The Red Cross Movement: Myths, practices and turning points 9781526133526

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
List of figures
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
The Red Cross Movement: Continuities, changes and challenges
Certainty, compassion and the ingrained arrogance of humanitarians
Part I The Movement’s foundational ‘myths’
The Americans lead the way?: The United States Sanitary Commission and the development of the Red Cross Movement, 1861–71
Intertwined stories of war humanitarianism: The British Order of St John of Jerusalem and the Red Cross in the Spanish ...
The early history of the Red Cross Society of China and its relation to the Red Cross Movement
Failure to launch: The American Red Cross in an era of contested neutrality, 1914–17
Part II Turning points
Challenging the colonial and the international: The American Red Cross in the last war of Cuban independence (1895–8)
Realignment in the aftermath of war: The League of Red Cross Societies, the Australian Red Cross and its Junior Red Cross ...
The ‘British Red Cross still exists’, 1947–74: Finding a role after the Second World War
Feed the hungry – no matter what?: The Norwegian Red Cross and Biafra, 1967–70
Part III The Red Cross’s modus operandi
‘A cog in the great wheel of mercy’: The New Zealand Red Cross and the International Red Cross Movement
Coming of age in the crucible of war: The First World War and the expansion of the Canadian Red Cross Society’s ...
The 1938 International Committee of the Red Cross Conference: Humanitarian diplomacy and the cultures of appeasement ...
‘£50,000 is too small a fine to pay’: The British Red Cross and the Spanish refugees of 1939
The British Red Cross Society and the ‘parcels crisis’ of 1940–1
The Red Cross in wartime Macau and its global connections
A humanitarian and national obligation: A comparison between the Dutch Red Cross, 1940–5, and the Dutch Indies Red Cross, ...
Index

Citation preview

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The Red Cross Movement

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This series offers a new interdisciplinary reflection on one of the most important and yet understudied areas in history, politics and cultural practices:  humanitarian aid and its responses to crises and conflicts. The series seeks to define afresh the boundaries and methodologies applied to the study of humanitarian relief and so-​called ‘humanitarian events’. The series includes monographs and carefully selected thematic edited collections which cross disciplinary boundaries and bring fresh perspectives to the historical, political and cultural understanding of the rationale and impact of humanitarian relief work. Islamic charities and Islamic humanism in troubled times Jonathan Benthall Humanitarian aid, genocide and mass killings: Médecins sans Frontières, the Rwandan experience, 1982–​97 Jean-​Hervé Bradol and Marc Le Pape Calculating compassion: Humanity and relief in war, Britain 1870–​1914 Rebecca Gill Humanitarian intervention in the long nineteenth century Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla The military–​humanitarian complex in Afghanistan Eric James and Tim Jacoby Global humanitarianism and media culture Michael Lawrence and Rachel Tavernor (eds) A history of humanitarianism, 1775–​1989: In the name of others Silvia Salvatici Donors, technical assistance and public administration in Kosovo Mary Venner The NGO CARE and food aid from America 1945–​80: ‘Showered with kindness’? Heike Wieters

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The Red Cross Movement Myths, practices and turning points

Edited by Neville Wylie, Melanie Oppenheimer and James Crossland

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 3351 9  hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

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Contents

List of figures  Notes on contributors  Acknowledgements 

page viii ix xii

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The Red Cross Movement: Continuities, changes and challenges  Neville Wylie, Melanie Oppenheimer and James Crossland

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Certainty, compassion and the ingrained arrogance of humanitarians  27 Davide Rodogno Part I: The Movement’s foundational ‘myths’ 

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The Americans lead the way? The United States Sanitary Commission and the development of the Red Cross Movement, 1861–​71  James Crossland Intertwined stories of war humanitarianism: The British Order of St John of Jerusalem and the Red Cross in the Spanish civil wars of the 1870s  Jon Arrizabalaga, Guillermo Sánchez-​Martínez and J. Carlos García-​Reyes

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The early history of the Red Cross Society of China and its relation to the Red Cross Movement  Caroline Reeves

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Failure to launch: The American Red Cross in an era of contested neutrality, 1914–​17  Branden Little

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Part II: Turning points 

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7 Challenging the colonial and the international: The American Red Cross in the last war of Cuban independence (1895–​8)  Francisco Javier Martínez 8 Realignment in the aftermath of war: The League of Red Cross Societies, the Australian Red Cross and its Junior Red Cross in the 1920s  Melanie Oppenheimer

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9 The ‘British Red Cross still exists’, 1947–​74: Finding a role after the Second World War  Rosemary Cresswell

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10 Feed the hungry –​no matter what? The Norwegian Red Cross and Biafra, 1967–​70  Eldrid Mageli

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Part III: The Red Cross’s modus operandi  11 ‘A cog in the great wheel of mercy’: The New Zealand Red Cross and the International Red Cross Movement  Margaret Tennant 12 Coming of age in the crucible of war: The First World War and the expansion of the Canadian Red Cross Society’s humanitarian vision  Sarah Glassford 13 The 1938 International Committee of the Red Cross Conference: Humanitarian diplomacy and the cultures of appeasement in Britain  Rebecca Gill 14 ‘£50,000 is too small a fine to pay’: The British Red Cross and the Spanish refugees of 1939  Kerrie Holloway

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15 The British Red Cross Society and the ‘parcels crisis’ of 1940–​1  Neville Wylie

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16 The Red Cross in wartime Macau and its global connections  Helena F. S. Lopes

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17 A humanitarian and national obligation: A comparison between the Dutch Red Cross, 1940–​5, and the Dutch Indies Red Cross, 1942–​50  Leo van Bergen

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Index 

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Figures

9.1 British Red Cross expenditure on HM Forces, Home Relief and Overseas Relief, 1957–​70. British Red Cross Museum and Archive, RCC/​1/​29/​34–​47, The British Red Cross Society, Annual Reports for 1957 to 1970.  16.1 Form for Red Cross messages used by the Macau Red Cross, May 1943. Historical Archives of the Portuguese Red Cross Society. Photo by Helena F. S. Lopes. 

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Notes on contributors

Jon Arrizabalaga is Research Professor in the History of Science at the Spanish National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC-​IMF), Barcelona. During recent years, his research has been mainly focused on humanitarian action and war medicine in modern Spain. He edited the special section ‘War, Empire, Science, Progress, Humanitarianism:  Debate and Practice within the International Red Cross Movement from 1863 to the Interwar Period’, Asclepio, 66:1 (2014). Rosemary Cresswell (formerly Wall) is Senior Lecturer in Global History at the University of Hull, UK. She is the Principal Investigator for the project ‘Crossing Boundaries: The History of First Aid in Britain and France, 1909–​1989’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/​N003330/​1), and is writing a history of the British Red Cross. James Crossland is Senior Lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University. He is the author of two books, Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross (2014), and War, Law and Humanity:  The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853–​1914 (2018), both of which chronicle the Red Cross’s development in relation to the changing nature of warfare in the modern era. J. Carlos García-​Reyes is a research manager at Instituto de Salud Carlos III (Madrid, Spain). He was research fellow JAE-​CSIC at the Milà i Fontanals Institution (IMF-​CSIC, Barcelona, 2008–​13). Having taken his M.A. in the history of science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2009), he is now working on a Ph.D. thesis on the origins and early history of the Spanish Red Cross. Rebecca Gill is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Huddersfield, and researches the history of humanitarian organisations in Britain. Her work on this topic includes Calculating Compassion:  Humanity and Relief in War, Britain 1870–​1914 (Manchester University Press, 2013). She is currently working on an Arts

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and Humanities Research Council project on the relief worker and pacifist Emily Hobhouse.

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Sarah Glassford is the archivist in the University of Windsor Leddy Library’s Archives, Rare Books and Special Collections unit, in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Mobilizing Mercy: A History of the Canadian Red Cross (2017), and co-​editor of two volumes exploring Canadian women’s history during the world wars. Kerrie Holloway is a Research Officer with the Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute. She holds a Ph.D.  in history from Queen Mary University of London, and her thesis analysed the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief and its work with Spanish refugees in France in early 1939. Branden Little is Associate Professor of History at Weber State University in the United States. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (2009). An award-​winning author and teacher, he has published essays on humanitarian relief and naval history. Helena F. S. Lopes is Lecturer in Modern Chinese History and Senior Research Associate in the History of Hong Kong at the University of Bristol. She holds a D.Phil in history from the University of Oxford, where she is currently an associate member of the Faculty of History. Her doctoral thesis analysed Sino-​Portuguese relations during the Second World War, with a particular focus on neutrality and collaboration in Macau. Eldrid Mageli is a historian, researcher and teacher, and was formerly senior advisor at the Red Cross headquarters in Oslo. Her principal publications include Med rett til å hjelpe: Historien om Norges Røde Kors (2014) –​the 150-​year history of the Norwegian Red Cross –​and NGO Activism in Calcutta: Exploring Unnayan 1973–​ 1997 (2009). Francisco Javier Martínez works as a researcher at the University of Évora, Portugal. He investigates the history of medicine, public health and humanitarian relief in contemporary Morocco, especially in relation to Spanish and French colonial interventions. He has recently co-​edited, with John Chircop, Mediterranean Quarantines, 1750–​1914:  Space, Identity and Power (Manchester University Press, 2018). Melanie Oppenheimer is Professor and Chair of History at Flinders University, South Australia. She was the centenary historian for the Australian Red Cross and wrote The Power of Humanity (2014). She writes about gender, war and volunteering,

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and is currently undertaking a biography of the inaugural president of the Australian Red Cross, Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, later Viscountess Novar: the first woman appointed to the Board of Governors of the League of Red Cross Societies. Caroline Reeves is Associate in Research at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center, specialising in the history of Chinese charity and philanthropy. Recently in Shanghai as a visiting scholar at Fudan University, she is working on a manuscript on the history of Chinese giving and its import in the contemporary global arena. Davide Rodogno is International History Professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies of Geneva. He has published on the history of military occupation, on humanitarian interventions in the Ottoman Empire, on humanitarian photography and on networks of experts. He is currently working on a monograph tentatively entitled Night on Earth –​Humanitarian Organizations’ Relief and Rehabilitation Programs on Behalf of Civilian Populations, 1918–​1939. Guillermo Sánchez-​Martínez, nowadays an antiquarian bookseller, was head librarian at the Universidad de Cantabria (1987–​91) and at the Universidad Pública de Navarra (1991–​2009). His main interests are related with the history of ideas. Among his most recent publications are Nicasio Landa:  ‘Muertos y heridos’, y otros textos (2016, edited with Jon Arrizabalaga), and the article ‘Enemies by Accident, Neutral on the Rebound: Diversity and Contingency at the Birth of War Humanitarianism, 1862–​1864’, Asclepio 66:1 (2014). Margaret Tennant has Professor Emerita status at Massey University, and has written a history of the New Zealand Red Cross: Across the Street, across the World: A History of the Red Cross in New Zealand 1915–​2015. She has specialised in women’s history, as well as the history of health and social policy. Leo van Bergen is a Dutch medical historian mainly focusing on military medicine, tropical medicine and humanitarianism. His latest publications are Uncertainty, Anxiety, Frugality on leprosy in the Dutch Indies (2018), The Dutch East Indies Red Cross 1870–​1950: On Humanitarianism and Colonialism (2019) and Pro Patria et Patienti: De Nederlandse Militaire Geneeskunde 1795–1950 (Dutch Military Healthcare 1795–1950) (2019). Neville Wylie is Deputy Principal and Professor of International History at the University of Stirling. His research focuses on the history of international humanitarian law, prisoners of war and neutrality. He is the author of Barbed Wire Diplomacy: Britain, Germany and the Politics of Prisoners of War, 1939–​1945 (2010), and Britain, Switzerland and the Second World War (2003).

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Acknowledgements

This volume grew out of a chance encounter between two of the editors, Melanie and Neville, at a conference in Singapore in early 2014. After recovering from the surprise at discovering a shared intellectual interest in the history of the Red Cross, conversation quickly turned to bemoaning the dearth of scholarship on the subject and, in time, to the possibility of gathering like-​minded scholars together to discuss the matter further. Thoughts slowly crystallised over the next few years, and after James Crossland and Christine Winter joined the enterprise, and support was secured from the Australian Red Cross, the Canadian Network on Humanitarian History (www.aidhistory. ca), Flinders University and the University of Nottingham, a conference was duly convened in Adelaide, South Australia, in September 2016. The event brought together over fifty historians, archivists and practitioners, and explored some of the continuities and changes that have defined the Red Cross Movement since its inception in the 1860s. Many of the ideas and papers first discussed at the conference have found their way into this volume, though the project has also drawn in scholars who were either unable to make the journey ‘down under’ or whose interest in the subject was piqued by the debates sparked by our discussions in Adelaide. The editors are delighted to thank Ali Lehman, for overseeing the conference administration; Michael Barnett, who delivered its first keynote address; and Judy Slayter, who addressed the conference in her capacity as CEO of the Australian Red Cross. We are, of course, especially grateful to our contributing authors, who have responded to our editorial requests, comments and recommendations in a timely and generous manner. We greatly appreciate the help of our editors at Manchester University Press, Tony Mason, Rob Byron and Jonathan de Peyer; the support of our series editor, Bertrand Taithe; the work of our two indexers, Olivia and Isabella; and the advice of a number of colleagues who freely gave up their time to comment on the papers, structure, themes and ideas as the project evolved. We are, finally, indebted to two archivists, Fabrizio Bensi at the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Grant Mitchell at the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, for providing information on the increasing interest shown in their archival holdings –​an interest that, we hope, will only be furthered by the chapters brought together in this volume.

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The Red Cross Movement: Continuities, changes and challenges Neville Wylie, Melanie Oppenheimer and James Crossland

For over 150  years, the ‘Red Cross’ has brought succour to the world’s needy  –​ from sick and wounded soldiers on the battlefield to political detainees, internally displaced people, and those suffering from the effects of natural disasters –​as well as having played a major role in a range of global developments in public health, such as blood transfusion. The world’s pre-​eminent humanitarian movement, its relevance and status today are as high as they have ever been in its long history. At the time of writing, headlines carry news of the efforts of the Indonesian Red Cross –​ Palang Merah Indonesia –​to bring aid and assistance to those communities affected by the most recent natural disaster to hit the country, the Krakatoa eruption and tsunami that struck Sunda Strait on 22 December 2018. That these terrible events are not the only crises demanding the Red Cross’s attention is clear from the website of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC), which gives prominence to the work carried out for the inhabitants of Sulawesi and Lombok, still rocked by aftershocks from the earthquake, tsunami and mudslides that struck in recent months; the ongoing operations in the typhoon-​affected areas of the Philippines; and to those in Nigeria, where a quarter of a million people are at risk after floods inundated a half of the country. The Federation’s counterparts in the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) are busy in the world’s war and conflict zones: in Syria and Iraq; in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo; in Chad, Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Myanmar; and in seventy-​one other countries around the globe. The Red Cross, first used as an emblem to identify and protect civilian volunteers tending injured Prussian and Danish soldiers on the battlefield at Dybbøl on 24 April 1864, has become one of the world’s most recognisable symbols. The movement it spawned is older than most countries on the planet, and includes, at the last count, 192 national societies, comprising 165,822 local branches with 473,513 staff and over 11.5 million volunteers.1 If the scale and longevity of the Red Cross distinguish it from other non-​ governmental organisations or humanitarian networks, so too does its approach to humanitarian affairs. Its stated mission is to ‘alleviate human suffering, protect life

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and health, and uphold human dignity, especially during armed conflicts and other emergencies’.2 Grounding its actions on seven fundamental principles, the Red Cross has historically depicted its activities as a specific form of charity through humanitarianism, extending, as Jean Pictet, the author of the principles suggested, ‘its merciful action to the whole of humanity’.3 Furthermore, its interventions are governed by the principle of neutrality. This has led it to insist on obtaining agreement from all parties before deploying its delegates in the field, and operating without reference to the underlying injustices causing peoples’ suffering whenever and wherever it occurs. As Jean Pictet memorably put it, like the swimmer who advances in the water but who drowns if he swallows too much of it, the Red Cross seeks to reckon with politics without becoming a part of it. The approach is in marked contrast to the methods taken by many other humanitarian organisations, whose operations are often framed by the principles of non-​partisanship or solidarity, and who not only alleviate suffering wherever it is found but also explicitly bear witness to the suffering and injustices uncovered. The Red Cross might, then, be the world’s most distinguishable humanitarian movement, but it represents a distinctive ‘brand’ of humanitarianism: a brand that both shapes the nature of its activity and operates as a powerful factor in motivating individuals, whether staff or volunteers, to engage in the movement as ‘Red Crossers’. Indeed, their activities are often described as ‘Red Crossing’. Commentators and those within the organisation frequently use the term ‘Movement’ to describe the Red Cross, and we adopt it in this volume. In truth, though, as a descriptor, the word’s value and appeal lies principally in its vagueness, its lack of precision. The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is governed by its own set of statutes, and consists of three discrete elements. The first element is the ICRC itself, the origins of which lie in the meeting of a five-​ man committee in Geneva in 1863, whose members were concerned with how best to protect medical staff and the wounded from attack on battlefields. This concern led to the drafting of the First Geneva Convention in 1864, an act that both satisfied its members’ desire to secure an international agreement to protect the sick and wounded, and started a process of mission creep that led to the ICRC becoming the ‘architect’ and ‘guardian’ of international humanitarian law (IHL) in the decades that followed.4 Today, the ICRC’s remit for protecting victims of war is vast, and far exceeds the legal mandate set out in international treaties. Through both IHL development, and humanitarian acts in myriad conflicts, the ICRC has developed into a protector of soldiers, medics, civilian victims of conflict, prisoners of war and political prisoners. Of the 756,158 detained persons visited by ICRC delegates in 2013 only 2,818 were formally protected under the Third (prisoners of war) and Fourth (civilian) Geneva Conventions of 1949.5 As it has expanded into these new fields of humanitarian assistance, however, the ICRC has also had to avoid encroaching on State interests, by maintaining its political neutrality and operational impartiality, and insisting that its actions are acceptable to authorities on all sides of conflicts.6

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This delicate balancing act between politics and humanitarian action in war has never been easy, and some episodes  –​the Holocaust and Biafran War are good ­examples –​left the institution badly scarred. Managing its relations with the federal authorities in Berne has likewise frequently tested the institution.7 The problem has, however, been compounded in recent years by the need to accommodate human-​ rights laws into its war-​focused practices. This has led to the ICRC attempting to clarify ‘customary practice’ in the application of IHL, and updating Pictet’s 1964 commentaries on the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, in the hope, one suspects, of encouraging conformity.8 The second element of the Red Cross Movement is the IFRC Societies. Created in the wake of the First World War by the national societies of the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan, the League of Red Cross Societies was officially formed in May 1919. Despite having a fundamentally different vision from that of the all Swiss ICRC –​that of mobilising the combined strength of the national societies, and wedded to a concept of humanity that extended beyond zones of armed conflict and into everyday struggles of the peacetime world  –​its birth created uneasy and at times unwelcome competition for the ICRC.9 Responding to the misery and destruction wrought by the ‘war to end all wars’, and buoyed by the spectacular growth of national Red Cross societies as a result of the war, the vision of its founder, American banker turned philanthropist Henry Pomeroy Davison, was to create a ‘real International Red Cross’. This would be a humanitarian version of the League of Nations that could bring together the ‘Red Cross organisations of the world’, to continue their work in peacetime.10 The focus would be on social, medical, educational and peacetime relief initiatives, with the League of Red Cross Societies playing a facilitating and coordinating role, creating an exemplary global humanitarian community. Using the network of Red Cross national societies, medical research and science would combine to extend Red Cross work into peacetime, to prevent disease and create public-​health programmes around the world. Despite its controversial birth and the initial curtailment of its original lofty ideals through illness, death and lack of funds in the early years, the League survived and, in time, thrived. Its role during the interwar years was to foster and promote transnational initiatives within the Red Cross network, to standardise, coordinate and promote health care, nursing, the Junior Red Cross, and disaster relief. The Second World War and the process of decolonisation that followed in its wake led to a huge increase in the number of new national societies. Changing its name, from the League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in October 1983, and again to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in November 1991, this body also has some oversight of basic governance structures in national societies.11 The power of the Red Cross Movement, however, lies in the national societies themselves. This global network of 192 diverse and culturally specific societies  –​ the most recent addition to which being Bhutan, which joined the movement in

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December 2019 –​embodies Henri Dunant’s ambition of taking the organisation of relief out of the hands of the military, tapping the energy and dynamism of civilian volunteers on a global scale.12 This adherence to Dunant’s vision is still very much in evidence, even if, over time, many national societies have loosened their original voluntary anchor and, for the sake of efficiency, professionalism and other external factors, adopted the status of quasi-​State organisations. Others are completely controlled by their governments, defined as being ‘auxiliaries’ to the ‘public authorities in the humanitarian field’.13 The journey that brought the Movement to this position was a long and winding one. With few exceptions, the national societies of the late nineteenth century existed principally to supplement the work of over-​ stretched army medical departments, becoming crucial cogs in the war machines of many states.14 By the turn of the century, this nexus between wartime service and Red Cross work had been solidified, albeit with states party to the revision of the Geneva Convention of 1906 making sure to restrict the freedom of action of Red Cross workers and ensure that they were given no special status in IHL. Beyond the battlefields, however, the Movement was given more room to grow by governments that saw the value of Red Cross volunteers as responders to peacetime natural disasters and disease epidemics. This recognition of the national societies’ value in contributing to the peacetime health of states and their citizens was recognised in 1919, when the Covenant of the League of Nations called on member states to ‘encourage and promote the establishment and co-​operation of duly authorised voluntary national Red Cross organisations having as purposes the improvement of health, the prevention of disease, and the mitigation of suffering’.15 Notwithstanding the heterogeneity of its membership, as part of a single movement, the constituent parts of the Red Cross all adhere, at least in theory, to the seven fundamental principles of the Red Cross Movement. The principles  –​ humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity and universality  –​emerged out of the confusion and debacle of the Second World War, and were adopted in Vienna in 1965.16 It is important to note that the Movement went without this core set of principles for a long time. One of the principles most commonly associated with the Red Cross, neutrality, was absent from the founding discussions in 1863, and took time to gain traction.17 This was not for want of trying. In 1875 Gustav Moynier, the long-​time President of the ICRC (1864–​1910), suggested four principles to guide the Movement’s actions. In times of peace, the Red Cross Societies were to prepare for future emergencies, sharing good practice and technical knowledge across the network. They were to embrace a sense of mutuality, nurturing ties among the various national societies, and agreeing on having only one ‘national’ Red Cross Society in every state. Finally, the Movement was to hold to Dunant’s co-​opted phrase of ‘tutti fratelli’ (‘all are brothers’), and dispense assistance on the basis of a soldier’s needs, not his nationality. Although these ideas remain relevant today –​only one Red Cross Society is still permitted in the territory of each independent state18  –​Moynier’s principles spoke to the specific concerns

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The Red Cross Movement

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and pressures facing the young Movement, particularly after the Franco-​Prussian War of 1870–​1.19 The next attempt to clarify the Movement’s organising principles, following the carnage of the First World War and the emergence of the League of Red Cross Societies, was no less momentous. The revised statutes of 1921 stressed values that remain central to the Movement’s current operations, in insisting on its members’ impartiality, independence, universality and equality. It is no surprise that the Movement felt the need to reiterate its commitment to these values –​and add three more –​in 1965, following events in the Congo that underscored the extent to which Cold War divisions had permeated international politics and threatened the independence of international institutions. It was also a time when the Movement had just welcomed a raft of new national societies from the newly independent states in Asia and Africa, whose leaders had little experience in, or, necessarily, understanding of, the Red Cross Movement and its values.20 Although the Movement has repeatedly reaffirmed its commitment to the 1965 fundamental principles (most recently in 2015) the fact that it has felt the need to do so, and has, periodically revised and updated its principles, suggests a plurality of opinion as to what the Red Cross should stand for, and how it should operate in the field. The root cause of these divisions may in part lie in the competing conceptions of humanitarianism, derived from the different geographical circumstances and historical and political trajectories of the Movement’s numerous members. Still, a recurrent theme in the Movement’s history has been the interplay between the national perspectives adopted by the national societies and the transnational values promoted by the two international agencies headquartered in Geneva. The issue is no better exhibited than in the evolution of the Movement’s defining emblem. Despite being touted as early as 1864, the Red Cross symbol did not initially receive universal endorsement. What would eventually became known as the International Committee of the Red Cross grew out of an entity, the Genevan Society for Public Utility, which had been in existence for over three decades. The committee adopted a series of names before finally settling on the title it bears today in 1875.21 The committee’s annual bulletin, which began in 1869, reflected this hesitation, and only adopted the title Bulletin international des Sociétés de la Croix-​Rouge in 1886, whilst the International Red Cross conferences were not dubbed as such until the 1884 conference in Geneva.22 The ‘Red Cross’ clearly struck a chord with the nascent relief societies of continental Europe, but some national societies, particularly from the English-​speaking world, were content to operate under different banners: the United States waited until 1881 to create a Red Cross society, the British until 1905.23 For many states beyond Europe’s shores the emblem’s obvious religious connotations have also proved problematic. Although there is no direct evidence to suggest the symbol is an inversion of the Swiss flag –​as a red cross was used to indicate plague or illness in earlier times –​it is generally accepted that the Movement’s founding fathers consciously adapted the Swiss flag for the symbol of the nascent

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humanitarian organisation. The religious symbolism of the cross, however, was scarcely lost on the Protestant Genevans, who were proud of their Christian beliefs and active in promoting Christian values in other areas of their private and professional lives. The Red Cross’s association with Christianity ran up against its ambitions to universalise the humanitarian message, and this tension, retaining a single unifying emblem while acknowledging the religious sensitivities of the non-​Christian world, has been a recurrent theme across the years.24 At Moynier’s personal direction, the Red Crescent symbol was carried by ICRC volunteers in the Russo-​Turkish wars in the 1870s, but was not officially adopted as a recognised emblem until 1929. The Iranian Society formally adopted the ‘Red Lion and Star’ symbol in 1922, and although it fell into disuse after the Islamic revolution of 1979, the symbol remains, on paper, a recognised emblem of the Movement. Finally, the Red Crystal was accepted as a formal emblem in 2005, to accommodate the wishes of the Israeli national emergency service, Magen David Adom, to be admitted as a full member of the Movement. Debates over the symbol are, however, rarely straight forward. The proliferation of symbols may have been largely resisted, but there has been little consistency in practice. Why has the Movement pandered to specific religious or cultural sensitivities, and what accounts for the retention of the symbol by some national societies, and its rejection by others? Anxious to court western sympathies, the Japanese dutifully followed the European precedent in establishing a national society in 1887, and they have retained the symbol ever since, despite their turbulent relations with the West over the first half of the twentieth century.25 The Chinese, by contrast, expressed doubts about the wisdom of uncritically adopting the symbol when they belatedly turned their attention to creating a society in 1904. The Malaysian National Society elected to drop the Red Cross in favour of the Red Crescent in 1975, even though their counterparts in Indonesia  –​home to the largest Muslim population on the planet  –​were content to keep the original name and symbol.26 Since its earliest days, there has been an inherent tension between the status of the national societies, as chartered entities operating under the supervision of State authorities, and the position of the League/​Federation and the International Committee, for whom the principles of independence, neutrality and impartiality have naturally sat more comfortably. It is easy to see how national preferences can cut across Geneva’s ‘vaulting universalism’, such as when the New Zealand Society casually assumed that its ‘primary responsibility’ in 1947 was to attend to the needs of its ‘kith and kin’ in the British Isles rather than those of the war-​ravaged societies on the continent of Europe or across Asia. Taken to extremes, such centrifugal tendencies have tested the Movement, and brought it perilously close to fragmentation, whether over the challenge posed by fascism in the 1930s and 1940s; the alternative humanitarianism propagated by communist regimes; or, more recently, the issue of apartheid in the 1980s.27 Given the significance of these moments, it is surprising how little sustained attention they have received from historians. It is still unclear how far

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the assimilation of fascism in some European Red Cross societies posed an existential threat to the Movement, or whether the communist conception of humanitarianism offered a genuine, and in its own way a no less legitimate, alternative to the cosmopolitan tradition espoused in Geneva. Recent research is uncovering different ‘genealogies’ of humanitarianism, some of which had little connection to the liberal, Enlightenment roots that nurtured thinking around the idea of the Red Cross.28 The vehemence with which the ICRC pushed back on communist-​inspired humanitarianism reveals much about the ideological lens adopted by members of the committee. There is little doubt that the humanitarian ideals propelling the Movement have proved less neutral, less independent and less impartial than its promoters have often assumed. The laudable goal that first animated Henri Dunant, of tendering aid to wounded soldiers on the battlefield, was submerged very quickly during the 1860s and 1870s, by the process of the voluntary societies established to administer this aid being co-​opted by the State authorities and military institutions.29 A similar fate befell the belief that aiding those rendered hors de combat by their wounds was necessarily devoid of military significance; such services inevitably freed the State to devote its resources to other matters, facilitated the recovery of soldiers from their wounds and hastened their return to the battlefront. Historians of military medicine have long noted that far from limiting the impact of warfare, the assistance of well-​intentioned volunteers has helped sustain the war-​making capacity of their states.30 This point was made by John Hutchinson in his foundational study of the militarisation of the Red Cross, Champions of Charity, published in 1996.31 In such circumstances, the underlying sentiments behind humanitarianism can be easily lost. As Rachel Chrastil has shown, the word humanité rarely featured in ‘Red Cross’ speeches and pamphlets in France in the decades before 1914: Red Cross volunteers were called upon to serve a ‘French cause, not a humanitarian one’.32 Some international lawyers come to similar conclusions as regards the legal codes, developed in parallel with the rise of the Red Cross over the latter half of the nineteenth century. Instead of IHL constraining states’ capacity to wage war, Eyal Benvenisti and Amichai Cohen explain governments’ grudging acceptance of the emergence of the Geneva Conventions and other legal instruments in terms of their belief that such codes would ultimately help them maintain control over their armed forces.33 Other areas of ‘humanitarian’ activity have likewise tested the independence, neutrality and impartiality of the Red Cross’s endeavours, whether as contributors to the ‘civilising mission’ of colonial empires, or the ‘nation building’ or peace-​and-​stability (pacification) projects promoted by the international community in various parts of the world. Such tensions are not of course unique to the national societies, but have equally marked the activities of the International Committee and League/​ Federation. The Red Cross Movement is, then, a complex, multidimensional network that resists simple categorisation. It might perhaps best be seen not so much as a single

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river of ideas and institutions, but rather as an arcuate delta, where the main body bifurcates into numerous distributaries, or channels, which follow their own course, at times converging, at other times diverging. It works as a privileged network, held together by a shared understanding of (some) common ideals, institutions, and a real or imagined history. Its institutions instinctively orientate themselves in different directions: the national societies to their domestic constituencies and public-​health systems; the League/​Federation to a transnational network of relationships, projects and groupings; and the ICRC to the international state system and legal community. The very complexity of the Red Cross Movement might in part account for the reluctance of historians to grapple with it in its entirety. The popular historian Caroline Moorehead, has, to date, been the only author to tackle the subject.34 By contrast, professional historians have tended to devote themselves to more narrowly based studies. The enduring fascination for war and conflict goes some way to explaining the attention lavished on the ICRC. The staggered opening of the ICRC’s archives to public scrutiny certainly encouraged this trend. The first papers, covering the period up until 1945, were opened in 1996, and periodic releases of material relating to subsequent periods have been made ever since  –​the latest, detailing the ICRC activities from 1966 until 1975, in 2015. Concerns that the opening of the archives might sully the Committee’s reputation have proved unfounded. In retrospect, the decision to address the most obvious skeleton in the ICRC’s cupboard, commissioning Jean-​Claude Favez to write a history of the ICRC and the Holocaust, proved remarkably astute, sealing the wound and containing the impact that public disclosure of its papers might have had on its current operations.35 Indeed, access to the voluminous ICRC holdings has proved a boon for the institution. Nearly a quarter of a century after the archive flung open its doors, there is no decline in the number of researchers anxious to mine its papers: the archive receives between 500 and 600 visitors to its reading rooms every year and handles around 2,000 written requests for information.36 The ease of access might have accentuated, arguably to the point of exaggeration, the ICRC’s role in the Movement’s history and the domination of its vision in the historical narrative.37 The burgeoning literature on the ICRC has, at the very least, enhanced the organisation’s reputation, amplified its own external messaging and buttressed its position as the lead agency in the Red Cross Movement. Recent years have seen the appearance of a number of studies of national societies, many sponsored by the societies themselves, to mark their centenary year. The anglophone societies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada have been particularly well served in this respect. Other major societies, such as the American, Dutch, Norwegian, French and German, have also been the subject of scholarly monographs, and a history of the British Red Cross (BRC) will be published for the 150th anniversary in 2020.38 These studies have done much to uncover particular national trajectories, and the different approaches to humanitarianism and philanthropy that have marked the journey of the Red Cross since its inception 150 years ago. There

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is, though, a danger implicit in these studies, many of them in English, of seeing the history of the Red Cross through the lens of the privileged –​generally western –​eyes of national societies that have the resources to curate their archives, deposit them in national libraries or university repositories, and make them available to public scrutiny.39 It is to the editors’ regret that, despite their best efforts and intentions, the chapters brought together in this volume largely reflect and unwittingly reinforce this privileged version of the Red Cross’s history.40 Naturally, studies of national societies tend to emphasise national priorities and concerns, and chart their own institutional histories and perspectives. Though not ignoring the wider context, relations with the broader Red Cross ‘Movement’ rarely feature as a primary focus of attention. As a consequence, we are still waiting for historians to address such critical subjects as the relations among, say, the major national societies –​the American, Japanese, Chinese, Soviet, Indian etc. –​and between the two Geneva-​based headquarters at the ICRC and IFRC. There remains a significant gap in the literature between the institutional histories of the Movement’s principal components and the functioning –​or perhaps, better, ‘functionings’ –​of the Movement as a whole.41 The least well-​served element in the historiography is the IFRC –​which has only one survey work devoted to it:  Daphne Reid and Patrick Gilbo’s celebratory and uncritical offering, made on the occasion of the IFRC’s seventy-​fifth anniversary. This work joins a study by Clyde Buckingham, made in 1964 and focused on the origins of the IFRC; the chapter by Bridget Towers that appeared in a collection of essays on international health organisations, published in 1995; and two recent articles by Julia Irwin and Kimberly Lowe that have a particular focus on the League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS) and one national society, the American Red Cross.42 Statistics from the IFRC’s archives re-​enforce this narrative of neglect. In recent years, the IFRC has dealt with around 160 requests per annum, with a little over half of these coming from external enquirers. Moreover, the majority consult the archives as part of broader studies of health and medical history, especially nursing education and blood transfusion, as well as disaster and refugee relief, and are not specifically focused on the role of the IFRC and the broader Red Cross Movement.43 A research project, ‘Resilient Humanitarianism’, has recently commenced that might go some way towards addressing the dearth of focused enquiries on this unsung element in the Red Cross Movement. Given that the IFRC celebrated its 100th year in 2019, the initiative is perhaps long overdue.44 It is not the purpose of this volume to provide a definitive, far less a comprehensive, assessment of the Red Cross Movement. Rather, the chapters seek to offer insights into particular facets of the Movement’s history that, taken collectively, provide a starting point from which we can re-​evaluate both the Movement as an institutional network, and a particular view –​a Red Cross view –​on the broader humanitarianism enterprise. Humanitarianism, as a distinct subject of scholarly enquiry, has received increasing attention over the last three decades, stimulated, in part, by the optimism brought on

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by the end of the Cold War in the 1990s and the prospect of replacing power politics with a normative-​based international order.45 Historians have been central to this intellectual endeavour, providing insights into how the idea of humanitarianism and its associated institutions and regimes have evolved over time.46 But it is a crowded field, dominated in large part by political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists and legal scholars. Our collection, therefore, starts with a chapter by Davide Rodogno that explores what he sees as the ‘ingrained arrogance’ in humanitarians’ motivations, which have remained remarkably constant over time. In the process, he underscores the value of addressing humanitarian institutions from a historical perspective and using the historians’ methodological tools. Importantly, he argues that historians need to ‘expand the optic beyond humanitarianism itself ’ and be flexible and reflexive in testing its boundaries. The Movement’s foundational ‘myth’ The collection is structured across three discrete, though interconnected, themes. The first considers what one might call the Red Cross’s foundational ‘myth’: a story that has its genesis in Henri Dunant’s traumatic encounters on the battlefield of Solferino, and which spawned a vision of humanitarianism that has proved to be coherent, compelling and durable. The Movement has traditionally explained its success in ‘heroic’ terms: it points to the power of ‘Dunant’s Dream’ in promoting and sustaining the ideological conformity of its membership –​through a commitment to the Red Cross ideals, fundamental principles and ‘brand’ –​while at the same time admitting to an extraordinary level of diversity in the make-​up of the Movement itself. Recent research has increasingly called this narrative into question, and, by contrast, emphasised how Dunant and his colleagues did not find, far less found, the humanitarian agenda in 1863. There were plenty of alternative approaches to those proposed in Geneva for dealing with the battlefield wounded or promoting humanitarian ideals in the mid-​nineteenth century. Even within the Red Cross Movement there were competing definitions of what the idea and the Movement should mean, and who, or what, could adopt the mantle of the Red Cross.47 The first two chapters in this section shed light on alternative approaches to humanitarianism in the 1860s, and in the process prompt us to consider different ‘histories’ of the Movement emerging at this time. James Crossland’s chapter examines the work of the United States Sanitary Commission, an institution born out of the American Civil War that, as early as 1862, operated volunteer ambulance detachments bearing a striking resemblance to the vision Dunant proposed in Geneva the following year. It is tempting to see the Commission’s hand behind Dunant’s project: its observers attended the 1864 conference and their experience in battlefield medicine was eagerly sought by those present. Crossland disputes this account. He does, though, credit the Commission for shaping the broader history of the Red Cross Movement, in offering a version of the kind of militarised

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relief agency that would eventually take hold in Germany and, in due course, in other European states that were anxious to learn from Prussia’s successes in military medicine during its victory over France in 1870–​1. Similarly, then, to the way Francis Lieber’s instructions for the Union armies shaped the direction of European thinking on the law of armed conflict, the Commission played an important part in the early institutional development of the Red Cross.48 Though the American imprint on the early history of the Red Cross Movement is unmistakable, Lieber and the Commission were not the only influences at work.49 The chapter by Jon Arrizabalaga, Guillermo Sánchez-​Martínez and J. Carlos García-​ Reyes explores how different conceptions of humanitarianism were manifest in the work of foreign-​aid agencies operating in Spain’s Carlist wars of the 1870s. Although the wars are often overlooked in general histories of the period, they are significant for the Red Cross story in that they posed the International Committee with its first test over whether to intervene in armed conflicts of a non-​international character. Geneva ultimately chose to remain on the sidelines, establishing a precedent that remained unchallenged until 1936, when Spain’s renewed descent into internecine conflict prompted the Committee to dispatch its delegates into a civil war zone for the first time. The Carlist wars showed how the Geneva Convention triggered diverse responses within the Movement in the 1860s and 1870s, bringing to the fore tensions over how aid should be dispensed in civil wars, over the sanctity of the Red Cross emblem and over the question of Red Cross engagement with other humanitarian networks. The chapter underscores the extent to which these identities, loyalties and institutional memberships overlapped, particularly between the newly emergent national Red Cross Societies, the Order of St John of Jerusalem and the Alliance universelle de l’ordre et de la civilisation, with individuals occupying multiple roles across the spectrum of humanitarian organisations. Arrizabalaga, Sánchez-​Martínez and García-​Reyes quote Sir John Furley, who wrote in 1876 that the ‘Red Cross’ was the only ‘emblem of neutrality’ capable of enlisting ‘the sympathies of the whole of Europe’.50 There is no doubt that the idea of the Red Cross quickly gained traction even if, as their chapter shows, individuals and states interpreted its meaning in different ways. The last two chapters in this section both touch on this aspect of a divergent Red Cross story. Caroline Reeves’s contribution charts the emergence of the Red Cross in China, where a national society was formally inaugurated in 1904. The Red Cross first attracted public interest during the Sino-​Japanese war of 1894–​5, when western missionaries trumpeted their own efforts to make up for the absence of a national society in China and the apparent indifference shown by the imperial authorities to the provision of medical services for the Chinese forces. The subsequent attempts to bring the Red Cross to China shed considerable light on the perceptions of both the Chinese and the self-​appointed ‘guardians’ of the Movement, the ICRC. Geneva refused to recognise the Shanghai Chinese Red Cross Society on the grounds that its membership was western, not Chinese, and it served local, rather than national

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needs. More specifically, though, the Committee refused to believe that ‘the Chinese people [were] sufficiently civilized, from the point of view of the laws of war, to observe faithfully the Geneva Convention, even if their Emperor were to sign it’. In short, only ‘civilised’ states could accede to the conventions or be welcomed into the Red Cross Movement. Reeves’s chapter shows how this view became internalised amongst the Chinese elite, and came to dominate its attitude towards both the maritime convention, discussed at the Hague conference in 1899, and the decision to found an official society in 1904. This was justified on entirely pragmatic, political grounds, rather than for reasons of humanitarian sentiment or even military expediency. Interestingly, the only concession the Chinese considered worth exploring was whether they should join Siam, Persia and the Ottoman Empire and insist on a distinctive emblem for their society, as it was thought ‘inappropriate for China to adopt the sign of a cross’. The Chinese case shows the extent to which the Red Cross’s appeal had become decoupled from its humanitarian roots by the turn of the century, and challenges the assumption that the catalyst for institutional formation necessarily sprang from a specific relief action or war situation. It also reveals the divergent attitudes that were developing towards western and non-​western humanitarianism under the Red Cross banner. By contrast, Branden Little’s chapter, which focuses on the travails that beset the American Red Cross Society before the United States’ entry into the First World War in April 1917, reaffirms the centrality of war to the history of the Red Cross Movement. The dynamism shown by the American Society before and after the war are celebrated elements in the Red Cross story. Clara Barton forged a society that pioneered a peacetime role for the Red Cross, while Henry P. Davison used the resources and influence of the American Society to provide an alternative to the ICRC and launch the LRCS in 1919.51 A very different picture emerges, though, if we look at the three years of American neutrality. Little reveals a society that so singularly failed in its efforts to ignite popular enthusiasm for its activities that it was forced to withdraw its ambulance teams from Europe in 1915 for want of funds. It was only after the ousting of the prewar leadership and, importantly, the creation of a War Council led by Davison, that the Society was able to fuse modern fundraising and public-​relations techniques into effective instruments, and capitalise on America’s belligerency to become the largest civic organisation in American history. By highlighting the Society’s ‘failure to launch’ between 1914 to 1917, Little reminds us of the importance of continually testing the grand narrative of the Red Cross, and being mindful of the way powerful historical forces are often shaped by contingency and fortune. Turning points Little’s chapter offers a springboard into the second theme addressed in the collection:  the role of turning points in propelling and shaping the Movement’s

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development over time and place. Such moments figure prominently in the writing on humanitarianism. They play an important part, for instance, in studies that have sought to understand humanitarianism as a series of epochs.52 By examining turning points from different perspectives from within the one institution, the collection shows how the Red Cross Movement as a whole has responded to changing external environments and opportunities, and how, as part of a broader network, individual national societies charted their way forward. Francisco Javier Martinez-​Antonio’s work, for example, offers a fresh reading of the impact of the Spanish-American War of 1898 on both the American Red Cross Society and the wider Red Cross Movement. It is widely accepted that the war, the first to see the use of concentration camps, stimulated American interest in the plight of civilians, and saw the American Society develop a specific tradition of civilian assistance.53 Martinez-​Antonio extends our understanding of the conflict by looking at the Society’s broader relations with the Red Cross Movement. The Americans deliberately challenged the ICRC’s standing by keeping it at arm’s length and circumventing its authority by forging direct links with other national societies. Both actions anticipated the kind of disputes that rocked relations between the American Red Cross and Geneva in 1919. Events in Cuba represented a ‘seminal’ episode in the journey that would eventually see the American Red Cross emerge as a ‘humanitarian world power’. In retrospect, the Cuban war may also, though, have been pivotal for the ICRC. Washington and Madrid’s willingness to adhere to the hitherto dormant ‘additional articles’ of 1868 prompted the Committee to look afresh at the possibility of updating the 1864 Geneva Convention, a task they had avoided for the best part of three decades. The war persuaded the Committee to re-​engage with legal discussions and prepared the ground for the emergence of a dedicated ‘maritime code’ at the Hague conference in 1899.54 The recent centenary commemorations around the events of the First World War have naturally renewed historical interest in the conflict, and sharpened our understanding of how the war shaped subsequent events.55 There is little doubt that the war and its chaotic aftermath had a profound impact on the history of the Red Cross, and attitudes towards the international community’s responsibility for promoting humanitarian ideas. Some national societies were, however, more deeply affected than others. In her contribution to the volume, Sarah Glassford shows how the war had a particularly powerful effect on the development of the Canadian Red Cross Society (CRC). In some respects, the CRC had followed a similar trajectory to the other off-​shoots of the BRC. It looked to London, rather than Geneva, for inspiration and direction; its first baptism of fire, during the South African War of 1899–​ 1902, cemented this process and provided a framework on which to build when war returned in the summer of 1914. The First World War was also a coming of age for the young Society, allowing it to extend its presence at home –​some 1,150 branches had been founded across Canada by 1918 –​and grow in confidence and capacity; by 1917, the CRC felt sufficiently emboldened to take the lead in providing assistance to the

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Allied military intervention in Siberia. What made the CRC’s journey so remarkable was the position it had adopted after the South African War, when it had effectively returned to a position of dormant inactivity, despite the moves of those in London to dispense with this practice and embrace a more activist, outwardly facing role. The war proved catalytic, therefore, in drawing national, imperial and transnational factors into play, and expanding the CRC’s vision of what it could accomplish as a humanitarian organisation, both for Canadian society and for the wider international community. The First World War provides the backdrop, rather than the focus, of the turning point identified by Melanie Oppenheimer in her discussion of the Australian Red Cross. Conflict was key to developing the capacity and confidence of the young Society, established as a branch of the BRC on the outbreak of war, even if its contribution to the collective humanitarian effort was often blatantly overlooked in British accounts. What interests Oppenheimer, though, is how the fortunes of the Society converged with those of the newly founded LRCS. For this young Society, the League provided an international platform to develop a distinctive Australian voice and agenda: for the League, the Australians offered a counter-​weight to the established European societies, who were divided over the League’s role and sceptical as to its value. In tandem with the Americans and Canadians, the Australians actively promoted the Junior Red Cross programme, an initiative that traced its origins back to the New South Wales Division of the Australian Red Cross, and developed into an important transnational movement over the course of the 1920s. Although there were perhaps local reasons for their popularity in Australia, the Juniors’ wider appeal had much to do with the need to tackle the communist threat, and inculcate values of ‘good citizenship’ and ‘the right kind’ of –​that is, liberal –​cosmopolitanism. The international context occupies an important place in Rosemary Cresswell’s study of three key moments in which the BRC was forced, after the Second World War, to re-​evaluate its position and reframe its public message. In 1947, while the institution basked in the glow of its impressive wartime accomplishments, its Public Relations Department warned that in the public eye, it needed to maintain its existence. With the return of peace, the organisation slipped from people’s minds, yet it was still required to prepare for an impending conflict with the Soviet Union, and to support health care in a variety of ways in the face of the new National Health Service. It was likewise difficult, in 1960, for the organisation to trade on its primary function as a wartime organisation, when new charitable aid agencies, such as Christian Aid, Oxfam and War on Want, were increasingly encroaching on the humanitarian space. The economic downturn in the early 1970s prompted another rethink of the Society’s external messaging, with international activities demoted in the Society’s publicity materials. By this date, the sheer range of Red Cross activities, both at home and abroad, made it difficult for the Society to give a clear message and remain relevant to its public constituency.

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Eldrid Mageli’s chapter likewise dwells on how external events impact on national societies, though her focus is principally on the ramifications this has had for relations within the broader Red Cross Movement. She takes as her subject the Biafran War of 1967–​70: a conflict that is widely recognised as having transformed attitudes towards humanitarianism and the provision of international aid. The ‘weaponisation’ of humanitarian aid by the federal and Biafran authorities threw into question some of the assumptions that had traditionally underpinned the Red Cross’s activities.56 The ICRC’s insistence on impartiality and neutrality ultimately compelled it to suspend aid flights to the Biafrans, and, in the process, cede ground to those agencies who were fired by the radical humanitarianism of the sans frontiériste movement, pioneered by former ICRC doctor Bernard Kouchner, who founded Médecins Sans Frontières in December 1971, and who professed a more muscular model for international aid and humanitarian action.57 Mageli’s chapter uses the example of the Norwegian Red Cross to explore how these issues played out for an individual national society. Alarmed by the collapse of its domestic standing and the threat posed to its position by the success of the church aid movement in Norway, the Norwegian Society worked hard to bring about a change of heart in Geneva, appealing directly to the ICRC, and mobilising its fellow Scandinavian societies and contacts in the League. The redefinition of humanitarianism under the pressure of events in the developing world thus played out very differently across the Red Cross family. In Norway, the Red Cross faced a domestic constituency that was fully prepared to embrace an activist stand on issues relating to the Global South. It was a position that was reflected in the Norwegian Government’s attitude towards the additional protocols in the early 1970s when, much to the chagrin of the ICRC and the US and British Governments, Oslo championed the right of national liberation movements to be given a seat at the conference table.58 The Red Cross’s modus operandi The final set of chapters considers the Movement’s modus operandi. How have the constituent parts of the Movement functioned over the last one-​and-​a-​half centuries to make it into a dominant global force in humanitarian affairs? One way to address this issue is to consider the matter from different perspectives: the domestic, transnational and international. At the domestic level, the Red Cross has historically proved adept in integrating itself into State and civil society sectors. But how might this process affect the way the Movement, or individual national societies, articulate their mission, tap sources of strength and dynamism, respond to the needs of the disadvantaged, and conceive of their role and place in the humanitarian arena? Clearly, success invariably hinges on an ability to compromise:  but as we have seen, the history of the Movement is replete with examples of national societies whose co-​option by State structures ended up undermining the Red Cross’s

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core humanitarian values and/​or foundational principles. The Movement’s most distinctive feature is its capacity to knit together its constituent elements into an interlocking, self-​supporting international network. This has enabled it to act in ways that were not traditionally available to other humanitarian actors. Recent moves to coordinate at a national level, such as Britain’s Disasters Emergency Committee or Germany’s Aktion Deutschland Hilft  –​and indeed, at an international level, through the Emergency Appeals Alliance –​may have eroded this advantage.59 But what distinguishes the Red Cross is that its constituent parts –​the national societies, ICRC and League/​Federation –​all occupy rather different and at times conflicting positions. This has allowed them to draw on their complementary strengths rather than merely deepening the well of resource and expertise. This is particularly pertinent for an understanding of relations between the international agencies  –​the ICRC and the League/​Federation  –​and the national societies. The international agencies are deeply involved in norm creation and the development of international law:  an involvement that not only provides the normative and legal context for humanitarian activities, but also supplies a sense of identity, legitimacy and agency for the Red Cross Movement as a whole.60 Margaret Tennant’s chapter examines how the interaction between local concerns and the international context played out in the case of New Zealand. What might be a tension between the inward-​and outward-​looking faces of national societies can, Tennant argues, be moulded to their advantage. Echoing the comments made in Melanie Oppenheimer’s chapter about the opportunities opened to small societies by the creation of the LRCS in 1919, Tennant shows how, over time, the New Zealand Society has leveraged its membership of the Movement to slip out from under the shadow of the BRC, and to punch above its weight in the international arena. Its local concerns over the impact of natural disasters on civic populations –​brought home in the 1931 Hawkes Bay earthquake and, most recently, the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch –​has enabled the Society to articulate a model for engaging with the wider Red Cross Movement and, in some respects, justify the prominence of New Zealanders in the executive organs of the League and, later, Federation. It has also, though, provided New Zealand with a mechanism for repositioning itself on the international stage: forging a new postimperial network of humanitarian action that dovetailed with the country’s emergent identity as a member of the Pacific community. The next three chapters, by Rebecca Gill, Kerrie Holloway and Neville Wylie, focus on a single national case –​the BRC –​and offer insights into the way members of the Red Cross Movement responded to what became, in effect, one of the most problematic periods in the Movement’s history. Gill’s chapter on the diplomacy surrounding the 1938 International Red Cross Conference in London reveals both the extent of the fascist threat to the Red Cross’s ideals, and the problems the Movement had in responding to this challenge. In retrospect, the tensions foreshadowed some of the difficulties faced four years later when confronting evidence of the Holocaust.

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It should be remembered that, despite its withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, Germany remained an active member of international organisations devoted to health and social-​welfare issues, and in the Red Cross Movement the German Society led the way in debates over such issues as civil defence during air raids. Moreover, the affable face of the Society –​its president, the Duke of Saxe-​Coburg –​ was well suited to broadcasting Germany’s ostensibly peaceful intentions to a British audience and playing to the Germanophile sentiments found amongst large swathes of the British aristocracy and social elite:  the very people who occupied prominent positions in the BRC and its regional branches. Indeed, as Gill notes, the welcome accorded to Saxe-​Coburg revealed the appetite for appeasement in the British establishment and the ‘irreproachable’ position enjoyed by the Red Cross. It proved a potent cocktail, and one that meant that the ICRC’s hopes of convincing the Movement to extend the Geneva Convention to cover the civilian population were seen off. The German Red Cross’s defence of the status quo struck a chord in a Movement that was happy to celebrate transnational co-​operation but was reluctant to embrace the kind of supranational intervention championed by the ICRC. The London conference took place against the charred backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. Within six months the Republic had been brought to its knees, triggering a flood of refugees, some half-​a-​million people, to cross the Pyrenees in search of sanctuary. Kerrie Holloway’s examination of this refugee crisis shows how the BRC’s close association with the interests and policy preferences of the British Government coloured its response to international events. Throughout the war, the BRC leadership had happily aligned itself with the official policy of non-​intervention, insisting that Spain’s circumstances ‘rendered any action as an independent society incompatible with the neutrality incumbent on a national Red Cross Society’. Funds were channelled through the ICRC, but in truth, the BRC leadership had little sympathy for the Republican cause, and, as Holloway’s chapter shows, equally little interest in aiding Republic refugees encamped across south-​eastern France once the war came to a close. The man chosen to coordinate the relief effort was an outspoken supporter of the Franco regime, and the supplies put at his disposal were woefully inadequate in their scale and inappropriate for the refugees’ condition. Only 70 per cent of the funds initially earmarked for the refugees had been spent by the time operations were wound up: an amount equivalent to roughly a day’s expenditure by their French counterparts. The BRC’s ‘modus operandi’ was, Holloway concludes, influenced as much by its ideological inclinations and the preferences of its Government as by the resources at its disposal. The chapter by Neville Wylie continues this theme, though it emphasises how, in responding to challenges, national societies often find themselves prisoners of their past. In trying to manage the ‘crisis’ that affected the flow of relief parcels to British prisoners of war (POWs) in the summer of 1940, the BRC was hampered by the nature of its relations with the Government, its public standing and its position with the wider Red Cross Movement. Wylie suggests that its success in positioning itself

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as one of the core institutional pillars of the British establishment –​a position amply evident in Gill and Holloway’s c­ hapters –​ultimately worked to its disadvantage. As public concern for the parcels’ traffic mounted, the Society found itself unwittingly manoeuvred into the firing line by a Government anxious to evade criticism for its own part in the supposed ‘Red Cross’ parcels crisis. The leadership struggled to adapt to wartime conditions, strike the right tone in its public relations and shrug off claims that it valued the social standing of its volunteer membership more than the efficiency of its operations. In particular, the aloof attitude it had traditionally taken towards the ICRC and the non-​British members of the Red Cross Movement left it exposed at a time when it was forced to call on Geneva and the neutral societies to resolve the crisis. The centrality of war to what Reeves calls the ‘normative genesis’ of the Red Cross Movement has encouraged historians to focus on the national societies of states that experienced war first hand. Comparatively little attention has been given to those neutral agencies upon which the BRC, and others like it, so critically relied. There is, it would seem, much still to be said about the connection between neutrality –​i.e. State neutrality –​and the functioning of the Red Cross Movement. The importance of this issue is obvious for traditional neutrals, such as Switzerland and Sweden, but is also relevant to all states that found themselves sitting on the touchlines of war and in a position to offer humanitarian services.61 During the Second World War, Portugal’s capital, Lisbon, hosted representatives of no fewer than eighteen national societies, and its own national society found itself increasingly drawn into negotiations with the belligerent powers over the provision of relief or the exchange of diplomats and civilian internees. Helena Lopes’s chapter on the Portuguese Red Cross delegation in the small imperial enclave in Macau shows how neutrality, imperialism and transnationalism intersected to shape the outcome of humanitarian initiatives in East Asia. Leo van Bergen’s chapter likewise addresses the imperial context, but also builds on Wylie’s by showing how the actions of the Netherlands and Dutch East Indies Red Cross Societies were trapped in their respective pasts. Van Bergen argues that their humanitarian repertoire was crafted to reflect long-​held attitudes and practices. During the Japanese occupation, the Dutch East Indies Red Cross administered to the needs of the Dutch population, in line with the wishes of the Japanese occupation authorities, but largely ignored the plight of the indigenous communities. After Japan’s defeat, the Society quickly resumed its traditional position, dispensing medical aid to those who remained loyal to the Dutch colonial regime, but denying it to those who did not. Its counterpart in the Netherlands exhibited similar dexterity in realigning itself to the changing circumstances. Conditioned by decades working in the service of the country’s military elite, the Dutch Red Cross found it relatively simple to transfer its allegiances to the German occupation authorities, applying racial criteria to its blood transfusion service and raising an ambulance unit for service on the eastern front. A mixture of Calvinism and anti-​communism

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justified, in the board’s view, the Society’s offering its services to the Wehrmacht. Interestingly, a similar set of considerations ushered the Swiss Red Cross down the same path, leading to the Society’s dispatching medical missions to the eastern front in the belief that humanitarian neutrality was unnecessary in a war against Soviet communism. The Second World War might have demonstrated the Red Cross Movement’s capacity to mobilise support and resources on a global scale, but it also showed a worrying malleability in the Movement’s attitude towards some of its values, and a tendency to filter its actions through discriminatory lenses. Its wartime success came at a price, and left the Movement with some difficult questions to answer once peace returned.62 New directions Through a focus on our three perspectives of foundational myths, turning points and modus operandi, and by drawing on local, national and international perspectives of individual national societies across time and place, the chapters of this volume help reframe the Red Cross Movement as an institutional network. The picture that emerges is of a multifarious and multilayered network, in which the national societies and the League/​Federation assume more prominent roles than is commonly assumed in a literature that remains heavily weighted towards a view derived from the ICRC. This view of the latter as the primary, perhaps only, aspect of the Red Cross family worthy of consideration has led to the construction of a narrative premised on the false notion that ideological coherence –​dictated over the decades from Geneva –​is the tie that binds the Red Cross Movement. Our efforts to address this problem here mark the beginning of what we hope will be a new phase in the study of the Red Cross, which will be driven by the pursuit of a deeper, more holistic and inclusive, understanding of the Movement. The need for such a new direction could not be clearer. The Red Cross is a privileged network, but there is little evidence that this network operates as effectively as it could. As Peter Maurer, the ICRC president, put it, ‘the Movement has an incredible capacity to be a powerful force in the world, to save lives, to change lives. But its potential is drastically untapped. It is, as others have described a “Sleeping Giant”.’63 There have been well-​documented attempts to rouse the giant from its slumbers. The controversial Tansley Report of the 1970s, referred to as a ‘pitiless inquisition’ by former ICRC president Dr Eric Martin, was one such example. Tansley’s main conclusion was that the major challenges for the Red Cross Movement came from within.64 It is tempting to say that such internal challenges have ever been thus. Though the chapters presented here explore the many layers of this long-​standing tension within the Movement, we still have much to learn about the interaction of its constituent parts at various stages in its long history. How did the ICRC try to promote conformity? What role did the regular showpiece International Red Cross conferences, convened more or less continuously since 1867, and the regional

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conferences –​such as the Far Eastern Conference, Bangkok (1922), held under the auspices of the League, and the Pan American Conferences (the first held in Buenos Aires in 1923) –​play in this story? A similar question could be posed as to the influence exercised by the Movement’s annual bulletins, regular prize competitions, circulars and publications.65 There is also a need to examine more deeply the differing national, transnational and international forces at play within the Red Cross Movement. The ICRC was never ‘international’; it was an exclusively national-​based body until the idea of a League of Red Cross Societies was born, courtesy of the Americans: an event that stung the ICRC in 1919 and still, to this day, has repercussions and consequences. The League was always, as David Forsythe suggests, a ‘controversial addition to the Red Cross network’, the ‘ugly duckling of the Red Cross family’.66 Yet in many respects, the League’s arrival in the aftermath of the First World War was part of a wave of global humanitarian responses to the immense suffering of civilians and was part of the new internationalisation of the postwar period.67 When viewed from this perspective, rather than through the paranoid lens of Geneva, the League’s arrival appears as a timely initiative of the post-​1919 age, rather than the arrival of a disruptive guest to the ICRC’s party. More research is required on this subject in order to ascertain the extent to which the ICRC’s derogatory view of the League was valid, or whether it was simply another example to support Davide Rodogno’s thesis of ‘ingrained arrogance’. Beyond the ICRC and League/​IFRC binary, there has long been a tendency in the Movement for the national societies to function autonomously or within privileged sub-​networks: their response to appeals for aid and assistance tends to reflect regional sympathies or groupings. The chapters collected here speak to the power of these sub-​networks; but they also highlight their limitations, and the need for members of the inner circles to reach out to peripheral members at times of extreme crisis. This prompts us to question the domination of certain Red Cross societies in the Red Cross story, especially those of America, Western Europe, Britain and its former dominions, which have received the lion’s share of coverage in Red Cross scholarship, to the detriment of a deeper consideration of non-​western/​ Global South perspectives. There is an urgent need for studies on the Red Cross in parts of the world such as Asia, Africa, and Central and South America, whether as individual national societies or as regional networks.68 Such studies are likely to provide us with competing histories of humanitarianism; they will also likely throw up sets of ideas that may offer further challenging counterpoints to the Red Cross ideal of unity, coherence and energy, and its western Eurocentric definition of ‘humanitarianism’. Another exciting emergent area of scholarly interest in the Movement draws on the perspectives offered by social, cultural and particularly gender historians. The ‘heroic’ narrative of the Red Cross is disconcertingly white and male, yet there is clearly a need to revise this view. Dunant’s famous clarion-​call, ‘tutti fratelli’, was

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first uttered by the women of Castiglione tending the wounded on the battlefield of Solferino, and it was the Comtesse Valérie de Gasparin who first piqued Dunant’s interest in the concept of peacetime aid societies. Many of the chapters collected here speak to the decisive influence exercised by women in shaping the Movement and staffing its cadres. Much could be learnt from these women’s stories about their motivations, ambitions and ideals in undertaking the work of ‘Red Crossers’. Moreover, there is also much work to be done on how, in certain circumstances, the Red Cross was explicitly ‘feminised’ in terms of its external messaging and publicity imagery.69 Finally, there is clearly a gendered angle to any explanation of how national aid or relief work provided a stimulus for action, particularly after 1919, when the League’s agenda for peacetime work shifted the Movement’s focus and threw up competing ideas on its sense of mission and motivation –​or ‘humanitarian sensibilities’, to use Liisa Malkki’s phrase.70 Another area opened up in this collection that requires further research going forward is the role that national societies and the League/​Federation have played in the area of domestic public-​health services. From the post-​First World War period onwards, and within a broader mission to improve health and prevent disease, Red Cross societies around the world have engaged in a range of social welfare services, from running hospitals and training nurses to establishing blood transfusion services. These domestic services, often in partnership with governments, indicate the extent to which the initial bond that drove the Movement forward  –​that of voluntary humanitarianism with state-​sanctioned war  –​has diversified over the last 150 years. This has led to the ingraining of Red Cross work into the day-​to-​day provision of services by states, as well as the many broader, global campaigns to combat disease and deprivation, extending the role of the Red Cross beyond the battlefield in ways that even Dunant could not have imagined. A final word must be said on the archives and sources used by scholars involved in our field. Writing on the subject of the Red Cross still suffers from a weakness endemic to much of the writing on humanitarianism, in that for the most part, it entirely overlooks the lived experiences of those at the receiving end of Red Cross largesse and assistance. In order to recapture the voices, narratives and perspectives they offer for our understanding of the Red Cross, historians will need to be much more ambitious in their search for sources, and perhaps too, more imaginative in the way they use them. This is by no means easy, but we cannot be satisfied if the histories we write about the Red Cross merely reinforce the power-​disparities and inequalities that ‘humanitarians’ allegedly aspire to overturn. At the same time, it is important to recognise that even ‘institutional’ histories of the Red Cross will only be written if the relevant records are preserved. This status is not always the case across the Movement’s various archives, especially those of the smaller, less wealthy national societies. Historians must take a lead role in preserving the complex story of the Red Cross. In November 2011, the Council of Delegates of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement agreed on a Resolution ‘[p]‌reserving the

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historical and cultural heritage of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement’.71 Projects such as the Australian Red Cross’s ‘Gifting to the Nation’ of its records in its centenary year in 2014, and the recent Canadian deposition of its records into twenty-​three archives, libraries and academic collections across the country in 2018, were led by historians, passionate about the preservation and accessibility of Red Cross archives. There are, as Charlotte Clements and Georgina Brewis remind us, various ways the scholarly community can help with saving the records of voluntary organisations –​historians can write money for archives into their grant proposals, draw up a written memorandum of understanding, disseminate guidance and champion the archive collections they use.72 There is clearly a need for historians to reach out and offer their expertise to the archivists of the Red Cross world. To give back and not always take, to make deeper use of the archives that are already available, and encourage those less accessible through purpose and interest to open their doors. It is only by taking such actions that we might solve the problem we have identified here of a preoccupation with western humanitarianism in the current scholarship. Notes 1 The IFRC in numbers: https://​media.ifrc.org/​ifrc/​ (accessed 4 October 2018). 2 www.icrc.org/​en/​movement (accessed 23 October 2018). 3 J. Pictet, The Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross:  Commentary (Geneva:  International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1979), p. 22. 4 D. Palmieri, ‘An Institution Standing the Test of Time? A Review of 150 Years of the History of the ICRC’, International Review of the Red Cross, 94:888 (2012), 1273–​98. 5 S. R. Ratner and R. Giladi, ‘The Role of the International Committee of the Red Cross’, in A. Clapham, P. Gaeta and M. Sassòli (eds), The 1949 Geneva Conventions:  A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 525–​47 (p. 534). 6 D. Forsythe, The Humanitarians:  The International Committee of the Red Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); J. D. Armstrong, ‘The International Committee of the Red Cross and Political Prisoners’, International Organization, 39:4 (1985), 615–​42; R. Geiβ, A. Zimmermann and S. Haumer (eds), Humanizing the Laws of War:  The Red Cross and the Development of International Humanitarian Law (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2018). 7 See, among others, T. Brückner, Hilfe schenken:  Die Beziehung zwischen dem IKRK und der Schweiz 1919–​1939 (Zürich: NZZ Libro, 2016), I. Vonèche Cardia, Neutralité et engagement: Les relations entre le Comité international de la Croix-​Rouge et le gouvernement suisse pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Lausanne: Société d’histoire de la Suisse romande, 2012). 8 J. Henckaerts and L. Doswald-​Beck, Customary International Humanitarian Law, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and the International Committee of the Red Cross, 2005); ICRC, Commentary on the First Geneva Convention: Convention (I) for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); ICRC, Commentary on the First Geneva Convention: Convention (II) for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); commentaries on the Third (prisoners of war) and Fourth (civilians) conventions are expected to appear in due course.

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9 I. Hermann, ‘Décrypter la concurrence humanitaire: Le conflit entre Croix-​Rouge(s) après 1918’, Relations internationales, 151 (2012), 91–​102. 10 C. E. Buckingham, For Humanity’s Sake: The Story of the Early Development of the League of Red Cross Societies (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1964), p. 24. See also M. Oppenheimer, ‘ “A Golden Moment”?:  The League of Red Cross Societies, the League of Nations and Contested Spaces of Internationalism and Humanitarianism, 1919–​22’, in J. Damousi and P. O’Brien (eds), League of Nations:  Histories, Legacies and Impact (Melbourne:  Melbourne University Press, 2018), pp. 47–​48; J. F. Irwin, ‘Connected by Calamity: The United States, the League of Red Cross Societies and Transnational Assistance after the First World War, Moving the Social, 57 (2017), 57–​76. 11 See statement by the IFRC, following the Board of Governors’ decision in October 2018 to suspend the membership of the Hellenic Red Cross Society. https://​media.ifrc.org/​ ifrc/​press-​release/​statement-​suspension-​hellenic-​red-​cross-​member-​ifrc/​ (accessed 17 October 2019). 12 H. Dunant, A Memory of Solferino (London: Cassell, 1947), p. 57. 13 This was defined in 2007 as being ‘a specific and distinctive partnership, entailing mutual responsibilities and benefits, based on international and national laws, in which the national public authorities and the National Society agree on the areas in which the National Society supplements or substitutes public humanitarian services’. Resolution 2, 30th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, 2007. 14 J. Crossland, War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853–​1914 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 57–​114, 133–​52. 15 Covenant of the League of Nations (1919), Article 25. 16 See Pictet, The Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross. 17 D. M. Segesser, ‘Le concept de neutralité et la Convention de Genève de 1864’, in J. Chandet, A. Crépin and C. Windler (eds), Le temps des hommes doubles: Les arrangements face à l’occupation, de la Révolution française à la guerre de 1870 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013), pp.  69–​84. 18 An exception was made in 2007 with respect to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. 19 Moynier’s principles and ideas on how to reform the Red Cross movement and give it direction were conveyed in G. Moynier, Etude sur la convention de Genève pour l’amélioration du sort des militaires blessés dans les armées en campagne, 1864 et 1868 (Paris: Librairie de Jöel Cherbuliez, 1870); and G. Moynier, ‘Ce qu’est la croix rouge’, Bulletin international 21 (1875), 1–​8. 20 One might note the existence of similar concerns behind the desire to clarify diplomatic practices in the Vienna conventions on diplomatic and consular relations in 1961 and 1963 respectively. 21 Forsythe, The Humanitarians, p. 29. 22 P. Bossier, From Solferino to Tsushima (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1984), p. 338. 23 A National Aid Society had existed in Britain since 1870; the British Red Cross Society was finally inaugurated in 1905. 24 For the role of religion in motivating humanitarian endeavours, see P. Stamatov, The Origins of Global Humanitarianism: Religion, Empires and Advocacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and M. Barnett and J. Stein, Sacred Aid:  Faith and Humanitarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 25 N. M. Kosuge, ‘The “Non-​Religious” Red Cross Emblem and Japan’, International Review of the Red Cross, 85:849 (2003), 75–​93. 26 R. Provost, ‘The International Committee of the Red Widget? The Diversity Debate and International Humanitarian Law’, Israel Law Review, 40:2 (2007), 614–​47.

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27 See G. Steinacher, Humanitarians at War:  The Red Cross in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 28 N. J. Andrews, ‘The Romantic Socialist Origins of Humanitarianism’, Modern Intellectual History, 2019, doi: 10.1017/​S1479244318000550. 29 G. Best, Humanity in Warfare:  Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts (London: Routledge, 1983), pp. 141–​3. 30 See, for example, M. Harrison, The Medical War: British Military Medicine in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 31 J. F. Hutchinson, Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996). 32 R. Chrastil, ‘The French Red Cross, War Readiness, and Civil Society, 1866–​1914’, French Historical Studies, 31:3 (2008), 445–​76 (p. 459). 33 E. Benvenisti and A. Cohen, ‘War Is Governance: Explaining the Logic of the Laws of War from a Principal-​Agent Perspective’, Michigan Law Review, 112:8 (2013), 1363–​417. 34 C. Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream:  War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: HarperCollins, 1999). 35 J.-​C. Favez, Une mission impossible? Le CICR, les déportations et les camps de concentration nazis (Lausanne: Payot, 1996). English translation: The Red Cross and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 36 Email communication with ICRC archives, Mr Fabrizio Benzi, 22 October 2018. 37 See, for example, Forsythe, The Humanitarians. 38 M. Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity:  100 Years of Australian Red Cross, 1914–​2014 (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2014); M. Tennant, Across the Street, across the World: A History of the Red Cross in New Zealand (Wellington: NZRC, 2015); and S. Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy: A History of the Canadian Red Cross (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2017). Two titles on the American Red Cross were published in 2013: see J. Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and M. M. Jones, The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). For a history of the Dutch Red Cross, see L. van Bergen, De zwaargewonden eerst? Het Nederlandsche Roode Kruis en het vraagstuk van oorlog en vrede 1867–​1945 (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 1994); for Norway, see E. Mageli, With the Right to Help: The Story of the Norwegian Red Cross (Oslo: Pax, 2014). Two context-​specific titles that examine the German and French Red Cross societies are B. Morgenbrod and S. Merkenich, Das Deutsche Rote Kreuz unter der NS-​Diktatur, 1933–​1945 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2016); and B. Taithe, Defeated Flesh: Medicine, Welfare and Warfare in the Making of Modern France (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). R. Cresswell, Health and Humanitarianism: A Global, National and Local History of the British Red Cross, 1870–​2020 (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). 39 See, for example, the work of Japanese scholars attached to the Department of Nursing, Hiroshima Prefectural College of Health and Welfare, and the Japanese Red Cross College of Nursing; Yukari Kawahara, ‘125-​Year History of the Japanese Red Cross Nursing Education’, Journal of Humanitarian Studies, 4 (2015), 93–​9. 40 Appendix 1 summarises the archival holdings of the national Red Cross societies (as of 2014). Public contacts for national society archives can be found at https://​media.ifrc.org/​ifrc/​ who-​we-​are/​archives/​ (accessed 17 October 2019). Where no contact is available, scholars are encouraged to approach the IFRC archives ([email protected]). 41 A notable exception is Hutchinson’s Champions of Charity, which offers an incisive analysis of the Movement’s early history, and the different ‘national’ approaches to Dunant’s founding idea.

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42 D. A. Reid and P. F. Gilbo, Beyond Conflict:  The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1919–​1994 (Geneva:  IFRC, 1997); Buckingham, For Humanity’s Sake; B. Towers, ‘Red Cross Organizational Politics, 1918–​1922:  Relations of Dominance and the Influence of the United States’, in P. Weindling (ed.), International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918–​1939 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 36–​55; Irwin, ‘Connected by Calamity’; K. A. Lowe, ‘The LRCS and ICRC: A Re-​Evaluation of American Influence in Interwar Internationalism’, Moving the Social, 57 (2017), 37–​56. 43 Email communication with IFRC Archivist, Mr Grant Mitchell, 31 October 2018. 44 This four-​year project, ‘Resilient Humanitarianism:  The League of Red Cross Societies, 1919–​1991’ (DP190101171), will run from 2019 to 2022. The Chief Investigators are Melanie Oppenheimer, Susanne Schech, Romain Fathi, Rosemary Cresswell and Neville Wylie. 45 For the appeal of humanitarianism as a principal area of research, see M. Hilton, E. Baughan, E.  Davey, B.  Everill, K.  O’Sullivan and T.  Sasson, ‘History and Humanitarianism:  A Conversation’, Past and Present, 241 (November 2018), e1–​e38, doi:10.1093/​pastj/​gty040. 46 See in particular B. Simms and D. J.  B. Trim (eds), Humanitarian Intervention:  A History (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011); J. Paulmann (ed.), Humanitarianism and Media: 1900 to the Present (New York and Oxford: Berghann Books, 2018); F. Klose (ed.), The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2016); J. Paulmann (ed.), Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid in the Twentieth Century (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2016); E. dal Lago and K. O’Sullivan, ‘Introduction: Towards a New History of Humanitarianism’, Moving the Social, 57 (2017), 5–​20; J. Paulmann, ‘Conjunctures in the History of International Humanitarian Aid during the Twentieth Century’, Humanity:  An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 4:2 (2013), 215–​38. 47 Crossland, War, Law and Humanity, pp. 44–​93. 48 See J. F. Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York: Free Press, 2012). 49 J. Guillermand, ‘The Contribution of Army Medical Officers to the Emergence of Humanitarian Law’, International Review of the Red Cross, 29:271 (1989), 306–​32. 50 J. Furley, Among the Carlists (London: Tinsley, 1876), p. 287. 51 See Towers, ‘Red Cross Organizational Politics’; Irwin, Making the World Safe; Jones, The American Red Cross, passim. 52 M. Barnett, Empire of Humanity:  A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2011); B. Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–​1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Y. Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World and the Global Humanitarian Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Paulmann, ‘Conjunctures in the History of International Humanitarian Aid’. 53 Irwin, Making the World Safe. 54 See N. Wylie, ‘Muddied Waters: The Influence of the First Hague Conference on the Evolution of the Geneva Conventions of 1864 and 1906’, in M. Abbenhuis, C. E. Barber and A. R. Higgins (eds), War, Peace and International Order? The Legacies of the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 52–​68. 55 See, for instance, D. Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century (London: Simon & Schuster, 2013). 56 M. Desgrandchamps, L’humanitaire en guerre civile: La crise du Biafra (1967–​1970) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018); Lasse Heerten, The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 57 This is explored in E. Davey, Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954–​1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 58 S. Widmer, ‘Switzerland, Regime Change, and Armed Conflict in Sub-​Saharan Africa in the Global Cold War, 1967–​1979’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Lausanne, 2018).

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59 The Emergency Appeals Alliance currently acts as an umbrella organisation for the Austrian, Belgian, British, Canadian, Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, Swedish and Swiss national groupings. See www.emergency-​appeals-​alliance.org/​ (accessed 28 October 2018). 60 See Ratner and Giladi, ‘The Role of the International Committee of the Red Cross’. 61 See, for example, Cédric Cotter (S’)Aider pour survivre: Action humanitaire et neutralité suisse pendant la Première Guerre mondiale (Geneva: Georg, 2018). 62 For postwar criticisms of the Red Cross see G. Best, Law and War since 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 63 Speech given by Mr Peter Maurer, president of the ICRC, Joint Opening Ceremony  –​ Statutory Meetings of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement 2017. Antalya, 6 November 2017. www.icrc.org/​en/​document/​my-​message-​movement-​its-​time-​awaken-​ giant (accessed 15 November 2018). 64 There were six detailed background papers that accompanied the final report, An Agenda for Red Cross: A Re-​Appraisal of the Role of the Red Cross, July 1975. For a brief overview, see Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity, pp. 188–​9. 65 The International Review of the Red Cross will devote some of its 150th-​year edition (2019) to a discussion of its historical role. 66 Forsythe, The Humanitarians, pp. 36–​7. 67 See, among others, Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism; K. D. Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 68 See I. Feldman, ‘Humanitarianism and Revolution:  Samed, the Palestine Red Crescent Society, and the Work of Liberation’, in Paulmann, Humanitarianism and the Media, pp. 222–​39. 69 The female nurse is a ubiquitous image in many national societies’ propaganda materials during the First World War, especially the American Red Cross. Consider, for instance, Harrison Fisher’s 1918 poster ‘I summon you to comradeship in the Red Cross  –​Woodrow Wilson’, depicted on the dust cover of Irwin’s Making the World Safe (see note 38), or A. E. Foringer’s ‘The Greatest Mother in the World’, which featured in ARC fundraising posters in 1918 and 1919, and again in 1943. See, in general, D. Palmieri, ‘Humanitarianism on the Screen: The ICRC films, 1921–​1965’, in Paulmann, Humanitarianism and the Media, pp. 90–​106; and D. Rodogno and H. Fehrenbach (eds), Humanitarian Photography:  A History (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2015). 70 L. Malkki, The Need to Help:  The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). For a study of the role and motivation of ICRC delegates, see Brigitte Troyon and Daniel Palmieri, ‘The ICRC Delegate: An Exceptional Humanitarian Player?’, International Review of the Red Cross, 89:865 (March 2007), 97–​111. 71 www.icrc.org/​en/​doc/​resources/​documents/​resolution/​council-​delegates-​resolution-​6–​ 2011.htm (accessed 20 January 2019). 72 www.voluntarysectorarchives.org.uk (accessed 20 January 2019). This is part of a British Academy Research Project, ‘Digitising the Mixed Economy of Welfare in Britain’.

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Certainty, compassion and the ingrained arrogance of humanitarians Davide Rodogno

The kind of humanitarianism I know something about is western humanitarianism, which emerged in the late eighteenth century in forms that are familiar or still recognisable in 2019.1 This kind of humanitarianism is definitely a permanent feature of international relations as we know them. It is as trivial as it is true to say that humanitarianism is not easily defined. Humanitarianism can be substantial, liquid or volatile, can be evasive and pervasive, everywhere and nowhere to be seen; it often is insatiable, and its impacts intangible. Can we really tell, in the context of natural and/​or man-​made disasters what is the specific ‘weight’ of humanitarian action? Can we –​historians –​elucidate the mystery of its 21 Grams? This is a broader and looming question with which I am still grappling.2 In this chapter, I would like to offer some preliminary reflections on a related issue –​that of humanitarians’ motivations  –​which may help partially to elucidate the above-​mentioned mystery. My reflection is in fieri and slouching, though I hope the reader can recognise a thread connecting the various sections of this chapter. Here I assume that humanitarians’ motivations are heterogeneous. My argument is that despite such heterogeneity, during the last 120 years western humanitarians have retained a distinctive trait: a certain kind of arrogance, which I view as ingrained and related to certainty and compassion (a term that derives from Latin cum-​ patire, literally to suffer with). My argument suggests continuity in very different times and spaces, and for very different actors of such ingrained arrogance. Before dealing with the core of the matter, explaining what I mean by arrogance and why I  think it is ingrained, I  wish to say a few words on the recent historiography on humanitarianism. Some historical research encompasses humanitarian pensiero ed azione (thought and action).3 In the work of historians, the complete separation of humanitarian thought from action(s) is infrequent. However, historians working on humanitarianism, humanitarian actions and interventions tend to privilege specific dimensions, assuming rather than really explaining the motivations of the protagonists of their stories. Some historians work on national and transnational aspects of the history

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of humanitarian movements, such as the Red Cross. Others focus on humanitarian ideology (-​ies), on humanitarians’ ethos or its inner cluster of sentiments, or on the moral imperative to do something to alleviatee suffering humanity. Significant work has been undertaken on the history of international humanitarian law, on the intimacy of humanitarianism with colonial and imperial history, with philanthropy and charity. Other historians have examined humanitarian institutions; humanitarian industry and its business, its markets; or the history of humanitarians as professionals and/​or volunteers. A  growing number of historians use a gendered approach, whereas others focus on the history of humanitarian practices or the relations between humanitarian actions and the media.4 In late 2018, Past & Present published a ‘conversation’ among a group of historians coming from different backgrounds, who discuss their own involvement in the field, why they think it emerged, where they see it going, and what they consider its strengths and weaknesses to be.5 Research fragmentation and specialisation happened fast, and left unsatisfied scholars from other disciplines interested in reading overviews on the history of humanitarianism. Tired of waiting, one political scientist bravely ventured into history and, in 2011, published Empire of Humanity.6 Michael Barnett connected the antislavery and missionary movements of the nineteenth century to post-​Cold War humanitarian operations and the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863, to the emergence of the major international humanitarian organisations of the twentieth century. The level of Barnett’s analysis was global, though he pointed to inherent ethical ambiguities in humanitarianism. Barnett also highlighted the varieties of humanitarianism and reflected on the needs of the beneficiaries and those of the compassionate; the latter are part of my reflection. In further scholarly contributions, Barnett reflected on humanitarianism as an order that, in his view, has all of the elements of governance. He went so far as to refer to this order as constituting a humanitarian government, which is concerned with the administration of human collectivities in the name of a higher moral principle that sees the preservation of life and the alleviation of suffering as the highest value of action.7 Barnett refers to western humanitarianism as including an interlocking set of norms, informal institutions, laws and discourses that legitimate and compel various kinds of interventions to protect the world’s most vulnerable populations; a surfeit of conventions and treaties designed to secure the fundamental rights of all peoples, such as the right to life; a multitude of slogans and rallying cries, including ‘never again’ and ‘the humanitarian imperative’, that accompany graphic and heart-​ wrenching photos of victims of violence; and a metropolis of states, international organisations and non-​governmental organisations, some of which are dedicated to the goal of reducing suffering and others to lending a hand only under the ‘right’ circumstances. These norms, laws, actors and institutions are nestled in discourses of compassion, responsibility, benevolence and care that, in turn, are attached to claims that the ‘international community’ has obligations to its weakest members.

