research projects studying the daily lives of children and their parents. Over the last 35 years, she has participated in the development of the sociology of childhood, contributing many books and papers to this process including Towards a Sociology for Childhood (Open University Press, 2002). Virginia Morrow is Visiting Professor at the UCL Institute of Education, London and Research Associate, Young Lives, in the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. Her research has explored children’s work, sociological approaches to the study of childhood and children’s rights, the ethics of social research with children, violence affecting children, children’s understandings of family, and children’s ‘social capital’. xi Preface to the revised edition When we wrote our book, over 10 years ago, it was because we wanted to tell the story of English children’s contributions to the war effort. There had been many books about children in wartime: as objects of state concern; as victims; and, above all, as evacuees. We wanted to show that there was another story waiting to be told: about children as active participants in the war effort. Since that time, there have been many more studies that have focused on children’s work both in the present and in the past. Here we want to flag up two sorts of studies – children’s contributions to war efforts during the First World War, and children as workers across the world. Studies on childhood in the First World War Rosie Kennedy’s 2014 book, The Children’s War: Britain, 1914–1918, is about the impacts that the First World War had on children’s lives. She discusses the rhetoric engaged in by government, religious organisa- tions, education authorities and schools to encourage children to engage with the war. She draws on memoirs by people who were children at the time, including rich and poor, well-known and less well-known. She considers the encouragement that children received to join organised groups – such as the Scouts and Guides – and to work together for the war effort; also the contributions that children made through schools, where teachers led them to engage with the war effort, picking blackber- ries for jam, knitting comforters, sending parcels to the men at the front. Her informants reflect on what the war meant to them. xii In complement, Berry Mayall’s 2018 book Visionary Women and Visible Children, England 1900-1920: Childhood and the Women’s Movement focuses on some of the poorest children, those who went to elementary schools between about 1910 and 1920. Again, this book draws on memoirs, in which people looking back at their childhoods describe the very hard lives that they mostly lived in families in which every penny counted and every contribution to the unending tasks could help. Children could see that they must do what they could. So they helped with housework, minding the baby, running errands. Where and when they could, they earned small amounts of money to supplement the family income. Life became especially hard, with fathers away at the war, food in short supply, mothers out at work or working at home to supplement the ‘separation allowances’ received from the government to compensate for fathers’ lost earnings. Children had to queue for food, had to do even more jobs at home. In addition, children were recruited to work in agriculture and in factories, and many thousands were ‘exempted’ from school for this work – though education commentators deplored this move. After the war, commentators thought that children should be recompensed for their work, through a better education system. These two books have several things in common. They describe a time when children were regarded as members of society, who could (and should) be called on to contribute when circumstances required. They were not shielded from the harsh realities of the war, rather they were kept informed – at school, through newsreels, through visits by older brothers and schoolmates now serving in the war. Much of the work that children did was orchestrated by teachers, Scouts and Guides leaders, Cogs (a salvaging scheme for children; see Irving, 2019) and so on. Children at work across the world Children in poor families across the world find themselves with respon- sibilities to help out as and when they can. But they also have a duty to get themselves an education, since it is through educational qualifica- tions that they hope to earn enough to help their family further as well as improve their own financial prospects (e.g.