Abstract
First aid was the focus of growing voluntary activity in the post-war decades. Despite the advent of the National Health Service in 1948, increased numbers of people volunteered to learn, teach, and administer first aid as concern about health and safety infiltrated new activities and arenas. In this article we use the example of the Voluntary Aid Societies (VAS, focusing in particular on St John Ambulance) to highlight continuities and change in the relationship between state and voluntary sector in health and welfare provision during the four decades after 1945. Though the state assumed vastly expanded health and welfare responsibilities after the war, the continuing vitality of the VAS suggests cultural continuities that the post-war welfare state did not eradicate. The article therefore builds on the insights of historians who argue that volunteering remained a vital component of British society across the later twentieth century, and that the state and voluntary sector were not mutually exclusive.
Highlights
First aid was the focus of growing voluntary activity in the post-war decades
In this article we use the example of the Voluntary Aid Societies (VAS, focusing in particular on St John Ambulance) to highlight continuities and change in the relationship between state and voluntary sector in health and welfare provision during the four decades after 1945
After the Second World War, there were fears that the voluntarism that many saw as an essential feature of British society, and which had come to the fore in the collective effort of the home front, would be fatally eroded by the advent of the welfare state.[1]
Summary
The ‘Voluntary Aid Societies’ (VAS)—in England, the British Red Cross Society (BRCS) and the SJA—were a crucial part of the mixed ecology of emergency healthcare during the first half of the century; from the mid-1930s, these organizations were at the forefront of civil defence, training and providing volunteers to give emergency first-aid assistance during bombing raids.[11] There were. Undoubtedly tensions between an ethos of voluntary public service and the emerging emancipated individual of the post-war era.[12] But the VAS continued to occupy an important place in the public life of the nation. We argue that the VAS represented the adaptation of an older service ethos and liberal view of welfare to new circumstances These organizations’ survival, and, on many counts, flourishing, across the three post-war decades gives us an insight into change and continuity in an English voluntarist tradition across a period often represented as an era of radical social transformation
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