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What do they tell us about humanitarians’ motivations? Why did humanitarians put such an effort into building up this empire? Another scholar, again not a historian, Didier Fassin, offered an equally compelling and extremely useful prism through which to study humanitarianism and the motives of humanitarians. Humanitarian Reason sees humanitarianism as oscillating between a politics of inequality and a politics of solidarity.8 Fassin sought to elucidate how the decisions over where to apportion life and death that humanitarians must daily engage with work in relation to anthropological notions of the gift. He saw that the vital politics of humanitarianism are broader than Foucauldian biopolitics. Fassin accepted that humanitarianism is a form of biopolitics, insofar as it sets up and manages refugee camps, establishes protected corridors in order to gain access to war casualties, develops statistical tools to measure malnutrition, and makes use of the media to bear witness to injustice in the world. But he also wanted to see humanitarianism as a politics of life, to the extent that it takes as its object both ‘the saving of individuals, which presupposes not only risking others but also making a selection of which existences it is possible or legitimate to save’, and ‘the defense of causes, which presupposes not only leaving other causes aside but also producing public representations of the human beings to be defended’.9 Anthropologist Liisa Malkki has provided us with the most valuable analysis of the great variety of motivations that human beings bring to their work and their lives. Malkki rejects descriptions of heroic aid workers and describes them as driven by both ordinary and extraordinary professionalism, by boredom, and by their need for personal and professional development. Precisely because of their neediness, the aid workers Malkki portrays ‘explode the opposition between values and interests, between ideals and money, that structures theoretical debates about action in the social sciences, and that also shapes the ways that we discuss career choices in everyday life’.10 If historians are tributaries of social sciences, social scientists have to resort to history. Barnett wrote a history of humanitarianism and Fassin wrote a moral history of the present. Historians have not worked on the motivations of humanitarians in an extensive way. I leave aside hagiographic publications, otherwise fascinating, which do not necessarily quench my thirst, as they often say more about the authors of such publications than about the motivations of the humanitarians (or humanitarian institutions) they sanctify. The study of humanitarians’ motivations could be undertaken in a number of ways. Among these options one might consider focusing on a single individual, selecting a number of individuals or a number of institutions, and the environment where they performed actions they defined as humanitarian. One might offer an analysis of what were their most profound and intimate motives, beyond what their organisations’ propaganda and official publications claimed. It could be possible to work on the consistency and discrepancy between institutional humanitarian objectives and individual motivations, or on humanitarians’ motives and their compatibility with the priorities of those who are helped. The study of humanitarians’ motivations could also be

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undertaken at a broader level, contextualising man-​made or natural disasters, with particular attention to the problematic definition of these two terms or other equally problematic terms, such as ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency’. Even if the existing literature on this topic were conspicuous, I claim it would still be difficult to generalise or to offer a broader explanation of continuities and changes over time and spaces. Over the years, when reading letters, reports and other materials I  found in humanitarian institutions’ archives or in private papers, I was struck by how difficult it was to read significant materials on humanitarians’ most intimate motives. I perceived or, perhaps, misperceived, a tension and a discrepancy between intimate motives and the triumphalist tone of official publications. In the last fifteen years, the history of humanitarianism offered increasingly multilayered and sophisticated analyses, from micro to systemic, top-​down and bottom up, from the centre and the margins. Paying attention to discourses, as an increasing number of historians do, is of crucial importance for detecting consistencies and discrepancies between humanitarian thoughts and actions. The study of humanitarian actors has expanded, and it now includes articles and monographs on individuals and institutions, on secular and (to a lesser degree) faith-​based institutions, on small organisations and powerful philanthropic foundations, on the Red Cross movement, but also on public opinion and media, on nation-​states and empires. Fortunately, scholarly literature on the history of humanitarianism has been diverse and protean. Chronologies of humanitarianism have expanded. Different historians with different sensitivities have put forward their preferred genesis moment for humanitarianism. The list is long: the Enlightenment, the rise of capitalism, the First World War, the interwar period, the Second World War, the Cold War, the end of the Cold War, 9/​11; the foundation of the Red Cross; the Lisbon earthquake of 1755; technologies of science and medicine that made visible the details of suffering in the individual body; the Armenian genocide, the genocide of European Jews; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention; Biafra; and the genocide in Rwanda. Historians’ obsession with origins and genealogies might be considered futile; however, it has been useful in demolishing nefarious Whig histories of humanitarianism as well as teleological accounts tracing a specious fil-​ rouge from the Enlightenment to Médecins sans Frontières. What, though, do all these moments and origins of western humanitarianism tell us about humanitarians’ motivations? Very little is the answer. The loci of historical research on humanitarianism have expanded too:  local and localised, domestic, foreign, international, imperial, global and transnational. They intertwined with secular and faith-​based dimensions, with political ideologies including liberalism and, to a lesser extent, communism. On the one hand, scholars focused and still focus on what happens when humanitarians land somewhere and do something. On the other hand, some scholars investigate the preconditions of humanitarian actions. This in turn explains the tension  –​often unresolved  –​ between the domestic and the foreign in many scholarly writings on the history of

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humanitarianism, simply because the motive for humanitarians’ actions originate in one place but are manifest somewhere else, far away. This is one of the reasons why historians using a transnational approach often enjoy working on humanitarianism. Humanitarians land somewhere (with or without an invitation), with a baggage full of beliefs, of practices and of political and moral assumptions. Still, we are not close to disposing of credible political biographies of humanitarians. We do not really know much about their motivations. We often know what hagiographical accounts want us to know about them. Critical biographies, an honorable research option, seem to be out of fashion. Historians have paid increasing attention to the intended and, more often, unintended consequences of humanitarian projects  –​they have contextualised issues of moral authority and legitimacy, and deliberate attempts to depoliticise humanitarian actions. Historians have paid attention to the ways in which humanitarians claim to intercede in a given society to provide a service; they have examined how humanitarians ended up altering the alchemy of life and death and inexorably affecting the distribution of power. Some historians prefer to narrow down their research to actions such as providing temporary shelter, food and medical care during wartime or immediately after disasters, their focus being on mitigating suffering and saving lives in times of crisis or emergency. Such times often coincide with the ways help providers conceive crises and emergencies, which I think may be problematic insofar as these historians run the risk of taking at face value what a crisis or an emergency is. Other historians have a broader conception of humanitarian actions and of humanitarianism, choosing instead to explore the effects (or lack) of humanitarian operations and their aftermaths. What about humanitarians’ motivations within these historiographical strands? Again, there is little in the literature. And what about humanitarians’ motivations in relation to aid recipients? The vast majority of historians working on the history of humanitarianism are fully aware of how difficult it is to research the history of humanitarianism from this perspective. This is because of powerful narratives one finds in the archives of humanitarian and international institutions, which conceal, neglect or silence the voices and existences of aid recipients. More recent historiography is reassessing the role of religious charitable networks and, little by little, the approach exclusively centred on the work of international associations is being questioned, the specific weight of foreign institutions in times of crisis being downsized to the point of becoming an epiphenomenon.11 In my current research, the perspective I take is limited to the supply side of humanitarian programmes in the interwar period, and how humanitarian actors created (or contributed to creating) a demand that suited them. I leave to other more competent and ambitious historians the study of the sufferers’ needs, which for me is a chimeric object of historical enquiry. I think that a one-​sided history, albeit having a modest objective, can still be useful; and I am persuaded that shedding some light on the certainty and compassion of humanitarians may be beneficial to those among us who can afford to write a history from the margins. As

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a caveat I would add that writing ‘the’ history of the needy, of the victims, of the vulnerable (no matter how one conceptualises these categories) is problematic in any case if, to put it in Primo Levi’s words, the latter is about writing the history of the saved leaving aside the history of the drowned. The richness of studies and their diversity should be cherished, and I claim that the biggest mistake we can make as scholars and as teachers is to turn research into a parochial, inward-​looking gated community. If we wish to create a field, though I think this is not strictly necessary, we should avoid erecting barbed-​wire fences around it. Otherwise, the only interesting historical enquiries on this subject will be those undertaken by scholars operating beyond such sterilised space. Humanitarianism is not a self-​standing -​ism; it is intimately connected to money (capitalism) and religion, sentiment and empire, domestic societal contexts, conflicts and violence, gender, culture and international law. We need to connect our research to our sensitivities and curiosity –​it is important to expand the optic beyond humanitarianism itself, if we wish to understand it. If the optic of our research were to put at its epicentre humanitarian pensiero ed azione, we would run the risk of missing the point. Like anthropologists, historians strive to find a critical vantage point, uncontaminated by the actors’ representations: one point that would allow us to maintain sufficient distance from the object of our analyses and to stay away from the magnetic force of these institutions’ archives. However, contaminatio is the necessary fertiliser of research. I  claim it is indispensable to connect the history of humanitarianism with contiguous fields, including economic, financial, military, political history, or the history of science. As to which of these contiguous fields one should privilege, I have no prescriptions or suggestions; historians will choose according to their individual sensitivities and academic interests. Historians interested in researching the history of humanitarianism will need to keep reading, exchanging and discussing ideas with other scholars. They will also need to keep themselves open to research in the social sciences; however, theoretical or philosophical conceptualisations must be handled with care. For instance, I am not sure that ‘bare life’ or ‘states of exceptions’ should be the systematic starting point of historical research.12 Furthermore, I warmly invite historians to be more assertive about the contribution of our beloved discipline. We should rejoice at researching the fragments and connecting them to a broader, often imagined or merely sketched, mosaic. We should assert history’s craftsmanship. As historians, we have every right to be more interested in the multiple nuances of our empirical materials than in the validity of theoretical paradigms to understand what humanitarian projects or humanitarians’ motivations have been about. I believe historians have an important role to play, in contextualising humanitarian projects and providing the broader community of scholars and readers with a better, more nuanced understanding of humanitarianism as an ideology, a movement and a profession. Hereafter, exceptionally, I will do exactly the opposite of what I have been preaching, since this time I am only sharing an exploratory and rough reflection.

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I started reflecting on the ingrained arrogance of humanitarianism after years of research, which revealed the apparent dichotomies that turned into seamless entities upon which humanitarians seemed to thrive:  the domestic and the foreign, the national and the international, the religious and the secular, missionaries and military or colonial administrators, measurement and improvisation. I could see how the domestic and the local forged humanitarian actions abroad, from a moral, political and financial point of view; and foreign experiences were imported back home. My reflection came about when I realised that humanitarianism was more than just one of the two Janus-​faces of humanity, the brighter one –​the darker one being violence and war, misery and destitution. Research in various archives and in different time-​periods also convinced me that humanitarian actions are profoundly asymmetrical, no matter how insistently humanitarians reject this claim. Universality and impartiality, when confronted with reality, invariably become biased and selective. They are quintessentially political. It is because of these tensions –​human, all too human, as Nietzsche would have it –​that in a world of super-​heroes, of saviours and damned, of misery and nobility of intentions, I saw glimpses of one of the most persistent and, I argue, ingrained temporal, spatial and ideological features of western humanitarianism. In different epochs I kept observing humanitarians who needed chaos to harbinger order. They needed anarchy to govern, the needy to rescue, and war and horror to exist. What, if anything, distinguished humanitarians from other human beings? What was (and still is) the inner framework supporting the need to help, turning impulses and intentions (moral, political, religious) into actions? A specific kind of ingrained arrogance may be a partial answer to these questions. There are various ways to think about arrogance. One is the definition you will find in any internet search engine. The Merriam-​Webster online dictionary, for example, defines arrogance as ‘An insulting way of thinking or behaving that comes from believing that you are better, smarter or more important than other people’.13 This is not the kind of definition I have in mind. Indeed, I believe this specific meaning of arrogance should not be discarded a priori for several reasons. I will point out two of them. First, such a definition is sometimes used to qualify the work, and/​ or the intentions, of humanitarian actors. In some quarters –​academic included –​ humanitarians are seen as arrogant; their arrogance is said to derive from (or to be identical to) that of western missionaries and of imperialists of all sorts. Hence, according to this view, humanitarians are inherently arrogant because of a historically informed, often teleological, interpretation. Second, if the perspective taken in a given historical analysis is that of the forgotten, of those who during a conflict are never to be reached by humanitarian organisations, one might end up assuming that humanitarians and their institutions are arrogant. The forgotten might view humanitarians as arrogant because they decided, deliberately or not, to ignore their suffering and misery. According to this view, humanitarians might be Machiavellian planners, creators and managers of crises and emergencies that they exploit to do their business; they might be portrayed as cynical parasites profiting from tragedies

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happening around the world. Furthermore, if the drowned –​here I refer to Primo Levi –​whenever their voices can be studied (which, as we know, is far from being systematically possible), will be at the centre of a given historical enquiry, it is quite plausible and understandable that humanitarians and their intentions will become peripheral.14 In both these cases, either because of a teleological interpretation or because of the perspective of one’s analysis, arrogance will be quite close to the Merriam-​Webster definition. I would like to suggest a different concept of arrogance. As historians we cannot assume that humanitarians believed they were better, smarter or more important than other people. Only cross-​referenced evidence can reveal whether this may or may not have been the case. It is equally incorrect to claim that since the roots of the humanitarian movement are religious and located in the West during the heyday of western imperialism, all western humanitarians were (and are) ipso facto imperialists –​as if they had an original sin or a genetic disease, which made all their deeds either outright imperialist, or motivated by concealed imperialist intentions. Moreover, the idea that individuals, associations and non-​government organisations (NGOs) –​not to mention states or the broader international community –​are responsible for, or have a duty to protect, the lives of strangers has distant origins. According to some historians this duty dates back to the late medieval period. Others suggest it is a product of the Enlightenment and found its expression domestically and in the colonies where white, Christian, western colonisers rationalised their subjugation of indigenous peoples by casting themselves as benevolent ‘guardians’ or ‘trustees’ of humanity.15 A doctrine of the ‘sacred trust of civilization’ was elaborated by European governments, intellectuals and colonisers in several guises and in different ‘dark’ corners of the globe. It was paralleled by ideas of domestic guardianship of aboriginal peoples in North America, or guardianship of ‘liberated’ Afro-​American slaves.16 As Jean Starobinski notes, already at the end of the eighteenth century there were abundant signs that civilisation might well become a secularised substitute for religion, an apotheosis of reason. Philosophies of history used the same term, civilisation, to describe both the fundamental process of history and the end result of that process. They established an antithesis between civilisation and a hypothetical primordial state (nature, savagery or barbarism). Minds were thus spurred to imagine the venues, causes and mechanisms of the journey taken through the ages. As Starobinski puts it, very eloquently, in reference to the ‘justification’ for colonisation: A term fraught with sacred content demonizes its antonym. Once the word civilization ceases to denote a fact subject to judgment and becomes an incontestable value, it enters the verbal arsenal of praise and blame. Evaluating the defects and merits of the civilization is no longer the issue. Civilization itself becomes the crucial criterion: judgment is now made in the name of civilization. One has to take its side,

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adopt its cause. For those who answer its call it becomes grounds for praise. Or, conversely, it can serve as a basis for denunciation: all that is not civilization, all that resists or threatens civilization, is monstrous, absolute evil. As rhetoric heats up, it becomes legitimate to ask for the supreme sacrifice in the name of civilization. This means that the service or defense of civilization can in certain circumstances justify the recourse to violence. Civilization’s enemies, the barbarians, if they cannot be educated or converted, must be prevented from doing harm.17

Throughout the nineteenth century, and particularly towards the end of that century, ‘humanitarian’, for quite some time a derogatory and insulting term, emerged as a meaningful companion of civilisation. In fact, if we replace the term civilisation with the term humanitarianism in the above-​mentioned passage by Starobinski, the result is quite meaningful. It is a term fraught with sacred content, an incontestable value: judgement is now made in the name of humanitarianism. All that is not humanitarianism, all that resists or threatens humanitarianism, is monstrous, absolute evil. This means that the service can in certain circumstances justify the recourse to violence. Humanitarianism’s enemies, the barbarians, if they cannot be educated or converted, must be prevented from doing harm. It is undoubtedly true that in the past and in more recent times, some humanitarians have made humanitarianism sacred. There are plenty of examples of governments who have waged humanitarian wars or used and abused the humanitarian rhetoric in the past and in more recent times. It is not so surprising that as a legacy of their roots many humanitarian actors still speak today of humanitarian ‘missions’, which ambiguously hints at a religious terminology. Undeniably, the invocation of the sacred entails arrogance. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) still uses the term ‘delegate’. Today’s delegates may completely ignore or be indifferent to the religious connotation of this term. In the New Testament God delegates his power to the apostle Paul. Paul is a delegate of God who exclusively acknowledges God’s authority. The ICRC delegate acknowledges her/​his headquarters’ authority to bless and protect (in Biblical terms), which places her/​ him in an exceptional, super-​partes, position, though it implies responsibility and accountability. Humanitarianism and violence were not always opposed to each other, yet every time they collided, arrogance proliferated. Humanitarian missions or operations (another term with further troubling military connotations) measured, assessed, decided and ultimately governed, and –​as we know –​whoever governs has the monopoly of justice and violence. This kind of arrogance is troubling though relatively easy to explain. Critical theories, from that of Antonio Gramsci to those of Michel Foucault and others, help us connect civilising processes and humanitarianism. I will not expand on them here since this is not the point I wish to make. I am more interested in the set of more or less well-​articulated motivations I was referring to at the beginning of the chapter.

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The word arrogance comes from the Latin arrogare, which means to adopt. In Latin, rogare means to ask, to ask for, to invite. The arrogator was one who adopted an adult as a son. To arrogate is also close to another Latin verb: sumere. In English this verb can be translated with the verb to assume, in the sense of taking upon oneself the responsibility of someone who, for some reasons, cannot. The arrogance of the humanitarians I am referring to is not about claiming rights or privileges in an illegal or unfair way; it is close to trusteeship and paternalism.18 However, it is not systematically or necessarily paternalist arrogance. Paternalism is the interference with a person’s liberty of action justified by reasons referring exclusively to the welfare, good, happiness, needs, interests or values of the person being coerced. Humanitarianism, Barnett argues, has strong elements of paternalism, but not all humanitarian actions count as paternalism because many can be assumed to operate with the consent of the recipient party.19 Those involved in humanitarian aid must frequently make decisions without having the opportunity to obtain the consent of the affected population, but they (reasonably) assume that these victims want to be helped in various ways. The decisions made by humanitarians are arrogant, not necessarily in a pejorative sense. Ideas on the affected population are based on a selective, specific reading of the situation as construed by humanitarians. Humanitarians arrogantly interpret who is and who is not a victim, or they decide the ranking of victims according to their priorities. I claim that a specific kind of ingrained arrogance has characterised and still characterises humanitarianism in its various forms and shapes. I  see it as a prerequisite of humanitarian actions, inextricably related to humanitarians’ certainty of their ability to help. Such certainty comes before or goes hand in hand with paternalism. Humanitarians, I posit, must have been certain of knowing why and how to help out the needy before they boarded a ship or an aeroplane to reach the place where suffering (distant suffering) was taking place; the help provider knew what was good; he or she knew how to act in the best interest of selected aid recipients. It is this arrogant assumption that I explore further hereafter. Before answering the question as to why humanitarians’ arrogance is ingrained, I  need to address the plausible suggestion of replacing the term arrogance with self-​confidence.20 In his definition of weak and strong paternalism, Barnett refers to one of the elements of strong paternalism being an unshakable sense of confidence that one knows best. There are many sources of confidence. Sometimes it is age, sometimes experience or a form of knowledge. Confidence can also be an effect of discourses of identity and difference –​men claiming to know what is best for women, whites claiming to know what is best for blacks, civilised people claiming to know what is best for uncivilised, and so on. Sometimes it is a sense of the divine, a belief that paternalists have God-​given insights because of revelation or a certainty that comes from operating in the name of putative natural and universal rights. In terms of its effects, then, belief in God is not that different from a belief in ‘humanity’ and the appeal to natural rights favoured by many in the humanitarian and human-​rights communities.

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The final distinguishing characteristic of what Barnett refers to as strong paternalism is the lack of accountability mechanisms that give local populations some way to restrain the actions of the paternalisers. Although humanitarians frequently shroud themselves in discourses of humanity, cosmopolitanism and a global public, they are notably unencumbered by what the objects of their care have to say. In the case of weak as well as of strong paternalism, self-​confidence –​the belief that you can do something well or succeed at something  –​is virtually undistinguishable from arrogance. The sources I have analysed over the years –​whether studying the case of early-​ nineteenth-​century interventions upon grounds of humanity, or examining the decision of an NGO to publish the picture of a dead toddler face down upon a Turkish shore in 2015  –​showed that humanitarians were profoundly persuaded that they could and should help, relieving and improving the lives and living conditions of individuals, communities, societies or entire regions of the world. This persuasion, whether genuine or fabricated, formal or substantial, secular or religious, determined actions, politics and policies. Some of these actions had positive effects. Others had disturbing consequences, such as arrogating privileges; deciding who, when, how, why and for how long aid could and should be dispensed; or setting up categories of vulnerability, which amounted to a deliberate act of inclusion and exclusion. Such a persuasion was and probably still is the basis upon which motivations were (and are) articulated. Humanitarians knew how to help, they knew how to solve a specific problem, they knew how to save lives. The humanitarian was the expert par excellence. He or she was also a missionary and/​or an adventurer in many respects. The humanitarian was like the plumber that knows how to fix your leaking pipes. What made the work of humanitarians different from that of the plumber was that, sometimes, humanitarians offered their services or invited themselves to solve other individuals’ problems. Officially, they offered their services –​to the aid recipients, at least –​for free. In some cases, the circumstances of the invitation were ambiguous, and the duration of their invitation was problematic –​either too long or too short, and its ex post facto assessment was, quite often, doubtful as a result. Before quitting their hometowns, humanitarians, professional or volunteers, even those who went into the field for the first time, already knew how to help strangers. I wonder what was the place of doubt, if any, before they landed in distant places? What changed during the actions of humanitarians? What changed when the action was over? When, if at any time, did certainties crumble before harsh realities? When did doubt become a possibility? Today a significant body of scholarly literature, mainly produced by anthropologists, sociologists and former practitioners, refers to paradoxes and dilemmas humanitarians experienced over the years.21 Many NGOs reflect and undergo public processes of auto-​critique. Still, at a profounder level, more existential philosophical quandaries and unresolved tensions must have appeared even before the epoch of accountability. The thought that came to my mind quite

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often when reading humanitarians’ back-​to-​office reports and other unpublished sources was that if, when on a mission, humanitarians had any doubts about what they were doing or their ability to help, they had two options open to them: they could conceal such doubts or they could admit to having them and eventually terminate the mission –​a stark decision. I suspect that sceptical humanitarians, and those who never doubted or who pretended to have no doubts, might be a good starting point to reflect on humanitarians’ motives. Doubts are often nowhere to be seen in humanitarians’ publications or in the archives of these institutions. These publications dribbled and trickled certainties. When they did not, the entire purpose of the mission, its very raison d’être, was placed in jeopardy; this in turn had serious consequences for humanitarians’ existence as professionals. As philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein puts it: The difference between the concept of ‘knowing’ and the concept of ‘being certain’ isn’t of any great importance at all, except where ‘I know’ is meant to mean: I can’t be wrong. (12.) For ‘I know’ seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression ‘I thought I knew.’ … (194.) With the word ‘certain’ we express complete conviction, the total absence of doubt, and thereby we seek to convince other people. That is subjective certainty. But when is something objectively certain? When a mistake is not possible. But what kind of possibility is that? Mustn’t mistake be logically excluded?22

This paradigm of certainty must have existed and must have been (consciously or not) accepted by humanitarians before doubts appeared (if and when they appeared). Hence, I argue, a plausible working hypothesis to reflect on humanitarians’ motivations might be that certainty as defined by Wittgenstein may have inhabited the minds and the bodies of humanitarians and may have led to the kind of arrogance I  discussed before. It would be interesting to understand if such certainty still inhabits the minds and bodies of today’s humanitarians. I insist on the importance of not exceptionalising the moral universes of humanitarians. I  think that Wittgenstein’s certainty should not be considered as their exclusive prerogative. In Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now, which gives an account of the war in Vietnam via Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, the protagonist, Colonel Kurtz, reflects on certainty. To be absolutely clear, and to avoid any superfluous criticism, I am not in any way, shape or form claiming that this fictional character’s moral universe has anything to do with humanitarians’ morality. Colonel Kurtz is the perfect antithesis of the humanitarian. In fact, it is precisely for this reason that I think a mise en parallèle is fruitful. Kurtz’s monologue is as follows:

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I’ve seen horrors, horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face. And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces, seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile, a pile of little arms. And I remember, I, I, I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized, like I was shot, like I was shot with a diamond, a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God, the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres, these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love, but they had the strength, the strength, to do that. If I  had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment, without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.23

Kurtz has seen horrors, and because of the horrors he has seen he claims his actions are above and beyond judgement. Like Colonel Kurtz, humanitarians are generally reluctant to be judged, though they systematically judge and assess, which points to both posture and asymmetric relations between humanitarians and aid recipients. Horror –​says Kurtz –​has a face. You must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. Humanitarians, like soldiers, know how to make a friend of horror and of moral terror just as they believe they know how to help and how to save lives. Finally, Kurtz mentions his participation in a mission to vaccinate children, whose consequences were completely unintended and from which he drew lessons, the lessons of a soldier. Humanitarians, like soldiers, are moral –​ as Kurtz puts it  –​and at the same time they are able to utilise their primordial instincts, their strength and their knowledge/​certainty to save the needy. Moreover, they must be persuaded to possess such inner, primordial qualities naturally. If, on the one hand, this mise en parallèle shows that Colonel Kurtz and real humanitarians belong to different moral universes, on the other hand it assumes that humanitarians are equipped with a different, special moral code. This seems to me to be an inadequate starting point. Finally, I would like to argue that alongside certainty, humanitarians were (and still are) able to suffer with the aid recipients (cum-​patire). Compassion, no matter

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how selective, biased or discriminating it may be, is co-​substantial to certainty in shaping humanitarians’ ingrained arrogance. In his On the Basis of Morality (1840), Arthur Schopenhauer argues that there are only three fundamental incentives that motivate human actions:  (a) Egoism:  the desire for one’s own well-​being; (b)  Malice:  the desire for another’s misfortune (he/​she does not discuss malice toward one’s own self); and (c) Compassion (Mitleid): the desire for another’s well-​ being. The ultimate incentive for doing something, or leaving it undone, is precisely and exclusively centred in the happiness and misery of someone else who, writes Schopenhauer, plays a passive role: that is to say, when the person on the active side, by what he does, or omits to do, has absolutely no other objective than to benefit the recipient of help. It is this aim alone that gives to what is done, or left undone, the stamp of moral worth. Just as arrogance is a term that must be handled with care and has different meanings for different people, the same rule applies to compassion. The latter has, for instance, been heavily criticised by philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who claimed that the essence of compassion is nothing other than the narcissistic desires of an exploitative bourgeoisie to feel good about itself.24 This view might apply to the compassion of some humanitarians. There are at least three things worth noting in Schopenhauer’s definition of the moral worth of compassion. It is an active–​passive situation: where the recipient is passive and has no agency. Compassion, writes Didier Fassin, is a moral relationship with no possible reciprocity; and, adds Luke Bretherton, loving concern often produces modes of domination, a paradox of care and a central dilemma of humanitarianism.25 The disinterested nature of the action entails a moral worth, which is above and beyond discussion; it is genuine loving-​kindness, which intertwines with certainty. Compassion, considered as something that will be offered or not from the one to the other on the basis of socially constructed premises, entails seeing it as, potentially, a technique of power relations in organisations. Compassion, involving someone being perceived as in need by someone in a position to provide or withhold help, will always be contextually specific, yet has general parameters of power relations. Choice is always present. The compassion givers exercise choice because they can act in a way that they construe as compassionate or not, and the subject of that act of compassion also makes a choice in terms of how it is received. They can choose to recognise that action positively as compassionate, or they might choose to see it as negative, perhaps because they deem it patronising.26 The individual chapters of this volume examine various facets, issues and actors contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the history of the Red Cross Movement that encompasses the ICRC, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) and national societies. This preliminary reflection of mine might be connected to the Red Cross Movement, its history, politics and principles:  its arrogance, certainty and compassion. The scale and longevity of the Red Cross make it a different, unique creature in the

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humanitarian landscape and go beyond it as well. The Red Cross presence in different epochs, in different spaces  –​national and global, colonial and postcolonial  –​offers a conspicuous number of research angles and perspectives. The symbolic power of the Red Cross emblems, recognised all over the world, contributes to the elevation of the Red Cross Movement above all other humanitarian organisations –​an elevation that is only heightened by the existence of 192 national Red Cross societies. The blazon and prestige of the Red Cross may have motivated its professional and volunteer agents to take on further heavier responsibilities (arrogance) and may have forced them to conceal doubts on their ability to respect the seven principles. For over a century, with the possible exception of Geneva and of Switzerland, the Red Cross has been seen, understood and experienced in a local or national context, and as a national institution in which citizens help out fellow citizens. In many countries all over the world national societies have been militarised whenever their nation was at war. National Red Cross societies have survived thanks to the work of innumerable volunteers. The fact that so many national societies exist and, in most cases, thrive, might also invite historians and scholars to reflect on the alleged existence of a global civil society. The historical analysis of the nature of humanitarianism at the service of a national cause might unveil more granular specific motivations of stakeholders operating under specific ideological constraints. Alternatively, it might shine a light on an identical (or analogous) kind of certainty and arrogance of transnational overseas work of ICRC delegates. As to the latter, their work seems to be wrapped within a higher moral veil. In many respects the ICRC cultivates secularised rites, rituals and liturgies of salvation and redemption, including the symbolism of the cross and an ultra-​modern museum that might be imagined as the equivalent of a temple.27 The Red Cross’s seven principles and their moral and juridical values are the equivalent of the Book. The latter is explained by treaties such as the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols. The ICRC acts as guardian of International Humanitarian Law and of a Movement. As in any church there were and still are orthodox believers and heretics, as the birth of Médecins sans Frontières shows; there were and there will always be moments of distance and closeness among siblings (i.e. the ICRC and IFRC). The reflections I have sketched out have worked to build a hypothesis concerning continuities and patterns of humanitarians’ motivations. Certainty and compassion, stripped of values; faith-​based and secular; and open to the possibility of being selective, biased and even discriminatory; might suggest some permanent features of humanitarians’ motivations, which in turn might contribute to our understanding of humanitarian pensiero ed azione. The child learns by believing the adult. Doubt comes after belief. (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §160)

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Notes 1 I am working on a new monograph tentatively entitled Night on Earth  –​Humanitarian Organizations’ Relief and Rehabilitation Programs on Behalf of Civilian Populations, 1918–​ 1939 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); and am author of Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–​1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), and, with H. Fehrenbach, ‘A Horrific Photo of a Drowned Child:  Humanitarian Photography and NGO Media Strategies in Historical Perspective’, International Review of the Red Cross, 97:900 (2015), 1121–​55. 2 21 Grams is a 2003 film directed by Alejandro Ganzáles Iñárritu. 21 Grams (Focus Features, 2003)  refers to a 1901 study performed and published by Duncan MacDougall who was persuaded and wished to demonstrate that souls exist and have weight, and attempted to measure the mass lost by a human being when the soul departs the body. 3 I refer to Giuseppe Mazzini’s Republican ideal and a journal he founded in London in 1858. 4 Here is a non-​exhaustive, non-​representative, alphabetically ordered list signalling different themes and approaches; levels and units of analyses, of spaces and times; examined by a number of scholars (which does not include the authors of this volume):  A. Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2005); G. Bass, Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York: Alfred A.  Knopf, 2008); E. Baughan, ‘ “Every Citizen of Empire Implored to Save the Children!” Empire, Internationalism and the Save the Children Fund in Interwar Britain’, Historical Research, 86: 123 (2013), 116–​37; E. Davey, Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Intellectual Origins of Humanitarianism, 1954–​1988 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2015); A. Ribi Forclaz, Humanitarian Imperialism: The Politics of Anti-​Slavery Activism 1880–​1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); R. Gill, Calculating Compassion: Humanity and Relief in War, Britain 1870–​1914 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2013); J. Hutchinson, Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996); G. Lachenal and B. Taithe, ‘Une généalogie missionnaire et coloniale de l’humanitaire:  Le cas Aujoulat au Cameroun, 1935–​1973’, Le mouvement social, 227 (2009), 45–​63; A. Lester and F. Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-​Century British Empire (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2014); J. Reinisch, ‘Internationalism in Relief: The Birth (and Death) of UNRRA’, Past & Present, 210, supp. 6 (2011), 258–​89; P. Ryfman, Une histoire de l’humanitaire (Paris: La Découverte, 2008); S. Salvatici, ‘ “Help the People to Save Themselves”:  UNRRA Relief Workers and European Displaced Persons’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 25 (2012), 1–​24; B. Taithe, ‘Reinventing French Universalism: Religion, Humanitarianism and the French doctors’, Modern and Contemporary France, 12:2 (2004), 147–​58; K. Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 5 M. Hilton, E. Baughan, E. Davey, B. Everill, K. O’Sullivan and T. Sasson, ‘History and Humanitarianism: A Conversation’, Past & Present, 241:1 (2018), e1–​e38. 6 M. Barnett, Empire of Humanity:  A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2011). 7 M. Barnett, ‘International Paternalism and Humanitarian Governance’, Global Constitutionalism, 1:3 (2012), 485–​521 (485–​6). See also sociologist Monica Krause’s review of that monograph in The Times Higher Education (3 September 2015). 8 D. Fassin, Humanitarian Reason:  A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2012).

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9 S. Reid-​Henry, ‘Humanitarianism as Liberal Diagnostic:  The Geography of Humanitarian Reason and the Political Rationalities of the Liberal Will-​to-​Care’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39:3 (2013), 418–​31. 10 L. Malkki, The Need to Help:  The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 11 M. Tanielan, The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid, and World War I in the Middle East (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2017). 12 G. Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Turin: Einaudi, Nuova Serie, 2005), translated as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); G. Agamben, Lo stato d’eccezione (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), translated as States of Exception (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015). 13 Merriam-​ Webster Learner’s Dictionary, www.learnersdictionary.com/​definition/​arrogance (accessed 11 February 2018). 14 P. Levi, I sommersi e i salvati (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), translated as The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988). 15 See B. Simms and D. J.  B. Trim (eds), Humanitarian Intervention:  A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), passim. 16 B. Bowden, ‘The Ideal of Civilisation: Its Origins and Socio-​Political Character’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 7:1 (2004), 25–​50. 17 J. Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise; or, The Morality of Evil (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 18. 18 G. Dworkin, ‘Paternalism’, Monist, 56 (1972), 64–​84. 19 M. Barnett, ‘Humanitarian Governance’, Annual Review of Political Science, 16 (2013), 379–​98. 20 Barnett, ‘International Paternalism’, 504–​6. 21 I. Feldman, ‘Looking for Humanitarian Purpose:  Endurance and the Value of Lives in a Palestinian Refugee Camp’, Public Culture, 27:3 (2012), 427–​49. Interesting anthropological literature on humanitarianism focuses on inherent dilemmas as part of this work. Feldman investigates what happens when the purpose of saving lives, one of the few certainties of humanitarianism, is called into question. 22 L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969). In a court of law, for example, ‘I am certain’ could replace ‘I know’ in every piece of testimony. We might even imagine its being forbidden to say ‘I know’ there. 23 Apocalypse Now, film, dir. F. F. Coppola (United, 1979). 24 N. Sznaider, ‘The Sociology of Compassion:  A Study in the Sociology of Morals’, Cultural Values, 2:1 (1998), 117–​39. 25 Fassin, Humanitarian Reason, p.  3. L. Bretherton, ‘Poverty, Politics, and Faithful Witness in the Age of Humanitarianism’, A Journal of Bible and Theology, 69:4 (2015), 447–​59 (448): ‘the paradox of care is that we tend merely to tolerate or leave alone those for whom we do not care or have compassion, even if what they are doing is harmful or goes against our values. However, when we see someone for whom we care or feel responsible doing something wrong or harmful or suffering in some way, we feel compelled to help, usually at the expense of that person’s agency. Even if what we do to help is not intentionally paternalistic or colonial in orientation, our interventions are more often than not an attempt to govern the lives of others. While the impulse to rule is often a loving one born out of humanitarian concern for another’s welfare, that impulse is distorted by the belief that we think we know better how those in need should live, and we end up removing their agency in order that they might conform to our

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notions of what is good and right and proper. Another way to put this is that we exercise paideia over them, and this often involves strict forms of discipline –​albeit “pastoral” in nature –​ in order that they might live well. Loving concern thus often produces modes of domination. This paradox of care represents a central dilemma in all means of welfare provision that attempt to address poverty and inequality, whether through local, national, or international initiatives.’ 26 A. V. Simpson, S. R. Clegg and D. Freeder, ‘Compassion, Power and Organization’, Journal of Political Power, 6:3 (2013), 385–​404 (p. 386). 27 J. Y. Pinder, ‘A Theatrical Critique of Humanitarian Civility in the ICRC Museum’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 23:4 (2018), 483–​98.

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Part I

The Movement’s foundational ‘myths’

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The Americans lead the way?: The United States Sanitary Commission and the development of the Red Cross Movement, 1861–​71 James Crossland

In the spring of 1863, Henri Dunant posited a suggestion to remedy future suffering in war: ‘would it not be possible, in time of peace and quiet, to form relief societies for the purpose of having care given to the wounded in wartime by zealous, devoted and thoroughly qualified volunteers?’. In so doing he asked his readers –​civilians who might never have seen a battlefield –​to volunteer, as he had at Solferino, to bring succour to the world’s soldiers.1 Two conferences followed, in October 1863 and August 1864, from which was produced the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded in Armies in the Field. The Red Cross Movement grew from that convention, with national societies of volunteers bearing the Red Cross armband being established across Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Persia and Asia in the decades that followed, each with its own interpretation of Dunant’s idea.2 Potent as the growth of Red Cross Movement was, there was one major power that refused to follow the vision laid out by Dunant  –​the United States. Rather than joining the list of nations that were steadily signing up to the Red Cross project, Washington held aloof, waiting until 1881 to ratify the Geneva Convention and authorise the foundation of an American Red Cross (ARC). Moreover, once constituted, this Society bore little resemblance to the associations of Red Cross-​ wearing military-​medical auxiliaries that were fast becoming fixtures in most armies on the other side of the Atlantic.3 Instead, the ARC of the late nineteenth century was separate from both the Government and the army, its volunteers –​led by ‘America’s Nightingale’, Clara Barton –​engaged in civic philanthropic projects, national disaster response and international famine relief.4 The belated development of a peacetime-​focused Red Cross society in the United States was particularly peculiar given that, a full year before Dunant’s A Memory of Solferino was published, Abraham Lincoln’s armies were benefiting from the labours of a volunteer humanitarian organisation that bore more than one similarity to the Red Cross societies that would later develop out of Dunant’s idea. This organisation, the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC), was founded in 1861 with the aim of supporting

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the Union in its war against the Confederacy. It did this by coordinating the efforts of the north’s many philanthropic groups into a single, united humanitarian force that provided medical advice, and organised the sourcing and delivery of food and medicines to the army’s poorly supplied and under-​staffed Medical Bureau.5 The USSC did not last in an operational sense beyond the end of the American Civil War in 1865, and its legacy in the United States was a fallow one. Its achievements and innovations in the fields of military medicine and wartime humanitarianism were mostly forgotten by a nation that was more concerned with either championing the sacrifice of its soldiery, or moving on into the era of national Reconstruction.6 In Europe, however, the USSC’s legacy was more complex. Its promoters and former members haunted the meeting halls, conference chambers and battlefields where the Red Cross idea was nurtured during the late 1860s. This chapter will, therefore, explore the extent and impact of American influence on the burgeoning Red Cross Movement. There will also be an emphasis on the part played by the USSC in the development of the Red Cross concept in Geneva and, more broadly, on the evolution of Europe’s Red Cross societies into what a contemporary observer described as a group of ‘official organizations for the purposes of war’.7 Before addressing the external influence of the USSC on this process of ‘militarisation’ within the Red Cross, however, an explanation of how this war-​focused mentality shaped the Movement during its formative years must first be provided. Red Cross societies: military-​medical auxiliaries or relief organisations? As various other chapters in this volume demonstrate, Dunant’s vision was interpreted in ways many and varied.8 The size, capabilities and character of Red Cross societies were often determined by the degree of support offered to them by their governments, the attitude of their nation’s military towards civilians operating in warzones, and the ability of the volunteers to source donations of money and medical supplies. Up until the reforms prompted by its disastrous performance in the Franco-​Prussian war of 1870–​1, France’s Red Cross served more as a club for Parisian elites than as a voluntary military-​medical service. Russia’s Red Cross Society was fragmented and built around the regional chapters of the Sisters of Mercy. The Spanish Red Cross was controlled by army surgeons who sought to fuse Catholic samaritanism with military-​medical science, whilst Britain’s Red Cross Society was beset by squabbling amongst its leadership over the organisation’s purpose and direction.9 Amongst these various manifestations of Dunant’s idea, the German Red Cross (GRC) stood out, providing in its structure, administration and raison d’être a template for Red Cross organisation that many other societies sought to emulate. Founded in 1864 and developed by army surgeons connected with King Wilhelm of Prussia’s finely tuned military machine during his kingdom’s wars against Denmark (1864), Austria (1866) and France (1870–​1), the GRC was praised by neutral war

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observers, volunteers from other humanitarian societies and even the Red Cross critic Florence Nightingale. To her mind, the GRC was highly ‘organized in controlling sickness and attending to wounded’, and a ‘wonderfully good’ example of how civilians could do their humanitarian bit in times of war.10 What appealed to those who praised the GRC was the professionalism and purpose that was infused into its work. The GRC’s first guiding principle was that its volunteers had to be subordinate to military authorities, and in no way operate independently of direction on the battlefield. This rule left little room for the purist samaritans of the Red Cross movement, who wished to wander onto fields of carnage with nothing more than a roll of bandages and a willingness to do good. The second GRC principle was that it would be a truly national organisation, capable of mass mobilisation. The third, related principle was that the GRC would always be active, even in peacetime, recruiting the finest surgeons to train volunteers, who would also be engaged constantly in stockpiling donations of food, medicines and other supplies in anticipation of war. The fourth key principle of the GRC was that despite bearing the Red Cross flag and, in theory, carrying the universalist principles of brotherhood and humanity embedded into it by Dunant’s words, the Society’s primary purpose was to assist the German army in its various conquests. The Germans were under no illusions: the purpose of the Red Cross was to keep soldiers fighting-​fit in order to facilitate the waging of war.11 This interpretation of the Red Cross idea was popular across Europe with army surgeons, generals and nationalist humanitarians, which led to the GRC’s vision of a militarised Red Cross becoming much desired by many states in the years after Prussia’s 1871 triumph over France.12 Between then and the turn of the century, the Red Cross Societies of France, Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, the Ottoman Empire and Russia adopted a militarised form of Red Cross humanitarianism that aped the practices and principles of the GRC. The militarisation of the Red Cross via the GRC’s influence has been seen by historians as decisive in the Movement’s history, with the Franco-​Prussian, Russo-​Japanese and First World wars serving as the key milestones on the Red Cross’s transformative road from the samaritans of Solferino to the military-​medical auxiliaries of the twentieth century.13 Strong as this narrative of a German-​led evolution is, there is an anomaly in the Eurocentric tale. This is because the USSC had already mastered this form of militarised voluntary humanitarian action, not only before the GRC did, but before Dunant and the Red Cross founders had formed the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Furthermore, during the two years in which the Red Cross Movement was engendered in Geneva, knowledge of the USSC was being disseminated to the ICRC, as well as to important Red Cross affiliates in Prussia. The question raised by these transatlantic connections is what influence did the otherwise aloof Americans have on the development of both the ideas and the practices of the Red Cross?

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The USSC and the Red Cross: ideas, 1861–​5 The USSC was never supposed to be a distributor of medical aid for soldiers, or a home for the ‘imperturbable, unwearying, unfaltering’ battlefield angels that Dunant envisioned as spearheads of his movement.14 The initial conception of the USSC was more sanguine. It was to be a civilian-​run sanitary and medical advice bureau, which would, as its founder and president, Henry Whitney Bellows, put it, ‘acquaint itself with the actual condition of the troops’ in the Union, in order to provide the Army Medical Bureau with a snapshot of the fighting fitness of Lincoln’s men. Bellows imagined its work as being conducted away from the battlefield. Instead, USSC volunteers would operate within the halls of power in Washington, the quartermasters’ office of the army and the hospitals that lay far behind the frontlines. There, they would promote the merits of good hygiene in barracks; gather statistics on effective forms of treatment, rates of infection and lice infestation; and compile reports on various miscellaneous military-​medical matters. The limited labours of Bellows’s volunteers would be, as he put it, ‘divided into two parts: I inquiry, II advice’.15 It was a humble and bland vision of humanitarian action when contrasted with the kind of battlefield sacrifice that drove so many of Europe’s Red Cross volunteers.16 The USSC’s advisory mandate was due to the backgrounds of its founders, as well as the context in which they forged their organisation –​a context that differed greatly from that which was contemporaneously incubating the Red Cross idea. Dunant was seeking to replicate his own palpable experience of battlefield succour on an international scale. Many of the surgeons who joined the Red Cross sought to use the freedom of movement seemingly granted to them by the Geneva Convention to wander warzones and hone their medical skills on any and all wounded and sick they encountered. Whether as a purist samaritan or as a student of medicine, the Red Cross offered a way for the adventurous civilian to indulge, explore and experience things that only a battlefield could provide.17 Bellows –​a reformist preacher from New York who was deeply involved in civic charity work –​saw the USSC’s mission differently, desiring the infusion of scientific-​based, medically minded wisdom into the Union’s war effort. Bellows’s emphasis was on developing systems and rules for the delivery of humanitarian assistance, rather than a culture of unfettered blood-​ and-​guts medical labour. He was joined by two others:  Elisha Harris, a doctor from Vermont whose expertise lay in hospital cleanliness and quarantine logistics, and Frederick Law Olmsted, an architect whose claim to fame prior to joining the USSC was that he had designed New York’s Central Park. Although there were some doctors within the USSC’s leadership, most of its members had backgrounds similar to Olmsted’s –​conservative East Coast intellectuals, who saw their self-​appointed task as being to advise army commanders about the state of their troops, and in so doing bring some measure of professionalism and efficiency to the Union’s military-​ medical regime.18 A more sanitised version of wartime humanitarianism one could seldom hope to find.

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Both Dunant and the USSC did, at least, share in the fact that their efforts were launched in response to parlous military-​medical planning. For Dunant, however, the effect of this was localised, confined to the vineyards and valleys around Solferino, where the indifference and ineptitude of Austrian, French and Sardinian medics had forced the Swiss into action.19 The USSC faced similar problems, albeit on a scale that dwarfed the acute burdens of conflict shouldered by Dunant. Caught unprepared by the outbreak of war with the seceding states of the Confederacy in the spring of 1861, the Union Army’s Medical Bureau had only 30 full-​trained surgeons and 83 assistant surgeons to cater for the near 100,000 soldiers that were hastily recruited during the war’s first months. Its budget  –​adjusted abruptly in May from the peacetime sum of $90,000 to the still woefully insufficient figure of $241,000 –​was soon consumed by bulk purchases of foodstuffs, bandages, blankets, stretchers, surgical equipment, medicines and other basics that the quartermasters’ office lacked.20 The lack of planning for the military-​medical demands of a protracted war, rather than the immediate issue of men dying on a single battlefield, created the USSC. As such, there was always a distance between the visceral misery that acted as handmaiden for the Red Cross, and the more prosaic problems of long-​term logistical planning and resource management that confronted Bellows. Another difference was that, in contrast to Dunant’s rhetoric of ‘tutti fratelli’, the USSC was an unambiguous component of the Union’s war machine. There was little mention by Bellows, Harris or anyone else of assisting the even more woefully ill-​ prepared medical services of the Confederacy. This alignment with Lincoln’s administration was reflected in the fact that shortly after its official founding on 13 June 1861, the USSC was granted a headquarters in a Government building in Washington, DC, and that amongst the professionals and pastors in its leadership were two active army officers. The USSC’s leadership openly despaired, moreover, not for the inhumanity of the conflict, but for the ‘humiliation of the defeat and the terrible humiliation of the mad flight’ of Lincoln’s armies. They expressed exasperation during the war’s disastrous opening months at how ‘we are hurrying more thousands of green men, badly prepared, totally undisciplined’ into an army that ‘has been ruined by bad management, inefficiency’. By the USSC’s reckoning, this culture of confusion had left the Union’s troops so shambolic that they were ‘in no condition to cope with [General] Lee’s barefooted, ragged, lousy, ruffians’. The USSC’s task was clear: to marshal the ‘intelligence, humanity and patriotism of the American people acting through its agency with the design of promoting the health, comfort and efficiency of the vast armies called into the field to subdue the Rebellion’.21 Owing to its more narrow and strategic mandate, the USSC was initially a very different animal from the Red Cross. In a short amount of time, however, the exigencies of war forced the USSC into a form of humanitarian mission creep, which transformed it from a statistics-​gathering advice bureau into a prototype for the kind of militarised Red Cross societies that would develop in Europe in the years after the American Civil War. A key aspect of this transformation was the founding

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of the Field Relief Corps (FRC) in 1862, an organ of the USSC that took its agents away from the distant advisory role they had initially assumed and placed them into the field. The civilians who volunteered for the FRC –​village doctors, soldier’s wives, pharmacists, churchmen, medical students, nutritionists, journalists –​were embedded, irrespective of their competencies, into army battalions where they were to be constantly ‘animated with an anxious spirit to aid the medical officers of the army as far as may be in their power’.22 The FRC embodied Dunant’s later call for the movement of civilians into a military space; however, there was a measure of discipline and military oversight to the FRC’s deployment that ran counter to Solferino’s narrative of humanitarianism unleashed. All FRC units adopted a standard loadout:  two supply wagons containing food, water, medicine, cooking and camping equipment, blankets and stretchers; two-​to-​six horses; and two USSC sanitary inspectors, one usually having a recognised medical qualification, as leaders of the staff attached to each unit. Most of the staff, moreover, were paid. The Army of the Potomac’s FRC deployment cost $750 to maintain in the field each month, the money almost exclusively being spent on the wages of the eighteen men employed by the USSC. The superintendent of the corps alone volunteered his services, with the others generally being paid $45 per month, the only exceptions being a surgeon, who was paid $60, and the ‘three coloured men’ who were temporarily employed as carters, and who had to divide a monthly wage of $50 between them. With the FRC in place by 1863 and the demands on the Army Medical Bureau growing exponentially in response to the massive battles of the war’s middle years, the USSC branched out further by forming yet another military-​medical service, the Auxiliary Relief Corps. Staffed once again by paid and often medically trained recruits, the corps’s purpose was to assist in the administration of battlefield medical treatment and evacuation of the wounded. In the form of the Field and Auxiliary Relief Corps, therefore, the USSC had developed two versions of what would later be known as Red Cross ambulances a full year before the Geneva Convention was drafted.23 It was not only in the harnessing of civilians for military-​medical purposes that the Americans were ahead of the Europeans. The USSC had conceived of the idea of using a distinctive badge to indicate its presence in warzones in late 1863 –​five months before Louis Appia and Charles van der Velde bore the first Red Cross badges during the Schleswig-​Holstein war. The USSC’s symbol of an angel hovering protectively over wounded soldiers was drawn up, moreover, a full year before the Geneva Convention’s decree that ‘a distinctive and uniform flag shall be adopted for hospitals, ambulances and evacuation parties’ had been inked. By that time, USSC volunteers were already wearing angel armbands, their ambulances were flying angel flags, and their supply depots and hospital steamships were draped in banners emblazoned with angel crests and USSC lettering. Once deployed, moreover, the angel symbol fell under the agreement made in June 1862 between Union and Confederate commanders to respect the neutrality of medical staff on both

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sides, provided that they be clearly identified as non-​combatants.24 Consequently, by the time the ICRC convened its fateful conference in Geneva in August 1864, the USSC was operating volunteer ambulance detachments that, in theory if not always in practice, were assured of neutrality and inviolability by means of a distinctive symbol. With regard to organisational structure and visions of what it could achieve as a humanitarian actor, the USSC was once again ahead of the ICRC. In the war’s middle years, the USSC’s leadership became highly territorial, absorbing smaller charitable organisations across the Union and bringing them under the USSC umbrella. As part of this ‘corporate’ model of expansion, the USSC was also much concerned with self-​promotion, accountability and recruitment drives. In 1863, it began issuing a Sanitary Commission Bulletin that, not unlike the Bulletin international des sociétés de secours aux militaires blessés that was established six years later, was used to enlighten readers as to the benefits of the USSC’s work, encourage donations and offer ripostes to critics. The Bulletin was just one medium through which the USSC pursued an increasingly ambitious agenda, the end goal of which was to spearhead a national project that could both preserve the Union during the war, and engender a healthier, more charitable and intellectually stimulated United States once the peace had been won.25 This campaign required the USSC to brand itself as a platform for the progressive and humanitarian-​minded. In this campaign, the USSC was successful. There are folders of letters in its archives from not only would-​be humanitarians eager to serve with the Field and Auxiliary Relief Corps, but also academics, doctors, philosophers, churchmen, industrialists, inventors, and self-​ proclaimed nutritionists and homoeopaths. All of these suggested that the USSC adopt their ideas for treating wounds; freezing and transporting foodstuffs; quarantining cities; designing sewers and hospitals; and manufacturing tents, stretchers, splints and ambulance carts.26 Much like the Red Cross societies of Europe –​which would convene a series of conferences from 1867 onwards in which innovations in science, industry and medicine were showcased as contributing to the Red Cross cause –​the USSC recognised that a humanitarian organisation had to be welcoming of new technologies and forever expanding its purview. As with much else, the need to ‘raise the science that consoles, repairs and heals up to the science that destroys’ was acknowledged as imperative by the ICRC and the leaders of Europe’s national Red Cross societies, albeit two years after the USSC had completed its work along the same lines.27 If we consider the types of societies that developed in Europe there are, ostensibly, grounds for believing that the USSC provided a font of ideas for the Red Cross Movement. Indeed, to the minds of some, the USSC did no less than provide the impetus for the creation of the Red Cross itself. Albert Love has stated that ‘the account given at the Geneva Convention of 1864 of the practical application of these (the USSC’s) principles during a great war had material influence upon the conclusions of the Convention’. The author of the USSC’s history, William

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Quentin-​Maxwell, has similarly argued that ‘one would like to think of the United States Sanitary Commission as mid-​wife to the Red Cross’. To his mind, the USSC’s Europe-​wide dissemination of pamphlets containing examples of effective wartime relief was essential to the success of the Red Cross. Without this crucial preparing of the ground, so Quentin-​Maxwell argues, the notion of civilians being useful as agents of relief in war would never have been countenanced by Europe’s generals, and ‘Dunant’s efforts might have been fruitless.’28 It does seem strange that within a year of the USSC’s founding Dunant emerged with Solferino in hand, and the suggestion for volunteer ambulances in mind. The similarities between Dunant’s volunteer ambulances and the FRC units are rather striking. The problem, however, is that there is no evidence of Dunant knowing about the USSC prior to the first Geneva Conference of October 1863. This is probably because the USSC did not begin disseminating information on its practices in Europe until late 1863, when its leadership decided that the future of the organisation lay in establishing other sanitary commissions outside the United States.29 To this end, Bellows despatched two propagandists across the Atlantic –​Charles Bowles and Edmund Crisp Fisher –​who were tasked with setting up USSC outposts in Paris and London, respectively. It is predominantly from the reports left by these two men that Quentin-​Maxwell and Love drew their conclusions that the USSC had helped give birth to the Red Cross. A key document in this narrative is the report that Bowles filed on his attendance at the 1864 Geneva Conference. Despite holding the status of an observer only  –​owing to Lincoln’s Government’s general lack of interest in Dunant’s project –​Bowles claimed to the USSC leadership that he had guided the discussions and convinced a number of attendees to adopt the USSC as a template for setting up their Red Cross societies. His counterpart in London, Edmund Crisp Fisher, was also certain that it was ‘unreasonable to suppose that any citizen of the United States can be ignorant of the achievements of this blessed volunteer association, which the nations of Europe are now seeking to emulate’. He also believed that his promotion of the idea that ‘the Sanitary Commission of the United States may be said to have inaugurated a new era in the history of war’ had helped persuade Whitehall to engage in the Geneva project.30 In addition to Fisher and Bowles’s accounts of their influence in Europe, the man who accompanied the latter to the Geneva Conference, the United States minister in Berne, Charles Fogg, believed that ‘the great practical solving by our countrymen and countrywomen of nearly all the problems likely to be considered by this congress’ had already been achieved by the USSC.31 The fact that there were exchanges of correspondence among Bowles, Bellows, and the ICRC in the period between the convening of the first Geneva Conference in October 1863 and the second conference of August 1864 also demonstrate that there were avenues through which the practices and ethos of the USSC were shared with Geneva during the crucial months in which the lament of Solferino was turned into the ten articles of the Geneva Convention.32

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There are problems with this impression of American influence on the formative stages of the Red Cross project. Fisher’s claim to have persuaded British minds of the usefulness of both the USSC and the Red Cross is belied by the fact that British representatives at the Geneva Conferences were amongst the least interested, holding as they did to the view that Nightingale’s post-​Crimean war reforms of military medicine had made the idea of a British Red Cross society superfluous.33 The reality of a lack of British interest is backed, moreover, by the USSC’s own Bulletin, which conceded in early 1865 that Fisher’s propaganda efforts has stimulated little, if any interest in the USSC –​or any variant of voluntary humanitarianism –​in Britain. The same article also undermined Bowles’s efforts to sway French minds through the dissemination of USSC reports and pamphlets to the clubs and philanthropic societies of Paris.34 Moreover, as John Hutchinson has demonstrated, for all his pretensions to the contrary, Bowles was a nonentity at the conference. Far from leading proceedings, the naive Bowles misinterpreted the ICRC’s attempts to court American interest in the convention by offering praise to the USSC, as an acknowledgement of the latter’s being a template for Europeans to follow. The minutes reveal, moreover, that Bowles’s efforts to promote the American way of humanitarian action resulted, at best, in a polite acknowledgement of the USSC’s capacity to share in the Red Cross mission.35 This goal of a shared transatlantic mission was, however, a tall order for both the USSC and the ICRC. Bellows was intensely interested in Dunant’s idea, and sought him out as a correspondent in the spring of 1864, through which the American tried to ‘ascertain the character and objects of this project in Europe and any connections it might have actual and potential, to the work of the USSC’. Bowles also maintained a correspondence with Dunant, although he sometimes felt that the Swiss was utopian in his visions. As Bowles saw it, in contrast to the focused USSC and its selfless dedication to the Union, Dunant’s chief desire was ‘to have his name enrolled among the immortals’ for his heroic humanitarian efforts.36 Bowles’s demarcation between the USSC’s vision of wartime humanitarianism and that of the ICRC became canon to the former after the Civil War had ended and it published its official history, within the pages of which only one reference was made to Dunant’s enterprise: If the record of the Commission possess any but a local and temporary value, it is because it shows how much a Free People can do for its Armies in Lessons taught the Field, and even during the actual shock of battle without impairing the rightful and necessary supremacy of discipline. No Army had ever before received such aid on a large scale and during a series of great campaigns. The military representatives of the Powers of Europe in ‘International Congress’ assembled, at Geneva, in 1863, discussed the feasibility of popular unofficial relief to Armies in active service, and generally condemned the project as not only Utopian but mischievous and disorganizing.37

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Far from guiding the Red Cross, it seems clear from this statement that by the time its wartime work had concluded in 1865, the USSC saw itself as operating in a different orbit from the well-​meaning men of Geneva. The ICRC, for its part, kept a similar distance from the USSC. Initially, the Red Cross founders were mostly indifferent to the Americans, with interest manifesting only via Dunant’s correspondence with Bellows and Bowles, and his fellow ICRC founder Théodore Maunoir offering praise for the USSC’s ability to engender mass participation in a humanitarian enterprise. As to the actual exchange of ideas between the ICRC and the USSC from the period of October 1863 through until August 1864, the issue of the USSC was barely remarked on by anyone other than Maunoir.38 It was only after Washington continued showing no interest in signing up to the Convention in the weeks following the second conference that Dunant increased his volume of correspondence with the USSC. This correspondence, however, reveals that Dunant was little interested in finding out about the USSC’s work. Rather, what concerned him was that the USSC continue to function after the Civil War –​and in so doing morph into an American Red Cross society. Tied to this was Dunant’s insistence to Bellows that the latter keep up the pressure on Washington, until such time as the United States agreed to join the Red Cross project, a campaign that was also taken up by Dunant’s co-​founder Gustave Moynier, particularly after Dunant was forced out of the ICRC in 1867.39 Bellows responded by keeping the USSC going in the years after the Civil War via a new body, the American Association for the Relief of the Misery of Battlefields. Testament to the importance of the spark of war in firing the USSC’s imaginations, however, the American Association floundered in the postbellum United States. With war far from the minds of charitable Americans, whose concerns now lay more with rebuilding their shattered nation, the American Association struggled for donations, members and purpose.40 As Bellows opined to Dunant in 1869, ‘the distance of the United States from the scenes of European battlefields’ made it ‘very difficult for our people to feel the interest that they should in the admirable efforts of the Comité Internationale’.41 To the American people’s lack of interest was added the continual refusal of the United States Government to sign and ratify the Geneva Convention  –​the first crucial step before Bellows could transform his struggling American Association into a fully fledged Red Cross society. In the end, Bellows was forced by old age and exhaustion to retreat from this goal and, in the mid-​1870s, he gradually dissolved the American Association, abandoning any hopes he had to become the founder of the Red Cross in the United States. That task was left instead to the Civil War volunteer nurse Clara Barton, whom Moynier and Appia spent much of the 1870s encouraging to continue the fight to have the Convention ratified by Washington.42 With regard to the question of American influence on the Red Cross idea, therefore, it is clear that the USSC’s propagandists barely raised the eyebrows of the ICRC’s founders, Bowles’s attempts to steer discussions in Geneva were minimal to non-​existent, and Dunant and Moynier  –​far from looking to

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Bellows for guidance –​engaged with him only in the name of internationalising the Red Cross idea that they had engendered.

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The USSC and the Red Cross: practices, 1864–​71 The USSC did not influence the ICRC’s ideas. However, owing to the transatlantic networks of humanitarians and army surgeons that had been developing since the 1850s, the USSC’s practices were known to other members of the Red Cross family.43 Thomas Evans  –​a court advisor to both Napoleon III and King Wilhelm I  who had observed the USSC in action in 1862 –​enthusiastically suggested the idea of Field and Auxiliary Relief units to the GRC during the mid-​1860s. Accordingly, in Prussia the idea of ‘sanitary detachments’ –​civilian-​manned but military controlled ambulances –​was developed along lines very similar to those that had guided the development of the Field and Auxiliary units of the American Civil War. In both cases the importance of military oversight was paramount, and the nexus between civilian mobilisation and wartime requirements was emphasised. Although Evans admitted that Dunant’s suggestion of volunteer ambulances was the catalyst for his thoughts on ‘sanitary detachments’, his promotion of the USSC’s practical demonstration of the idea at the Prussian court was decisive. This is demonstrated by the fact that, following his pitch for ‘sanitary detachments’, Evans also convinced the GRC to purchase blueprints of the same stretcher-​bearing railcar that the USSC had developed.44 Evans’s efforts with the Germans were also extended to the French, with the assistance of a fellow American and former USSC volunteer Edward A. Crane, who had been a ‘sanitary inspector’ for the organisation in New Orleans. Years later, he was in Paris when the Franco-​Prussian war broke out, to which he responded by volunteering to serve in a French ambulance unit. It was not simply a devotion to healing that motivated him. Like Evans, Crane was committed to facilitating, as he put it, knowledge transfer among ‘the Sanitary Association of the United States, the Sociètè Internationale, the Sociètè de Secours aux Blessés and other kindred associations’. Together with Evans  –​who, by this time had returned from Wilhelm’s court and aligned himself with Napoleon III –​Crane endeavoured to replicate the USSC’s form of military-​controlled humanitarianism in France.45 The outcome of this mission was somewhat mixed. A key problems Evans and Crane faced was that, unlike in the Union, they did not have the luxury of a clean slate to work from, and instead encountered deeply entrenched views of what were, and what were not, the correct ways of deploying humanitarian assistance in war. These views, held primarily by the army surgeons who controlled the Parisian ambulances, were premised on the notion that volunteers were an encumbrance rather than a resource. This stance greatly retarded the Americans’ ability to persuade the French of the importance of harnessing civilians for military-​medical work. In the end, the Parisian ambulances adopted few, if any, of the methods and ideas that had been put into practice in the

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Union. Ironically, it was only after France’s defeat that the French Red Cross looked to the GRC –​which had spent its time more profitably studying USSC methods –​as a template for reorganising its operations.46 The USSC idea found more fertile soil in Spain. Nicasio Landa, the head of the Spanish Red Cross, was an admirer of both the USSC and its affiliate, the Union army Medical Bureau’s pioneering surgeon, Jonathan Letterman. Having studied the latter’s work on evacuating wounded, Landa developed a new form of suspension stretcher and, from the USSC, he acquired a template from which to create his own bespoke Red Cross society. What impressed Landa most was the balance struck by the USSC between military needs and the mobilisation of civilians. The right mix between these two elements, he believed, was essential both for overcoming the problem of the Spanish Red Cross being too reliant on small Christian charity groups, and for convincing the military of the usefulness of civilians in wartime. The subsequent modifications made to the Spanish Red Cross led, ultimately, to a more militarised and disciplined Red Cross society emerging by the time of the second Carlist War of the 1870s.47 Following Prussia’s triumph over France, moreover, the Spanish followed the French, the Dutch, the British and the Russians in further refining their Red Cross preparations along lines that were in keeping with the GRC’s practices and ideas  –​practices and ideas that the USSC had initially pioneered. Conclusion The USSC did not give birth to the Red Cross and, despite its trailblazing efforts in the field of wartime humanitarianism, the direct impact of its work on Europe’s Red Cross societies was minimal. Arguably, the GRC took inspiration from the USSC, using the ideas proffered by Evans, as well as the general knowledge base of USSC work in Europe provided by Fisher and Bowles, as reference points. The militarised nature of the GRC and the societies that followed its lead, however, needed little help from across the Atlantic in order to gestate. The premise of mass civilian mobilisation for the purposes of war –​or, more specifically, military-​medicine in war –​was in keeping with the broader conception in Prussia of warfare as a national activity, in which every one of Wilhelm’s subjects had a role to play.48 The possibility of this militarised conception of the Red Cross being embraced across Europe after 1871 was quite high, even without the advocacy of Evans, Crane, Bowles and Fisher. This is because –​as this chapter has demonstrated –​the idea of militarised humanitarianism was not a uniquely Prussian –​or, indeed, European –​phenomenon. The fact that militarised humanitarianism was conceived of and carried out in the United States before the Red Cross idea had even been suggested, and, moreover, that it had taken hold in Japan in the late 1860s, speaks to a more profound truth.49 This is that for all Dunant’s insistence on ‘tutti fratelli’, the need to militarise and professionalise humanitarian work for the purposes of keeping soldiers fighting fit in their nation’s

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interest was an equally, if not more, universal idea than the spirit of Solferino. In acknowledging and embracing this truth before the Geneva Conferences the Americans did, indeed, lead the way.

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Notes 1 The author acknowledges the support of the British Academy/​Leverhulme Small Grants scheme in funding the research that went into this chapter. H. Dunant, A Memory of Solferino (Geneva: ICRC, 1959 [1947]), pp. 115–​16. 2 P. Bossier, From Solferino to Tsushima:  The History of the International Committee of the Red Cross (Geneva: ICRC, 1985), pp. 17–​45. 3 J. F. Hutchinson, Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), Chapter 5. 4 M. M. Jones, The American Red Cross: From Clara Barton to the New Deal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Chapters 3–​4. The problems this created for the ARC as it faced the challenge of the First World War are explored in Branden Little’s contribution to the present volume. 5 C. J. Stillé, History of the United States Sanitary Commission, Being the General Report of Its Work during the War of the Rebellion (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1868), pp. 33–​5. 6 D. W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). 7 Quote from William Macpherson at 1906 Geneva Conference, cited in Hutchinson, Champions of Charity, p. 199. 8 See, in particular, the contributions of Leo van Bergen, Sarah Glassford, and Jon Arrizabalega et al. 9 C. Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: HarperCollins, 1998), Chapter 3. 10 The acronym GRC will be used throughout this chapter to describe both the German Red Cross and its forebear, the Prussian Red Cross. For the GRC’s influence on the Red Cross movement see J. Arrizabalaga and G. Sánchez-​Martínez, ‘Humanitarian Aid in Peacetime:  Conflicting Narratives in the International Red Cross Movement, 1867–​1884’, Asclepio, 66:1 (2014), 1–​30 (pp. 2–​17); quotes from London, British Library (BL), Add. MS 43393: Nightingale to Longmore, 14 February 1867; V. Swain, ‘Franco-​Prussian War, 1870–​1871: Voluntary Aid for the Wounded and Sick’, British Medical Journal, 3 (August 1870), 511–​14. 11 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), RG 200, Box 8:  ‘Study on Relationship that Should Exist between Army and Charitable Organizations’, 1904. 12 N. Pirogov, Bericht ueber die Besichtigung der Militair-​Sanitätsanstalten in Deutschland, Lothringen und Elsass im Jahre 1870 (Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, 1871), pp. 5–​10, 40–​9; C. A. Gordon, Lessons on Hygiene and Surgery from the Franco-​Prussian War (London: Ballière, 1873); H. Brackenbury, ‘Philanthropy in War’, Blackwoods Magazine, 121 (February 1877), 150–​74. 13 Hutchinson, Champions of Charity, Chapter 5; M. Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 76–​82; G. Best, Humanity in Warfare (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 151–​3. 14 Dunant, Solferino, p. 72. 15 New  York Public Library (NYPL), USSC, MSS 22263/​14.2:  ‘Organisation of the Sanitary Commission’, 5 April 1861. 16 See generally J. Furley, In Peace and War: Autobiographical Sketches (London: Smith, Elder, 1905); E. Pearson and L. McLaughlin, Service in Servia under the Red Cross (London: Tinsley

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Brothers, 1877); C. Ryan, Under the Red Crescent:  Adventures of an English Surgeon with the Turkish Army at Plevna and Erzeroum, 1877–​1878 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897). 17 J. Crossland, War, Law and Humanity:  The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853–​ 1914 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), Chapters 5, 6. 18 W. Quentin-​Maxwell, Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission (New York: Longmans, Green, 1956), pp. 333, 338–​9; G. M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War:  Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (Chicago:  University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 100–​2. 19 L. LeFort, La Campagne d’Italie en 1859, au point de vue médico-​chirugical et administratif (Paris: Victor Mason, 1869), pp. 27–​30. 20 G. W. Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), pp. 4–​5; J. Keegan, The American Civil War (London: Vintage, 2010), p. 51. 21 The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted:  Defending the Union, ed. Jane Turner Censer, Vol. IV (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986): Olmsted to John Olmsted, 3 August 1861; Olmsted to Mary Perkins Olmsted, 29 July 1861. A. Nevins and M. H. Thomas (eds), The Diary of George Templeton Strong, abridged version (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1952), 11 September 1862, p. 203. NYPL, MSS COL 22263/​1.3: Heywood to Bellows, 29 November 1863; Stillé, History of the USSC, p. 19. 22 The United States Sanitary Commission: A Sketch of Its Purposes and Its Work Compiled from Documents and Private Papers (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1863), Vol. II: account of the Field Relief Corps of the United States Sanitary Commission in the Army of the Potomac, 19 September 1863, doc. 72. 23 NYPL, MSS COL 22263/​1.4: Steiner to Agnew, 13 January 1864. For recruits into the FRC see generally 22263/​16; NYPL, MSS COL 22263/​5.2: minutes of the USSC Standing Committee meetings, 13 June 1864; Quentin-​Maxwell, Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel, p. 249. 24 Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field, 22 August 1864, article 7; G. W. Davis, ‘The Sanitary Commission –​The Red Cross’, American Journal of International Law, 4:3 (1910), 546–​66; The United States Sanitary Commission:  A Sketch of Its Purposes and Its Work Compiled from Documents and Private Papers (Boston, MA:  Little, Brown, 1863), meeting of the European Branch of the United States Sanitary Commission, 30 November 1863, pp. 62–​4. 25 W. Y. Thompson, ‘The U.S. Sanitary Commission’, Civil War History, 2:2 (1956), 41–​63; S. Devine, Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), pp. 15–​20. 26 For the letters see generally NYPL, MSS COL 22261/​1.2–​11. 27 L. Appia and G. Moynier, La guerre et la charité, trans. J. Furley (Geneva:  Cherbuliez, 1867), p. 44. 28 A. Love, The Geneva Red Cross Movement: European and American Influence on Its Development (Pennsylvania:  Medical Field Service School, 1942), p.  22; Quentin-​Maxwell, Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel, pp. 289–​90,  275–​6. 29 Dunant’s first contact with the USSC appears to have been via Charles Bowles just after the first Geneva Conference; NYPL, MSS COL 22263/​1.5. For the setting up of the Paris and London outposts see NYPL, MSS COL 22263/​1.12. 30 NYPL, MSS COL 22263/​1.15:  Bowles to Foster-​Jenkins, 13 May 1864; NYPL, MSS COL 18818/​1.3:  Fisher letter, September 1864 (no day given); NYPL, MSS COL 18818/​2.3:  ‘The

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Working of the United States Sanitary Commission with Regard to the Armies in the Field’, 10 February 1865. 31 NARA, RG 200, P108, Box 2: report of Charles S. P. Bowles, Foreign Agent of the United States Sanitary Commission, upon the International Congress of Geneva (August 1864); Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS): Fogg to Seward, 6 August 1864. 32 T. Maunoir, ‘Note sur l’œuvre des Comités de Secours aux Etats-​Unis d’Amérique’, in T. Maunoir and G. Moynier, Secours aux blessés:  Communication du Comité International faisant suite au compte rendu de la Conférence Internationale de Genève (Geneva:  Fick, 1864), pp. 179–​89. NARA, RG 43, Entry A12, Box 1: ‘Neutralization of Wounded and of the Medical Service, Historical Precedents’, undated. Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), AF 5.2: Bowles to Dunant, 14 May 1864; Harris to Dunant, 7 June 1864. 33 Crossland, War, Law and Humanity, pp. 73–​4. 34 USSC Bulletin, 1:6 ( January 1865), 17. 35 Hutchinson, Champions of Charity, pp. 51–​2; NARA, RG 200, P108, Box 2: minutes of 1864 Congress, 22 August. 36 NYPL, MSS COL 22263/​1.13: Bowles to USSC New York, 29 April 1864; my italics. 37 Stillé, USSC History, p. 487. 38 T. Maunoir, ‘Note sur l’œuvre’. For the Committee’s indifference to the USSC see Jean-​François Pitteloud (ed.), Procès-​verbaux des séances du Comité International de la Croix-​Rouge, 17 février 1863–​28 août 1914 (Geneva: Henry Dunant Society, 1999), pp. 16–​29. 39 ICRC, AF 5.1: USSC to Dunant, 26 January 1866; and ICRC, AF 4–​5.2 generally. 40 The American Association for the Relief of the Misery of Battlefields: Its Constitutions, with a Sketch of the International Movement for the Amelioration of Suffering among the Sick and Wounded of Armies in the Field (Washington, DC: Gibson Brothers, 1866). See generally NYPL, MSS COL 22263/​5.2: minutes of Standing Committee meetings, 1865–​78. 41 ICRC, AF 5.1: Bellows to Moynier, 23 July 1869. 42 NARA, RG 200, 041, Box 5:  extract from The American National Red Cross:  Its History, Organization and Activities, 1866–​1872; ICRC, AF 5.1:  Bellows to Moynier, 16 July 1876; W. Eleazar-​Barton, The Life of Clara Barton: Founder of the American Red Cross, Vol. II (Boston, MA: Houghton-​Mifflin, 1922), pp. 144–​71. 43 For the history of these networks see Crossland, War, Law and Humanity. 44 T. W. Evans, Sanitary Institutions during the Austro-​Prussian-​Italian Conflict (Paris:  Simon Raçon, 1868), pp. 18, 110; T. W. Evans, Memoirs of Dr Thomas W.  Evans:  The Second French Empire (New York: D. Appleton, 1905), pp. 126–​42. 45 Crane had come to Europe via Edmund Crisp Fisher’s London USSC outpost in 1864; NYPL, MSS COL 18818/​1.2: Fowler to Fischer, 7 October 1864; Crane to Bellows, 19 July 1870, reproduced in T. W. Evans, History of the American Ambulance Established in Paris during the Siege of 1870–​1871, Together with the Details of Its Methods and Its Work (London: Sampson Low, 1873), pp. 1–​12. 46 Letter from Simms to Lloyd-​Lindsay, reproduced in W. MacCormac, Notes and Recollections of an Ambulance Surgeon, Being an Account of Work Done under the Red Cross during the Campaign of 1870 (London: J & A Churchill, 1871), pp. 16–​21; Evans, History of the American Ambulance, pp.  19–​22. For the French Red Cross’s reorganisation see B. Taithe, Defeated Flesh:  Welfare, Warfare and the Making of Modern France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp.  88–​97.

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47 J. Arrizabalaga and G. Sánchez-​Martínez, Nicasio Landa, 1830–​1891: Le Comité de Genève et la première Croix-​Rouge espagnole (Geneva: CSIC, 2013), pp. 170–​96; NYPL, MSS COL 22263/​ 1.7: Landa to USSC French Branch, 4 March 1864. 48 R. M. Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). 49 F. Käser, ‘A Civilized Nation: Japan and the Red Cross, 1877–​1900’, European Review of History, 23:1–​2 (2016),  16–​32.

