Robert Snape

Voluntary action in leisure in inter-war Britain was shaped by three principal forces. The most immediate and pressing was the need for social and cultural reconstruction after the First World War. The widespread demand for and expectation of a better post-war society stimulated interest in the potential contribution of leisure to this in terms of its more democratic distribution and of community-building. However the optimism of the early phase of social reconstruction was undermined by a series of economic crises that led to the mass unemployment of the 1930s and the ‘enforced leisure’ of the unemployed. The absence of work raised difficult questions about the meaning of leisure, fuelling fears of alienation and community breakdown. In areas of high unemployment voluntary action became not so much a question of deploying leisure to community reconstruction but of maintaining community cohesion to prevent the unemployed becoming a separated community. However, in the more prosperous regions of the midlands and the south, leisure opportunities expanded as living standards improved. The third force was the changing nature of leisure itself as new forms, notably the cinema, wireless and greyhound racing, gained widespread popularity. With the founding of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1927 drama and both light and classical music became increasingly available. The popularity of spectator sport also grew, providing an affordable leisure interest for everyone and especially working-class people.

The years immediately preceding the First World War were marked by significant industrial unrest with 40.9 million working days lost through strikes in 1912 alone and trade union membership increasing to over four million by 1914. A harmonious relationship between labour and capital was thus a major aim of post-war social reconstruction. Reformers and trade unions demanded shorter hours and a more equal distribution of leisure, both being resisted by employers. However, new Home Office guidelines on factory welfare revived interest in the socialization of workers in factory-based leisure communities. Leisure became an important non-statutory component of welfare as a field for the creation of a social community out of the economic community of the workplace. Although employers construed the leisure of their welfare schemes as an economic and a social good, critics argued it to be a distraction from low wages and trade union activity. However, the welfare provision of leisure could also be interpreted as a moral act; Alfred Zimmern, for example, who had worked in the Ministry of Reconstruction, believed it countered the dehumanization of factory work and Delisle Burns, reflecting the progressive liberal view that the factory was a social institution bound to the common good, suggested welfare could be both economically desirable and a moral good. After the War, as scientific management and industrial psychology devised schemes to bind employees to the corporate identity of the firm, welfare was decreasingly an expression of the paternalism of an individual factory owner. The provision of work-based leisure schemes was voluntary as, in most cases, was the worker’s decision to join them.

During the First World War the social and cultural orthodoxies of the late-Victorian and Edwardian era came under severe critical attack and by 1919 there was widespread demand for fundamental social change through post-war social reconstruction. When the government established a Ministry for Reconstruction in 1917, it was emphasized that this was not a rebuilding of society as it had existed, but of moulding a better world from the social and economic conditions that had come into being during the War. The demands of reconstruction embraced several long-standing concerns of social policy, notably housing and health, and it is instructive to recall George Orwell’s description of the War as a heightened moment in an almost continuous crisis. This was particularly true in terms of leisure and voluntary action, in which its effect was to re-energize interest and debate in the meanings of leisure and social work initiated by social philosophers before the War. That there was a need for social renewal was not contested; the question was what type of society should be aimed for. Many critics believed more than an adjustment of the social and cultural values of pre-war society was necessary; as ‘Demos’ expressed it, reconstruction presented an unparalleled opportunity to overhaul national life in accordance with the ideals of a new age. There was a consensual view that the new society should be more democratic and less unequal than pre-war society and many reformers broadly shared the Labour Party’s vision of a new social order of fraternity, co-operation, equality and democratic participation in political power.

Evangelicalism has been credited with the invention of the voluntary society; by the end of the nineteenth century, as Pat Thane notes, it was the largest single inspiration of charitable effort. Evangelicalism was a pervasive cross-denominational movement that proclaimed the responsibility of the church to apply the message of the gospel to social problems. Its defining characteristic as a force for voluntary intervention was its emphasis on social ethics and welfare and from the 1830s it inspired a middle-class crusade to infuse social and cultural life with Christian principles, prompting churches and socio-religious organizations to become providers and organizers of leisure. Puritan religion was suspicious of leisure as a source of sin and non-conformist denominations in particular imposed strict limits upon recreation. In the face of the new social problems of urbanization, religious attitudes to leisure changed. The extent to which they did so was varied; leisure remained a potential cause of sin and thus required moral regulation, but might also serve as the basis of a Christian social life.

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.

Long-term unemployment was a persistent feature of inter-war Britain, affecting at least 10 per cent of the insured workforce every year between 1921 and 1938, with the exception of 1927 when the proportion fell to 9.7 per cent. When uninsured workers were included, the total was higher and in 1932 3,400,000 persons, 17 per cent of the total workforce, were out of work. Ken Roberts has noted that the lower economic groups, being the most vulnerable to unemployment, are the most affected by class inequalities in leisure. This was historically the case as the concentration of unemployment in working-class areas intensified its social impacts. While areas of the midlands and south of England developed new industries and enjoyed a degree of prosperity with new opportunities for leisure through the welfare schemes of modernizing factories, regions in which the older staple industries were in economic decline experienced economic and social distress. In the north-east shipbuilding town of Jarrow, for example, over 80 per cent of workers were unemployed in 1932 while in the mining areas of South Wales the average rate was over 70 per cent.

From the final decade of the nineteenth century evangelical religious interest in leisure was challenged by secular models of voluntary association, which defined leisure not primarily in moral terms but in those of an imagined ideal social community. Utopian thinking had historically associated leisure with ideals of community and the good society, notably through Plato and Aristotle and later Thomas More, whose Utopians devoted an hour to recreation each day and tended their gardens when not following Aristotle’s guidance to pursue intellectual development. In terms of the built environment, Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford, both connected to the Chelsea Utopians discussion circle on citizenship, developed a sociological approach to urban living in which leisure and the cultural environment formed the seedbed of community in a new type of town. A different type of community was envisioned in socialism, which developed a leisure culture imbued with co-operative and collective values.

Walter Besant’s novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men and Andrew Mearns’ The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, published in 1882 and 1883 respectively, stimulated middle-class interest in the urban slum as a separated community. Together with social surveys they contributed to a topographical imagination of the late-Victorian city, which, in Rosalind Williams’ terms, posited the slum as a subterranean social underworld inhabited by a dispossessed class. At a time when degenerationist theories were fashionable, the slum seemed to herald a collapse of civilization. Helen Dendy (later Bosanquet), a leading figure in the Charity Organisation Society, expressed a widely held view in describing its population as a ‘residuum’ characterized by lack of foresight and self-control. To middle-class reformers the slum constituted a challenge to address the spatial and cultural distances between prosperous and poor communities.

The First World War re-energized the Edwardian voluntary spirit and placed new demands on post-war voluntary action. The discourse of post-war social reconstruction was not a sterile intellectual debate but an analysis of need and a call to action. In keeping with the new interest in social reconstruction, the focus of voluntary service, according to James Heighton, President of the National Association of Guilds of Help, had to change from personal case-work to civic engagement, community well-being and greater co-ordination. In some fields of social policy, notably housing and health, state intervention was forthcoming.

The historical development of leisure and voluntary action corresponds with thematic approaches and periods in the historiography of social policy. Pat Thane adopted the sub-periods of 1870–1914, the First World War, and the inter-war decades; Derek Fraser deployed a similar framework of an age of laissez faire from c.1780 to c.1885 and the emergence of a social service state c.1885 to 1939. Although no single model of voluntary action, or indeed leisure, was absolute at any given point, these temporal frameworks reflect broad phases of social, economic and cultural change and mark shifts of emphasis in voluntarism from paternalism and charitable philanthropy to social service and organized voluntary action.