VSO Old and New
Sot,—Had Mr. Chenevix Trench referred to the Spectator article of 1957 cited by Quoodle that helped start VSO he could never have written the letter lie did. All the priorities are there in order. Briefly, I always saw our priorities and VSO's over- seas as: I. Join the local labour unions and help to organise the workers to fight for their social and economic due. As I learned to know my Asia as a member and later as president of an Asian trade union it is hardly odd that I should put that where 1 clid and do. I never realised that was like the old Colonial Service.
2. To meet, mix and mingle with the young educated people, Nixon's 'wave of tomorrow,' and,, of course, on equal terms; in games, the arts, dis- oussions and debittes.
3. To get down into slumland Hong Kong, Singapore, Kingston, etc., and get going with youth clubs, boy scouts and the rest of it 'to take off the streets the kids whom we present to the Commun- ists—but not, of course, under denominational or political auspices, "again, of course, as equals, and only, as number Tour, to work in the backwoods with their brains and hands. And it was not all like the old Colonial Service. Might I qnote a VSO boy on that one; 'When the DO comes round he comes up-river in a launch. I paddle with them in the same canoe.'
But the present VSO life of experts, textbooks, lecture rooms, blue books, tea parties and the British Council, I would put as priority, or should I say posterity, twenty-six.
Unhappily, when .VSO got started I was told priority one was out or one would never get a penny for the fares (the volunteers then . often worked their passages but there was not always all that time, not awfully like the old Colonial Ser- vices really). Priority two had to be played down a lot for the same reason as priority one. So priority four got pushed up into the limelight and I had to cite it as the most typically striking aspect of the old VSO. Priority three was, of course, equally vital. Had I realised I was writing for leaders who thought 'the volunteers had private means (!) which the Colonial Service had not' (they. had not even pay, which the Colonial Service had) I would, of course, have pointed out that the pioneer backwoods work was only inter alia. But then where was I to begin? And at any rate, even priority four is a sight better than posterity twenty-six.
19 Great Ormond Street, WC1
GEORGE EDINGER
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