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Intertwined stories of war humanitarianism: The British Order of St John of Jerusalem and the Red Cross in the Spanish civil wars of the 1870s Jon Arrizabalaga, Guillermo Sánchez-​Martínez and J. Carlos García-​Reyes

After the ‘Glorious Revolution’ (1868) dethroned Queen Isabella II, two bloody civil conflicts shook Spain during the so-​ called Democratic or Revolutionary Sexennium (1868–​74): the Second Carlist War (1872–​6) and the Cantonalist uprising in the middle of the war ( July–​December 1873), as well as the first war of independence in Cuba (1868–​78).1 Like the two preceding ones, the latest Carlist rebellion was fuelled by a dynastic dispute, and aligned with the trend across Europe of Old Regime governments being favoured over liberal democracies. The prospect of a true parliamentary monarchy and the liberal revolutionaries’ attempts  –​consistent with European secularising movements –​to reduce the influence of religion and the Catholic Church on social life were used by Legitimists to justify the new uprising. The insurgents aimed to bring Carlos VII to the Spanish throne. The multifarious foreign initiatives to assist the Carlist war health services are a clear example of the extent of their support among Legitimist circles abroad, both in Europe and in the Americas.2 The new Carlist war started in the spring of 1872 and lasted until the end of February 1876, when the insurgents were again defeated. Their forces fought against four political regimes that quickly succeeded each other in Spain, namely, the reign of Amadeo I; the ephemeral First Spanish Republic; a failed unitary and authoritarian republic commanded by General Serrano; and the monarchy restored under Alfonso XII, son of Isabella –​whose coronation had caused the First Carlist War (1833–​9) –​and head of the branch of the Bourbon dynasty that had reigned previously. Though the international movement of aid societies and the Geneva Convention had emerged between 1863 and 1864, the results of these developments were not clearly visible until the Franco-​Prussian war (1870–​1). They were not limited to this new dimension of national aid societies supporting belligerent armies in alignment with the development of the Geneva agreements. In addition to two national societies following their armies  –​the efficient aid society managed by the Prussian branch of the Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, which followed the army

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of the German Confederation, and the comparatively chaotic service mediated by the French Red Cross –​there appeared for the first time in war a great number of ambulances, either mobile or permanent, not part of the Prussian and French national aid societies. Rather, they mostly came from countries such as England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium and the United States, with some managed by the French or foreigners resident in France. Their interventions showed that civil society felt it had the right to intervene in armed conflicts.3 In 1864, Spain had signed the Geneva Convention along with eleven other European countries, and the Order of St John of Jerusalem was given the job of creating the Spanish Red Cross (SRC). During the following eight years, the SRC developed slowly, in a political atmosphere marked by the fear of civil war and the experience of the first major mobilisation of the SRC –​as a part of the International Association –​on the occasion of the Franco-​Prussian war. The actions of the Geneva Committee and of the Red Cross national sections in France, and above all Prussia, provided the SRC with a model for its relief interventions with sick and wounded combatants when the Carlist war and the Cantonal insurrection began. However, as a result of the peculiar way the association had developed in Spain, the SRC civil voluntary forces were deployed without any coordination with the army.4 Civil wars were not contemplated in the 1864 Geneva Convention. It only applied to international wars between signatory countries. Therefore the Geneva Committee of the Red Cross decided not to intervene in the Carlist war.5 However, the SRC was determined to relieve the wounded on all sides in the conflicts under the principle of neutrality adopted in the Geneva Convention. It is, therefore, a remarkable early experience of the involvement of a national society of the Red Cross movement in a civil war.6 As suggested by Rebecca Gill, the history of humanitarianism and of the Red Cross is complex and needs to ‘take account of intricate blends of motivation and ideals’ of ‘those claiming to be “doing good” ’.7 Intersections between the Order of St John of Jerusalem and the international Red Cross Movement and, more generally, war humanitarianism, have not yet been sufficiently studied. This chapter takes as its focus the involvement of knights of the English branch of this Order in the last Carlist war. It offers an interesting case study, not only to frame the relief actions of John Furley, Vincent Kennett-​Barrington and other British knights of Saint John, but also to show how diverse, and even opposed to each other, their operative agendas were in the theatre of war. The Order of St John of Jerusalem in nineteenth-​century England Although the Order of St John in England was dissolved by Henry VIII and its goods confiscated by the Crown, it was reconstituted as a charitable association in 1831. Negotiations for it to be properly recognised failed in 1856 on the grounds that its continuing obedience to the papacy was deemed unacceptable. Thus it did not

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become a Royal Order until 1888 –​when Queen Victoria granted the relevant charter. However, from 1861, the English Order of St John experienced a sustained revival under the Grand Prior Sir William Drogo Montagu, seventh Duke of Manchester, by turning back to its original charitable work. A small group of reformist members steered the Order ‘away from its antiquarian and ceremonial preoccupations into useful, practical charitable endeavour in the form of first aid and ambulance work’.8 The group included British army commanders mostly related to the military health services, such as Colonels Robert Loyd Lindsay and Francis Duncan; Surgeon-​ Majors William G. N. Manley and Peter Shepherd; Thomas Longmore, professor of military surgery in the Army Medical School at Netley; the Conservative politician Edmund A. H. Lechmere; and the lawyer John Furley, who joined the Order in 1864. The group perceived that ‘practical first aid and improved patient transport’ had not only ‘self-​evident military applications’, but were ‘equally relevant to the civilian population of the rapidly industrialising, often dangerous society that was Britain in the 1860s and 70s’.9 In 1868, reformist members of the Order of St John promoted the Society for Aiding and Ameliorating the Condition of the Sick and Wounded of Armies in Time of War (SAA). Its provisional committee included Lord Eliot, Major-​General John St George, Sir A. H. Edmund Lechmere, the chaplain W. B. L. Hawkins, J. A. Pearson, Captain John Burgess (as honorary secretary) and John Furley. The new association was set up ‘with a view to the establishment of a National Red Cross Society for the relief of sick and wounded in war, similar to the societies which had been already formed in other countries’.10 Burgess and Furley were sent as delegates of the committee to the International Conference of Aid Societies held in Berlin in 1869, while Thomas Longmore acted as representative of the British Government at this conference, as he had done at earlier conferences held in Geneva (1864) and Paris (1867).11 On the outbreak of the Franco-​Prussian war in July 1870, the SAA’s promoters found an opportunity to arouse humanitarian emotions as well as fears for the fate of British troops just fifteen years after the end of the Crimean war.12 Furley approached Loyd-​Lindsay  –​a hero of the Crimean war who had been awarded the Victoria Cross  –​asking him for help to form an English branch of the Red Cross. On 22 July Loyd-​Lindsay made an appeal through The Times for solidarity with the sick and wounded soldiers in this new conflict according to the terms of the Geneva Convention, and donated £1,000 on behalf of the SAA.13 On 4 August 1870, and following the immediate success of the appeal, the leaders of the SAA formally renamed it as the British National Society for Aid to Sick and Wounded in War (NAS) under the patronage of the Queen and the presidency of the Prince of Wales. Furley hurried to Geneva in order to introduce the NAS as the British Red Cross to the International Committee. The NAS launched a successful public subscription for the relief of war victims, collecting £294,455. Postwar discussions arose around the question of whether, in peacetime, the NAS should either be kept

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in a state of readiness for future conflicts (albeit not being involved in civil emergencies) and natural disasters in and outside Britain, or merely ‘frozen’. In 1872, led by Loyd-​Lindsay and including Furley, Longmore, Burgess and Captain Henry Brackenbury –​another Crimean war veteran –​those in favour of the first option, for the creation of a standing peacetime organisation, split from the NAS.14 During the 1870s the splinter group developed an innovative model of urban civil ambulances in Great Britain under the patronage of the Order of St John with an ‘Ambulance Committee’ already in action between 1872 and 1874. By 1875 this committee had become the Ambulance Department of the Order, with Surgeon-​ Major William Manley as its superintendent. In 1876, Colonel Francis Duncan succeeded Manley as director, while Furley became its head of stores before serving a term as director as well. This department developed an increasing number of activities, including training first-​aiders, selling supplies to the local ambulance corps that proliferated in the 1870s, and designing products (for example, the ‘St John Ambulance Litter’, the ‘Ambulance Hamper’ and the ‘Furley Stretcher’) and arranging for commercial manufacturers to produce them. As a result of these developments, Lechmere, Duncan and Furley established the St John Ambulance Association in 1887 as an organisation to teach first aid, publish its first-​aid handbook  –​Peter Shepherd’s Little Black Book (1879)  –​and market the ambulance equipment. Chaired by Lechmere (with Furley as deputy-​chairman) the association rapidly spread throughout the British Empire.15 John Furley played a notable role in the founding of the two most important relief societies in England, namely the SAA and the St John Ambulance. Yet, our main interest in Furley’s relief work during the Carlist war does not rule out a closer look at the work carried out by other British knights of St John –​particularly, Vincent Kennett-​Barrington, and the trio Edmond de la Poer, John de Havilland and George Beaumont. An examination of the work of these five figures allows us to illustrate the extent to which disparate war-​aid agendas co-​existed within the English branch of the military Order of St John. Inspecting Carlist military hospitals: Edmond de la Poer, John de Havilland and George Beaumont On 3 November 1874, the Irish nobleman Edmond James de la Poer was invested as Knight Hospitaller of Saint John of Jerusalem ‘with the vows of obedience, chastity and poverty’, in an emblematic war hospital the Carlist insurgents had established in the old monastery of Irache.16 On the slopes of Montejurra, the sacred mountain of the Carlists, this ancient Benedictine abbey was located two miles outside Estella, the main city of south-​west Navarra and at the time the main seat of the court of the Carlist pretender and the headquarters of his insurgent army. The hospital was managed by La Caridad, Asociación Católica para el Socorro a los Heridos, a replica of the Spanish Red Cross on the Carlist side, and was committed to fulfilling

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the same functions on the insurgents’ side as the Red Cross did in the Government camp. This allegedly included channelling economic and material aid for relief activities to the combatants, regardless of their side. It was not surprising that La Caridad had been established in opposition to the Red Cross Society, which was regarded as being too liberal, and, in Furley’s words, too closely associated with ‘Freemasons, Socialists, Republicans, and Freethinkers’.17 De la Poer arrived at Irache five months earlier, accompanying the French Legitimist Count William de Bourgade, the director of supplies and facilities of La Caridad.18 He had been with De Bourgade during the evacuation of several hundred wounded combatants from hospitals at Portugalete, after the Carlists’ siege of Bilbao was broken by Government troops on 2 May 1874. These hospital patients were first transferred by sea from Santurce (northern Spain) to Socoa (south-​west France), and then by land to La Caridad’s hospital in Lesaca, a small town then under Carlist control in northern Navarre, close to the French border.19 The Master of the Knights Hospitaller at the Irache hospital chapel was John von Sonntag de Havilland, a native of the United States with English parentage, and a soldier of fortune who had fought with the American forces in the Mexican–​American War (1846–​8), who passionately supported the cause of the Confederate States in the American Civil War.20 De Havilland had worked as a translator for the US embassy in Madrid before serving in Spain under Don Carlos –​the Legitimist pretender –​where he became a ‘general’ of the Carlist army. In the investiture ceremony at Irache, De la Poer was escorted by a number of Knights Hospitaller, including Lord George Beaumont, an English Catholic nobleman and ardent supporter of Don Carlos, who represented the Carlists in England. ‘General’ de Havilland and Lord Beaumont appear to have been commissioned by the British Order of St John to make ‘a Tour of Inspection of the military hospitals’ on the Carlist side. This mission did not prevent them from later being ‘attached to the staff of Don Carlos during the attack on Irun and subsequent military operations’.21 Some months earlier, along with two other knights of St John, Allan Herbert and Lord Eliot, De Havilland and Lord Beaumont had planned to attend the international conference for improving the fate of prisoners of war that was to be held in Paris in May 1874. The conference had been promoted by the Société pour l’amélioration du sort des prisonniers de guerre (Society for the Improvement of the Condition of Prisoners of War (SICPOW)), led by France-​Edgard d’Houdetot as president and Henri Dunant as international secretary, in order to discuss the adoption of an international convention regarding prisoners of war. The four knights of St John were English members of the executive committee of SICPOW, which was an offshoot of the Alliance universelle de l’ordre et de la civilisation (Universal Alliance for Order and Civilisation).22 According to its founding manifesto, this international alliance of national aid societies, which had been established in Paris in 1871 after the end of the Commune, was dedicated to the ‘progress of civilisation’ through Christian inspiration. It sought ‘the intellectual, moral and material improvement of the workers,

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the good relations between the social classes, the international relationships most favourable to the common good and less opposed to the humanity in peacetime and to the respect for individuals and neutrals in wartime’.23 In practice, however, the Alliance chose to shelve ‘the pursuit of improved conditions for the workers in order to further social and political peace through arbitration and the codification of international law’.24 The first conference held by the Alliance in Paris in June 1872 paid particular attention to the treatment of prisoners of war.25 Following Dunant’s proposals, the conference agreed that its ‘international permanent committee urged the organisation of a diplomatic convention in order to uniformly regulate the fate of prisoners of war in civilised countries’.26 However, the conference was short-​circuited by the Government of the United Kingdom, which vetoed it, and by the Russian Tsar Alexander II, who proposed that the European governments celebrate a diplomatic conference in Brussels to discuss the rules of military warfare. The initial reluctance of the British Government to regulate warfare was counteracted by the Swiss, who reminded them that they had already signed the 1868 amendments to the Geneva Convention.27 The conference was finally held in Brussels between 27 July and 27 August, where many matters were discussed. It concluded with a ‘Project of Declaration Concerning the Laws and Customs of War’ that, even though it neither had the force of law nor was ratified by any country, was subject to scrutiny by the Institut de Droit International of Ghent, and eventually taken on in its Oxford Manual of the Laws of Land Warfare. The Oxford Manual should be considered one of the earliest attempts to set an international standard for the treatment of war prisoners, only preceded by the US ‘Lieber Code’, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 at the height of the American Civil War.28 It is worth mentioning that the member of the provisional committee that promoted the SAA in 1868, Lord William Gordon Cornwallis Eliot, was son of the British politician and diplomat Lord Edward Granville Eliot,29 who, as commissioner of the British Government, had successfully negotiated the end of indiscriminate executions of prisoners of both sides during the First Carlist War in northern Spain in 1835.30 In regard to the treatment of war prisoners, it was the intention of the ‘Eliot Convention’ to be observed in other provinces if the war spread, although it was only ever applied to the Basque-​Navarrese country.31 The English Society for the Relief of the Sick and Wounded of the Spanish War: Vincent Kennett-​Barrington (1844–​1903) Members of the English branch of the Order of St John were involved in at least two international temporary relief societies in the Carlist war: namely, the English Society for the Relief of the Sick and Wounded of the Spanish War (ESR) in London, and the Société des Secours aux Blessés Espagnols in Paris. The two societies intended to coordinate the equal distribution to both sides of money and goods donated by foreign voluntary agencies. This was in spite of the prohibition of

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the Geneva Committee to intervene in an ‘internal’ conflict, and the pressure placed on the Geneva Committee, by the Count of Ripalda (the SRC’s acting president and member of the Spanish branch of the Order of St John) to become involved and encourage humanitarian action by national aid societies of third-​party countries. Both temporary societies came out of an Anglo-​French-​Spanish committee for the relief of the sick and wounded of the civil war in Spain, established in Paris by early November 1873. This committee brought together the Count of Ripalda and the Count of Sérurier –​the leader of the French Red Cross societies; honorary president of SRC; and, like the former, a knight of St John of Jerusalem –​as well as a large number of personalities from France, Britain, Spain and other European countries. Some of them, like the British entrepreneur Henry Blount, the English art collector Sir Richard Wallace, the French jurist and politician Edouard Laboulaye and the French physician Philippe Ricord, had been prominent in war-​relief tasks during the Commune of Paris, while others, such as the Prince de La Tour d’Auvergne, the Duke of Norfolk and the Count of Orgaz were politicians and diplomats, most of them being members of the nobility.32 This committee claimed to be ‘independent and entirely alien to the Red Cross committees existing in all the civilised nations’, and invited subscriptions to ad hoc accounts opened in Paris and London.33 Little information appears to be available about the ESR. Apart from some details found in the letters and reports of Vincent Kennett-​Barrington, its principal delegate in Spain, the most valuable information is the draft final report of its executive committee. This document includes its first general report (10 August 1874), the summary of its accounts to 22 September 1874, and Kennett-​Barrington’s first report (London, August 1874).34 As confirmed in the ESR’s first general report, the Society appears to have been formed to counter the NAS’s refusal to assist directly in what was a civil war.35 According to its accounts, the subscriptions to September 1874 were £6,218 19s 10d, most of which had been collected by the London committee. Around ₤5,350 was invested in ‘direct material aid to the sick and wounded’, supplies of fresh provisions of fruit and vegetables, and grants for urgent applications for aid. Furthermore, all the materials had been equitably distributed between both sides.36 Most goods were bought in England, although they used J. Violett and Co., a foreign bank in Bordeaux, for the purchase of provisions and ‘hospital necessaries or comforts’, largely because of the easier communication between Bordeaux and ‘the headquarters of both the contending armies’.37 As to the remaining ₤865 48s 18d, about ₤166 constituted minor expenses for advertising, insurance, shipping charges, telegrams, postage and printing, leaving a balance of ₤699. According to the committee’s remarks, ‘not one shilling was expended in the ordinary charges of Agency’, and ‘they endeavoured to observe, and they hope not without success, a rule of complete impartiality as between the belligerents’.38 Among the members of the ESR, there were some who belonged to the NAS, most notably Vincent Kennett-​Barrington, a veteran of NAS relief in the Franco-​Prussian

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war. Along with his friend, the sailor and polar explorer Allen William Young, Kennett-​Barrington appears to have been the most active and devoted representative of the Society during the Carlist war.39 Between 1874 and 1876, he embarked on three missions to Spain, all of them undertaken on its active northern front during April–​ May 1874, October 1874–​May 1875 and September 1875–​May 1876.40 He prioritised collaboration with the Carlist relief association La Caridad, and all of his missions were devoted to insurgents. Some years later, Kennett-​Barrington explained that he had done it as a member of a ‘Neutral Society’, having taken into consideration the intensified ‘feeling of animosity between the two sides’ on account of the Spanish Government’s refusal officially to recognise their opponents as belligerents. Thus, he found ‘most important to endeavour to lessen this feeling by securing the protection and comfort of the wounded of either side who had fallen into the hands of the enemy and by arranging for their transport back to their own lines’ by taking advantage of his own ‘position as a neutral’.41 Kennett-​Barrington’s most celebrated humanitarian activities in the Carlist war were the seaborne evacuation of several hundred Carlist patients from La Caridad war hospitals at Portugalete to the one at Lesaca in May 1874, and the directorship of the Lesaca war hospital during the last stage of the war (February 1876). After his last mission to Spain, he went on to carry out humanitarian missions on behalf of the knights of St. John in other conflicts, namely the Turko-​Serbian war (1876–​7), the Russo-​Turkish war (1877–​8), the Suakin Campaign in Egypt (1885–​6) and the Serbo-​Bulgarian war (1885–​6).42 Other names associated with the ESR included local people who were involved in relief tasks in the area of Bilbao during its siege by the Carlists, as well as those involved in both supplies and evacuation of the wounded. Among the former were Carlos de Larrea, one ‘Sr. Quintana’ of Santurce (Blas de la Quintana Uribarri) and ‘Madame de los Heros’, who ran a small war hospital for Government soldiers at Mioño, close to Castro Urdiales, and whose devotion to relief tasks had merited a formal letter of gratitude from General Serrano as head of the Spanish Government.43 Among the latter was George Batters, owner of the Somorrostro, who generously put his steamship –​ordinarily used for the transport of iron ore from Bilbao mines –​ at the disposal of the ESR for transporting wounded men and for ferrying medical supplies, mostly between south-​west France and northern Spain.44 There were also some Spanish businessmen engaged in trade between Spain and England, such as Manuel Misa Bertemani, the chairman of the ESR, and Cristóbal de Murrieta, who ‘took charge of the Somorrostro and directed her employment in the service of the Committee, organising also the despatch and distribution of supplies from Bordeaux with excellent judgment’, and whose banking company ‘C. de Murrieta y Cía’ in London offered, with no charge, an account for the handling of this fund.45 Finally, some English and Irish Catholic knights of St John of Jerusalem who favoured the Carlists’ Legitimist view were also involved in the ESR:  the three already mentioned as present at the investiture ceremony at Irache  –​General de Havilland, Lord Beaumont and Count de la Poer. We might wonder whether

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Kennett-​Barrington himself was entirely opposed to their Legitimist views, despite his firm belief that he was acting as ‘a neutral’ in the civil war. Indeed, more than twenty years later he still boasted of having obtained a medal for John Casey Hoey, the honorary secretary of the ESR, and a very active Irish journalist in Catholic Ultramontanist circles in Victorian England.46 Last but not least, Kennett-​ Barrington appears to have been closely associated with several hospitals of La Caridad  –​mostly at Portugalete, Lesaca and Irache  –​and with two of the three managers of this relief association, namely the Count de Bourgade, in charge of its supplies and facilities, and the Jesuit priest Manuel Fernández de Barrena, in charge of its human resources.47 The Société des Secours aux Blessés Espagnols: John Furley (1836–​1919) In contrast to the NAS’s reluctance to be involved in the London-​based English Society for the Relief of the Sick and Wounded of the Spanish War, the Paris-​based Société des Secours aux Blessés Espagnols (SSB) had been established in late 1873 by the Red Cross members the Count of Ripalda and the Count of Sérurier. The SSB was located in the same building as the central committee of the French Red Cross. Led by the British entrepreneur and promoter of Paris ambulances Henry Blount, it comprised French nationals, as well as foreign residents in Paris acting as delegates of at least four countries (Britain, the USA, Belgium and Spain). These included the Carlist politician Tirso de Olazabal. Some of its members –​Ripalda, Sérurier and Blount, but also Philippe Ricord, the dukes of Norfolk and Chaulnes, Sir Richard Wallace, the Count of Romrée, and the Marquis of Béthisy –​were also participating on the Anglo-​French-​Spanish committee.48 The SSB took charge of collecting and fairly redistributing the first-​aid donations to both the SRC and the Carlist association La Caridad. Visibly relieved by this solution, in March 1874 the Geneva Committee addressed a circular letter to Red Cross national committees encouraging them to send their donations to this new association, to which it made a first contribution –​5,000 francs –​for the cause.49 In contrast to Kennett-​Barrington, who went to Spain as a representative of the ESR, John Furley chose to go through the Paris-​based Societé. Indeed, he brought letters of recommendation ‘to several influential people belonging to the two parties’, which he had obtained from the SSB, particularly those by its two main leaders –​ the counts of Ripalda and Sérurier.50 Yet Furley was well aware that, because it was a civil war, he was neither ‘authorised to represent any branch of the Red Cross Society’, nor had any ‘right to expect any assistance’ from the British NAS, of which he declared himself a member, so that he ‘had only [himself] to rely upon’ in his ‘neutral work in Spain’.51 Although he missed the support he had received from the British NAS during the Franco-​Prussian war, Furley declared himself ‘anxious’ to enlarge his ‘knowledge of military hospital work, regular or irregular’,52 as well as being convinced that it would

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afford him a ‘very useful experience’ gaining ‘as independent a position as it is possible to expect in a civil war’ and rendering ‘some personal service on one side or the other –​perhaps on both sides’.53 Yet, he admitted that, despite his lack of preference for the army of either side, he had chosen the Republican army first, influenced by his ‘desire to find Don Nicasio de Landa, the energetic and chivalrous champion of the Red Cross in Spain’.54 Later on in his journey, Furley claimed to have made himself useful in quite difficult situations because he had been ‘known to the principal members of the Spanish Red Cross Society and of the Caridad, and had already given proofs of my impartiality’.55 Furley appears to have skilfully taken advantage of his English nationality as well as his contacts and acquaintances amongst members of the diplomatic and consular corps, other governmental officers, businessmen and newspaper correspondents.56 Furley’s choice suggests that he remained aloof from the London-​based Society, which he referred to as ‘an English committee for the relief of sufferers in the present war’ –​perhaps because of his dislike for its proximity to Legitimism.57 He was disappointed that this Society had evenly distributed £5,000 for humanitarian relief to the hospitals of both armies through ‘a Minister of State’, claiming that this was a gift to the involved parties rather than relief for the victims of war.58 He stressed that ‘the only way in which neutrals can practically aid the victims, is through the direct agency of money spent on or near the spot’, showing that he saw himself clearly identified with the cause of the international Red Cross Movement.59 This is fully consistent with his leading role in ensuring that the British NAS adhered to the Geneva Convention when the Franco-​Prussian war broke out in August 1870, his involvement in war relief activities in Paris as a commissioner of the NAS, and further as a member of the Comité d’Action de la Société Française de Sécours aux Blessés during the siege of La Commune, among other responsibilities.60 Furley’s mission in Spain began on 29 April 1874 with a 22-​hour rail journey from Versailles to Bayonne, where he spent a day visiting people to whom he had recommendations, particularly the secretary and the treasurer of the local Red Cross Committee, who promised him ‘every assistance in their power’.61 On the same evening, Furley went by train to St-​Jean-​de-​Luz, and the following morning, given the impossibility of crossing to the Spanish Government side by land, travelled by sea from the nearby small harbour of Socoa to Santander. His stay there was the beginning of a restless two-​month journey by ship, train, coach and on foot that led him across different theatres of the active northern front of the Carlist war and its rearguard in the Basque-​Navarrese country and Cantabria, which he reported from careful diary notes in his work Among the Carlists. During the mission, the French-​ Basque cities of Bayonne and St-​Jean-​de-​Luz were not only safe but privileged spaces where humanitarian interventions were often negotiated and carried out. In addition to visiting a great number of hospitals and ambulance services on both sides, and helping in relief tasks, Furley’s most remarkable interventions concerned the complex maritime transfer operation of wounded Carlist combatants from La

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Caridad hospitals at Portugalete to that of Lesaca, northern Navarra, in a territory under the control of the insurgents. Agreed by both sides and jointly coordinated by La Caridad and the SRC, the transfer was made from Santurce (Biscay) to Lesaca across the Franco-​Spanish border in two stages using two steamships (up to the French harbours of Socoa and Hendaye), buses and carriages.62 Another of Furley’s interventions was the successful operation to release Henry O’Donovan, an Irish medical student and sympathiser with the insurgents’ cause, and brother of the war correspondent Edmund O’Donovan. Having joined La Caridad ambulances as a volunteer, O’Donovan was imprisoned in Estella between November 1873 and May 1874, accused of attempting to poison Don Carlos with a medical prescription including ‘morphia and opium’, which the Irishman usually consumed.63 Furley wrote in detail of a long operation when he first visited Doña Margarita (Don Carlos’s wife and the president of La Caridad) at Pau and received her letters of recommendation for his journey.64 Furley’s information may well have been useful for Doña Margarita’s propaganda tour of the Carlist hospitals on the northern front, which started on the following 10 June, and ended in Irache in the first days of July that year.65 Finally, between 22 June and 3 July 1874, Furley’s attention was focused on La Caridad’s hospital at Irache when a decisive strike at nearby Estella, then the seat of the Carlist court, occurred. He hastened to the scene on the assumption that if Irache went through a situation similar to that of the Santurce hospitals a few weeks before, he could be helpful, because of his proven authority as a neutral on both sides, in securing for that hospital ‘an easy transition under the Geneva flag’ so that any new transfer of sick and wounded combatants to other hospitals would be unnecessary.66 Furley, who defined himself as a ‘neutral volunteer’ in the title of his memoirs on the Franco-​Prussian war and the Paris Commune, appears to have been deeply concerned to personify these humanitarian values in all his interventions in the Carlist war.67 Equally sympathetic with the war victims on both sides, his independent spirit led him to claim a determination to ‘simply describe things’ as seen by him so that his readers could ‘draw their own inferences’. In pursuing his mission, he ‘mingled with all the parties’, though he had the self-​declared purpose of being careful to ‘divulgat[e]‌no secrets’ by giving ‘no names’ in ‘treating of anything about which an appearance of secrecy was pretended’.68 Furley praised the works of the SRC as well as those of La Caridad, but was not beyond criticising either of them, denouncing the Carlist bombardment of Bilbao as a ‘moral crime’ and ‘political blunder’, and criticising the Government’s circumvention of the Geneva Convention, as in the case of a war hospital under the Red Cross flag at Castro Urdiales, where he found ‘some pieces of artillery and a guard-​room’, and tons of ammunition ‘being taken away for shipment to Bilbao’.69 Furley made positive comments about the contributions of La Caridad, such as its management of hospitals, particularly in Santurce during the siege of Bilbao and in Irache.70 He commended the qualities of the two women managing La Caridad

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alongside Count de Bourgade and the Jesuit Barrena. On the one hand, he admired the ‘lively and active sympathy’ of its president, Doña Margarita, towards the victims of the war as much as he was amazed by her ‘extreme devotion to the cause of her husband’.71 On the other, he noted that the ‘energy and cheerfulness under difficulties’ of its ‘superintendent of the nurses’ –​Madame Calderón ( Josefa Vasco) –​were ‘astonishing’, and that she did not even lose her ‘smiles’ in moments of ‘trouble and confusion’.72 None of this praise, however, prevented Furley from criticising the functioning of La Caridad and the Carlist military health services. First, he disapproved of the ‘system of centralization’ La Caridad had imposed on its hospitals. According to him, ‘one central and too absolute control’ increased their maintenance expenses and disturbed the patients, for ‘[w]‌ere the hospitals smaller and more numerous, a greater number of doctors might be required, but an enormous saving would be effected in the items for transport of men and material’. The situation was aggravated during wartime when communications were disrupted by variable front lines, so that displacements often involved long journeys by land and/​or sea over neutral territories. To Furley it was far better ‘to multiply hospitals, when possible, than to concentrate the sick and wounded in large hospitals’.73 He emphasised that ‘[w]ounded men should be carried no further than is absolutely necessary from the spot where they happen to be found’, and that the Geneva Convention had been ‘framed, in a great measure, with this view’ –​a severe criticism of the leaders of La Caridad for the unnecessary evacuation operations they had promoted in Santurce hospitals.74 Second, he claimed that each hospital ‘should have its staff complete, for in time of war it is impossible for one director to superintend hospitals often separated from each other by many leagues, and perhaps, as was the case at Santurce and Irache, involves a journey over neutral territory and a sea voyage’. As an alternative, he proposed having ‘one or more inspectors’ whose duty was ‘to visit these hospitals, and to keep them, as far as possible, in rapport with each other and the chief direction’. Finally, Furley stressed that ‘freedom and latitude’ and ‘the fullest independence’ should be ‘granted to all who are considered worthy of undertaking the management of a hospital under any flag that is recognised as neutral’. In exchange, he claimed that directors of these hospitals should be ‘qualified to bear the entire responsibility in defeat as well as in victory’. Among the most suitable qualities required for these responsibilities, he pointed out ‘the exercise not only of common sense, but of great tact and extraordinary powers of conciliation’.75 Most significantly, Furley ended his memoirs defending the primacy of the Red Cross mission –​in whose service he declared to ‘have had the honour to labour’ –​ and by claiming the ‘impossibility’ of having more than one ‘neutral body in time of war’.76 Though being prepared to accept that ‘a private society’ such as La Caridad could ‘direct its funds in[to] any channel it may prefer’, he claimed that this society was ‘too exclusive ever to receive the recognition of Europe’, and that it misled

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ignorant people to ‘suppose that in Spain there exists no such thing as unity of sympathy and sentiment, even for the victims of war’.77 Furley concluded his considerations by tackling the crucial issue of the proliferation of neutral flags in war relief. Caustically, he disqualified ‘the propriety or possibility of maintaining two or more neutral flags to cover hospitals and ambulances in time of war’; and he maintained that the Red Cross flag was the only one that had ‘enlisted the sympathies of the whole of Europe’ and could ‘exist as the emblem of neutrality’.78 Conclusion The ways in which British knights of St John sympathised with different war humanitarianisms and became involved in the Second Carlist War are an example of the wide and diverse reception the Geneva Convention had in the European society of the 1860s and 1870s. The multilateral obligation to protect the war-​ wounded was assumed by individuals and groups of different political and religious stances in all the countries of Europe, and as such was incorporated into their individual and collective values. This applies not only to those sympathising with Prussian warmongering or with British or Russian militarism, but also to those Legitimists longing for the Old Regime or those identifying themselves with the then flourishing liberal pacifism. Furley, for example, appears to have been well aware of this reality.79 In constructing their world ideals they incorporated the vigorous early modern law of nations (ius gentium) and its correlative humanitarianism into an extant set of social, political and religious feelings. However, everybody implemented these ideals in their own way on the battlefields, either in a neutral manner (for example the international Red Cross Movement), or in a partisan way (any association supporting one of the contenders). During those decades, this can be seen again and again, in every violent conflict and within all factions. A good indication of the assumption of these world ideals was that humanitarian behaviour was also used as a part of war propaganda during the conflicts in order to discredit the enemy’s actions. They could be branded as not being sufficiently humanitarian, or denounced for their breach of any article of the Geneva Convention. Certainly, the paradox is that this propaganda war probably contributed to the greater assimilation of humanitarian values by the body of European civil society. Likewise, it was an objective circumstance that the European armies’ rejection of any interference of civil humanitarian initiatives on the battlefields finally prevailed after the representatives of the armies of all European countries decided, in a conference held on the occasion of the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878, to ban the entry of civil ambulances to the battlefields –​an idea John Furley himself had also strongly advocated.80

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Notes 1 This chapter is an outcome of the research project funded by the MINECO (Spanish Government) and the FEDER (European Commission), ‘Relief Action and Medical Technologies in Humanitarian Emergencies, 1850–​ 1950:  Agencies, Agendas, Spaces, Representations’ (HAR2015–​67723P). There is controversy about the number of the Carlist wars in nineteenth-​century Spain. We have chosen to call this one the Second (and not Third) Carlist War, because the so-​called ‘War of the Matiners’ (1846–​9) was not a proper war but rather a minor conflict restricted to some areas of Catalonia. 2 J. Canal, ‘Guerra civil y contrarrevolución en España y en Europa del sur en el siglo XIX’, Ler história, 51 (2006), 9–​36; El Carlismo en su tiempo:  geografías de la contrarrevolución (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 2008). 3 G. Sánchez-​Martínez and J. Arrizabalaga, ‘Transforming the Meaning of War Medicine and Challenging the Red Cross’ Earliest Humanitarian Agenda: The Civil Wars in Spain, 1870–​ 1876’, in V. Lathion and R. Durant (eds), Humanitaire et médecine, Vol. II: La Croix-​Rouge à l’épreuve du feu, 1870–​1914 (Geneva: Genève humanitaire and Institut d’histoire de la médecine et de la santé, forthcoming). 4 J. C. García-​ Reyes, G. Sánchez-​ Martínez and J. Arrizabalaga, ‘Movilización patriótica, medicina de guerra y humanitarismo:  La Cruz Roja española en los conflictos civiles del Sexenio Democrático’, Estudos do século XX, 12 (2012), 69–​86. 5 For more detail about the behaviour of the Geneva Committee regarding the Carlist war, see Sánchez-​Martínez and Arrizabalaga, ‘Transforming the Meaning of War Medicine’. 6 In contrast, the SRC does not appear to have been involved in the colonial war of Yara (1868–​ 78), probably because a predominantly Eurocentric and ‘civilised’ view of humankind led it to defend the use of the sword in order to extend ‘civilisation’ so that those peoples resisting being ‘civilised’ or fighting for their emancipation were excluded from humanitarian protection. See García-​Reyes, Sánchez-​Martínez and Arrizabalaga, ‘Movilización patriótica’, 71. 7 R. Gill, ‘The Origins of the British Red Cross Society and the Politics and Practices of Relief in War, 1870–​1906’, Asclepio, 66:1 (2014), 1–​13 (p. 10). 8 I. Howie-​Willis, ‘Sir John Furley: A forgotten St John Ambulance “founding father” ’, St John History: The Journal of the St John Ambulance Historical Society of Australia, 15 (2015), 34–​45 (p. 37). 9 Ibid., 37. See also E. J. King, The Knights of St John in the British Empire, Being the Official History of the British Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem (London: St John’s Gate, 1934), pp. 135–​47. 10 J. Furley, In Peace and War: Autobiographical Sketches (London: Smith, Elder, 1905), p. 24. 11 Ibid., pp.  24–​5; ‘Longmore  –​Obituary’, British Medical Journal (12 October 1895). Further information on the international conference of aid societies held in Berlin in 1869 can be found in J. Arrizabalaga and G. Sánchez-​Martínez, ‘Humanitarian Aid in Peacetime:  Conflicting Narratives in the International Red Cross Movement, 1867–​1884’, Asclepio, 66:1 (2014), 1–​30. 12 Gill, ‘The Origins of the British Red Cross Society’, p. 3. 13 R. Loyd Lindsay, ‘Help to the Wounded’, The Times (22 July 1870), 5. 14 P. Morris, First Aid to the Battlefront: Life and Letters of Sir Vincent Kennett-​Barrington, 1844–​1903 (Stroud: Sutton, 1992), pp. 5–​6; Gill, ‘The Origins of the British Cross Society’, pp. 6–​7; J. F. Hutchinson, ‘Civilian Ambulances and Lifesaving Societies: The European Experience, 1870–​ 1914’, in R. Cooter and B. Luckin (eds), Accidents in History (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 158–​78 (pp. 162–​3). 15 King, The Knights of St John, pp. 176–​89; Howie-​Willis, ‘Sir John Furley’, pp. 37–​42.

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16 He was a former papal camarero who had been a count of the Papal States since 1864, and former member of the House of Commons for the Irish county of Waterford (1866–​73). See B. Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland (London:  Harrison, 1871), pp. II, 1104; Marquis de Ruvigny (ed.), The Nobilities of Europe (London: Melville, 1909), pp. 15, 104, 207. 17 J. Furley, Among the Carlists (London: Tinsley, 1876), p. 20. 18 The male nurse Guillaume Bourgade de la Dardye would become a papal camarero secreto (like De la Poer) between 1886 and 1903. See A. Battandier, Annuaire pontifical catholique XVIII Année (Paris: Maison de la Bonne Presse, 1915), p. 639. 19 Furley, Among the Carlists, pp. 170–​1, 173, 176–​7, 186, 188. 20 The entitlement assigned to De la Poer was that of Knight of Justice. When he married in 1881, he passed to Knight of Devotion class. See de Ruvigny, The Nobilities of Europe, p. 260. 21 V. Kennett-​Barrington, Letters from the Carlist War (1874–​1876), ed. A. L. Lascelles and J. M. Alberich (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1987), pp. 18, 95. 22 ‘La Conférence de Bruxelles pour l’amélioration du sort des prisonniers de guerre’, Le mémorial diplomatique, 11:24 (1874), 378–​9. 23 ‘Manifeste de l’Alliance Universelle de l’Ordre et de la Civilisation’ (after May 1871), in Congrès de l’Alliance Universelle de l’Ordre et de la Civilisation (Paris: A. Pougin, 1872), p. III. 24 P. Boissier, History of the International Committee of the Red Cross: From Solferino to Tsushima (Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1985), p. 287. 25 ‘Projet pour servir de base à une convention diplomatique entre les états civilisés relative aux prisonniers de guerre’, in Congrès de l’Alliance Universelle de l’Ordre et de la Civilisation, pp. 13–​45. 26 ‘Conclusions’, in Congrès de l’Alliance Universelle de l’Ordre et de la Civilisation, p. 45. 27 See ‘Miscellaneous nº 1[–​2], 1874: Correspondence Respecting the Proposed Conference at Brussels on the Rules of Military Warfare’, United Kingdom Parliamentary Papers, 42 (1874). 28 G. Werner, ‘Les prisonniers de guerre’, in Académie de Droit International: Recueil des cours, 21:1 (1928), 5–​103 (pp. 17–​19); T. L. Dowdeswell, ‘The Brussels Peace Conference of 1874 and the Modern Laws of Belligerent Qualification’, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 54:3 (2017), 805–​50. 29 The fact that his father, the old Lord Eliot, was alive up to 1877 did not prevent his heir, William Gordon Cornwallis Eliot, from having been previously known by his father’s title. See J. G. Nichols, The Herald and Genealogist (London: Nichols & Nichols, 1873), Vol. VII, pp. 378–​9. 30 G. B. Smith, ‘Eliot, Edward Granville’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–​16). 31 J. F. Coverdale, The Basque Phase of Spain’s First Carlist War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 172. 32 The sitting of the Anglo-​French-​Spanish committee and its composition were reported by newspapers such as Le républicain de la Loire (23 February 1874); La correspondencia de España (23 February 1874); and La época (26 Februrary 1874). 33 Count of Ripalda to Gustav Moynier, 26 February 1874 (ICRC Archives, Geneva, Correspondence  –​Spain, 133). For the mission and composition of this committee, see Edouard Laboulaye, [note on the Société des Secours aux Blessés Espagnols], Journal des débats politiques et littéraires (1 March 1874), 3. 34 Society for the Relief of the Sick and Wounded of the Spanish War (ESR), Final Report of the Executive Committee ([London]: Wyman, not before January 1878). Preserved in the Museum of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, London (VIC-​BH/​45 166), the sixteen-​page proof leaflet

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is damaged: pp. 13–​14 are missing, and the bottom half of pp. 11–​12 is cut. Neither of the two letters referred to on p. 3 as appended to the leaflet is included in these proofs. The missing or mutilated pages involve a report of Kennett-​Barrington dated by hand as ‘London Aug 1874’. Its contents have some similarities with the letter he had sent from St-​Jean-​de-​Luz on 20 May 1874 to ‘the Secretary of the English Society for the Relief of the Sick and Wounded of the Spanish War’ regarding the maritime evacuation on the steamship the Somorrostro. See Kennett-​Barrington, Letters from the Carlist War, pp. 10–​13. 35 ESR, ‘First General Report’, in ibid., p. 8. 36 Ibid., p. 5. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., pp. 4–​8. 39 Allegedly, Furley met Captain Allen Young on 7 May 1874 in Santander, where he ‘had arrived in his beautiful yacht, the Dream, laden with hospital stores from an English society’. See Furley, Among the Carlists, p. 54. Young was often mentioned by Kennett-​Barrington regarding the Somorrostro maritime evacuation. See Kennett-​Barrington, Letters from the Carlist War, pp. 6, 8, 12, 13. 40 For the whole edition of his correspondence during the Carlist war, see Kennett-​Barrington, Letters from the Carlist War. 41 V. B. Barrington-​Kennett, Some Ambulance Operations during the Carlist, Turco-​Servian, and Turco-​Russian Wars: A Paper Read before the Knights of St John of Jerusalem in England at Their General Assembly on June 24th 1879 (London: Harrison & Sons, 1879), p. 3. 42 Kennett-​Barrington, Letters from the Carlist War, pp. xi, 88–​9, 101; Morris, First Aid to the Battlefront, pp.  8–​10; J. Arrizabalaga, P. Larraz-​Andía and G. Sánchez-​Martínez, ‘Between Medical Innovation and War Propaganda:  The Irache Hospital at the Second Carlist War, 1873–​1876’, in C. Bonfield, J. Reinartz and T. Huguet-​Termes (eds), Hospitals and Communities, 1100–​1960 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013), pp. 327–​62 (pp. 353–​5). 43 Furley, Among the Carlists, p. 49; ESR, ‘First General Report’, p. 7. 44 ESR, ‘First General Report’, p.  7. Just before the maritime evacuation of Carlist sick and wounded combatants from Santurce to Socoa, the Somorrostro had transported, from Castro Urdiales to Santander, ‘under the directions of C.  de Murrieta, 300 Government sick and wounded, part of those who fell at the forcing of the Muñecas Pass by Marshal Concha’. See ESR, ‘First Report of Barrington-​Kennett’, in Final Report of the Executive Committee, p. 12. 45 ESR, ‘First General Report’, pp. 5, 7. Not surprisingly, the Murrieta banking company also kept an account for the handling of Carlist funds open, through which, in June 1874, the insurgents received £8,280 to buy guns. See A. Pirala, Historia contemporánea: Anales desde 1843 hasta la conclusión de la actual guerra civil, 6 vols (Madrid: Manuel Tello, 1876–​9), Vol. V, p. 390. Pirala also mentioned that the ‘palacio de los señores Murrieta’ was damaged by the bombing of Santurce, Portugalete and Las Arenas by eight warships of the governmental navy (Vol. V, p. 237). See also Kennett-​Barrington, Letters from the Carlist War, p. xxviii. 46 J. McCarthy (ed.), Irish Literature, 10 vols (Washington: University of America, 1904), Vol. IV, pp. 1588–​90; J. D. Root, ‘The “Academia of the Catholic Religion”: Catholic Intellectualism in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 23:4 (1980), 461–​78 (p. 464). 47 Furley, Among the Carlists, pp. 21–​4. The third manager of La Caridad was its ‘superintendent of the nurses’, Josefa Vasco, Madame Calderón. 48 See C. Arenal, ‘La Caridad en la guerra’, La voz de la Caridad, 97 (15 March 1874), 5–​8; Laboulaye, [note on the Société des Secours aux Blessés Espagnols]. 49 ICRC Archives, letter from the count of Ripalda to Moynier, 10 March 1874.

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5 0 Furley, Among the Carlists, p. 1; Furley, In Peace and War, p. 298. 51 Furley, Among the Carlists, pp. 24, 286; Furley, In Peace and War, p. 298. 52 ‘My own resources were not sufficient to allow me to take an independent course; but I am quite sure the same plan which was frequently adopted during the Franco-​German war would have succeeded here. If I  had had a small portion of the support I  then enjoyed from the English Red Cross Society, I should have taken a bold initiative without any fear of failure. On such occasions, will, perseverance, and tact may do an infinity of good for suffering humanity, but money is an absolute necessity.’ Furley, Among the Carlists, p. 49. 53 Ibid., p. 24; Furley, In Peace and War, p. 298. 54 Furley, In Peace and War, pp. 298–​9. 55 Furley, Among the Carlists, p. 284. 56 Throughout the pages of Among the Carlists, Furley mentioned the British consuls in Santander (Mr March), Bilbao (Horace Young) and Bayonne (Mr Graham); the chancellor of the French Consulate in Bilbao (M. Béguin); a French consular agent in Pamplona (M. de Meurville); a French courier d’Ambassade; a Queen’s messenger (Major Herbert Byng Hall (1805–​83), who later authored Spain and the Seat of War in Spain (London: Henry Colburn, 1837)); and Mr and Mrs Hodgson, the owners of large mines close to Castro Urdiales. Among the newspaper correspondents were those of The Times (Mr March and Dr Austin), the Daily News (Mr Scarborough), Freeman’s Journal (Edmund O’Donovan), the Standard (Mr Houghton), the Paris journal Union (M. Maggiolo) and L’osservatore romano (M. Cassani). 57 Furley, Among the Carlists, p. 21. 58 ‘But  –​and this is not the first time I  have expressed such an opinion  –​no foreign society should be invited, nor should it consent, to relieve an army of any part of its own responsibilities. A gift, such as that to which I have just referred, of £5,000 worth of hospital stores, to be made through a Minister of State for equal division between two contending armies, whether engaged in civil or international wars, is really made to the respective Governments, and not to the sick and wounded.’ Ibid., p. 59. 59 Ibid., p. 60. 60 On this double experience, see J. Furley, Struggles and Experiences of a Neutral Volunteer, 2 vols (London: Chapman & Hall, 1872), Vol. I: In France amongst Germans, Vol. II: In and Out of Paris during the Commune. On the humanitarian action in France during the Franco-​Prussian war and the Commune see, among others, B. Taithe, Defeated Flesh: Medicine, Welfare, and Warfare in the Making of Modern France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); B. Taithe, Citizenship and Wars: France in Turmoil 1870–​1871 (London: Routledge, 2003); J. P. Martineaud, La Commune de Paris, l’assistance publique et les hôpitaux en 1871 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). 61 Furley, Among the Carlists, pp. 1–​2. 62 Ibid., pp. 70–​9, 168–​88. 63 In La época (31 July 1874) a letter was reproduced, addressed by O’Donovan to The Times, in which he remarked that he used laudanum. After the letter, the newspaper said in a complementary commentary that Furley was the director of the Carlist Ambulances, thus demonstrating a poor circulation of the information. 64 Furley, Among the Carlists, pp. 103–​55. 65 J. Arrizabalaga and P. Larraz-​Andía, ‘Humanitarianism, War Medicine and Propaganda: The Carlist Association La Caridad, 1873–​1876’, in P. L. Sanz (ed.), Health Institutions at the Origin of the Welfare Systems in Europe (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 2010), pp. 77–​107 (pp. 97–​102). 66 Furley, Among the Carlists, pp. 284–​5.

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Ibid., pp. 132–​3. Ibid., pp. 70, 109. Ibid., pp. 67–​8. Ibid., pp. 22–​3. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., pp. 22–​3, 74. Ibid., p. 160. Ibid., pp. 283–​4. Ibid., pp. 285–​6. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., pp. 286–​8. La Caridad’s viewpoint was expressed in a thought-​provoking anonymous article in El cuartel real (16 March 1875), 2–​3, which may well have been written by De Bourgade or Barrena. 78 Furley, Among the Carlists, p. 287. 79 J. Furley, ‘The Convention of Geneva, and National Societies for Aid to Sick and Wounded Soldiers in War’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, 20 (1877): 632–​57 (pp. 634, 640). 80 See Congrès international sur le service médical des armées en campagne tenu à Paris les 12, 13 et 14 août 1878 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1879), pp. 105–​35. For Furley’s views in this respect, see his ‘The Convention of Geneva’, p. 637. 6 7 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

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The early history of the Red Cross Society of China and its relation to the Red Cross Movement Caroline Reeves

On 5 March 1895, word spread through the north Chinese port city of Niuzhuang that the Japanese army was on its way to take the city.1 The Japanese had already conquered and devastated much of northern Manchuria in the Sino-​Japanese war of 1894–​5, and the Chinese civilians who had not yet fled Niuzhuang prepared what they could against the looming threat.2 Scottish medical missionary Dr Dugald Christie, a prominent figure in China’s European-​led first wave of the Red Cross Movement described the terror in the city: In the main street we noticed a very conspicuous Red Cross flag over what was manifestly an opium-​den. The owner emphatically protested his right to fly it, as he had been in the service of a foreign doctor years before. It was pathetic to see a little mud hut with poor tattered paper windows, and some half-​naked children huddling at the door, to watch their father put up a stick with a bit of dirty cotton at the end, on which were sewn some scraps of red in the rough form of a cross. ‘What is it for?’ we ask him. ‘To protect us when the foreigners come.’ ‘But what does it mean? What is the red cross for?’ ‘Who knows? They say foreigners won’t touch you if you have that.’3

In early 1895, the Red Cross symbol and Movement were new phenomena in China, mysterious to many but potentially powerful. Over the next few decades, peoples and nations around the world began to translate the symbol in their own ways, based on local traditions and national exigencies, and to form their own Red Cross societies according to local customs and prerogatives. During the same period, the Chinese people would also come to understand and accept the importance of the Red Cross institution and mission. The Red Cross symbol soon came to mean much more to the residents of north China than it did on that threatening day in March 1895. In 1895, despite local ignorance in Niuzhuang, the Red Cross symbol was already in use in many places around the world and already widely associated with Henri Dunant’s idea of a neutral voluntary medical force serving on the battlefield.4 The British had formed a Red Cross-​type organisation in 1870, just seven years after

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the founding of the international group. The Americans inaugurated their society in 1880.5 The Japanese founded their society in 1887 and it would become the largest society in the world by 1900.6 Following the Japanese attack in 1894, knowledge of the Red Cross Movement in China began with American-​educated Chinese in Shanghai, and European medical missionaries and Japanese armies working in the field, and soon spread among the Chinese people and their rulers. This chapter discusses the earliest history of the Red Cross Movement in China, leading up to the founding of China’s own Red Cross Society in 1904 by a group of Chinese elites. By that time, the Red Cross Movement had become familiar to the imperial Chinese Government and to a growing cadre of Chinese intellectuals, merchants and officials. How did the Chinese understanding of the Red Cross Movement develop over the course of its introduction into China? How did Chinese officials, elites and civilians come to adopt this western organisation, permeated by principles and preoccupations foreign to China’s own cultural and material context? The first part of the Red Cross story in China is one of American-​trained Chinese and western medical doctors and civilians taking action to help the wounded in the name of the Red Cross during the Sino-​Japanese war of 1894–​5. Highlighting these individuals’ perceptions of their work in China, I  explore Red Cross humanitarianism as a site of demonstration of the western ‘civilising influence’ on the East. Yet the important and timely intercession of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) ensured that the first official Red Cross Society of China was not led by this group, but awaited formation by the Chinese people themselves. As knowledge of the Red Cross Movement spread in China, different Chinese constituents began to support and circulate information about the Movement on their own terms. A mere four years after the close of the war, the Chinese Government took the initiative to form an indigenous Chinese Red Cross organisation. This chapter also examines this initiative, and uncovers the original Chinese debates regarding China’s adherence to the Geneva Conventions and formation of a Red Cross Society. Sparked by the 1899 meeting at The Hague, these debates reveal important insights and correctives to the idea of ‘universality’ in the Red Cross Movement. The evidence from this first decade of the Red Cross Movement in China reveals the historical and cultural variability and evolution of the Movement, and challenges the widely accepted heroic narratives of founding espoused by the international Red Cross establishment. ‘From very shame, and perhaps from higher motives’ Dr Dugald Christie, the Scots medical missionary who observed the Chinese in Niuzhuang appropriating the Red Cross symbol for their protection as the Japanese approached, was an important member of a cadre of western medical missionaries and American-​educated Chinese who had taken it upon themselves to form a Red Cross society in China during the Sino-​Japanese war. Founded in Shanghai soon after

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the outbreak of the war by Mrs N. P. Andersen, a group calling itself the Shanghai Chinese Red Cross Society supported Christie’s medical efforts in north China.7 Mrs Andersen was the Chinese Christian wife of a Danish sea captain who worked for the Customs Service in Shanghai. She had grown up in an Americanised household, the oldest daughter of Tsang Lai-​sun (Zeng Laishun), a Chinese Christian who had been educated in America and who often served as an intermediary between the foreign community and progressive members of the Qing court.8 Mrs Andersen was a crusader for a number of social causes in China and often the only Chinese woman on various expatriate committees and boards.9 In 1894, two weeks after the outbreak of the war, Mrs Andersen announced her new endeavour in the North China Herald, China’s most influential English-​ language paper (where her brother was a reporter).10 Under the headline ‘Red Cross Philanthropy’, she appealed to foreign residents of Shanghai to ‘send in parcels of old table napkins, worn-​out sheets, etc’ to use as bandages in North China’s recently established military hospitals.11 Eventually serving as vice-​president of the new Red Cross group, Mrs Andersen, with her family, would become the nexus of a network of Chinese elites who supported and advocated for the Red Cross Movement in China, along with an active and vocal group of expatriate Christians. This organisation grew throughout the war, providing money, medical services and materials to help Chinese soldiers at the front. Spearheaded by Mrs Andersen and overwhelmingly funded by Chinese elites, the Shanghai Chinese Red Cross Society collected over 3,000 silver taels’ worth of medical supplies and organised medical care under Red Cross auspices for approximately 1,400 wounded in Tianjin alone.12 From the start of the war, the issue of the Red Cross Movement in Asia was hotly discussed in the English-​language Chinese press. The existence of a Japanese Red Cross society and the absence of a ‘native’ Chinese Red Cross society sparked voluminous commentary on what the existence of such a society might connote about the host nation. The overwhelming rhetoric among the western community on the topic of the Red Cross in China was one of disparagement of the Chinese, and much of the English-​language commentary surrounding the new western-​led organisation focused on the importance of furnishing a model of correct Red Cross behaviour to Chinese civilians, officials and soldiers. Some of the commentary conflated the lack of a Chinese governmental military medical service with the lack of a Red Cross organisation. This mistake exemplified a much debated issue across the Red Cross Movement: whether or not it was wise to take responsibility for the well-​being of a nation’s soldiery out of the hands of the Government and put it into the hands of a voluntary aid society. These are the same grounds on which Florence Nightingale had opposed the formation of the original Red Cross group three decades earlier.13 Others were clear that it was the responsibility of the Chinese Government to provide for its soldiers on the battlefield, and that forming a Red Cross organisation in China was a mistake because it further absolved the backward Chinese Government of its duties towards its military. When

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a Tianjin-​based ‘Red Cross’ mission set sail for Port Arthur (Lushun) aboard the ship Toonan in November 1894, and the Japanese turned the mission back on account of its lack of official Red Cross credentials, an article soon appeared in the North China Herald saying, ‘The lay mind of Tientsin looks on the action of the Japanese re: the Red Cross business with some satisfaction; many feel that the humanitarians were acting in a very short-​sighted manner of relieving the Chinese government of its bounden duty and obligation toward its own wounded.’14 Other contemporary newspaper and missionary reports stressed the example provided to the Chinese populace by the foreign Red Cross efforts. Dr Daly, who served in Niuzhuang, wrote about how his work would give recognition to the Red Cross mission and symbol in China. The Red Cross Hospital, established here [in Niuzhuang] and in other ports, will have the effect of bringing the Red Cross institutions forcibly to the notice of Chinese officials, and also spread the knowledge and meaning of such institutions to the soldiers and inhabitants of many provinces, as the patients who are recruited from many parts of China thoroughly appreciate the fact that the flag floating over their heads indicates a place of refuge and aid for the wounded, and affords protection from the enemy.15

Others who held similar ideas were less gracious: ‘Such deplorable ignorance can only be cured by proper education  –​by putting the Red Cross idea in its true footing’, stating that the charitable efforts begun by Mrs Anderson would serve as a lesson to Chinese officials.16 Dr B. C. Atterbury, who was decorated in 1896 by the dowager empress for his Red Cross work during the war, summed up this attitude: Worthy of notice is the value of the Red Cross Society in stirring up the Chinese official to something like a realization of what they themselves owe to their own soldiers. The idea of a number of foreigners contributing time and money in such efforts was novel to them. From very shame, and perhaps from higher motives, several of the most influential took a lively interest in the work and helped in many ways.17

Some elite Chinese already involved with China’s efforts to modernise along western lines chimed in to agree with these sentiments. American-​trained Chinese doctor V. P. Suvoong wrote in the China Medical Missionary Journal, ‘Being a Chinese, I am filled with profound humiliation that China, with all her boasted learning of Classic memory, never gives a thought of pity to those that are wounded in her defense.’ He called for the creation of a Red Cross society for China, ‘in a word doing as a civilized nation ought to do’.18 These western and westernised observers were undoubtedly sincere in their views of Chinese attitudes towards their soldiers. But even those doctors who worked

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closely with, or published the reports of, Chinese doctor Kin Ta-​ting ( Jin Dating), the chief medical officer of the Imperial Army, ignored or seemed unaware of the Chinese army’s own medical efforts in the field, or of Chinese support for the Red Cross mission.19 Dr Kin’s involvement in north China had been solicited by Chinese general Yuan Shikai, who ‘begged [Li Hongzhang, commander-​in-​chief of the north China army] most earnestly to send a medical officer to open a field hospital’ near Mukden. Chinese officials were well aware of the need for medical assistance for the troops. The problem, however, was China’s scarcity of medically trained doctors. Dr Kin noted that until his arrival, only ‘native doctors’ were attending to the wounded, rather than western-​trained biomedical doctors, and that ‘had the army possessed a proper medical corps most of the wounded might have quickly been cured and restored to their duties’.20 In fact, the overall medical situation in the Sino-​Japanese war was not unlike the medical situation in the American Civil War a mere thirty years earlier.21 Thus the rampant denigration of China’s military medical situation in western accounts overlooked how recently biomedicine had come into use elsewhere in the world, and how the situation among China’s soldiers was not unique or even uniquely bad. These attitudes were exacerbated by Japan’s widely publicised Red Cross activity on the battlefield with China. At the start of the war, western observers in Mukden wrote, the more one learns about the state of affairs in China and Japan, the more one sympathizes with the latter … Japan is winning European sympathy because her ways are so much more civilized and humane than those of her vast and unwieldy rival. That the Japanese have for years had an admirably managed Red Cross Society, founded by themselves, is certainly a most remarkable fact.22

It was a fact, moreover, that spoke ‘more for reality of her assimilation of Western civilization’ than even her Parliament or military advancements.23 These attitudes towards Japan’s Red Cross presence during the war were widely held for more than a decade, when the Chinese finally founded their own indigenous society. Despite any comparisons or criticisms, the efforts of the new Society were actually extremely successful, even according to western observers. Over 3,000 silver taels’ worth of medical supplies were sent to the front, where they were administered by Dr Kin. Approximately 1,400 wounded were treated under Red Cross auspices in Tianjin alone.24 And Chinese people from up and down the social spectrum recognised the importance of Red Cross work. Local officials approved Red Cross initiatives in their areas. For example, Dr Christie opened a ‘Red Cross hospital’ in a rented inn in Niuzhuang in December 1894, with approval from the local magistrate.25 These hospitals, although originally suspect among the Chinese soldiers, eventually won their trust, and reports from Niuzhuang tell of a gradual increase in patients until the eight-​man western medical team was treating more than 200

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wounded Chinese soldiers a day.26 Prominent Chinese officials also supported the new organisation, including Viceroy (Governor-​General) Liu Kunyi, who received permission from the emperor to bestow official rewards on Red Cross president Austrian Consul-​General von Haas and Mrs Andersen for their contributions. Dr Christie and other doctors also received recognition from the emperor for their Red Cross activities.27 Soon after the war ended, the empress dowager herself recognised Dr Atterbury for his Red Cross work.28 Certain activities simply could not have taken place without Government sanction. For example, the Toonan mission mentioned above had been approved and credentialled by Governor-​General Li Hongzhang, one of China’s most respected officials of the time, who was an open supporter of the Red Cross Movement.29 Li had even offered personally to bankroll the Red Cross’s activities in Tianjin, his bailiwick. Thus it appears that despite any western rhetoric negatively characterising the Chinese for their lack of humanity, civilisation, biomedical training, or governmental responsibility for its military, many Chinese soldiers, civilians and officials did embrace the principles trumpeted by the western critics. Moreover, by learning about the activities of foreign Red Cross societies, including the Japanese Red Cross Society, Chinese observers learnt to appreciate the Red Cross Movement, and espouse its ideals. The western doctors involved in the Red Cross Movement in China during this period applied to the ICRC for official recognition of their Shanghai Chinese Red Cross Society, but their request was denied. Gustav Moynier wrote to the western petitioners, applauding their extensive accomplishments but insisting on two points. First, since China had not yet signed the Geneva Convention of 1864, there could not be any official recognition for a Chinese Red Cross society; and second, since the society that the missionaries had formed was ‘composed exclusively of foreigners’, it could not be recognised as China’s national society. As Moynier pointed out, the single society per state ‘must have a national character’. In the same letter, Moynier also noted that the ICRC had not yet solicited imperial China to join the Geneva Conventions because, as he put it, ‘we do not believe that the Chinese people are sufficiently civilized, from the point of view of the laws of war, to observe faithfully the Geneva Convention, even if their Emperor were to sign it’.30 In other words, China was neither civilised nor colonised enough to allow the missionaries’ organisation to be recognised by the ICRC.31 Thus the opportunity for the Chinese to form their own Red Cross society remained open after the Sino-​Japanese war of 1894–​5. The Hague Conference of 1899: civilisation and the politics of peace ‘Civilisation’ was a critical term in the international society of the late nineteenth century.32 With it came many of the dominant European and American assumptions of cultural, racial, religious and moral superiority. ‘Being civilised’ was the sine qua

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non of entry into the so-​called family of nations. Solidarity based on Christianity and the commitment to Christianise, paramount in the eighteenth century, had become less imperative with the secularisation of Europe in the wake of industrialisation, and other values took Christianity’s place as benchmarks of civilisation.33 While still firmly rooted in Christianity, secular enlightenment values such as the rule of law, the supremacy of progress (including material prosperity), the ability to wage modern warfare and the authority of science began supplanting earlier criteria in the nineteenth century.34 The equation between the existence of a national Red Cross organisation and the presence of civilisation was current in the late nineteenth century, as the comparison between China and Japan mentioned above reveals. States that did not participate in the organisation were suspect, and their status as ‘civilised’ compromised, regardless of racial or religious credentials. For example, America’s attitude as a relative latecomer to the Red Cross Movement vexed Red Cross supporters.35 The United States had refused to sign the Geneva Convention for many years and was explicitly hesitant about creating a national Red Cross organisation. When Louis Appia, one of the Swiss founders of the Red Cross, asked Clara Barton, well known for her relief work in the American Civil War, why the United States would not support the new Red Cross Movement or sign the Geneva Convention, Barton reflected: Not a civilized people in the world but ourselves missing, and saw Greece, Spain, and Turkey there. I began to fear that in the eyes of ‘the rest of mankind’ we could not be far from barbarians. This reflection did not furnish a stimulating food for national pride. I grew more and more ashamed.36

Barton was not alone in this view of the Red Cross Movement. The line between civilisation and barbarism was a clearly marked one, and the existence of a national Red Cross society helped put a state on the right side of the divide. In 1899, what did it mean to be civilised? The First International Peace Conference at The Hague, convened by Russian Tsar Nicholas II to discuss peace, provides an answer repeated at all successive peace conferences and that remains appropriate today. To be civilised, a state must have the capacity to wage war, but choose instead to pursue peace. Despite the apparent weight given to humanitarian measures of civilisation, the less delicate side of civilisation was paramount, as the agenda of the 1899 Hague Conference reveals. As Akira Iriye argues, despite lofty rhetoric stressing humanitarianism and legal regulation, by the late nineteenth century the ‘prerequisites for membership’ in the society of nations—​and thus presumably the ultimate determinant of civilisation—​were actually ‘armaments, successful military campaigns, and colonies’.37 The case of Japan in the late nineteenth century highlights this paradoxical trend. Despite the agenda of westernisation Japan pursued through the Meiji period (1868–​1912), it was not until Japan successfully took on the Chinese in the Sino-​Japanese war that it received recognition as a ‘civilised’ state.

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The Hague conference was considered important not just in defining civilised behaviour for states; it was also a critical arbiter in determining which states were civilised. Contemporary American observer Joseph Choate remarked that any country participating in the Hague Conference had ‘been recognized as an equal power vested with complete and perfect nationality and equal sovereignty, and entitled to be treated as a civilized nation, and not to be classed with African aborigines as a fair prey for the spoiler’.38 The guest list for the conference thus became cause for much international interest. Although popular sentiment in the international community still echoed Emerson’s nineteenth-​century summation of China’s international position –​‘China, reverend dulness [sic]! hoary ideot [sic]!, all she can say at the convocation of nations must be –​I made the tea’ –​Tsar Nicholas II had invited China to the conference as a full player.39 Like many non-​European states, China interpreted the invitation as a marker of inclusion in civilised society. The conference offered a much-​coveted opportunity to join with the great powers to sculpt the legal framework of international society –​or at least to been seen as so doing. For the Qing State, or at least a small coterie within the court, the invitation represented important international recognition and gave China considerable ‘face’. This event allowed China to appear on the world stage participating in great power diplomacy, not as a victim or as a defeated enemy, but as an equal. Although welcome, the recognition that the invitation seemed to convey was also deeply ironic. From the Opium Wars (1839–​42, 1856–​60) to the most recent ignominious defeat by the Japanese in 1895, Qing China had not fared well at the hands of international forces in the nineteenth century. Unequal treaties, extraterritoriality, treaty ports, and territorial concessions brought home the dominant force of the West –​and Japan –​over China. Lacking a Red Cross organisation and much more, China (unlike Japan) had been seen as far from achieving the necessary levels of civilisation to be considered part of the international community. The Sino-​Japanese war of 1894–​5, fought on many fronts –​both military and humanitarian –​had served to highlight China’s weaknesses. Catapulting Japan’s progress towards attaining civilisation into the international spotlight, China’s defeat had shown observers how far ‘behind’ China was, especially compared with her island neighbour. The subsequent ‘scramble for concessions’ –​a full-​scale territorial grab by European powers as part of the New Imperialism –​resulted after this realisation of China’s vulnerability. The invitation to the conference, therefore, was all the more attractive to China. It seemed to offer an intimation of diplomatic parity and the chance to join the civilised world, especially coming at a moment when China was facing the spectre of being ‘carved up like a melon’.40 On 26 March 1899, an imperial edict was issued to Yang Ru, China’s minister to Russia, Austria and Holland, in residence at the St Petersburg court, ordering Yang to proceed to the Netherlands to serve as China’s chief delegate to the Peace Conference at The Hague.41

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China at The Hague The First Hague Peace Conference opened on 18 May 1899. Yang Ru’s presence as China’s chief representative to the Hague Conference and that of his colleagues elicited intense interest from western delegates at The Hague. The ‘Chinamen’ in their ‘outlandish costume[s]‌’ were considered exotic and a curiosity. In contrast, the Japanese delegation –​already ‘civilised’ in their western dress –​aroused no such response. George William Frederick Holls, the American secretary, noted, ‘it should be remarked that the distinguished Chinese delegate and his associates followed the discussions most carefully’.42 China’s chief delegate Yang Ru did not sign any of the conventions or declarations at the treaty’s official signing on 29 July 1899, citing his responsibility to wait for his Government’s instructions before proceeding. China’s reticence was not unusual.43 Yang’s correspondence with the Qing court after the conference, however, reveals much about concerns as to China’s place in international society and her inclusion in international treaties. Yang’s recommendations for adhering to certain parts of the agreement frequently suggest ‘following the majority’, revealing a primary concern with demonstrating China’s willingness to co-​operate with the world powers.44 Yang Ru’s communications single out the extension of the 1864 Geneva Convention and the creation of a Red Cross society for special attention among the issues raised in the treaty. The reputational benefits to China of working within the treaty’s stipulations far outweighed any Qing concerns about any of its other aspects. They carried more weight than the burden of material obligations outlined in the treaty (such as the provision of biomedical relief services in wartime), which Qing officials immediately recognised and noted as impossible. They even overcame reservations about the symbol of the cross, which the Red Cross organisation imposed on signatories of the Geneva Convention (although it was not until 1904 that the Chinese actually displayed a Red Cross flag). Furthermore, any disparities in belief systems were overcome by reinterpreting the obligations of the treaty in terms of China’s own cultural context. Primus inter pares was becoming a recognised member of the civilised international community. This achievement was a critical component of China’s state-​building mission, assuring any other considerations would be pushed to the background. In his communications with the Chinese court, Yang insists that adherence to the Geneva Convention and the formation of a national Chinese Red Cross society was critical diplomatic manoeuvres for China. The Convention for the Adaptation to Maritime Warfare of the Principles of the Geneva Convention of 1864 had met with unanimous approval at The Hague. Although the Qing bureaucracy did not have the personnel or the resources to set up western-​style hospitals in Chinese port cities (where foreigners congregated), nor to build or man the hospital ships called for

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in the convention, the obstacles posed by the treaty could –​and would have to –​be overcome, according to Yang’s report. Yang explained: All other countries regard the Red Cross Society as a humane endeavour, a product of civilisation [wenhua]. Japan has already established such a group, sponsored by the Government and supported by the people. This group has had much success. If we do not join [the Red Cross Movement], it will seem as if we are the only country not performing these good deeds. It will be hard to justify ourselves. If we follow the Japanese model and create such a society, however, it will be a swift and easy way to show that China can conform with others … If we do not sign, the foreigners will suspect China of segregation, and later, when there is another treaty beneficial to China, the foreigners will not be willing to negotiate with us as cordial friends.45

Yang’s concern with the treaty is as much one of setting a precedent in the world community as it is of interest in the content of the agreement. Assessing the Geneva Convention pragmatically, Yang did not address debates of eastern versus western humanitarian philosophy, nor even capacity. His focus was on China’s international status. Yang wanted to make sure China was not left behind or left out, ‘the only country not performing these good deeds’. In a later memorial, he elaborated: If we join [this treaty], in the future when international conventions deciding postal issues, commercial matters, or international law [are being held], we can cite China’s involvement in this conference as a precedent, and thus we will no longer be excluded. The advantages here are numerous and significant. This is a great turning point in China’s recent foreign relations.46

The Qing discussion of the extension of the Geneva Convention to Maritime War (part of the treaty) became increasingly focused on the creation of a Red Cross society in China. Prince Qing, head of China’s foreign affairs, pronounced that although the Red Cross is ‘something China’s army and navy have never had before, the trend is that China must not become isolated. It does no harm to show that China can follow along [with the other countries] and demonstrate that China, too, performs moral and virtuous deeds.’47 Agreeing with Yang Ru, Prince Qing, an influential member of the court, also expressed the opinion that in this case, particularly, China needed to demonstrate its ability to function according to western precepts of civilised behaviour and to join the western nations on their terms. Apparently intrigued, the court ordered more information about ‘the so-​called Red Cross activities’.48 In response, Prince Qing delivered another memorial, introducing a brief history of the Red Cross Society. In this document, the conflation of the Red Cross and the Geneva Convention became complete. For this audience’s intents and purposes, the Geneva Convention became synonymous with a call for the creation of a national Red Cross society.

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Situating the Red Cross organisation in a Chinese context, the Prince suggested that establishing a Red Cross society was a political custom of western governments, based on a concept resembling the ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi’s idea of jian ai, universal love.49 Echoing Yang, the Prince explicitly stressed the fact that nations around the globe considered the Red Cross mission a most desirable, compassionate undertaking. The peer pressure of international society was clearly at work here. The Prince, on behalf of the Zongli Yamen (foreign ministry), recommended that China join the treaty.50 On 6 December 1899, the throne approved the signing of the 1864 Geneva Convention and all articles of the Hague Treaty except the Land War Convention.51 Yang’s final report, dated 28 January 1900, summarised his experiences at The Hague and confirmed his authorisation to sign the approved parts of the treaty.52 The large part of his memorial is dedicated to the Red Cross Society. Yang’s enthusiasm for the formation of a Red Cross society in China and his desire to take part in that project bubbles through the formal language of the official memorial. In his final memorial, the public face of the endeavour was crucial. China should quickly establish a Red Cross group in order to show China’s good intent to the world, he wrote. The Japanese Society’s rules and regulations could serve as a model for China’s group. Funds would initially come from the imperial treasury, which would ‘lead the country’ in supporting the organisation. According to Yang’s vision, solicitations could be made, presumably among the elite (shenshi), and ‘from small sums, a great sum would be collected’.53 Yang’s plans for the Society’s immediate future also included ‘building hospitals, purchasing [hospital] ships, storing medicines, training personnel and setting up establishments in treaty ports’. Yang went so far as to suggest himself as head of the Chinese Red Cross Society. ‘My term [as foreign minister] ends next spring’, he notes; ‘if I receive your favour and may return to China, I would be more than happy to take charge of this endeavour, as well as to donate 5,000 taels of silver from my salary as a meagre contribution, so that we can quickly set up a model’. Yang had only one reservation about the organisation as it stood. Following the examples of Persia, the Ottoman Empire and Siam (countries that voiced similar objections at the conference), Yang proposed a modification of the Red Cross symbol for use within China, ‘because China’s culture and religion [wenjiao] are unlike [those of the Europeans], it would be inappropriate for China to adopt the sign of the cross’.54 This departure from the policy of ‘following the majority’ may have been a concession to China’s domestic isolationists, signalling recognition of the anti-​Christian feeling already beginning to crest in China as part of the Boxer Movement of 1900. As an alternative, ‘in order to show China’s difference’, Yang suggested adding two strokes to make the cross a zhong (中), as in Zhonghua (China) or adding four strokes to the cross to make it into the character wan (卐, the Buddhist swastika). Here Yang suggested differentiating China and China’s culture

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from the assembled western nations and not ‘following the majority’. Although sensitive to western dominance, Yang Ru saw this issue as an opportunity to align China with other non-​western states. Siam, Persia and Turkey were countries whose outspoken resistance to the Christian chauvinism of the western majority (although ostensibly unintentional in the case of the Red Cross symbol) was clearly inspiring to China’s representative.55 Unfortunately, at this point Yang Ru’s discussions with the court came to an abrupt halt. Just as China was taking these steps to improve her status in the international community, the Boxer Uprising, an anti-​foreign, anti-​Christian peasant uprising erupted in China.56 The Hague Convention was quickly put aside by officials overwhelmed with the domestic crisis and the documents for ratification lost. The same ‘international community’ that China was trying so hard to join banded together to crush the uprising and impose yet another staggering indemnity on China. The only Red Cross activity during the uprising was that organised by the Japanese, whose Red Cross hospital ships waited offshore to care for the wounded of the ‘civilised’ nations crushing China’s revolt.57 Yang Ru’s energies were redirected to negotiating an exit from this crisis. The Red Cross initiative would not be rekindled again until 1904, when the pendulum swung back to a more open foreign policy, and the Russo-​Japanese war once more brought national and international humanitarian relief into the domestic Chinese spotlight. To Yang Ru, a diplomat with extensive overseas experience, and to Prince Qing, chief member of the Zongli Yamen, the signing of the Hague Convention and participation in the Red Cross Movement offered China an opportunity to ‘join in great power diplomacy on equal footing’.58 Rather than springing out of an actual relief action or war situation (the normative genesis of national Red Cross societies in hagiographic narratives), in 1899 the formation of a Red Cross society was seen by the Qing imperial court as a diplomatic tool, a badge of civilisation worn to enter a certain club, a mark of belonging and a sign of incipient sovereignty. The decision to form a national Red Cross society was one based neither on important re-​evaluations of China’s moral standards, nor on a radical reinterpretation of the meaning of civilisation in China’s own cultural and historical context, but on the importance of being included in the comity of nations. The normative force of international society, although a very fledgling society compared to that of today, was already working powerfully. Conclusion The history of the introduction of the Red Cross Movement into China reveals a significant deviation from the traditional depiction of the spread of the Red Cross Movement around the world. Rather than following the Red Cross establishment’s conventional narrative stressing the adoption of Dunant’s mythically universal humanitarian agenda, the origins of the Red Cross idea in China actually followed

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a different path: first one in which the Chinese Government, military and culture were shamed by non-​Chinese, and then one of diplomatic strategising by China’s State leaders hoping to be included in the international community of the turn of the twentieth century. As M. Abbenhuis notes, ‘The internationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a decisive Euro-​centric and Anglo-​centric flavor, which was an unsurprising consequence of the fact that European (including Anglo-​American) standards dictated the form of most global interactions.’59 By the time Chinese humanitarian leaders actually founded a Chinese-​led, Chinese-​ directed national Chinese Red Cross society in 1904, the idea of the Red Cross in China had already become associated not necessarily with humanitarianism, but with national sovereignty, international status, international protection on the battlefield and cultural dignity.60 Despite the apparent success of the Red Cross Movement’s ideological conformity around the world, this story reveals that behind the superficial isomorphism suggested by the creation of national societies and their adherence to the international Movement lies a diversity of meanings and motivations often far from those traditionally associated with the Red Cross establishment. Despite the romantic appeal of the trope of an exceptional individual undergoing an epiphany, revealing the universal truth of the Red Cross principles and then spearheading the establishment of a voluntary humanitarian organisation on behalf of their respective country (think Dunant, Barton or –​just plain mistakenly –​Nightingale), the reality –​at least in the Chinese case –​was far from that story. As independent historians correct that picture of Red Cross history for the world, a more genuine, inclusive and culturally accepting Red Cross regime can establish itself in the world community. Notes 1 Niuzhuang is the historical name of Yingkou, Liaoning Province. 2 S. C. M. Paine, The Sino-​Japanese War of 1894–​1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) is one of the few books to take on this important conflict. 3 For a biography of Christie, see I. I. Christie, Dugald Christie of Manchuria, Pioneer and Medical Missionary: The Story of a Life with a Purpose (London: J. Clarke, 1932); D. Christie, Thirty Years in Moukden 1883–​1913 (London: J. Clarke, 1914), pp. 101–​2. 4 For this history, see C. Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: HarperCollins, 1999). 5 The American Red Cross did not officially become part of the Red Cross Movement until 1882, when it was recognised by the International Committee of the Red Cross; J. F. Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 22. 6 F. Käser, ‘A Civilized Nation:  Japan and the Red Cross 1877–​1900’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 23:1–​2 (2016), 16–​32. This article reviews the literature on the founding of the Japanese Red Cross Society and discusses many of the same issues I discuss for the Chinese case. 7 North China Herald (17 January 1896), 97.

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8 E. J.  M. Rhoads, ‘In the Shadow of Yung Wing:  Zeng Laishun and the China Educational Mission to the United States’, Pacific Historical Review, 74:1 (February 2005), 19–​58. 9 C. T. Smith, Chinese Christians:  Elites, Middlemen, and the Church in Hong Kong (Hong Kong:  Hong Kong University Press, 2005), p.  73. She also worked on anti-​footbinding campaigns. 10 North China Herald (17 August 1894), p. 293. Mrs Andersen’s brother Spencer Laisun worked for the North China Daily News, the daily paper of the weekly Herald. 11 Notably, the appeal was actually sent in by a western male intermediary on her behalf. 12 China Educational Mission participant Tong Kidson  –​that is, Tong Wing Chun/​Tang Rongjun  –​was responsible for much of the fundraising; North China Herald (17 January 1896), 97F; B. C. Atterbury, ‘Red Cross Work in Tientsin’, China Medical Missionary Journal, 9:4 (December 1895), 213–​15 (p. 214), and other hospital reports in the same journal issue, passim to p. 225; CEMConnections.org, ‘Tong Wing Chun’, www.cemconnections.org/​index. php?option=com_​content&task=view&id=137 (accessed 30 October 2018). 13 J. F. Hutchinson, Champions of Charity (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 40–​3. This debate continues today; see, for example, L. Polman, War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times (London: Viking, 2011). 14 North China Herald (7 December 1894), p. 931. 15 North China Herald (22 March 1895), p. 445. 16 V. P. Suvoong, ‘Medicine in China’, China Medical Missionary Journal, 8:4 (December 1894), 192–​9 (p. 199). 17 Atterbury, ‘Red Cross Work in Tientsin’, p. 214; H. Corbett, ‘China’s Claim upon the Church in America’, Missionary Review of the World, 21 (1898), 127–​32 (p. 130). 18 Suvoong, ‘Medicine in China’, p. 199. 19 CEMConnections.org, ‘Kin Ta Ting’, www.cemconnections.org/​index.php?option=com_​ content&task=view&id=84 (accessed 30 October 2018). 20 Kin Ta Ting, ‘Report of Doctor Kin of the Viceroys’ Hospital, Tientsin’, China Medical Missionary Journal, 9:4 (December 1895), 215–​16 (p. 215). Dr Kin counted over 1,300 soldiers treated in his hospitals, although not all were under the Red Cross aegis. 21 J. E. McCallum, Military Medicine:  From Ancient Times to the 21st Century (Santa Barbara: ABC-​CLIO, 2008), pp. 61, 109 offers some statistics that compare Japan’s medical situation in the war with the American Civil War. China’s situation was worse, but not markedly so. 22 Ibid. 23 North China Herald (26 October 1894), p. 678. 24 North China Herald (17 January 1896), p. 97; Atterbury, ‘Red Cross Work in Tientsin’, p. 214, and other hospital reports, passim to p. 225. 25 Christie, Dugald Christie, p. 99. 26 North China Herald (30 December 1894), p. 301; (2 August 1895), pp. 184, 197. 27 Christie, Dugald Christie, pp. 107–​8. 28 Corbett, ‘China’s Claim’, p. 130. 29 A. Nagao, La Guerre Sino-​Japonaise au point de vue du droit international (Paris:  A. Pedone, 1896), p. 121; North China Herald (11 January 1895), p. 42. 30 This is not exactly accurate, of course. See P. Boissier, Histoire du Comité International de la Croix-​Rouge de Solferino à Tsoushima (Paris: Plon, 1963), p. 420. 31 Käser discusses the four criteria presented to the Japanese by Moynier in order to be considered for inclusion in the Red Cross Movement: ‘morals; law; Western medicine; and acknowledgement of the Red Cross emblem’; Käser, ‘A Civilized Nation’, p. 23.

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32 This section is based on work previously published in C. Reeves, ‘From Red Crosses to Golden Arches:  China, the Red Cross, and the Hague Peace Conference, 1899–​1900’, in J. Bentley, R. Bridenthal and A. Yang (eds), Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), pp. 64–​93. On the term ‘civilisation’, see G. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); and T. Winichakul, ‘The Quest for Siwilai: A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational Thinking in the Late 19th and Early 20th C. Siam’, Journal of Asian Studies, 59:3 (August 2000), 528–​49. Käser also touches on this topic in reference to the Japanese; Käser, ‘A Civilized Nation’, p. 23 and passim. 33 H. Bull and A. Watson (eds), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 125. 34 Winichakul, ‘The Quest’, p. 530, and esp. n. 5; A. von Siebold, Japan’s Accession to the Comity of Nations (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1901), pp. 47, 66. 35 Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, p. 92. 36 C. Barton, The Red Cross: A History of This Remarkable International Movement in the Interest of Humanity (Albany:  J. B.  Lyon, 1898), pp. 60–​72; quotation from I. Ross, Angel of the Battlefield: The Life of Clara Barton (New York: Harper, 1956), p. 106. 37 A. Iriye, China and Japan in the Global Setting (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 18. 38 J. Choate, The Two Hague Conferences (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1913), p.  26 (italics mine). 39 Ralph Waldo Emerson, letter to Mary Moody Emerson, 6 April 1824, in Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), Vol. VII, p. 127. 40 Rudolph Wagner discusses this expression in his article ‘ “Dividing Up the [Chinese] Melon, guafen  瓜分”:  The Fate of a Transcultural Metaphor in the Formation of National Myth’, Transcultural Studies, 1 (2017), https://​heiup.uni-​heidelberg.de/​journals/​index.php/​ transcultural/​article/​view/​23700/​17430 (accessed 21 October 2019). 41 Wang Yanwei and Wang Liang (comps), Qingji waijiao shiliao, 9 vols (Taipei:  Wenhai Chubanshe, 1964), Vol. IV, p. 552. 42 C. Davis, The United States and the First Hague Peace Conference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), p. 108; F. Holls, The Peace Conference at The Hague and Its Bearing on International Law and Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1900), p. 325. 43 China was not alone in not signing; J.  B. Scott (ed.), The Proceedings of the Hague Peace Conferences (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), passim; Holls, The Peace Conference, p. 325. ‘All powers represented signed the final act, but only seventeen of the powers signed all the conventions and declarations. Of the great powers Russia and France had signed all documents. Delegates of Great Britain, Italy, Germany and Austria-​Hungary [of the great powers] chose to sign no conventions or declarations, preferring to leave to their governments all decision concerning these documents. The United States signed the first convention and the first declaration’; Davis, The United States and the First Hague Peace Conference, p. 182. 44 The following material is taken from Yang Ru, memorial to the throne, GX25.9.4 (4 October 1899), Taibei, Waijiaobu Archives,1–​28–​1 (3). For a revised version of this memorial, leaving out many of Yang’s pithy comments, see Wang and Wang, Qingji waijiao shiliao, Vol. V, p. 26, document dated GX25.9.11 (11 October 1899). 45 Although wenhua is now usually translated as ‘culture’, I would suggest that a less anachronistic translation of the term would be closer to ‘civilisation’. See N. Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (New York: Urizen, 1978), particularly Chapter 1, ‘On the Sociogenesis of

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the Concepts “Civilization” and “Culture” ’, pp.  1–​50, for a discussion of the controversy in Europe between the concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’ over the previous two centuries. 46 Wang and Wang, Qingji waijiao shiliao, Vol. V, p. 40, GX25.12.28. 47 Ibid., Vol. V, pp. 27–​8, memorial dated GX25.9.28 (1 November 1899). Neither Prince Qing nor Yang Ru mentions the foreign missionary Red Cross activities of 1894–​5 in Manchuria during the Sino-​Japanese war, nor is there any indication that these officials or the throne were aware of that enterprise. 48 Da Qing li chao shi lu, Taibei: Hua wen shu ju, min guo 53 [1964]. 49 For an English translation of Mozi, see Mozi, Mo Tzu:  Basic Writings, trans. B. Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), esp. pp. 39–​49. 50 Wang and Wang, Qingji waijiao shiliao, Vol. V, pp. 31–​2. 51 Ibid., Vol. V, p. 34. 52 Ibid., Vol. V, pp. 39–​41, memorial dated GX25.12.28 (28 January 1900). The following section is based on this memorial. 53 This fundraising strategy was deeply rooted in the Chinese philanthropic tradition. For example, Joanna Handlin Smith notes that the late Ming landowner and philanthropist Chen Longzheng advocated a similar strategy; see J. Smith, ‘Benevolent Societies: The Re-​Shaping of Charity during the Late Ming and Early Ch’ing’, Journal of Asian Studies, 46:2 (1987), 309–​37 (p. 325). 54 Scott, Proceedings, p. 181 notes Persia’s and Turkey’s official reservations: that Persia was permitted to use the Lion and Red Sun and Turkey to use the Red Crescent. Holls, The Peace Conference, pp. 125–​6 notes Persia’s and Siam’s reservation of the right to use distinctive flags. Siam ‘reserved the right to change the sign on the Geneva flag to a symbol sacred in the Buddhistic cult, and calculated to increase the saving authority of the flag’. Also see Choate, Two Hague Conferences, p. 16. 55 Ultimately, both Siam and China would concede to the cross. China unofficially adopted the Red Cross symbol for the Chinese Red Cross Society in 1904 and officially recognised it in 1907 at the Second Hague Conference. 56 P. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); J. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 57 Hutchinson, Champions of Charity, pp.  208, 211; O. Checkland, Humanitarianism and the Emperor’s Japan, 1877–​1977 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), p. 25. The French sent nurses, but not Red Cross nurses; see Hutchinson, Champions of Charity, p. 257. 58 M. C. Wright, China in Revolution:  The First Phase 1900–​1913 (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1968), p. 8. 59 M. Abbenhuis, The Hague Conferences and International Politics: 1898–​1915 (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 18. 60 For this story, see C. Reeves, ‘The Red Cross Society of China: Past, Present, and Future’, in J. Ryan (ed.), Philanthropy for Health in China (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 214–​33.

