The New-Model VSO
SIR,—As Quoodlc was so generous in his reference to my modest part in devising the VSO idea. may I comment on the director's letter in your last issue?
I could never have mooted, in the Spectator or anywhere else, the notion of a-body working through the British Council. Other considerations apart, in- cluding my own experience in the service of that institution, any association with the British Council is bound to brand VSO as a colonialist body with a propaganda motive.
The essential virtue of the original VSO was that it became so acceptable just because it was com- pletely free from the British government and all its agencies. Again, sir, you refer to the withdrawal of volunteers from Somalia (the volunteers and the Somalis both protesting). But there are other coun- tries that have expelled the British Council, and naturally those are just the ones where VSO and only VSO could be accepted. Burma, for instance. Zanzibar, Cuba and Indonesia.
Mr. Whiting stresses the need of the emerging countries for lecturers and teachers in their various training colleges. Too true, and VSO has doubtless been a happy means to get them on the cheap; just as it has been most convenient for the Ministry of Overseas Development, after failing to attract the full-time quota of men and women to fill such posts, to plug the gaps with these short-term idealists. But all that is just a prolongation of the old Colonial Establishment that VSO was first devised to break away from. Now, with its graded hierarchy of graduates and cadets (the very word just stinks of colonialism) and its overbearing weight of illustrious pensioners on the directorate; it appears a cross between the East India Company and a sort of poor man's Colonial Service; just as the British Council is the poor man's Foreign Office.
This, of course, is just what the old VSO, which knew no social or financial distinctions between graduates, schoolboys and apprentices, was not. It dispatched its lone volunteers to the remotest places where the White Establishment, if ever it existed, was definitely unpopular. The result was that in West Africa the boys were acclaimed as gods, in Sarawak made blood-brothers of the peoples up-river, and sped from the Indian reservations of South America with witch-doctors' spells to ensure their return. One somehow cannot quite imagine such things hap- pening to Mr. Whiting's graded experts allotted to the various institutions approved of by the British Council.
It is quite understandable that VSO should be working in more countries in 1965 than in 1962. There are so many more to work in. And now that Singapore has broken with Malaysia it can claim yet another one. Equally, one appreciates that with a government grant of something like £200,000 it can field more volunteers than could the old VSO with £13,000 (it would be interesting to work out the comparative costs of each volunteer). The ques- tion is, as you yourself asked, are they the countries where British are thick on the ground and on the spot already? Or are they those with nationalist and left-wing governments that the more orthodox are not inclined to face? What happened to the scheme for teachers in Malaya in Chinese-language schools? And what of Cuba? If British buses go there, so can British boys.
What happened to the posts in Vietnam. Laos and Ceylon? Why are the volunteers in India in rich men's schools, not in the villages?
Does it not really just add up to this? The new- model VSO is more luxurious than the old and better serviced. With 400 travelling inspectors to 1,000 volunteers, no one can say that it is under- staffed. It is far more favourably viewed in White- hall, if not in the emergent countries, and it is more respectable to work for. On the other hand, it has reverted to the colonialist pattern of circa 1880.
14 Great Ormond Street, WC1
GEORGE EDINGER
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