First Aid, Voluntarism and the Cold War

The ‘Cold War’ brought the threat of nuclear attack to British cities and towns, and one response was to revive voluntary Civil Defence, which had proved of value during the Second World War. The Civil Defence Corps (CDC) consisted of up to half a million volunteers in the 1950s, practically all of whom were trained in first aid. While historians, and many contemporaries, have portrayed this citizens’ army of rescuers and bandagers as a woefully underpowered response to nuclear Armageddon, the CDC did at least ensure that hundreds of thousands of people obtained basic skills in emergency medicine that were of utility in everyday life. 

The CDC project thus stimulated health voluntarism, and in the process galvanised and provided a sense of purpose to the Voluntary Aid Societies (VAS) – St John Ambulance and the British Red Cross Society – who, together with St Andrew’s Ambulance in Scotland, provided most of the first aid training to CDC volunteers. These organisations had, throughout the twentieth century, stood shoulder to shoulder with the armed forces in times of war, channeling voluntary effort into the provision of emergency medicine for soldiers and civilians alike. The Cold War CDC prolonged the link between VAS voluntarism and the militaristic state. 

In this paper we will describe the continuing relationship between the VAS and civil defence across the period 1948-1985. We will illustrate this relationship with examples from oral histories and sources from local archives in East Riding and East Sussex which show how first aid training was adapted to address the particular threats presented by nuclear weapons. We will also consider volunteers’ complex responses to their training and the CDC project. We will argue that cold-war preparedness functioned in some ways like an actual war by providing a threat that kept militaristic ‘medical’ voluntarism at a relatively high level. Our paper will finish with a consideration of the diminished but continuing role of militaristic medical voluntarism after the demise of the CDC in 1968. We will point out that today health voluntarism and volunteerism through the VAS has been largely stripped of militaristic overtones but not entirely, and that VAS volunteers continue to provide an important resource with the potential to supplement the state in times of emergency. We are grateful to the AHRC for funding for our research. 

• Rosemary Cresswell is Research Fellow in the School of Social Work and Social Policy, University of Strathclyde 
• Stefan Ramsden is Lecturer in the Department of History, University of Hull

All welcome- this session is free to attend, but booking in advance is required.