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Failure to launch: The American Red Cross in an era of contested neutrality, 1914–​17 Branden Little

It is a strange fact that today is the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Geneva, and today the Red Cross is called upon as it never has been before to mitigate human suffering (Mabel T. Boardman, de facto head of the American Red Cross, 22 August 1914).1

In histories of the First World War, the American Red Cross (ARC) is best known for its millions of members who energetically participated in a wide array of relief and reconstruction initiatives across war-​torn Europe.2 Less is known about the ARC’s profound struggles during the period of American neutrality, 1914 to 1917. Every major undertaking the Red Cross leadership initiated when the United States was neutral failed. It failed to orchestrate a national relief movement, to undertake substantive foreign relief operations and to adapt institutionally to America’s entry into war. Given its abject ‘failure to launch’ in these ways, it is all the more remarkable that the ARC transformed into the United States’ leading relief society during the brief period of American belligerency, 1917–​18. To appreciate that unlikely transformation, it is imperative to consider the hurdles on which the Red Cross originally stumbled. In August 1914, the de facto leader of the ARC, the politically well-​connected Washington socialite Mabel T.  Boardman, recognised immediately that the violent outbreak of great-​power war in Europe necessitated humanitarian counter-​ measures. She knew that warring nations in Europe and Asia especially had instantly ‘called upon [Red Cross societies] … to mitigate human suffering’. But Boardman also knew that few people would reflexively call upon the ARC to participate in this grand humanitarian endeavour.3 Between its establishment in 1881 and 1914, the ARC had encountered relatively few instances to tender relief services according to its federal charter: ‘To furnish volunteer aid to the sick and wounded of armies in time of war’. Most recently, and as outlined in Francisco Javier Martínez-​Antonio’s chapter in this volume, the ARC had undertaken military medical services in Cuba during the Spanish–​American War of 1898. But its lacklustre performance revealed

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the Red Cross to be poorly led and equipped. Domestically, the ARC had responded in a piecemeal fashion to industrial and natural disasters, including the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. A small body of medical and social services professionals, organised into a tiny constellation of mostly inactive ARC chapters, raised meagre funds and performed various humanitarian services in the aftermath of these tragedies. The private generosity of Wall Street bankers sustained the ARC’s limited existence in between these crises when public interest waned.4 In the absence of systematic contributions or governmental financing, the ARC was hard pressed to make adequate preparations either for auxiliary military service or for disaster-​relief operations. Although Congress had previously acknowledged the Red Cross as the embodiment of an international humanitarian spirit to aid victims of great calamities, few Americans considered the ARC their nation’s best expression of humanitarianism. A heritage of failures and a bias towards locally (rather than nationally) administered relief shaped American attitudes to Boardman’s embryonic society.5 As war exploded in 1914, the ARC’s standing in the eyes of the American people remained poor. Boardman welcomed the opportunity the First World War created to demonstrate the capacity of the ARC to serve humanity. She and other senior ranking officials of the ARC quickly convened in Washington, DC to determine a response. Their insufficient resources stretched thin by relief operations in revolutionary Mexico, ARC leaders nevertheless decided to aid European Red Cross societies.6 Expectations of a swift and decisive end to the ‘grand smash’ hastened the ARC’s formulation of plans to ensure its contribution to saving lives.7 Boardman and her colleagues worried that unless the ARC acted with alacrity the opportunity to improve its reputation by exemplary overseas service would pass. They exhibited no concerns that their desires to aid wounded soldiers might fail on account of financial or logistical deficiencies, such as those encountered in Cuba and Mexico. Boardman’s coterie believed the shock of a European war would arouse Americans so profoundly that they would (at long last) enthusiastically support the ARC during this international crisis.8 Failed attempts to orchestrate a national humanitarian movement On 5 August 1914, the diminutive ARC issued a nationwide call to aid wounded soldiers in Europe. Governors, mayors, chambers of commerce and civic associations received Boardman’s request. She also invited American medical professionals to join an expedition that would partner with host-​nation Red Cross societies by performing surgeries and providing palliative care. ‘Grieved as we may be over this terrible war’, the ARC petition read, ‘the agonizing cry of suffering men can not appeal to us in vain’.9 Boardman desperately hoped that the ARC’s statement would rally American society to support the ARC as it had never done before. Her hope was that the ARC would spearhead a national humanitarian movement in the midst of what appeared to be the greatest global crisis in modern times. The ARC,

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however, did not need to convince Americans of the need to contribute to war relief. They were already so inclined and were energetically raising funds for myriad causes. Instead, the ARC struggled to persuade Americans to donate to its own coffers rather than to the scores of other war-​related charities and European Red Cross societies. Boardman was particularly grieved to learn that the Prince of Wales Fund had raised more money in a single week in September 1914 than the ARC had in its entire decades-​long existence.10 She sharply resented the proliferation of new relief societies to aid Belgian refugees and their claim to resources that she felt should be channelled towards the ARC.11 She denounced the existence of ‘so many temporary relief committees [that] have sprung into existence for war relief purposes’. And she brazenly dismissed the gaps in Red Cross programmes that new competitor organisations such as the Committee of Mercy addressed, namely that of suffering among civilians in wartime. Boardman’s lament indicated the dismal reality that the ARC had never inspired widespread American support. ‘It is rather strange’, Boardman scoffed, ‘that some people have more confidence in the administration of the Prince of Wales Fund under the English people, or the Belgian Relief Fund in Europe, than they seem to have in the American Red Cross’. She could not fathom ‘why anyone … has greater confidence in foreign administration than in the American administration. All Red Cross books and accounts are open at any time to the public.’12 In her search for scapegoats, she conflated refusal to support the ARC with disloyalty to the United States. Yet no other American besides Boardman likely considered supporting the ARC an essential facet of patriotism in 1914. Her claim to transparency in ARC records, moreover, belied the fact that the ARC’s long-​standing reputation of incompetence and graft hurt its appeal. Public uncertainty about giving to the ARC (as a medical auxiliary to the US armed forces), when the United States was neutral and unlikely to enter the war, likewise manifested in contributions to relief societies that were directly involved in the war. Undaunted by these portents, Boardman informed the American press that the ARC constituted the only officially recognised relief agency in the United States, as specified in its Congressional charter. ‘It would appear logical’, she concluded, ‘that all funds contributed by Americans should pass through the medium of the National Red Cross’.13 Failing to understand her logic and admit that the ARC could perform this funds-​transfer service competently, Americans responded generously to personal appeals made by representatives of the Belgian, British, French and German Red Cross Societies. Boardman resented this symbol of a lack of interest in the ARC, even though she had initially envisioned rendering services to European Red Cross societies. Rather than delight in their receipt of American funds, she privately denounced delegations of foreign Red Cross officials ‘here who have gone traveling about the country begging for contributions’.14 Boardman also publicly insisted it was illegal for foreign Red Cross societies to raise money in the United States. With little effect she lodged protests at the corresponding embassies.15 Neither

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European delegations, nor American citizens, paid much attention to her complaints that they were disregarding the ARC’s purported Congressional authority. To Boardman, the ARC’s dismal reputation was not to blame for its lack of fundraising success. She faulted the campaigning of wily foreigners and the ardour of incipient relief committees that ignored the ARC’s long but chequered history. Historians of the ARC have sympathetically treated her frustrations, but they have misidentified the reasons why the ARC struggled to generate support. Historians have repeatedly insisted that American indifference to the war in 1914, and prevalent isolationistic tendencies, were chiefly to blame for the ARC’s difficulties.16 An inability to raise funds, however, derived largely from the ARC’s poor standing in American society. Americans did not trust that it would use donations wisely. The ARC’s failure to convey the message that it could function in a war while the United States was neutral likewise hindered its appeal. An immature fundraising mechanism in a highly competitive field for charitable dollars, furthermore, was also to blame for the organisation’s meagre funds. Americans were not uninterested in the war. And they were not isolationists when it came to humanitarian expressions. The urgent reply of Americans to war’s distress suggests that this enduring characterisation by historians of the ARC is simply incorrect.17 Boardman clearly understood that Americans were enthusiastic humanitarians. They had the means to give. They just tended not to give to the ARC.18 President Woodrow Wilson did the ARC no favours, despite serving as its titular president. Boardman hoped Wilson would insist that the American people direct their charitable resources toward the ARC. The mechanism by which he could accomplish this grand manoeuvre to thrust the ARC suddenly into leading a national humanitarian movement was never clearly defined. Perhaps by either issuing an executive order, or by ramrodding restrictive national legislation, Wilson could compel American humanitarian sympathies to align with Red Cross needs. Although alert to the ARC’s quandary, Wilson politely refused to help Boardman achieve a monopoly over all American relief activities. He opposed making even limited gestures of support, such as declining to endorse its national appeal in 1914. Rather than articulate his lack of confidence in Boardman’s executive competency, Wilson lamely insisted that an endorsement might complicate his plans to arbitrate the war. Boardman resented his position. ‘Personally I  believe all war relief funds should have been placed under the supervision of the [ARC], with various departments embracing the different features of the relief work’, she soon informed Wilson’s private secretary. Unmoved by her behind-​the-​scenes protests, the White House lent no meaningful assistance to Boardman’s ARC.19 Wilson harboured no particular vendetta or ill will towards the Red Cross, even as he came to understand the ARC’s limitations in a complex humanitarian emergency. He discouraged concurrent efforts to consolidate all American humanitarian initiatives into the newly formed American Relief Clearing House/​War Relief Clearing House for France and Her Allies (ARCH/​WRCH). Wilson’s interest in

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war relief and sympathies for war sufferers had quietly shifted towards the plight of the people of German-​occupied Belgium, who would likely starve without neutral humanitarian intervention. Wilson knew that neither the ARCH/​WRCH, which was a partisan Allied entity, nor the ARC, which focused on soldiers’ aid, could or would feed 7 million Belgian civilians. Wilson privately admired the newly formed, neutral Commission for Relief in Belgium, led by an accomplished American engineer named Herbert C. Hoover. Wilson’s early preferences confirmed growing American support for Belgian relief and undermined Boardman’s monopolistic ambition. In the absence of any federal compulsion, American wartime participation in humanitarian activities remained wildly popular and wholly decentralised.20 The futility of ARC foreign relief operations Unable to lead a national movement for war relief and unwilling to serve as a mere conduit for donations to European Red Cross societies, the ARC lowered its sights on sending just a small medical expedition to Europe. ARC officials envisioned deploying American doctors and nurses to supplement European Red Cross personnel embedded in military contingents. This distinctive American contribution to alleviating European distress would, in Boardman’s estimation, elevate the ARC’s standing in American society. Boardman’s expeditionary idea gained token support from the Wilson administration and Congress, but neither was willing to contribute funds. Several ship owners, however, generously leased ships to the ARC at the nominal cost of $1, rather than charge extortionately inflated rates, as was the new wartime custom.21 The ARC’s August appeal raised enough funds to organise the expedition that autumn. Among the largest benefactors, the Rockefeller Foundation contributed $10,000. Boardman had requested an even greater donation from the foundation, but it declined. The foundation limited its gift in the hopes that other Americans would be moved by its investment in the expedition’s success.22 It remains unclear whether the foundation’s hopes were genuinely achieved, or if a few large donors enabled the expedition to proceed. Several thousand doctors and nurses volunteered in response to the ARC Bureau of Medical Service’s publicity initiative. It placed advertisements for the expedition in newspapers and journals. It also issued appeals to relevant medical societies.23 Many of the volunteers confessed that adventure beckoned and had motivated their application to serve at the frontlines.24 In other words, they cared less about the ARC itself than its ability to carry them to the battlefield. Volunteers applied with the knowledge that the Red Cross preferred a six-​month commitment of service, but would not require one. Their backgrounds varied widely, from country doctors to big-​city surgeons and public-​health administrators. Aided by the American Medical Association, Red Cross officials promulgated a set of criteria for applicants to ensure their competency and qualifications for overseas service. No guidelines of this sort had existed

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beforehand. This procedure was designed to protect the reputation of the Red Cross from criticisms of having unwittingly employed charlatans. But it also excluded many volunteers, primarily those from rural settings, whose credentials were less easily established than those armed with recommendations from directors of metropolitan hospitals –​in this respect ‘modern’ medicine acquired an urban resonance. ‘Proving’ one’s formal credentials helped to reinforce the professional standards of medicine in the twentieth century.25 Surgical experience ranked foremost among the ARC’s priorities for its volunteers, yet in accordance with the view that the war would quickly end, Red Cross officials thought the specialty would no longer be needed within three to four months’ time.26 In view of this naive short-​war belief, ARC officials unflinchingly embraced the deployment of ‘a large number of surgeons and nurses who knew little of war and military conditions’. The war, in their fanciful estimation, would not last long.27 After screening hundreds of candidates and subjecting many doctors to army physical fitness tests, the Red Cross organised surgical teams into ‘units’ of three physicians and twelve nurses.28 Like doctors, nurses also desired adventurous wartime service. They welcomed the opportunity to showcase the importance of skilled nursing, a relatively new profession in the United States.29 Officials of the ARC selected female candidates exclusively for nursing duties. Male nurses were barred because of concerns, borne out by British experiences in the Boer War, that they might be treated as spies or even abandon their patients to join one of the fighting forces. Women, by contrast, were not considered potential combatants by ARC officials.30 Boardman would have preferred to send a great number of physicians and nurses to Europe, but lacked the money to dispatch more than a few hundred. The first surgical unit departed in early September 1914 for Serbia. Later that month, and with much fanfare, the ARC flagship Mercy carried ten more ‘units’ to duty in France, Russia, Britain, Germany and Austria-​Hungary.31 A testament to expansive American interest in war relief, Mercy’s hold brimmed with gifts of medical supplies provided mostly by immigrant aid societies in the United States that delighted in the offer of free transatlantic transportation courtesy of the ARC.32 In October, two additional units went to Serbia and three surgeons departed for Russia and Austria-​ Hungary. In early 1915, three more surgical teams were deployed to France and La Panne, on the narrow coastal strip of unoccupied Belgium. The complement of medical professionals in ARC uniforms reached its peak then, with 16 units composed of 75 physicians and 255 nurses.33 In addition to medical expertise, the ARC volunteers brought large quantities of medical supplies. The lists of material included hundreds of thousands of yards of bandages, gauze and cotton, and tens of thousands of anti-​typhoid and anti-​tetanus doses. Units also brought state-​of-​the-​art X-​ray machines and other specialised equipment to facilitate their surgical operations. Surplus items were intended as gifts to the host-​nation Red Cross societies. But in one accidental gesture of generosity,

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the American Ambulance in Paris, the hospital and transportation service organised by expatriate volunteers, received 9,000 ARC-​delivered stretchers on which to transport injured soldiers. In November 1914, twelve ships carried ARC medical supplies to several Allied, Central Powers and neutral countries. Hundreds more shipments of various sizes followed in 1914–​15.34 At first blush, the ARC’s initiatives to combat soldiers’ suffering seemed remarkably successful. In less than twelve months, however, the ARC’s financial capacity for overseas operations disintegrated. Donations shrank so precipitously as to call into question the feasibility of the units’ continued deployment. ‘The war has been so long drawn out’, Boardman confided to a friend, that it was exhausting ARC coffers. She did not admit that, at precisely the same time, other relief societies’ funds were enlarging, not contracting. The ARC was losing the fierce competition for charitable funds, and other humanitarian agencies such as the Commission for Relief in Belgium and Near East Foundation were winning. Boardman blamed the war, not the ARC’s ongoing problems with securing the public’s confidence. ‘It is for this reason [dwindling resources] that we have felt it advisable to consider the withdrawal of the personnel that we have sent to Europe.’35 Admittedly, part of Boardman’s administrative burden had little to do with money per se, but rather was to do with maintaining an assemblage of volunteer doctors whose private practices invariably suffered from their absence. Holding physicians to commitments of more than six weeks’ duration –​let alone the ARC’s desired six months –​proved nearly impossible. The constant turnover of doctors proved exasperating to her. Money was nevertheless at the core of the ARC’s decision to abandon Europe. Boardman decided to husband the Red Cross’s diminishing resources rather than risk bankruptcy and scandal. Lacking the financial basis to continue foreign operations, she withdrew the expedition. In August 1915, Boardman abruptly announced the ARC would leave its posts in Europe within one month. Her press release did not admit that the ARC was leaving for legitimate reasons—​a lack of funds. Oddly and unfortunately, Boardman refused to acknowledge any blame or express any remorse for leaving mid-​war. Instead, she reasoned that after an entire year of fighting, the warring nations ought to have created their own medical systems sufficient to the enormous tasks at hand. ‘Most of the rich countries have billions appropriated for war’, and could afford the costs, she untactfully declared.36 Boardman left an unfavourable impression in Europe as host nations wondered why the US Government-​affiliated relief agency lacked the commitment to stay. Undoubtedly, few of the recipients understood that the ARC relied exclusively on private donations, not Government funds like many European Red Cross societies. She had saved the ARC from bankruptcy but not entirely from scandal.37 Failure fully to disclose the overriding financial basis of its decision left the Red Cross, and the United States, vulnerable to criticisms. In Budapest, the director of the ARC’s Austrian unit, William J. Crookston, observed, ‘I cannot help thinking that it is a pity we are unable to see the thing through … the popular mind here is not

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able to disassociate the American Red Cross from the United States Government.’38 Already susceptible to pointed attacks by partisans of both warring coalitions for privileging one side over the other, and for remaining neutral as a pretext to make windfall profits by selling arms and food to Europe, Americans discovered to their surprise that even small-​scale participation in relief could also attract derision. Officials of the USA failed to foresee this eventuality when they endorsed voluntary efforts to aid suffering populations. American aid was widely and justifiably heralded by European recipients, but its delivery implied commitments that American officials were either unwilling or unable to recognise.39 Curtailing or terminating relief services while the war still raged infuriated some recipients of ARC assistance. Sanguine Red Cross officials in the United States were blithely unaware of this hostility. They were, moreover, overly gratified that their units had treated upwards of 30,000 military personnel in 1914–​15, despite this number constituting a mere drop in the sea of millions of casualties.40 Undeniably the ARC had saved the lives of some grievously wounded soldiers and helped others to return to duty. But its expedition had only done so for a brief time and helped a comparatively small number of troops. Officials of the ARC were unsuccessful in their plans to render a great service during the three years the United States remained neutral. The American Red Cross’s inability to adapt to belligerency In the midst of the ARC expedition’s withdrawal in 1915, a power struggle occurred within the Red Cross leadership. It involved a ‘centering of responsibility’, in the estimation of Ernest P. Bicknell, the ARC director-​general of civilian relief. Boardman hoped to divest tacit control of the Red Cross from New York elites, who privately financed the organisation’s peacetime operations, and concentrate the ARC’s power in Washington, DC, where she resided.41 Since her rise to power in the early 1900s, Boardman had unabashedly relied on the donations provided by Wall Street financiers and philanthropists. But the war sharply accentuated philosophical differences in New  York and Washington concerning the Red Cross’s operations. A fight for control ensued.42 The dispute ignited with Boardman’s desire to enlarge the ARC. She wanted the Red Cross to become a truly national organisation, but the head of the New York office and vice-​president of the ARC, Robert W. de Forest, blanched at the prospect. De Forest knew well that the ARC was floundering about and could not likely stand the strains of growth. He hoped to strengthen its existing but limited capacity to do good works. The two titans could not agree. Boardman asserted: ‘Honestly my impression has been (and I know it has been that of many others in this office) that our small New York group who have run the Red Cross for some years have been so busy finding the mote in our eye that they have quite overlooked the beam in their own.’ Her biblical allusion to the alleged hypocrisy of De Forest’s New York cabal was exceedingly unfair.43

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She claimed De Forest’s ‘theories dominated the ARC and naturally did a great deal of harm’. But Boardman avoided confronting her long-​time ally and instead chose to undermine his credibility sotto voce. However, De Forest’s credentials as a progressive philanthropist and social-​welfare advocate were near impeccable. He proved resilient against her attacks. De Forest was the founder and president of the powerful Charity Organisation Society of the City of New York.44 While on summer vacation in Europe in 1914, moreover, he had personally witnessed the devastation caused by the German invasion of Belgium. He had also helped American traveller-​refugees to evacuate the Continent and return to the safety of the United States.45 De Forest’s opposition to relief publicity and his ecumenical patronage of the partisan Belgian Relief Fund, among other humanitarian causes, nevertheless conflicted with parochial ARC interests in ways offensive to Boardman. His preference for restricting ARC membership to high society certainly reflected Red Cross traditions, but it did not represent the organisation’s future, Boardman believed. De Forest feared the ARC becoming ever more unwieldy and subject to even greater criticisms than it already had received.46 De Forest’s faction remained guarded against the proliferation of ARC chapters. ‘Local organisations of the Red Cross in large cities are essential’, he asserted, ‘but small groups of ambitious women, whose chief motive is to get themselves into the limelight, are Red Cross liabilities and we do not want them’. He may have had Boardman in mind. Although De Forest stressed the importance of maintaining a ‘strong national organisation’, to him this meant a concentration of power in the hands of a few competent executives. An ARC-​commissioned historian, Gustave R. Gaeddert, believed De Forest’s contempt for the masses hindered the Red Cross’s growth. In Gaeddert’s estimation, De Forest had overlooked the necessary foundation for expansion in the wider population in a time of total war.47 The possibilities of truly national ARC remained alluring to Boardman, but her attacks and De Forest’s resistance paralysed the Red Cross. Interested observers feared its dissolution and irrelevance. De Forest was perhaps excessively concerned about the effective management of chapters, but Boardman offered no alternative in which she would capably lead a bona fide national organisation. After a decade as its de facto leader, she had not yet demonstrated the ability to imbue the ARC with the requisite resources to sustain multi-​year relief operations. As late as December 1915—​some eighteen months into the war—​General Leonard Wood, the foremost advocate of military preparedness in the United States, blasted Boardman’s organisation for its ineptitude. Wood believed the Red Cross ‘lacked that type of definite well-​thought-​out organisation which would make it promptly available in time of war’. It was not, he complained, ‘a reasonably efficient and effective organisation’.48 A properly financed and forcefully led institution promised to provide the necessary responsiveness to crises to avoid such stinging criticisms. De Forest and Boardman agreed that the status quo was untenable but were unable to resolve their differences.

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Two months after the ARC expedition’s withdrawal from Europe, in October 1915, President Wilson interjected himself at last into the ARC equation. Wilson’s authority included the right to appoint a chairperson for the Red Cross. He had not previously exercised that right. Until then, he had let Boardman serve in an ill-​defined leadership role; the ARC had no official chair. Weary of the ongoing complaints by ARC insiders such as De Forest, Wilson summarily displaced Boardman. In her stead, Wilson formally appointed the former president of the United States, William H. Taft, as chair.49 Imbued with full executive power to govern the ARC, Taft quickly overhauled the struggling Society. He superintended its rapid transformation into a war-​ready organisation. In the process De Forest’s New York clique lost much of its influence, and its opposition to expansion unravelled. Boardman’s power evaporated virtually overnight, even though Taft compassionately softened the blow by welcoming her continued service to the ARC. But Taft had effectively launched a coup and now firmly controlled the ARC’s reins.50 His foremost objective was to place the ARC in a position of readiness to serve the US armed forces should the United States declare war. In the uncertain aftermath of the Lusitania disaster earlier that year, Taft understood the increasing likelihood of US belligerency. His reorganisation fitted well with General Wood’s hope that the ARC would be refashioned so that it could render creditable service to America’s armed forces in this eventuality. Taft hired Eliot Wadsworth of Boston as his deputy. An affluent lawyer and banking official of international experience, Wadsworth had recently chaired the Rockefeller Foundation’s War Relief Commission in Europe in 1914–​15, where he had served alongside the long-​time ARC official Ernest Bicknell, who had been seconded temporarily by the Red Cross to the foundation. Prior to his partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, Bicknell had joined the US Relief Commission while it evacuated Americans, including De Forest, from Europe. Partly by virtue of his overseas activities, Bicknell had avoided the Boardman–​De Forest contretemps. A  confidant of Wadsworth who held the absolute confidence of the foundation, Bicknell survived Taft’s ascension to the throne. He represented the professional turn in humanitarian administration that would soon supersede the ranks of socialites and philanthropists who had long dominated relief societies.51 Taft, Wadsworth and Bicknell fast became allies in the consolidation of power in Washington. Wadsworth and Bicknell derived tremendous authority in bureaucratic jockeying from their overseas relief service and first-​hand experience in the practical application of humanitarian aid. Relatively few Americans had held executive responsibilities of this nature. The historian Gaeddert properly characterised Wadsworth as a brilliant visionary who ‘provid[ed] aggressive leadership’ necessary to the establishment of ‘the Red Cross as the nation’s, if not the world’s outstanding relief agency during the war’.52 In 1916 and 1917, Taft and Wadsworth assembled a brain trust of corporate leaders in the emergent fields of fundraising, advertising, public relations, and

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telecommunications to guide the ARC’s expansion. The prospect of contending with more than 130 other relief societies such as the Commission for Relief in Belgium displeased Wadsworth, much the same as it had vexed Boardman. Wadsworth asked Edgar H.  Wells, a classmate of his at Harvard and fellow Rockefeller Foundation official, to spearhead the drive to grow membership and local chapters.53 Wells had recently served as general secretary of the Harvard Alumni Association, where he was familiar with maintaining human networks of national leaders. Beginning in December 1916, Wells controlled Red Cross promotion activities.54 Meanwhile, George O.  Tamblyn, the executive secretary of the Red Cross’s Atlantic Division, became a dynamic fundraiser for the Red Cross. He was recognised by contemporaries as a ‘dean’ of ‘institutional money-​raising’, particularly for his formative role in the historic, multimillion-​dollar capitalisation of the Yale Endowment Fund in the 1920s.55 Tamblyn had learnt much from Wadsworth and Wells, who in 1919 collaborated to raise unprecedented sums for the Harvard Endowment Fund. Historians credit these innovators with having ‘changed the course of American higher education’ in the 1920s and 1930s. But they actually pioneered the techniques while working for the ARC in the First World War.56 The public-​relations genius who defused the disaster for the Rockefeller family in the wake of the Ludlow mine massacre, Ivy L. Lee, also joined forces with the new Red Cross.57 Scholars consider Lee a founder of the profession of public relations. Lee especially is credited with rebranding the Rockefeller family name from one impugned as ‘robber barons’ by muck-​raking anti-​industrialist crusaders such as Ida M. Tarbell to one primarily associated with philanthropy.58 Joining Taft, Wadsworth, Bicknell and Lee was Theodore N. Vail, the president of American Telephone and Telegraph, who had overseen the monopolisation of the infant telecommunications industry. Vail chaired the ARC’s expansive membership campaigns in 1917. He also gave great impetus to the Red Cross’s initiatives for centralising relief operations. Scholars credit Tamblyn, Lee and Vail as great trailblazers, but have overlooked their engineering of national mobilisation plans for the Red Cross. War relief provided a blast furnace by which modern fundraising and public-​relations techniques were first forged into effective instruments. The ARC constituted the premier experiment in national humanitarian organisation that fused together civil society, business and government. Within one month of the US declaration of war on Germany in April 1917, this conglomeration of innovators-​turned-​humanitarians established the ARC War Council. President Wilson sanctioned its creation. Its formation signalled a complete rupture from previous ARC governance under Boardman and De Forest. Henry P. Davison, a senior partner of the internationally powerful J. P. Morgan banking firm, led the War Council. This executive body rapidly superintended the transformation of the ARC into a truly national organisation. The old ARC had perished, and a new ARC grew in its place.59

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The ARC that existed in 1914 had essentially ceased to function in 1917–​18 –​it had been replaced by an entirely new organisation under new management. By the time she was dethroned, Boardman had grown the ARC to a mere 22,000 members. Under Taft, Wadsworth, Davison and their brilliant marketing team, its membership swelled dramatically.60 Within a year of US military entry into the war, the ARC’s ranks surged to 32 million members, totalling 20 million adults and 12 million children. Within less than two years, the ARC had become the largest civic organisation in the history of the United States. It also became one of the best-​funded entities in wartime. Nearly one-​third of the United States’ population of 105  million paid Red Cross dues. Moreover, almost half the nation contributed to its fundraising campaigns during the war and helped amass $400  million for relief services, the equivalent of at least $8 billion today.61 This generosity is all the more remarkable as it coincided with the private subscription of billions of dollars in 1917–​18 to Liberty Loans that financed US military mobilisation and operations. The overwhelming response to the membership and financial drives of the Red Cross in 1917–​18 revealed that Americans viewed humanitarian relief and fighting the war as indistinguishable. The new ARC helped to recast the organisation as trustworthy and creditable. Although they had resisted Boardman’s correlation of membership and patriotism in 1914, Americans now widely accepted the War Council’s premise that participation in the ARC’s manifold activities confirmed patriotic ardour and good citizenship. Empowered with dynamic leadership and the unbridled support of American society, the new ARC proved eminently capable of supporting America’s military mobilisation through the provision of medical auxiliary units serving alongside US forces. Wadsworth justifiably celebrated that the ARC ‘is today the greatest relief organisation that the world has ever known’.62 Americans joined the ARC en masse to participate in the war and to shape its outcome. Their response revealed confidence in proclamations by President Wilson not only that the new ARC was capable of rendering important humane service, but that active participation in its affairs would speed the war’s end. In this approach opponents of military intervention and those favouring it found common ground. Supporters of myriad humanitarian causes, moreover, enthusiastically channelled their energy towards the new Red Cross. The ARC clearly promoted and benefited from the coincidence of its programmes with military mobilisation. Its new leaders had rapidly achieved their goal of attracting wholesale interest in the ARC by the American people. It took the nation’s entry into a world war to accomplish their design.63 Conclusion Had the United States remained neutral during the war, the ARC would have likely remained an unimportant organisation in both American society and the annals of war relief. It would never have become the large and esteemed humanitarian agency

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that replaced its diminutive and unpopular predecessor. Its initial claims to neutrality, impartiality and affiliation with the US Government did little to elevate its stature among Americans, who invested more heavily in other humanitarian endeavours from 1914 to 1917. The United States’ military entry into the conflict, however, created the chance for the ARC’s redemption. American belligerency made possible its institutional efflorescence. Armed with the US president’s endorsement and the public’s receptivity to calls for alternative forms of war mobilisation in 1917–​18, and aided by a vigorous corporate leadership, the ARC transformed into an astonishingly successful humanitarian enterprise that eclipsed both its competitors and its reputation for failure. Notes 1 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), RG 200, American Red Cross, G1 (ARC), Box 3: European war relief, 1914–​17, M. Boardman to H. J. Howland, 22 August 1914. 2 F. R. Dulles, The American Red Cross:  A History (New  York:  Harper & Bros, 1950); H. P. Davison, The American Red Cross in the Great War (New York: Macmillan, 1920); J. F. Irwin, Making the World Safe:  The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); M. M. Jones, The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 3 NARA, ARC, Box 3: European war relief, 1914–​17, M. Boardman to H. J. Howland, 22 August 1914; B. Little, ‘An Explosion of New Endeavours:  Global Humanitarian Responses to Industrialized Warfare in the First World War Era’, First World War Studies, 5 (2014), 1–​16. 4 G. R. Gaeddert, The History of the American National Red Cross, Vol. III:  The Boardman Influence, 1905–​1917 (Washington, DC: ARC, 1950), p. 105. 5 NARA, ARC, Box 18:  institutional members, F.  Almy to E.  Wadsworth and E.  Bicknell, 15 December 1916; R. Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880–​1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 52; 161–​2; R. S. Popkin, ‘The History and Politics of Disaster Management in the United States’, in A. Kirby (ed.), Nothing to Fear: Risks and Hazards in American Society (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), p. 104. 6 ‘Red Cross Offers Aid’, New  York Times (5 August 1914); and ‘Call for Red Cross Aid’, Washington Post (5 August 1914). 7 ARC, Annual Report, 1914 (Washington, DC, 1914) (AR 1914), p. 6. 8 NARA, ARC, Box 64: memo for diplomatic corps by P. C. Knox, 1 November 1909; Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New  York, Rockefeller Foundation (RF), Box 67, folder 657: R. de Forest to J. D. Greene, 22 January 1915. 9 ‘Appeal by Red Cross’, Washington Post (6 August 1914). 10 NARA, ARC, Box 3: European war relief, 1914–​17, memo for Associated Press, October 1916. 11 NARA, ARC, Box 12: war preparedness, M. Boardman to H. F. Draper, 1 July 1915. 12 NARA, ARC, Box 12:  criticisms, M.  Boardman to E.  F. Baldwin, 23 November 1914 and 15 December 1914. 13 NARA, ARC, Box 3: European war relief, M. Boardman to an anonymous newspaper editor, 26 September 1914. 14 NARA, ARC, Box 63: British Red Cross, M. Boardman to J. H. Choate, 30 March 1915. 15 NARA, ARC, Box 12:  criticisms, M.  Boardman to E.  F. Baldwin, 15 December 1914; Box 63:  Swiss Red Cross, M.  Boardman(?) to consul of Switzerland in St Louis, Missouri,

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28 August 1914; Box 63: Belgian Red Cross, J. G. Whiteley to M. Boardman, 24 October 1915, and Boardman’s reply, 25 October 1915. 16 Dulles, The American Red Cross, pp. 132, 135; Jones, The American Red Cross, p. 159. 17 B. Little, ‘Continuity and Change: The Transforming American Red Cross and the Dynamics of Humanitarianism’, book review of Jones, The American Red Cross, in Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Listserv (H-​SHGAPE), H-​NET Reviews (August 2013), www.h-​net.org/​reviews/​showrev.php?id=39722. 18 ‘American Red Cross Ship’, New York Times (6 August 1914); ‘City Asked to Aid Red Cross’, Los Angeles Times (7 August 1914); NARA, ARC, Box 3: European war relief, American Red Cross appeal, 11 August 1914. 19 NARA, ARC, Box 69: Belgium, M. Boardman to J. P. Tumulty, 3 November 1914 (emphasis added); ‘American Red Cross Planning to Send Scores of Nurses to Relief of European Suffering’, Trenton Evening Times (6 August 1914). 20 Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa, Lou Henry Hoover Subject Collection, Box 12: Belgian relief correspondence, L. Bates to L. Hoover, 19 December 1914; RF, Box 67, folder 658:  H. Hoover to L.  Bates, 2 November 1914; Seeley G.  Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton, New Jersey, C.  N. Carver papers, Box 7, folder W.  H. Page:  W. H.  Page to W.  J. Bryan, [December 1914?]. 21 RF, Box 67, folder 657: M. Boardman to J. D. Rockefeller, Jr, 8 August 1914. 22 RF, Box 67, folder 657: M. Boardman to J. D. Greene, 6 August 1914; Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report, 1913–​14 (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, 1915), p. 24. 23 AR 1914, pp. 20–​1. 24 Ibid., p. 34; NARA, ARC, Box 12: criticisms, M. Boardman to E. F. Baldwin, 15 December 1914. 25 Lubove, The Professional Altruist, pp. 215, 118–​56. 26 AR 1914, p. 21. 27 NARA, ARC, Box 12: criticisms, undated interview of M. Boardman. 28 AR 1914, pp. 17, 20–​1; ARC, Annual Report, 1915 (Washington: ARC, 1915) (AR 1915), p. 29. 29 NARA, ARC, Box 42: England Relief Unit, M. Boardman to M. Harcourt, 1 June 1915; ‘5,000 Nurses Ready’, Washington Post (6 August 1914). 30 NARA, ARC, Box 42: France Relief Unit, M. Boardman to E. Reid, 12 August 1914. 31 NARA, ARC, Box 12: criticisms, M. Boardman to E. F. Baldwin, 23 November 1914. 32 NARA, ARC, Box 12:  criticisms, M.  Boardman to L.  Leland, 17 September 1915; AR 1914, p. 23. 33 Including rotations, a total of 350 personnel served. The cost of these units totalled about $352,000; NARA, ARC, Box 3:  European war relief, 1914–​ 17, ‘What the [ARC] Has Accomplished in European War Relief: A Statement to the Public’, September 1916. 34 AR 1914, pp. 16–​17, 23; NARA, ARC, Box 69: Europe, ARC 119(B), shipments, 7 September 1914 to 30 September 1916. 35 NARA, ARC, Box 42:  England Relief Unit, M.  Boardman to M.  Harcourt, 1 June 1915; AR 1915, p. 7. 36 NARA, ARC, Box 12: criticisms, M. Boardman to L. Leland, 17 September 1915. 37 B. Little, ‘Band of Crusaders: American Humanitarians, the Great War, and the Remaking of the World’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2009), pp. 140–​63; Irwin, Making the World Safe, pp. 55–​61; AR 1914, pp. 17–​21; AR 1915, p. 29. 38 NARA, ARC, Box 42: Hungary Relief Unit, W. J. Crookston to R. Patterson, 4 August 1915. 39 Little, ‘An Explosion’. 40 AR 1915, p. 27.

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41 NARA, ARC, Box 12: reorganisation, 1915, M. Boardman to C. Norton, 17 September 1915; and E. Bicknell to R. de Forest, 24 September 1915. NARA, ARC, Box 12: criticisms, E. Bicknell to F. W. Church, 7 March 1916. 42 NARA, ARC, Box 12: reorganisation, 1915, R. de Forest to M. Boardman, 29 September 1915; C. Norton to M. Boardman, 15 September 1915; G. R. Gaeddert, The History of the American National Red Cross, Vol. IV:  The American National Red Cross in World War I, 1917–​1918 (Washington, DC: ARC, 1950), pp. 3–​7, 19, 50, 56–​9, 60; S. Deutsch, ‘Learning to Talk More like a Man: Boston’s Women’s Class-​Bridging Organizations, 1870–​1940’, American Historical Review, 97 (1992), 379–​404. 43 NARA, ARC, Box 12: reorganisation, 1915, M. Boardman to C. Norton, 17 September 1915. 44 NARA, ARC, Box 12:  reorganisation, 1915, C.  Norton to M.  Boardman, 15 September 1915; M. Boardman to C. Norton, 17 September 1915; E. Bicknell to R. de Forest, 24 September 1915. 45 RF, Box 66, folder 650:  ‘Belgian Relief Measures’, [November 1914?]; B. Little, ‘Evacuating Europe: US Policy, Strategy, and Relief Operations for Overseas American Travelers, 1914–​ 1915’, Journal of Military History, 79 (2015), 929–​58. 46 NARA, ARC, Box 12: reorganisation, 1915, E. Bicknell to J. M. Glenn, 13 November; S. M. Cutlip, Public Relations History: From the 17th to the 20th Century. The Antecedents (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), p. 273. 47 R.  de Forest to E.  Wadsworth, 29 September 1916, quoted in Gaeddert, The History, Vol IV, p. 24. 48 NARA, ARC, Box 12: war preparedness, L. Wood to C. A. Devol, 13 August 1915. 49 Irwin, Making the World Safe, pp. 61–​2. 50 On Taft and Boardman’s relationship see correspondence in NARA, ARC, Box 63, Constantinople. 51 RF Administration, Program and Policy, Reel 1, Box 8, folder 70:  ‘War in Europe and the First War Relief Commission (1914–​1915)’, Source Book (First Period), Vol IV, pp. 855–​9; RF, Box 56, folder 552: RF memorandum, 13 March 1915; E. P. Bicknell, In War’s Wake, 1914–​1915 (Washington: ARC, 1936). 52 Gaeddert, The History, Vol IV, p. 52; E. Wadsworth, ‘The Work of the Red Cross in the Event of War’, American Journal of Nursing, 17 (1917), 1155. 53 Gaeddert, The History, Vol. IV, p. 23. 54 ARC, Annual Report, 1916 (Washington: ARC, 1916), pp. 7–​8; and ARC, Annual Report, 1917 (Washington: ARC, 1917) (AR 1917), pp. 3–​4. 55 ‘Hat Passers’, Time (16 November 1936), www.time.com/​time/​magazine/​article/​ 0,9171,756930–​1,00.html (accessed 15 July 2008); Lubove, The Professional Altruist, p.  215; G. Tamblyn, ‘Campaigning for Red Cross Members’, Red Cross Magazine, 12 (1917), 463. 56 S. M. Cutlip, Fund Raising in the United States:  Its Role in America’s Philanthropy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1965), p. 173. 57 R. E. Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd: The Story of Ivy Lee and the Development of Public Relations (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1966); R. G. Tugwell, ‘The New Deal: The Progressive Tradition’, Western Political Quarterly, 3 (1950), 390–​427 (p. 393); E. L. Bernays, ‘Emergence of the Public Relations Counsel: Principles and Recollections’, Business History Review, 45 (1971), 296–​316. 58 Interview with F. Seitel, author of ‘Spin Cycles: A Century of Spin’, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News, 19 January 2007, www.cbc.ca/​news/​background/​spincycles/​transcript-​ seitel.html (accessed 30 July 2008); K. Hallahan, ‘Ivy Lee and the Rockefellers’ Response to the 1913–​1914 Colorado Coal Strike’, Journal of Public Relations Research, 14 (2002), 265–​315.

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5 9 Irwin, Making the World Safe, pp. 73–​5. 60 AR 1917, p. 18. 61 Davison, The American Red Cross, p. 19; Cutlip, Fund Raising in the United States, p. 123. 62 AR 1917, p.  8; B. Little, ‘A Child’s Army of Millions:  The American Junior Red Cross’, in L. Paul, R. R. Johnson and E. Short (eds), Children’s Literature and Culture of the First World War (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 283–​300. 63 J. F. Irwin, ‘International Humanitarianism in the United States’, 7 May 2013, Oxford University Press blog, http://​blog.oup.com/​2013/​05/​world-​red-​cross-​crescent-​icrc-​day/​ (accessed 17 August 2016).

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Turning points

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Challenging the colonial and the international: The American Red Cross in the last war of Cuban independence (1895–​8) Francisco Javier Martínez

For a better understanding of Spanish modern and contemporary history and, in particular, of the history of its Red Cross Society and of the role of the Red Cross Movement in relation to Spain’s armed conflicts, it would be useful to consider this country’s position in the modern world as being transitional or intermediary.1 By the nineteenth century, Spain had become a second-​rate actor. Its metropolitan, European territory was ravaged by recurrent civil wars, a product of deeply rooted political, social and territorial tensions. Spain was also left aside from European high politics and did not participate in any of the major conflicts of the time (the Crimean war, the Franco-​Prussian war and the First World War).2 Regarding its overseas possessions in the Caribbean and the Far East –​tiny remnants of a once world-​leading empire –​insurrections and conspiracies broke out regularly, while attempts at administrative reform and military expansion (including the SpanishMoroccan War) remained subordinated to the interference and ambitions of the European great powers, and the United States.3 Spain would only marginally participate in Europe’s renewed colonial drive in Asia and Africa following the Opium Wars in China, the Ottoman Empire’s defeats and the Berlin Conference of 1884–​5. As a result, analytical concepts such as nation-​state, empire and colonialism are difficult to apply to the Spanish case without modifications.4 Spain can be placed in between opposition categories instead, at some intermediary place within the gradual scale of power ranging from independent nations with strong imperial expansion to colonised societies on the verge of disintegration and submission. It was definitely closer to the first, but too bent towards the second to be considered as a full-​fledged, conventional representative of ‘the West’ or ‘Western Europe’. Modern Spanish history can be seen as a valuable standpoint for exploring the nature of that intermediary terrain within which many world societies actually stood. The singular Spanish case could thus contribute generally to the opening of ‘black boxes’ of dichotomist categories in historical analysis.5 This includes the enduring separation between national and colonial historiographies. The elaboration of a common

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analytical frame for both of them would put an end, for example, to the writing of distinctive histories of Britain and British India, or to the establishment of essentialist differences between the European and North African military campaigns of the French Second Empire. This chapter aims to take an episode from Spain’s modern history as a case study with which to move the focus of Red Cross historiography towards intermediary realities, for the narrative of the humanitarian movement born in Geneva in 1864 has been overwhelmingly framed by rigid national and colonial categories. This attempt will be made in relation to the relief initiatives carried out during the last war of Cuban independence of 1895–​8 –​which includes the Spanish–​American War of April–​August 1898. However, this chapter will not explore so much the singular activities of the Spanish Red Cross (SRC) in that conflict as the atypical involvement of the American Red Cross (ARC). As Marion Moser Jones and Julia Irwin have shown, the latter Society was, by the end of the nineteenth century, still a small-​sized, problematically structured and rather secondary constituent of the international Red Cross Movement.6 Both authors point to the First World War as the turning point for the ARC. However, I will argue that it was the Cuban war that started its push for world humanitarian power. As I will try to demonstrate, this was a result of the ARC openly challenging for the first time both the model of colonial expansion practised by other national societies and the model of interstate collaboration set up and controlled by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) since the early days of the Geneva Conference. The American Red Cross and prisoner relief in the Cuban conflict Red Cross humanitarian activities during the last war of Cuban independence comprised medical care for the belligerent armies, relief for civilians and assistance to prisoners.7 The latter aspect was concentrated in the Spanish–​American War of 1898 and its immediate aftermath, with several national societies involved, though the most important would not be the SRC, as logically expected, but the ARC. The American Society sought to assist prisoners of all kinds and from all sides (including the USA) in various ways. Before the US entry in the war, the ARC seems to have played a certain role in the move taken in March–​April 1897 by the newly elected president, William McKinley, who ‘successfully pressured the Spanish to release all Americans held prisoner in Cuba and sent to the island fifty thousand dollars for relief of Americans harmed by the conflict’.8 This measure followed the death of the Spanish-​born, American-​naturalised doctor Ricardo Ruiz de Ugarrio, at the Guanabacoa prison in late February, and the imprisonment of three American citizens in the same institution. These events received wide press coverage and triggered contacts between the US Consul General and the State Department that led to the signing of a legal agreement between the United States and Spain relating to American prisoners.9

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However, the main ARC actions in relation to prisoners took place during the war and especially after military operations were over. For example, the Society managed to provide assistance to over 2,000 Spanish civilians and military personnel captured by US forces. The earliest among them were the crews of 51 vessels seized by the US navy just days after a blockade of Cuba commenced following the declaration of war of 21 April 1898. Those vessels carried 444 seamen and 30 passengers, all of whom were taken to Key West, Florida.10 A small number of Cuban sympathisers and American nationals among them were released, but all seamen and the rest of passengers were imprisoned on the grounds that they were ‘able-​bodied young men’ who had plied ‘their vocation to enroll as members of the Spanish naval reserve’.11 It was also argued that ‘it would be cheaper to hold and feed them than to set them free and fight against them’.12 However, as they were left to their own devices onboard the ships, they soon ran out of fresh food, clothes, medicines and money, with the subsequent risk of falling ill or even triggering an epidemic outbreak. The ARC came to help them by way of the State of Texas, a vessel chartered by the Central Cuban Relief Committee (CCRC) –​a Government relief board appointed by the US president and set up in New York on 1 January 1898, on which Clara Barton, the ARC’s president, occupied one of the three seats.13 The State of Texas cargo was originally meant for the relief of the so-​called reconcentrados (civilians held in concentration camps in Cuba, to whom detailed reference will be made later). However, Rear Admiral William T. Sampson, commander of the North Atlantic squadron and responsible for the naval blockade, did not let the vessel reach the island despite the presence of Barton onboard.14 She, therefore, decided to wait in Key West for permission to intervene and, while there, learnt of the troubled condition of Spanish prisoners. Apart from using a part of the vessel’s cargo to feed and clothe them, she also purchased a load from some of the seized Spanish ships and distributed part of it among the seamen. Additionally, she managed to raise funds from the citizens of Key West for the same purpose.15 This ARC scheme was in operation for several weeks until the War Department began to issue regular food rations to the prisoners. A second group of Spanish detainees in the USA was composed of twenty infantry officers and soldiers captured by Sampson’s squadron, who were also taken to Key West in the first days of May.16 Local authorities initially planned to lock them up in Fort Taylor, Key West’s main defence facility. The risk that they had access to valuable information about its batteries and fortifications finally led to their transfer to Fort MacPherson, an army facility on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia, in which a camp had been set up for the training of troops heading for Cuba.17 There, since early August, the ARC had been operating a volunteer-​run kitchen, which prepared food for convalescent soldiers. The American Society later appointed seven nurses for service at the fort’s military hospital, while sending supplies of clothes and drugs.18 By mid-​August, sixteen of the original twenty Spanish prisoners of war  –​plus six ‘spies’ allegedly working for the Spanish Government –​were still held at Fort MacPherson and could have benefited from the ARC initiatives.19 On 21 August,

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they were transferred to the naval base at Portsmouth, New Hampshire,20 where they arrived three days later. There, they joined the nearly 1,600 navy officers and sailors captured during the naval combat of 3 July, which resulted in the total destruction of the Spanish fleet under the command of Admiral Pascual Cervera in Santiago de Cuba’s bay. This was by far the largest group of Spanish prisoners taken by the Americans. After much discussion on the location best suited for receiving such considerable numbers of men, the USS Harvard and USS St Louis took them to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard on 9 and 15 July respectively. The detainees were placed in a makeshift facility named Camp Long, on Seavey’s Island, Maine.21 Admiral Cervera and some forty navy officers were immediately transferred to Annapolis, Maryland, headquarters to the US Naval Academy. At Cervera’s request, however, ten commissioned officers remained at Camp Long to act as intermediaries between Spanish prisoners and the US authorities.22 During their captivity, a large number of sick and wounded prisoners were assisted by six ARC male nurses in the navy hospital at Portsmouth.23 Thirty-​one of them died, mostly from pernicious yellow fever diagnosed onboard the USS St. Louis.24 According to Clara Barton, ARC nurses found the patients ‘easily managed and always grateful for what was done to them’.25 This was to the point that, when repatriation was agreed between the Spanish and US Governments in mid-​ September, the prisoners asked the ARC to send the nurses with them to Spain. This was agreed, and the nursing team chief, Mr Brayman, reported that they were treated ‘with much courtesy and cordiality and that the voyage was accomplished without the loss of a single patient’.26 At the port of Santander, the American nurses were ‘warmly welcomed’ by SRC representatives, and in Bilbao personnel of both Red Cross Societies ‘exchanged brassards’.27 Finally, ARC activities regarding prisoners during the Cuban war also extended to Cuban detainees. In August 1898, the Cuban–​American League (CAL), a lobbying group that promoted Cuba’s annexation to the USA, took it for granted ‘that the [US] government is doing everything possible for the discharge of the Cuban political prisoners now in confinement in various Spanish prisons’.28 The CAL demanded that publicity be given to these diplomatic demarches because it would ‘bring about better understanding with the Cubans’.29 The US Government’s lasting commitment to this issue would be confirmed by Article VI of the Peace Treaty with Spain signed in Paris on 10 December 1898, which stated that: Spain will, upon the signature of the present treaty, release all prisoners of war, and all persons detained or imprisoned for political offences, in connection with the insurrections in Cuba and the Philippines and the war with the United States.30

Despite such commitment, things moved slowly. More than two years had passed when on 18 April 1901 the SRC received a confidential letter from Clara Barton. She informed the Spanish Society that the ARC had received a complaint from

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an anonymous US citizen, requesting that it take steps towards the release of the ‘thousands’ of Cuban political detainees still held in prisons located in Spain’s African enclaves on the northern coast of Morocco and the Gulf of Guinea, ‘as a result of the last two wars of independence’.31 After the complaint was endorsed by the Governor-​General of Cuba, the US State Department and the US president himself with no practical effects, Barton replied that ‘here is but one more application left in the world, that would be to Spain herself and … I shall with your kind permission refer it to the head of the Red Cross in Spain’.32 After receiving the letter, the SRC president, the Marquis of Polavieja, addressed the Spanish prime minister, arguing that Barton’s ‘politely formulated’ enquiry, as well as the excellent relations existing with her  –​after the decisive ARC intervention in the release of Spanish prisoners in the Philippines in 1899 –​obliged the Spanish Society to answer back.33 As a result, an official request was issued to the ministries of war, navy and justice, and the Home Office, asking if any political prisoners from the former overseas territories were still being held in detention centres under their responsibility.34 All of them denied the allegations, and by early December the SRC informed Barton of the outcome of this enquiry.35 The SRC and the Spanish Government were earnest in their reply. However, there had been hundreds of overseas prisoners in Spanish African penitentiaries in previous years with deportation procedures set up during the first war of Cuban independence in 1868–​78.36 This practice was repeated more extensively during the conflict of 1895–​8. Following the first group of Cuban prisoners sent to Ceuta in October 1895, the number of deportees from overseas territories reached over 2,000, with around 700 being held in Ceuta, 260 in the Chafarinas Islands and 1,000 on the island of Fernando Poo.37 According to these conservative estimates, almost 90 per cent of them were Cubans, which corresponds well with the greater importance of the war in that territory; however, it may also reflect the availability of sources and bibliography for that case in comparison with Puerto Rico and the Philippines. These figures included prisoners of war and political deportees in various proportions. Thus, for example, of the almost 700 men confined in Ceuta, two-​thirds belonged to the first category and the rest to the second.38 A good number of these prisoners from overseas territories remained in Spanish African penitentiaries after the war ended, despite occasional pardons granted by Spanish authorities throughout the conflict and rare escapes from prison.39 Shortly before the peace treaty was signed in December 1898, US consuls in Madrid began to press Spanish authorities to have the Cuban and Puerto-​Rican prisoners released. Their démarches led to the passing of various decrees of amnesty. For example, 290 Cubans (including 22 ñáñigos, members of an Afro-​Cuban secret society opposed to Spanish rule) were released in October 1898.40 Most ñáñigos, however, together with anarchists and ‘bandits’, would not be freed until January 1899.41 From 1900 onwards, despite denunciations such as the one that triggered Clara Barton’s letter, almost all of the remaining overseas prisoners were inmates who had been condemned before

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1895 for criminal offences or banditry. An estimate after 1898 gave a total figure of 212 detainees, of whom 173 were Cubans.42 Of the latter, 31 would die while still imprisoned between that year and 1909.43 Some of them would demand their release by way of personal letters sent to the president of the newly established Cuban Republic as late as December 1906, the last one being actually sent by a deserter from the Spanish army who had joined the Cuban forces before being captured in 1897 and sent to Ceuta in October 1898.44 Challenging colonial humanitarianism François Bugnion has argued that the intervention of the ARC in favour of the Cuban reconcentrados in the early months of 1898 was a ‘significant precedent’ in the history of the Red Cross, as ‘it was the first time that a national society foreign to a country prone to civil war got permission to act at the site of the insurrection’.45 Relief activities regarding prisoners during the Spanish–​American war and its aftermath, briefly presented in the former section, were another aspect of the atypical involvement of the ARC. Both shared a common feature: the American Society intervened in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines as if these territories belonged to the USA, and treated Cuban and Filipino prisoners as if they were their own nationals. This modus operandi was not merely a wartime pursuit but rather, both during and after the conflict, was a course of action that had been followed by the USA since the end of the first Cuban war of 1868–​78. It seems clear that this first war had turned the destiny of Cuba into an openly trilateral affair involving Spaniards, Americans and Cubans, the first two of which were actually moved by nationalist rather than colonialist goals.46 After 1878, Spain and the USA began a competition to achieve the full integration of the island within their own respective state systems and national territories. Spain came to consider Cuba as key to its cohesion and modernisation, even if this implied the existence of a heterogeneous and transatlantic polity. The USA, on the other hand, saw in Cuba one of the last opportunities for pursuing its policy of ‘manifest destiny’, which had justified the annexation of huge territories during the nineteenth century  –​and whose most recent example was the incorporation of Hawaii in July 1898, when the Spanish–​American war was still being fought. Finally, Cuban insurgents sought to gain national independence from both present Spanish domination and future American rule. The radical incompatibility among these three nationalist projects stood behind the outbreak of a new and harsh conflict, but before that moment arrived, Spanish authorities had already been obliged to consent tacitly to growing US intervention and Cuban self-​organisation. This situation helps explain why neither Spain nor the USA aimed at creating a colonial Red Cross during and after the conflict. On the one hand, the SRC took advantage of the war to begin its activities on the island, to which it extended its metropolitan organisation as if it were just another Spanish province. Secretary Juan

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Pedro Criado Domínguez suggested to Spanish elites in Cuba the convenience of creating a ‘delegation’ of the SRC, and a Junta Central was thus established in Havana in the spring of 1895, followed by a network of comisiones in the main towns.47 Activities focused on the relief of Spanish army officers and, soldiers and comprised the establishment of hospitals and food kitchens, as well as giving money and clothes to the sick and wounded who had to be shipped back to Spain. In the aftermath of the war, SRC committees in Cuba aided the repatriation of tens of thousands of military casualties to dozens of Red Cross hospitals (sanatorios) provisionally established throughout Spain since the beginning of the conflict.48 These activities sparked the criticism of Cuban patriots, who strongly censured the SRC’s ‘inhumanity’, as allegedly the Society ‘would not extend its benefits to Cuban hospitals and wounded because the [Spanish] government considered them as rebels and intended to treat them as such’.49 Regarding the ARC, instead of providing aid or funds for the SRC and the insurgents, as any neutral society was expected to do, the American Society managed to obtain the formal consent of Spanish authorities to deploy itself on the ground. This unprecedented action was the last of a series of tolerated US interventions on the island, of which the Yellow Fever commissions of 1878, 1888 and 1897 had been the most important in the medical-​sanitary domain.50 Otherwise, the ARC was following its civil-​oriented tradition, which had set it apart from most existing Red Cross societies, closely connected with their respective national armies and military medical services and focusing their interventions in war combats.51 More precisely, the ARC intervention on Cuban soil focused on reconcentrados, civilians who had been obliged by Spanish authorities to leave the countryside for depriving the insurgents of local support and manpower (and also expelled by Cuban insurgents, so that the island’s economic activity collapsed).52 Around 400,000 reconcentrados were forced to settle in concentration camps located in the vicinity of the main cities and towns. All the camps suffered from a lack of adequate housing, regular food, potable water and warm clothes, leaving the inhabitants ravaged by diseases, malnutrition and death.53 Press campaigns, political debates and demands from US pro-​Cuban groups such as the CAL led President McKinley, on the 24 December 1897, to ask Spanish authorities in Cuba for permission to intervene on behalf of reconcentrados.54 When permission was granted, McKinley immediately created the CCRC, which soon began sending cargos of clothes, food and medicines to the island, where they were received and distributed by the Consul General Fitzhugh Lee. Barton herself hurried to Havana with twenty ARC voluntaries in a fully loaded ship in early February 1898.55 Food was distributed, aid provided to hospitals and an orphanage opened. Barton remained in Cuba until the US declaration of war obliged her to leave in late April. During those two-​and-​a-​half months she enjoyed cordial relations with Spanish military and SRC authorities, who praised her activities.56 By contrast, Cuban patriots such as Tomás Estrada Palma, head of the Cuban revolutionary

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junta of New York, criticised the ARC for helping Spain solve ‘a rearguard problem’ and therefore easing its war effort.57 The ARC had also been taking care of Cuban refugees fleeing the island since the outbreak of the war. Since 1896, several thousand had arrived at Key West and Tampa, Florida. To assist them, ‘committees and agents’ of the ARC had been established in both localities that served as distributing agencies of the supplies sent by the ARC first and the CCRC later. In Key West, for example, up to 1,700 Cubans were fed daily by the ARC kitchen and warehouse.58 In sum, both the SRC and the ARC extended their metropolitan organisation to Cuba during the war as if it were their own national territory. Co-​existence was possible because of the agreement between governments and because each association targeted a different needy population. Following US victory, the ARC would continue with its previous activities, now on a larger scale and almost without competition –​though it seems that the SRC kept its delegation in Cuba until around 1909.59 However, a distinctive local branch would soon be opened. Its earliest precedent may have been a so-​called ‘Cuban Red Cross, Auxiliary to the American National’ (CRC-​AAN) set up in Tampa, Florida, in connection with the assistance provided by the ARC to Cuban refugees since 1896.60 Its president was Miguel M. Calejo, a Cuban Baptist priest exiled to the USA during the war, and its secretary Dr José Ignacio Torralbas, a member of the Academia de Ciencias Médicas, Físicas y Naturales of Havana, long-​time supporter of independence and head of the Sociedad Patriótica of Tampa.61 As Calejo planned to return to Cuba to resume his religious duty in August 1898, he requested permission from the ARC to ‘move the headquarters’ of the CRC-​AAN with him to the island.62 Apparently, this permission was not granted, and it was Clara Barton, back again in Cuba, who personally started the process that led to the creation of the ‘Cuban branch of the ARC’ in the summer of 1899 under the direction of the wife of Colonel Estes Rathbone, newly appointed director-​general of Cuba’s Post Office.63 When Barton left the island for good in September of that year, most of the ARC operations were transferred to the local branch. The successful intervention of the ARC in the war and its extension to Cuba helped culminate the long-​running efforts of the American Society to become a truly Government-​backed and nationwide institution. Barton had asked the successive cabinets for a federal charter since 1882, but her failure had kept the ARC at bay as a modest organisation with a reduced number of volunteers and associates.64 Moreover, although the ARC was supposed to centralise Red Cross activities throughout the country, its influence did not actually reach far from Washington, DC. The New  York Red Cross, for example, enjoyed considerable autonomy from the ARC and raised far more human and financial resources than the central committee, with which it had set up a local hospital and a nursing school.65 The California Red Cross sprang up out of an autonomous local initiative in 1898, and was responsible for sending the earliest relief to American soldiers in the Philippines without the ARC initially knowing about it.66 Many US states, counties and cities

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still lacked an ARC organisation in early 1898. The Cuban war success ended this situation, as the Society was granted a federal charter in 1900, followed by a new one in 1905. Bureaucratic centralisation and nationwide deployment were then achieved, with the ex-​Spanish overseas possessions being initially incorporated as if they were US territory. The Cuban branch of the ARC persisted after the end of the US first military occupation in 1902, but in the end an independent Cuban Red Cross would be created in 1909.67 The Philippines branch, by contrast, persisted until the Japanese occupation of this archipelago in 1942. The Puerto Rico branch of the ARC still exists today. Challenging international humanitarianism Despite the ARC being a second-​rate society in the Red Cross world by the end of the nineteenth century, it showed great potential to expand, either as a national organisation, or as actor of international humanitarianism. Its activities within the USA (for example, during a yellow fever outbreak in Jacksonville in 1878 and floods in Pennsylvania in 1889), plus relief provided to civilians struck by famine in Russia in 1891 or those massacred by the Ottoman army in Armenia in 1896, hinted at this. Such potential would finally pose a growing challenge to the hegemony of the ICRC in the Red Cross Movement for various reasons. A very important one was that the ARC tradition, as we have already pointed out, focused mainly on civilian relief in natural disasters, epidemics or war, and was essentially very different from the relief to wounded soldiers in armed conflicts characteristically promoted by the ICRC and generally endorsed by most existing national Red Cross societies.68 Because of this specific humanitarian culture, but also because of its reliance on an increasingly powerful US diplomatic and commercial network throughout the world, the ARC felt less and less compelled to subordinate its organisation and activities to the ICRC and more prone to sustain horizontal, direct relations with other Red Cross societies. The creation of the League of Red Cross Societies in 1919, led by the ARC War Council chairman Henry P. Davison, was the ultimate challenge posed by Washington to Geneva.69 However, it was during the Cuban conflict that the ARC took the first significant steps towards ‘making international humanitarianism American’, as Julia Irwin has expressed it.70 This was due to the weak involvement of the ICRC when compared with the ARC’s leading role during the 1895–​8 war. Regarding the ICRC, its most effective humanitarian initiative in relation to Cuba was vicarious, for it was launched and managed by the Swiss Federal Council, the collective executive and head of state of Switzerland. Two days after the US declaration of war on 21 April 1898, the Federal Council, through the Swiss diplomatic representatives in Washington and Madrid, requested the ministries of foreign affairs of Spain and the USA to put into practice the so-​called ‘additional articles’ in relation to naval wars proposed during the Geneva Conference of 1868. The Swiss Government claimed

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that its right to promote such a humanitarian initiative derived from ‘its capacity as the intermediary organ between the signatory states of the convention of Geneva’.71 Despite the fact that the additional articles of 1868 had not been ratified or included in any formal treaty, France and Germany had tacitly followed the regulations during the whole duration of the Franco-​Prussian war of 1870–​1.72 For the Cuban conflict, the Federal Council proposed the acceptance of an amended version of the articles drafted by France and agreed with Great Britain. Both Spain and the USA would subscribe to it on 9 May and apply it during the war.73 A second, and much less successful, initiative was launched by the ICRC on the day of the declaration of war. The SRC and the ARC were informed of the possibility of receiving aid from other national societies by way of the ICRC –​if they agreed to it –​as had been done in previous international conflicts. As the committee’s president, Gustave Moynier, put it: If your means should prove insufficient and if you desire to receive foreign assistance, we shall be most ready to offer our aid in making that desire known to the Red Cross societies of the Neutral Powers. In that case, it would be well for you, whilst addressing the application to us, to indicate what kind of help it would be most desirable for our correspondents to furnish.74

The SRC replied four days later, giving thanks to the committee but refusing to receive aid on the grounds that its own resources sufficed for dealing with war needs.75 The ARC, by contrast, would not send its reply until 8 June, a month and a half later.76 Maybe the USA was not initially interested in the offer; maybe the delay was due to the fact that Clara Barton was at that time on board the State of Texas, and official correspondence had to make its way from Washington, DC to Florida and back. In any case, the ARC finally accepted the ICRC’s offer, the funds from which would be used to support the army and navy medical services and to prepare a hospital ship called the Moynier that would carry the Red Cross flag.77 The ICRC would not actually launch its ‘Appel en faveur de la Croix-​Rouge Américaine’ until 20 June, ten days after the US marines had landed at Guantánamo Bay. By that time, several Red Cross societies had already sent funds or offered their assistance directly to the ARC. In contrast to the ICRC’s vicarious and belated initiatives, the ARC was very actively and rapidly involved in the Cuban war, as has already been shown. The activities of the American Society challenged the model of Red Cross work hitherto promoted by the Geneva Committee in at least two ways:  first, as shown before, because of a dominant focus on civilians and prisoners; second, because the ARC promoted horizontal, direct relations with other national Red Cross societies without the mediation of the ICRC. Thus, both the aid to reconcentrados and the prisoners’ relief were the product of bilateral US–​Spain, ARC–​SRC negotiations. Another example of this was an initiative launched by the Portuguese Red Cross. Just days

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after the declaration of war –​and following an idea of its secretary, Luiz Guilherme Santos Ferreira –​the Portuguese Society proposed to the SRC and the ARC that it act as an intermediary agency to bring Spanish prisoners of war in the USA (and in the Philippines) into contact with their families.78 Both societies agreed, and a correspondence service was set up, leading to the dispatch of 758 letters to Spanish detainees in the USA and the Philippines, and 17 letters back to Spain between May and September 1898.79 This episode, for which the only precedent was the correspondence service organised by the ICRC during the Franco-​Prussian war, served as the basis for the Portuguese Red Cross idea of creating an ‘Agença Central de Pesquisas’ during the Second Boer War of 1899–​1902, and influenced the creation of the International Prisoner of War Agency of the ICRC during the First World War.80 A last example of horizontal relations relates to the aid sent by several national Red Cross societies to the ARC. As mentioned earlier, the belated ‘Appel’ of the ICRC of 20 June 1898 was preceded by the decision of various societies to raise or send funds for the warring parties shortly after hostilities broke out. For example, on 23 April, the central committee of the French Société de Secours aux Blessés Militaires agreed to launch a public subscription on behalf of the ARC and the SRC, to which it contributed an initial sum of 50,000 francs.81 The ICRC was informed of this two days later, as were the two concerned societies, which were asked whether they preferred to receive the aid in the form of money or goods (such as equipment, linen and drugs).82 Another society that raised funds was the Association Congolaise et Africaine de la Croix-​Rouge  –​the Belgian-​sponsored Society organised in the Congo, which sent 500 francs to the ARC by way of the Belgian ambassador in Washington, DC.83 A  committee of the Civic Guard of Brussels, organised under the patronage of the Belgian Red Cross, also launched a subscription ‘to extend help to the victims of the Spanish–​American war’.84 Finally, the Canadian branch of the British Red Cross contacted the ARC on 20 April, offering its help should war broke out, while the Italian Red Cross made a similar offer a week later.85 As the linchpin of these various initiatives, the ARC did the most to promote this kind of direct, horizontal relations between fellow societies as a means to achieve greater efficiency and also because the free interaction between them would naturally favour the pre-​eminence of those with larger resources, and therefore its own future ambitions. Conclusion It has been acknowledged in the ARC’s historiography that its intervention in the last war of Cuban independence was a relevant step in the development of its own specific tradition of assistance to civilians. However, as this chapter argues, such intervention was also a seminal and fundamental episode in the rise of the ARC to the status of humanitarian world power, a rise expressed in the challenge posed to hitherto dominant colonial and international models of the Red Cross. On the one

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hand, the ARC did not aim to set up a colonial society in Cuba, either before, during or after the war, but tried instead to incorporate the island into its incipient national structure as if it were another US territory. This challenge to colonial humanitarianism was an expression of the decades-​long US interventionism in Cuba and was matched by the absence of a colonial Red Cross on the island under Spanish rule. On the other hand, the war showed that the ARC also challenged the model of Red Cross work hitherto promoted and led by the ICRC. The ARC out-​performed the Geneva Committee in the scope and relevance of its activities during the conflict. It also moved away from the Committee’s traditional modus operandi by focusing on civilian and prisoner relief and by promoting horizontal relations with other national Red Cross societies. In this way, the 1895–​8 war in Cuba could be taken as the seminal episode in the struggle for hegemony in the Red Cross world between Washington and Geneva that would lead to an open confrontation with the creation of the League of Red Cross Societies in 1919.

Notes 1 This chapter was prepared with the support of CIDEHUS, UID/​HIS/​00057/​2013 (POCI-​ 01–​0145-​FEDER-​007702); of the project IF//​00835/​2014CP1232/​CT0002 of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT); and of the project HAR2015–​67723-​P of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO). F. J. Martínez-​Antonio, ‘Vom Spanien in Übersee zum Spanien in Afrika:  Über die Eigentümlichkeit des spanischen Imperiums im 19. Jahrhundert’, Mittelweg 36:6 (December 2013–​January 2014),  18–​35. 2 J. M. Jover Zamora (dir.), Historia de España Menéndez Pidal. Tomo XXXIV: La era isabelina y el sexenio democrático (1834–​1874) (Madrid: Espasa-​Calpe, 1996); Historia de España Menéndez Pidal. Tomo XXXVI: La época de la Restauración (1875–​1902) (Madrid: Espasa-​Calpe, 2000). 3 J. Pan-​Montojo (co-​ord.), Más se perdió en Cuba: España, 1898 y la crisis de fin de siglo (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2006); M. D. Elizalde and J. M. Delgado (eds), Filipinas: Un país entre dos imperios (Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2011). 4 On the problems of applying colonial and postcolonial schemes to the history of the modern Spanish Empire, see F. J. Martínez-​Antonio, ‘ “Lost in Colonialism”:  La sanidad española en Cuba antes y después de la Guerra de los Diez Años’, Scripta nova, 418:20, (2012), 16, http://​ revistes.ub.edu/​index.php/​ScriptaNova/​article/​view/​14808 (accessed 4 November 2019). 5 The term ‘black box’ is taken from B. Latour, Science in Action:  How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 6 M. M. Jones, The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); J. Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 7 M. I. Porras and J. De Las Heras, ‘La Cruz Roja Española, la repatriación de los soldados de las guerras coloniales y el desarrollo de la ciencia médica en España, 1896–​1950’, História, ciência, saúde: Manguinhos, 23:3 (2016), 829–​46. 8 Jones, The American Red Cross, p. 83. 9 www.historyofcuba.com/​history/​ruiz1.htm (accessed 22 October 2019).

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10 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), AGO 84994:  enclosed copy of a letter from the US District Attorney relating to crew and passengers on prizes, Key West, 26 May 1898. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Jones, The American Red Cross, pp. 84–​5. 14 Ibid., p. 89. 15 C. Barton, The American Red Cross in Peace and War (Washington: American Historical Press, 1906), pp. 369–​70. 16 NARA, AGO 76932: A. S. Daggett to the Adjutant General, Department of the Gulf, Key West, 4 May 1898. 17 NARA, AGO 76932:  Brigadier General Commander Graham to Adjutant General Army, 3 May 1898. 18 American National Red Cross Relief Committee:  Reports May 1898, March 1899 (New  York: Knickerbocker Press, 1899), pp. 210–​11. 19 NARA, AGO 121124A, B, C: Fort Macpherson to Adjutant General Office, 17 August 1898. 20 NARA, AGO 121124A, B, C: Fort Macpherson to Adjutant General Office, 22 August 1898. 21 NARA, AGO 125652: Telegram from Goodrich to the Secretary of Navy, Portsmouth, 10 July 1898; telegram from Cotton to the Secretary of Navy, Portsmouth, 16 July 1898. 22 NARA, AGO 125652: Portsmouth to the Secretary of Navy, 10 July 1898. 23 Barton, The American Red Cross, p. 479. 24 NARA, AGO 125652: Cotton to the Secretary of Navy, 16 July 1898. 25 Barton, The American Red Cross, p. 6. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., p. 507. 28 NARA, AGO 121357: Secretary of the Cuban–​American League to the President of the United States, 26 August 1898. 29 Ibid. 30 Treaty of Peace between the United States and Spain, 10 December 1898 http://​avalon.law. yale.edu/​19th_​century/​sp1898.asp (accessed 18 December 2013). 31 Library of Congress, Manuscript Division (LOC), Clara Barton Papers: Barton to the president of the Spanish Red Cross, 18 April 1901. 32 LOC, Barton Papers: Barton to W. H. Murray, 16 April 1901. 33 Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Organizaciones internacionales (AMAE), H2743: ‘Despacho del Marqués de Polavieja al Ministerio de Estado’, Madrid, 1 May 1901. 34 AMAE, H2743:  ‘Despacho del Ministerio de Estado al Marqués de Polavieja’, Madrid, 22 May 1901. 35 AMAE, H2743:  ‘Despacho del Ministerio de Estado al Marqués de Polavieja’, Madrid, 4 December 1901. 36 J. Márquez, ‘Convictos cubanos deportados a Canarias y África durante la represión del independentismo, 1868–​1900’, Boletín Millares Carlo, 17 (1998), 103–​19; C. González, ‘Cubanos en Fernando Poo:  Un capítulo de las memorias de John Holt’, Cuadernos de historia contemporánea, número extraordinario (2003), 205–​ 12; M.  del Carmen Barcia, ‘Desterrados de la patria: Cuba, 1869–​ 1898’, n.d., www.baldoralumni.com/​pdffiles/​ desterradosdelapatriacuba1869–​98.pdf, pp. 1–​24 (accessed 18 December 2013); I. de Aranzadi, ‘El legado cubano en África: Ñáñigos deportados a Fernando Poo. Memoria viva y archivo escrito’, Afro-​Hispanic Review 31:1 (2012), 29–​60.

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3 7 Márquez, ‘Convictos cubanos’, 110. 38 P. de la Concepción, Prisioneros y deportados cubanos en la guerra de independencia, 1895–​1898 (Havana: Imprenta P. Fernández y Cía, 1932), pp. 491–​512. 39 On pardon, see El Día (16 July 1897), El País (22 October 1897), La Unión Católica (2 March 1898). On escapes, see El Imparcial (8 August 1897). 40 Márquez, ‘Convictos cubanos’, 118. 41 Ibid., 118–​19. 42 Ibid., 113. 43 E. Barranco, census of prisoner deaths in the Ceuta prison, www.cubagenweb.org/​mil/​ mambi/​prisoners/​Ceuta/​Censo.pdf (accessed 13 January 2014). 44 Barcia, ‘Desterrados’, p. 24. 45 F. Bugnion, Le Comité International de la Croix-​Rouge et la protection des victimes de la guerre (Geneva: Comité International de la Croix-​Rouge, 2000), p. 280. 46 F. J. Martínez-​Antonio, ‘Fiebre amarilla, medicina de laboratorio y hegemonía española en Cuba (1878–​95) a propósito del médico militar Casimiro Roure y Bofill’, in Q. Bonastra and G. Jori (eds), Imaginar, organizar y controlar el territorio: Una visión geográfica de la construcción del Estado-​Nación (Barcelona: Icària, 2013), pp. 457–​93; F. J. Martínez, ‘Not a Polar Island: Yellow Fever, Spanish Medical Research, and the Struggle for Scientific and Political Hegemony in Late Nineteenth Century Cuba’, História, ciência, saúde: Manguinhos, 24:4 (2017), 1125–​45. 47 La Cruz Roja: Memoria de la delegación de la asamblea española en la isla de Cuba (Havana: El Comercio, 1899), p. 38. 48 J. C. Clemente, Historia de la Cruz Roja española (Madrid:  Cruz Roja Española, 1986), pp. 84–​8; Porras and De Las Heras, ‘La Cruz Roja Española’, pp. 832–​5. 49 ‘To members of the Red Cross associations’, La République Cubaine ( July 1897), p. 2. 50 Martínez, ‘Not a Polar Island’, p. 1133; M. Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878–​1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 51 Jones, The American Red Cross, p. 10. 52 F. Pérez Guzmán, ‘Los efectos de la reconcentración (1896–​1898) en la sociedad cubana. Un estudio de caso: Güira de Melena’, Revista de Indias, 58:212 (1998), 277–​93; Y. Rivero Marín, ‘La reconcentración de Weyler en Sagua la Grande’, Contribuciones a las ciencias sociales, September 2011, www.eumed.net/​rev/​cccss/​13/​ (accessed 4 January 2014). 53 A. Stucki, Las guerras de Cuba: Una historia de violencia y campos de concentración (1868–​1898) (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2017), p. 15. 54 Barton, The American Red Cross, p. 361. 55 Jones, The American Red Cross, p. 86. 56 Barton, The American Red Cross, pp. 370, 373. 57 Jones, The American Red Cross, p. 85. 58 Barton, The American Red Cross, p. 368. 59 Delegación General en la República de Cuba: Informe elevado a la Asamblea Suprema recopilando los hechos más importantes realizados por esta comisión, durante el periodo comprendido desde junio 6 de 1921 hasta marzo 31 de 1925 (Havana: Cruz Roja Española, 1925), pp. 5–​6. 60 LOC, Barton Papers: M. Calejo to Stephen Barton, 10 August 1898. 61 Historia de los Bautistas (El Paso: Casa Bautista de Publicaciones, 1990), p. 362; ECURED, www. ecured.cu/​index.php/​Jos%C3%A9_​Ignacio_​Torralbas_​Manresa (accessed 15 January 2014). 62 LOC, Barton Papers: M. Calejo to Stephen Barton, 10 August 1898. 63 LOC, Barton Papers: notes on Cuba 6, 1899. 1 June–​13 October. Entry of 12 July 1899. 64 Jones, The American Red Cross, p. 93.

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6 5 LOC, Barton Papers: Red Cross Hospital and Training School for Sisters, 1898–​9. 66 LOC, Barton Paper: Philippine Islands, March 1899–​November 1901. 67 Cuban Red Cross, www.sld.cu/​sitios/​cruzroja/​temas.php?idv=14423 (accessed 15 January 2014). 68 Jones, The American Red Cross, pp. 21–​37. 69 On the tensions between the League and the ICRC, see J. F. Hutchinson, Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 279–​319. 70 Irwin, Making the World Safe, p. 13. 71 Barton, The American Red Cross, p. 384. 72 Ibid., p. 385. 73 Ibid., pp. 387–​8. 74 LOC, Barton Papers: Gustave Moynier to the ARC’s president, Clara Barton, 21 April 1898. 75 Archivo Històrico da Cruz Vermelha Portuguesa (AHCVP), ‘Correspondencia, Guerra Hispano-​Norteamericana, 1898 –​Appel en faveur de la Croix-​Rouge Américaine’, Geneva, 20 June 1898. 76 LOC, Barton Papers: Barton to Moynier, Key West, 8 June 1898. 77 AHCVP, ‘Correspondencia, Guerra Hispano-​Norteamericana, 1898 –​Appel en faveur de la Croix-​Rouge Américaine’, Geneva, 20 June 1898. 78 AHCVP, ‘Actas da Cruz Vermelha, Sessão em 29 d’Abril de 1898’. 79 AHCVP, ‘Actas da Cruz Vermelha, Sessão em 15 de Outubro de 1898’. 80 The British turned the idea down; Cruz Vermelha Portuguesa: Breve historial (Lisbon: Cruz Vermelha Portuguesa, 2002), p. 4. 81 LOC, Barton Papers:  letter from the Comité Central de la Société de Secours aux Blessés Militaires to the ARC, 25 April 1898. 82 Ibid. 83 LOC, Barton Papers: ‘Lettre du président de l’Association Congolaise et Africaine de la Croix-​ Rouge au présidente de la Croix-​Rouge Américaine’, 18 May 1898. 84 LOC, Barton Papers:  dispatch from the US Legation in Belgium to the State Department, 21 May 1898. 85 LOC, Barton Papers:  president of the Italian Red Cross to the president of the ARC, 26 April 1898; president of the British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War (Canadian Branch), 20 April 1898.

