Abstract
Much voluntary work with young people in the inter-war years focused on those aged between fourteen and twenty years old who had left school but were not yet fully equipped to enter the world of adult leisure. Its overall aim was to intervene in the transition to adulthood to encourage a preference for active leisure and to develop the skills of social citizenship. In this context character became important in sociological rather than moral terms; its improvement, as the National Conference on the Leisure of the People noted, was the foundation of intelligent employment and citizenship. Central to social service with young people was the self-managed club; as B.A. Campbell, the leader of a London boys’ club remarked, in a time of democracy and democratic government, the boys had to be allowed to govern themselves. The juvenile, or adolescent, was, as Mike Brake has argued, a cultural construct, variously identified as respectable, delinquent or culturally rebellious. Much intervention in the leisure of young people reflected not idealism but a perceived need for control and regulation; Pearl Jephcott, a senior organizer in the National Association of Girls’ Clubs, conceded that inter-war voluntary social service for youth never transcended the idea of a social ambulance. Nevertheless, through experimentation, social research and state-voluntary partnership, a modern twentieth-century approach to provision for young people emerged that led to the publication in 1942 of The Service of Youth and its recommendation of the establishment of youth committees by local authorities.