‘A Band of Lunatics down Camberwell Way’: Percy Lane Oliver and Voluntary Blood Donation in Interwar Britain

Abstract

In 1946, Britain launched its National Blood Transfusion Service (BTS), an early and famous component of its National Health Service.² The National BTS’s reliance on unpaid, voluntary donors who made their blood a ‘gift’ to dying strangers contrasted strikingly — and often favourably — with the American tendency to pay ‘donors’ for blood. The sociologist Richard Titmuss seized on this contrast, turning it into an eloquent defence of altruism in his classic study, The Gift Relationship (1970). Here, social conscience played hero to self-interest’s villain. The National BTS, Titmuss argued, could ‘only be understood within the context of the Health Service’. The NHS, an exemplar of ‘socialized medical care’, was ‘the most unsordid act of British social policy in the twentieth century’, encouraging ‘sentiments of altruism, reciprocity and social duty … [in] all social groups and classes’.³ For Titmuss, the NHS extended the communitarian spirit and material responsibilities generated in wartime. The National BTS exemplified this spirit. Titmuss made no mention of blood donation’s pre-NHS history, so freeing the reader to conclude that the system of voluntary donation arose de novo from this post-war movement. It did not. It was, instead, the product of interwar Britain, shaped by its much older tradition of medical charity.

It is a matter of national pride that ours is the only country in the world, with the exception of Holland, Sweden and some of the Dominions, where voluntary bodies of donors are the rule and not the exception. In most countries the voluntary services of Great Britain are regarded as hopelessly Utopian and as characteristic a national phenomenon as the British Constitution.