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Realignment in the aftermath of war: The League of Red Cross Societies, the Australian Red Cross and its Junior Red Cross in the 1920s Melanie Oppenheimer

During the interwar period, one of the programmes that engendered considerable interest within the Red Cross Movement was the Junior Red Cross. Described as ‘one of the best guarantees for the permanence of the peacetime work of the Red Cross Society’, the Junior Red Cross tapped into a new and prescribed role that children and youth could play within Red Cross into the future.1 Youth were viewed optimistically by sections of the Red Cross, arguing that they could play a role in leading the world out ‘of the dark jungle of old passions between nation and nation’.2 The links that could be established between the various national Junior Red Cross programmes concerning international friendship and good will would create an awareness of other nationalities and cultures, and improve international relations through the establishment of a global children’s network. The newly established League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS) and its Bureau of Junior Membership would play a leading role in building up the Junior Red Cross in many national societies, further internationalising the movement and providing a point of difference from the fifty-​year-​old International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). As Branden Little and others have suggested, the humanitarian responses to the First World War created ‘an explosion of new endeavours’.3 There was an exponential growth of the Red Cross Movement in its brand power and reach. Through voluntary action, patriotic funds and war charities, the war provided combatant national Red Cross societies with a range of opportunities with which to win over the hearts, minds and especially wallets of its constituents. By 1918, with the war not yet over, a global influenza epidemic claimed more victims than the war itself –​ most of them civilians. The pandemic, which struck Europe, America, Africa and Asia, saw over 30 million people die –​around two-​to-​three times the total number of people killed in the war itself. National Red Cross societies were closely involved in assisting during the pandemic. The repercussions of four years of war had decimated local populations across Europe, and the parlous state of civilians in particular, with outbreaks of typhoid and typhus, was a huge concern for governments and private

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charities alike. Behind all of this, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, too, created significant concern for the body politic. This chapter takes as its focus the foundation years of the LRCS, and examines how one national society –​the Australian Red Cross –​realigned itself as part of the transition from war to peace in the first years of the 1920s.4 This was done, it will be argued in part, through the Australian Red Cross’s relationship with the newly formed LRCS, and the emerging global programme of the Junior Red Cross. The Australian Red Cross played a major but little-​known role in this regard, as it was one of the first national societies to recognise the potential of involving children in the Movement. The part played by Lady Helen Munro Ferguson –​later Viscountess Novar –​whose leadership, initiative and knowledge were invaluable during her presidency of the Australian Red Cross from 1914 to 1920, is also discussed: specifically her role as the first woman member of the Board of Governors of the LRCS when she represented the Australian Red Cross. Arriving in Australia in May 1914 as the wife of the sixth Governor-​General, Ronald Munro Ferguson, Lady Helen brought with her a detailed knowledge of the Red Cross Movement, as she was involved with the formation of the Scottish Branch of the British Red Cross Society in 1909 and the development of the Voluntary Aid Detachment scheme across Scotland, as well as her local Red Cross branch in Fife.5 Few, if any, women held the top leadership position in a Red Cross society as Lady Helen did in Australia, which makes her contribution all the more remarkable.6 By the end of the First World War the Australian Red Cross, formed in August 1914 on the outbreak of war as a branch of the British Red Cross Society, was firmly established as a major wartime voluntary organisation. With Australian troops fighting as part of the British forces, the Australian Red Cross played a significant role assisting sick and wounded combatants both at home and abroad, their dependants as well as civilians caught up in the fighting. The postwar period brought opportunities for this young national society, especially through the LRCS. This chapter touches on the formation of the LRCS, and explores how the Australian Red Cross projected itself to the ‘emerging world’ of the Red Cross as a young, dynamic and innovative national society, not only through the representations of its former president, Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, but also through its Junior Red Cross programme, helping to develop an international children’s movement facilitated through, and by, the LRCS. Establishment of the League of Red Cross Societies Since its formation on 5 May 1919 in Paris, there has been considerable debate around the establishment of the LCRS by five national Red Cross Societies of America, Britain, France, Italy and Japan. The contestations and controversy with the ICRC are well known.7 It is not the intention of this chapter to go once more over this ground; suffice to say that the origins of the LRCS, in part, lie within the

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short and all-​too-​brief flurry of optimism in the immediate cessation of war, and the well-​meaning enthusiasm of American banker and chairman of the American Red Cross’s War Council, Henry Davison, and ‘his energy, his influence, his foresight, and his labor’.8 There is also evidence of an ‘ingrained arrogance’, as discussed by Davide Rodogno in Chapter 2 of this volume. A partner at J. P. Morgan and Co. in New York, Davison was headhunted for the position of chairman of the War Council of the American Red Cross in 1917 on America’s entry into the war.9 The fifty-​year-​ old Republican, once described as a ‘rising young financial genius’, had a generous dose of ‘American brashness’ and threw himself into his Red Cross duties. Under his dynamic leadership, as Julia Irwin and others have reminded us, the American Red Cross reached unparalled new heights in terms of membership, funds raised and public profile during the war.10 As the conflict drew to a close, it became clear to national Red Cross Society leaders that the organisation’s humanitarian work should continue into the postwar period. With a range of crises extending far beyond the armistice of 11 November 1918, national societies were keen to continue their work into peacetime; however, with the Swiss-​based ICRC’s focus on war, its Geneva Convention and amelioration of combatants in war, the path forward was not clear. Leaders such as Lady Helen in Australia, Davison in America and others wanted to build on the wartime renaissance of Red Cross work. As former Commissioner and British Red Cross representative, Sir Arthur Lawley, stated in Paris on 21 February 1919 when the announcement of the organisation of a Committee of the Red Cross Societies (the forerunner of the LRCS) was made, it was ‘to formulate and to propose to the Red Cross Societies of the world an extended program of Red Cross activities in the interest of humanity’.11 Led by America, representatives of the national societies of Britain, France, Italy and Japan initiated a new chapter in global humanitarian response. On 5 May, this was formalised as the LRCS, with Henry Davison, representing the American Red Cross, elected chairman, and members of the Board of Governors including Sir Arthur Stanley (British Red Cross), Count Frascara (Italian Red Cross), Count Jean de Kergorlay (French Red Cross) and Professor Ninagawa ( Japanese Red Cross).12 According to its Articles of Association, the LRCS was to help the development of national Red Cross societies, improve health, prevent disease and mitigate suffering, promote ‘the welfare of mankind’ through ‘new contributions to science and medical knowledge’, and coordinate ‘relief work in case of great national or international calamities’.13 Senior appointments included Scottish born Sir David Henderson, former commander of the Royal Flying Corps during the war, as Director General, and Swiss American-​born, economics graduate from Harvard, diplomat, and ICRC committee member, William E.  Rappard, as Secretary-​General. Rappard’s tenure was short lived as he took up a position as Director of the Mandates Division of the League of Nations after fifteen months with Red Cross.14 Henderson died in 1921. Dr Richard Strong was released by Harvard University for twelve months to take up the position of General Medical Director. American nurse, Miss Alice Fitzgerald,

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who had served with the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service and the American Red Cross during the war, took up the position of Director of the Department of Nursing.15 The formation of a Board of Governors was proposed at the first meeting of the LRCS in March 1920. They included the national societies of Argentina and Brazil (representing South America); Sweden and Denmark (representing the Scandinavian states); Canada and Australia (representing the Dominions); and Spain and Switzerland (representing the neutral states). The Balkan Provinces were represented by Serbia. From this list, countries were selected by drawing lots to serve two and four years on the Board. Australia drew a four-​year position and was represented by Viscountess Novar (formerly Lady Helen Munro Ferguson) on the League’s Board of Governors.16 The Red Cross Movement blossomed far beyond the shores of Geneva as a result of the First World War. Across the globe, national Red Cross societies were either formed in response to the war (as in Australia and New Zealand); or enjoyed a substantial increase in responsibility, prestige and wealth (for example, the Canadian, British, American, and French Red Cross Societies).17 Between May 1919 and July 1921, membership of the LRCS expanded from five to thirty-​five national societies. These included newly independent countries such as Czechoslovakia and Finland, the British Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India, as well as countries in South America and Asia.18 On the establishment of the LRCS, there was considerable discussion as to the particular roles the British Dominion Red Cross Societies should and could play. The LRCS relied on these national societies as well as those from the Americas and the newly created European national societies to support its existence. It was very unclear, however, as to what their status actually was. The uncertainty rested on the question of whether or not they were ‘independent’ societies. Australia’s case reveals the complexity. Formed on 13 August 1914, it became a member of the LRCS on 19 June 1919, an independent society in 1927 and was recognised by the ICRC on 17 November 1927, after the Balfour Declaration (1926) where British Dominions were granted full autonomy within the British Empire. However, for all intents and purposes it was an ‘independent’ society from the beginning and saw itself as such. The LRCS agreed and wanted their representation from the beginning. They were a useful ‘block’ against the staid, conservative, largely hostile and well-​established European societies, and an integral power base for the fledgling League. As the newly appointed Director-​General of the LRCS, David Henderson stated in a letter to the General-​Secretary of the Australian Red Cross in May 1919, ‘In forming plans for national Red Cross representation in the League, it was deemed absurd that the British Dominions Red Cross Societies should be represented only by the representatives of the British Red Cross’.19 Australia agreed. The Australian Red Cross had acted independently of the British Red Cross from the outset. It was a ‘branch’ in name only. Through the LRCS, Australian Red Cross gained a voice

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on the international stage, as compared with the ICRC, which refused to recognise it as more than a branch of the British Red Cross. It has not been appreciated just how important the LRCS became to national societies that were removed by the International Committee. Lady Novar noted this at a meeting of the Board of Governors in Paris in April 1924:  ‘Dominion Red Cross Societies were not represented at the XIth International Conference, nor were they recognized by the International Committee; only in the League did these Societies occupy a place and it was only through the League that they could exercise their influence.’20 Dominion Societies such as Australia, too, were generous financial donors to the LRCS. Using surplus stores left over from the war in London as well as Cape Town and Colombo (Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon), the Australian Red Cross was the first national society to assist the LRCS and Poland’s nascent national society established in 1919. For example, between October 1919 and April 1920, the Australian Red Cross shipped 5,856 cases of relief materials such as hospital clothing, medical supplies and food valued at £70,000 from London to Warsaw to assist the LRCS’s work with the typhus epidemic raging in Poland.21 The Australian Red Cross and the League of Red Cross Societies Like leaders of other national societies, president of the Australian Red Cross, Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, thought deeply about how to build a peacetime programme. At the end of the war, she urged the thousands of members of the Australian Red Cross –​most of whom were women –​not to disband their network of branches that criss-​crossed the large country, ‘not to let the spirit of voluntary service … escape from our midst’. ‘To create a great organisation is not easy, but to recreate it after once [sic] it has collapsed is often impossible’, she cautioned. What everyone had to do was to ‘look around and consider the uses to which this efficient and powerful society might best be put’.22 While keeping returned veterans and their dependants as their core constituency (through the running and staffing, largely by volunteers, of convalescent homes, and a range of postwar social welfare programmes that continued up until the 1970s), the Australian Red Cross expanded to include a range of peace activities. This included services to local communities, in particular civilian hospitals, maternity homes, bush nursing, health associations and the Junior Red Cross, as well as founding a blood-​donor service in the late 1920s. It made good sense, too, for Lady Helen to represent the Australian Red Cross on the newly constituted Board of Governors of the League. Members of the Council of the Red Cross in Australia were unanimous in their support for the appointment. It would be very beneficial, wrote Lady Forster, her successor at Government House, ‘to have as their representative one who has such far reaching knowledge of the Red Cross, and such distinguished judgment in matters concerning its development in days of peace’.23 This sentiment was acknowledged in the illuminated address given to her as a farewell gift on 9 August 1920 at her last Central Council meeting. In part,

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it stated ‘We rejoice to know that, as a governor of the League, you will not only continue to be associated with the work in Australia, but that you will find a world-​wide scope for all the talent and energy which produced such magnificent results in this outpost of the Empire.’24 Lady Helen attended League meetings in Geneva and Paris from 1921 to 1924, and 1927, 1930 and 1932, as well as the ICRC meetings in 1921, 1928 and 1930.25 During the 1928 and 1930 Conferences, she was elected a member of the Commission permanente.26 With her long-​standing interest in nursing, Lady Helen was appointed to the International Advisory Committee of the League of Red Cross Societies’ Nursing Home, later called the Manchester Square International School of Nurses, established at 15 Manchester Square, London, for international students attending its courses at Bedford College.27 While representing Australia at the LRCS, Lady Helen corresponded regularly with Philadelphia Robertson, her former secretary and now secretary-​general of the Australian Red Cross in Melbourne, providing a personal perspective on a range of issues that dominated the LRCS in its early years. She also sent back detailed reports. Lady Helen was initially sceptical about the benefits of Australia belonging to the LRCS. Like many others, the records suggest that at first she was indifferent as to what the LRCS could hope to achieve (especially its relationship to the ICRC), and uncertain of what her role as a representative would involve. ‘In time, no doubt, as the League of Red Cross Societies becomes better established and its usefulness becomes more apparent, the outlying Red Cross Societies such as ours will be more interested in it, and will better understand the need for cooperation’, she wrote in 1920.28 Again, like others, Lady Helen was confused as to the difference between the LRCS and the International Committee. As she explained, ‘in distant countries such as Australia, it was perplexing to receive letters, circulars etc from two organisations with almost identical aims’.29 The strained and uncertain relationship between the LRCS and the ICRC dominated the attention and discussion of Red Cross leaders at meetings of the Board of Governors and Council of the League attended by Lady Helen through the 1920s.30 She came to view the Australian Red Cross’s role at the LRCS as one of support, to assist countries with a less developed national society with its health work and services in particular.31 The Australian Red Cross was well served with Lady Helen on the LRCS Board of Governors. She was the perfect representative –​a highly experienced leader with in-​ depth knowledge of how a national society operated, well regarded, who, as the only female Board member, could hold her own amongst the men. Fluent in French, she could understand and converse with a diverse range of national representatives, and follow the French-​language proceedings closely. When the LRCS re-​located to Paris in 1922–​3, she recommended that the Australian Red Cross support it with a £250 donation. At the May 1927 meeting of the LRCS, where fifty-​two other nations were represented, Lady Helen was called on to chair a special committee to nominate various officials for specific positions.32 She continued her support and promotion

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of the Australian Red Cross in an international capacity through the writing of articles on the role it played in the assisting disabled soldiers that were published in the LRCS’s magazine, the World’s Health, and (in French) the Revue internationale de la Croix-​Rouge.33

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The development of the Junior Red Cross in Australia The development of the Junior Red Cross as a global movement within the broader context of the development of the LRCS as an emerging international humanitarian organisation of the 1920s is reasonably well covered in the historiography. This includes the roles played by national societies of America and Canada in particular to involve children as active agents (and recipients), to assist and engage with other children nationally and internationally through public health and humanitarian initiatives. There is an emerging body of work that focuses on the role of the Junior Red Cross in North America, and the impact of its programmes through the interwar period especially as they relate to public health. These studies assume a narrative that has North America at the epicentre.34 The American Junior Red Cross was founded in August 1917, with the entry of America into the war. Like that of its senior body, the growth of the Junior Red Cross in America was phenomenal. Implemented in schools, within a year almost half the school-​age population –​around 11 million schoolchildren –​were enrolled as members.35 However, the role played by Australia is less well known. The Junior Red Cross began during the First World War, with Canada and the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) both claiming to be the originators of the concept.36 Throughout the war, and in all belligerent countries, children were encouraged to undertake a range of patriotic work in a variety of organisations, including the Red Cross. In the Australian context, the emergence of the Junior Red Cross in NSW and the Children’s Patriotic Fund in South Australia saw boys and girls involved in the relief of suffering and distress caused by the war.37 Although the American Red Cross was important in the development of the Junior Red Cross globally, there were other national societies that played a major role in developing and internationalising the concept of the Junior Red Cross. As Philadelphia Robertson remarked in November 1922, ‘The American Red Cross beats so many drums that one is apt to think they do more than any other Red Cross Society in the world.’38 The idea that Australian children, or ‘Juniors’, could be involved in Red Cross work was the brainchild of Eleanor MacKinnon, a stalwart of the newly established Red Cross in NSW and a woman of considerable talents.39 The Junior Red Cross was considered her ‘greatest monument’, ‘her child’; MacKinnon saw the untapped potential of drawing children into the wartime activities on the home front in ways that developed, amongst other things, ‘a spirit of service to others’.40 Thousands of ‘Juniors’ formed ‘Circles’ and helped with Red Cross work throughout the war.

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The first Junior Red Cross Circles were formed within two weeks of the outbreak of war in August 1914, at Glencoe Public School, a small rural community in northern NSW on the New England Tablelands, and at Sydney and Parramatta Girls’ High Schools in Sydney.41 MacKinnon believed that the NSW Junior Red Cross was the first of its kind in the world. ‘I have always been fully determined that we shall hold our position as the foundation J[unior] R[ed] C[ross] of the world’, she later insisted. The evidence for her claim is strong. On Wednesday 5 August 1914, Lady Edeline Strickland, wife of the governor of NSW, invited guests to Government House in Sydney, where ‘An Account for the work of the Girl Aids and Junior Red Cross Society will be given.’ The date for acceptance was 27 July 1914, a week before war broke out.42 The objects of the Junior Red Cross in NSW concerned active citizenship; children helping others, especially the children of ex-​servicemen; and: (a) the encouragement among our young people of a spirit of voluntary social service and self-​denial (b) the special care of all those who have suffered bodily and mentally, and of the children of those who fell in the Great War (c) the linking up of this with other societies of children throughout the world, and the promotion of peace through closer relationship and understanding with other nations of the world (d) the training in efficiency which will be of assistance in war or times of great national disaster (e) the co-​operation with any organisations which exist for the improvement of health, the prevention of disease and mitigation of suffering throughout the world.43

From the beginning, connecting with schools was an integral part of MacKinnon’s vision for the Junior Red Cross. Schools, she astutely believed, ‘represented the best and most accessible recruiting grounds for Junior Red Cross membership’. During the war, she was in discussions with the Department of Education to establish a formal arrangement between schools and the Junior Red Cross. This was agreed to, and in July 1918 the organisation was inaugurated. The inclusion of the Junior Red Cross in schools as a ‘service activity’ became critical for the successful promotion of the Junior Red Cross, not only in Australia but elsewhere round the world. From 1918, Junior Red Cross Circles in NSW were established in local schools, or structured along the same lines as the senior Red Cross branches in a town or suburb. The membership fee was 1s per year, with 6d spent on purchasing a Junior Red Cross badge and the balance retained by the Circle to purchase materials.44 An adult (from the local branch, a school principal or teacher) became patron of the Circle, but the positions of president, secretary and treasurer were to be held by child members. Rules and formalities were kept as simple as possible, with adults supervising ‘but

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not taking the work out of [the children’s] hands’, in order to develop ‘business-​ like habits’ and to train children in ‘organisation and self-​reliance’.45 MacKinnon was adamant that children should be allowed to be in charge of their own activities: ‘these are entirely left in their own hands, as we feel that in this way we get a better result from the children and they have a keener interest in anything undertaken on their own initiative’, she wrote.46 Adults were to guide but not dictate. She feared that ‘too much supervision’ would ‘kill’ the ‘spontaneity’ of children.47 The work undertaken by children depended ‘upon their own natures and environment’ as well as the age of the children. MacKinnon was mindful not to ‘overlap’ the work of any existing organisation that ‘would resent any incursions into its field of effort’.48 She trod carefully with the hierarchy within the Department of Education too, realising early on ‘the necessity of going very warily’, which paid off, as ‘we count the State School Teachers as our best and firmest friends’.49 During school holidays, Junior Red Cross Circles remained active with what we would call ‘school holiday programmes’ today. In 1922, for example, hundreds of children in Sydney volunteered to work in Red Cross facilities such as the Blinded Soldiers’ Tea Rooms and Graythwaite in North Sydney, where the Red Cross ran a home for the most physically damaged ex-​servicemen. Juniors were drafted to headquarters where they sewed and made toys for orphans, and others helped with the Armenian Relief Fund.50 Another innovative programme was the Milk Campaign, where milk was provided daily to children up to the age of six in the working-​class inner suburbs of Sydney. A  Milk Pail Shield was awarded to the Junior Red Cross Circle that raised the most funds for this scheme each school term. The other major feature of the NSW scheme was its emphasis on Junior Red Cross Circles working to assist the children of returned servicemen, as well as children who had lost their fathers as a result of the war. This matched a priority for the Australian Red Cross’s peacetime programme of supporting the ex-​serviceman and his family. The NSW Junior Red Cross established and ran a fund to assist children of soldiers who were ‘crippled’ with polio, providing crutches, glasses and surgical appliances for the children. It also established three homes for the children of returned soldiers, all funded by the donations of children from Junior Red Cross Circles around the state. ‘Shuna’ and ‘Juong’ were located in the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney, an area well known for its cool and bracing climate. Established in large houses donated by benefactors, the homes were fitted out for around twenty children. ‘Shuna’, at Leura, was run for ‘delicate daughters of our Soldiers’, who were often malnourished and required rest and recuperation. The children were daughters of invalid soldiers, those who had contracted TB (and who were residents of the Red Cross’s adult sanitoria) and were not receiving a military pension, or whose fathers’ wage-​earning capacities were limited by their war service. By 1927, over 200 girls had visited ‘Shuna’. ‘Juong’, at Springwood, was a similar facility for the sons of returned soldiers.51

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Alternative Junior Red Cross structures in Australia Within Australia, where each State Division was autonomous, the Junior Red Cross was not homogeneous. It was not until 1921 that other State Divisions looked to implement a Junior Red Cross, led by the direct intervention of their new president, Lady Forster. Invited to deliver a special address to the juniors as part of a Red Cross exhibition displaying Red Cross industries at the Sydney Town Hall in May 1921, she expressed a wish ‘that every child in the State might become a member of the Society’.52 When Lady Forster returned to Melbourne (where she lived), she suggested to Philadelphia Robertson, who was secretary of both the Central Council and the Victorian Division, that the other Divisions should follow NSW’s lead. When the Victorian Division established their own Junior Red Cross, however, they chose to base it on the newly formed British Red Cross Society’s Junior Red Cross. This model was quite different from that of NSW, as they co-​operated closely with the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, which were seen as ‘kindred Societies’. The British were much more hierarchical, with adults placed in charge of all positions within the Circles.53 Somewhat surprisingly, minutes of the first meeting of the Junior Red Cross Committee of the Victorian Division do not mention NSW. Rather, somewhat obliquely, the minutes record that the Junior Movement was ‘spreading throughout all countries where a Red Cross Society is in existence’.54 Furthermore, the Victorian Division adopted the badge of the British Red Cross Juniors and ordered copies to be made in Britain. Like their NSW counterpart, however, the Victorians recognised the importance of engaging with schools. They received strong support from the Department of Education, and each school became the official unit for the Junior Red Cross Circle. It paid a yearly membership fee of 2s 6d, with the members themselves paying no subscription. By 1935, Victoria had a membership of nearly 70,000 children in 1,558 schools. Other State Divisions struggled to establish Junior Red Cross Circles, and when they did, they looked to Philadelphia Robertson and Victoria for the lead, rather than to NSW.55 Queensland’s first Circle was established in 1922 and used the Victorian model and rules. In Tasmania, the minister for education was not interested in Junior Red Cross in schools, believing that ‘the work of school and children should be subject to as little interruption as possible’.56 Eventually there was a change of heart, and by the late 1920s, the principles of the Junior Red Cross were included in the civics curriculum of Tasmanian schools.57 Similarly, there was little interest in South Australia, either from the State Division or from the State director of education. Eventually, a Junior Red Cross was established, and in March 1927, nine Circles with a membership of 300 were reported. It was not until the 1930s, in partnership with the Girl Guides and the Young Women’s Christian Association, and having gained approval to operate in both public and Catholic schools, that the Junior Red Cross achieved rapid expansion in South Australia. In Western Australia

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the concept struggled, with only eleven Circles remaining in 1930 and none by 1934. The strength of the Junior Red Cross remained centred on the eastern states.58

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The Junior Red Cross and the League of Red Cross Societies In the aftermath of the First World War, a feature of international humanitarianism was its focus on children.59 The emergence of the Junior Red Cross as a global movement for change focused on inculcating in children themselves ideals of humanitarianism, good citizenship and education within the practices of kindness and charity and helping others. It was designed to allow children to develop empathy and fundraise specifically for children less fortunate, both in their own countries and overseas. The LRCS took up the role of global facilitator, establishing a Bureau of Junior Membership and publishing a Junior Red Cross Supplement as part of the League’s Bulletin in March 1921.60 The report was based on the work of Lyman Bryson, who was an assistant commissioner of the American Red Cross during the war. Appointed to the Bureau of Junior Membership at the LRCS, and on the invitation of the American Red Cross, Bryson travelled home to the USA in late 1920 to study its developments. He noted that the membership of the American Red Cross’s junior arm was ‘much larger than the adult membership and … growing at a faster rate’.61 Bryson was unaware of developments in Australia and did not include its extensive Junior Red Cross programme in his report. He later identified six Junior Red Cross organisations (in addition to Australia) that had been established by national societies, namely China, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Spain and Switzerland; that Britain, Belgium, France, Italy, Bulgaria and Portugal were about to establish Junior sections; and that Norway, Sweden and Brazil were seriously discussing the idea. The LRCS saw a role for itself to ‘act as a medium of communication’ among the various national societies and to publish pamphlets on the organisation of schoolchildren, as well as acting as a conduit for the exchange of ideas and information in an emerging area of growth for the Red Cross.62 With the encouragement of the LRCS, the Australian Red Cross worked with other national societies, especially America and Canada, in championing the idea of the Junior Red Cross. But it was not straightforward. The very concept of the Junior Red Cross was controversial, especially in the older and more established European societies. At a meeting of the League Board of Governors in Paris in September 1922, the French delegate remarked that the Junior Red Cross was a ‘very delicate matter’. The Italian delegate, Senator Ciraolo, believed that although the concept was developing slowly in his country, some believed the Junior Red Cross would ‘fight against the spirit of socialism’ and it was therefore discouraged. Colonel Bohny, representing the Swiss Red Cross, spoke about the difficulties they were having in establishing a Junior Red Cross. He complained that the Secretariat of the League seldom received communication from the Swiss Red Cross about the Junior Red Cross because it ‘was extremely difficult … to organise’. As a whole the Swiss Red

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Cross opposed the concept of a Junior Red Cross organisation.63 In 1924, the ICRC president, Gustave Ador, protested against the use of the Red Cross emblem by the Junior Red Cross, indicating ongoing issues about its legitimacy.64 The Junior Red Cross, as articulated through the LRCS, not only wanted to be a vehicle for the ‘training of good citizenship’; it wanted to create the ‘right sort of cosmopolitanism, by opening up the children’s eyes and hearts for a better understanding of the world around them’.65 One of the ways to do this was through the publication and dissemination of Junior Red Cross magazines to engage with members around the world. In 1918, the NSW Junior Red Cross, under the editorship of Eleanor MacKinnon, published the first Junior Red Cross publication in the world. Called the Junior Red Cross Record, it published reports, activities, short articles on first aid, fundraising ideas and engagement with children internationally each month.66 By 1925, twenty-​one national societies had their own magazines that were circulated through, and by, the LRCS. Another practical innovation was the interschool correspondence programme. Albums and letters were exchanged among Junior Red Cross Circles nestled within schools around the world. The correspondence programme was not only educative but, it was argued, would improve international relations through developing an awareness of differences in culture and language.67 This was an important programme, first developed by the American Junior Red Cross when they established the Bureau of School Correspondence and Education Material in Paris in 1920.68 The interschool correspondence programme of the Junior Red Cross thrived, and by 1925, it was estimated that it was operating in 46 countries with over 259 different international arrangements.69 In the Australian context, the programme was especially popular in Victoria, probably because that was where the national office was based, and the programme was organised through exchanges between national societies.70 By May 1927, over 146 portfolios had arrived in Australia from Junior Red Cross Circles overseas. The bulk of interschool correspondence was with the Canadian and American Junior Red Cross, 41 and 68 respectively. Other countries included Great Britain, with Austria, Germany, Brazil, Belgium, France, Norway, Switzerland, New Zealand, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan each contributing at least one portfolio. The portfolios ‘stimulated international friendliness between Juniors’ and included knowledge of life in the various countries. With the involvement of the schools and Junior Red Cross Circles based around the school unit, and with the Junior Red Cross a ‘service activity’ in schools, it became part of the school curriculum. After the school day was completed, Australian children would don their Red Cross uniforms or armbands displaying the emblem and undertake a range of activities, whether related to health or fundraising, or engaging with children internationally. Junior Red Cross members went on excursions and nature walks to find flora and fauna samples to include in their international portfolios. They drew maps, and collected stamps and newspaper cuttings containing interesting information of Australia.

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Conclusion It has been argued in this chapter that during the early years of the LRCS emerging national Red Cross societies such as the Australian Red Cross found value and guidance from the Movement’s new federated body, and played a part in ensuring its success. From the outset, the LRCS had the support of the Australian Red Cross most notably through the work of its first female member of the Board of Governors, Viscountess Novar. She saw the benefits of international engagement and exchange in peacetime that the LRCS was attempting to facilitate through the Red Cross Movement. Importantly, too, its Junior Red Cross programme became the flagship of the Australian Red Cross on the world stage. This was the work that the LRCS was most interested in, and as a result, Australia sent in more reports about its Junior Red Cross than any other member of the Red Cross Movement. Along with the American and Canadian Red Cross, the Australia national society had something unique to offer the LRCS and broader world of Red Cross. It involved the next generation of the movement. Citizenship education was not a new phenomenon in the aftermath of the First World War, but how the Junior Red Cross Movement engaged within that space was innovative. Most importantly, placing the Junior Red Cross within a school setting assisted not only the growth and development of the organisation itself but also helped with inculcating notions of active citizenship through the development of a civics curriculum. The iniative to allow children to gather together under the auspices of the Red Cross, in order to foster and extend its work beyond national borders and into the international spaces through the initiation of the Junior Red Cross, was led by the LRCS. Through a range of programmes that focused on good health, active citizenship and international friendship, the Junior Red Cross became a flagship initiative for numerous national societies through the 1920s. It was spectacularly successful, out-​performing the adult arm in terms of membership and outreach. By December 1927, the total membership of the Junior Red Cross around the world was over 10 million children, represented in forty countries –​twenty-​two of these in Europe; twelve in the Americas; two in Australasia; one in Africa; and three in Asia, including the Junior Section of the Japan Red Cross, formed in 1922.71 By creating a global network of young humanitarians largely operating through a local school network, the aims and aspirations of Red Cross were channelled around the world inspiring generations of children. At a national level, the Junior Red Cross was not only a nursery for the Red Cross membership of tomorrow but it sought to introduce a set of personal values and characteristics that instilled discipline, loyalty and service in its juniors. Internationally, the aim was to build friendships and create a structure that enabled the global engagement of children to foster cultural understanding and world peace, facilitated through the LRCS. The aim was to build independence and empathy for others less fortunate, as well as to foster a spirit of voluntary social service. It provides us, therefore, with an example with which to examine the 1920s, and further develop our understanding of the internationalism

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and humanitarianism of the period, focusing on the Red Cross Movement and the LRCS. The vision of organised co-​operation among nations was played out in many contexts and spaces and was not only the preserve of nation-​states. It extended to humanitarian organisations, through bodies such as the LRCS and in terms of the Junior Red Cross ideal, to children.

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Notes 1 University of Melbourne Archives (UMA), National Executive Correspondence, Box 260: Junior Red Cross ( JRC), Frank Tate, former Director of Education, ‘Permanence of the Peacetime Work of the Red Cross Society’, Victoria, 22 April 1932. 2 Sir P. Gibbs, ‘The Junior Red Cross:  Victorian Organiser’s Visit’, Examiner, Launceston, Tasmania (4 March 1929), 9. 3 B. Little, ‘An Explosion of New Endeavours:  Global Humanitarianism Responses to Industrialised Warfare in the First World War Era’, First World War Studies, 5:1 (2014), 1–​16. 4 Until 1928, its official name was the Australian Branch of the British Red Cross Society, but in this chapter it will be referred to as the Australian Red Cross. 5 Apart from her six years in Australia, she remained president of the branch until her death in 1941. See M. Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity: 100 Years of Australian Red Cross (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2014); M. Oppenheimer, ‘ “The best PM for the empire in war”? Lady Helen Munro Ferguson and the Australian Red Cross Society, 1914–​1920’, Australian Historical Studies, 32:119 (2002), 108–​34. 6 Cédric Cotter stated that ‘all managerial functions were occupied by men and closed to women’. This was not the case in Australia, where Lady Helen controlled all aspects of the organisation, including chairing its powerful finance committee from her home, Government House, in Melbourne. See ‘Red Cross’, in 1914–​1918 Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, https://​encyclopedia.1914-​1918-​online.net/​article/​red_​cross (accessed 9 May 2018). See also Oppenheimer, ‘The best PM for the Empire’; M. Oppenheimer, ‘Lady Helen Munro Ferguson and the Australian Red Cross: Vice-​Regal Leader and Internationalist in the Early Twentieth Century’, in F. Davis, N. Musgrove and J. Smart (eds), Founders, Firsts and Feminists:  Women Leaders in Twentieth-​Century Australia (Melbourne:  eScholarship Research Centre, University of Melbourne and Australian Women’s Archives Project, 2011), www.womenaustralia.info/​leaders/​fff/​, pp. 274–​91 (accessed 24 October 2019). 7 Caroline Moorehead described the relationship between the two bodies as a ‘double helix’. See Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: HarperCollins, 1998). See also B. Towers, ‘Red Cross Organizational Politics, 1918–​1922:  Relations of Dominance and the Influence of the United States’, in P. Weindling (ed.), International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918–​1939 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp.  36–​55. For a history of the LRCS, see D. A. Reid and P. F. Gilbo, Beyond Conflict:  The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1919–​1994 (Geneva: IFRC, 1997). 8 National Archives Records and Administration (NARA), Henry P.  Davison Collection, Correspondence, 1911–​1991, American National Red Cross (ANRC), 158, Box 3: speech of Sir Arthur Lawley, Paris, 21 February 1919. 9 C. E. Buckingham, For Humanity’s Sake: The Story of the Early Development of the League of Red Cross Societies (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1964), p. 1; J. F. Hutchinson, ‘Custodians of the Sacred Fire: The ICRC and the Postwar Reorganisation of the International Red Cross’, in Weindling, International Health Organisations, pp. 17–​35 (p. 18).

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10 J. Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 11 Bulletin of the Committee of Red Cross Societies, 1:1 (March 1919), p. 1. 12 See M. Oppenheimer, ‘ “A golden moment”? The League of Red Cross Societies, the League of Nations and Contested Spaces of Internationalism and Humanitarianism, 1919–​ 22’, in J. Damousi and P. O’Brien (eds), League of Nations:  Histories, Legacies and Impact (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2018), pp. 8–​27. See also Y. Makita, ‘The Alchemy of Humanitarianism: The First World War, the Japanese Red Cross and the Creation of an International Public Health Order’, First World War Studies, 5:1 (2014), 117–​29. 13 Bulletin of the League of Red Cross Societies, 1:1 (15 May 1919), 1–​4; Buckingham, For Humanity’s Sake, p. 84; Oppenheimer, ‘A golden moment’, p. 20. 14 Rappard was heavily invested in the League of Nations and he wrote numerous books and articles on the League, the theme of international order and collective security, and its ideals and failures. These books include International Relations Viewed from Geneva (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925); Uniting Europe:  The Trend of International Cooperation since the War (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1930); The Geneva Experiment (London:  Oxford University Press, 1931); and The Quest for Peace since the War (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1940). He later co-​founded the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva, and held other influential positions as Swiss representative on the International Labour Organization and later the United Nations. 15 For an overview of Fitzgerald’s war, see C. E. Hallett, Nurse Writers of the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 111–​18. 16 IFRC, A0800–​1: General Council 1920–​4, Board of Governors, 1921–​2, minutes of the meeting of the General Council of the League of Red Cross Societies, 1920. 17 For comprehensive histories see, for example, Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity; M. Tennant, Across the Street, across the World: A History of the Red Cross in New Zealand, 1915–​2015 (Auckland: NZRC, 2015); S. Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy: A History of the Canadian Red Cross (Kingston, ON: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2017); Irwin, Making the World Safe; M. M. Jones, The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); R. Cresswell, Health and Humanitarianism:  A Global, National and Local History of the British Red Cross, 1870–​2020 (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). 18 For a history of the LRCS see Reid and Gilbo, Beyond Conflict; Buckingham, For Humanity’s Sake; Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream. 19 Archives of the Australian Red Cross Society (ARCS), Melbourne, correspondence League and ARC, 1919–​1930, Series No 33, Box 225, David Henderson to the General Secretary ARCS, 26 May 1919. 20 Archives of the International Federation of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent (IFRC), AO800–​2: Board of Governors, 1923–​1934, Paris, minutes of Board of Governors, 26 April 1924. 21 Bulletin of The League of Red Cross Societies, 1:10 (May 1920), p. 3. 22 Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity, p. 57. 23 ARCS, Series 33, Box 202:  letter to Lady Novar from Lady Forster, Government House, 18 November 1924. 24 Extract quoted in League of Red Cross Societies, ‘News of the Red Cross Societies’, Bulletin of the League of Red Cross Societies, 2:4–​5 ( January–​February 1921), Geneva, p. 116. 25 With Lady Helen still in Australia when the first General Council of the League was held in Geneva in April 1920, the ARC was represented by Lady Robinson; former ARC Commissioner, Major W. D. Busby; and Mr Robert Bush.

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26 This body was to make arrangements for the subsequent conference. I would like to thank Grant Mitchell, Manager, Library and Archives unit, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, for his assistance in identifying records concerning Lady Helen and her role on the international stage with both the League and the International Committee. 27 Lady Helen mentioned that six New Zealand students had taken the course and hoped Australians would take up the opportunity. ARCS, Series 33, Box 202:  Helen Novar to Philadelphia Robertson, Raith, 5 August 1926. The LRCS later established a School of Nurses in Albania; Series 33, Box 225: Lady Helen’s notes of the Fourteenth International Red Cross Conference and Twelfth Meeting of the Board of Governors of the League, Brussels, 6–​12 October 1928. 28 ARCS, Series 33, Box 225:  Lady Helen to William E.  Rappard, Esq., Secretary-​General, 12 July 1920. 29 ARCS, Series 33, Box 225:  personal letter from the League to Lady Helen, 30 March 1920, clarifying aspects of the League and how it differed from or complemented the role of the International Committee, ‘of which all members are all Genevese [and which] has so unassailably neutral a character’. 30 This is well covered in Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, Chapter 10; and Reid and Gilbo, Beyond Conflict, Chapter 4. 31 ARCS, Series 33, Box 202: letter to Philadelphia Robertson, 9 April 1922, London. 32 ARCS, Series 33, Box 225: meeting of League of Red Cross Societies, 4–​7 May 1927, Paris. 33 Viscountess Novar, ‘The Australian Red Cross Past and Present’, World’s Health:  Monthly Review of the League of Red Cross Societies, 7:11 (November 1926), 430–​3; Vicomtesse Novar, ‘La Croix-​Rouge australienne et les soldats invalides’, Revue internationale de la Croix-​Rouge, 133 ( January 1930), 1–​6. 34 For the USA see, for example, J. F. Hutchinson, ‘The Junior Red Cross Goes to Healthland’, American Journal of Public Health, 87 (1997), 1816–​23; J. F. Irwin, ‘Teaching “Americanism with a world perspective”:  The Junior Red Cross in the US Schools from 1917–​1920s’, History of Education Quarterly, 53 (2013), 255–​79; A. Valdes, ‘ “I, being a member of the Junior Red Cross, gladly offered my services”: Transnational Practices of Citizenship by the International Junior Red Cross Youth’, Transnational Social Review, 5:2 (2015), 161–​75. For Canada, see S. Glassford, ‘Practical Patriotism: How the Canadian Junior Red Cross and Its Child Members Met the Challenge of the Second World War’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 7 (2014), 219–​42. 35 Irwin, ‘Teaching “Americanism with a world perspective” ’, p. 258. 36 For Canada, see Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy, esp. pp. 54 and 93 on its origins. Groups such as ‘The Maple Leaves’ were in operation in Ontario as early as 1899 as a Red Cross group for both girls and boys, although this particular group was short-​lived. There is evidence, however, to suggest that children’s Red Cross units were established at a local county level in Britain well before the First World War. In Australia, a Girls’ Aid League added ‘Junior Red Cross Society’ to its title in June 1913. See Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity, p. 12. Andrée-​Anne Plourde has suggested that the idea was initially proposed at the Fifth International Conference of the Red Cross Societies as early as 1892. See A.-​A . Plourde, ‘Rome, 1892: The Beginnings of the Red Cross Youth Movement’, in F. Klose, M. Palen, J. Paulmann and A. Thompson (eds), Online Atlas on the History of Humanitarianism and Human Rights, http://​wiki.ieg-​mainz.de/​ ghra/​articles/​plourde-​rome (accessed 16 July 2018). 37 A. Campbell, ‘ “… thousands of tiny fingers moving”:  The Beginnings of the Junior Red Cross Movement in New South Wales, 1914–​1925’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical

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Society, 90:2 (2004), 184–​200; M. Oppenheimer, All Work, No Pay: Civilian Volunteers in War (Walcha: Ohio Productions, 2002), esp. Chapter 3. 38 When Lady Novar returned to Scotland in 1920 and began representing the ARC at the League, she believed that her protégé organisation was ‘doing the best peace work’ in continuing to look after returned soldiers and nurses, as well as having ‘a definite peace programme in helping the civilian hospitals … and a flourishing Junior Section’. UMA, National Executive Correspondence, Box 260: JRC. This is outlined in a letter from Philadelphia Robertson to Eleanor MacKinnon, 20 November 1922. 39 See State Library of New South Wales Archives, Mitchell Library (ML), MSS 2502: Eleanor MacKinnon papers; Jacqueline Abbott, ‘MacKinnon, Eleanor Vokes (1871–​1936)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography (2006–​19 [1986]), National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, adb.anu.edu.au/​biography/​mackinnon-​eleanor-​vokes-​7398/​text12863 (accessed 3 March 2016). 40 Lady Street, president of NSW Division of ARC, The ARC, n.s., 16 (April 1936), p. 6. 41 MacKinnon had lived near Glencoe and had attended Sydney Girls’ High School. 42 ML, MSS 2502:  Eleanor MacKinnon Papers, Nonagh West [Gwen Ashton], Eleanor MacKinnon: Her Life and Work, unpublished and undated manuscript (c. 1978), p. 9. 43 UMA, Box 260: JRC, NSW booklet, undated. 44 UMA, Box 260: JRC, Eleanor MacKinnon to Philadelphia Robertson, 20 September 1922. 45 UMA, Box 260: JRC, NSW booklet, undated; Eleanor MacKinnon to Philadelphia Robertson, 20 September 1922. 46 UMA, Box 260: JRC, Eleanor MacKinnon to Philadelphia Robertson, 2 June 1921. 47 UMA, Box 260: JRC, Eleanor MacKinnon to Philadelphia Robertson, 24 March 1931. 48 UMA, Box 260: JRC, Eleanor MacKinnon to Philadelphia Robertson, 24 July 1921. 49 UMA, Box 260: Eleanor MacKinnon to Philadelphia Robertson, 2 June 1921. 50 Australian Red Cross Society Leaflet, 12 (December 1922). Eleanor MacKinnon was a passionate advocate for the Armenians, and from 1920 was the Hon. Secretary of the Lord Mayor’s Armenian Fund in Sydney, which raised millions of pounds. See West, Eleanor MacKinnon, p.  31. For the work of the Red Cross and Graythwaite, see M. Oppenheimer, ‘Fated to a Life of Suffering: Graythwaite, the Australian Red Cross and Returned Soldiers, 1916–​1939’, in M. Crotty and M. Larsson (eds), Anzac Legacies:  Australians and the Aftermath of War (Melbourne: Scholarly Publishing, 2010), pp. 18–​38. 51 Australian Red Cross Quarterly, n.s., 11 (May 1926), p. 7. ‘Shuna’ was lent by Red Cross supporter Dame Eadith Walker in 1924 and subsequently bequeathed to the Red Cross. ‘Juong’ was bequeathed by trustees of the Mary Ann Dewar estate in 1925. ‘Ramsgate’ Junior Red Cross Home was at the beach, where children, often from the bush, could have a seaside holiday. 52 ARCS Leaflet, 7 (September 1921), 4. 53 UMA, Box 260: JRC, Philadelphia Robertson to Colonel Stanley, British Red Cross Society, 18 August 1921; UMA, Australian Red Cross Victorian Division (ARCV), JRC Committee minutes, 1921–​36, Box 260: 11 November 1921. 54 UMA, ARCV, JRC Committee minutes, 1921–​36, Box 260: 11 November 1921. 55 The Central Council for the Australian Red Cross was relocated from Federal Government House in Melbourne in 1920. To save money, it moved into the offices of the Victorian Division, with Philadelphia Robertson taking up the position of secretary to the Victorian Division as well as secretary of the central body. See Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity, esp. pp. 61–​2. 56 UMA, Box 260: JRC, George Brooks to Mr Fussell, 13 March 1926.

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57 UMA, Box 260: JRC, letter from Secretary General (Philadephia Robertson) to the Hon. H. S. Baker, Minister for Education, Hobart, Tasmania, 15 November 1929. 58 Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity, p. 74; UMA, Box 260: JRC, Western Australia Division, E. A. Abel to Miss Ballantyne, 18 June 1930. 59 The explosion in numbers of refugees and population movements across Europe, as well as the emergence of ‘youth’ or ‘children’ as a recognised category in need of particular assistance, led to the formation of a range of voluntary organisations such as Save the Children. It has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. See, for example, Linda Mahood, Feminism and Voluntary Action: Eglantyne Jebb and Save the Children (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Emily Baughan, ‘ “Every Citizen of Empire Implored to Save the Children!” Empire, Internationalism and the Save the Children Fund in Inter-​War Britain’, Historical Research, 86:231 (2013), 116–​37. 60 ‘The Junior Red Cross Supplement’, Bulletin of the League of Red Cross Societies, 11:5 (March 1921), 185–​93. 61 Bulletin of the League of Red Cross Societies, 11:3 (December 1920), 145–​6. 62 UMA, Box 260:  LRCS, Lyman Bryson to Hon. Secretary-​General, ARCS, Melbourne, 2 June 1921. 63 IFRC, AO800–​1: minutes of the Board of Governors, Paris, 11 September 1922, pp. 9–​10. 64 ARCS, Box 33: Lady Novar to Miss Robertson, 11 May 1924. 65 ARCS, Box 33:  ‘Miss Pavla Molnarova, Editress of the Czechoslovak JRC Monthly News’, Australian Red Cross Quarterly, n.s., 3 (May 1924). 66 UMA, Box 260, JRC:  Eleanor MacKinnon to Philadelphia Robertson, 31 July 1929. ‘A JRC magazine was first published by us in 1918 and we were fortunate enough to be able to send copies of this to the League recently to establish our position in regard to publications’, MacKinnon explained. 67 ‘The Junior Red Cross Supplement’, Bulletin of the League of Red Cross Societies, 2:5 (March 1921), 191. 68 ‘What the Junior Red Cross is Doing in Europe’, Bulletin of the League of Red Cross Societies, 11:3 (December 1920), 167. 69 Annie Campbell, ‘I Serve: The Junior Red Cross in New South Wales, 1914–​1924’ (B.A. dissertation, University of Western Sydney, 2000), p. 58. Annemarie Valdes is incorrect when she states that the International School Correspondence Program did not operate in Australia. See Valdes, ‘I, being a member of the Junior Red Cross’, p. 162. 70 UMA, Box 260, JRC:  Philadelphia Robertson to Eleanor MacKinnon, 24 March 1931. See also correspondence between the Secretary General (Philadephia Robertson) and H. L. Pitt, Superintendent of NSW Division, 11 October 1934. 71 LRCS, Information Bulletin, 1 December 1927.

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The ‘British Red Cross still exists’, 1947–​74: Finding a role after the Second World War Rosemary Cresswell

In 1974 the British Red Cross Society (BRCS) commissioned an ‘Attitude Survey’, the analysis of which concluded that the public knew much more about the organisation’s wartime than peacetime activities. Another survey completed during that year revealed that the number of younger members was in decline.1 Since the late 1940s, the BRCS had faced challenges regarding its identity and public perception, leading to the repositioning of the charity at a time of tremendous political, social and economic change. Indeed, in 1947, the BRCS’s Public Relations Department stated that the public needed to know that the ‘British Red Cross still exists’.2 To what extent did the end of the Second World War and the launch of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948 affect policy, philanthropy, volunteerism and public perceptions of the charity? Did the charity’s role in Cold War civil defence perpetuate awareness of the relationship between the BRCS and the ‘Warfare State’?3 Despite a much wider range of activities that required charitable support, how did the BRCS’s role as a voluntary aid society with ‘auxiliary’ status in relation to public authorities affect people’s willingness to volunteer and donate in a postwar world with an increasing number of competing charities?4 From 1960, the annual reports placed much more emphasis on publicising international humanitarian aid. But further complexity regarding the BRCS’s identity resulted from the charity joining with four major British relief agencies in 1963, forming the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), collaborating to raise funds for selected humanitarian activities. Drawing on the wider historiography on postwar humanitarianism for context, this chapter uses archival research to analyse the way in which the BRCS attempted to adapt its image between 1947 and 1974, focusing on examples from the years 1947, 1960 and 1974 in which there were shifts in the representation of the charity. The concerns of 1974 repeated the worries of 1947. In 1947, the chairman of the Executive Committee, Frederick James Marquis, first Earl of Woolton, who had been the minister of food and the minister of reconstruction during the Second World War, publicly announced his concern about the charity’s reputation within

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the annual report, focusing on membership rather than fundraising. He wrote that the work of the Red Cross was: still widely associated with war alone. It is essential therefore that we continue our propaganda directed to the purpose of creating an informed public of our aims and purposes in peace, recruiting new members and at the same time stimulating and retaining the interest of our own personnel … Our great organisation has the unique privilege and trust of the generations who have come to know it in war –​let us see to it that the trust is exemplified in a world that I am convinced longs for unity and peace.5

The association with war was not the BRCS’s only worry in 1947, as the NHS Act had been passed in 1946. With the launch of the NHS a year away, the BRCS secretary, W. J. Phillips, wrote to the county directors arguing the revised role that the Red Cross would have in supplying health services of which it had provided a wealth in the interwar period, from blood-​donation and -​transfusion services to ambulances and clinics: The special contribution which the Society can make, lies in its ability to mobilise trained voluntary aid, particularly part-​time voluntary aid, for the relief of the sick and the suffering and Branches should emphasise to their members that it is their duty to assist and co-​operate with Local Health Authorities provided they do so in accordance with Red Cross principles.6

Twenty hospitals and clinics were relinquished, as well as the blood-​donation service, although the BRCS still gave assistance for the National Blood Transfusion Service and ambulance services, retained some specialist clinics and provided a hospital car service, as well as developing new roles within the health service over the next decades.7 The nationalisation of BRCS services caused upset, considering the effort in establishing them and the equipment within them that had been purchased by the charity. A note from the secretary documented a preference for organisations remaining under Red Cross control but with a Grant-​in-​Aid from the Government, so that independence and ‘Red Cross identity’ could be retained.8 With its diminished health services, the BRCS sought a role providing a new range of health-​and social-​ care activities, with language that evoked William Beveridge’s goal for the voluntary sector to remain significant within the Welfare State.9 Woolton reflected within his memoir that he believed that the State could not provide ‘enough’ and needed to be ‘supplemented by people with the time and the efficiency and the deep sympathy that is required to clarify some of the complicated and innate human problems’.10 As minister of reconstruction, he had been part of the discussions regarding the development of a national health service, and he did not approve of the Labour Party’s version, referring to the ‘Socialist Government’ in discussing how the NHS was conceived.11 There were echoes of this idea of ‘sympathy’ in the BRCS secretary’s

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memo to county branches of the BRCS in July 1947, when he referred to the value of the Red Cross within the NHS as a result of the ‘human sympathy of the voluntary worker’, and in Beveridge’s Voluntary Action report with regard to another part of the charity sector in 1948: ‘Will the State be able to create a machine capable of doing what the affiliated orders did in the most difficult of all forms of social insurance, of combining soundness with sympathy in the administration of cash benefits to the sick?’.12 Although the Second World War was over, the BRCS’s work and identity in connection with war were perpetuated from the late 1940s. There were significant activities, including relief, rehabilitation and tracing missing people, in the aftermath of the war. War Office, Home Office and Ministry of Health preparations for a potential Third World War included the BRCS, continuing the formal relationship with the Order of St John (known in the Second World War as the War Organisation, which continued as the Joint Committee) and the State by providing a volunteer reserve and first aid training for the Civil Defence Corps.13 In the 1950s, the BRCS continued to provide supporting roles, including during the Korean War, the Malayan Emergency, and conflicts in Cyprus.14 The challenge to its identity was not the only issue faced by the BRCS in the aftermath of the Second World War; it also had financial concerns. In 1949, despite the NHS taking over many services, BRCS general purposes expenditure of £352,264 exceeded its income by £108,000.15 Spending was reduced in 1950 with the withdrawal of most of the BRCS’s personnel from Germany, termination of relief work in India and Pakistan, and reduction to relief for Jordan. In 1950, income remained similar to 1949. Yet, the balance for general purposes remained at £1.7 million.16 In 1954, the BRCS benefited from an increase in the market value of its investments of just over £100,000. However, the BRCS pointed out in its financial report that without this increase, which could not be relied upon, the funds would have decreased by almost £83,000.17 In 1956, net general funds dropped by £80,000, somewhat hidden by fundraising specifically for Hungarian Relief. In 1956, the Red Cross was entrusted by the British Government with running a campaign for Hungarian Relief. In total, £166,000 was raised for Hungary, and another £31,000 for other areas requiring emergency help. These included areas affected by conflict (Kenya, Cyprus, the Middle East and Egypt), as well as those struck by natural disasters. However, the BRCS expressed its concern about the diminishing general funds, especially as money had to be kept in reserve in case war was declared, to maintain national and international operations, and to renew leases on premises. This resulted in a decision to ask county branches to increase their fundraising activities.18 In 1958, Woolton appealed to the Treasury for a Government grant, as the BRCS was running at a loss, yet was assisting the State with its activities. Despite Woolton’s experience of working with the governing political party, including as chairman of the Conservative Party (1946–​55), his plea was unsuccessful. He argued for recognition of the work of the charity in the service of the State, citing the difference

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between the Red Cross and other voluntary organisations because of its auxiliary role to the Government established by the Geneva Conventions. He argued that the BRCS had administered £220,000 of Government money for emergency relief; that it had supplied teams in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus, first funded by the charity, and then by the local governments; and that £5,000 of BRCS funds had been used to help, trace, and administer the Home Office hostels for, the Anglo-​Egyptian refugees. Expenditure was £70,000 higher per year than income so Woolton requested £20,000 per year from the Treasury.19 Reports for the 1950s all began with activities at home, which gives a flavour of how the BRCS had adapted within the Welfare State. For example, the 1958 report began with the usual foreword by the chairman, Lord Woolton, in which training activities in first aid and, to a lesser extent, nursing and welfare initiatives were outlined. These plans included the idea for first-​aid and nursing manuals to be jointly produced with the St John Ambulance Association and the Scottish St Andrew’s Ambulance Association, in order to establish a ‘common teaching policy’. Many other first aid training activities were also recorded, with organisations such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme for young people, and first aid in factories, through the drive to stimulate this by the Ministry of Labour, and within the Royal Air Force as part of Civil Defence preparations.20 A variety of topics were covered in the next pages, including the Film Library, the Stanley Shield Competition in First Aid and Nursing, Aid to the Sick and Wounded of the HM Forces and Ex-​Service Disabled Men and Women, Hospital Libraries, and convalescent homes and settlements. This was all before ‘Disaster and Emergency Relief ’, which was the focus for less than two pages, and even this section of the report started with work located in Britain, with topics such as welfare work with Hungarian refugees, and with the Anglo-​ Egyptian Resettlement Board. This section was interrupted half-​way through by a photograph of Red Cross workers helping the injured from a train accident in the south of England, and included a very short section on flooding and fires in Britain. The report then returned to more international themes, which related to work overseas, in particular Hungarian and other refugees in Austria, and the displaced persons’ camps in Germany. But the report soon reverted again to home concerns, such as civil defence, aid to the civilian sick and disabled within Britain, and BRCS nursing homes.21 Like 1947, 1960 was another year for a re-​evaluation of the perception of the role of the BRCS. In a long and provocative speech to the Executive Committee in February 1960, Woolton discussed a variety of difficulties, punctuating his report emotively by asking the committee members to embrace change. Much of the thrust of the last section of his speech was the need to reduce amateurism within the headquarters of the charity, without increasing the cost of administration. Despite arguing for change, Woolton still perceived the BRCS’s raison d’être to be focused on war, but that the organisation had to survive between conflicts. He discussed other activities at home and overseas, including proposing a further role within the Welfare

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State in providing voluntary social work, together with costly and extensive work abroad. Part of the purpose of the peacetime work at home was to be ready for war. Yet, although the BRCS had links with the military through its auxiliary role with the armed forces and the Red Cross’s activities in Cold War civil defence, he argued that the uniform was affecting recruitment.22 One of the options, a new boiler-​suit uniform, suitable for sports meetings and ambulance services, had been discussed in 1952, and the suggestion was made in 1957 that ‘rank insignia’ should be removed from the shoulders because their ‘quasi-​military’ connotations were not in the Red Cross’s ‘best interests’.23 Woolton had hoped that the decision to make the uniform less militaristic, and to reduce the cost, would improve recruitment. In some places membership had increased, but Woolton was concerned about the reason why the proportion of the population who were members was lower in Britain than in other countries.24 Michael Barnett has argued that ‘[h]‌umanitarianism went global after World War II’.25 Illustrating one of the changes that occurred in this period, there was a sudden alteration to the order of the contents of the BRCS’s annual report for 1960, which prominently highlighted and prioritised international disaster relief.26 Oxfam was established in 1942 to provide aid for Greece, with a focus on Europe, but its mandate was expanded to the ‘world’ in 1949, and both Oxfam and World Vision became development agencies in the 1960s. This period was also defined by the United Nations’ declaration of a ‘Decade of Development’.27 Maggie Black begins the fuller story of Oxfam’s involvement with the ‘Third World’ in the 1960s, with the previous chapters of her history of the first fifty years of the charity largely focusing on Europe, including the aftermath of the Second World War and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, which led to 171,000 refugees. However, extra-​European campaigns began earlier. There were minor results from a campaign for refugees that arose from the creation of Israel in 1948; grants for Kenya and South Africa in the mid-​1950s; and a successful appeal for Korea, which meant that more Oxfam funds were sent there than anywhere else in the world between 1954 and 1956. This extra-​European work was followed by assistance for refugees in Hong Kong and help in Algeria in 1957–​8.28 Another reason 1960 was a key year for raising the profile of international suffering was World Refugee Year (WRY). Lasting from June 1959 to June 1960, this was an international campaign supported by the United Nations (UN), but conceived in Britain by a group of young Conservatives, who were aware of the ‘messy process of colonial retreat’.29 There were also still refugee crises resulting from conflict, including from Palestine, China, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Partition of India, together with conflicts in Vietnam, Korea and Tibet, and the uprising in Hungary, amongst other areas.30 A film was made featuring the Duke of Edinburgh, the British Government contributed £200,000 to the UK Committee, £9 million was raised in Britain, and $74.7 million was donated worldwide. In addition to expenditure within Europe, funds raised were used to help refugees from Palestine and those living in Hong Kong, together with people suffering because of the war in Algeria.31

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However, it was the conflict in the Congo from 1960 that Black sees as definitive in Oxfam campaigns to help starving children. In this campaign, children were depicted with swollen bellies from hunger oedema, burning ‘the image of the starving African child onto the collective British consciousness’ from December 1960 onwards and changing public opinion, which had not automatically identified Oxfam with assisting ‘remote disaster victims’.32 The reaction to images in newspapers resulted in an unprecedented ‘massive outpouring from the public’ by January 1961, which included £104,000 to Oxfam’s appeal, £64,000 raised by the Red Cross and £40,000 by War on Want.33 Awareness of poverty in newly independent nations led to activities such as the ‘Freedom from Hunger’ campaign, established by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, and there was a week-​long Oxfam conference in Oxford on this theme in July and August 1960. The campaign promoted awareness in Britain and successfully attracted funding from the Government, produced educational materials for schools, and led to subsequent charitable donations in the early 1960s.34 Indeed, Africa was prominent in the news in 1960, with seventeen colonies gaining independence. With increasing awareness of poverty and low life expectancy in new countries the UN launched the aforementioned ‘Decade of Development’, announced by John F. Kennedy in January 1961.35 Some of these campaign strategies were not novel; photographs of emaciated civilians appeared in the late nineteenth century, as chapters within Davide Rodogno and Heide Fehrenbach’s Humanitarian Photography: A History illustrate.36 In particular, images of children with few or no clothes, revealing their severely malnourished bodies, were used to attract attention to campaigns in the interwar years, and subsequently by Thérèse Bonney’s photography of European children during the Second World War.37 It was not only the focus on Africa that transformed humanitarian activities in the postwar years. Black also sees the Hungarian Uprising as a key moment in Oxfam’s history, at least in terms of help for refugees, as the suffering of people in the snow and the success in placing refugees gave prominence to humanitarian activities. Indeed, this and other conflicts led to WRY –​three of the founders had seen the suffering of refugees first-​hand in Hungary, Korea and Hong Kong.38 Therefore, for humanitarianism more broadly, this was a time of significant reframing of activities, and Andrew Jones has argued that WRY elevated Christian Aid, Oxfam and War on Want to be ‘on a par’ with the Red Cross and Save the Children.39 However, when the DEC was founded in 1963, with the aim of co-​ ordinating five major British humanitarian charities’ television fundraising appeals for environmental and man-​made disasters, the BRCS was chosen as the lead in administering the organisation, albeit with decisions being made collectively. The BRCS was prompted by Save the Children to take on this role, as the BRCS’s focus was on relief rather than on longer-​term causes of suffering.40 Added to the impact of the Hungarian Uprising and WRY, 1960 marked a significant change for the BRCS because of the response to a year of major environmental disasters. The annual report for 1960 presents a major transition from the

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postwar annual reports and the way in which the key activities of the BRCS were reported, in line with the broader developments in humanitarianism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. ‘Disaster Relief ’ was prominently presented as the first item, with overseas aid discussed first.41 The report began by looking beyond events in the Congo and ongoing refugee crises, focusing on environmental disasters before conflicts. Woolton explained, ‘[i]‌n a world disturbed by a series of extraordinary and unhappy eruptions of nature, the year 1960 provided ample opportunities for those anxious to render succour to the unfortunate’.42 There were two cyclones in Mauritius; an earthquake in Agadir, Morocco; earthquake shocks and tidal waves in Chile; hurricanes in the Caribbean and the New Hebrides; a typhoon in Hong Kong; and further natural disasters in Greece, India, Iran, Pakistan and the Philippines. The BRCS still discussed the work of the colonial branches in providing relief: for example, the Kenya branch’s relief work in Mauritius.43 However, Woolton continued his introduction by referring to hundreds of thousands of people who had been the ‘victims of civil disturbances’ in various parts of the world, leading to large displacements of population.44 Yet this plea for attention to international events, supported by the note that the Red Cross provided both material support and a ‘skilled personal service’ in relief activities, was accompanied by an appeal to look at the list of all of the activities that the Red Cross was involved in within Britain. This included 94,259 people being awarded certificates from training and exams, with an argument that the public gave ‘generous support to the Red Cross when the war comes’ but give little thought to the long trail of preparation which its members undertake in training themselves for the times of emergency; I fear that they think only a little more of the immediate services which the Red Cross is prepared to render to them, day by day, if they fall in need.45

Therefore 1960 marked a sharp shift in the BRCS’s geographical range. It had been involved with aid outside Europe since the nineteenth century, particularly within the British Empire, and this extra-​European work increased during and following the First World War.46 Although European national Red Cross societies’ activities were certainly not limited to Europe before the Second World War, extra-​European campaigns were more unusual. For example, there was limited activity in Abyssinia in the 1930s. War in Asia led to care for prisoners of war during the Second World War, and to relief for civilians and displaced people beyond Europe, for example in the Middle East and later Malaya.47 The extraordinary postwar itinerary of overseas travel undertaken by the Countess of Limerick, Angela, as vice-​chairman of the Executive Committee, represents the breadth of international activities that developed within and beyond Europe, ranging from Central America to Australasia.48 It was after the Second World War, with decolonisation in many countries, that more international interventions took place outside Europe. Some were coordinated by

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the International Movement, for example in Palestine between 1948 and 1950, and in smaller interventions in Indonesia and other areas of Asia.49 David Forsythe particularly concentrates on Korea, Hungary and French Algeria in the 1950s, noting that the last conflict was ‘a situation that touched parts of Europe deeply’, and comparing the events in these countries with the British conflicts in Aden, Cyprus and Northern Ireland.50 Yet, the Red Cross could not easily build a new reputation as the leader in international aid in Britain, as within the DEC, the BRCS was one of five charities (with Oxfam, Save the Children, Christian Aid and War on Want). Oxfam was initially established in order to raise awareness tactfully of the effects of the British blockade policy in Greece and the indifference of the British towards it, and to provide food in the form of ‘controlled relief ’ for those starving in Nazi-​occupied Greece. This was followed by a campaign for Belgium that lacked the same success. Oxfam was founded, even though there were efforts by national Red Cross societies, such as those of Turkey, Switzerland and Sweden, to help with the catastrophe in Greece, which, together with exposure and disease, resulted in half-​a-​million deaths. Activists ranged from current and retired Oxford academics and politicians to Vera Brittain, the Red Cross’s well-​known Voluntary Aid Detachment member from the First World War, who had published her memoir, Testament of Youth, in 1933 and was involved with the Peace Pledge Union’s Food Relief Campaign.51 In the period when fundraising within the BRCS and Oxfam became more internationally driven, even before the DEC, Oxfam’s income had increased from £500,000 in 1958–​9 to £1,400,000 in 1960–​1.52 The BRCS’s income was £301,781 in 1960, and £416,766 in 1961, yet, with St John, it had raised £63  million during the Second World War.53 Throughout the 1960s, the annual reports promoted the BRCS’s fundraising for, and work in, overseas relief. Figure 9.1 clearly shows why this was appropriate, with expenditure on overseas relief far outstripping home expenditure on ‘relief ’ for most of this period (this does not include the running of regular ‘home’ activities within the UK). The value of the pound changed in this period, particularly in 1967, so what is important to read from this graph is how much was spent on relief overseas in comparison to within Britain each year. In 1974 it was time for another rethink about the way in which BRCS work was presented to the public. The BRCS commissioned the largest opinion-​poll and market-​research company in the country, the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB), to undertake an ‘Attitude Survey’ to prepare for the 1975 publicity campaign. The purpose of the survey was to aid public relations by ‘discovering whether there was substance in the view that the public was relatively uninformed about the Society and in particular about its every day work in this country’.54 The survey was undertaken in a year when fundraising was particularly difficult, with BRCS Chairman, Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh, explaining within the annual report that this was the result of an ‘economic blizzard’, with inflation leading to rising costs and depreciated investment income.55 Recruitment, fundraising and competing with

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Expenditure (£) on HM Forces, Home Relief and Overseas Relief, 1957-1970

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Figure 9.1  British Red Cross expenditure on HM Forces, Home Relief and Overseas Relief, 1957–​70. British Red Cross Museum and Archive, RCC/​1/​29/​34–​ 47, The British Red Cross Society, Annual Reports for 1957 to 1970. other causes had become a ‘more acute’ problem in the preceding years, exacerbated by the economic crisis.56 Another survey revealed that there was a declining trend in membership, particularly amongst younger people.57 The introduction by the BMRB stated that the survey was being undertaken in light of competition from other charities that had the ‘advantage of having more specific objectives’, and of the concentration on more ‘controversial’ overseas Red Cross activities within the press, at the expense of reporting local work.58 Following a small group discussion with people who had been involved with voluntary associations (but not with the BRCS) in order to help determine the hypotheses to be tested, 1,078 people were questioned.59 The survey revealed that many members of the public were unaware of the broader purpose of the Red Cross. Crucially, 64 per cent did not realise that Red Cross work occurred locally, even though 84 per cent thought that there was a ‘great deal’ of peacetime work that the Red Cross could do within the UK. Only 30 per cent thought that the Red Cross ran more services within local communities than other voluntary organisations. The public associated the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service (WRVS, established in 1938 as the Women’s Voluntary Service) with providing escorts for invalids, hospital libraries, and old people’s clubs and homes, much more than it did the Red Cross. However, 64 per cent wrongly assumed that the Red Cross still ran the Blood Transfusion Service, showing that these people were not aware that this had been nationalised. Crucially for one of the BRCS’s key activities, many more people associated St John Ambulance with first aid at sporting events than the BRCS (81 per cent versus 36 per cent). Despite

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the focus of the annual reports and BMRB’s opinion about the press reporting the Red Cross’s international work at the expense of local activities, even the message about the BRCS’s work in disaster relief was not getting through to the public. Oxfam was associated with overseas disaster relief to a much greater degree than any other charity –​67 per cent of those surveyed were aware of this link, 38 per cent selected the Red Cross and 4 per cent linked the WRVS with this activity. Yet people associated the BRCS with disaster relief within the UK more than any other charity, but still less than half of people were aware of this role, with 49 per cent compared to 37 per cent thinking Oxfam were involved, 17 per cent St John, and 17 per cent the WRVS.60 Questions also addressed fundraising; would respondents ‘rather give money to the Red Cross rather than other organisations’? The Red Cross was chosen by 19 per cent, which was interpreted as ‘[i]‌n other words, only about one person in five thinks that the Red Cross is the most important organisation to support’: perhaps an overly negative assessment, considering the range of charities in the UK.61 Explaining why the BRCS’s fundraising may have been suffering, only 39 per cent thought that it was funded through voluntary contributions alone, whereas 62 per cent thought this was the case for the Samaritans, 59 per cent for Oxfam, and 41 per cent thought this was the case for both the WRVS and St John.62 Therefore, in addition to finding a place within the Welfare and Warfare State during the third quarter of the twentieth century, the BRCS faced serious competition from major British charities such as the Order of St John and Oxfam. Indeed, these were not the only competitors, as the number of registered charities continued to increase in spite of the Welfare State.63 However, the problem of public understanding of the Red Cross’s role was not only a British issue. A report submitted to the League of Red Cross Societies’ Board of Governors’ session in Vienna in 1965 revealed similar transnational concerns. Roger Angebaud, from France, reflected on the purpose of the commemoration of the Red Cross Centenary in 1963: With regard to the old Societies, many of them agree that the Red Cross is a victim of its own reputation. Its name is so well known, its emblem so familiar, that no one ever thinks of asking any questions about it. If by chance the man in the street is questioned, quite frequently, after a few general replies, only absolutely absurd answers or none at all are forthcoming.64

Indeed, the international movement commissioned a review in the early 1970s known as the ‘Big Study’, or the Tansley Report, published as An Agenda for Red Cross: A Re-​Appraisal of the Role of the Red Cross (1975), with accompanying papers, critically assessing the image, role and activities of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.65 The sixth hypothesis of the BMRB study could relate to recruitment: ‘The Red Cross is a bit exclusive and they don’t like to work too closely with other voluntary organisations.’ Although 46 per cent thought this was false, 22 per cent agreed,

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with 32 per cent saying they did not know. Of the 1,078 people surveyed, 126 worked as volunteers, and even more of them (24 per cent) than the general-​population sample thought this was true.66 Another question directly related to recruitment: whether it was necessary to know about first aid or medicine before joining the Red Cross; 31 per cent of people thought this was true, including 25 per cent of voluntary workers. The BMRB wondered whether this meant people were ‘loath to come forward, since they feel they are not qualified’.67 Shuckburgh summarised the outcomes of the report, which he believed confirmed what had been suspected for a long time: ‘people knew all about our wartime role for prisoners of war and so on, [but] they are much less clear about what we do in peace, for example, our more general community work. They knew, of course, about disaster relief which receives the most publicity.’ As a result, Shuckburgh thought that the Survey ‘underlines in striking fashion the need to make our role in local communities better known –​not an easy task because inevitably it varies from place to place’.68 This year was also marked by a new-​style annual report, the design of which appears to have been directly informed by the findings of the Attitude Survey. The ‘Chairman’s Statement’ explained this was to compensate for the loss of the costly regular in-​house publication, Crosstalk. The 1974 annual report was glossier and A4 in size, with nine images on the cover, each with the emblem prominently placed. These images represented the breadth of work of the BRCS, including malnourished African children in the top-​right image and a ‘First Aid Post’ sign in the middle square, with other blocks including the Junior Red Cross, nursing, hospitals and fundraising.69 The report prioritised, in the following order, First Aid, Nursing, Welfare, Service Hospital Welfare, the Junior Red Cross, the National Training Centre, the Archives and the Supply Department, all before overseas work, which began with the conflict in Cyprus, then Overseas Branches, the International Movement, International Welfare and Tracing and the Invalid Travel Section. Finally, on page 18, the report turned to Overseas Disaster Relief, with ‘Ordinary Funds’ first. Across sixteen countries, £30,000 was spent by the BRCS in response to appeals from the League of Red Cross Societies and the International Committee of the Red Cross, for disasters such as flooding (particularly in Bangladesh, where the BRCS contributed the League’s chief delegate for six months), as well as drought, earthquakes, cholera, typhoons and a cyclone. Money was also spent on relief for victims of conflict in Iraq and civil disturbance in Grenada, as well as on vitamins for people suffering from cirrhosis in Afghanistan.70 ‘Special Funds’ were raised for a hurricane in Honduras, for which there was a DEC appeal, and drought in various areas of Africa, which involved teams, vehicles and supplies, as well as contributions to the cost of the League’s air-​lift of supplies.71 However, representations of the expenditure of the BRCS changed within the annual reports in the early 1970s, prior to the Survey. Figure 9.1 shows that expenditure on overseas relief had been much higher than home expenditure for most of the 1960s. From 1971, the expenditure on British-​based and overseas relief was combined within the reports.72 The costs at the

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end of the copy of the 1975 report held at the BRCS archives are annotated in pencil with ‘leave out overseas work’ and ‘International Operations’ inserted in biro, and the results of these notes can be seen in 1976, with a return to showing that £851,000 was spent in international operations.73 British operations were harder to provide costs for, as volunteerism was included, as well as charitable donations, with an estimate of £11,234,000 as the value of 86,416 unpaid volunteers in Britain. This was important for demonstrating how much work was undertaken in Britain in contrast to expenditure overseas, plus £2,565,000 spent on British operational costs including services and training, £756,000 on administration, and £213,000 for fundraising and public relations.74 The trend of prioritising domestic activities continued in the reports of 1975 through to 1984, despite conflicts at the beginning of this period, such as the Vietnam War and the subsequent crises in Cambodia. Britain was not alone, however, in juggling such a complex array of activities. In discussing the international activity of the Australian Red Cross, Melanie Oppenheimer refers to the International Movement’s work becoming ‘more complex as the Cold War reached its climax’, with civil wars, ‘refugees, stateless people and political detainees’, together with ongoing environmental disasters.75 In 1977, the annual report’s cover was illustrated with an image of a refugee in Lisbon, and in 1978 with people waiting for food and milk in Bangladesh. There were uncaptioned but contrasting images of domestic and overseas work in 1983, and a large single image of distribution of food in Chad in 1984, but the trend of prioritising domestic work in the contents continued during the second half of the 1980s, except when ‘International Aid’ was boldly presented as the BRCS’s first activity in 1985, with drought and famine in Africa.76 However, continuing the presentation of UK activities from the mid-​1970s within the 1980s’ reframing of the Society’s image, the new chairman, the Countess of Limerick, Sylvia, concluded the introduction to the report by contextualising the International Red Cross Movement and the BRCS’s contribution to disaster relief, stating that ‘[l]‌ess publicised but just as valuable as the international work have been the countless first aid, nursing, welfare, training and fund-​raising duties performed in Britain’.77 Conclusion There were three key moments when the BRCS saw a need to re-​emphasise and reframe the public message about its purpose in the third quarter of the twentieth century. In 1947, 1960 and 1974, the BRCS responded to national and international events –​the end of the Second World War and the launch of the NHS, the further internationalisation of British humanitarianism, and the economic crisis of the early 1970s. Evidence suggests that, despite the Red Cross Movement’s emphasis on independence and the wide range of work undertaken by the BRCS, the wartime connection with the State somewhat affected its ability to recruit and fundraise. As already noted, the BRCS was the auxiliary to the armed forces’ medical services, a

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role envisaged since the charity was founded as the National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War in 1870 in response to the Geneva Convention of 1864, and put fully in motion from 1909. The impact of this may be indicated by Woolton’s perception that the militarised uniform should change, and by the Attitude Survey response regarding how the BRCS was funded. One of the key factors appears to be its multifarious relief activities, provision for which was increasingly overlapped by other charities, meaning that the identity of the BRCS was not clear to the public. The Order of St John had been a long-​time competitor and collaborator, but new charities such as Oxfam, and the establishment of the DEC and other organisations, also increased the competitive market for donations and for volunteers. Notes 1 This chapter has benefited from support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/​N003330/​1) for the project ‘Crossing Boundaries:  The History of First Aid in Britain and France, 1909–​1989’ (2016–​19); from the Bodleian Libraries Sassoon Visiting Fellowship (University of Oxford), on ‘War, Humanitarianism and the British Red Cross’ (2016–​17); and from the Faculty of Arts, Cultures and Education at the University of Hull for supporting further research in Geneva. The research for this chapter is in preparation for a monograph on the history of the British Red Cross, under contract with Bloomsbury. Thank you to the wonderful archivists at the British Red Cross, Bodleian Libraries, and the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and for conversations with Melanie Oppenheimer, which have enhanced my research. Thanks also to the Sir Philip Reckitt Educational Trust and the University of Hull for support towards travel to attend the ‘Histories of the Red Cross Movement: Continuity and Change’ conference at Flinders University in South Australia. The author was formerly known as Rosemary Wall. British Red Cross Museum and Archives (BRCMA), RCC/​1/​29/​51, The British Red Cross in 1974, p. 5 (that is, the annual report). 2 BRCMA, Branch Circulars 1947, W. J. Phillips, secretary, to county directors, ‘Public Relations Department’, 17 March 1947. 3 For the concept of the ‘Warfare State’, see D. Edgerton, Warfare State:  Britain, 1920–​1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 4 See M. Meyer, ‘The British Red Cross’s Humanitarian Auxiliary Role to the British Government and Armed Forces’ (2009) for more information on the auxiliary role: www.redcross.org.uk/​ about-​us/​how-​we-​are-​run/​the-​international-​movement (accessed 29 January 2019). 5 BRCMA, RCC/​1/​29/​24, Report of the British Red Cross Society for the Year 1947, p. 4. 6 BRCMA, Branch Circulars 1947, W. J. Phillips, secretary, to county directors, ‘National Health Service Act 1946’, 5 June 1947. 7 BRCMA, Branch Circulars 1947, R.  Gedling, Ministry of Health, to joint secretaries, Joint Committee of the Order of St John of Jerusalem and BRCS, 14 October 1947; R.  Gedling, Ministry of Health, to F. H. D. Pritchard, legal advisor, BRCS, 24 October 1947; W. J. Phillips, secretary, to county directors, ‘National Health Service Act, 1946: BRCS Rheumatism Clinics not transferable to Ministry of Health’, 22 June 1948; see BRCMA, The British Red Cross in 1974, p. 7. 8 BRCMA, Branch Circulars 1947, W. J. Phillips, secretary, to county secretaries, ‘Headquarters’ Circular:  National Health Service Act, 1946’:  supplement to Circular 63/​47, and to notes issued at county directors’ conference, 9 October 1947.

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9 W. H. Beveridge, Voluntary Action: A Report on Methods of Social Advance (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015 [1948]). 10 F. J.  M. Woolton, The Memoirs of the Rt Hon. the Earl of Woolton (London:  Cassell, 1959), pp.  324–​5. 11 Ibid., pp. 281–​4. 12 Beveridge, Voluntary Action, p. 84. 13 The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA), WO 32/​15716, ‘British Red Cross Society: Working Party to Consider Activities in an Emergency. Report and Correspondence, 1948–​61’; BRCMA, RCC/​1/​29/​26, Report of the British Red Cross Society for the Year 1949, pp. 18, 27. 14 TNA, WO 32/​15716, ‘British Red Cross Society:  Working Party’; British Red Cross Society Quarterly Review, 38:1 ( January 1951), 6–​9; R. Wall and A. M. Rafferty, ‘Nursing and the “Hearts and Minds” Campaign: Malaya, 1948–​1958’ in P. D’Antonio, J. A. Fairman and J. C. Whelan (eds), Handbook on the Global History of Nursing (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 218–​36; BRCMA, RCC/​1/​29/​41, Report of the British Red Cross Society for the Year 1964, pp. 5–​7. 15 BRCMA, Report of the British Red Cross Society for the Year 1949, p. 61. 16 BRCMA, RCC/​1/​29/​27, Report of the British Red Cross Society for the Year 1950. 17 BRCMA, RCC/​1/​29/​31, Report of the British Red Cross Society for the Year 1954. 18 BRCMA, RCC/​1/​29/​33, Report of the British Red Cross Society for the Year 1956. 19 Oxford, Bodleian Libraries (OBL), papers of Frederick James Marquis, 1st Earl of Woolton, 1904–​1964, MS Woolton 50.1, fo. 22, Lord Woolton to Sir Thomas Padmore, Treasury Chambers, 3 April 1958. 20 BRCMA, RCC/​1/​29/​35, Report of the British Red Cross Society for the Year 1958, p. 5. 21 Ibid. 22 OBL, MS Woolton 53, fo. 8, address by Lord Woolton, Executive Committee, 10 February 1960, p. 3. 23 BRCMA, RCB/​1/​2/​16, minutes of Executive Committee meetings 1952–​7, 14 May 1952; RCB/​ 1/​1/​3, minutes from council meetings 1933–​55, 10 December 1957. 24 OBL, MS Woolton 53, fol. 8, address by Lord Woolton, Executive Committee, 10 February 1960, p. 3. 25 M. Barnett, Empire of Humanity:  A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 118. 26 BRCMA, RCC/​1/​29/​37, Report of the British Red Cross Society for the Year 1960. 27 Barnett, Empire of Humanity, pp. 120–​3. 28 M. Black, A Cause for Our Times. Oxfam: The First 50 Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 1–​80, esp. pp. 39, 41, 47–​9, 54, 75. 29 P. Gatrell, Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956–​1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 35. 30 Ibid., pp. 36–​51. 31 Black, A Cause for Our Times, pp. 60–​2. 32 Ibid., pp. 63, 65. 33 Ibid., pp. 65–​6. 34 Ibid., pp. 69–​74. 35 Ibid., pp. 67–​8. 36 D. Rodogno and H. Fehrenbach (eds), Humanitarian Photography:  A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 37 See H. Fehrenbach, ‘Children and Other Civilians:  Photography and the Politics of Humanitarian Image-​Making,’ in Rodogno and Fehrenbach, Humanitarian Photography, pp. 165–​99.

