REST-CENTRE POSSIBILITIES
By MARK BENNEY
THE L.C.C. Rest-Centre Service is now entering its second year of existence. There are two good reasons for celebrating its anniversary in print. Not only is it the out- standing example of an organisation built up entirely in response to war-time needs—needs .!_quite unforeseen in the preliminary planning period—but it has also been conceived in a spirit radically different from that of any previous social service of the kind.
Within an hour or two of the first mass-raids on London last autumn a serious breach in our civil-defence organisation became manifest. No authority seemed to have envisaged the possibility of families surviving the destruction of their homes. There were elaborate services for disposing of thousands of corpses, but no effective means at hand for disposing of the thousands of living who emerged sleepless and hungry from their shelters to find their houses a heap of rubble. There is no harm in saying now that the anger of those first hapless victims, whom harassed officials more than once left with the impression that they would be less trouble dead than alive, came near to causing serious disturbances. Voluntary workers laboured desperately, but the problem was hopelessly beyond their scope. The situation required the immediate and fullest exercise of authority. And, looking back, one cannot but be impressed by the unprecedented energy, freedom and decision with which the official machinery began to move.
Within a few days centres were being opened to provide for the basic needs of the new homeless—food, clothes, wash- places, blankets and a roof to rest under. The Social Welfare Department of the L.C.C. shouldered the administrative responsibilities, and accommodation was found for the most part in elementary school buildings. School-teachers in reception-areas were invited to return to man the new centres, and the response from them was magnificent. They worked day and night to convert the familiar classrooms to strange uses ; and displayed a protean capacity to undertake the work of a hundred different trades. In many instances, within four or five days of their recall, the teachers had their centres open and were feeding three hundred people a day. By October the new Rest-Centre Service, although ill-equipped and in a state of day-to-day improvisation, had broken the back of its formidable task. But it had done more than this : it had found a way of relieving distress without inflicting humiliations. There were no inquisitorial catechisms, and people who wished to make some return for services rendered were invited to share the work. Some measure of the success of this policy is at hand: as the rest-centres increased in number a large pro- portion of their staffs, voluntary as well as salaried, was recruited from among those who first entered them as air-raid victims.
Throughout the winter the service extended rapidly; the new year found nearly two hundred first-line centres in the metro- politan area. In the longer lulls between raids supervisors found opportunity to tidy up and brighten their centres, while area- administrators compared notes and requisitioned much-needed equipment. Perhaps some official sense of guilt, in not having anticipated the problems of the homeless, can be detected in the lavish scale of the supplies. At any rate it was not long before most of the centres lost all air of hasty improvisation, and took on a more orderly and permanent appearance, with bright kitchens laid out with three alternative sources of heat, well-stocked food- and bedding-stores, games-rooms, nurseries and reinforced dormitories. At the same time liaison with other after-the-raid services became closer and more extensive, so that few bombed-out people needed to remain in the centres for more than a week.
And now the approach of summer found the rest-centre staff, with their organisation complete, face to face with the common enemy of civil-defence workers: boredom. They found some relief in effecting incessant minor improvements about the buildings. School-teachers began to drift back to their own pro- fession. The dangerous age of the service was at hand. The interest taken by public and Press in their work provided a temptation which supervisors, with time hanging on their hands, found difficult to resist. A tendency to arrange the centres with a view to impressing visitors showed itself. Area-officers, in their allocation of stocks, were apt to favour the newer and brighter buildings. In the absence of any central directive regarding dietary-factors, supervisors allowed other considerations to in- fluence their food-requisitions. A room stocked with pyramids of gaily-labelled tins catches the eye of a hurrying pressman— he is unlikely to ask whether, behind this shop-window display, the more necessary but untidy foundations of emergency-feeding are to be found—bags of flour, rice, beans. Similar influences governed the provision of washing-facilities. Few of the school buildings were equipped with bathrooms; but a tiled floor and a few feet of garden hose fitted with spray nozzles would have met all the needs of the centres. But the few lucky supervisors whose wishes have been met prefer to show the visitor a gleam- ing bathroom containing a single mock-porcelain bath—while .others must still be content to produce only a plumber's estimate. Women organisers, too, with nothing to fear from a generous finance-department, have been excited • to elaborate experiments in the decorative arts, and without experience or guidance have produced many costly failures in their efforts to subdue large school-halls to the pattern of suburban boudoirs.
But these are mistakes natural to a young, vital organisation bursting to do good work, and they are easily rectified. More disturbing if less pronounced has been a recent trend towards over-elaborate regulation and discipline : this threatened what has so far been one of the most attractive features of the service—its lack of institutionalism. A hieratic separation of staffs, a proliferation of " notices " about the buildings, a locking and unlocking of doors at fixed hours—such trifles indicate the tendency of supervisors to spin an ever more complicated tissue of routine about their inactivity, which, extended a little farther, will hamper their response to the emergencies with which the centres are designed to cope.
There is the issue. The Rest-Centre Service was evolved in a hurry to meet a very urgent need—and in the stress of the times something very new and auspicious in social-welfare organisation emerged. But in terms of actual work done the organisation is grossly extravagant. Some of the centres have never had a single homeless person to deal with ; very few indeed have averaged more than one day in seven of occupa- tion by raid-victims. Yet their weekly wage-bill alone is between forty and sixty pounds. In terms of national economics, it would be far cheaper to hand each bombed- out person a hundred-pound note and a reservation at the Ritz.
But that is only true while the activities of the centres are confined to this one emergency-function. Need they be? The rest-centres occupy buildings unusually large and spacious. They are equipped with kitchens, dining-halls and trained kitchen-staff able to cater for large numbers, with nursery- rooms, first-aid posts, washplaces and baths. Large staffs spend their days waiting for these facilities to be used. Simul- taneously, the appropriate Ministries are pestering local authorities to provide more day-nurseries to release mothers for other work ; more communal-feeding establishments to economise food and fuel and raise nutritional standards ; more shelter-services to maintain health-standards. And there is no doubt at all that the rest-centres, without in the least impairing their efficiency to cope with their primary function, could undertake these duties.
It would involve a slight increase of staff—not more than two persons in each centre, one of them a trained nursery- worker. It would also involve other departments more intimately in the work of the centres—but the barriers of departmentalism have already been well breached. And in return there would be, not only a valuable extension of London's war-time services, but the release of a young and flexible organisation from a boring bondage to Nazi tactics.
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