Towards a new understanding of volunteering in England before 1960?

Why does a dominant version of the history of volunteering suggest that volunteering reached a low ebb during the years after 1945 until a so-called ‘volunteer boom’ in the 1960s: a rediscovery of volunteering to sit alongside the better known ‘rediscovery of poverty’? This exploratory working paper suggests a number of arguments against the prevailing view that volunteering was 'reborn' in the 1960s after reaching a low ebb in the post-war period. It argues for the existence of a ‘volunteering movement’ prior to 1960, shows that expansion of state welfare provision from the early twentieth century through until 1960s relied on the involvement of volunteers and discusses important changes to volunteering in the immediate post-war period. This working paper is published by the Institute for Volunteering Research. It was developed with the advice of Professor Nicholas Deakin and an earlier version was presented at the NCVO-VSSN Researching the Voluntary Sector Conference in September 2011