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3 8 Black, A Cause for Our Times, p. 57. 39 A. Jones, ‘The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) and the Humanitarian Industry in Britain, 1963–​85’, Twentieth Century British History, 26:4 (2015), 573–​601. 40 Ibid., pp. 579, 596; also see OBL, MS Oxfam PRG/​2/​3/​10/​11, Disasters Emergency Committee, 1963–​72, minutes for 1963. 41 BRCMA, RCC/​1/​29/​37, British Red Cross Society, Annual Report for the Year 1960, pp. 5–​9. 42 Ibid., p. 3. 43 Ibid., pp. 5–​9. 44 Ibid., p. 3. 45 Ibid., p. 4. 46 For an overview of this period see B. Oliver, The British Red Cross in Action (London: Faber and Faber, 1966). 47 D. P. Forsythe, The Humanitarians:  The International Committee of the Red Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 39; BRCMA, A. Limerick, ‘Introduction to Headquarters Report’, in Report of the British Red Cross Society for the Year 1948, p. 15. 48 D. Lindsay, A Form of Gratitude: The Life of Angela Limerick (East Grinstead: Chid Press, 1992), pp. 176–​217. 49 Forsythe, The Humanitarians, pp. 55–​6. 50 Ibid., pp. 58–​60, quote on p. 59. 51 Black, A Cause for Our Times, pp. 6–​21. 52 Ibid., p. 80. 53 BRCMA, Report of the British Red Cross Society for the Year 1960, p. 31; RCC/​1/​29/​38, Report of the British Red Cross Society for the Year 1961, p. 33; RCC/​1/​29/​24, Report of the British Red Cross Society for the Year 1947, p. 4. 54 BRCMA, RCB/​1/​2/​18, minutes of Executive Committee meetings, March 1969–​July 1976: B. Hodgson to directors/​co-​ordinators of branches, ‘Attitude Survey’, 1 October 1974, p. 1. 55 BRCMA, The British Red Cross Society in 1974, p. 4. 56 Hodgson, ‘Attitude Survey’, p. 1. 57 BRCMA, The British Red Cross Society in 1974, p. 5. 58 BRCMA, RCC/​1/​12/​3/​225, British Market Research Bureau (BMRB), prepared for the British Red Cross Society, ‘Attitudes towards Voluntary BRCS Organisations –​Report and Survey, July 1974’, p. 1. 59 Ibid., p. 2. 60 Ibid. 61 Hodgson, ‘Attitude Survey’, p. 3. 62 BRMB, ‘Attitudes towards Voluntary BRCS Organisations’. 63 P. Alcock, ‘Voluntary Action, New Labour and the “Third Sector” ’, in M. Hilton and J. McKay (eds), The Ages of Voluntarism: How We Got to the Big Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 160–​1. 64 International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Archives (IFRCA), League of Red Cross Societies, Board of Governors, XXVIIIth Session, Vienna, 28 September–​2 October 1965, Annex X: final report of the League’s Commission for the Red Cross Centenary, pp. 2–​3. 65 D. A. Reid and P. F. Gilbo, Beyond Conflict:  The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1919–​1994 (Geneva:  International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1997), pp. 208, 222–​6; M. Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity: 100 Years of Australian Red Cross, 1914–​2014 (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2014), pp. 186–​9.

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6 6 BMRB, ‘Attitudes towards Voluntary BRCS Organisations’, p. 1. 67 Ibid. 68 BRCMA, The British Red Cross Society in 1974, p. 5. 69 Ibid., cover and p. 4. 70 Ibid., p. 18. 71 Ibid., p. 19. 72 BRCMA, RCC/​1/​29/​48, The British Red Cross Society in 1971; RCC/​1/​29/​49, The British Red Cross Society in 1972; RCC/​1/​29/​50, The British Red Cross Society in 1973; The British Red Cross Society in 1974. 73 BRCMA, RCC/​1/​29/​52, The British Red Cross Society in 1975, p. 23; RCC/​1/​29/​53, The British Red Cross Society in 1976, p. 10. 74 BRCMA, The British Red Cross Society in 1976, p. 10. 75 Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity, p. 186. 76 BRCMA, The British Red Cross Society in 1976, cover; RCC/​1/​29/​54, The British Red Cross Society in 1977, p. 1 (cover); RCC/​1/​29/​55, ’78 Care in Action: The British Red Cross Society, cover; RCC/​1/​29/​56, ’79: Care in Action: The British Red Cross Society, cover; RCC/​1/​29/​57, The British Red Cross Society, 1980, p. 1 (cover); RCC/​1/​29/​58, The British Red Cross Society, 1981, p. 1. (cover); RCC/​1/​29/​59, Annual Review of the British Red Cross Society, 1982, p. 1; RCC/​ 1/​29/​60, The British Red Cross Society Annual Review, 1983, p. 1 (cover); RCC/​1/​29/​61, A Review of Red Cross Work in 1984, p. 1 (cover); RCC/​1/​29/​62, British Red Cross Review of ’85, pp. 5–​8; RCC/​1/​29/​63, British Red Cross Review of ’86; RCC/​1/​29/​64, British Red Cross Review of ’87; RCC/​1/​29/​65, British Red Cross Review of ’88; RCC/​1/​29/​66, British Red Cross Review of ’89. 77 BRCMA, British Red Cross Review of ’85, p. 3.

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Feed the hungry –​no matter what? The Norwegian Red Cross and Biafra, 1967–​70 Eldrid Mageli

During the post-​Cold War crises in the 1990s, the right to ‘humanitarian intervention’ came to the forefront of international debates. According to this view, people matter more than their governments. If atrocities are sufficiently awful, outsiders have a responsibility to intervene. There is today an awareness that such intervention may have negative political consequences, and indeed, despite good intentions, might even prolong conflicts and people’s suffering. Mary B.  Anderson’s seminal work Do No Harm:  How Aid Can Support Peace  –​or War revealed the dilemmas and possible pitfalls of aid. The book generated scholarly debate when it came out in 1999 and has since become a much-​used handbook in aid circles.1 However, in the history of humanitarian aid such reflections were often absent, most noticeably in the case study of Biafra in Nigeria in the late 1960s. The massive amounts of food aid delivered to Biafra unquestionably alleviated suffering and prevented many deaths, but they also contributed to a protracted conflict, and arguably extended the war by over a year.2 Few analysts, however, paid much attention to this possibility while the crisis was unfolding. For a long time, Biafra was remembered mainly for pictures of starving, malnourished children; for the heroic efforts of the individuals and organisations in the provision of food and medicines; and for the establishment of a new organisation that advocated the need to bear witness about civilians’ suffering:  Médicins sans Frontières. Later studies have generated new insights that have, in turn, led to a more nuanced view of the massive aid campaign to Biafra. Two coalitions of aid organisations were involved in Biafra: the Red Cross –​comprising the International Red Cross Committee (ICRC) and several national Red Cross societies, and an alliance of Western European Christian organisations, both Protestant and Catholic, called the Joint Church Alliance ( JCA). They were united by a desire to aid the starving, but they were also competitors in the humanitarian market, since both were dependent on donations from their national supporters. The ICRC, unlike the JCA, found itself bound by the Geneva Convention, which stated

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that both parties to a conflict must accept the delivery of aid.3 This complicated and delayed Red Cross aid efforts. The Norwegian Red Cross (NRC) objected to the ICRC’s cautious approach and tried to convince the ICRC that given the extent of the catastrophe, the main issue should be to bring in as much food as possible, even if it contravened international humanitarian laws. This chapter will examine the NRC and its ‘activist’ role in this relationship. The conflict Biafra is an area in the south-​east of Nigeria, named by the Ibo secessionists (the Ibos being the regionally dominant ethnic group) who, in 1967, seceded from the Nigerian federation and declared a new independent state. Nigeria itself as a country had only gained independence from the British in 1960. The Ibos were Christians, generally well educated and prominent in a wide range of professions in Nigerian society, not only in their heartland in the south-​east, but all over the country. The mid-​1960s was a period of violence and military coups. The Ibos were subjected to severe discrimination and massacres by the other two main ethnic groups, Hausas and Yorubas, both predominantly Muslim, and many of the Ibos fled to the south-​east. The military governor, Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, declared independence from Nigeria. The federal forces decided to crush the rebellion, and war ensued.4 In May 1968, federal forces conquered Biafra’s Port Harcourt. Biafra became economically as well as geographically isolated. Dried cod from Scandinavia had been an important protein source, but this food item was no longer available. Kwashiorkor, an acute protein deficiency that causes absurdly distended stomachs, became a prevalent sight. The humanitarian situation in Biafra deteriorated rapidly. Because of the federal blockade, in the autumn and winter of 1968/​9 deaths due to starvation in Biafra were reported in western newspapers. It was the first starvation disaster broadcast on television. European newspapers were continuously updating the situation, not least because of the effective propaganda by the Swiss advertising bureau Markpress, hired by the Biafran authorities to present their version of the story. Markpress’s main message was that the suffering of the Biafran people was caused by the federal Government’s callous blockade. Numbers were suggested –​perhaps as many as 1 million people in the enclave needed immediate help. Images of starving children, wandering skeletons with an empty gaze, refugees on ceaseless wandering, made reporters compare the situation to the Holocaust. Were these people the new Jews? Christian missionaries in the area pointed out that the Ibos were Christians seeking protection from marauding Muslims, who were advancing from the North. European church organisations struck the alarm bell and began to organise a collective effort to aid fellow believers in an African country.5

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Feed the hungry The United Nations was unwilling to get involved in a war it regarded as an internal African matter. The Organisation of African Unity (OAU) feared that a breakaway republic would create precedence for other African conflicts. Few states were prepared to recognise the Biafran claim to independence. Only five did so; four of these were African.6 Owing to historical colonial legacies, Great Britain was pro-​ Nigeria. France tilted towards the Biafran side, partly because of British–​French rivalry in the area, but refrained from formally recognising Biafra. Although the Biafran claim to independence met with little enthusiasm, in Africa or elsewhere, the plight of the Biafran people engendered widespread global sympathy. In August 1968, ICRC president August Lindt launched plans for a massive aid operation. Surface transport by trucks was out of the question, as this might interfere with both sides’ military operations. Biafran authorities would not tolerate it because they suspected that federal authorities might poison food provisions. Lindt therefore announced plans for airborne aid, which became known as International Airlift West Africa (INALWA). The ICRC mobilised the international Red Cross network. National associations were requested to provide planes and staff. This led to one of the largest aid operations in the history of the ICRC.7 The appeal met with great enthusiasm in several European countries, and especially in Scandinavia and Great Britain. In Norway, the NRC leadership discussed the case with the foreign ministry. The Government donated 700,000 Norwegian kroners (NOK).8 An aircraft with the Red Cross logo freshly painted on it was loaded with dried milk, dried fish and medicines, and readied for take-​off. At the same time, the NRC consulted professional advertising agencies and launched a nation-​wide fundraising campaign. For the first time in the history of the NRC, a commercial agency was used to raise money. Pictures of hungry children were distributed, with catchy texts:  ‘Aid the starving! Help Biafra!’.9 The response was overwhelming. Businesses, trade unions, local communities and individuals donated generously. Storage places were filled to the brim with dried food items. Housewives went from door to door to collect money. A couple of weeks’ campaigning brought in NOK 1.3 million. For the NRC, the plight of Biafra received top priority. Both its president, Torstein Dale, and its secretary-​general, Haakon Mathiesen, encouraged the public to give freely. The two of them began a period of hectic commuting between Geneva and the Nordic capitals, to coordinate Red Cross aid in the best possible way.10 According to the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, relative to the protection of civil persons in time of war (Article 23), each of the warring parties must give its permission to allow aid to be distributed to civilians caught in a warzone.11 In Nigeria, however, the parties were in fact rather unwilling to accept aid without first having the donors accept conditions that were intended to strengthen the hand of the respective combatants. Lindt conducted lengthy negotiations with Ojukwu, as well as with Nigeria’s prime minister, Lieutenant General Yakubu Gowon. Both were

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concerned with military progress and not particularly concerned with feeding the starving population. Both used relief aid as part of a power game. They accepted aid on conditions the other could not agree to, whether it was Nigerian inspection of aid, landing permissions in Biafra, which airstrip to use or from where the aid was to be sent.12 The question of day or night flights turned out to be a major sticking point. Gowon realised that some airborne aid to the secessionist area could not be avoided, mainly because of its propaganda value. Ojukwu accepted night flights only, ostensibly to protect the planes from being shot down; others, though, suspected the real motive was to smuggle in arms under the cover of darkness. Without Ojukwu’s assent, the ICRC could not guarantee the security of its staff. With serious limitations, and only night flights, ICRC’s INALWA commenced at the beginning of September 1968. Having obtained a tacit and uncertain permission from the Nigerian authorities, and with occasional interruptions when negotiations failed, the committee brought in large amounts of food and medicines to both the federal and the Biafran sides. Overall, with the exception of western relief during the Berlin blockade, the ICRC created the largest air bridge in history.13 Several national Red Cross associations felt the ICRC was too compliant in dealing with the demands of the warring parties and strongly expressed their dissatisfaction at ICRC policy. Torstein Dale was the mouthpiece of Norwegian sentiments, and wrote countless letters to Geneva criticising the organisation for caving in to Biafran pressure and halting the daytime flights.14 At the same time, the NRC leadership considered whether it would be possible to bring in aid under its own schemes, independent from the ICRC operations. Was it possible to initiate a separate Nordic aid action? The other Nordic Red Cross associations were largely positive. In the meantime, the night flights brought in large quantities of food and other provisions, varying between 2,000 and 5,000 tons a month. Between February and April 1969, the air bridge functioned continuously. In April a record was reached, with 500 ICRC flights landing in Biafra that month alone.15 In retrospect, the ICRC can be faulted for the lack of an overall strategy, and its fixation on bringing in as much food as possible without delay.16 Although there was certainly a lack of food and resultant starvation, there was no attempt made by the ICRC to evaluate actual needs. The reasons for the ICRC’s eagerness to act rather than to analyse appear to be twofold: the steady supply of horror reports featuring in the western press, especially detailing the starvation of children, and the challenge to the Red Cross’s standing in Biafra posed by the mobilisation of aid by the churches and religious orders. Church aid While the ICRC negotiated conditions for access, Christian Europe acted. Biafra became a rallying call for Christians, and Nordic churches were particularly active. In August 1968 church organisations in Denmark, Norway and Sweden established

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their own airline, ‘North Church Aid’, soon to become the JCA.17 Around thirty-​five Protestant and Catholic organisations from a dozen countries took part. Aeroplanes were purchased on the open market, and pilots hired. The churches cared little for what Gowon or Ojukwu or others in Nigeria or Biafra said. For them, feeding the starving was paramount. The credo of ‘love thy neighbour’ proved more important than respect for Nigerian sovereignty. The delivery of aid was first and foremost a matter of conscience, and not the function of international laws or norms.18 In Norway aid provided the opportunity for a major breakthrough for Christian solidarity work. In Christian youth associations enthusiasm ran high. Biafra was at the centre of fundraising, church collections, postcard sales and passionate newspaper articles. The Norwegian pastor Elias Berge organised his own ‘Biafra express’, a special fleet of cars that drove through small towns and valleys, spreading the message. Everywhere people turned up to greet it, mayors gave speeches and bands played. Euphoria proved contagious.19 By January 1969, Markpress had refined its political message. The agency’s overall objective was, by now, to convince the world of the need for Biafran independence. According to Markpress, the Nigerian authorities used starvation as a deliberate weapon of war; their real intention was extermination. This way, Markpress made genocide part of the vocabulary. To avoid such a horrific scenario, full sovereignty for the Ibos was the only viable solution. Prophecies of genocide did not lead western governments to recognise a new African state, but they inflamed public opinion in several European countries.20 Norway was no exception. Several articles appeared in Norwegian newspapers, encouraging Biafran support while condemning Nigerian federal policies. People from different walks of life mobilised. A special Biafra committee was established, featuring prominent people from business, political and academic sectors, as well as the cultural elite. The committee voiced its concern at numerous public occasions and invited Biafrans to Norway to tell their stories. Political youth organisations pressed the Norwegian State to give more aid to Biafra. An entire issue of the Norwegian journal Internasjonal politikk (International Politics) was devoted to the conflict in Biafra.21 With the ICRC’s INALWA campaign, one major Norwegian newspaper applauded the decision to give aid no matter what the Nigerian authorities said, and when planes were grounded Nigeria was blamed. ‘Tons of food accumulating in Lagos’, ran one headline. ‘Nigeria targeting humanitarian planes’, another.22 In this heated atmosphere of ‘Who can help the most?’, the Norwegian Red Cross and Norwegian Church Aid decided to co-​operate. In a joint campaign, the two distributed numerous pamphlets to private individuals, again appealing for help. The argument was that the war continued mercilessly, and that no political solution was in sight. Millions of people depended on food brought in by air. If transport stopped, starvation would again be widespread. This time, NOK 27 million were collected. The Norwegian State contributed 68  million, in cash and kind. By 1969 the Red Cross aid had become the largest in the organisation’s history. Between September 1968 and May 1969 more than 5,000 flights had taken place. Several hundred Red

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Cross volunteers had been dispatched, and around 2,000 Nigerians took part.23 Hunger was, reports said, at last brought under control. At the same time, Red Cross aid moved towards a dramatic climax.

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Article 23 On 5 August 1969, a Swedish Red Cross plane was shot down, reportedly by mistake. This incident marked the end of Lagos’s tacit acceptance of night flights. The Nigerian authorities made it clear to the ICRC that henceforth they regarded all flights to be in contravention of the Geneva Convention. The ICRC airlift came to a halt. The circumstances surrounding the downing of the Swedish aircraft are still somewhat murky. Nigeria’s actions were, most probably, a reaction to the solo operations of the Swedish count and war adventurer, Carl Gustav von Rosen, who cultivated a personal friendship with Ojukwu and had no sympathy for the Nigerian federation. Earlier, he had brought in food and medicines for the churches and caused some embarrassment when he argued in favour of providing the Biafran people with weapons so that they could fight for their sovereignty. He led his own military operation, which he called ‘Biafran Baby’. At one point, he let his planes bomb Port Harcourt and caused considerable damage.24 For the ICRC, the Nigerian decision to withhold permission for flights caused a dilemma. The case in point was the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 23. Although the Fourth Geneva Convention was not specifically concerned with civil wars, it stated that each warring party had to give its permission to allow aid to civilians caught in the warzone. Biafra was not recognised internationally, and therefore had no status in international law. However, Nigeria did, and in referring to Article 23 in stopping the flights, it forced the ICRC to consider whether it was ready to act against its own laws. Ultimately, it decided that it was not. Keeping its planes on the tarmac and renewing negotiations with the two parties kept the Committee on the right side of the Geneva Conventions, but under the existing circumstances, it placed it at odds with the sentiments of the national Red Cross societies. The NRC was particularly critical of the ICRC’s position. Its president, Torstein Dale, saw in the Nigerian decision a blatant attempt to starve the Biafran people into submission. According to Dale the ICRC should resume the night flights as soon as possible, no matter what the wishes of the Nigerian Government: ‘In the name of humanity’, he wrote on 1 July 1969, ‘the ICRC must object … and appeal to the people of the world and their governments to … clear a channel for the aid provisions. The Red Cross must let its voice be heard.’25 Dale had little faith in the ICRC’s ability to act. His sense of frustration was aggravated by the fact that as the church aid organisations were not bound by the Geneva Convention, their aid operations continued, placing the plight of civilians before legal technicalities. It was a position that struck a chord with the NRC’s new secretary-​general, Arnold Rørholt. Correspondence between him and the ICRC president leaves little doubt

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as to the level of his frustration. Although he realised that the ICRC had an obligation to respect the Nigerian Government’s decision, he insisted that ‘it makes a rather disheartening impression when the committee … talks about millions of people on the brink of starvation, and … for principal [sic] reasons, does not insist on helping, or simply does not force the aid through’.26 During July 1969, as the ICRC negotiators talked, the churches had delivered 700 tons of food aid into Biafra. Why could the churches fly when the Red Cross did not? And, perhaps equally important, how would the public in Norway react to this? It was July and holiday season; however, in a few weeks’ time people would return to their everyday routines, and the NRC would have a difficult time explaining the Committee’s passivity. As Rørholt stated, ‘this will inevitably give the impression that the churches do the job because of humanitarian concerns while the Red Cross refrain because of political concerns’. He expressed his annoyance that the Committee appeared to represent the Red Cross with little regard for the numerous national associations. He compared the ICRC to the absolute monarch King Louis XIV of France –​‘La Croix-​Rouge, c’est moi’ –​because it used the Red Cross name in complete disregard of the existence of the numerous national Red Cross societies. The ICRC could pursue its high ideals of neutrality and legality, but national societies were dependent on public support.27 Dale and Rørholt attempted to find ways of bypassing the international committee. Rørholt wrote a letter to all the other Nordic Red Cross societies. He argued that the respective governments ought to negotiate with Nigeria, so that Lagos would be forced to accept aid. Rørholt suggested the Norwegian foreign ministry as the vanguard in a joint Nordic action. His efforts in this regard did not meet with success, except the formulation of an official letter to the warring parties, which requested that the ICRC be allowed to aid the war victims in Biafra. Norway and Denmark were at the forefront of this initiative.28 In France, too, there was criticism of the ICRC’s legalistic line. Throughout the war, the French Red Cross acted independently of the ICRC and instead co-​operated closely with the French Government. In the autumn of 1968, the French Red Cross sent a team of five doctors to Biafra to aid the wounded. The doctors concluded that most of the victims were civilians, and a great number were undernourished children. One of the doctors, Bernhard Kouchner, was deeply shocked when he realised that children were dying of starvation, and objected to the ICRC unwillingness to tell the world. In 1970, he broke with the Red Cross and founded Médecins sans Frontières to protest against Red Cross silence. To Kouchner, the most important issue was to establish an organisation prepared to bear witness to atrocities and injustice.29 During the autumn of 1969, Rørholt and Dale’s concern about the ICRC’s inactivity increased. There were two reasons. One was the suffering of people in Biafra, the other  –​no less important in their opinion  –​was waning support for the Red Cross in Norway. Rørholt set out his concerns in a letter to Henrik Beer, secretary-​general of the LRCS, in late November, in which he ‘deeply deplored’ the

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ICRC’s failure to negotiate a resumption of Red Cross flights.30 In Norway, it was clear that the favourable reputation enjoyed by the NRC was diminishing. Members of the local Red Cross associations, the press and people in general showed little understanding of the Geneva Conventions and found it hard to understand why the most important humanitarian organisation in the country was so palpably failing the needs of the Biafran population. As the situation in Biafra deteriorated, the focus of Norwegian charitable donations shifted from the Red Cross to the churches. Frustrated by Beer’s ineffectual reply  –​he had merely reiterated the ICRC’s responsibilities under the Convention –​Rørholt and Dale tried a different tack. In a letter to Beer on 27 November, Rørholt suggested that ‘the case in point is the interpretation of this Convention’.31 The main thrust of Article 23 was that parties in an armed conflict were obliged to allow the transit of certain items –​food and medicines –​to a civilian population in need. At the same time, the parties could limit this access if it interfered with the pursuit of military goals. This was the reason the federal Government gave for banning the flights. Dale questioned whether this interpretation should be accepted. Could a state be more concerned with a war’s progression than with humanitarian issues? Dale referred to René Cassin, who the previous year had received the Nobel peace prize for his contribution to the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Citing Cassin’s view that a new era had begun in which humanitarian considerations would be central to world politics, Dale found that this provided an opening for a new interpretation of the Geneva Convention. The convention could and should be read in a more ‘aid-​friendly’ way than had hitherto been the case.32 Dale was confident that he had found a legal opening; the challenge was convincing the ICRC that it was worth pursuing. Dale was optimistic. The centrality of a ‘humanitarian right’ might allow for a reinterpretation of Article 23, and prepare the ground for an expansion of the Fourth Convention. The point was to alter the Convention so that it could no longer be used contrary to its original intent, which was to aid civilian victims. Pursuant to an NRC initiative, the Twenty-​First International Red Cross Conference in Istanbul in September 1969 adopted a resolution to that effect. It was non-​committal but did underline the need for securing quick and efficient aid to civilians in the case of natural and other catastrophes. Several participants regarded it as a fruitful beginning. The discussions that followed also made use of terms such as ‘world society’, ‘humanitarian intervention’ and ‘people’s right in international law’, thus anticipating later discussions about the national-​state, sovereignty, and international legal rights and commitments.33 In the meantime, the civil war and the ICRC’s prevarications dragged on. The Nigerian authorities continued to insist that as a sovereign state Nigeria had a legal right to control goods and drugs. The Biafran leadership, for its part, refused to receive items that had undergone inspection. On 30 June 1969 authorities in Lagos offered to allow the Nigerian Red Cross and a national rehabilitation committee to oversee all aid entering Nigeria, both to the federal side and to Biafra. The Nigerian Red

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Cross thereafter appealed to European governments and national Red Cross societies for assistance. This created a somewhat embarrassing situation. The Europeans were generally more inclined to support Biafra than the federal side and had little faith in the commitment of the Nigerian Red Cross to aid suffering Biafrans. The secretary-​generals of the Scandinavian Red Cross societies all agreed that aid should not be channelled through the Nigerian Red Cross, but should go through the LRCS and the ICRC instead. The main thing was to avoid the impression that the ICRC primarily supported Nigeria, while the LRCS preferred Biafra.34 In November 1969 Nigerian authorities decided to accept day flights; however, the Biafran leadership continued to refuse. This puzzled Rørholt, who attended meetings in Geneva: ‘President [Marcel A.] Naville said … [that] his conclusion was that neither of the two really wanted to resume the Red Cross flights.’35 Rørholt found this hard to fathom. Contemporary reports had established that in Biafra there was ‘more suffering per square kilometre than anywhere else in the world’.36 Why, then, this unwillingness to receive aid? Rørholt appeared reluctant to admit there might exist non-​humanitarian motives: ‘[One] could almost believe … that General Ojukwu and his people prefer to sacrifice a substantial portion of the civilian population to obtain a diplomatic, political and military advantage.’37 In other words, as late as November 1969 Rørholt was surprised at the thought that Biafran leaders might be using aid as part of a political game. The reason for this was probably the centrality Biafra had acquired in people’s minds, as a place synonymous with suffering and hunger. In November, the ICRC sent a telegram to the Icelandic Red Cross enquiring whether they could assume control of the airlift, possibly in co-​operation with the other Nordic societies. The request provoked considerable consternation in the Scandinavian societies. As Rørholt caustically noted, if it implied that the ICRC did not consider the national societies to be bound by the principle of legality, then ‘the … societies could have [acted independently] of the ICRC as early as June’.38 The Swedish Red Cross Secretary, General Olof Stroh, wrote a long letter to the ICRC’s president, in which he questioned why the ICRC was intent on encouraging national associations to act in a manner that the ICRC itself had claimed was incompatible with Red Cross principles.39 Dale was likewise unimpressed by the ICRC. Even though he had earlier criticised the Committee for being overly swayed by legal technicalities, this did not mean that national societies were free to disregard the law. The suggestion called into question the ICRC’s credibility as a provider of aid. ‘It is my opinion that the Committee should no longer have anything to do with aid. This should be the task of the LRCS –​in war as in peace.’40 The NRC’s frustration continued into the early weeks of 1970. By this time, the ICRC had still not succeeded in resuming the flights. The NRC leadership conceded that the churches had benefited from the situation and gained increased domestic support.41 At the same time, federal forces entered Biafra and crushed the Biafran rebellion. The south-​eastern region was again brought under federal control.

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On 15 January 1970, Ojukwu gave up the struggle and fled the country, bringing the civil war to an end.

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The challenges of humanitarian action Several scholars maintain that with the end of the Cold War, emergencies have become more ‘complex’, ‘more barbaric’ or ‘irrational’, that they are caused by a ‘breakdown of authority’ and that this calls for a different humanitarian intervention.42 However, wars and crises during the Cold War were no less complex than at present. Neither does the concept of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) –​which has guided humanitarian politics since 2001 and justified intervention in Kosovo, Kabul, Iraq and Libya –​signal anything substantially new. Rather, the R2P is a culmination of a position, a recognition that states or organisations have a responsibility in certain circumstances to intervene in other states to protect civilians from genocide, hunger and suffering.43 Saving lives is one important aspect of the R2P, although not the only one. Historians have until relatively recently paid little attention to the history of humanitarian intervention. Most of the analyses have been done by scholars of politics, international law, sociology and strategic studies, with a focus on the present and recent past. References to pre-​1990 crisis situations are remarkably few.44 Today, the problematic aspects of the relief operation in Biafra appears to be largely forgotten.45 It is possible that our fixation with contemporary or post-​Cold War humanitarian crises has contributed to the neglect of earlier experiences such as Biafra. Biafra is largely remembered for the televised images of starving children and the birth of Médecins sans Frontières. It is less well known, but well documented, that the massive aid operation kept the Biafran State from collapsing in the summer of 1968. One reason was that planes carried weapons as well as food. Another was that relief support was financial as well as material. The Biafran currency was worthless outside Biafra. The agencies exchanged it at the official exchange rate and paid the military authorities in Biafra several thousand dollars a day in landing fees. They also paid for the living costs of hundreds of aid workers in Biafra, including expenses for trucks and cars, and for the building of hospitals, clinics and other medical centres. One estimate puts the cost of the relief effort at US$250 million, of which as little as 15 per cent would have sufficed to cover the arms Biafra needed for the war.46 Thus, foreign, ‘hard’ currency became a substantial contribution to the Biafran war effort, and enabled Biafra’s leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu, to purchase the weapons he needed. Biafra’s chief military planner, Mike Okwechime, confirmed after the war that ‘financing the war was largely accomplished through private and humanitarian contributions’.47 The Biafran leadership’s main concern was to achieve Biafran sovereignty, not to aid hunger victims. General Ojukwu admitted that he was prepared to let Biafrans die if Biafra survived.48

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Most scholars agree that the humanitarian aid prolonged the war for at least one year.49 ‘The Nigerian Civil War’, notes the distinguished analyst Fiona Terry, ‘provides one of the most insidious examples of the manipulation of suffering and humanitarian action to gain international legitimacy’.50 For Ian Smillie, aid to Biafra was a ‘historical feat’ of bravery, but ‘an act of unfortunate and profound folly’.51 Other writers, however, point out that although the humanitarian air bridge undoubtedly strengthened the Biafran war effort, it is difficult to assess the exact quantity or value of weapons brought in this way, and so the military significance of the humanitarian operations remains uncertain.52 The harmful consequences of food aid were not evident at the time, because by 1968/​9, Biafra was a pet topic for Europeans. Whereas the United Nations and European governments were reluctant to intervene, humanitarian non-​government organisations (NGOs) mobilised on the grounds of human need. It was the first major relief effort that was dominated by NGOs. Only gradually did it dawn on observers, actors and analysts that Markpress and Ojukwu had deceived the public as well as the relief agencies. To be sure, the federal blockade caused severe starvation, but there was no genocide, before or after the defeat of the secessionists. It became clear that Biafran military leaders had exploited world good will for their own political cause. Ojukwu knew all too well that pictures of emaciated children sold well abroad, and could be used to leverage international support. Western NGOs fell for his propaganda, in the oft-​cited phrase of Oxfam’s historian Maggie Black, ‘hook, line and sinker’.53 Until Biafra, the ICRC was the leading star in providing humanitarian aid. It upheld classic universalist ideals, adhered to principles of impartiality and neutrality, and sought the consent of both parties before intervening in a crisis. With Biafra, activist-​oriented NGOs entered the scene. Several of these saw the ICRC’s legalistic neutrality as outdated. The NRC leaders shared this view, and again and again played the ‘humanitarian consideration’ card to persuade the ICRC to act. So why was the NRC leadership so concerned with aid provision, even when the Nigerian authorities denied access to the enclave? One reason was a genuine concern for the starving. There were pressing needs, both in Biafra and in the federal territory; however, among Europeans and in Norway the perceived needs in Biafra were greater. Biafrans faced starvation and death, and the NRC shared the belief, widespread among aid agencies, that their condition was a direct result of a deliberate policy pursued by the federal authorities. In short, the federal Government was the main villain and cause of all the trouble. In addition to a desire to aid the needy came the NRC realisation that ICRC dithering cost their organisation domestic support. Biafra was a ‘cause célèbre’ of its time, a major humanitarian issue that captured the hearts of the Norwegian public. Their willingness to give generously to ease Biafra’s plight transformed Norwegian Church Aid into a major donor organisation in Norway, a position it has retained ever since. In the process, people turned away from the NRC. As De Montclos

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wisely observes, ‘[b]‌ecause the humanitarian market is very competitive, aid is often implemented for the audience rather than for the victims’.54 Waning domestic support for the Red Cross became a major concern for the NRC. The general geo-​political situation, with two superpowers pursuing their strategic interests in less developed countries, left little room for considerations of individual rights. The unfortunate aspects of the humanitarian effort to Biafra have had remarkably little influence over subsequent debates on humanitarian intervention, despite its relevance to the contemporary challenges facing the aid community.55 Until the 1980s, human-​rights issues in aid-​giving were the preserve of a few NGOs, such as Amnesty International, Save the Children and Oxfam. However, issues raised in Biafra proved a forerunner for later debates over the right to intervene to save individuals. In the 1980s, relief agencies, academics, consultants, journalists and lobbyists began to converge towards a common view that shared a belief in human-​ rights-​based foreign policy. In the 1990s, the concept of human security became the latest neologism among policymakers and scholars concerned with governmental and international policymaking, as an attempt to think about international security in terms other than military defence and states’ need for territorial control.56 It is possible that a renewed acquaintance with the Biafra crisis, the churches’ disregard for legal technicalities and the NRC’s activist attitude to aid would add to current discourses of the right to intervene. A ‘people-​first’ policy that privileges the rights of individuals above those of State sovereignty might prove a short-​term alleviation but may have longer-​term, harmful consequences. Notes 1 M. B. Anderson, Do No Harm:  How Aid Can Support Peace  –​or War (Colorado:  Lynne Rienner, 1999). 2 I. Smillie, The Alms Bazaar: Altruism under Fire –​Non-​Profit Organizations and International Development (London: Intermediate Technology Publications, 1995), p. 105. 3 M. Desgrandchamps, L’humanitaire en guerre civile: La crise du Biafra (1967–​1970) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018). 4 J. de St Jorre, The Nigerian Civil War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972); A. H. M. Kirk-​ Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook 1966–​1970 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); M. Gould, The Biafran War: The Struggle for Modern Nigeria (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012). 5 C. Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 616. 6 Tanzania, Gabon, Zambia, the Ivory Coast and Haiti. 7 A. de Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 72–​7. 8 Equivalent to about NOK 6.4 million in 2017, or 660,000 Euros. 9 ‘Hjelp de som sulter! Hjelp Biafra!’ 10 E. Mageli, Med rett til å hjelpe:  Historien om Norges Røde Kors (Oslo:  Pax forlag, 2014), pp. 249–​50.

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11 The Convention was applied here, although this was an internal conflict and not a war between two internationally recognised states. 12 F. Terry, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (New  York:  Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 42–​3. 13 Mageli, Med rett til å hjelpe, p. 244. 14 Red Cross Archives, National Archives Oslo (RCA), P250/​2/​423N: INALWA, Torstein Dale to Samuel A. Gonard, 13 September 1968. RCA, P250/​1/​423N: ‘Videre helt generelt’, Dale to Gonard, 15 January 1969. 15 D. P. Forsythe, Humanitarian Politics:  The International Committee of the Red Cross (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 187. 16 Ibid., p. 194; D. P. Forsythe, The Humanitarians: The International Committee of the Red Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. Chapter 2, pp. 51–​95. 17 Popularly nicknamed Jesus Christ Aid. 18 A. Tønnessen, Kirkens nødhjelp: Bistand, tro og politikk (Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk, 2007), Chapter 5. 19 J. Simensen, Norsk utviklingshjelps historie, Vol. I:  1952–​1953:  Norge møter den tredje verden (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2003), p. 237. 20 M. Black, A Cause for Our Times. Oxfam: The First Fifty Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 121; Mageli, Med rett til å hjelpe, pp. 255–​6. 21 Internasjonal Politikk, 3 (1969). 22 ‘Tusener av tonn matvarer hoper seg opp i … Lagos’; Aftenposten (9 September 1968). ‘Nigeria skyter mot hjelpefly’; Aftenposten (10 September 1968). 23 Mageli, Med rett til å hjelpe, p. 257. 24 For Rosen’s activities in Biafra, see J. J. Stremlau, The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War 1967–​1970 (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 324–​6; and Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, p. 621. 25 RCA, PA250/​1/​423N: statement, 1 July 1969. For this and the following quotes, see also Mageli, Med rett til å hjelpe, Chapter 11. 26 RCA, P250/​1/​423N: ‘Videre alt efter …’, Arnold Rørholt to League secretary-​general, Henrik Beer, 18 July 1969. 27 RCA, P250/​1/​423N:  ‘Videre alt efter …’, Rørholt to Beer, 18 July 1969; Rørholt to Dale, 16 July 1969. 28 S. R. Pedersen, ‘Nødhjelp og diplomati: Norge og Biafra-​krigen 1967–​1970’ (master’s dissertation, University of Oslo, 1998), p. 109. 29 D. P. Forsythe and B. A. J. Rieffer-​Flanagan, The International Committee of the Red Cross: A Neutral Humanitarian Actor (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 63. 30 RCA/​P250/​1/​423N: ‘Videre alt efter …’, Rørholt to Beer, 27 November 1969. 31 RCA/​P250/​1/​423N: ‘Videre alt efter…’, Rørholt to Beer, 27 November 1969. 32 RCA/​P250/​1/​423N/​: ‘Videre alt efter …’, Dale, speech to the Oslo Militære Samfund (Oslo Military Society), 13 October 1969. On Cassin, see J. Winter and A. Prost, René Cassin and Human Rights: The Project of a Generation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 33 Pedersen, Nødhjelp og diplomati, pp.  59–​80; Simensen, Norsk utviklingshjelps historie, Vol. I, pp. 240–​1. 34 RCA/​P250/​1/​423N:  ‘Videre alt efter …’, Dale to Naville, 26 November 1969; Danish secretary Arne Fromm to Marcel A. Naville and Beer, 25 November 1969; Olof Stroh to Beer, 20 November 1969. 35 RCA/​P250/​1/​423N: ‘Videre alt efter …’, Rørholt, report from Geneva, 7 November 1969.

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36 According to O.  D. K.  Norbye, ‘Katastrofehjelp og utviklingshjelp’, Internasjonal politikk, 3 (1969), 458–​70 (p. 460). 37 RCA/​P250/​1/​423N: ‘Videre alt efter …’, Rørholt, report from Geneva, 7 November 1969. 38 ‘Hvis dette er tilfellet, kunne … foreningene ha [opptrådt uavhengig] av ICRC så tidlig som juni.’ RCA/​P250/​1/​423N: ‘Videre alt efter …’, Rørholt to Dale, 20 November 1969. 39 RCA/​P250/​1/​423N: ‘Videre alt efter …’, Stroh to Naville, 25 November 1969. 40 ‘[D]‌et [er] min mening at Komiteen ikke burde ha noe med hjelpevirksomhet å gjøre. Det bør være Ligaens oppgave –​i krig som i fred.’ RCA/​P250/​1/​423N: ‘Videre kronologisk’, note, 3 December 1969. 41 RCA/​P250/​1/​423N: ‘Videre kronologisk’, Rørholt to Haakon Mathiesen, 10 January 1970. 42 As noted by Terry, Condemned to Repeat?; and M. Barnett and T. G. Weiss (eds), Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics (New York: Cornell University Press, 2008). 43 B. Simms and D. J. B. Trim (eds), Humanitarian Intervention: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 9. 44 As noted in ibid. An exception is M. Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (New York: Cornell University Press, 2011). 45 M. A. P. de Montclos, ‘Humanitarian Aid and the Biafra War: Lessons Not Learned,’ Africa Development, 34:1 (2009), 69–​82. 46 Smillie, The Alms Bazaar, p. 105. 47 De Montclos, ‘Humanitarian Aid and the Biafra War’, p. 74. 48 R. Brauman, ‘From Philanthropy to Humanitarianism:  Remarks and an Interview,’ South Atlantic Quarterly, 103:2–​3 (2004), 397–​417 (p. 407). 49 See, for instance, Smillie, The Alms Bazaar; De Waal, Famine Crimes; and De Montclos, ‘Humanitarian Aid and the Biafra War’. 50 Terry, Condemned to Repeat?, p. 42. 51 Smillie, The Alms Bazaar, p. 104. 52 C. K. Nielsen, ‘Danske nødhjælpsoperationer i komplekse katastrofer:  En analyse af Folkekirkens Nødhjælps og Dansk Røde Kors’ humanitære engagement i Biafra, Cambodia og Etiopien 1968–​1988’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Aarhus University, 2010), pp. 66–​7. 53 Black, A Cause for our Times, p. 121. 54 De Montclos, ‘Humanitarian Aid and the Biafra War’, p. 76. 55 Ibid. 56 A. Suhrke, ‘Human Security and the Interests of States’, Security Dialogue, 30:3 (1999), 265–​76; R. Paris, ‘Human Security:  Paradigm Shift or Hot Air?’, International Security, 26:2 (2001); G. King and C. J. L. Murray, ‘Rethinking Human Security’, Political Science Quarterly, 116:4 (2001–​2), 585–​610.

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Part III

The Red Cross’s modus operandi

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‘A cog in the great wheel of mercy’: The New Zealand Red Cross and the International Red Cross Movement Margaret Tennant

Wherever we are and however small our Branch may be, let us ever keep in mind that we are a cog in the great wheel of mercy, and its smooth and efficient running depends upon our individual and united efforts.

So went Malcolm Galloway’s exhortation to the first national conference of the New Zealand Red Cross (NZRC) in 1940. Galloway, the Society’s national secretary, emphasised that the Red Cross was the ‘practical application of all that is noble in every creed’, providing a non-​partisan banner under which the peoples of the world could find common ground. He especially noted the increasing solicitude felt within the Red Cross Movement as a whole for a ‘sister society’ when disaster struck. Whether familial or mechanistic, Galloway’s metaphors emphasised the place of the NZRC in a larger conglomerate, one that transcended national boundaries in the name of humanity.1 It was this which also made the Red Cross distinctive within the larger assemblage of voluntary organisations in the Dominion. The 1940 conference provided an illuminating moment in the history of the NZRC, attendees looking forward and back, some seeing themselves for the first time as part of a national structure, let alone an international movement. An intimate acquaintance with disaster underpinned the Red Cross affiliation of many there. Major catastrophe had struck in the Hawkes Bay region of New Zealand nine years earlier, in February 1931, with a calamitous earthquake that had prompted donations from countries as diverse as India, Turkey, Norway and Japan. More than £5,000 had been cabled immediately and without solicitation via the League of Red Cross Societies. Although the Red Cross had had a presence in New Zealand since the First World War, the earthquake had pushed the New Zealand Government into formally recognising the NZRC as a national society in 1932. From the Hawkes Bay earthquake of 1931 to the Christchurch earthquake of 2011, natural disaster provided a distinctive lens from which NZRC stalwarts gained a sense of being part of a wider web of ‘mutual benefit and jeopardy’.2

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New Zealand did not experience twentieth-​century combat on its own shores, though it contributed troops to far-​distant conflicts. Speakers at the 1940 conference looked into the face of a new world war, considering how to maintain a connection with the health-​and-​hygiene remit of the League while stepping into ‘war’ mode and a closer association than ever before with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). At the same time, the New Zealand Society needed to build up its own, still fragile, internal mechanisms and consider its ‘peacetime’ role. Galloway’s careful outline to the conference of the Red Cross Movement’s history, the story of Solferino, and the formation of the ICRC and then the League, was a response to a new influx of members at the start of the war and supporters’ lack of knowledge about the wider movement. It was also a response to the membership’s tendency to focus upon the minutely local, for in Red Cross history the grand narratives of war, disaster, mass slaughter, diplomacy, international protocols and humanitarian law are balanced by another, often neglected, Red Cross world altogether. This encompasses schoolroom pen pals and children’s penny-​collection tins, wealthy philanthropic benefactors, intimate knitting circles, home nursing classes, voluntary detachments and marching practice, neighbourly visitation, and the inevitable local squabbles that beset the organisation. Below the statutes and international protocols, there was also a very personal level at which individuals imagined an entity called ‘Red Cross’ and worked in its name in very practical ways within their localities. For ex-​servicemen such as Malcolm Galloway it was wartime care from the Red Cross after being wounded, and the symbolic power of the emblem in time of extremity, that lifted their vision to a wider sense of ‘the great wheel of mercy’. As overview histories of Red Cross national societies gradually emerge, they underline the full variety of this idealistic, sometimes contentious Red Cross family. They raise questions about what it meant to ‘be Red Cross’ in different national contexts and at different times, about the relationships between the different levels of Red Cross association, and understandings of the humanitarian remit across the world. Like many organisations characterised as ‘transnational’, the Red Cross has its own structures that transcend national boundaries, and it involves global exchanges of information, techniques and personnel. But its ideals and agenda often took a particular form within national boundaries, while the space they could occupy and the claims they could make varied according to local context. The remainder of this chapter is a view outwards from the perspective of a small national society far beyond Europe, functioning in a polity with a strong tradition of State activism. Like other Anglo-​settler societies, such as Canada and Australia, New Zealand’s status as a British Dominion provided another external allegiance that preceded, intersected and sometimes complicated relationships with the League and the ICRC. The imperial dimension is a first focus of the chapter, followed by the Red Cross relationship with the New Zealand Government, and the ways in which it shaped and ultimately constrained how the international suite of Red Cross

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activities could play out within New Zealand. The mechanisms of engagement with the League show how this small antipodean ‘cog’ supported and at the same time was given legitimacy through membership of the wider movement, with a major shift in the terms and intensity of this interface from the 1960s.

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The imperial connection The 1940 NZRC conference was opened by Lord Galway, the Society’s patron and representative of the British Crown. The vice-​regal presence was significant, for in its early years the NZRC, like many others within the British Empire, reached out not to Geneva or Paris, but to London, still the Dominion’s cultural capital. Where mention was made of the origins of the movement, Florence Nightingale was as likely to feature as Henri Dunant: in one particularly shameless appropriation of the foundation story, a First World War pamphlet produced in Auckland characterised the Red Cross as ‘the intelligently directed, persistent effort of one of the most marvellous organisations contrived by British genius’.3 As numerous small efforts in support of the wartime Red Cross coalesced into a national presence over 1915–​17, it was assumed that their natural attachment was to the British Red Cross. When a constitution of sorts emerged in 1917, it was for the ‘New Zealand Branch of the British Red Cross and Order of St John’, indicating alignment with another, and British-​originated, body, as well as the British Red Cross. The first national president and driving force behind this association was New Zealand’s governor-​general, Lord Liverpool. He and most of his vice-​regal successors continued to be conduits to Britain long after the war. Many of those prominent in NZRC activities were persons of wealth and social standing for whom the imperial connection was very personal, reinforced by regular trips ‘Home’ and participation in its social life. A number of New Zealanders domiciled long-​term in the United Kingdom held the position of Red Cross Commissioner for New Zealand, a voluntary-​sector parallel to their Government’s high commission in London. This Red Cross presence faded only in the 1980s. It was not surprising that for many, the imperial link trumped any sense of a wider, European-​based international body, even if it did not entirely displace it. Melanie Oppenheimer notes an Australian view that the NZRC had ‘thrown in their lot early with the British Red Cross Society’, and that the Australian body, although also a branch, had a strong sense of independence.4 The New Zealand attachment reflected a more general sense of ‘Britishness’ in New Zealand, and a foreign policy where New Zealand acted as an especially loyal outpost of empire during the early twentieth century.5 The imperial link played out in ways large and small. During the First World War fundraising for the Red Cross in New Zealand drew upon an international repertoire of queen carnivals, bazaars, lotteries and flag days, with a dedicated ‘Our Day’ targeting a particular day of the year for a mammoth assault on potential donors’ pockets and purses. (The ‘Our’ signified oneness of effort and timing across the

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British Empire rather than a Red Cross identity as such.) Once raised, funds either went directly to the British Red Cross, or were spent on goods such as bandages that also went via London for Red Cross usage in France and other theatres of war. A large amount of effort specifically targeted New Zealand soldiers convalescent in British-​based military hospitals.6 Patriotic imperialism also meant that New Zealanders associated with the Red Cross struggled with precepts such as neutrality and universalism in wartime, the assumption being that funds raised would support, if not New Zealand servicemen, at least allied troops, and not necessarily those out of combat. Although in 1916 New Zealand’s Red Cross Record emphasised a reciprocal need to adhere strictly to neutral work only, pointing out that breaking the Geneva Convention could bring retaliation on allied wounded, those in the localities saw little difference between raising funds for an ambulance or hospital ship, or for an aeroplane.7 As Heather Jones has written of combatant states closer to the front, ‘National charities were often as culturally mobilised against the enemy as any other national group –​they generally did not believe that the enemy shared their humanitarian culture.’8 This was equally true of far-​distant New Zealand, where the reluctance to extend humanitarian responses to the enemy continued after the war. Even Malcolm Galloway, more attuned than most to the international dimension, gave short shrift in 1924 to a request to help the starving children of Germany, and was accused of letting anti-​German sentiment get in the way of humanity.9 In the Second World War, NZRC fundraising efforts were clear in theory about the Movement’s mission to help the sick and wounded from all sides, but when put to the test after the war, there was prevarication. When the ICRC sought funds from national societies in 1947 to assist German and Austrian prisoners of war (POWs) and war-​disabled, many of whom were still detained by Allied powers, local sentiment did not prioritise assistance to the civilians of continental Europe, let alone to former enemy combatants. Rather, a ‘Food for Britain’ campaign was in full swing, and, as Malcolm Galloway wrote to the vice-​president of the ICRC, ‘We feel that it is our prime responsibility to help our own kith and kin in every way that we possibly can.’10 Local sentiment was appeased by a strategy of sending funds to the British Red Cross, leaving that Society to decide whether any surplus was sent further afield. National societies’ commitment to the Movement’s fundamental principles, and especially to neutrality and impartiality, was ever tested. Imperial interests also informed the process by which the NZRC was formally recognised as a national society. The ‘branch’ status of Red Cross activity within New Zealand had always been loose, more a matter of sentiment and borrowing than the usual constitutional mechanisms and alignment of rules. The link with St John was messy and acrimonious, however, with St John claiming ‘Red Cross’ status for New Zealand. The League of Red Cross Societies accepted Dominion branches of the British Red Cross as members early in its existence, New Zealand joining on 11 July 1919.11 The ICRC was less accommodating, recognising separate Dominion Red Cross societies only after the 1926 Balfour Declaration acknowledged that the

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Dominions were autonomous and equal communities within the Empire.12 Beset by squabbles over remaining war funds, the New Zealand Branch of the British Red Cross and Order of St John was in disarray during the 1920s, unable to command recognition from its own Government, let alone the ICRC. The British Red Cross increasingly prodded the New Zealand subsidiary to get its house in order. A 1930 letter signed by its secretary, Hugh Bateman Champain, and his equivalent number in the Order of St John urged the dissolution of the existing New Zealand body –​ ‘for it is neither the New Zealand Red Cross Society nor a Branch of the British Red Cross Society’ –​and the formation of a new society.13 The New Zealand Government finally put its weight behind such a move after the Hawkes Bay earthquake of 1931, which underlined the need for a nationally organised disaster-​relief mechanism to coordinate volunteers. A Government proclamation of 3 June 1932 recognised the New Zealand Red Cross Society as the national Red Cross Society for New Zealand under Article 25 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.14 The pressure from Britain for such a move was strategic as well as reputational, a product of the intersecting imperial dynamic. The ICRC had long been viewed in Britain as a suspiciously ‘continental’ body, while the Empire had its own Red Cross networks, brought together for the 1930 British Empire Red Cross Conference. Here, even ICRC president Max Huber acknowledged the cohesion of the Red Cross within the British Empire, and the Empire as a highly varied ‘world within itself ’, a ‘magnificent example of an association of nations’ bound by free choice and common allegiance to the Crown.15 The Dominion societies represented a Red Cross conglomerate within the wider Movement, a counter to the conservative, Swiss-​based ICRC, which, James Crossland has suggested, had ‘few friends in Britain’ at the start of the Second World War.16 The first president of the autonomous New Zealand Red Cross Society, Dr William Collins, confirmed in 1932 that New Zealand’s move to independent status was at the behest of the British Red Cross Society, ‘for it gives the Empire an additional vote in the International deliberations on Red Cross affairs’.17 Representatives of Empire and Commonwealth Red Cross societies often met separately, during and in advance of international Red Cross gatherings. This occurred during the 1952 International Conference held in Toronto, for example, Malcolm Galloway describing the ‘splendid co-​operation’ that existed among the Commonwealth bloc, common problems being discussed ‘with complete understanding and uniformity of purpose’.18 Significantly, the same familial language that was used within the Red Cross also appeared within the Commonwealth. The NZRC looked to the British Red Cross for models of activity and form for many decades: Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) uniforms and first-​aid manuals, and core activities such as meals on wheels, all drew upon British Red Cross examples until at least the 1970s, when Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community undermined the remaining ties with former colonies such as New Zealand, emotional and cultural, as well as economic. From the Second World War, New Zealand ‘embraced another great power protector’, the USA, and by 1970 its foreign policy

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was increasingly oriented towards the Pacific.19 All this had consequences for the mechanisms by which the NZRC engaged with the movement.

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The humanitarian remit and Government relations There were no Government ministers present at the 1940 NZRC conference, though some Government officials provided a vocal presence. Elsewhere, national societies have been ‘quasi-​governmental entities’, often playing a handmaiden role to national military establishments, especially in time of war. There were many instances where politics blighted or at least overrode international ideals.20 The most notorious example is that of the German Red Cross, which was closely associated with the Nazi State in the 1930s and 1940s, but it was not alone in being subordinate to totalitarian governments and their ideological positions.21 In a more benign context, even the American Red Cross was incorporated by Congress and reported annually to that body, its titular president being the president of the United States.22 Elsewhere the families of politicians and members of royalty were often dominant forces in national societies. But as well as proximity, there could be distance and suspicion, and an unevenness of acceptance, because ‘government’ is neither monolithic in itself nor consistent in its engagement with non-​profits –​its various arms may have different priorities, and in a small country such as New Zealand interpersonal differences could have policy consequences. The Red Cross presence in terms of programmes consequently varied from country to country. As Christophe Lanord has pointed out, national Red Cross societies have always been considered auxiliary to public authorities, and while they were welcome to offer their services, ‘accepting them would remain the privilege of government’.23 Even in a country such as Canada, where the Red Cross was able to make significant inroads into peacetime health and social services, Government was only slowly won over to the value of the organisation.24 The task was even more difficult in New Zealand, where the Red Cross was a relatively late starter. However much NZRC leaders aspired, at various times, to cosy up to Government agencies, the Society was just one voluntary organisation among many with a national presence. It could never claim to have the highest standing  –​that accolade was generally given to New Zealand’s infant welfare and mothercraft organisation, the Plunket Society, which had received Government subsidies and political endorsement since the 1900s. The early strife between the Red Cross and St John during the 1920s had made successive governments wary of too close an association, and although national society status was acceded in 1932, the Red Cross was never able to claim the primacy it achieved in countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States. In 1935 a Labour Government came to power in New Zealand with an extensive welfare programme focused on the State. The leaders of the Red Cross in New Zealand at the time, mostly persons of means and social standing, were not natural allies of a Government intent on the redistribution of wealth and increased taxation

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and regulation. The national presidents over most of the first Labour Government’s term were philanthropist Helen Lowry, wife of a wealthy Hawkes Bay landowner, and Sir Robert Heaton Rhodes, also a landowner, and former cabinet member in one of the farmer-​dominated governments that had preceded Labour. The absence of Labour ministers from the opening session of the 1940 NZRC conference was therefore telling: for all that the standing of the Red Cross increased enormously within the public domain during the Second World War, there were a number of points where the new Zealand Red Cross felt aggrieved at a lack of political acknowledgement and connection. In the mid-​1930s there were hopes that the prime minister would instruct key cabinet members to serve on the NZRC executive and council, and that there would be a formal contract specifying Government concessions to the Society. Excessively ambitious, this plan went nowhere.25 Then, to the annoyance of the Society’s leaders, the wartime Government gave a new body, the Women’s War Service Auxiliary, the prime responsibility for coordinating women’s voluntary activity during the conflict.26 The first VADs were sent overseas under the aegis of this body, and without Red Cross protective insignia. The Government would not permit the Red Cross to collect independently and separately for the sick and wounded, requiring this to be done via a Government-​appointed Patriotic Fund Board. When the New Zealand Society followed the British in insisting that its name could not be attached to fundraising for soldiers’ ‘comforts’, claiming this would compromise perceptions of neutrality, the Labour Government’s attorney-​general cited the American and Canadian Red Cross Societies’ work on behalf of combatant forces, cutting the ground from under its local organisation. And it was not until October 1945 that the NZRC was belatedly given official recognition as an auxiliary of the New Zealand armed forces’ medical personnel.27 While officials within the Departments of Health and Defence were generally well-​disposed towards the NZRC during the war, the head of the Department of Internal Affairs, Joe Heenan, was irritated by the Society’s claims to distinctiveness, and actively worked against its taking a lead role in New Zealand’s planning for postwar international relief operations: ‘there should be no loophole left for Red Cross claiming a higher standing than any other Body, or preferential treatment in any direction’, he wrote in 1943.28 The NZRC was far from being integrated into the New Zealand State, then or later. Rather, it was one of a number of agencies, voluntary, private and Government, constantly competing for space within a nationally specific constellation of social services. This space was limited by the remit of the New Zealand State itself. Openings for the peacetime agenda of the Red Cross within New Zealand were restricted by the Government’s prior claims to many of the most prominent operations within the Movement’s international repertoire. For example, in many parts of the world the Red Cross trained nurses and even ran hospitals. In 1901 New Zealand had become the first country in the world to legislate for the registration of nurses under a system of State examination, all tightly controlled by the Health Department’s director of

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nursing: there was little space here for Red Cross action. The local Red Cross did fund four registered nurses to the London-​based Red Cross postgraduate nursing course in public health during the 1920s, but most ended up employed by the Department of Health, largely as part of the School Medical Service. The Department of Health had established its prior claim to public health activities in the community, and there was little opportunity here for the Red Cross to take a leadership role. Blood, the League’s history notes, became as ‘commonly known a National Society activity as “war” and “disaster” ’ –​not so in New Zealand, where St John first formed the National Blood Transfusion Council in 1932, and was eventually forced to cede control of the blood service to the public hospital system.29 The Red Cross remained a bit player, its volunteers mostly providing cups of tea and biscuits on the sideline. In other areas, too, the expanding mid-​century Welfare State pre-​ empted Red Cross attempts to introduce new activities. New Zealand Red Cross leaders sometimes looked enviously across the Tasman to the hegemonic role of the Australian Red Cross in so many fields of endeavour, from the blood service to the responsibility accorded the Red Cross for soldier rehabilitation during the Second World War. This is not to say that NZRC members and branches were inactive, but their peacetime role was a diffuse and changing one, with many ventures seeding a more extensive public alternative. In the late twentieth century the most persistent activities by which the Red Cross positioned itself as adjunct to the State were the meals-​on-​wheels scheme for housebound persons, various forms of assistance to civil defence in natural disaster and support for refugees. These activities generated Government contracts, most recently for assistance to the international refugees brought in annually under Government quotas: the Red Cross has benefited from wider Government moves towards contracting with non-​profits for undertakings once dominated by its own agencies.30 Always, however, the range of activities elaborated in the name of Red Cross humanitarianism depends on spaces and support conceded by Government, in New Zealand, as elsewhere. Engagement with the League Distance from Europe posed ongoing challenges for New Zealand’s interface with the international Red Cross Movement. The absence of armed conflict alongside an awareness of local vulnerabilities to natural disaster meant that the closest links were with the League, not the ICRC. A handful of New Zealanders served on the League’s Board of Governors and attended international gatherings from the early 1920s, but most, like Dr Bernard Myers, New Zealand’s London-​based honorary Red Cross commissioner from 1937 to 1947, were expatriates.31 In 1935 NZRC stalwart Helen Lowry made a philanthropic gesture that saw her country register more fully on the Movement’s radar than was usual, ratcheting up its engagement with the League. Keen not only to signal international good will, but to recognise ‘the wonderful assistance given by the League at the time of the

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Hawkes’ Bay earthquake’, she gave £1,000 to the League, at that time the largest private donation it had received.32 Lowry subsequently attended a meeting of the League’s executive in Paris in 1936, where she met, and was charmed by, the League’s undersecretary-​general, Lewis de Gielgud. De Gielgud was issued with an invitation to visit New Zealand as part of a wider tour that included Japan, China and Australia. On his arrival in New Zealand, De Gielgud gave a reassuringly English face to the Red Cross, press reports noting his background as a graduate of Eton and of Oxford, and his connections to an eminent English theatrical family –​as usual at the time, the imperial lens was inescapable.33 In the Red Cross equivalent of a royal tour, the undersecretary-​general enjoyed civic welcomes, public receptions and luncheons with the great and the good. Over his twenty-​eight days in New Zealand he visited eleven centres and gave thirty-​eight speeches, six in the form of radio broadcasts. His mission was to enlighten the New Zealand public about the international organisation of the Red Cross, the League especially, and about the peacetime activities of other national societies.34 In meetings with the New Zealand Society’s council and executive, De Gielgud was equally concerned to ascertain how the League might help a disorganised national society to put its house in order, and gave practical advice on funding campaigns, systematic recruitment and possible national projects. One outcome was the appointment of a national organiser for the New Zealand Society (again, funded by the ever-​generous Mrs Lowry) but it was the advent of the Second World War that gave the greatest boost to Red Cross numbers.35 National chairman of the NZRC, Dr Alexander Gillies, saw De Gielgud’s visit as marking ‘an epoch in Red Cross work in New Zealand’, in terms of the boost it gave both to the national society’s organisation, and to awareness of the larger movement and its needs: ‘[being] a long way from the world’s centre, New Zealanders tended to be ignorant of the work there was to be done at the moment. With war going on in two theatres the Red Cross movement was much in demand.’36 One of these theatres was China (the other Spain), and reports on the Sino-​Japanese war and the bombing of Shanghai came through during De Gielgud’s visit. Although he publicly downplayed the effects of the Japanese assault, De Gielgud’s promotion of the international dimension was a factor in New Zealanders’ subsequent response. Supported by the local Chinese community, the Red Cross promoted a ‘Far East Appeal’ aimed at raising £10,000. From this, medical supplies and four volunteer doctors were sent to China over 1937–​8.37 The doctors can be regarded as the forebears of the New Zealand aid workers sent in increasing numbers on Red Cross missions after 1960. De Gielgud especially hoped during his visit to promote the Junior Red Cross ( JRC), which he characterised during his trip as ‘a wonderful chain of interest and friendship throughout the world’, comprising 26  million junior companions over sixty-​two countries.38 The JRC was already in better shape than the adult sections of the NZRC, having been taken up in Wellington in the early 1920s, and gradually, but unevenly, extended to schools in different parts of the country. It benefited from a substantial legacy for an ongoing magazine, had a presence in areas where there was

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no adult Red Cross branch and, as was the case internationally, activity depended heavily upon the enthusiasm of individual teachers. Minister of education Peter Fraser appears to have been the only Government minister to have had official contact with De Gielgud during his visit, though he was quick to point out that there was ‘no end of good Societies’ wanting to get into schools, to the possible detriment of teacher control.39 Still, from the late 1930s senior education officials were permitted to serve on the national JRC Committee and a school nurse with a teaching background, Leila Small, was appointed national director, mostly while on State salary, to establish the work in accord with other countries.40 Clarence Beeby, the progressive director of education appointed in 1940, gave official endorsement to the JRC in New Zealand, seeing it as an ideal conduit for the ‘child-​centred’ education system he was advancing. Beeby, who described himself as ‘one of the most-​bandaged men in New Zealand’ (since JRC boys and girls constantly demonstrated their skills on him during school visits), spoke approvingly of the way the JRC was ‘not academic, but it provides a good solid core of reality where you can deal with the whole child … It is a training for citizenship in the best sense of the term.’41 By this time the JRC was the branch of NZRC work most closely connected to the League, its young members exposed more fully than their seniors to ideals of international friendship and co-​operation. Material supplied by the League was reprinted in New Zealand publications; health plays and games, songs, charts, rules, posters, and handbooks originating from the League became part of classroom currency in New Zealand schools. In the New Zealand JRC journal of the 1940s, as in publications across the world, flies developed conversational skills and crawled over food before being vanquished by health fairies armed with fly swats; knights waged combat for ideals of health and wholesomeness; and, in a series adapted with a local touch, Māori-​speaking vegetables came to life in ‘The Garden of Rongo-​ma-​ Tane’. These variations on standard JRC health tropes were supplemented by stories about children from other lands and their customs. The exchange of portfolios with schoolchildren across the world opened classrooms up to cultural exchanges and, in the process, helped them to understand their own Society and its distinctive elements.42 Although membership of the New Zealand JRC peaked at around 30,000 in the later years of the Second World War,43 and was minscule in the context of the many millions claimed for the movement as a whole, it was a significant force in many urban and Māori schools. More importantly, the emphasis on youth internationalism embodied in the ideals of the JRC from the 1920s to the 1940s denoted a significant period in the Movement’s history and, in New Zealand, the juniors represented the most outward-​looking face of the Red Cross during this time. Postwar attempts to develop the juniors into ‘Red Cross Youth’, drawing in larger numbers of adolescents, were never as successful. In the archives of the NZRC, mid-​century materials sent by the League not only relate to children. A series of League publications –​The World’s Health, the League’s

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Monthly Bulletin and Red Cross World –​testify to the circulation of information about Red Cross activities and national society initiatives. There were boxes of material from the press information service of the League; brochures from headquarters advising on volunteer services; and cyclostyled ICRC circulars translated by the League’s staff on international humanitarian law, use of the emblem and the work of the ICRC in conflict zones; as well as direct correspondence between League and New Zealand administrators.44 Articles abounded on public-​health topics, and League statements on programmes from around the world were intended to inspire other national societies, as well as the sharing of resources. Some of this material was reprinted in NZRC publications, most especially the Red Cross Magazine, though beyond this, it is unclear how widely the information permeated. Certainly some was disseminated at New Zealand’s 1940 Centennial Exhibition, in full swing in Wellington at the time of the first NZRC conference. Here the Society had a display based heavily upon models, posters and lantern slides supplied by the League. New Zealand’s ability to reciprocate was limited. An underresourced and understaffed national office could forward little in the way of assistance to the wider Movement’s peacetime work. The NZRC annual contribution to the League in the late 1930s was £200, and Red Cross leaders expressed embarrassment at the limited recompense delivered by the New Zealand organisation for the resources supplied by the international body.45 Even the JRC, reliant as it was on individual teachers, frequently fell down on exchanges with juniors in other countries, and even in acknowledging portfolios received from other countries:  as the JRC national director reported in 1948, ‘the exchange of portfolios as a means of fostering international friendship at a distance such as this, is not as successful in practice as it is in theory’.46 The rhetoric of international exchange and good will was stronger than practical outcomes by the late 1940s. Enthusiasm waxed and waned. War work for the Red Cross was a different matter, and here the scale of adult activity on behalf of POWs during the 1930–​45 period was exceptional, in New Zealand as elsewhere. While interactions with the ICRC were mostly at Government level, wider awareness of the ICRC increased markedly during the war, even if public consciousness failed to distinguish between it and the League. Returned soldiers remained loyal to an undifferentiated Red Cross Movement for many decades after, often leaving the NZRC substantial legacies in gratitude for all that the Red Cross symbolised during the conflict. Memoirs by POWs testified to the mental as well as physical sustenance embodied in Red Cross contacts:‘The Red Cross was venerated as some white palace up in a high crag above the lake, and everybody was going to subscribe to it for the rest of their lives … It was our link with civilisation, so we didn’t just sit down and give up.’47 There was less enthusiasm in New Zealand for the other side of Red Cross work with POWs. New Zealand itself had internment and POW camps, the former mostly for unnaturalised German residents, and the latter for Japanese soldiers captured in the Pacific war. The ICRC maintained a small footprint in New Zealand via three Swiss citizens:  Dr Walter Schmid, the Swiss

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consul-​general in Wellington, who acted as representative of the Protecting Power in New Zealand, and Dr George Morel and then Dr Leon Bossard, who served as ICRC representatives in New Zealand, visiting the camps. In February 1943 guards shot dead forty-​eight Japanese prisoners at the Featherston camp, following what has variously been described as a ‘riot’; a ‘mutiny’; or, in the eyes of many participants, a justifiable refusal to work.48 Schmid and Bossard were responsible for reporting to Geneva and to the Japanese Government on the circumstances, coming under strong pressure to do so in a manner which would not invite retribution in POW camps under Japanese control. While Red Cross branches located near the camps did assist prisoners in small ways, it was certainly not trumpeted about. As news came out about Japanese treatment of Allied POWs, national secretary Galloway had to defend the supply of cigarettes, magazines and food parcels to their Japanese equivalents: ‘Whatever has been done by other nations, does not justify the Red Cross declining to carry out its humane work. To do so would reduce it to a hollow mockery, and render it unworthy of the unchallenged position it occupies in the eyes of the world.’49 As we have seen, Galloway was less resolute when it came to assistance for former enemies as part of the postwar reconstruction:  neutrality and impartiality were always the most compromised tenets of Red Cross ideals at national society level. A new era Histories of the ICRC and of the League point to substantial challenges and introspection from the 1960s. After a time of relative complacency, when the Movement was able to rest upon wartime laurels, there came a period of change in global politics and an undermining of the dichotomous relationship between the League and the ICRC as war and humanitarian disaster became intertwined. There was an upsurge in the number of competing aid agencies, and an expansion in the number of national Red Cross societies, most from outside Europe.50 These developments resonated throughout the national society network. What did they mean for a small Red Cross society far distant from Europe that had long aligned itself with an imperial network, and that now saw itself as part of a wider western bloc within the Red Cross –​but, increasingly, one with a particular geographical location and set of responsibilities? There was a parallel process of change, re-​evaluation and generational shift within the NZRC. As with the wider movement, there was competition from newer agencies and a questioning of the activities carried out in the name of humanity within New Zealand’s borders. The professionalism and relevance of many activities came under scrutiny. (A survey from the early 1990s showed nearly 120 different welfare activities across branches, many of them offered at a standard that did not bestow credit on the Red Cross ‘brand’, as it was increasingly termed.)51 As with the wider Movement, it proved difficult to narrow down the smorgasbord of offerings to

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a core of professionally delivered activities that could also keep the voluntary membership engaged. Many of the dilemmas identified for the Movement as a whole over the late twentieth century were not easily resolved, and were faced by the non-​ profit sector more broadly. But the changes faced by the Movement had other consequences for national societies such as the NZRC, as they looked beyond their borders. Much was positive. There was a diminishing of distance as air travel enabled more New Zealanders to travel overseas, enabling new forms of direct interface with Geneva. As the League and ICRC moved to internationalise their staff, personnel were seconded to work in, and beyond, Geneva. New Zealanders were among them. New Zealand professionals, mostly nurses and doctors, joined those working as ‘delegates’ in crisis zones overseas.52 One of the first was a physiotherapist, Barbara Tomlinson, sent to Morocco in 1960 following an episode of mass paralysis caused by adulterated cooking oil. Team deployments followed to places as far afield as Vietnam, the Thai–​ Kampuchea border, Sudan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Chechnya, among other locations. Most personnel sent were under contract to the ICRC or the League, or, via bilateral arrangements, with other societies, rather than the direct management of the NZRC. The number of countries to which New Zealand delegates were sent increased markedly over time, from six delegates to south Vietnam in 1970, to a high point of sixty-​five delegates in twenty-​nine countries in 2014–​15.53 The programme is now promoted as the ‘flagship’ of the NZRC, its importance underwritten by a belief in the distinctively practical, ‘go-​to’ approach of its overseas workers.54 An important side-​effect of delegate (now ‘aid worker’) activity is their reports back to New Zealand, and the personalising of Red Cross humanitarian activity world-​ wide. The awareness of humanitarian action is spread via aid-​worker talks, blogs and reports, and use of media in ways inconceivable in the past. The diminishing of distance now takes many forms. The NZRC also became more assertive in its relationship with the Movement’s international bodies. From the late 1950s a wider variety of Red Cross representatives, including staff, were funded to the Movement’s international gatherings. Participation in the ICRC and the League (from 1991 the ‘Federation’) was no longer the prerogative of a wealthy social elite. A  more confident engagement with the League saw New Zealanders serve on its subsections and specialist commissions, being first elected to its Executive Council in 1985. But participation in the Movement’s politics was not always easy or edifying: after attending a meeting of the Executive Council in 1999, one New Zealand president described ‘a powerless body plagued by the politics more commonly seen in the United Nations –​those of regional parochialism, economic superiority, and a poor relationship with Federation management’.55 Having moved beyond an imperial alignment, the NZRC came up against other factional interests within the Red Cross Movement. Graeme Whyte, its Commissioner for International Affairs in the 1980s and deputy chair of the League’s Permanent Scale of Contributions Committee, wrote home lamenting that some

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newcomers to the Movement seemed not to understand its core principles. ‘Spare a thought for poor little New Zealand’, he wrote. ‘Elected for the very first time to one of the League’s principal organs (the Executive Council) we find that we and those whom we presume to regard as our friends are outnumbered by more than two to one.’56 ‘Friends’ in this case were the established powers, primarily western donor countries, some of whom met under the banner of ‘Like-​Minded Societies’. ‘Like-​mindedness’ was soon tested. At the 1986 combined Red Cross–​governmental conference, Government delegations led by African states forced through a resolution to exclude the South African apartheid Government’s representatives. The NZRC delegation, along with those of some thirty-​one other societies, refused to take part in the vote, regarding it as utterly unconstitutional and contradicting the principles of impartiality and universality.57 The moment was telling, signifying a split between the western donor countries with which the NZRC was primarily aligned, and newer member countries, especially African states –​and the ability of newcomers to carry the day. Sub-​identities were not just between large and small financial contributors to the movement, or newcomers and others, however. In 1984 the League’s secretariat was reorganised along geographical lines, one of the smaller departments overseeing the Asia and Pacific area. In 1989 a New Zealander, Jerry Talbot, was invited to work for the League in Geneva as head of this department. He and other Australasian Red Cross personnel argued that developmental issues in the Pacific needed to be treated as a special case, and not just as an extension of needs in Asia or other parts of the developing world.58 An extension desk was set up, first in the Australian Red Cross headquarters and later upgraded to a regional office, now based in Suva. New Zealanders generally have developed a strongly Pacific identity in recent decades, and two separate pressures came together to shape the NZRC international strategy: the Federation’s emphasis on the development of self-​sufficiency in national societies (rather than sending aid), and the New Zealand Government’s linking of Red Cross international subsidies to Pacific programmes, especially in island states prone to cyclones and other disasters. While New Zealand aid workers do travel further afield in response to crisis, the Pacific has become a particular focus of action and partnership. As the NZRC secretary-​general wrote in 2013, ‘The Pacific is our home and our history, our past, present and future’, the ‘sister societies’ there a rightful focus for NZRC humanitarian efforts.59 Conclusion The national societies of the Red Cross have always faced a tension between their inward-​and outward-​looking faces. Their role within their own communities and the degree to which the Red Cross humanitarian repertoire could be extended within national boundaries was influenced by Government, the shape of the civil society sector more generally and by the societies’ own resources. The minutely

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local could sometimes overwhelm the international, and the principles and wider actions of the Red Cross Movement were imperfectly understood by many national society donors and volunteers  –​and by governments. For New Zealand, disaster relief provided a key connection into the movement, and to the League/​Federation in particular. International appeals resonated with New Zealanders aware of their own country’s vulnerabilities to flooding and earthquake. Disaster was to remain a key connection, either through the receipt of aid  –​as in 1931 and again in 2011, when Christchurch experienced a major earthquake –​or outwards, via the sending of goods; money; and, more recently, expertise in response to appeals elsewhere. Assistance with disaster-​preparedness in the Pacific is now a key part of the New Zealand Society’s international strategy. The case of the NZRC also shows how relationships with the wider Movement shift over time. There has been a loss of the sense of the Red Cross as a children’s movement, a vector for youth training in citizenship and internationalism. But in other ways the international dimension became more pronounced in New Zealand over the late twentieth century, as its Red Cross Society moved from an imperial and largely deferential ‘little sister’ relationship to a wider, more assured and partnership-​based interaction across the Movement. There was a move from the transfer of goods to the sending of personnel and expertise in response to international appeals. A  regional vision has become more apparent, and this reflects, in part, Government pressures, priorities and acceptance of Red Cross expertise. While the NZRC remains a relatively small player within the Movement, its current international strategy confidently asserts the ‘can-​do attitude we are renowned for around the world. These qualities have enabled us to make contributions disproportionate to our size and location.’60 Whether conceived as independent members of a vast and varied international family that periodically comes together, as signatories to the principled agenda of an idealistic movement or as practically working ‘cog[s]‌in a great wheel of mercy’, Red Cross societies have benefited from the cachet of belonging to a long-​established international body. With this came the responsibility that Malcolm Galloway emphasised during the New Zealand Society’s first conference:  the sense of belonging to a mutually constitutive world-​wide humanitarian enterprise in which all should play an active part. It was this that took the NZRC beyond the status of ‘just another charity’ within national borders, and that encouraged members to connect, however imperfectly, with the distinctive Red Cross principles of neutrality and impartiality. Notes 1 This chapter draws together and expands upon material published in different sections of my history of the New Zealand Red Cross, Across the Street, across the World: A History of the Red Cross in New Zealand 1915–​2015 (Wellington: New Zealand Red Cross, 2015). I would like to

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thank members of my Wellington research support group, especially Charlotte Macdonald, for comments on an earlier draft. New Zealand Red Cross Society, National Conference Summary of Proceedings (Wellington: New Zealand Red Cross, 1940), p. 15. 2 Michael Barkin writes about this process more generally in ‘Disaster in History’, Mass Emergencies, 2 (1977), 219–​31. See also J. Hutchinson, ‘Disasters and the International Order: Earthquakes, Humanitarians and the Ciraolo Project’, International History Review, 22 (March 2000), 1–​36. 3 Joint Committee, Auckland Centre of New Zealand Branch, British Red Cross and Order of St John of Jerusalem, Handbook of Information Concerning Red Cross Activities at Home and Abroad (Auckland: Joint Committee, 1918), pp. 2–​3. 4 M. Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity:  100 Years of Australian Red Cross 1914–​2014 (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2014), p. 49. 5 W. David McIntyre, ‘Imperialism and Nationalism’, in G. W. Rice (ed.), The Oxford History of New Zealand, rev. edn (Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 346. New Zealand did not formally adopt the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which ended the sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament over the Dominions, until 1947, though the Labour Government elected in 1935 did act with a greater sense of internationalism than its predecessors. 6 The Red Cross Record, first published as the Canterbury Red Cross Record, is an especially useful source on such activity. See also M. Tennant, ‘Of Violets and Poppies: Charities in the Great War’, in S. Loveridge, New Zealand Society at War 1914–​1918 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2016), pp. 206–​19. 7 Canterbury Red Cross Record (14 April 1916), p. 17; (19 June 1916), p. 3. 8 H. Jones, ‘International or Transnational? Humanitarian Action during the First World War’, European Review of History, 16:5 (October 2009), 697–​713 (pp. 698–​9). 9 New Zealand Truth (23 February 1924), p. 7. 10 New Zealand Red Cross Archive (RCA), A14 1/​4, Box 938, Malcolm Galloway to Ernest Bloor, 27 August 1947. 11 Emailed information from Grant Mitchell, IFRC Archive, 22 May 2013. 12 Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity, p. 59; M. McKinnon, ‘New Zealand in the World’, in K. Sinclair (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 237–​66 (p. 246). 13 Archives New Zealand, Wellington (ANZ), AD1 1160 220/​3/​3/​Part 2, P. S. Wilkinson and H. B. Champain to C. S. Falconer, Dominion secretary, Order of St John, and Captain Galloway, secretary, New Zealand Branch of the British Red Cross and Order of St John, 19 June 1930. 14 ANZ, AD1 1161 220/​3/​3/​Part 6, ‘New Zealand Red Cross Society (Inc.) Status in Relation to the Geneva Convention Precis of Official Correspondence 1913–​1941’. 15 British Empire Red Cross Conference 1930 (London: British Red Cross Society, 1930[?]‌), p. 24. 16 J. Crossland, ‘The British Government and the International Committee of the Red Cross Relations, 1937–​ 1945’ (Ph.D.  dissertation, Murdoch University, 2010), http://​ researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/​id/​eprint/​5123/​, p. 23 (accessed 26 October 2019). 17 RCA, A10–​2/​22, Box 937, W.  Collins to Hon. R.  Masters, 15 December 1932; Evening Post (15 December 1931). 18 Red Cross Magazine (December 1952), p. 51. 19 D. Capie, ‘New Zealand and the World: Imperial, International and Global Relations’, in G. Byrnes (ed.), The New Oxford History of New Zealand (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 573–​98 (p. 586).

