BRIAN DEER:
TRAVELLING WHITE Page
1
The
Sunday Times Magazine (London) April 26 1998
Every
year thousands of British volunteers embark on an
awfully big adventure: to help the Third World. But
Voluntary Service Overseas, VSO, funded by £21m of
taxpayers' money, is under attack. Critics say that
it does little to fight poverty and a lot to boost
volunteers' careers.
BRIAN
DEER INVESTIGATES
Forty
years ago last month, a letter appeared in The Sunday
Times that was to produce a remarkable effect. It was
from the Bishop of Portsmouth, one Launcelot Fleming,
who proposed a new form of social action to bolster
Britain's impact overseas. He had just finished
chairing a committee of the nation's great and good
that had probed the then-emerging rock 'n' roll
culture - and he had come to the conclusion that
there was Something To Be Done with what he described
as "suitable boys". Rather than be
corrupted by newfangled pinball machines, motor
scooters and other contemporary vices, he felt that
young chaps (he never mentioned girls) should go and
do Good Work around the world.
"I
know of urgent appeals from Sarawak, from Uganda and
from west Africa," he wrote, in a 350-word
epistle to this newspaper, printed under the headline
The Year Between, "not for money but for
volunteer assistance, in the field of primary
teaching, youth work, community development, adult
education and social welfare generally, where a
readiness to give service would not only be of value
in itself, but could act as an inspiration to the
young people of these countries."
This
letter is now pasted into the front of my notebook as
I fly with photographer David Harrison above an
orange west African landscape. We are seated near the
back of a 19-seat Beech 1900C, built in Wichita,
Kansas, heading 400km north from the city of Accra,
the coastal capital of the republic of Ghana. Seated
around us are six Protestant missionaries who chatter
excitedly about "planting churches". I ask
their leader if business is good. He grins and tells
me it's "excellent."
We
are here because of what grew out of that letter:
Voluntary Service Overseas, or VSO. After its
publication, on March 23 1958, a retired colonial
official named Alec Dickson, in cahoots with Fleming,
contrived an apparently spontaneous write-in campaign
from friendly headmasters and chums overseas, giving
Sunday Times editors and the newspaper's readers the
impression of a groundswell of support. Letters
poured in and, within weeks, what had been a
sub-editor's inspiration to fill a single-column,
two-line correspondence page heading was taken up as
the interim title of this body. They called it
"The Year Between".
How
the bishop squared taking part in this deception
presumably god only knows, but 1958 was as different
an era to ours as the Beano is from Nintendo. Many
columns of that weekend's Sunday Times were filled
with talk of the H-bomb. The paper reported that 40%
of households had television sets, and the radio
listings included such Light Programme treats as the
Billy Cotton Band Show. Celebrity medical stories
included news that Lady Harwood had mumps, and the
page 1 splash was:
- SIR
WINSTON IS
- 'NOT
TOO WELL'
In
this environment, the bishop's proposal must have
sounded like a Billy Bunter jape. "If, as I
believe, there will be no difficulty in finding
volunteers," he explained, "it will be
necessary for some body - or bodies - to accept
responsibility for three things: for selecting
suitable boys and suitable projects, for finding
travelling expenses, and for ensuring that at the
other end there is someone who will meet the boys and
set them on the right road."
*****
| brian deer |
