Berry Mayall - You Can Help Your Country

Revised edition

Berry Mayall and Virginia Morrow

First published in 2020 by

UCL Press

University College London

Gower Street

London WC1E 6BT

Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk

Berry Mayall and Virginia Morrow, 2020

Images as noted under each figure.

Berry Mayall and Virginia Morrow have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Mayall, B. and Morrow, V. 2020. You Can Help Your Country: English childrens work during the Second World War. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787356726

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ISBN: 978-1-78735-684-9 (Hbk.)

ISBN: 978-1-78735-678-8 (Pbk.)

ISBN: 978-1-78735-672-6 (PDF)

ISBN: 978-1-78735-690-0 (epub)

ISBN: 978-1-78735-697-9 (mobi)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787356726

Berry Mayall is Professor Emerita of Childhood Studies at the UCL Institute of Education, London. She has worked for many years on research projects studying the daily lives of children and their parents. Over the last 35 years, she has participated in the development of the sociology of childhood, contributing many books and papers to this process including Towards a Sociology for Childhood (Open University Press, 2002).

Virginia Morrow is Visiting Professor at the UCL Institute of Education, London and Research Associate, Young Lives, in the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. Her research has explored childrens work, sociological approaches to the study of childhood and childrens rights, the ethics of social research with children, violence affecting children, childrens understandings of family, and childrens social capital.

When we wrote our book, over 10 years ago, it was because we wanted to tell the story of English childrens contributions to the war effort. There had been many books about children in wartime: as objects of state concern; as victims; and, above all, as evacuees. We wanted to show that there was another story waiting to be told: about children as active participants in the war effort.

Since that time, there have been many more studies that have focused on childrens work both in the present and in the past. Here we want to flag up two sorts of studies childrens contributions to war efforts during the First World War, and children as workers across the world.

Rosie Kennedys book, The Childrens War: Britain, 19141918, is about the impacts that the First World War had on childrens lives. She discusses the rhetoric engaged in by government, religious organisations, education authorities and schools to encourage children to engage with the war. She draws on memoirs by people who were children at the time, including rich and poor, well-known and less well-known. She considers the encouragement that children received to join organised groups such as the Scouts and Guides and to work together for the war effort; also the contributions that children made through schools, where teachers led them to engage with the war effort, picking blackberries for jam, knitting comforters, sending parcels to the men at the front. Her informants reflect on what the war meant to them.

In complement, Berry Mayalls book Visionary Women and Visible Children, England 1900-1920: Childhood and the Womens Movement focuses on some of the poorest children, those who went to elementary schools between about 1910 and 1920. Again, this book draws on memoirs, in which people looking back at their childhoods describe the very hard lives that they mostly lived in families in which every penny counted and every contribution to the unending tasks could help. Children could see that they must do what they could. So they helped with housework, minding the baby, running errands. Where and when they could, they earned small amounts of money to supplement the family income. Life became especially hard, with fathers away at the war, food in short supply, mothers out at work or working at home to supplement the separation allowances received from the government to compensate for fathers lost earnings. Children had to queue for food, had to do even more jobs at home. In addition, children were recruited to work in agriculture and in factories, and many thousands were exempted from school for this work though education commentators deplored this move. After the war, commentators thought that children should be recompensed for their work, through a better education system.