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20 D. Forsythe, The Humanitarians:  The International Committee of the Red Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 127. 21 C. Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream:  War, Switzerland, and the History of the Red Cross (London: HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 578, 699. 22 K. R. Kosar, The Congressional Charter of the American National Red Cross: Overview, History, Analysis, Congressional Research Service Report (Washington, DC:  Library of Congress Congressional Research Service, 2006), p. 7. 23 C. Lanord, ‘The Legal Status of National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’, International Review of the Red Cross, 840 (December 2000), 1053–​77 (p. 1056). 24 See S. Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy:  A History of the Canadian Red Cross (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2017). 25 RCA, A10–​2/​22, Box 937, ‘The New Zealand Red Cross Society, Incorporated: Policy’, 2nd Edition, April 1935’. 26 Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington (ATL), 83-​243-​Q0962, minutes, Dominion Council NZRC, 28 January 1942. See also correspondence in RCA, E07-​1/​1, Box 942. 27 ATL, 2000-​200-​04/​2, minutes, Joint Council of St John and NZRC Executive, 2 December 1942; Emergency Committee of Joint Council of St John and NZRC, 30 March 1943. ATL, 968 83-​243-​29, annual meeting of NZRC Council, 12–​13 July 1943. 28 ANZ, IA1 3053 171/​92/​Part 1, J. Heenan to F. Shanahan, 21 December 1943, and surrounding correspondence. 29 D. A. Reid and P. F. Gilbo, Beyond Conflict: The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1990–​1994 (Geneva: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1997), p. 165. On the New Zealand provision of blood services, see L. Bryder and D. Dow, Banking of Blood: Auckland Regional Services 1941–​1991 (Auckland: Auckland Regional Blood Services, 1991). 30 On these activities see Tennant, Across the Street, Chapters 7 and 10. 31 B. Myers, The Reminiscences of a Physician (Wellington:  A. H.  and A.  W. Reed, 1949), Chapter 14. 32 RCA, New Zealand Red Cross, Annual Report, 1935, p. 12; Reid and Gilbo, Beyond Conflict, p. 92. 33 Auckland Star (2 September 1937), p. 15. 34 Press (29 September 1937), p. 11; Evening Post (20 April 1938), p. 14. 35 ATL, 83–​243-​Q0963, NZRC Dominion Executive meeting, 8 October 1937. 36 Press (28 September 1937), p. 11. 37 Press (21 October 1937); Evening Post (23 July and 26 October 1938); ATL, MSX-​7425, Clarence Meachen, press cuttings, 1937–​8. 38 Evening Post (25 September 1937), p. 18. 39 ATL, 83-​243-​29 968, ‘Meeting of Dominion Council of NZRC Called to Welcome Mr Lewis de Gielgud’, 23 September 1937. 40 ATL, 83-​243-​Q0962, NZRC Emergency Committee minutes, JRC Executive 20 October 1945. 41 ATL, 83-​243-​Q0945, NZRC organisers’ meeting, 3 December 1942. 42 Nancy M. Sheenan makes this point with regard to the Canadian JRC in ‘Junior Red Cross in the schools, an international movement, a voluntary agency, and curriculum change’, Curriculum Inquiry, 17:3 (1987), 247–​66 (p. 251). New Zealand children were encouraged to write about the country’s history and geography, local manufacturing, and farming, and their own current pursuits and future aspirations; The Junior Red Cross: What It Is (Wellington: NZRC, [1935]). 43 RCA, NZRC Annual Report 1946, p. 13. This figure represented some 10 per cent of school-​aged children in New Zealand.

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4 4 A key file here is RCA, General File 1936–​9, A 10–​1. 45 See, for example, chairman Joseph Abel’s comment in NZRC Annual Report 1935, p. 14; and RCA, New Zealand Red Cross Society Summary of Proceedings, 1940, pp. 15, 25. 46 RCA, F01–​1/​3, Box 940, JRC report for Dominion Executive, February–​May 1948. 47 Warrant Officer R. Thomson, quoted in D. McGill, P.O.W.: The Untold Stories of New Zealand’s Prisoners of War (Lower Hutt: Mills Publications, 1987), p. 89. 48 Auckland War Memorial Library, Court of Inquiry Report, Prisoner of War Camp, Featherston, New Zealand, folder 1, MS 2004/​33. See also M. Nicolaidi, with the assistance of E. Thomson, The Featherston Chronicles: A Legacy of War (Auckland: HarperCollins, 1999). 49 M. Galloway to Rotorua Red Cross Centre, 18 February 1946, quoted in O. Sanders, Incident at Featherston (Auckland: Heinemann Education, 1990), p. 48. 50 See, for example, Reid and Gilbo, Beyond Conflict, pp. 178–​81. 51 Emailed information from former NZRC director-​general John Searle, 23 January 2014. 52 On changes to the staffing of the ICRC and the League, see Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, pp. 674–​8; Reid and Gilbo, Beyond Conflict, pp. 249, 252–​3; B. Troyon and D. Palmieri, ‘The ICRC Delegate: An Exceptional Humanitarian Player?’, International Review of the Red Cross, 89:865 (March 2007), 97–​111. 53 Litmus Group, Evaluation of the New Zealand Red Cross Delegates Programme:  Prepared for the New Zealand Red Cross (30 May 2012), http://​litmus.co.nz/​wp-​content/​uploads/​ 2015/​11/​Evaluation-​of-​the-​NZ-​Red-​Cross-​Delegates-​Programme-​2008-​2012.pdf, pp. 1–​ 8 (accessed 26 October 2019). A. J. Davy, ‘Human Security for Humanitarian and Development Practitioners: The Experience of Aid Workers from New Zealand Red Cross’ (M.A. dissertation, Massey University, 2015), p. 74. 54 Litmus Group, Evaluation, p. 8. 55 RCA, NZRC Annual Report 1999, p. 3 56 RCA, A32–​5/​2, Box 893, Graeme Whyte to R. Jaeckli, ICRC Board member, 19 November 1985. 57 Joan Cockburn, former president of the NZRC, personal communication, 24 June 2013; Press (28 October 1986), p. 3; RCA, NZRC Annual Report 1986, p. 3. 58 IFRC Archive, Geneva, Box 19594, ‘Red Cross Development in the Pacific:  Report of a Meeting Held Auckland, 8–​11 March 1983’; RCA, NZRC Annual Report, 1983, p. 3; Red Cross News, 3 (1991), p. 5. 59 RCA, New Zealand Red Cross, Aid Workers Programme Report 2012/​13, p. 2. 60 New Zealand Red Cross International Strategy 2015–​2018:  Sharper Focus for Greater Impact, www.redcross.org.nz/​documents/​50/​International_​Strategy_​Report.pdf (Wellington:  New Zealand Red Cross, 2015), p. 2 (accessed 26 October 2019).

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Coming of age in the crucible of war: The First World War and the expansion of the Canadian Red Cross Society’s humanitarian vision Sarah Glassford

When the Canadian Red Cross Society (CRCS) was created in 1896 as the first colonial branch of the British Red Cross Society, it held closely to the Red Cross Movement’s founding vision of inactivity in peacetime. While other national Red Cross societies used peacetime, at a minimum, to prepare for war, the Canadian Society did not, and, as a result, failed to gain any lasting traction in its first decade-​ and-​a-​half of existence. After this unpromising beginning, the First World War transformed the Society beyond all expectation into a nation-​wide patriotic and humanitarian cause, its wartime work fuelled in significant part by British imperialism and an emerging sense of Canadian nationalism. War-​related national and transnational currents subsequently contributed to the CRCS leaders’ 1918 decision to take up the cause of peacetime public health in Canada, and the ways they articulated and justified that mission-​drift. The interwar integration of the peacetime Red Cross into Canadian civil society marked a turning point in its history, a period that also saw shifts in its relationship with the British Red Cross and its place within the broader Red Cross Movement. The First World War served as a catalyst for change in the CRCS: re-​evaluating its peacetime role as an institution in light of its wartime achievements, the Society emerged with an expanded sense of mission and a correspondingly broader vision of its own humanitarianism. The evolution of the CRCS between the 1880s and 1920s thus offers a useful case study in the ways intersecting national, imperial and transnational forces shaped the evolution of one humanitarian institution. The founding mythology of Henri Dunant and the Battle of Solferino has played an important inspirational and motivational role within the Red Cross Movement for more than a century-​and-​a-​half. It was a story, however, that had limited relevance for Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. British North America was an inward-​looking collection of unfederated colonies until Canadian Confederation in 1867. Even then, although Britain’s signature on the first two Geneva Conventions bound the new Dominion of Canada to observe their provisions, the absence of large-​scale military engagements for the Canadian militia until 1885

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meant developments in Geneva held little interest for Canadians. As was possibly the case in Australia and New Zealand as well, the Red Cross emblem became a recognised symbol in Canada long before anyone perceived a need to establish a Red Cross society in the country. War mostly happened elsewhere.1 When the CRCS was finally established, it was not inspired by Dunant’s humanitarian vision, nor even by a comparable Canadian humanitarian awakening. A founding CRCS myth, involving the Canadian Society’s founder, George Sterling Ryerson, and his use of a home-​made Red Cross flag during the Northwest Uprising in 1885, did eventually emerge. But it seems not to have been widely known until the publication of Ryerson’s memoir in 1924. Even then, it did not appear as a rallying point in the Society’s own publications until the following decade.2 The Dunant myth, although better known than that of Ryerson, was similarly not a significant element of CRCS life until the time of the First World War. This absence of a well-​ known founding mythology early in the Society’s history is worth noting because it may have inadvertently contributed to the Society’s initial struggles. George Sterling Ryerson’s improvised use of a Red Cross flag in 1885 was an entirely pragmatic move, according to his own telling. In the smoke and confusion of a pitched battle between the Canadian militia and indigenous peoples of the western prairies, Ryerson (a militia surgeon) used his flag to distinguish a wagon carrying the wounded from other military vehicles on the battlefield. (Other militiamen did likewise at other points in the campaign, indicating the Red Cross idea’s permeation of British colonial military culture by this time.)3 This pragmatism would also mark Ryerson’s subsequent creation of the CRCS. The 1885 Northwest Uprising highlighted the many deficiencies of the Canadian militia, and inspired a small group of military medical men to take up the cause of reform. Ryerson was among this number: he later wrote that the idea of military medical reform ‘almost obsessed’ him for the next decade. However, Ryerson did not turn to the Red Cross as a solution to the problem of military sick and wounded until he had exhausted his other alternatives. He began with an attempt at internal militia reform, then contributed to the establishment of the St John Ambulance Association in Canada. The former failed, and the latter proved insufficient for the purpose, since St John was not then recognised under the Geneva Conventions for battlefield service. Only as a third resort did Ryerson explore the idea of a robust Red Cross society as a means to his desired end.4 During a holiday in Britain, Ryerson met with British National Aid Society (‘Red Cross’) leaders to discuss the possibility of extending their organisation to Canada. In August of 1896 the ‘Canadian Branch of the British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War’ (almost immediately referred to colloquially as the ‘Canadian Red Cross Society’) was officially established with the British councillors’ approval. Although the British Society granted its new branch complete domestic autonomy, it offered explicit instruction as to the Red Cross mandate of aiding the sick and wounded in war through supplementing the work of the Canadian militia,

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the British National Aid Society, and other belligerents who adhered to the Geneva Conventions (in that order). In line with the views of founding British National Aid Society president, Lord Wantage, there was to be no peacetime work of any kind other than the careful husbanding of any funds left over from the previous conflict, for use in a future war.5 This was entirely satisfactory to the small circle of elite English-​Canadian men with militia connections who made up this first incarnation of the CRCS. Circumventing a national military establishment that refused to invest in army medical services was their sole concern.6 However, the appointment of a reform-​minded minister of militia in 1896 meant these deficiencies were soon amended without Red Cross intervention. This shift in the national policy landscape around military medicine, combined with the lack of any Canadian military engagements to provide an outlet for concrete action, meant the new CRCS had nothing to do.7 An inspirational founding myth or shared humanitarian vision might have filled this void, but neither was in evidence at the time. As a result, the Society floundered during its first three years of existence. Canada’s membership in the British Empire provided the first opportunity for the Society to test its mettle: the participation of several contingents of Canadian volunteers in the South African (or Anglo-​Boer) War, 1899–​1902, temporarily offered the coherence and energy the CRCS had been missing. The Society served as one of the leading channels of comforts and medical supplies from Canadians at home to Canadian and imperial troops in South Africa, sent personnel to oversee their distribution in concert with the British Red Cross, and established a positive reputation among the urban populations that supported its work. This was particularly true in the imperially minded provinces of Ontario and New Brunswick. However, as early as the summer of 1900 enthusiasm waned –​coinciding with the war’s shift from a dashing, mobile conflict to a gruelling and unglamorous guerrilla-​style war. When the CRCS printed its summary report of wartime aid at war’s end in 1902, few took notice.8 This first significant Red Cross venture was thoroughly framed by English-​ speaking Canadians’ patriotic imperialism: grassroots fundraising efforts and advertising universally tied Red Cross work to the imperial cause, while French-​speaking Canadians (who viewed the war unfavourably and tended to sympathise with the Boers as a fellow colonised people) did not support the CRCS.9 Although the Society’s expansion and fundraising success during the South African War hinted at a rosier future than it had thus far enjoyed, the change would be short-​lived. The war marked Canada’s first significant military engagement on the international stage, and English-​Canadians’ strong identification with the Canadian volunteers fighting in South Africa alone fuelled their support for CRCS efforts. It was Canada’s first taste of what John F. Hutchinson called ‘Red Cross patriotism’ –​the conflation of ‘devotion to the nation’ (which in this case also encompassed devotion to the British Empire) and ‘devotion to the Red Cross’. Two contemporary surveys of Canadian participation in the war highlight the national and imperial framework within which

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Canadians understood the Red Cross in this period:  both works praised CRCS work for Canadian troops, but neither placed it within the context of a broader Red Cross movement. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC); non-​ British Red Cross societies active in South Africa; and even the neutral, humanitarian mission of the Red Cross Movement received no mention.10 This sense of complete disconnection from the international Movement is not surprising, since the Society’s British parent organisation was itself known within the Red Cross world for its insularity and wilful ignorance of the rest of the Movement.11 In this nationally and imperially focused context, civilian support for the CRCS dried up at the same time as Canada’s most prominent military contributions to the British campaign in South Africa. The limitations of the Society’s founding wartime-​only mandate became abundantly clear at this point. Once again the CRCS practically ceased to exist, for lack of a compelling reason to do so. The CRCS’s peacetime struggle was by no means unique. The question of how to sustain interest, in peacetime, in an organisation designed to provide wartime aid was a central problem for the entire Red Cross Movement from its earliest days. Dunant had anticipated precisely this cycle of expansion and contraction for national societies, back in the 1860s, but also expected the societies to be ‘always organised and ready for the possibility of war’.12 The solution, in the eyes of many European national societies, was to take up some form of active peacetime work, usually along the lines of training personnel for wartime services. The American National Red Cross (geographically distant from Geneva’s disapproving eye, but right next door to Canada) was the first national society not only to embrace peacetime work, but also to move beyond wartime preparedness. Clara Barton threw her fledgling American Society into peacetime domestic disaster relief and civilian humanitarian aid overseas, paving the way for others to follow.13 In its South African War report, the Central British Red Cross Committee opined that although it would be wise to prepare plans for medical service provision in future wars during peacetime, an active peacetime Red Cross was ‘not applicable to the genius and spirit of the British nation’ (which relied upon voluntary recruitment in wartime) and, in any case, would not ‘arouse any great or permanent interest’, since another war might never arise.14 This official attitude on the part of the British parent Society provided tacit approval for the CRCS to subside into inactivity after 1902. Nor was the lack of activity simply a result of inertia or lack of imagination. George Sterling Ryerson, perhaps hoping to capitalise on the Society’s wartime success and almost certainly inspired by the activities of the American Red Cross (ARC), proposed in 1900 that the Society expand its mandate to include peacetime disaster relief, comforts for combatant troops in wartime and ‘other patriotic objects.’15 The mention of patriotism makes it clear that Ryerson had not experienced the equivalent of a humanitarian conversion experience, but rather was interested in parlaying national support for the Society’s wartime work into an active peacetime agenda of some kind. Whatever his hopes, his fellow CRCS councillors voted down the

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proposal, choosing instead to adhere to Lord Wantage’s original vision of peacetime inactivity and financial stewardship. Although the CRCS councillors believed they were toeing the party line in sticking to their wartime-​only mandate, they soon found themselves out of step with events in Britain. Behind the scenes, the multiple Red Cross organisations in that country were undergoing a forced merger and reorganisation –​one that included an active peacetime organisation and closer alignment with both the British War Office and the international Red Cross Movement. By 1905, a major reform had been orchestrated and the new British Red Cross Society (BRCS) began work on a peacetime Voluntary Aid Detachment scheme inspired by similar measures taken by the German and Japanese Red Cross Societies.16 Yet neither this British change nor an attempt to revive the CRCS in 1909 that resulted in an administrative reorganisation and federal Act of Incorporation could dislodge the CRCS faithful  –​still dominated by a small group of elite English-​Canadian men  –​from their adherence to a now outdated wartime-​only mandate. The 1909 changes brought a certain amount of energy to the Society, but it made only token gestures towards pursuing war-​preparedness along the lines suggested by the BRCS. This continued failure to provide either a compelling vision of humanitarianism or a set of concrete activities meant that efforts to organise provincial CRCS branches after 1909 met with limited success –​this despite the fact that the period marked one of Canada’s rare moments of militarism, and therefore arguably offered the most fertile ground possible for CRCS expansion short of an actual declaration of war.17 The Canadian Society’s determined adherence to the Wantage doctrine up to 1914 represents a road-​not-​ taken by the wider Red Cross Movement, its crippling effect on the development of the CRCS a lesson in how not to succeed as a wartime humanitarian aid organisation in peacetime. Then came the First World War. Much as Archie Loyd (Lord Wantage’s nephew and ardent advocate of his uncle’s principles) argued in 1904, volunteers proved ‘obtainable on very short notice if wanted’.18 The CRCS’s dispiriting failure to thrive as an organisation after 1900 and unpreparedness for a major wartime humanitarian aid effort turned out to be no hindrance to success in 1914. In this respect, the Society mirrored Canada as a whole: the country was notably ‘ill-​prepared, for the most part unprepared’ to go to war, yet roused itself on short notice and immediately mustered a surprisingly respectable response.19 Canada played no role in the diplomatic lead-​ up to the war, and had no choice over whether it joined or not:  British colonies were automatically at war when Britain declared war in August 1914, and the British lion expected its colonial cubs to lend their wholehearted support. But Canadians (and particularly British-​born immigrant Canadians) flocked to the colours and mobilised for war as enthusiastically as if it had been their own personal fight.20 And just as it had been in the South African War, the CRCS was seen by Canadians as one way to demonstrate personal patriotism, support the citizen-​soldier sons of the

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nation, and make a tangible civilian contribution to the cause of King and Empire –​ only this time on an infinitely larger scale. The First World War as a whole is popularly considered a coming-​of-​age moment for Canada, but the point is much debated by historians who seek greater nuance or dispute this overarching argument’s applicability to groups such as women, visible minorities, the working classes and French-​Canadians.21 There is no question, however, that the First World War was the coming-​of-​age moment for the CRCS. After an initial period of barely controlled chaos at the Society’s hastily opened national headquarters in Toronto, the CRCS swiftly took shape as a nation-​wide charitable powerhouse, commanding the time, talents, energies and resources of volunteers from coast to coast –​and especially of women. The transformation would continue throughout the war, but its outlines were substantially established by January 1915. Within days of the outbreak of war, South African War branches were being revived, and in ensuing months hundreds of new ones were created. New national leaders, both male and female, came forward to augment (and eventually to replace) the old guard of military medical men. In the Society’s 1912 annual report –​its last prior to the war –​it proudly listed four (nominal) provincial Red Cross organisations, but not one local branch anywhere in the country. By 1918 the Society consisted of 1,150 chartered branches in communities of all sizes. Hundreds of thousands more Canadians worked for the CRCS through auxiliaries, Women’s Institutes and church sewing circles.22 The Society’s actual wartime work was much the same as that of other national Red Crosses in combatant countries of the First World War. Women sewed and knitted comforts, rolled bandages, and provided other supplementary medical supplies; the national Society and its overseas headquarters in London, England, operated an Information Bureau that provided comforts and entertainment for convalescent Canadian troops in Britain, but also looked after prisoner-​of-​war (POW) parcels and correspondence, and coordinated a Missing and Wounded Inquiry Bureau. The CRCS built and equipped numerous hospitals and rest homes in England and France, provided motor ambulances for overseas use, and sent its volunteers into Canadian bogs to search for sphagnum moss suitable for use in bandages when global cotton supplies grew short.23 In the course of its work overseas, the CRCS as an organisation was exposed to the breadth and diversity of the Red Cross Movement, shedding its prior insularity by engaging with more than its British parent Society for the first time. What it discovered was the Movement’s great strength as a network of ideologically like-​ minded organisations willing to work together to accomplish shared goals. Although Canada’s POW relief effort was notable for its tensions and inefficiencies where federal government–​CRCS relations were concerned, the components of the system internal to the Red Cross Movement worked remarkably well. Although the CRCS, like all national societies, had little to do with the ICRC in other respects during this period, the ICRC’s vital role as a central agency for POW information and delivering

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food parcels to POW camps was the only reason the CRCS was able to serve as a link between Canadians and their captured loved ones –​an ability limited to Red Cross societies.24 Once the United States entered the war in 1917, the CRCS and the ARC maintained a thoroughly positive relationship that included reciprocal exchanges of advice on mobilising local volunteers, advertising techniques and materials, and cash donations that were described as tangible expressions of support between allies.25 The CRCS still did not share the ARC’s expansive view of what was appropriate Red Cross work, but could not help noticing the breadth of its activities and corresponding vitality as an organisation. Despite the purported neutrality of the Red Cross Movement, financial donations to a sister Red Cross society in a combatant country made a political statement, as the ARC well knew when it made its highly publicised 1918 donation of $500,000 to the CRCS. For this reason, CRCS money or supplies flowed to the British, French, Serbian, Belgian and Montenegrin Red Cross Societies, but never to the German or Austrian Societies, and only to the Italian Red Cross after Italy joined the Allies.26 These interactions were important examples of the CRCS’s new engagement with the Red Cross as a transnational movement, but its imperial Red Cross ties remained more extensive as well as more significant. The Society had cordial (if not close) relations with the New Zealand Red Cross Society, and an agreement to co-​operate ‘where possible’ with the Australian Red Cross Society, while all Red Cross societies of the British Empire helped care for one another’s troops as they convalesced in hospitals in England and France. This mixing of convalescent servicemen from across the British world in hospitals run by different Red Cross organisations meant that Canadians could take pride in Red Cross work that was truly imperial in scope, the CRCS assured its supporters.27 The Canadian Society’s primary connection within the Red Cross Movement, however, remained the BRCS –​of which it was still technically a branch. The work of the CRCS for POWs and in tracing the missing and wounded relied heavily upon the larger, better-​funded and locally based BRCS operations, while BRCS volunteers were crucial additions to the Society’s overseas workforce of Canadian women who had followed their military husbands as far as Britain. As a colonial branch, the CRCS had no legal rights except through the BRCS. The Canadian Society’s first overseas commissioner was therefore instructed by CRCS leaders in Toronto that he should conform to ‘the custom and practice of the parent Society’ whenever possible.28 Massive cross-​Canada fundraising campaigns for the BRCS co-​ ordinated in conjunction with the CRCS, and held on Trafalgar Day (21 October) in 1915, 1916 and 1917, served as further evidence of the imperial tie.29 Yet, even as the imperial connection guided and enabled its overseas work, the CRCS came into its own as a national society over the course of the war. It relied less on BRCS direction (although it continued to rely on BRCS infrastructure) each year, and increasingly strove to have its contributions recognised by both the BRCS and soldier recipients as distinctively Canadian offerings. In a telling editorial change to the second draft

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of her report on CRCS war work for the 1921 International Red Cross conference, CRCS Executive Committee member Adelaide Plumptre replaced the words ‘colonial branch’ with ‘overseas branch’ when explaining the Society’s relationship to the BRCS.30 Moreover, the growth and maturity attained by the CRCS during the war years was reflected in its tangible work. When Allied Red Cross societies sent a relief mission to Siberia after the 1917 Russian Revolution, the CRCS was confident and capable enough to take the leading role providing comforts to British and Canadian soldiers alike both before and after a short-​lived and ineffective BRCS-​led mission to the region.31 The sheer volume of supplies and material assistance provided by the CRCS impressed observers, while the widespread and grassroots nature of its volunteer support base made the organisation itself a ubiquitous feature of the Canadian home front. These two factors combined to produce one of the most enduring developments of the First World War for the CRCS: namely, the array of powerful meanings Canadians attached to the organisation, its work and their relationship to it. Donors and volunteers of the First World War came to understand themselves as contributing to a cause that was both patriotic and explicitly humanitarian. The CRCS offered them the opportunity to provide care, relief and perhaps even directly life-​saving supplies to Canadian, British imperial and Allied soldiers (although the possibility that enemy soldiers might also benefit, should they happen to find themselves in hospital on the British side of the lines, was downplayed). Indeed, through its membership in the larger Red Cross Movement the CRCS offered Canadians the ability to reach overseas, and even behind enemy lines, to a sick, wounded or captured loved one. The CRCS, like other national Red Cross societies in the combatant nations, gained a reputation as a mothering organisation that channelled ‘love-​gifts’ to vulnerable men, serving as a surrogate family member or friend at a loved one’s bedside. These associations placed the Red Cross on a metaphorical pedestal in Canadian society and kept it there throughout much of the rest of the twentieth century.32 The humanitarianism recognised by the CRCS at this point was still narrowly focused on wartime, and emphasised humanitarian acts for those sharing a national or imperial identity, but paved the way for a postwar expansion of that humanitarianism into peacetime. The failure of the CRCS to integrate itself into Canadian peacetime civil society before 1914 was largely responsible for its failure to thrive outside a brief period of activity during Canada’s involvement in the South African War. However, by the end of the First World War forward-​thinking new CRCS leaders at the national and provincial levels were determined not to repeat that mistake. An endowment fund was created in 1916, in hopes of avoiding prewar financial difficulties and funding future work, but the form and extent of that work went undefined until 1918. By that point, the physical devastation wrought by the war and the success of the wartime CRCS opened many supporters’ eyes to the possibilities for continued humanitarian service in the postwar world. At the February 1918 CRCS Central Council meeting,

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founder George Sterling Ryerson once again proposed that the CRCS take up peacetime work. This time Central Council approved the move.33 The war continued to demand the Society’s full attention for the next seven months, but immediately following the armistice, the CRCS began diverting cash and supplies to the relief of civilian refugees in Europe.34 Keen to find further outlets for its members’ energy and its left-​over war funds, the CRCS sought BRCS guidance as to what peacetime activities the latter might advise. British Red Cross leaders, mindful of American-​led moves to revamp international Red Cross co-​operation and lead the Movement into widespread peacetime health and disaster relief work –​a vision that ultimately took shape as the League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS) –​counselled patience.35 As Canadian Red Cross supporters waited impatiently for these international matters to sort themselves out, they engaged in local relief work during the Spanish Flu epidemic (which stalked Canada during the winter of 1918–​19) and mulled over the possibilities for local peacetime action.36 These home-​grown ideas were relatively constrained, revolving primarily around the welfare of veterans, but events on the international stage opened CRCS leaders’ eyes to far wider horizons. The creation of the LRCS, and the addition of Article 25 (urging member states to support the peacetime work of the Red Cross) to the League of Nations Charter provided unequivocal international support for the idea of CRCS activity in peacetime. Meanwhile, the conference of international medical experts convened in Cannes by the LRCS in April 1919 pointed the way to a collective focus for that work through civilian public health.37 Despite some limited internal dissent and protests from voluntary organisations in Canada who feared Red Cross encroachment on their areas of peacetime work, the CRCS charged enthusiastically into this new territory. Article 25 and the British Government’s embrace of this new Red Cross direction helped convince the Canadian Government to agree to an expanded CRCS peacetime mandate. As of 7 July 1919, the purposes of the CRCS were officially delineated in the language of the LRCS’s humanitarian vision: ‘In time of peace or war to carry on and assist in work for the improvement of health, the prevention of disease and the mitigation of suffering throughout the world’.38 That same year, the Society’s Central Council approved a National Peace Policy establishing child welfare, good hygiene and proper sanitation within Canada as national priorities to be worked out through a newly decentralised CRCS organisational structure. Each provincial division translated the national guidelines into concrete programmes and services tailored to local needs. Canada’s unacceptably high maternal-​and infant-​mortality rates were a common concern, as was the lack of access to health-​care services for many Canadians in rural and outpost areas of the country.39 The three-​point CRCS mandate established in 1919 would help the Society justify its drift from its original wartime mandate, in response to issues such as these, over ensuing decades. So too would the transnational character of the Red Cross Movement. A 1922 CRCS fundraising campaign pamphlet (aimed at quelling

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lingering suspicions among other Canadian organisations that the Red Cross had no business in civilian public health work) reminded readers that the CRCS was ‘one of the 43 National Red Cross Organisations engaged in a World-​Wide Crusade for Better Health’, operating with the endorsement of the ‘Governments who were signatories to the Peace Treaty in 1919, also by the International Medical Conference of Public Health Experts held at Cannes in the same year’.40 This new awareness of the wider Red Cross Movement was reflected in the CRCS’s contributions to early LRCS relief efforts, and the attendance of CRCS representatives at both the March 1920 meeting of the LRCS General Council and the 1921 International Red Cross conference. Significantly, these forms of participation paralleled the presence of Canadian representatives at the Versailles peace talks –​a sign of Canada’s tentative move into a new status on the global stage as an autonomous country rather than merely one of many British colonies.41 The national context reared its head in very practical ways, however, tempering early CRCS enthusiasm for participating in the wider Red Cross Movement. By the late 1920s the CRCS faced financial difficulties, and scaled back its attendance at Red Cross conferences as well as its financial contributions to international relief efforts. A more significant change in the CRCS’s relationship to the wider Red Cross Movement resulted from the 1926 British Empire Conference. The conference informally defined the status of Great Britain and its Dominions as autonomous entities, free to deal independently with both internal and external affairs (later formally codified in the 1931 Statute of Westminster). This lead the BRCS to inform the ICRC that the Red Cross Societies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India were no longer branches of the BRCS but independent societies. The CRCS was accordingly recognised by the ICRC as an autonomous national society in November 1927.42 However, the CRCS had been quite content to remain officially a branch of the BRCS, and the change did little to alter entrenched attitudes about the relative importance of imperial and international Red Cross ties. The Canadian Society chose to be represented by BRCS delegates at the first two International Red Cross conferences it could have attended as an independent society (1928 and 1930), a decision justified on financial grounds. Yet a large Canadian contingent attended the special British Empire Red Cross Conference held in 1930, and the CRCS arranged a special cross-​Canada radio broadcast on 11 May 1931 to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the BRCS, on British Empire Red Cross Day. Canadian representatives (albeit ones outside the ranks of CRCS leadership) also participated in the international conference of 1929 that revised the 1906 Geneva Convention, as part of the British delegation.43 The Society’s membership in the British imperial Red Cross family continued to hold a special significance for CRCS leaders that its membership in the wider Red Cross Movement did not.44 The Society’s drift out of the British imperial orbit and into a fuller embrace of the Movement’s international character and global humanitarian mandate would have to wait for the post-​Second World War decades, empowered by a broader national

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context in which Canadian politicians and diplomats led the country to take a more prominent, independent place on the international stage.45 After challenging early years in which a wartime-​only mandate severely hindered the growth and effectiveness of the CRCS, the First World War marked a watershed in the organisation’s history. The CRCS that entered the 1920s would face new challenges, of course, but it would never again be the tiny, little-​known and largely irrelevant organisation it was until July 1914. In an echo of the situation in mid-​ nineteenth-​century Europe that led to the creation of the Red Cross Movement in the first place, the wide-​scale mobilisation of Canadian citizen-​soldiers for the duration of the First World War led Canadian civilians to care about the welfare of military personnel to an unprecedented degree. The war’s destructiveness and scale, paired with its direct impact on practically every community in the country, transformed the organisation administratively, financially, demographically and ideologically. The armistice led these new wartime leaders with no ties to a narrow prewar vision of the Red Cross mandate to reflect on the Society’s role and purpose as a humanitarian agency. Emboldened and inspired by their organisation’s impressive wartime accomplishments and considerable moral authority, they pushed the CRCS forward into peacetime public health work –​a move that would have been unthinkable before 1916. This self-​reinvention served pragmatic purposes and was often promoted as a form of nation-​building, so the CRCS still had a way to go on its journey towards embracing a truly global vision of humanitarianism. Yet the change marked a vital expansion of the organisation’s humanitarianism. Instead of an exclusive focus on the welfare of sick and wounded military personnel in wartime, CRCS personnel now recognised that Canada was full of civilians who could benefit from aid offered in the name of humanitarianism –​principal among them the many mothers, children, veterans’ families, and rural or outpost communities with little or no access to health-​care services. Having broadened their vision of humanitarianism this far during the interwar years, it would be a small step for CRCS leaders after 1945 to recognise civilians in the Global South as deserving aid for the same reason. The influences of national, imperial and transnational forces on the evolution of the CRCS are each evident in this snapshot of CRCS history: a war that took place as a result of global power struggles drew Canada in by means of its imperial ties. The CRCS’s prewar inertia was a result of its national leaders’ decision to adhere to outdated imperial policy, but the national support it received from Canadians during the war transformed the organisation. National leaders’ decision to embrace the broader Red Cross Movement’s shift towards public health work beginning in 1919 marked a significant moment of transnational influence on the CRCS, but CRCS leaders had already begun independently considering a similar (if less ambitious) change, and national priorities and public health conditions shaped the specific initiatives outlined in the CRCS’s 1919 National Peace Policy. Examined collectively, it seems clear that potent national, imperial and transnational influences coalesced

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during the First World War to expand irrevocably the Canadian Red Cross Society’s vision of not only what it could accomplish as a humanitarian organisation, but also who was deserving of its aid.

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Notes 1 S. Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy:  A History of the Canadian Red Cross (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2017), pp. 28–​9; M. Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity: 100 Years of Australian Red Cross 1914–​2014 (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2014), pp. 9–​15; M. Tennant, Across the Street, across the World: A History of the Red Cross in New Zealand 1915–​ 2015 (Dunedin: New Zealand Red Cross, 2015), pp. 23–​30. 2 G. S. Ryerson, Looking Backward (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1924), p. 81. The first appearance in publicity materials of Ryerson’s 1885 flag story thus far located is in ‘Historical Review of the Canadian Red Cross Society’, Red Cross Bulletin –​Ontario Division (March 1934), p. 4. Earlier historical reviews mention Ryerson’s founding of the society in 1896 but omit the 1885 story. 3 Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy, pp. 31–​3. 4 Ryerson, Looking Backward, p. 117; Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy, pp. 35–​42. 5 J. F. Hutchinson, Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), p. 239. 6 Ryerson, Looking Backward, p.  117; CRCS, Report of the Canadian Red Cross Society of Its Operations in the South African War 1899–​1902 (hereafter South African War Report) (Toronto: CRCS, 1902), pp. 11–​2; British Red Cross Museum and Archives (BRCMA), D/​WAN/​18/​1/​ 16, Charles Hodgetts to J. G. Vokes, 15 October 1896. 7 Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy, pp. 48–​9. 8 Department of Militia and Defence for the Dominion of Canada, ‘Supplementary Report –​ Organization, Equipment, Despatch and Service of the Canadian Contingents during the War in South Africa 1899–​1900’, Sessional Papers, 35:12 (1902), sessional paper 35a; CRCS, South African War Report; Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy, pp. 49–​69. 9 Canadian Red Cross National Archive (CRCNA), Box 49, file 49.1, circular from Newmarket branch, 1900; ‘Chit Chat’, The Globe (5 March 1900), p. 5; CRCS, South African War Report, p. 69; R. C. Brown and R. Cook, Canada 1896–​1921: A Nation Transformed (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974), pp. 39–​41. 10 Hutchinson, Champions of Charity, p. 256; E. Ursual, Canadians in Khaki: South Africa 1899–​ 1900 (Montreal: Herald, 1900), p. 125; W. S. Evans, The Canadian Contingents and Canadian Imperialism: A Story and a Study (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901), pp. 238–​42, 249–​51. 11 Hutchinson, Champions of Charity, p. 240. 12 H. Dunant, A Memory of Solferino (Geneva: ICRC, 1986), p. 117. 13 M. M. Jones, The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), pp. 28, 37–​94; J. F. Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp.  13–​34. 14 Report by the Central British Red Cross Committee on Voluntary Organisations in Aid of the Sick and Wounded during the South African War (London:  His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1902), p. 61. 15 CRCNA, Ryerson Papers, file T–​U–​V, Charles Hodgetts to Central Council members, 19 November 1900; ‘Red Cross Work’, Globe (16 November 1900), p. 12. 16 Hutchinson, Champions of Charity, p. 51.

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17 Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy, pp. 74–​8; D. Morton, ‘The Cadet Movement in the Moment of Canadian Militarism, 1909–​1914’, Journal of Canadian Studies 13:2 (1978), 56–​68. 18 A. Loyd, ‘The Central British Red Cross Council’, 9 September 1904, quoted in Hutchinson, Champions of Charity, p. 246. 19 Brown and Cook, A Nation Transformed, p. 213. 20 T. Copp, ‘The Military Effort, 1914–​1918’, in D. Mackenzie (ed.), Canada and the First World War: Essays in Honour of Robert Craig Brown (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 35–​7; R. Rutherdale, Hometown Horizons: Local Responses to Canada’s Great War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), pp. 46–​73. 21 These questions inform the essays in Mackenzie, Canada and the First World War. See also the varying interpretations of the transformation thesis with regard to gender issues in S. Glassford and A. Shaw (eds), A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service:  Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland during the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012). 22 Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy, pp. 82–​5. 23 The work of the CRCS in the First World War is engagingly described in M. M. Moore, The Maple Leaf’s Red Cross:  The War Story of the Canadian Red Cross Overseas (London:  Skeffington & Son, 1919); see also Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy, pp.  98–​105, 109–​13. 24 J. Vance, Objects of Concern:  Canadian Prisoners of War throughout the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994), pp. 42–​55; C. Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 182–​4, 187, 204. 25 CRCNA, Executive Committee Archived Minute Book (ECAMB) 3, Executive Committee meetings, 1 May 1917 and 11 March 1918, pp.  155, 293; ECAMB 4, Executive Committee meetings, 25 March, 7 May, 9 July 1918, pp. 1–​2, 37, 75. 26 Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy, p. 105. 27 ‘Australian Red Cross Society’, [CRCS] Bulletin ( June 1916), p. 15; Ryerson, Looking Backward, Chapter  21; CRCS Commissioner’s Reports for week ending 8 May 1915, [CRCS] Bulletin ( June 1915), p. 10. 28 ECAMB 1, Executive Committee meeting, 30 September 1914, p. 88. 29 The ‘Our Day’ campaigns and their overt appeal to a Canadian sense of Britishness are analysed in S. Glassford, ‘Marching as to War: The Canadian Red Cross Society, 1885–​1939’ (Ph.D. dissertation, York University, 2007), pp. 233–​9. 30 CRCNA, Box 5, file 5.I, ‘Report to the Tenth International Red Cross Conference’, p. 1. This national pride is evident throughout Moore, The Maple Leaf’s Red Cross. 31 J. A. Polk, ‘The Canadian Red Cross and Relief in Siberia, 1918–​1921’ (M.A. thesis, Carleton University, 2004), pp. 51–​4; ‘Canadian Red Cross Society Played Its Part in Siberia’, [CRCS] Bulletin (April–​May 1919), p. 10. 32 S. Glassford, ‘ “The greatest mother in the world”: Carework and the Discourse of Mothering in the Canadian Red Cross Society during the First World War’, Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, 10:1 (2008), 219–​32; A. Plumptre, ‘Canada’s Love-​Gifts’, in Canada and the Great World War: An Authentic Account of the Military History of Canada from the Earliest Days to the Close of the War of the Nations, Vol. II:  Days of Preparation (Toronto:  United Publishers of Canada, 1917), p. 196. 33 ‘The Duchess of Connaught’s Canadian Red Cross Endowment Fund’, [CRCS] Bulletin ( June 1916), pp. 3–​4; ECAMB 3, Central Council meeting, 5 February 1918, p. 268; CRCNA, Ryerson Papers, file W, memorandum signed by G. S. Ryerson, 5 February 1918. 34 ECAMB 4, Executive Committee meeting, 19 November 1918, pp. 163, 167.

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35 ECAMB 4, Executive Committee meeting, 21 January 1919, p. 207; H. P. Davison, Proposed Plan for World-​Wide Coordination of Red Cross Activities (Washington: American Red Cross, 1919); Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, pp. 258–​63; The League of Red Cross Societies (Paris: Secretariat of the League, 1929), p. 1. 36 Glassford, ‘Marching as to War’, pp. 293–​8. 37 The Cannes conference is discussed in M. Oppenheimer, ‘“A Golden Moment?” The League of Red Cross Societies, the League of Nations and Contested Spaces of Internationalism and Humanitarianism, 1919–​1922’, in J. Damousi and P. O’Brien (eds), League of Nations: Histories, Legacies and Impact (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2018), pp. 8–​27. 38 ‘An Act to Amend an Act to Incorporate the Canadian Red Cross Society’, Statutes of Canada, 9–​10 George V, Chapter 101 (1919), p. 61. 39 Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy, pp. 134–​5, 140. 40 Glenbow Museum and Archives (GMA), M8228/​224, ‘Nation Builders:  Are You One?’, pamphlet, 1922, p. 3. In 1926 an Alberta Red Cross leader recalled that ‘every man’s hand was against the idea of Red Cross work in peacetime, except those who were active Red Cross members’; GMA, M8228/​224, ‘An Interpretation of Red Cross  –​an Address by Mrs. C.  B. Waagen’ (Calgary: Alberta Division CRCS, 1926), p. 7. 41 CRCS, Annual Report 1920 (Toronto: CRCS, 1921), p. 24. 42 ECAMB 8, Executive Committee meeting, 18 May 1927, ‘248-​7 International Status of Canadian Red Cross Society,’ p. 19. ‘Reconnaissance de la Croix-​Rouge canadienne’, Bulletin international des sociétés de la Croix-​Rouge, 58 (November 1927), 831–​3. 43 Dr W. A. Riddell (as Canadian advisory officer to the League of Nations), and future Canadian governor-​general, Lt Col. Georges Philias Vanier (Canadian representative for naval, military and air questions), represented Canada in the British delegation in 1929. Neither appears to have been actively involved in the CRCS at that time. On Dominion participation in this conference see The National Archives of the United Kingdom, FO372/​2550, Treaty Miscellaneous, 1929; T8958, Sir George Warner to Sir Hubert Montgomery; and Library and Archives Canada, RG25 A2, Vol. 192. 44 Conferences: ECAMB 8, Executive Committee meeting, 13 January 1930, ‘264-​4 British Empire Red Cross Conference’, p.  235; Executive Committee meeting, 19 September 1930, ‘266-​7 Report on British Empire Red Cross Conference’, pp. 277–​98; Executive Committee meeting, 19 September 1930, ‘266-​12 International Red Cross Conference’. Radio broadcast: Library and Archives Canada, MG26K, Vol. 304, reel M1045, ‘British Empire Red Cross Day –​Florence Nightingale Broadcast’, p. 204580; Vol. 304, reel M1045, J. L. Biggar to A. W. Merriam, 4 May 1931, p. 204226; Vol. 304, reel M1045, N. Sommerville to R. B. Bennett, 16 May 1931, p. 204229. 45 The CRCS hosted its first International Red Cross conference in 1952, and made sustained international relief work for civilians a major component of its work beginning in 1946. Glassford, Mobilizing Mercy, pp. 213, 244–​51, 255–​6.

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The 1938 International Committee of the Red Cross Conference: Humanitarian diplomacy and the cultures of appeasement in Britain Rebecca Gill

If, as Karina Urbach writes, ‘what happened during the summer of 1938 was a long theatre performance with an excellent cast of German go-​betweens’, then the Sixteenth International Conference of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) held in London in June that year provided one of the most prestigious settings for these encounters.1 This spectacle of internationalism reveals the contribution of humanitarian diplomacy to a history of appeasement that has dealt almost exclusively with the masculine ‘high’ diplomacy of the Foreign Office. It is clear from the planning, preparation and hosting of the formal talks, and the whirl of social functions, that the conference was carefully orchestrated by the British Red Cross Society (BRCS) and the British Government to ensure harmony with British foreign policy. In focusing on the 1938 ICRC Conference, this chapter will depart from most histories of the Red Cross Movement, which have documented its response to war and examined its relief work on the ground, to sample a slice of its peacetime activities and dissect the social and cultural milieu of its international relations. This will encompass both discussions at the conference table and the ‘cosmopolitan sociability’ and aristocratic family networks through which the Red Cross as an idea and as an institution was brought into being.2 No more perfect example of this sociability exists than in an extract from the British Red Cross Quarterly Review for July 1938, which described one of the many evening soirées that accompanied the conference: At Lancaster House, Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for the Co-​Ordination of Defence, received the guests, who flowed up and down the great staircase so happily preserved, a relic of social splendour in the spacious days before the War, and drifted amusingly past showcases full of elegant china and ancient finery out to a marquee and buffet, opening on to the illuminated garden, where the pleasant summer evening invited people to sit and listen to the band. It was a very distinguished gathering and the glitter of orders and the display of decorations made a brilliant spectacle.3

This event was one of several to which representatives of the ICRC, the League of Red Cross Societies and the national Red Cross societies were welcomed, including

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a service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral, a garden party at Buckingham Palace, lunch at Claridge’s and an ‘at home’ at Florence Nightingale International House. At a reception at the Guildhall, they were met with a display of ancient city charters, manuscripts and artefacts, including the presentation of the Freedom of the City to Florence Nightingale in London’s Roll of Fame, and a statuette of Nightingale in the art gallery.4 In Britain, women, particularly the titled ladies who headed much of the BRCS county organisation, were at the fore of Red Cross sociability in this period. One such prominent example was member of the BRCS Council and president of the Durham and Ulster branches, the famously pro-​appeasement Tory hostess, Lady Londonderry. Her attendance at the conference reveals the place of the Red Cross in expressions of ‘patriotic feminism’ in this period, and illuminates the distinctive internationalism of women on the right. The humanitarian diplomacy in evidence at the conference hall, dinner table and evening soirée offers insight into the intricate political groundwork undertaken by the ICRC for its institutional neutrality and impartiality to be preserved, but also the extent to which the ICRC’s ideals of internationalism served national interests in this pivotal year of Anglo-​German relations. Above all, in taking stock of the peacetime business and brokerage at the 1938 ICRC Conference it is possible better to comprehend the moral and material dilemmas faced by the Red Cross when war broke out a year later. Red Cross internationalism, and the policy and performance of appeasement In her work on the Red Cross in the First World War, Heather Jones reminds us that ‘we need to distinguish very carefully between the development of an international humanitarian sphere at the supra-​national level’, through which the ICRC operated to restrain wartime violence, act as a neutral coordinator of relief and monitor the Geneva Conventions, ‘and the national level of aid where national Red Cross societies and aid movements were integral parts of the war effort’.5 She also argues that ‘the national aid work sphere was, in reality, also part of a “transnational” learning curve … this was key to why national charities evolved very similarly all across wartime Europe’, with the British and the German national Red Cross societies at the fore of these exchanges.6 These dynamics continued into the interwar period, where attempts were made to formalise protocols for the treatment of prisoners of war that had arisen in the First World War, but also, by the 1930s, to consider the protection of the civilian, both in terms of potential revisions to the Geneva Conventions and in terms of the role of national Red Cross societies in civil defence preparations. When the 1934 ICRC Conference had drawn to a close in Tokyo, it was agreed that the next conference would take place in Madrid four years later. By then, of course, Spain had become engulfed in conflict, devastated by aerial bombing campaigns that had annihilated combatants and civilians alike, and the ICRC had undertaken its first intervention in a civil war. The ICRC therefore took the decision to accept

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the BRCS’s invitation to host the conference in London in the year that would mark the seventy-​fifth anniversary of its foundation. Proceedings in June 1938 took place against a background of ongoing civil war in Spain, worrying reports of Jewish persecution in Germany and parliamentary discussions over air-​raid planning for London. The question of the civilian in war overhung the conference. The BRCS hosted the delegates in its capacity as a registered charity with its own elected leadership and constitution. Although the British Government had at first maintained a qualified distance from the BRCS when it was founded in the 1870s, it was by now a respected member of the British establishment, directly responsible to the Committee of Imperial Defence and the Home Office in the organisation of its Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) and civil defence work, and under the continued patronage and influence of British royalty and aristocracy.7 The British Government’s involvement in the planning of the conference is evident from the index of Foreign Office correspondence for that year.8 The Foreign Office advised, for instance, that Prince Tokugawa, part of the Japanese delegation to the conference, be shown ‘special courtesy’, as it ‘might be helpful in connexion with Anglo-​Japanese relations’.9 It appears to have had a hand in all high-​level details of preparation, including edits to the opening speech of HRH the duke of Gloucester, chairman of the Council of the BRCS. ‘How truly international our movement is can never be more vividly realised than on an occasion like this’, the Duke pronounced. He drew attention to the wartime suffering of the civilian, ‘which could be prevented by the exercise of that mutual goodwill which the Red Cross has done so much to engender’. This would take place, he declared, through ‘the extension of that spirit of chivalry which is fundamental to its work’.10 In addition, the Foreign Office intervened to avoid diplomatic embarrassment over Spanish participation at the conference by instructing the BRCS to invite representatives of both the Spanish Red Cross and the recently formed Nationalist Spanish Red Cross Society. In response to civil war in Spain, the British Government had followed a policy of non-​intervention, not without criticism from those who argued that this reinforced an unjust status quo.11 The BRCS, which had likewise declared its strict impartiality, and offered a limited form of assistance to both sides in the conflict, had been subject to similar reproach.12 In a very obvious example of the convergence at the conference of a British foreign policy of non-​intervention and the BRCS’s interpretation of impartiality, the chairman of the BRCS Executive, Sir Arthur Stanley, offered a platitudinous defence of the decision to invite the Nationalists when challenged by the Spanish Red Cross: in no circumstances whatever will this Conference be drawn into a political discussion. (Loud Applause). We have met to deal with questions concerning the Red Cross. We are all aware of the existence of two Red Cross organisations in Spain, both of which are doing excellent work. It is perfectly in order that both parties should be invited to send representatives, and I am sure we are all very glad to see them here. (Applause).13

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In a letter addressed to the Chairman of the BRCS on 23 June, recorded without comment in the conference Report, the delegate of the Spanish Red Cross, Dr Aurelio Romeo Lozano, expressed his dissatisfaction on the grounds that:

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this other [Nationalist] Spanish delegation does not belong to a national Society officially recognized by the International Committee, and … a delegation already exists which has been officially invited and represents the Spanish National Society enjoying all statutory rights.14

This dissenting voice went unacknowledged, unmollified by claims to fraternal accord. The British Government had likewise adopted a position of non-​intervention in response to increasing evidence of German rearmament and aggression. Three months prior to the conference, Hitler had annexed Austria, and fears were escalating that Czechoslovakia would face a similar fate. Correspondence in the BRCS archives shows that the Austrian delegation had been hastily struck off the list of invitees after the Anschluss (it had now been absorbed by the German Red Cross Society).15 It was thus in the midst of escalating threats from Germany and the intensification of appeasement diplomacy –​what prime minister Neville Chamberlain saw as the ‘peaceful settlement of grievances’  –​that the ICRC Conference was planned and hosted.16 Julie Gottlieb and Matthew Stibbe draw attention to the wider ‘international networks linked to the appeasement of Nazi Germany’, and to the contribution made by voluntary organisations and charities, such as the Red Cross.17 As they explain: [These] included transnational associations as well as organisations that promoted, or at least integrated, an approach to international relations which explicitly recognised the sovereignty of individual nation-​states and their right to self-​determination.18

Evidently, in organising the conference, it was the desire of the BRCS and the British Government to showcase a very particular kind of Britishness and, at the same time, to perform a distinct ceremonial and fraternal internationalism. The ‘apathy’ that James Crossland identifies as characterising the relationship between the British Government and the ICRC was, for the duration of the conference, nowhere on display.19 Instead, in the round of accompanying exhibits and publications, the ICRC spirit of familial goodwill was celebrated alongside Britain’s prominent place in traditions of European peace-​making, and her long history of aid on the battlefield. A starring role was given to Florence Nightingale. S. H. Best’s The Story of the British Red Cross, published to coincide with the conference, placed the current work of the BRCS (summarised as blood-​transfusion services and Air Raid Precaution (ARP) work, with no mention of the Spanish Civil War, nor the threats to European peace that made civil defence necessary) within the history

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of battlefield aid in continental wars stretching back to the wars of the Austrian Succession and Nightingale’s intervention in the Crimea. Her example was said to have been the very inspiration for Henri Dunant’s original advocacy of voluntary aid on the battlefield.20 In a grand service at St Paul’s Cathedral, attended by representatives of the fifty national governments and fifty-​four national Red Cross societies, the archbishop of Canterbury addressed the congregation of nurses, auxiliaries, scouts, volunteers and royal dignitaries on the growing menace of nationalism. The British press (well briefed by the BRCS) responded unvaryingly in kind. As one journalist put it: ‘this great service will be proof of how truly the goodwill of spirit in action, as exemplified by the Red Cross, is bridging the differences of nationality, language and outlook’.21 Thus, as an idea and as an institution, the Red Cross assumed the status of the inviolable and sacrosanct, placing it outside temporary political crises. It also served as a symbol of British formal political neutrality and peaceable intent. This was no more clearly broadcast than when George VI and his mother, Queen Mary, greeted the heads of the national Red Cross societies, Government ministers, the BRCS Council and the grandes dames of the local Red Cross branches for an afternoon reception, an event widely reported in the national and local press. This was heavily orchestrated, with the list of invitees vetted by the Foreign Office in advance. Instruction was given, for example, that the Red Cross delegates from the two sides of the conflict in Spain ought not to be placed together when drawn up for introduction.22 This showcasing of international accord bolstered the idea of the Red Cross ‘family’, and was strengthened not least by the aristocratic ties that bound the various heads of the European Red Cross societies.23 Indeed, the head of the German Red Cross, Duke Carl Edouard Saxe-​Coburg-​Gotha, was able to fraternise and proclaim his message of goodwill in the impeccably courteous manner of a member of the aristocracy (as grandson of Queen Victoria, he was related to the British as well as to many European royal families).24 Saxe-​Coburg was a frequent guest of Queen Mary. That he was able to attend Buckingham Palace in full Nazi uniform without negative comment in the British press reflects both the appetite for appeasement in Britain at this time, including amongst the highest members of the royal family, and the irreproachability conferred by the Red Cross emblem. As Karina Urbach has revealed, Saxe-​Coburg was a key go-​between for Hitler in his relations with Britain. Tasked in particular with winning over the British royal family, Saxe-​Coburg worked assiduously at maintaining British co-​operation throughout 1938 and the build-​up to Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler and the Munich Agreement in September.25 His presidency of the German Red Cross Society  –​the Deutsches Rotes Kreuz (DRK) –​provided excellent cover. Though Saxe-​Coburg has been seen as rather absurd and inconsequential both by biographers and by historians of the Red Cross –​historian of the ICRC Caroline Moorehead, for instance, described him as mild and genial, ‘unable to stand up to the increasingly dictatorial directives coming from the Nazis’ –​he was, in fact, instrumental in using the cover of the Red Cross

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to further German policy.26 But more than this, he was able to appropriate the ideal of Red Cross internationalism to broadcast a German message of peace on a world stage. In the glamorous and ceremonial conference functions, humanitarian diplomacy and Red Cross cosmopolitan sociability were pressed very firmly into the service of national policy and Anglo-​German rapprochement.

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Red Cross cosmopolitanism and the gendering of appeasement Julie Gottlieb and Matthew Stibbe point not only to the contribution of voluntary associations to cultures of appeasement in Britain, but also to the role of women in such organisations, and especially transnational ‘networks of conservative, right-​ wing and non-​political women’.27 As they explain: the aftermath of the First World War saw an explosion of interest in cross-​border co-​operation between civic organisations aimed at promoting peace in the broadest sense, without necessarily endorsing an absolute pacifist, or feminist stance. Often they were led by women and/​or driven at least in part by an idealised female perspective on wartime and post-​war relief.28

As an exemplar, they use the Anglo-​German Fellowship’s (AGF) invitation of the Nazi’s ‘perfect woman’, Gertrud Scholtz-​Klink, head of the National Socialist Women’s League, to Britain in March 1939. The AGF was a right-​w ing conservative organisation founded to promote ‘good understanding’ between Britain and Germany.29 It was pro-​appeasement, but not overtly pro-​Nazi. As part of her visit, Scholtz-​Klink attended a range of social functions and visits to welfare organisations. This included dinner at Claridge’s with a selection of women representing British Conservative Associations, with Dame Beryl Oliver in attendance on behalf of the BRCS.30 This kind of civic sociability, usually missing from a story of Anglo-​German relations that for too long has been ‘told as a male-​centred history from above’, had a key role in the enactment of appeasement.31 The cosmopolitan sociability that accompanied the ICRC Conference in June 1938 provides another such example of the role of civic organisations and of women in this story. This, however, is less a ‘history from below’ than a history of co-​operation and mutual endeavour from amongst the British establishment. One of the most distinguished names on the list of invitees to the Buckingham Palace garden party was the Marchioness of Londonderry, leading Tory hostess, prominent supporter of female suffrage, champion of appeasement, and president of the Durham and the Co. Down branches of the BRCS. She took her place alongside many of the other titled ladies who dominated the county organisations, including the Countess of Malmesbury (Hampshire), the Duchess of Devonshire (Derbyshire), the Duchess of Beaufort (Bristol) and the Countess of Stamford (Cheshire), all of

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whom served as branch presidents in this period. Lady Londonderry’s involvement was much more substantial than merely lending her title. Her work with the BRCS would last over thirty years and take in both the world wars. As Heather Jones notes, in the First World War national Red Cross societies were a sphere of ‘female social activism’ –​large numbers of women volunteered for Red Cross activities in all the major belligerents.32 This tapped into a ‘wartime defensive impetus’ that would continue into the interwar period and intensify in the era of appeasement.33 The Red Cross symbol, as she argues, ‘was at once militant and pacifist’, and although many in the Red Cross were not absolutist pacifists, they were broadly committed to the principles of ‘peace and preparedness’ that Gottlieb notes characterised many socially and politically conservative organisations in Britain in this period.34 Lady Londonderry’s attendance at the ICRC Conference as a member of the BRCS Council thus brings into relief her contribution as political hostess and wife, and highlights the overlap among the upper echelons of the BRCS, British Government departments and the Conservative Party. It also highlights the under-​researched role of women as Red Cross administrators, committee members, fundraisers and event managers, roles that feature less in a historiography of women’s involvement interested mostly in nursing history, but that demonstrate the potential of women with the leisure, finances and connections to extend the capacity and reach of the Red Cross as an organisation. Helen McCarthy has argued that in post-​suffrage Britain, women’s participation in voluntary associations across party lines fostered new forms of democratic and active citizenship.35 This demonstration of ‘active citizenship’ is evident not only in the Red Cross leadership, but also in the rank and file of the BRCS, such as those trained in first aid for civil defence and members of the VAD. It was, for example, an all-​female team of VADs who served as aides for the duration of the 1938 conference.36 Yet as Gottlieb and Stibbe note, British foreign policy in this era remained dominated by upper-​class men, with women’s politicking centred on hosting elite social functions, acting as confidantes and fundraising for the Conservative Party.37 The BRCS, with its conferences, annual Red Cross balls (the previous year’s had taken place at Grosvenor House and was presided over by the Countess of Brecknock), council meetings in London and local branch committees, was one of the arenas in which these upper-​class women could exercise indirect influence and, in the particular instance of the ICRC’s 1938 conference, play a role in the everyday politics of appeasement.38 The Red Cross volunteers’ example of ‘active citizenship’ thus demonstrates the ambivalences of women’s involvement, particularly the extent to which a woman’s informal political influence was based on class privilege and, however significant her role, took place at the intersection of informal, voluntary endeavour and formal, State power. This provided opportunity for those women with social and financial resources to assume positions of power within the BRCS, and in turn to maintain its public prominence, insofar as their interests could inform, or coincided with, the priorities of State.

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The minute books of the BRCS Council show that Lady Londonderry was indeed a respected and involved member. In 1907 she was delegated, for instance, to sit on the reception committee for the first and only ICRC Conference to be held in London prior to 1938. Two years later she was appointed by the Council to attend the meeting with the Secretary of State for War, and was given responsibility for initiating Red Cross branches across the country. She was also appointed to one of the subcommittees responsible for the formation of the VADs, which oversaw the training of Red Cross volunteers in first aid to be called upon in event of war to support the territorial forces, and, in 1912, she sat on the subcommittee constituted to oversee BRCS aid in the Balkan wars.39 In the First World War she had a familiar and frank relationship with Sir Arthur Stanley, the chair of the BRCS Council, under whom she worked overseeing the wartime activities of the Red Cross in Durham.40 This she undertook in addition to her instrumental role in the Women’s Legion. During the 1930s she served on the BRCS Council, and by the middle of this decade had turned her attention to ARP work. The BRCS had been given a prominent role in the British Government’s civil defence strategy; the 2 June 1938 edition of The Times reported that the BRCS had trained 36,000 ARP personnel. A few months later, the BRCS would be mobilising its volunteers for a show of civil defence during the Munich crisis.41 Lady Londonderry’s papers reveal that before and during the Second World War she was intimately involved in the day-​to-​day organisation of Red Cross civil defence work in Ulster, and in petitioning the Council for the creation of a formally constituted BRCS branch in Northern Ireland.42 Mount Stewart, her family estate, was used as a first aid station for the duration of the war.43 In many ways the Red Cross ARP work undertaken by Lady Londonderry mirrored the interest in aerial warfare of her husband, Lord Londonderry, who had served (rather ingloriously) as minister for air between 1931 and 1935, and had represented Britain at the disarmament talks at Geneva. They understood that war in the air and civilian casualties from aerial bombardment would be a feature of any future conflict.44 In 1938 Lady Londonderry published Retrospect, charting her public work as a suffragist and her behind-​the-​scenes role as political broker and hostess. She identified herself as a woman of action in service of a ‘virile’ patriotism. Red Cross work was part of a wider imperative to patriotic service and national defence.45 By this date, Lord and Lady Londonderry were vocal supporters of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement.46 As Ian Kershaw makes clear, she collaborated with her husband in attempts at fostering Anglo-​German relations that shaded into outright sympathy for the Nazi leadership, especially when convinced that Hitler shared her desire for peace.47 For Lady Londonderry and leading Tory women like her, BRCS civil defence work afforded opportunity for the greater involvement of militarised women’s organisations, and the furtherance of a ‘defencist’ position. This was perfectly in keeping with a conservative internationalism and a cosmopolitan sociability that saw her being entertained alongside Saxe-​ Coburg on the lawn of Buckingham Palace.

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Red Cross internationalism as an idea and as an institution:  the case of the civilian The idea of Red Cross internationalism, centring on common humanity and fraternal good will, was performed and celebrated in 1938, not least for its resonance with national objectives for peace and European accord. However, in the detailed discussions at the conference table, the Red Cross as an institution overseeing international laws of war and serving as an arbiter of humanitarian norms was severely tested, and the tensions between the remit of the ICRC and national societies and governments were brought into stark relief. For three days, the conference met at the British Medical Association’s headquarters in Tavistock Square. President of the ICRC Max Huber took the opportunity of his opening address to praise ‘the essentially chivalrous spirit which Your Royal Highness [the Duke of Gloucester] describes as fundamental in the Red Cross movement’, and to advocate its extension to ‘other defenceless victims of war’.48 This sentiment was then seconded in the speech of Norman Davis, chairman of the Board of Governors of the League of Red Cross Societies, who promised that ‘no effort shall be neglected which might lead to the mitigation of the horrors of modern warfare and to the protection of helpless women and children’.49 Afterwards, the floor was given to the Duke of Saxe-​Coburg to pass on Hitler’s greetings for the conference: The Führer and Reich-​Chancellor, Adolf Hitler himself, when surveying the possibilities of peaceful co-​operation between nations, has expressly referred to the Geneva Red Cross Convention, to its magnificent work of mercy over seventy years, and to the road to which it points in future. Going beyond the letter of the agreements which are already in effect, he referred to the spirit of the Convention, to that chivalrous mercy and help, of free and active understanding and resolute alleviation of suffering, to that spirit which inspires the entire Red Cross and makes it ever capable of new development.

In the name of Red Cross cordiality, Saxe-​Coburg was able to express German hopes for peace, whilst announcing the primacy of national sovereignty and the supremacy of the national Red Cross. Transnational co-​operation was to be celebrated, ‘supra-​ national’ intervention was not: [T]‌he International Committee of the Red Cross Conference will prove the possibility of a common solution of burning questions, and will once more affirm the noble spirit of this international co-​operation which has proved its worth in the period of the past three-​quarters of a century. Such co-​operative endeavours, carried on in the spirit of comradeship, are a wish of humanity that is old and ever new … The success of the Red Cross in its international work is undoubtedly due to the wise and steadfast resoluteness with which it has, from the very beginning of its existence, based its work upon the respect and the power of national endeavours.50

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In 1936 the DRK had come under direct control of the Nazi Party. By May 1936, Saxe-​Coburg could announce that the ‘transformation of the German Red Cross according to National-​Socialist principles has been carried out successfully’.51 The party had appointed a new Red Cross leadership, including Dr Ernst Grawitz, the SS’s chief medical officer, as acting president. Caroline Moorehead documents a photograph on the front cover of the December 1936 issue of the journal the Deutsches Rotes Kreuz in which Nazi swastikas flew alongside Red Cross flags, and Hitler, the ‘Protector of the German Red Cross’, inspected a line of nurses. The photograph marked the seventieth anniversary celebrations of the National Women’s Association of the Red Cross, presided over by Saxe-​Coburg and Gertrud Scholtz-​Klink, and featuring, among other speakers, a Dr Löffler extolling the virtues of racial purity and health.52 The following year, the DRK, along with all other welfare associations, was amalgamated into a single national organisation, and Jewish members were expelled. The DRK took the opportunity to advertise its new status and celebrate its modernity in the League of the Red Cross Societies’ journal: The clear-​cut organization has made it possible for the German Red Cross to prepare itself for the important mission entrusted to it by Chancellor Hitler. Modern warfare demands a high degree of efficiency on the part of the relief services, and only an organization which is perfectly equipped for every emergency in peace-​time can hope to meet requirements adequately in time of war.53

The DRK had now been transformed into an obedient adjunct of the German State, its leadership comprising political appointees. It is interesting to consider, therefore, why the German Government set such store by the DRK’s membership of the international Red Cross Movement, especially as the Nazis had proclaimed their opposition to other forms of internationalism (they had left the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization in 1933).54 Most of the historical literature on this period has stressed this exceptionalist view. However, as Kiran Klaus Patel notes, with regard to its social welfare organisations, the Nazi Party was keen to partake in the new internationalism of the health and welfare expert. The itemisation of DRK achievements in the 1938 ICRC Conference report confirmed the place of the DRK at the forefront of progress. Its ‘impressive statistics’ were noted, as were its range of first aid activities and the commendable ‘collaboration between the German Red Cross and Public Health Services’. Evidently, in its concerns for refining civil defence procedures and emergency relief it was to the fore in ideas and practices of the kind elsewhere being implemented by Lady Londonderry. Nazi social policies were thus viewed as exemplary transnational points of reference; indeed, as Mark Mazower argues, they were ‘in so many ways the apotheosis of very wide-​spread trends in European social thought’.55 To quote Patel, participation in the ICRC Conference was one of the ways in which the DRK ‘became a symbol and a site for negotiating the international prestige of a nation’.56

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Such transnational co-​operation aside, the technical work of the 1938 conference ensured that sentiments pertaining to the legal protection of the civilian in war would not become the basis of an extension to the Geneva Conventions. Mr Camille Gorgé of the Swiss Government, the chairman of the Second Commission of the conference tasked specifically with discussing possible extensions of the Geneva Conventions, took his lead from the representative of the ICRC, Paul de Gouttes, a specialist in international law. He surmised that ‘the eventuality of extending the scope of the Convention to civilians in war time seemed inopportune’.57 This limited formal response rested on the insistence that the ICRC’s most important role was to uphold, monitor and facilitate the workings of the Geneva Conventions, the efficacy of which would be jeopardised by extension of its responsibilities to those other than wounded combatants and prisoners of war. Only if it were strictly limited, it was agreed, would the Red Cross as an idea and an institution continue to retain the support of the various national signatories. This narrow legalism was adhered to by the ICRC throughout the 1930s and the Second World War. The response of the national societies was dominated by Senator Giuseppe de Michelis, from the Board of the Italian Red Cross, who persistently resisted any extension of the Geneva Conventions to civilians or to Red Cross relief personnel occupied in treating non-​combatants.58 He was also quick to assert that ‘it seemed to him very risky to legislate on questions involving the autonomy of states’.59 The Italian delegation’s high-​profile pressure on the ICRC followed a pattern seen during the Italo-​Ethiopian war.60 Although the German delegate on this panel was more taciturn, Johann Lohmann of the German Foreign Office agreed with de Michelis on every point.61 The conference recommended that in civil wars measures be put in place to protect children, respect the lives of non-​combatants and facilitate exchanges of political prisoners. However, it deflected the broader range of questions pertaining to civilians in war, referring them instead for further study and discussion. Senator de Michelis, ‘having heard the different opinions voiced during the deliberations and recorded in the Minutes’ on this question at the prior Conference of Experts in 1937, and noting that in the course of debate, several delegations remarked that it would be advisable to eliminate from the draft revised Convention any reference to the civilian population … consider[ed] that the proposed modifications might be embodied in a Protocol to be annexed to the Geneva Convention at the meeting of a diplomatic Conference in the near future.62

Herr Lohmann agreed. The decision was taken by the Second Commission’s chair to defer discussion to a later diplomatic conference of the national governments. This did not prevent individual members of the ICRC from using the opportunity of the 1938 ICRC Conference in London to broach, in private, the possibility of an ICRC inspection of peacetime civilian detainees in Nazi concentration camps,

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many of whom were reportedly living on reduced rations and subject to arbitrary beatings. It was necessary for the ICRC to operate through the DRK, as Germany’s national Red Cross Society, if it wished to intervene in the affairs of a sovereign State. The outcome was a carefully orchestrated ICRC visit to Dachau in August 1938. The delegates, having recourse to moral, but not legal, objections to the ‘very idea of a concentration camp, and particularly the lack of segregation of very different categories of prisoner’ as ‘an affront to a free citizen’s way of thinking’ offered a technical endorsement of Dachau as ‘a model of its kind’.63 This was not a finding that would have affronted Hitler, who used the very fact of an ICRC inspection as an endorsement. Indeed, the ICRC’s foundational belief in the sanctity of impartial protocols as a bulwark to the misuse of State power was being increasingly subverted by the DRK. Thus, over the question of intervention on behalf of Jewish refugees, raised with the DRK by the League of Red Cross Societies early in 1939 and reported in its Monthly Bulletin, Walther Georg Hartmann of the DRK responded that: [h]‌e thought it his duty to warn the Committee of the reaction which such a message might have in his country … The German Red Cross requested the League to see that Red Cross bodies shall not be involved … It found itself obliged to make this request because its most serious preoccupation was that not only the League, but the Red Cross itself, shall not go outside the international agreement which concerns it, i.e. the Geneva Convention. The Red Cross must play its part as a humanitarian relief body in full agreement with Governments.64

As the ICRC Conference foretold, when faced with the barbarity and obduracy of totalitarian regimes, the international ‘humanitarian sphere’ would face a profound moral and material test. The neutrality and impartiality at the heart of ICRC internationalism operated to avoid a segmentation of the Red Cross Movement; nevertheless, owing to what Jean-​Claude Favez, historian of the ICRC and the Holocaust, characterises as an ‘excessive respect for its own principles’, the Red Cross as an idea and an institution would prove inadequate to meet the challenges of the Second World War, not least because national societies became part of the mobilisation for ‘total’ war.65 Conclusion At the conference table and at myriad social functions, participants at the 1938 ICRC Conference eulogised and enacted the Red Cross ideal of internationalism, chivalry and bonhomie. Yet as the records of the ICRC Conference show, agreement on setting parameters to the ICRC’s jurisdiction in war was a priority in 1938. In these discussions, the notion of ICRC ‘supra-​nationalism’ was contested by degrees, especially and most overtly by the Italian and German delegates, who asserted national sovereignty and posited a form of internationalism based on cross-​border

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co-​operation rather than international oversight and intervention. Even for those soon-​to-​be belligerent nations such as Britain, the relationship with the ICRC turned on steely diplomacy and compromise. Indeed, as James Crossland has demonstrated, however much the British celebrated the Red Cross spirit at the 1938 conference, the history of the British Government’s relationship with the ICRC, particularly in the early years of the Second World War, was strained, characterised by ‘disenchantment and disagreement’, and premised on ensuring that international norms were aligned with national priorities and customs.66 The political groundwork the ICRC had to undertake at the conference and subsequently was intricate and often highly fraught. Like many interwar international committees, the ICRC’s main successes in this period rested on transnational knowledge exchanges, in this case the standardisation of relief practices. In contrast, however, attempts to extend the Geneva Conventions to protect civilians met with resistance. For, when it came to a sovereign state’s jurisdiction over its own civilians, or an occupying state’s policies towards an occupied people –​where the benefits of reciprocity were less apparent –​ the right of the ICRC to intervene was severely curtailed. But this was also a point that the ICRC would not press. Accusations of unwarranted intervention in the affairs of a nation could fracture the Red Cross Movement and undermine its authority to speak as an impartial international arbiter, and this cautious legalism dominated ICRC thinking in this period. It is clear that the fate of the civilian in modern war and, especially given events in Spain, their vulnerability to aerial bombardment, was of genuine concern. It is also clear that the ICRC, and the delegates of the Swiss Government, considered the effectiveness of the Geneva Conventions to rest in their being a very precise tool of intervention, limited to ameliorating the suffering of designated, and combatant, groups in war.67 This meant that when war broke out a year later, civilians, including those in the Nazi concentration camps, were not subject to ICRC protection. At the same time, the ideal of Red Cross internationalism, if not so readily its institutions, could be pressed into service of national aims. For those states busy mobilising their civilians, but offering the promise of peace, the Red Cross conference was an opportunity for the ideals of Red Cross civility and humanitarianism to stand as symbols of a foreign policy of co-​operation and good will. The British Government took pains to ensure that the spectacle of ceremonial fraternalism on display at the conference aligned with British policy. Through its cosmopolitan sociability in particular, and with women such as Lady Londonderry to the fore, it was able to further the policy and practice of appeasement. Indeed, Red Cross internationalism still operated with an aura of courtly diplomacy, vivifying upper-​ class mobility and the chivalric codes of the old elites. This Red Cross aristocratic ‘family’ included the key Nazi go-​between the Duke of Saxe-​Coburg. The 1938 ICRC Conference provided the perfect opportunity for him to broadcast Germany’s ostensibly peaceable intent, especially towards Britain.

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Notes 1 I would like to thank Thomas Gidney for his researches in the ICRC archives, Juliette Massin for her help with translation of documents from the French and Rob Ellis for reading this chapter in draft. K. Urbach, Go-​Betweens for Hitler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 285. 2 As Nina Glick Schiller et al. emphasise, cosmopolitan sociability is ‘embedded within social relations and practice-​based identities’, and ‘cosmopolitanism can never be gender, racially or ethnically neutral’; N. G. Schiller, T. Darieva and S. Gruner-​Domic, ‘Defining Cosmopolitan Sociability in a Transnational Age: An Introduction’, special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34:3 (2011), 403–​4. Glenda Sluga identifies sociability, in evidence at large international conferences as well as in the bureaucracies and physical spaces of interwar international agencies, as an important way in which ‘international mindfulness’ was fostered in this period. See her Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), p. 57. 3 British Red Cross Quarterly Review, 26:3 ( July 1938), 67. 4 British Red Cross Museum and Archives (BRCMA), Sixteenth International Red Cross Conference (London, 1938). 5 H. Jones, ‘International or Transnational? Humanitarian Action during the First World War’, European Review of History, 16:5 (2009), 697–​713 (p. 699). 6 Ibid., p. 699. 7 See R. Gill, Calculating Compassion: Humanity and Relief in War, Britain 1870–​1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 33–​5. 8 Frustratingly, most of this correspondence has been weeded out by an unknown hand and is now unavailable. 9 The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA), FO 371/​22193, ‘Visit to Europe of Prince Tokugawa and Other Japanese in Connection with International Red Cross Society Convention, London, 1938’. 10 BRCMA, Sixteenth International Red Cross Conference (London, 1938), report, pp. 49–​50. 11 The British Government’s policy of non-​intervention on behalf of the Spanish Republic operated as part of a strategy of appeasing Mussolini and Hitler; see Z. Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–​1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 222. For critics of this policy see T. Buchanan, The Spanish Civil War and the British Labour Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 12 Kerrie Holloway records Eleanor Rathbone’s accusation that the BRCS had ‘Fascist sympathies’ in her contribution to this volume. 13 BRCMA, Sixteenth International Red Cross Conference, p. 72. 14 Ibid., p. 72. The ICRC had maintained a chief delegate with both the governmental and the nationalist Red Cross societies in Spain; TNA, FO 371/​22193, ICRC memorandum, ‘On the Activities of the International Red Cross Committee in Spain’. 15 BRCMA, ‘XVI International Red Cross Conference: Diplomatic Representatives in England of Foreign Governments’, in Sixteenth International Red Cross Conference. Caroline Moorehead notes that this takeover and dissolution of the Austrian Red Cross went without comment from the ICRC; C. Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the Rise of the Red Cross (London: HarperCollins, 1998). 16 D. Reynolds, quoted in J. Gottlieb and M. Stibbe, ‘Peace at Any Price:  The Visit of Nazi Women’s Leader Gertrud Scholtz-​Klink to London in March 1939 and the Response of British Women’s Activists’, Women’s History Review, 26:2 (2017), 173–​94 (p. 175).

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1 7 Ibid.,174. 18 Ibid. 19 J. Crossland, Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1939–​1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 3. 20 S. H. Best, The Story of the British Red Cross (London: Cassell, 1938). 21 Yorkshire Observer (20 June 1938); BRCMA, Sixteenth International Red Cross Conference, London, June 1938, press cuttings (uncatalogued). 22 Queen Elizabeth, who was president of the BRCS, was in mourning for her mother and remained indoors; BRCMA, RCC/​1/​12/​5/​28, ‘Message from the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 20 June 1938’, ‘File: XVI International Red Cross Conference, 1938’. 23 On this persistent idea of the European aristocratic family see K. Urbach, European Aristocracies and the Radical Right 1918–​1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1, 61. 24 This included the Swedish royal family, which presided over the Swedish Red Cross, and to whom Saxe-​Coburg was related through the marriage of his daughter to the son of the Crown Prince. 25 Urbach, Go-​Betweens for Hitler, p. 183. 26 Ibid., p. 192; Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, p. 342. 27 Gottlieb and Stibbe, ‘Peace at Any Price’, p. 175. 28 Ibid., p. 174. 29 Ibid., p. 179; TNA, KV5/​3, ‘Anglo-​German Fellowship’. 30 For the presence of Dame Beryl Oliver see ‘Women Leaders Meet “Perfect Nazi Woman” ’, Daily Telegraph (8 March 1939). 31 J. Gottlieb, ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-​War Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), p. 3. 32 Jones, ‘International or Transnational?’, p. 698. 33 Ibid., p. 699. 34 Ibid., p. 707; and Gottlieb, ‘Guilty Women’, p. 4. 35 H. McCarthy, ‘Parties, Voluntary Associations, and Democratic Politics in Interwar Britain’, Historical Journal, 50:4 (December 2007), 891–​912. 36 BRCMA, RCC/​1/​12/​5/​28, ‘Staff: International Conference’, in ‘File: XVI International Red Cross Conference, 1938’. 37 Gottlieb and Stibbe, ‘Peace at Any Price’, p. 176. 38 Of the twenty-​eight members of the BRCS delegated to attend the 1938 conference, nine were women. 39 File of extracts of minutes of the BRCS Council in preparation for Beryl Oliver’s writing of The Red Cross in Action, BRCMA, ACC 2120. 40 See for example letters from Stanley to Lady Londonderry dated 25 October 1914, 6 December 1914 and 6 January 1917; Durham Public Record Office (DPRO), D/​LO/​ C675(1), D/​LO/​C675(2), D/​LO/​C675(3). Sir Arthur Stanley (1869–​1947) was the uncle of Lord Oliver Stanley (1896–​1950), Conservative politician and son-​in-​law to Lord and Lady Londonderry. 41 The BRCS Council minutes contain letters of thanks for their ‘prompt response in emergency’ from HRH the Princess Royal Commandant-​in Chief and Sir Samuel Hoare, Secretary of State for Home Affairs, BRCS Council minutes, 14 October 1938. 42 Public Record Office of Northern Irleland (PRONI), Londonderry papers, D 3099/​14/​49, ‘File: British Red Cross. Ulster Joint Committee 1939–​1948’. 43 PRONI, D 3099/​14/​53, ‘File: Mount Stewart Casualty Clearing Station, 1940’.

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44 Thus, in a speech in her husband’s constituency, she lauded the fact that ‘while they have worked for peace, the National Government has not for a moment forgotten that their first duty is to ensure the safety of Great Britain and her Empire against attack’; DPRO, D/​LO/​ F615(54), Lady Londonderry, undated speech. 45 The Marchioness of Londonderry, Retrospect (London: Frederick Muller, 1938), pp. 255–​6. 46 Gottlieb, ‘Guilty Women’, pp. 83–​8. 47 I. Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler:  Lord Londonderry, the Nazis, and the Road to War (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 141. 48 BRCMA, Sixteenth International Red Cross Conference, p. 51. 49 Ibid., p. 52. 50 Ibid., pp.  52–​ 3. Patricia Clavin’s observation that ‘some transnational encounters seek to exploit or even reinforce barriers’ would seem particularly apt in this case; P. Clavin, ‘Introduction: Conceptualising Internationalism between the World Wars’, in D. Laqua (ed.), Internationalism Reconfigured:  Transnational Ideas and Movements between the World Wars (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), p. 2. 51 Quoted in Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, p. 356. The DRK had been stripped of its role as a medico-​military organisation at the Versailles Peace Conference and had been restricted to domestic social work. Under the newly reconstituted DRK, its work as a medico-​military auxiliary was revived. 52 Ibid., pp. 356–​7. 53 League of Red Cross Societies: Monthly Bulletin, 19:9 (September 1938), 128. 54 For a consideration of these issues see Madeleine Herren, ‘Fascist Internationalism’, in G. Sluga and P. Clavin (eds), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-​Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 191–​212. 55 M. Mazower, quoted in K. K. Patel, ‘Welfare in the Warfare State: Nazi Social Policy on the International Stage’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 37:2 (2015), 3–​38 (p. 5). 56 Ibid., p. 14. 57 Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (AICRC), CI (16) 1938, ‘Sixteenth International Red Cross Conference. Second Commission: Summary of the Discussions of the Legal Commission’, p. 11. 58 The Italian Red Cross, as evident during the Italian campaign in Ethiopia in 1935–​6, was closely allied with the Fascist State. Its president, Senator Filippo Cremonesi, was an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini. In contravention of the Geneva Conventions, the Italian air force had bombed the Swedish and British Red Cross missions in Ethiopia, with Red Cross personnel as well as patients among the wounded. It had used gas against the civilian population. See Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, pp. 305–​16. 59 AICRC, ‘Summary of the Discussion of the Legal Commission’, p. 8. 60 As Rainer Baudendistel has shown, Italian manoeuvring and manipulation in combination with the political conservativism and formal legalism of the ICRC, rather than direct Italian influence on policy, determined the ICRC’s approaches to unverified breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and its failure to adopt a more responsive humanitarian diplomacy. R. Baudendistel, Between Bombs and Good Intentions: The Red Cross and the Italo-​Ethiopian War, 1935–​ 1936 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2006). 61 AICRC, ‘Summary of the Discussion of the Legal Commission’, p. 7. 62 BRCMA, RCC/​ 1/​ 12/​ 5/​ 28, ‘XVI International Red Cross Conference:  Resolutions’, in ‘File: XVI International Red Cross Conference, 1938’. 63 Quoted in J.-​C. Favez, The Red Cross and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 19.

