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Why try to increase volunteering? The idea of co-production is that public services and citizens contribute jointly to deliver positive social outcomes and sympathetic environments in which people can have creative, productive, and fulfilling lives (see, for example, Boyle and Harris 2009 ). Underlying recent interest in co-production across the political spectrum is a belief that 60 years of state provision of welfare, however well-intentioned, has eaten away at citizens’ capacity and desire for mutuality and for self-help. These are not new
7 The volunteers’ farewell: closing rituals, genteel ironies Plaudits for the Volunteers The Last Night ‘Positively our last appearance’, the ‘Plus Force’ were yelling out on the Underground Friday night. ‘Walk up, ladies and gentlemen. We promise you won’t be disappointed’. The parting sally as we left was, ‘Good-night, everybody, good-night’, in best B.B.C. style. (London, 1926b: 2) Some of the volunteers who had served on the Underground had goodhumoured celebrations . . . to mark the end of their service. At one North London station they made the platform
• 5 • Home front volunteers Introduction Writing a ‘Prefatory note’ to his wartime diaries in November 1918, Frederick Robinson observed that his contribution to the war effort ‘might perhaps have been greater’. This was not, he stressed, from want of trying: he had been ‘denied the opportunity. Personal service without payment was offered several times and declined. It was not possible to get within the ring fence. One had not the physical strength to dig potatoes, nor the inclination to make crutches’. Nevertheless, his ‘conscience … [was] clear. Members of
5 Images of the volunteers: media versus memory ‘Seeing It Through’ Tommy is stoking an engine, Grandpa waves flags red and green, Innocent Florrie Is driving a lorry, While Millicent runs a canteen. Daddy, of course, is a Special, Mother is ready to nurse, And we all think alike That this jolly old strike Is bad – but it might have been worse! (Tristram, 1926a: 327) The men rolled milk churns, unloaded fish, meat and vegetables at the expense of shins and hands, muscles and sleep, to say nothing of the wear and tear on ‘22’ flannels and Jermyn Street pull
presentation is our own research on voluntary organisations in a Nordic context, more specifically in Norway. Together with the other Nordic countries, Norway is characterised by extensive democratic participation and high levels of volunteering, and most of the volunteering takes place within voluntary organisations (Enjolras & Strømsnes, 2018 ). We will present some former research
9 The Tribunals and the Volunteer Training Corps Born in the early days of the war from the widespread urge to ‘do something’ to protect the homeland from a German invasion, the Volunteer Training Corps, or VTC, had a protracted gestation. The early proliferation of small, independently organized groups, the heterogeneity of opinion regarding their role, the enduring conviction of the War Office that they represented both a diversion of men from fighting units and an expensive frivolity ensured that ‘something’ long remained an undetermined quality. A degree of
Part III Volunteer girls Tens of thousands of women prepared themselves for war service as nurses in the years leading up to the First World War. A minority of these were fully trained. Others attached themselves to VADs, undertook short courses in sick-nursing, bandaging, invalid cookery, and hygiene, and held themselves in readiness for war. Still others came forward at the outbreak of war with no training at all, and began developing their skills in the heat and stress of the wartime emergency. Anne Summers has shown that British and Dominion women had been
4 Philanthropists, volunteers, fund-raisers, and local preachers I n 1889 Sarah Mary Babbage Terrett, Bible Christian founder of the English White Ribbon temperance organization, suddenly collapsed and died while attending a meeting at which she was a featured speaker. The shock and sense of loss must have been considerable because she was well known for her stirring addresses – on the third anniversary of the White Ribbon campaign she quoted Nelson and Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade to call on ‘all engaged in this glorious work, in the name and
of what a martyr really was remained unstable. 16 Even amongst those who agreed on the importance on witnessing through death, the question of whether or not a Christian was entitled to volunteer for martyrdom was a complicated matter, and one that resulted in a conflict between what one might take to have been the ‘official’ attitude of the early Church and the practice of (some of) its adherents. 17 G. E. M. de Ste
Between 2012 and 2017, at the Ł-section of Warsaw’s Powązki Military Cemetery, or ‘Łączka’, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance exhumed a mass grave containing the remains of post-war anti-communist resistance fighters. Being referred to as the ‘cursed soldiers’, these fighters have become key figures in post-2015 Polish memory politics. In this article we focus on the role of the volunteers at these exhumations in the production of the ‘cursed soldiers’ memory. Following the idea of community archaeology as a civil society-building practice, the observed processes of sacralisation and militarisation show how the exhumations create a community of memory that promotes the core values of the currently governing national-conservative PiS party. We found that tropes related to forensic research and typically identified with cosmopolitan memory paradigms are used within a generally nationalist and antagonistic memory framework.