The Student Chapter in Postwar Reconstruction, 1920–1926

Abstract

In February 1920 Ruth Rouse, travelling secretary of the World’s Student Christian Federation (WSCF), was on a postwar tour of central Europe when she came across women students in Vienna who were facing extreme hardship and near famine conditions. Rouse and her secretary Eleanora Iredale immediately realized that the condition of these students—many of whom were surviving on one meal a day in unheated rooms in the middle of a harsh European winter—necessitated international relief. Rouse and Iredale put out an urgent call for aid through the WSCF, still the only world-wide student organization then in existence.¹ The appeal generated an almost immediate response from student groups across Europe as well as in the United States, India and South Africa. In Britain, £2,000 was raised during the summer term of 1920 after a “lightning campaign” led by students involved with the Society of Friends and the Student Christian Movement (SCM).² This chapter explores the involvement of British students in this international movement to ease student hardship in Europe and Russia and in so doing allows insights into the changing student experience after the First World War. International relief and reconstruction were important forces around which an incipient British student movement coalesced in the early 1920s.