Abstract
A 1930 publication summing up seven years of progress of the National Union of Students (NUS) pointed out that in Britain there had not yet been a “self-conscious or articulate Self-help movement” on the lines of that in continental Europe.1 This was because the necessity for such a scheme had been delayed by the period of prosperity immediately following the war and because “it is not in the British psychology to create a national ‘movement’ when a situation may be met at least partially by individual or local effort.” Though there may not have been a movement on European lines, ideas of self-help were certainly under discussion in British universities in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The idea of Wirtschaftshilfe or work fellowship and self-help had emerged in Germany and Austria as a way of alleviating student hardship in the early 1920s.2 By 1926 students in Germany and Austria were in a position to share their experiences with students of other nations including those in “fairly normal economic conditions” and set up an office in Dresden to provide information and advice on hostels, restaurants and “self government activities of all kinds.”3 Students’ union shops and bars and the provision of student discounts by private companies are so taken for granted today that they seem obvious solutions to the problem of student hardship, but these were new ideas for the British student movement in the 1920s and 1930s.
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Notes
NUS, A Survey of Seven Years Development (London: NUS, 1930), 18.
Donald Grant, The European Student Relief of the World’s Student Christian Federation, A Brief Record of Work in Austria September 1920–April 1923 (Vienna: WSCF, 1923).
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© 2014 Georgina Brewis
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Brewis, G. (2014). No Longer the Privilege of the Well-to-Do? Student Culture, Strikes and Self-Help, 1926–1932. In: A Social History of Student Volunteering. Historical Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363770_5
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