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6 4 League of Red Cross Societies: Monthly Bulletin, 20:1 ( January 1939), p. 5. 65 Favez, The Red Cross and the Holocaust, pp. 279–​80. 66 Crossland, Britain and the International Committee, p. 3. 67 Nevertheless, the ICRC did not ignore the wider questions of civilian protection in war in the months following the conference. Rather than a modification of the Geneva Conventions, and in keeping with a restricted definition of its role by which limitations on methods of war were not part of its mandate, it recommended that the appropriate means was a third Hague conference, where the methods of war could be regulated to ensure, for example, safe zones for civilians. It sought to co-​operate with the Dutch Government, and other national governments, to facilitate this. The diplomatic wheels turned very slowly, however, and the conference was still in the very early stages of planning by the spring of 1939. See Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, CR 221, Max Huber to G. Motta, Swiss Federal Counsellor, 10 August 1938.

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‘£50,000 is too small a fine to pay’: The British Red Cross and the Spanish refugees of 1939 Kerrie Holloway

In late January 1939, almost 500,000 Spanish refugees, roughly half of whom were retreating Spanish Republican soldiers, fled into France, escaping the advancing Nationalist army after the fall of Catalonia. Across the border, the refugees were indiscriminately sorted into concentration camps on the beaches of the Mediterranean. Surrounded by barbed wire with only the sand for shelter for several weeks, many refugees felt their situation was due to the Non-​Intervention Agreement signed by their current host, France, and its ally Britain. While France was obliged to deal with the Spanish on its own soil, spending £35,000 daily to feed and control the influx of refugees, many looked to Britain to do more to support the situation it had helped to create.1 It was in this context that the British Red Cross (BRCS) found itself in receipt of a £50,000 grant from the British Government to aid the work of the French Government in the camps –​a paltry sum in any case, but one that was significantly hampered by both insufficiency and inefficiency. This case study highlights the close relationship between national governments and national Red Cross societies and argues that, in the Spanish Civil War, the biased ‘neutrality’ of the British Government, through its signing of the Non-​Intervention Agreement, directly influenced the actions and attitudes of the BRCS. Thus, by investigating the BRCS’s work during the Spanish Civil War, the priorities and prejudices of the British Government during the late 1930s are also revealed. The Spanish refugees in France The French opened its border to civilians –​women, children and the elderly –​on 28 January 1939, finally granting refuge to the mass of refugees gathered at the frontier since 22 January. Raoul Didkowski, the prefect of the Pyrénées-​Orientales, initially authorised the entry of 2,000 civilians per day, but more than 100,000 crossed the frontier in the first six days.2 This total grew again when French authorities allowed the Republican Army to enter during the afternoon of 5 February 1939. Lacking the material and munitions to keep fighting, 20,000 soldiers crossed into France on the

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first night.3 This phase of the exodus ended on 13 February when Franco’s troops planted a flag at the frontier, leaving approximately half-​a-​million refugees at the mercy of French hospitality.4 The improvised system of concentration camps established by the French developed in three stages.5 In the first stage, provisional sorting camps located along the frontier acted as reception centres into which refugees were placed until more permanent camps were established. These included Amélie-​les-​Bains, Arles-​ sur-​Tech, Le Boulou, Bourg-​Madame, Latour-​de-​Carol, Les Haras, Mazères and Prats-​de-​Mollo, which were soon evacuated because of the cold weather in the Pyrenees. The internees were sent on to larger stage-​two camps: semi-​permanent camps along the beaches of Argelès-​sur-​Mer, Saint-​Cyprien and Barcarès, each with between 80,000 and 100,000 men. These camps were established as holding spaces with little more than barbed wire surrounding an expanse of sand into which the refugees were herded. The wind and sand exacerbated the primitive conditions of these camps, leading to serious cases of conjunctivitis for the healthy and infection for the wounded. Refugee memoirs and newspaper reports claim it was several days before the refugees received any food, and then ‘the food ration was barely sufficient for life’.6 As for water, pumps were installed to extract water from 4–​5 metres below the surface, but ‘the water would wreak havoc’, causing dysentery  –​‘diarrhoea that came on suddenly, tortured your bowels and left you spent, exhausted’.7 Furthermore, medical supplies were rare:  most refugees remember having only aspirin to cure everything, which, as one refugee put it, ‘as famous as it is, is not a universal and miraculous cure’, and a French Socialist report claimed Argelès did not even have aspirin.8 The third and final stage of the process saw the construction of permanent establishments, such as the specialised camps of Agde, Bram, Gurs and Septfonds, and the punishment camps at Collioure and Le Vernet. The specialised camps were better in almost every way than the larger stage-​two camps –​smaller populations, purpose-​built barracks, located inland rather than on the beach –​yet conditions were still poor, and, in the punishment camps for ‘Republicans deemed to be dangerous due to their political engagement’, refugees experienced the worst conditions of all.9 Unfortunately for the Spanish refugees, ‘it was not until July, five months after the start of the exodus that the concentration camps of the Roussillon were truly organised’. Yet, the same month, the BRCS discontinued its work in the French concentration camps, having judged them to be adequate and its help no longer required.10 Britain’s attitude towards the refugee crisis and the £50,000 grant Although Britain was France’s strongest ally in non-​intervention, the attitude of the British towards the mounting refugee crisis in southern France was hardly generous. On 31 January 1939, as Neville Chamberlain continued to champion non-​intervention as a way to restrict the war to Spain rather than have it lead to

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a European-​wide conflict, he explained the refugee situation, stating, ‘How much more terrible it would be if the area of conflict should be extended and if the people and the children of other countries were to be compelled to undergo sufferings like those now being endured by the people of Spain’; and he rationalised Britain’s lack of assistance in France by affirming that ‘It must indeed be a difficult position for those people in the south of France … We, however, are further off. We are not in geographical proximity to the Pyrenees and to the people who are now so much in need of help.’11 The British Government had provided money through an international non-​ government organisation, the International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain (IC), started by a prominent British Quaker, Edith Pye. As the crisis in France grew, the Foreign Office (FO) contemplated another grant. Initially, William Montagu-​Pollock, an FO official whose primary responsibility was British policy on Spain, wrote in typed minutes on 3 March 1939 that ‘the International Commission is the best channel for further work’. He then revised his opinion, handwriting an addendum I have now amended the draft to the Treasury in the light of the response received from the British Red Cross Society and of discussions with Mr. Davies, the Society’s Secretary. My impression is that the French Government are particularly reluctant to accept help from an international organisation and that they would far prefer help from a purely British organisation, such as the British Red Cross Society.12

Although it had no presence in Spain or France, the FO chose the BRCS because it was the preference of the French Government, but also presumably because it was the humanitarian organisation most closely linked, physically and ideologically, to the British Government. The BRCS had previously remained uninvolved in Spain, mirroring the stance of the British Government, and it stated in June 1937 that ‘the Society early recognised that the actual circumstances of the Civil War rendered any action as an independent society incompatible with the neutrality incumbent on a national Red Cross Society’. Therefore, it had decided not to send medical units or personnel to Spain, although it did raise funds for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).13 These two courses of action –​simultaneously not intervening in the conflict directly whilst still sending aid via the ICRC –​highlight an important distinction between national Red Cross committees and the ICRC. Although, as suggested by David Forsythe, the ICRC has been indirectly subjected to Swiss nationalism throughout its history, national Red Cross societies were directly militarised and mobilised to aid national war efforts in both tangible and ideological ways, through what Bertrand Taithe labels an ‘appropriation of humanitarian principles … on purely national basis’.14 Indeed, James Crossland suggests that the strong link between national Red Cross societies and the military meant that ‘neutral humanitarianism was not compatible

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with practical relief for victims of war’, although ‘humanitarianism in the national interest … was achievable, indeed, necessary’.15 While Crossland does not include the Spanish Civil War in his study, his analysis can be easily extrapolated to this conflict. The BRCS remained uninvolved, following the lead of the non-​intervening British Government, whilst the ICRC delved into the conflict on both sides, sending ten delegates to different parts of Spain to relieve the conditions of prisoners of war, establish message systems between prisoners and their families, and exchange prisoners between the two sides.16 Yet, while Crossland separates national Red Cross societies from the international body, both the French and British Red Cross societies echoed many of the principles of the ICRC. Unlike religious organisations, as Michael Barnett and Thomas Weiss suggest, the ICRC believes strict impartiality is the most efficient way to aid those in need, ‘to the extent that it does not challenge grave injustices [and] is potentially complicit with murders’.17 This paradox appeared when Germany invited the ICRC to assess the Nazi concentration-​camp system in 1935 and again in 1938. Although the ICRC was invited to view the camp at Dachau with full consent from the Nazi Government, once there, they saw only what the Nazis wished them to see rather than the full truth of the camps. After the second visit, on 19 August 1938, the two Swiss inspectors spoke highly of the system, making ‘allowance for the fact that the very idea of a concentration camp … is an affront to the free citizen’s way of thinking’, and labelled Dachau a model camp, ‘in so far as the way it is built and run is concerned’.18 The term ‘model camp’ was applied to the French camps of Barcarès and Bram the following year. At the start of 1939, with the refugee crisis on the French border imminent, the BRCS began raising funds in Britain to send to the French Red Cross (FRC), an organisation also closely tied to its national government.19 Like the French Government’s handling of the refugee situation, the FRC was not without criticism. One work on Argelès describes the FRC as having done the minimum during the first crucial weeks of February, despite the French Government entrusting it with the ‘large scale of supplies for the Spanish refugees’.20 Another stated that ‘the French Red Cross totally ignored what happened on the French sands, the refugees did not exist, including pregnant women and new-​born babies in this oblivion’, and that it never even entered the camps to aid the Spanish refugees.21 Francisco Pons dismissed the work of the Red Cross in his memoir, stating, ‘their flag … did not fly for us. Us, the Republicans … we had not been one of its major concerns during the fight. Why should we become one now?’.22 Even Marcel Junod, a field delegate for the ICRC, was shocked not to find the FRC in the camps, except for three nurses at Bram.23 Yet at the same time, a secretary at the French Embassy in London assured Montagu-​ Pollock and the FO on 8 February that ‘Red Cross workers are being sent urgently to the frontier.’24 Josep Carles Clemente concurred, claiming the FRC ‘immediately sent to the frontier in the Pyrenees Orientales various teams of nurses who dealt with a considerable number of wounded and sick’, and that ‘such an immense

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labour’ necessitated the FRC calling in the ICRC for assistance.25 Clemente’s credibility, however, is undermined by the fact that he was a Carlist and supporter of the Nationalist cause. Nevertheless, it was the extent of their work, or rather the lack thereof, that gave most people cause for complaint. John Hope Simpson claims only 2,000 FRC nurses were supplied to attend to the needs of 500,000 Spaniards scattered among 2,000 camps. By May, the Nation reported that ‘the French Red Cross, composed to a high degree of the “right people”, is somewhat too proud of its work’, having distributed only ‘18,000 shirts, 4,000 sheets, and 8,000 pairs of trousers’ in three months.26 Owing to the close relationship between national Red Cross societies and their governments, as well as the alliance between France and Britain, the French Government accepted the assistance of the BRCS while disapproving of many of the other British left-​wing humanitarian organisations. In a letter to the FO dated 6 March 1939, the French ambassador stated that his government ‘greatly appreciated [the FO’s] suggestion regarding the participation of the British Red Cross and is completely ready to accept the assistance of this organisation’.27 The BRCS felt similarly about the French Government. John Kennedy, the BRCS commissioner overseeing the work in France, conveyed to Montagu-​Pollock that ‘he was very anxious not to offend in any way the susceptibilities of the French authorities, whose feelings appeared already to have been somewhat hurt … by the rather free manner in which the various voluntary workers at Perpignan, many of whom were decidedly “pink”, had expressed themselves’.28 Without a presence in France during the first weeks of February, however, the BRCS not only had little chance to assist, but also lacked an opportunity to criticise French performance. Upon hearing that the British Government had awarded the grant to the BRCS rather than to the IC, several relief workers in the camps voiced their concerns to the FO, including the vice-​chairman of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief (NJC) and independent MP for the English universities, Eleanor Rathbone. On 9 March, Rathbone wrote to R.  A. Butler, Parliamentary Under-​Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, arguing that choosing the BRCS over the IC would be ‘disastrous, in view of the distrust felt by Republicans of the Red Cross Fascist sympathies’. She then went on to describe Commissioner John Kennedy’s companion on his most recent trip to Perpignan (most likely T. P. Kavanagh, the man later assigned to run the BRCS operations in Perpignan) as having been ‘ferociously outspoken in his distrust of “Reds” and willingness to pack them all back to Franco’.29 These private views showed a marked contrast to Rathbone’s earlier public opinions, expressed in the House of Commons in mid-​February, when she attempted to spur the British Government to action, asking Butler, ‘could he not initiate, if the French Government approved, some action on the part of the Red Cross with the support of the Government so that supplies can be sent? What is the Red Cross for if it is never on the spot?’.30 Ostensibly, meeting Kavanagh changed her mind as to the appropriateness of the BRCS to distribute aid to the Spanish refugees.

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The British Red Cross’s work in France Upon receiving the grant, the BRCS wished to use part to fund a public appeal –​a proposal the FO was apprehensive of from the beginning.31 Nevertheless, the appeal appeared in The Times on 14 March 1939 beside the announcement of the British grant. Beyond monetary donations, the BRCS appealed for gifts in kind, such as ‘clothing, particularly underclothing; boots and shoes … invalid foods, soap, toilet articles and comforts’.32 A second appeal was published a week later, using stronger language and exhorting readers to ‘send [their] message of sympathy and compassion either in a cash donation or as a gift in kind’, as ‘operations will be extended in proportion to the help received from the public’.33 By late April, however, the FO dismissed the appeal as having done ‘little more than meet its own cost’.34 In May, Montagu-​Pollock admitted that it had ‘brought in less than £2,000 in cash, and is not expected to bring in any more’.35 Part of the failure of this appeal presumably stems from the political consensus among potential donors. Readers of The Times were well versed in the refugee situation, as the newspaper published numerous articles dealing with the Spanish Civil War in general and the refugee crisis in particular; yet, it maintained a similar line to the British Government, focusing on neutrality, non-​intervention and appeasement. It viewed the Spanish Civil War from multiple angles and published a range of articles in support of both sides. While numerous, these articles were much more dispassionate than similar articles found in papers such as the Manchester Guardian, and ‘on only three occasions did the journalists record the actual words of the refugees’.36 On one occasion, when describing the flight from Catalonia, the article also printed quotes from the gendarmes and customs officers who worked along the Franco-​Spanish frontier, and claimed that the French preparations had been ‘complete’ and that ‘representatives of the Red Cross are active’ –​a position that paralleled both the British Government’s and that of the BRCS.37 Furthermore, once in the camps, The Times referred to them as ‘internment’ or ‘refugee’ camps rather than ‘concentration’ camps. Therefore, when the BRCS published its second appeal on 21 March 1939, it was asking people to show sympathy with a cause for which many conservative, right-​w ing readers of The Times had none, and the appeal did not evoke the same outpouring of support found at many of the pro-​Republican ‘Aid Spain’ fundraising meetings. Furthermore, by issuing its first appeal alongside the announcement of a British Government grant, the BRCS may have caused potential supporters to feel they were solving the problem indirectly, via taxes paid to the Government, and that they did not need to give their own donation. Before the BRCS began its work in the French camps, other British organisations showed a willingness to co-​operate, following the precedent already set by the first three British agencies established in Perpignan (the Quakers, the IC and the NJC).38 In late February, Edith Pye wrote to Audrey Russell, the medical advisor

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to the IC, that her ‘personal view is that the right body to deal with this military question [of soldiers in the camps] is the Red Cross’.39 This idea echoes the founding principles of the Red Cross, that neutral national Red Cross societies should aid the wounded soldiers of armed conflicts indiscriminately. Nevertheless, Pye doubted ‘whether they themselves have the right people to undertake it, and can get going quickly enough’.40 When the grant was officially announced two weeks later, Russell espoused a positive view of the BRCS and a desire to co-​operate:  ‘I agree that it doesn’t matter who does it so long as something is done, and quickly, but whoever comes ought to take the opportunity of benefitting by our experience.’41 For the BRCS, Kennedy was willing to accept the help of other workers but ‘only on condition that they would sign the British Red Cross contract, which included an undertaking that they should refrain from giving publicity to their individual views on the work in hand’.42 As the relief work in France progressed, however, the BRCS desired to separate completely its work from that of other organisations, creating tensions and revealing prejudice, rather than neutrality. Kennedy wrote to the FO to complain that, instead of co-​operating and sharing resources like other agencies, ‘certain English and other organisations in the Perpignan neighbourhood … have been carrying out a certain amount of relief work among the Spanish Refugees and are giving the impression that they are working for the British Red Cross’.43 Kennedy’s bias manifested itself in other ways as well. Contrary to other reports, he continually emphasised the successful, efficient and competent coordination of the camps by the French authorities, and favourably compared the camps to the trench conditions experienced by the British army during the First World War. In his first report, he asserted that before the 200,000 men could be dispersed from the camps, they ‘must be disinfected both physically and mentally’, and stated: It is no part of my task to put forward any suggestion which has any political tinge, but, if I may give a soldier’s opinion after spending a day among these men I should be very much against any collective judgment of them. Most of them appeared to me to be just rather exhausted, bewildered Spanish boys, fine looking boys, uneducated boys, who have tried to digest and understand semi-​educated rubbish.44

In his second report, Kennedy advocated for a system of teaching for the refugees that ‘would equip them to return to Spain as possibly wiser and better citizens of their country’. In terms of amusement, Kennedy claimed that games and footballs ‘could be of the greatest value in giving these men the necessary amusement to relieve the monotony of the Camp and possibly take their minds off politics and other undesirable things’, particularly for a population who he was ‘told are by nature inclined to be idle’. This report also included a comment from a Spanish officer who claimed he ‘was afraid the men were getting too much meat’, contrasting sharply with other reports of only one loaf of bread for every twenty-​five men.45

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While Kennedy considered himself ‘neutral’ and, therefore, unbiased, the relief work undertaken by the BRCS suffered from a reliance on reports of the right-​wing French Government and an unfavourable opinion of the refugees –​one shared by the single BRCS relief worker on the ground in France, T. P. Kavanagh. Kavanagh, who had previously lived in Barcelona with his Spanish wife, held more than just conservative political persuasions: he openly supported Franco. At the end of March, a few weeks after beginning his work for the BRCS in France, Kavanagh insisted that the FO contact Franco’s Government and make it quite clear that the work [Kavanagh] is doing among the refugees of the Republican Army is being done entirely at the request of the British Red Cross Society and is nothing to do with any political sympathies for those to whom relief is being given. He is, in fact, an ardent supporter of General Franco and is hoping to go back and live in Spain when the situation in Barcelona permits.46

After several months in Perpignan, Montagu-​Pollock stated that Kavanagh had gained ‘the reputation of preferring to go to the [French] Authorities and ask them what they want to entering the camps to study conditions at first hand’, and he blamed Kavanagh for the unwillingness of Russell to co-​operate with the BRCS as desired by the FO because she felt he was ‘not tackling the problem sufficiently seriously’.47 Yet the 1939 BRCS report claimed that Kavanagh had been ‘extremely successful in getting things done, and in maintaining cordial relations with all concerned’.48 Spending (or not spending) the Government grant Despite Kavanagh’s ‘success’, however, the grant was never fully spent. Final accounts showed a total expenditure of just under £35,000.49 An early letter from the French ambassador explicitly sought aid in the form of camping and sleeping equipment, stating ‘If the British Red Cross was able to send to Perpignan as soon as possible a great quantity of this equipment, it would be an invaluable service.’50 In his own defence, Kennedy later declared, ‘We have been given a definite sum of money. We have a definite plan to expend it’ –​a plan that never fully appeared.51 Ignoring the French Government’s appeal, the BRCS’s first idea was a fully equipped field hospital, an endeavour unsupported by the British Government. On 15 March, Pollock informed Kennedy that the FO was ‘somewhat anxious lest, if the Red Cross Society concentrated its activities on organising a hospital outside the camps to the exclusion of any work within the camps, the criticism might be made that His Majesty’s Government’s intervention was insufficiently effective’. He impressed upon Kennedy ‘the importance of quick action in regard to the supply of tents and bedding’.52 Francis Hemming, the British secretary of the Non-​Intervention Committee, also criticised this idea for barely addressing the refugee problem, and he claimed the BRCS had ‘no intention of doing anything outside their normal lines of activity’.53 The idea of

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running a separate field hospital was abandoned in March, but this initial indecisiveness led to a delay in providing substantial aid. Another source of delay stemmed from the BRCS’s desire to spend the grant on British goods and then ship the supplies to France, rather than buying locally. Concerned more with the British national economy than expediency or efficiency, Kennedy stated in a letter to Montagu-​Pollock, ‘I should like to be sure that these large sums of money which are now being spent in relief should, as far as possible, be spent in England.’54 Shipped from London, the consignments then languished between two and nine days at Bordeaux awaiting customs permits, since the BRCS had managed to secure exemption from import duty, saving some money but resulting in further delay.55 Other voluntary organisations were not given the same exemption except on shipments of clothing. In July 1939, Dorothy Morris, a Quaker relief worker, explained in a letter to the Friends that the half-​franc duty per kilo necessitated serious consideration of which goods to send, with only large orders of milk, cocoa and sugar being deemed worthy. As Morris explained, ‘The whole point from the French point of view, of course, is that it is desirable to receive money and spend it locally’, thus paralleling the position taken by the BRCS towards British goods.56 By 14 April 1939, the BRCS had sent only 11,800 blankets, despite the French Government’s plea for bedding supplies.57 It also claimed to have provided upwards of 45,000 men with new clothing, even though more than 200,000 Republican soldiers had crossed the border in military uniform with nothing else to wear.58 Furthermore, these numbers were likely exaggerated, as Kennedy’s third report, submitted to the FO around the same date, showed that only 26,551 shirts, 12,084 shorts and trousers, and 31,811 sets of underclothing were issued. Clothing remained a problem throughout April, and Kennedy named it one of his chief concerns, yet he insisted the BRCS was ‘doing all we can with our resources about [clothing] though, of course, we cannot possibly do enough with the money at our disposal’ –​money that was never fully spent.59 Along with providing too little, the BRCS also failed to consider the types of clothing appropriate for the situation. Speaking to Montagu-​Pollock on behalf of the NJC, Lord Faringdon, a Labour peer, pointed out on 4 May that the sets of clothing included shorts, ‘a form of clothing which all Spaniards regarded as indecent’.60 Similarly, Nancy Mitford, an English novelist and eldest of the famous Mitford sisters, who spent several weeks volunteering in France, declared in a letter to her mother that ‘The Red Cross are not much help, they issue shorts which Spaniards abominate, having a sense of dignity.’61 Mitford’s husband, Peter Rodd, also complained to Montagu-​Pollock that the BRCS’s khaki shorts were ‘garments which no Spaniard would dream of wearing and which will make him feel a complete fool’. Rodd used this letter to blame these inadequacies on both the British Government and the BRCS, saying, ‘The Government made a grossly insufficient grant of £50.000[,]‌[sic] a sum which amounts to a little less than two shillings per

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head of refugees for a period which now exceeds three months, and which has in any case been idiotically spent.’62 Furthermore, in a letter to Gladwyn Jebb, private secretary to Alec Cadogan, the Permanent Under-​Secretary of State at the FO, Rodd declared, ‘My view, which is not particularly important, but also the view of all the French authorities, civil and military which I have consulted, is that the British government are hardly taking their share of the responsibility. £50,000 is too small a fine to pay for failing to appear on a petition in bankruptcy, of a national policy.’63 Nevertheless, the BRCS sent the clothing that the French Government believed was necessary and therefore requested, without proper consideration as to how the goods met the needs of the refugees. Indeed, a report sent to the FO by Russell exposed the decision to outfit the refugees in shorts as French, and she argued it should be discouraged as impractical because of the mosquitos swarming above the marshy ground at the camps.64 Even worse than mere discomfort was the danger of epidemic since, at one point, Saint-​Cyprien was declared a ‘Malaria Zone’.65 The provision of unsuitable khaki shorts provided by the BRCS was predicated on a desire to provide clothing for the summer weather that was soon to arrive without considering the cultural norms, comfort or safety of the group being assisted. Thus, by the time the BRCS had spent £30,000 and was requesting additional funds in mid-​May, even the FO had begun contemplating ‘the value of the Society’s activities’ and whether it should ‘consider curtailing [the] grant to whatever may be needed to cover commitments already made’.66 One week earlier, Montagu-​Pollock had detailed the shortcomings of the BRCS, stating that ‘the Red Cross certainly made a bad mistake in failing to provide any relief quickly’, having taken ‘nearly two months to get under way … due to its determination that all the goods supplied should be British’. Concerning the second point, Montagu-​Pollock admitted that ‘the Red Cross does not appear to have been very clever at investigating the real needs and ensuring that they were quickly met either by itself or by the French Authorities’.67 Nevertheless, the FO maintained its public support for the BRCS and was able to avoid the issue of making another grant with the start of the Second World War.68 At its 13 July 1939 meeting, the BRCS Finance Subcommittee stated, ‘In view of the fact that it was hoped to close the account in about a month’s time it was not the intention of the Society to ask for the balance of the grant.’69 Therefore, the committee made the decision to discontinue relief work at a time when there were at least 138,000 men still in camps, and only a month after the NJC described the clothing needs as ‘very heavy’. The threat of war and need to provide aid at home were of no consequence.70 Several weeks later, in a weekly report from Perpignan, the NJC testified that women and children were still arriving from Spain ‘in a constant stream’ and that the French had requested 100 extra blankets, the same type of request it initially made of the BRCS and that could have been funded from the British Government grant.71

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It was at this point, however, that, in line with the ICRC’s opinion of the German concentration camps during the 1930s, the BRCS felt the conditions of the camps had reached an adequate level of maintenance. Camps were not inherently inhumane as long as they were maintained. Pye disagreed, claiming the camps suffered from overcrowding and stating that ‘the conditions of an ant-​heap still remain to make it purgatory for those accustomed to ordinary conditions of space and solitude’. She did admit, however, that there had been enormous improvements in the camp conditions by the end of June.72 Kennedy felt ‘quite satisfied’ with the BRCS’s work in the camps and remarked, ‘I am quite sure that the Government’s money has been wisely spent, and that the contribution which they have made is thoroughly appreciated both by the French and by the internees themselves.’ He went on to say that he felt ‘the time has now arrived when having spent £30,000 of the Government grant, and having established ourselves as the main agency for relief to which everyone is looking, we must make forecast for the future’.73 Unfortunately for the Spanish refugees, that future did not extend to fully expending the grant they were given. Conclusion Quite often the nature of a national government dictates the actions and sympathies of its respective Red Cross society. During the Spanish Civil War, non-​intervention was not neutral, but actually aided Franco’s Spain by preventing the Spanish Republic from purchasing arms even though it was the legitimately elected Government, and turned a blind eye to the foreign aid given to the Nationalists by Germany and Italy. Yet non-​intervention was in the national interests of Britain and France:  neither country was prepared for war in 1936 and believed that the best way to contain the war in Spain was through non-​intervention. They also naively believed that Hitler could be placated and appeased, both in Spain and later in Czechoslovakia. Finally, with the fall of Barcelona and with the end of the war imminent, Britain and France chose to recognise Franco’s Spain in February 1939. This decision was taken before the end of the war, in the hope that by establishing good relations with Franco’s Government, they could prevent his entering a European war that most saw as inevitable by this point, thus preventing France from having to fight a war on two fronts. The BRCS and FRC maintained a similar policy. They professed neutrality while doing as little as possible actually to help the Spanish Republicans. Throughout the war, this manifested itself in giving help via the ICRC, but with the introduction of half-​a-​million Spanish Republican refugees on French soil in February 1939, the two societies could not remain absent forever. Instead, the FRC appealed for volunteers, so that those French citizens who wished to aid the situation could do so, without making its full resources available for the Spanish.74 The British Government granted a paltry sum of only £50,000 to the BRCS, of which less than £35,000 was spent –​the same amount spent by France on the refugees each day. At the end of November,

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when the BRCS submitted its final accounts, the true priorities of the Government came to light. One FO worker, M. S. Williams, stated in the minutes that there was ‘an appreciable saving on the grant of £50,000 originally contemplated’, suggesting that the FO looked favourably on the economical way the BRCS used the grant and felt no regret in not having aided the Spanish refugees more generously.75 Although this is just one episode in the history of the Red Cross, the case study suggests that the way the BRCS handled its responsibilities during the Spanish refugee crisis reflects the similar mind-​set that exists between governments and their national Red Cross societies. Notes 1 The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA), FO 371/​24157, W 8979/​2694/​41, minute by H. L. Farquhar, 13 June 1939. 2 D. W. Pike, Vae victis! Los Republicanos españoles refugiados en Francia, 1939–​1944 (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1969), p. 13. 3 J. Villarroya i Font, 1939: Derrota i exili (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2000), p. 11; P. de Azcárate, En defensa de la República: Con Negrín en el exilio (Barcelona: Crítica, 2010), p. 107. 4 L. Tarragó, El document de Prats: Informe de l’exode de la població civil i dels Exèrcits Republicans Espanyols a Prats de Molló del 27 de Gener al 16 de Març de 1939, trans. T. Artigas (Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2009), p. 49. 5 Denis Peschanski promotes the idea of three stages of camps in many of his works. See ‘El paso de Le Perthus pone punto final a la República’, in J. Jornet (ed.), Republicanos españoles en Midi-​ Pyrénées: Exilio, historia y memoria (Zaragoza: Gobierno de Aragón, 2007), p. 126; La France des camps: L’internement, 1938–​1946 (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), pp. 42–​3; and ‘Reception camps’, in T. Ferré Panisello and M. Guerrero (eds), Agustí Centelles: The Concentration Camp at Bram, 1939 (Barcelona: Arts Santa Mònica, 2009), pp. 12–​13. The divisions here have been modified slightly, as Peschanski starts stage three with the building of more permanent huts in the large stage-​two camps and includes only tent-​like structures in stage two. 6 I. de Palencia, Smouldering Freedom: The Story of the Spanish Republicans in Exile (New York: Longmans, Green, 1945), p.  86. See also J. Gálvez Preito, quoted in S. Gemie, F. Reid, L. Humbert and L. Ingram, Outcast Europe: Refugees and Relief Workers in an Era of Total War 1936–​48 (London: Continuum, 2012). 7 F. Pons, Barbelés à Argelès et autour d’autres camps (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), p. 37. 8 Ibid., p. 36. Labour Party Archive, Manchester, William Gillies papers (WG), WG/​SPA 579, report entitled ‘The Situation of Spanish Refugees in France’, 24 February 1939. 9 M. Marín-​Dòmine, ‘Catalan Concentrationary Literature’, Catalan Review, 25 (2011), 11–​17 (p. 12). 10 R. Grando, J. Queralt and X. Febrés, Camps du mépris:  Des chemins de l’exil à ceux de la Résistance 1939–​1945, 5th edn (Canet: Editions Trabucaire, 2004), p. 81. 11 Hansard, House of Commons Debates, Vol. CCCXLIII (31 January 1939), col. 73, N. Chamberlain. 12 TNA, FO 371/​24154, W 3788/​2694/​41, minute by Montagu-​Pollock, 3 March 1939. 13 TNA, FO 371/​21372, W 12998/​37/​41, letter from chairman of Executive Committee of BRCS to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 7 June 1937.

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14 D. Forsythe, The Humanitarians:  The International Committee of the Red Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); B. Taithe, ‘The Red Cross Flag in the Franco-​Prussian War: Civilians, Humanitarians and War in the “Modern Age” ’, in R. Cooter, M. Harrison and S. Sturdy (eds), War, Medicine and Modernity (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), pp. 34–​5. 15 J. Crossland, Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1939–​1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 24. 16 Forsythe, The Humanitarians, p.  39. See also M. Junod, Warrior without Weapons, trans. E. Fitzgerald (London: Cape, 1951). 17 M. Barnett and T. G. Weiss, ‘Humanitarianism: A Brief History of the Present’, in M. Barnett and T. G. Weiss (eds), Humanitarianism in Question:  Politics, Power, Ethics (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 37. 18 J.-​C. Favez, The Red Cross and the Holocaust, ed. and trans. J. Fletcher and B. Fletcher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 4, 19. See also Crossland, Britain and the ICRC, p. 44. 19 See British Red Cross Archive, London (BRCA), RCB/​1/​3/​9, minutes of the 289th meeting of the Finance Subcommittee of the BRCS, 9 March 1939. 20 F. Solé and G. Tuban, Camp d’Argelers 1939–​1942, 2nd edn (Valls:  Cossetània Ediciones, 2011), p. 108; TNA, FO 371/​24136, W 2077/​66/​41, letter from French ambassador to George Mounsey, 28 January 1939. 21 A. Mínguez Anaya, Los campos de Argelés, St. Cyprien y Barcarés, 1939–​1942: Arena, Viento, Frio, Hambre, Sudor, Soledad y Muerte de los Republicanos españoles en las playas del sur de Francia ([Móstoles]: ‘Memoria Viva’ Asociación para el Estudio de la Deportación y el Exilio Español, 2012), pp. 96, 123. 22 Pons, Barbelés à Argelès, p. 54. 23 P. Marqués, La Croix-​Rouge pendant la Guerre d’Espagne (1936–​1939):  Les missionnaires de l’humanitaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), p. 369. 24 TNA, FO 371/​24154, W 2695/​2694/​41W, minute by W. Montagu-​Pollock, 8 February 1939. 25 J. Carles Clemente, El Árbol de la Vida: La Cruz Roja en la Guerra Civil Española (1936–​1939) (Barcelona: Laboratorios Beecham, 1993), p. 96. 26 J. H. Simpson, Refugees: A Review of the Situation since September 1938 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939), p. 59; F. G. Smith, Jr, ‘Spaniards in Exile’, Nation, 148:20 (13 May 1939),  557–​8. 27 TNA, FO 371/​24155, W 4001/​2694/​41, letter from French ambassador, 6 March 1939. 28 TNA, FO 371/​24155, W 4513/​2694/​41, record of conversation between W. Montagu-​Pollock and J. Kennedy, 15 March 1939. 29 TNA, FO 371/​24155, W 4541/​2694/​41, letter from E. Rathbone to R. A. Butler, 9 March 1939. 30 Hansard, House of Commons Debates, Vol. CCCLXIII (13 February 1939), col. 1347, E. Rathbone. 31 TNA, FO 371/​24155, W 4733/​2694/​41, letter from W.  Montagu-​Pollock to F.  C. Davies, 24 March 1939. 32 BRCS, ‘Field Hospital for Spanish Refugees’, The Times (14 March 1939). 33 BRCS, ‘A Mission of Mercy’, The Times (21 March 1939). 34 TNA, FO 371/​24156, W 6218/​2694/​41, letter from L. R. Sherwood to S. H. Wright, 26 April 1939. 35 TNA, FO 371/​24156, W 7471/​2694/​41, minute by W. Montagu-​Pollock, 9 May 1939. 36 Gemie et al., Outcast Europe, p. 15. 37 ‘Our Special Correspondent’, ‘Flight from Catalonia’, The Times (30 January 1939). 38 Friends Service Council Archive, Society of Friends, London (SOF), FSC/​R/​SP/​3/​4, letter from A. Russell to E. Pye, 21 February 1939. 39 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Library, Washington, DC (USHMM), RG-​ 67.007M, Box 9, folder 1, letter from E. Pye to A. Russell, 25 February 1939.

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4 0 Ibid. 41 SOF, FSC/​R/​SP/​3/​4, letter from A. Russell, 9 March 1939. 42 TNA, FO 371/​24155, W 4513/​2694/​41, record of conversation between W. Montagu-​Pollock and J. Kennedy, 15 March 1939. 43 TNA, FO 371/​24156, W7875/​2694/​41, letter from J. Kennedy to [A. Cadogan], 16 May 1939. 44 BRCA, RCB/​1/​2/​11, first report on the condition of the French camps by J.  Kennedy, 27 February 1939, included in the minutes of the 297th meeting of the Executive Committee of the BRCS, 10 March 1939. 45 BRCA, RCB/​1/​2/​11, second report on the condition of the French camps by J.  Kennedy, 3 April 1939, included in the minutes of the 298th meeting of the Executive Committee of the BRCS, 14 April 1939; O. D. Gallagher, ‘Britons Sleep in Sandholes, Eat Mule Stew’, Daily Express (13 February 1939); ‘Still Suffering’, Manchester Guardian (14 February 1939). 46 TNA, FO 371/​24155, W 5355/​2694/​41, letter from J.  Kennedy to W.  Montagu-​Pollock, 29 March 1939. 47 TNA, FO 371/​24156, W 7471/​2694/​41, minute by W. Montagu-​Pollock, 9 May 1939. 48 BRCA, RCC/​1/​29/​16, report for the year 1939. 49 TNA, FO 371/​ 23171, C 19434/​ 14018/​ 41, letter from J.  Kennedy to I.  Kirkpatrick, 27 November 1939. 50 TNA, FO 371/​24155, W4001/​2694/​41, letter from French ambassador to the Foreign Office, 10 March 1939. 51 TNA, FO 371/​24156, W 7029/​2694/​41, letter from J.  Kennedy to W.  Montagu-​Pollock, 28 April 1939. 52 Record of conversation between Montagu-​Pollock and Kennedy, 15 March 1939; emphasis in original. 53 TNA, FO 371/​ 24155, W 4975/​ 2694/​ 41, letter from F.  Hemming to Lord Plymouth, 15 March 1939. 54 TNA, FO 371/​24155, W 5939/​2694/​41, letter from J.  Kennedy to W.  Montagu-​Pollock, 4 April 1939. 55 TNA, FO 371/​24156, W 6305/​2694/​41, letter from F.  C. Davies to W.  Montagu-​Pollock, 18 April 1939. 56 SOF, FSC/​R/​SP/​3/​4, letter from D. Morris to D. Thomson, 21 July 1939. 57 TNA, FO 371/​24156, W 6306/​2694/​41, third report on the conditions of the French camps by J. Kennedy, 17 April 1939. 58 BRCA, RCB/​1/​2/​11, minutes of the 298th Executive Committee of the BRCS, 14 April 1939. 59 TNA, letter from Kennedy to Pollock, 28 April 1939. 60 TNA, FO 371/​24156, W 7471/​2694/​41, record of conversation between Lord Faringdon and W. Montagu-​Pollock, 9 May 1939. 61 N. Mitford, Love from Nancy:  The Letters of Nancy Mitford, ed. Charlotte Mosley (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993), p. 81. 62 TNA, FO 371/​ 24156, W 7473/​ 2694/​ 41, letter from P.  Rodd to W.  Montagu-​ Pollock, [5 May 1939]. 63 TNA, FO 371/​24156, W 6163/​2694/​41, letter from P. Rodd to G. Jebb, 11 April 1939. 64 TNA, FO 371/​24156, W 7347/​2694/​41, report on medical service in Spanish refugee camps and hospitals by A. Russell, 2 May 1939. 65 L. Pouységur, ‘Les réfugiés républicains espagnols dans le sud-​ouest de la France’, in M. Cohen and E. Malo (eds), Les camps du sud-​ouest de la France, 1939–​1944:  Exclusion, internement et déportation (Toulouse: Editions Privat, 1994), p. 27. 66 TNA, FO 371/​24156, W 7910/​2694/​41, minute by L. R. Sherwood, 16 May 1939. 67 TNA, FO 371/​24156, W 7471/​2694/​41, minute by W. Montagu-​Pollock, 9 May 1939.

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68 TNA, FO 371/​24156, W 7471/​2694/​41, record of conversation between Lord Faringdon and W. Montagu-​Pollock, 9 May 1939. 69 BRCA, RCB/​1/​3/​9, minutes of the 293rd meeting of the Finance Subcommittee of the BRCS, 13 July 1939. 70 USHMM, RG-​67.007M, Box 15, folder 1, letter from A.  Russell to D.  Morris, 31 July 1939; National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Thomas Murray Papers, 9083/​2/​1, NJC, ‘Great Welcome for “Sinaia” ’, 15 June 1939. 71 Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, Coventry, Wilfrid Roberts Papers, MSS 308/​ 3/​FR/​4, weekly report from Perpignan, 29 July 1939. 72 SOF, FSC/​R/​SP/​4, report from Perpignan by E. Pye, 28 June 1939. 73 TNA, FO 371/​24157, W 8784/​2694/​41, letter from Kennedy to Roberts, 1 June 1939. Roberts took over for Montagu-​Pollock at the beginning of June when Montagu-​Pollock moved to Sweden to be the chargé d’affaires. 74 WG, ‘The Situation of Spanish Refugees in France’. The president of the French Red Cross, the Marquis of Lillers, signed a manifesto urging French people of all political opinions to donate money, food and clothes to alleviate the plight of the Spanish refugees (cited in Pike, Vae victis, p. 21). 75 TNA, FO 371/​23171, C 19434/​14018/​41, minute by M. S. Williams, 14 December 1939.

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The British Red Cross Society and the ‘parcels crisis’ of 1940–​1 Neville Wylie

The ‘parcels crisis’ of 1940–​1 concerned the faltering efforts of the British Red Cross Society (BRCS) to supply relief parcels to British prisoners of war (POWs) captured by Germany during the Battle of France in May/​June 1940. On the face of it, the subject might appear rather trivial. The numbers of men involved –​some 45,000 –​were comparatively modest when set against the 2 million French, Polish, Belgian, Dutch and Norwegian servicemen who fell into German hands at the same time. Likewise, fretting over the dispatch of relief parcels to men who enjoyed the protection of the POW convention of 1929 and were spared the racially motivated excesses of the Nazi regime might also seem indulgent. The significance of the ‘crisis’, for our purposes, though, lies in what it tells us about the modus operandi of the BRCS, and the wider Red Cross Movement, at one of the most testing times of its history. The provision of relief parcels was arguably the most significant wartime activity undertaken by national societies. In the BRCS’s case, relief operations consumed nearly two-​thirds of its budget in early 1941; its success in supplying food, medical and ‘next-​of-​kin’ parcels to British prisoners ultimately assured it a central place in the nation’s war narrative.1 The comment inscribed into one POW logbook  –​‘God bless the Red Cross, they saved us from starvation’ –​typified the sentiment held by the 365,000 British servicemen who spent time in enemy hands between 1939 and 1945.2 The collapse of the relief-​parcel system after the fall of France very nearly jeopardised this impressive achievement.3 While the practical problems created were largely overcome by mid-​1941, the BRCS’s handling of the episode exposed weaknesses in the running of the organisation and in the Red Cross Movement more broadly. It revealed an institution out of touch with the popular mood, poorly led and ill equipped to meet the challenge of total war. Though many of the criticisms levelled against it were unjust, the crisis sorely tested the BRCS’s capacity to function in three key areas: the management of public debate and expectations as the crisis unfolded, the defence of its institutional autonomy against Government encroachments, and the leveraging of resources and connections as a member of the international Red Cross Movement.

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We will turn to these three areas in turn, but before doing so, it is important to consider the position that the provision of relief parcels occupied in the Red Cross as a whole. This was one of the few areas where the Red Cross enjoyed a clear locus standi. Amongst the myriad of voluntary aid societies that sprang up to attend to the needs of the battlefield sick and wounded over the last decades of the nineteenth century, it was the national Red Cross societies that established an early and commanding position in the field. Though not explicitly identified in the various international codes, the national societies were generally taken to be synonymous with the ‘regularly constituted … relief societies for prisoners of war’ mentioned in the 1899 Hague Convention. As such, they were entitled to ‘distribute relief in the camps and at the halting places of repatriated prisoners’ and receive from the official authorities ‘all facilities for the efficacious performance of their humane tasks’.4 The belligerents’ Red Cross societies largely lived up to these expectations between 1914 and 1918, frequently acting as a clearing house for the work of other voluntary agencies that sought to care for the needs of their servicemen abroad.5 The Red Cross’s involvement in the lives of POWs was also reflected in the work of the ‘Central Agency’, responsible for tracing the whereabouts of prisoners and communicating this information to the belligerent governments, and expressly acknowledged in the first POW Convention, signed in July 1929, which recognised the ‘humanitarian activities’ of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).6 It was no surprise, then, that the return of war in September 1939 saw national Red Cross societies on both sides of the battle-​lines quietly resume their work on behalf of POWs. In Britain, the BRCS immediately joined forces with the Order of St John of Jerusalem, as it had in the Great War, to form a Joint War Organisation ( JWO). Although POW relief operations were carried out under the JWO umbrella, the close association of the Red Cross with POWs meant that for most people, the distinction between the two institutions was blurred. It was a senior BRCS official, Lord Clarendon, who headed up the JWO’s POW department, and popular parlance referred to ‘Red Cross’, not ‘JWO’, parcels. Public relations One of the striking features of the parcels crisis was the speed with which BRCS public standing disintegrated once criticisms of its conduct began featuring in the press and Parliament in mid-​October 1940. Although the institution was arguably the most prestigious voluntary organisation in the British Empire by 1939, its record on POW matters during the First World War left much to be desired. Entrusted in late 1916 with bringing order to the national parcel production effort, its managerial competence was soon cast into doubt, which led to a parliamentary committee being called to look into its affairs the following year. The committee stepped back from censuring the organisation, but the BRCS leadership found it difficult to shrug off criticisms and continued to receive periodic mauling in the press until

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the final months of the war.7 Such doubts quickly resurfaced after 1939, and fuelled public concern when the BRCS’s handling of POW parcels was called into question the following year. As one War Office (WO) official wearily reflected in the early summer of 1941, ‘truly history has repeated itself ’.8 In trying to manage the crisis, the BRCS was hampered by its inability to control information and shape the ‘narrative’ of events. The parcels crisis stands as a rare exception in humanitarian affairs, in that the dialogue between those delivering and those receiving aid was one of near equality. Far from being voiceless or out of earshot, the prisoners drew on their letter-​w riting privileges under the 1929 Convention to alert relatives to their plight. News started trickling through the censorship authorities in mid-​July 1940. By mid-​August, prisoners’ letters were routinely circulated among the prisoners’ next of kin, and began cropping up in press commentaries and in parliamentary questions. While much of the information was, necessarily, out of date by the time it reached the UK, the POWs’ letters provided their supporters with the wherewithal to challenge official or BRCS statements on the provision of parcels or the state of POW health. On Christmas Eve 1940, for instance, The Times was able to give voice to the frustration of the senior British officer at Oflag VII C/​H, Laufen in south-​east Bavaria, who informed the newspaper’s readers that ‘since the beginning of August no parcels [had] been received direct from the Red Cross in Britain, except three containing medical foods’.9 It was not just in the control of information, however, that the BRCS found itself out-​manoeuvred. Throughout the twelve months following the fall of France, the Society struggled to retain the initiative in its relations with the prisoners’ next of kin, and the body that came to represent their views at a national level, the POW Relatives Association (POWRA). Although the BRCS initially welcomed POWRA, the eruption of the parcels crisis set the two bodies on divergent paths. The challenge facing the BRCS was partly organisational. The next-​of-​kin associations had emerged organically over the late summer to provide practical and emotional support to the prisoners’ families, and were inevitably more attuned to their needs than local Red Cross branches, far less the national headquarters in London.10 Even at a national level, though, the BRCS found it difficult to match the intensity of the next of kin’s advocacy work. Its most formidable opponent was Winifred Coombe Tennant, JP, Liberal parliamentary candidate and one time member of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, who peppered the press, Parliament and even the palace with memoranda on the parcels crisis, based on synopses of prisoners’ letters and dissections of the parliamentary debates and official communiqués. Although the principal focus of her ire was the WO and Government policy, the BRCS was not spared her invective, or her bombarding, in the words of a WO official, of ‘people all over England with implications that the Red Cross is not doing its best for the prisoners’.11 By the spring of 1941, MPs regularly drew on her memoranda in cross-​ examining government spokesmen and questioning the Red Cross’ performance.

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The zeal with which Coombe Tennant, and others like her, took up the cause of prisoners lay partly in the fear of seeing their loved ones become scapegoats for the lamentable showing of British arms in Norway, France and, later, Crete. This was understandable, given the stigma still attached to the act of surrender, though in reality official attitudes towards British POWs in 1940 were surprisingly benevolent.12 Red Cross and Government officials sympathised with the prisoners’ lot, even if they occasionally questioned whether the ‘acute sense of insufficiency’ experienced by prisoners –​especially officer prisoners –​actually amounted to the starvation conditions so often claimed.13 With the country steeling itself for invasion, few cared to add to the misery of those who had, as one well-​connected next of kin put it, ‘absorbed the full shock of the enemy’s onslaught in England’s darkest hour’, and tragically missed the ‘miracle’ of Dunkirk: men who were, in short, the latest unwitting victims of Britain’s failed policy of appeasement.14 Certainly POWRA had not set out to challenge the BRCS: quite the reverse. The organisation set out to cater for the London-​based next of kin, and to act as a ‘central office’ for the other regional and affiliated organisations (numbering some 180 by early 1943).15 It did, though, aspire to operating as ‘a useful liaison between the prisoners themselves, and the B[ritish] R[ed] C[ross] & St. J[ohn] W[ar] O[rganisation] by means of extracts from letters published in the News-​sheet, which could also be used as a medium for conveying information from the B.R.C & St. J. W.O. to their relatives’.16 As such, it was initially wary of associating itself too closely with Coombe Tennant, lest her methods damage efforts to establish POWRA as the legitimate and respectable ‘voice’ for the next-​of-​kin community. Still, POWRA could scarcely ignore the drumbeat of complaints coming from the regional organisations, and over the autumn, its interventions into the public debate became more strident. Its regular ‘News-​Sheet’, which boasted a circulation of some 6,000 by the end of the year, increasingly gave vent to the prisoners’ frustration at the trickle of parcels reaching their camps. The recruitment of Dame Adelaide Livingstone, one-​time honorary secretary to the official committee that investigated allegations of prisoner ill-​treatment during the First World War, marked an important stage in POWRA’s development. The veteran campaigner brought a wealth of experience to the organisation and a tenacity equal to that of Coombe Tennant. After one meeting with Livingstone, Field Marshall Sir Philip Chetwode, the BRCS chairman, admitted to being left in a state ‘bordering on dementia’.17 It was under Livingstone’s tutelage that POWRA began to lend its weight to calls for an official inquiry into the BRCS’s handling of the ‘crisis’, and the creation of a separate department in Whitehall to co-​ ordinate Government policy towards its men in enemy hands.18 Critics of the BRCS were keen to point out that throughout the late summer and autumn, individuals in neutral countries succeeded in getting parcels into Germany when the BRCS’s own efforts continued to flounder under the weight of ‘insuperable transport obstacles’. The most celebrated of these individuals was Mrs Campbell, whose ‘POW comforts fund’ mobilised the large ex-​pat and anglophile community

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in Portugal, and well-​wishers in her native United States, to dispatch parcels to individual officers held at Oflag VII C/​H. The apparent ease with which Mrs Campbell’s parcels reached the camps –​about ten days from dispatch to delivery –​meant that the next of kin increasingly turned to her, and her counterparts in Geneva, Berne, Bucharest, Sophia, Ankara and elsewhere, to send material to their loved ones. It was these ‘amateur’ networks that supplied prisoners with their first tangible contact with home and filled the void left by the official, ‘Red Cross’, efforts, whose bulk-​ transport operations only began to reach the camps in early 1941. The Government’s decision, in early November 1940, to restrict these ad hoc operations  –​on the grounds that they exacerbated Britain’s foreign exchange position; compromised the blockade; and privileged individual, usually officer, POWs over other ranks –​ was naturally met with incredulity by the next of kin, and fuelled resentment at the apparent favouritism shown towards the BRCS. How, then, should we judge the BRCS’s performance? There is little doubt that the Society’s ‘public relations’ effort was woefully inadequate. Not all of this was the BRCS’s fault. It was the Government, and not the BRCS, that restricted the activities of British communities in neutral Europe. Mrs Campbell’s activities might embarrass the BRCS, but halting them was, in the words of one BRCS staffer, both ‘unwise and unfair’.19 The BRCS’s failure to grasp the scale of problem was likewise not entirely its fault, since its calculations were based on information provided by the WO, whose staff misjudged the number of prisoners in German hands by a quarter. There was certainly some truth behind Chetwode’s complaint that ‘so far we have got all the blame in the Press over Prisoners of war, and it is nothing to do with us’.20 The BRCS’s messaging was, however, poor. For the next of kin, whose imprisoned relatives spoke of hunger and neglect, the BRCS’s dry statistics or hand-​ wringing accounts of the dilapidated state of European transport networks inevitably failed to strike the right note. The depiction of camp conditions given in the BRCS’s monthly magazine, the Prisoner of War, were likewise criticised for their lack of objectivity, though many of the inaccuracies only became apparent after prisoners returned home in 1945.21 Even Government officials, who were alive to the difficulties facing the parcel traffic, found the BRCS’s statements frustratingly opaque. British diplomats abroad dismissed BRCS reports as ‘complete eyewash’, while the director of POWs in the WO became so irritated by the mendacious and misleading information that he even suggested the WO vet communiqués before they entered the public domain.22 A postwar study by the WO admitted to its staff keeping a ‘steadily increasing watch and control over the actual work of the Society’ lest it encroach on ‘matters regarding prisoners of war which … do not come within their province at all’.23 The BRCS’s handling of relations with POWRA and other campaigners was also poor. True, having provided POWRA with funds, office space and access to BRCS databases, it was natural for Chetwode and his colleagues to feel piqued by POWRA’s incessant snipping in the press and lobbying in Parliament. At the

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same time, they were clearly naive in thinking that the heat could be taken from POWRA’s campaign by refusing to engage with its leaders or acknowledge its right to represent the prisoners’ interests. Chetwode and Clarendon adopted a distinctly condescending attitude towards Mrs P. M. Stewart, and her successor as POWRA’s organising secretary in April 1941, J. Craig Harvey, neither of whom enjoyed high social standing. The tendency to disparage POWRA’s efforts to voice the concerns of the next of kin persisted, long after POWRA’s criticisms began to colour opinions in Westminster, Whitehall and in what Chetwode dubbed the ‘cheap press’.24 The assumption that it was the Red Cross, and not the next of kin, that ‘spoke’ for the prisoners remained firmly entrenched, reflecting a distinctly elitist view of the Red Cross’s role that was out of step with the increasingly democratic gloss being given to Britain’s war effort by the end of 1940. Although the BRCS approved a further grant in aid to POWRA in December, it was not until the recruitment of Stanley Adams to the JWO in late January 1941, discussed below, that a concerted effort was made to reach out to critics in the press, Parliament, and POWRA’s national and regional committees. Even then, senior staff kept Adams on a tight rein to avoid giving ‘misleading and incorrect impressions of the [ Joint] War Organisation vis-​ a-​vis the POWRA’.25 Adams’s charm offensive certainly appeased the BRCS’s critics, but his very success only went to underline the extent to which the BRCS leadership had ignored the next of kin over the previous six months. The BRCS was also guilty of some of the administrative shortcomings that featured so prominently in the views of its critics. Over the late summer of 1940, a concerted effort was made to expand parcel packing capacity, with nine packaging centres either opened or expanded to cope with the expected demand. The same foresight was not shown, however, in the stores department, where officials failed to keep up with the packaging centres’ requirements, or overcome the transport bottlenecks or dislocation caused by enemy aerial action. The gravity of the situation only emerged in mid-​October when the work of some of the packaging centres ground to a halt for want of supplies. The problem was so acute that when Lord Clarendon looked into the matter, he came to the ‘absolutely astonishing’ conclusion that his department should abandon the production of food parcels –​one of the Red Cross’s core wartime activities –​and devote itself to providing prisoners with invalid comforts, clothing, tobacco and cigarettes.26 Fortunately, the situation proved less serious than first feared, and over the late autumn, order was restored to the supply chain. But further concerns over the running of Clarendon’s POW department continued to emerge, particularly in its handling of routine requests from outside parties. Even the BRCS’s allies in the WO were moved to voice their concerns: ‘if half of what is said … about the shortcomings of the Red Cross … is true’, commented one worried observer, ‘it looks as if there might be a very considerable scandal brewing’.27 In November, the handling of correspondence had fallen so far in arrears that Clarendon had to recruit an external consultant to overhaul the entire clerical system.28 The litany of problems seemed to confirm the long-​held

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suspicions that the Society was incapable of rising to the challenges of modern war. They laid bare an institutional culture that was uncritically rooted in a tradition of voluntarism, overly deferential to the wishes of ‘the establishment’ and too socially exclusive to entertain fresh ideas. Its reliance on volunteers was particularly marked and gave rise, in the words of one observer, to ‘a prejudice against the employment of a well paid and properly trained staff ’.29 An inquiry into the POW department, commissioned by a group of next of kin, found its staff to be conscientious and well-​ meaning but utterly out of their depth: ‘nothing but lovely ladies’, it reported, ‘who expect at least two hours off for luncheon at Quaglino’s’.30 Government relations Like most national Red Cross societies, the BRCS enjoyed close relations with the armed forces and Government departments. The movement’s amateur traditions thrived under the BRCS’s predecessor, the National Aid Society, but were lost in the Veldt of South Africa and firmly buried by the time the Society adopted the ‘Red Cross’ title in 1905.31 As Rebecca Gill’s chapter in this collection shows, the BRCS drew its staff from the ranks of Edwardian high society. Many had either charted or capped their careers in the Indian administration or armed forces, and remained closely connected with the military and political elite in London. Philip Chetwode was the archetype in this regard. On first-​name terms with most of the senior staff at the WO, he enjoyed particularly close relations with the parliamentary secretary, Sir James Grigg, whose period as financial secretary in India had coincided with Chetwode’s tenure in charge of the Indian army. Chetwode’s ability to address issues openly with Grigg and his colleagues certainly worked to the BRCS’s benefit, enabling him to keep the Government at arm’s length, while promoting a culture in Whitehall that was instinctively supportive of the Society and its staff.32 Yet, it is clear that the intimacy of these relations brought with it its own problems. It inevitably lent weight to those who accused ministers and officials of putting their personal friendships with the BRCS top brass before the interests of the prisoners or the next of kin. The WO in particular was held complicit in creating and later covering up the parcels crisis, and refusing to countenance handing authority for POW affairs over to a separate ministry.33 ‘There have been mistakes; there have been hold-​ups …’, a WO official nonchalantly informed Mrs Coombe Tennant. ‘But these have been growing pains, symptoms of healthy growth rather than constitutional disease.’34 Chetwode himself was moved to write to his ‘very good friends’ in the WO thanking them for defending the BRCS from ‘ill-​informed’ attacks.35 At the same time, however, Government officials and their political masters rarely resisted the temptation of using the BRCS as a lightning conductor for public criticism and obscuring the Government’s own record in the affair. This is most clearly apparent in the way the BRCS was manoeuvred into the firing line over the transportation of POW parcels. The arrangement concluded with the JWO at the

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start of the war divided responsibility for relief parcels between the JWO, which was tasked with producing the parcels, and the General Post Office (GPO), whose staff were responsible for transporting the parcels to Germany.36 It was the failure of the GPO’s transport arrangements over the late summer and autumn, not those of the BRCS, that was the root cause of the collapse of British parcel operations. This was not, though, how it was portrayed in official communiqués. In the prime minister’s first statement on the issue on 5 November, Members of Parliament were informed that ‘responsibility for the despatch of parcels … has, by arrangement with the Government, been undertaken by the war organisation of the BRC and Order of St John’. Sir James Grigg strengthened this impression, talking of the Red Cross valiantly ‘set[ting] to work at once to build up a new system of transmission’ after the fall of France.37 Such ‘supportive’ statements, though designed to head off calls for a public inquiry into the JWO’s handling of parcel operations, merely added fuel to the flames and placed the JWO’s POW department in an even more precarious position vis-​à-​vis the prisoners and their supporters than it was already. Tellingly, in his 5 November statement, Churchill ascribed the BRCS’s ‘influence and usefulness’ to its ‘independence of Government control and its relationship with the International Red Cross at Geneva’.38 As we shall see, the BRCS’s access to the resources and networks of the wider Red Cross Movement was invaluable in helping it resolve the parcel crisis. Its ‘independence of Government control’ was also, however, integral to its identity, its ability to raise funds and its claims to neutrality in dealing with sister societies abroad. Already by the summer of 1940, the BRCS had concerns over the division of responsibilities for POW matters and the tendency of the Foreign Office (FO), in particular, to encroach on questions that should, it felt, remain exclusively the preserve of the BRCS.39 The rising level of disquiet over the parcels crisis only went to aggravate BRCS–​Government relations still further. Following his statement to the House in early November, Churchill instructed foreign secretary Anthony Eden, and Eden’s successor at the WO, David Margesson, to intervene personally in the affair. Eden began fielding questions in the House from late November to demonstrate the new sense of urgency being given to the issue in official circles. It was Margesson, though, whose interventions ultimately violated BRCS autonomy. Over January 1941, he overrode Chetwode’s objections and arranged for the appointment of Stanley Adams, director of the travel firm Thomas Cook and Sons, as ‘managing director’ of Lord Clarendon’s POW department. His statement to the House on 5 February was both artful (it was, he claimed, Chetwode who had ‘secured the services’ of Mr Adams) and phrased in such a way as to cause discomfort in the BRCS and confusion amongst the public. Adams was said to have joined the ‘Parcels Department of the British Red Cross’ (not the JWO), while his title, ‘managing director’ (not ‘deputy-​director’, as preferred by Clarendon), implied a managerial deficit that his appointment was designed to redress. The arrival of Adams, as an acknowledged expert in European transport matters, naturally strengthened the

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belief that it was the BRCS, and not GPO, that was responsible for delivering relief parcels into the hands of Britain’s POWs.40 Adams’s appointment certainly satiated public opinion. It was heralded by POWRA as a ‘step … long overdue’; Coombe Tennant greeted the news with the ‘liveliest satisfaction’, and demands for an inquiry into the workings of the JWO abated over early 1941. But this success came at a cost for the BRCS. The Government had ridden roughshod over the BRCS’s statutes and demonstrated a propensity to abuse the Society when it suited its book. Chetwode and Clarendon were right to fret over the obvious ‘mission creep’ that Adams’s appointment entailed and the inflated public expectation that would likely come in its wake.41 Relations with the Red Cross Movement In the end, Chetwode need not have worried. By the early summer of 1941, parcels were reaching British POWs at the desired rate of one per fortnight. The BRCS’s contribution to resolving the ‘parcels crisis’, in particular overcoming the difficulties around transportation, was significant. Even before Adams’s appointment, attitudes on the transport issue had shifted; JWO staff had contributed to Whitehall discussions over the dispatch of bulk shipments via Finland or Ireland, or on the vessel scheduled to traverse the Channel as part of an exchange of sick and severely injured POWs. None of these schemes materialised, though in time a ‘northern route’ was opened to service the needs of POW camps in northern Germany. Nevertheless, it was only when attention turned to examining options in Iberia that serious headway in resolving the crisis was made. The head of the JWO’s Foreign Relations Department (FRD), Miss Judith Jackson, journeyed to Lisbon with a colleague from the GPO in late November; the first ship chartered by the BRCS and consigned to ferry British parcels to the French port of Marseille departed Lisbon little over a month later. Four additional ships were placed under charter with the BRCS, and by early April 1941 the last of the parcels that had accumulated in Lisbon over the previous year cleared customs and made their way to Germany. In most cases, this allowed camps to build up an eight-​week reserve. According to US inspectors, who toured the German POW camps, the supplementary food provided from home was one of the principal reasons why British POWs were free from signs of malnutrition by the end of the year.42 The transport arrangements were by no means perfect –​there was a temporary hiccough in early 1942 –​but the system generally held up well and adequate supplies reached British POWs in Germany and Italy until the summer of 1944, when Allied landings in France once again threw transport arrangements into disarray.43 The opening up this ‘southern’ route was a major feather in the BRCS/​JWO’s cap, and one that would reap it handsome dividends in the years ahead. If it is the ‘Red Cross’ ethos and working practices that had so inflamed public irritation in the months following France’s fall, it is the network of contacts and resources

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made available through its membership of the Red Cross Movement that ultimately accounts for its success in this endeavour. Every aspect of the BRCS’s efforts to wrestle with the parcels crisis was materially affected by the involvement of other Red Cross agencies. The bottlenecks threatening British parcel production in the late autumn of 1940, for instance, were eased by the offer of the Canadian Red Cross Society to pack and ship parcels direct to Lisbon: 5,000 a week in January 1941, rising to 30,000 in April and 60,000 per week by the end of the year.44 It was likewise the ‘extremely helpful’ interventions of the Portuguese Red Cross Society that enabled Miss Jackson to navigate the labyrinth of Portuguese customs regulations and progress negotiations over the chartering of neutral tonnage lying in Lisbon harbour. By far the most important actor in the negotiations, however, was the ICRC. While Miss Jackson later claimed credit for the scheme, the idea of dispatching parcels by sea was not only suggested by the ICRC, but was built on an approach that the ICRC had been developing since the summer.45 A permanent ICRC delegation arrived in Lisbon to oversee the arrival of parcels and relief shipments as early as June 1940, and a similar arrangement was set up in Marseille at the end of the year. The very fact that Jackson only reached Lisbon in late November –​despite being pressed by the British ambassador to do so at the start of September –​shows how sluggish the Society was in recognising the potential of a southern route. Throughout the autumn, the BRCS ignored the warning signs and continued to believe that parcels tracked by the GPO to Lisbon would somehow miraculously turn up in the POW camps.46 The overland routes across Spain and France, favoured by the GPO, not only led to the loss –​ through pilfering –​of a quarter of all parcels (some 135,000) but had more or less reached a state of paralysis by the time Jackson’s plane touched down in Lisbon.47 By this stage, it was a question not merely of supplementing the GPO’s postal service, so much as replacing it with an entirely new system. The vessels operated under a BRCS charter, but the practical operations were wholly managed by the ICRC. Many of the issues requiring attention –​the vessels’ identification markings, the scope of the charter contracts and provision of safe-​conduct passes etc. –​had been rehearsed by the ICRC earlier in the year, in talks with the British, German and Swedish authorities.48 It was the ICRC’s forwarding agents in Lisbon, Natural le Coultre & Cie, who undertook the negotiations with the various shipping companies. And while Jackson questioned the ‘force and drive’ of the ICRC’s representative in Lisbon, there is little doubt that her progress was in large measure attributable to his intercession.49 Beyond British earshot, the ICRC expended considerable time placating the French authorities, who resented seeing goods for British POWs unloaded in Marseille when their own efforts to secure overseas supplies for relief parcels continually ran up against the objections of the British Ministry of Economic Warfare.50 The BRCS’s attitude towards the ICRC and the wider Red Cross Movement was a strange mixture of detachment and condescension, following a pattern that, as Rebecca Gill and Kerrie Holloway’s chapters here show, predated the onset of

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war. They also reflected the view found in Whitehall, where officials, though sensitive to the growing importance of the ICRC in restraining German behaviour, still smarted at Geneva’s ill-​judged criticism of British belligerency during the Phoney War, and its tendency to meddle in matters beyond its competency.51 The BRCS had, in truth, never fully embraced the European ‘Red Cross’ tradition, or allowed itself to be influenced by ‘continental’ developments or currents of opinion. Though it championed the creation of the League of Red Cross Societies in 1919, and hosted the International Red Cross Conference in June 1938, the BRCS remained insular in outlook, and rarely looked beyond the anglophone societies, its ‘off-​shoots’ in the empire and ‘sister’ societies in the Dominions. The effect of these attitudes on British efforts to resolve the parcels crisis is difficult to gauge with any accuracy. The BRCS leadership clearly recognised the importance of engaging more actively with the broader network. The FRD was established on 11 May 1940 –​the day after Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries –​to steward relations with other Red Cross societies and foreign governments. That the needs of POWs lay behind this decision can be seen from the fact that the Department drew its staff from the foreign relations section of Clarendon’s POW department and was requested to ‘carry on the same work’.52 Judith Jackson worked hard to strengthen ties with Geneva and the other Allied and neutral societies. She was also attentive in protecting Red Cross prerogatives, censuring Whitehall officials whenever she caught them communicating with the ICRC outside Red Cross channels or encroaching on Red Cross control of parcel production. Still, it is questionable whether she made much headway in changing long-​ established practices and beliefs. The ingrained tendency in the BRCS to look to its own resources and snub the ICRC and the wider Red Cross family remained strong. It preferred to station its own staff in Lisbon to oversee the arrival of parcel shipments rather than drawing on arrangements sanctioned by the ICRC.53 Relations with Rodolphe Haccius, the ICRC delegate in London, were cordial, but never achieved the same level of confidence that the veteran delegate developed with his interlocutors in the FO and WO, or, for that matter, POWRA.54 Relations with the institutions in Geneva reflected this pattern. London more or less suspended relations with the League of Red Cross Societies, confining itself to merely sending ‘standard documentation’ to the beleaguered headquarters staff in Geneva.55 The contrast with the attitude adopted by the German Red Cross could not have been more marked. Whereas Jackson’s counterpart in Berlin made repeated trips to Geneva, the BRCS refused to appoint a delegate to Switzerland, and instead relied upon the overworked British consul-​general to intercede on its behalf. It was only after the parcels crisis had been resolved that a BRCS delegate, Sir Arthur Lawrence, made the trip to Geneva to consult with the Red Cross authorities.56 The parcels crisis clearly encouraged, even accelerated, this trend. There is little doubt, for instance, that the BRCS leadership resented the fact that the ICRC’s contribution to the parcels scheme garnered praise from precisely those quarters, in the

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press and Parliament, that so roundly criticised the efforts of the BRCS.57 In a letter to the British camp leaders in early 1941, explaining the steps taken to resume the flow of parcels, Chetwode pointedly warned prisoners against assuming that parcels bearing the ICRC’s stamp necessarily originated from Switzerland: ‘most of these come from the BRCS and have been readdressed in Geneva’.58 But behind such sentiments lay a broader, systemic, problem. As the war progressed, the ICRC found itself drawn into an increasingly wide range of activities that had little to do with the traditional work of the national societies. Not surprisingly, for all their impressive resources and domestic standing, national societies found themselves in the unaccustomed position of being marginalised from the key discussions and peripheral to the ICRC’s ‘humanitarian diplomacy’. For the BRCS, this diminished status was no more evident than when it hosted the four ICRC delegations that visited London between July 1940 and November 1941. The ICRC delegates spent most of their time doing the rounds in Whitehall, rather than in the company of their Red Cross hosts. The primary reason for the visit of Lucie Odier, head of the ICRC ‘relief bureau’, in July/​August 1940 was to discuss relief supplies for French refugees, not the provision of parcels for British POWs.59 Marcel Junod’s mission to London in March/​April 1941 was driven by Geneva’s desire to negotiate an Anglo-​German exchange of severely wounded prisoners, and when Odier returned to London in October that year, in the company of the ICRC’s ‘foreign minister’ Carl Burckhardt, only one of the five principal items up for discussion (securing a ‘northern route’ for the parcel traffic) involved the BRCS.60 In short, for much of the ICRC’s work, the BRCS was, in effect, surplus to requirements. What added insult to injury for Chetwode and his senior colleagues was that in pursuing its ‘humanitarian diplomacy’ Geneva increasingly dispensed with regular Red Cross channels of communication and took matters up directly with the Government ministries. This practice was not a slight on the BRC per se: such was the sensitivity of issues under discussion by 1941 that Rodolphe Haccius, Geneva’s representative in London, was also kept out of the loop.61 The irritation created in the BRCS was, however, palpable. Not only did Geneva’s actions undermine BRCS standing with the British Government but they also, in the opinion of the BRCS, threatened to endanger Red Cross independence and impartiality. In early August, senior BRCS figures harangued Haccius, accusing his superiors of ‘taking frightful risks for the future in entering on a policy of dealing with governments –​formed by political parties  –​directly, without informing the National Red Cross’.62 In a letter later that month, the chair of the BRCS’s Executive Committee, Sir Arthur Stanley, tried to tutor the ICRC president, thrice cautioning Max Huber against dealing directly with Government ministries lest it resulted in a ‘real weakening of the committee’s position as an independent neutral body’.63 Carl Burckhardt received a similar scolding when he met Sir John Kennedy in November, and was obliged to defend Geneva’s actions and account for the nature of its interactions with the Swiss Government. The consummate diplomat, Burckhardt succeeded in

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crafting a modus vivendi sufficient to save face for both parties. In reality, though, the agreement amounted to little more than a statement of current practice and a bland reaffirmation of the ‘mutual confidence between the ICRC and the BRC’. In return for retaining its ‘independence of action’ to deal with competent official authorities, the ICRC offered to keep ‘national societies closely informed of any matters which might affect [the ICRC’s] work in its own country or have repercussions on its activities elsewhere’.64 Burckhardt was not, however, prepared to admit to the BRCS’s right to adjudicate over the ICRC’s neutrality or the wisdom of its communications with foreign governments. With the benefit of hindsight, there was, of course, a prescience to Kennedy’s questioning of Geneva’s independence, given the influence Berne was able to exert over the Committee’s response to the Holocaust in October 1942.65 But at base, the dispute was symptomatic of anxieties felt by the British, and –​ if British sources are to be believed –​the American Red Cross too, over the waxing influence of the ICRC, and its growing independence from the national societies. It reflected the insecurities of an institution, still smarting from the precipitous decline in its domestic standing and bruised from its run-​in with Whitehall over its handling of the parcels crisis. Conclusion The challenge of sending relief parcels across Europe after the summer of 1940 would have taxed even the most efficiently run organisation. That adequate arrangements were in place by mid-​1941 was, given the circumstances, no small achievement. Although they certainly were slow in addressing the issue, the BRCS leadership showed commendable energy in recovering lost ground, and embracing responsibilities for areas that traditionally lay beyond their remit. Their response to the loss of Greece and Crete in the spring of 1941, though attracting criticism in some quarters, showed that lessons had been learnt and processes improved.66 By the end of the war, the BRCS could be justly proud of its work for British and imperial POWs, and the 19 million parcels it provided –​in collaboration with its sister societies in the Dominions –​to ensure their health and well-​being.67 Yet, it is equally clear that the ‘parcels crisis’ of 1940/​1 laid bare cultural and systemic weaknesses that hampered the Society’s ability to carry out its mandated duties. In particular, it reawakened long-​held doubts over its managerial competence, and its ability to keep up with changing public expectations over the administration of relief aid in a war that increasingly depended on the support and commitment of the entire British population. The damage it caused to the Society’s reputation was significant. Even after bulk shipments began reaching the camps in the spring of 1941, the level of public hostility remained high. As one FO official admitted in June, ‘it would [not] be easy to find many relatives of [British POWs] in Germany who have a good word to say for the BRC’.68 It would take the BRCS a full three years to eradicate these suspicions, and win back public sympathy. Part of the problem lay in

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its association with the aristocracy and ruling elite. To be sure, amongst European Red Cross societies, the BRCS’s social demographic was by no means unique. Its very acceptance as a trusted partner had hinged on the patronage it acquired at the court and amongst the military establishment. But such pedigree counted for little after the climactic events of the summer of 1940, and the Society struggled to shake off its image as the last refuge for retired colonels and well-​meaning, though utterly ineffectual, ‘society’ ladies. This image was, of course, something of a caricature. Far from being a ‘Colonel Blimp’, Chetwode had a justifiable reputation for plain speaking: his parting address on retiring from the army in 1934 was ‘the most devastating indictment of the military profession by a high ranking officer’ of the entire interwar period.69 Judith Jackson’s impressive record in Lisbon is testament to the formidable skills brought to the institution by its female staff, and while volunteers made up the back-​bone of the workforce, a full third of the POW department were professional, salaried employees. But perceptions are every bit as important as reality, and for many, the Society’s failings were baked into its social fabric. William Jowitt, Labour MP and the Solicitor General, who reported on the JWO in early 1942, was struck by the large number of ‘aristocratic ladies’ he found in its ranks and the apparent reluctance of the leadership to ‘employ more people who sprang from the loins of the people’.70 The Society likewise struggled to navigate between the competing claims and expectations of the Government, prisoners, next of kin and the wider Red Cross network. Again, these challenges were not particular to the British case, though the BRCS’s confidence in the collective capacity of the ‘British’ societies shaped its attitude towards the rest of the Red Cross Movement, and made the slights it suffered at the hands of its detractors that bit harder to bear. Perhaps the biggest cultural challenge it faced was finding a way to accommodate new actors in the field. Entrusted to coordinate Britain’s humanitarian effort, the BRCS leadership found it difficult to countenance the emergence of an agency such as POWRA that claimed to speak on behalf of Britain’s military prisoners. The BRCS’s reaction was overwhelmingly –​and in hindsight unnecessarily –​defensive: it was jealous of its prerogatives and wary of seeding ground to a group whose members should, in its eyes, have been the Society’s natural supporters. Adelaide Livingstone was certainly correct in questioning whether the BRCS staff had ‘the necessary qualifications for acting generally as the channel between the government and the public on POW matters’.71 The BRCS was not alone in struggling to square this particular circle. Other national societies looked upon the emergence of next-​of-​kin communities with misgivings. The British would surely have echoed the sentiments of one American Red Cross staffer, who warned against saying ‘anything concerning cooperation [with] the POW relatives associations, [since] there are too many of them springing up, and […] they have no authority, as such, to do any parcel sending’.72 The criticism directed at the Society in the press and in private correspondence is, nevertheless, surprising. The personal, emotional stake the relatives had in the

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crisis goes some way to explaining the depth of feelings aroused. So too, though, does the resentment felt towards an institution that had long cultivated the aura of a department of State, and come to assume a profound sense of self-​worth as a bulwark of bourgeois, gentile society and a bastion of British imperial power. In shouldering responsibility for the transportation of relief parcels, the BRCS may have resolved the immediate problems, but in the process, it inevitably fanned popular assumptions over the extent of its influence. By mid-​1941, the next of kin firmly believed that the BRCS was ‘primarily responsible for all POW matters’.73 It was only when attention shifted, that autumn, to discussions over the repatriation of sick and wounded POWs  –​negotiations for which were necessarily handled through official channels –​that the BRCS was able to edge out of the limelight and redress public expectations.74 The parcels crisis played a cardinal role in challenging, and ultimately undermining, the BRCS’s self-​confidence and belief in its own capacity. It was, in many respects, the last time the Society tried to orchestrate affairs on its own terms. The experience was a salutary one, but also timely. The summer of 1941 saw the war extend beyond Europe’s heartlands and assume global dimensions. It ushered in a period in which the Society became increasingly aware of its dependency on others –​on the Dominion societies, on the Americans and on the ICRC –​ to help it fulfil its responsibilities towards British POWs. The high esteem it enjoyed at the war’s close was thus a mark of the distance it had travelled since the tumultuous months following the fall of France, and the transformation in its thinking over its place in the Red Cross Movement. Notes 1 British Red Cross Archives (BRCA), JWO1/​1/​9, minutes of Inner Cabinet meeting, 14 August 1940. 2 Logbook of C.  W. G.  Allen, cited in Clare Makepeace, Captives of War:  British Prisoners of  War  in  Europe in the Second World War (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 77–​8. Prisoners of war frequently sketched or listed the contents of Red Cross parcels in their logbooks and diaries. 3 The loss of large numbers of POWs in the Far East created infinitely more complex logistical problems for relief agencies than those found in Europe, but the political and organisational challenge faced in 1940 ultimately proved more testing for the BRCS. 4 Hague II: Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, 29 July 1899. Article 15, https://​ihl-​databases.icrc.org/​applic/​ihl/​ihl.nsf/​Article.xsp?action=openDocument&doc umentId=0719070A8E6FDF5EC12563CD00515DAA (accessed 11 November 2019). 5 The Italian Government reneged on its obligations after it blamed its prisoners for the humiliation at Caporetto. Fear of political or biological ‘contamination’ likewise coloured attitudes towards returning POWs. See, inter alia, A. Rachamimov, POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front (Oxford:  Berg, 2002), pp. 133–​59, 191–​220; Y. Yanikdağ, Healing the Nation: Prisoners of War, Medicine and Nationalism in Turkey, 1914–​1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); G. Procacci, Soldati e prigionieri italiani nella Grande guerra: Con una raccolta di lettere inedite (Rome: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000).

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6 Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Geneva, 27 July 1929, Article 79, https://​ihl-​databases.icrc.org/​applic/​ihl/​ihl.nsf/​Article.xsp?action=openDocument&docu mentId=A1DAA9CE7432A838C12563CD00519260 (accessed 17 November 2019). 7 Reports by the Joint War Committee and the Joint Finance Committee of the British Red Cross Society and the Order of St John of Jerusalem in England on Voluntary Aid Rendered to the Sick and Wounded at Home and Abroad and to British Prisoners of War, 1914–​1919, with Appendices (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1921), p. 545. 8 The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA), FO 916/​14, Lambert (WO) to W. St C. Roberts (Foreign Office (FO)), 25 May 1941. For earlier criticisms of the BRCS, see Oxford, Bodleian Library, Irene Ward papers, correspondence, I. Ward, MP to WO, 29 January 1940. 9 ‘Christmas in the Prison Camps: Supplies Reach Geneva’, The Times (24 December 1940), p. 3. 10 See B. Hately-​ Broad, War and Welfare:  British Prisoner of War Families, 1939–​ 1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 11 National Library of Wales, Mam O Nedd Collection, W. Coombe Tennant (WCT), fol. 3551, C. Ponsonby, private secretary to the Secretary of State for War, to Mrs W. Coombe Tennant, 19 December 1940. 12 See B. K. Feltman, The Stigma of Surrender: German Prisoners, British Captors and Manhood in the Great War and Beyond (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2015); and, in general, H. Afflerbach and H. Strachan (eds), How Fighting Ends: A History of Surrender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 13 TNA, FO 916/​38, Maj. Gen. Sir A.  Hunter (Director, POWs, WO) to Mrs W.  Coombe Tennant, 18 January 1941. 14 TNA, PREM 4/​98/​1, Lord Linlithgow to the Secretary of State for India, 28 December 1940. See S. Longden, Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (London: Constable, 2009). 15 Hampshire Record Office (HRO): papers of Sir George Warner, 5M/​79 A25, Mrs P. M. Stewart (chair, POWRA) to Sir G. Warner (retired head of POW Department, FO), 19 February 1943. 16 Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (AICRC), D EUR GB1-​41, POWRA News-​Sheet no. 1 (c. June 1940), notes on first meeting, 1 May 1940, ‘Aims of the Association’. 17 Field Marshall P. Chetwode to Sir J. Grigg (WO), 1 May 1941, cited in BRCS, Red Cross and St John War History, 1939–​1945: Confidential Supplement (London: BRCS, n.d.), Vol. I, p. 226. 18 For FO concerns over POWRA’s ambitions, see TNA, FO 916/​550, H.  Satow (FO) to Sir G. Warner, 13 March 1943. 19 AICRC, D EUR GB1-​02, J.  Jackson ( JWO), ‘Prisoners of War:  Interim Report on Visit to Lisbon, November–​December 1940’, p.  10. For embarrassment, see TNA, PREM 4/​98/​1, V. Bovenizer (WO) to J. H. Peck (10 Downing Street), 10 January 1941. 20 TNA, WO 258/​14, Chetwode to Sir J. Grigg (WO), 13 November 1940; FO 916/​2569, memo by Capt. R. Gordon Munro (Deputy Director, JWO POW Department), 12 July 1940. The number of POWs ‘might well be between 20 and 30,000 before the end of the present year’. 21 See Makepeace, Captives of War, pp.  150–​1. POWRA’s newsletter was also guilty of giving overly favourable accounts of camp life; AICRC, D EUR GB1-​41, R. Haccius (ICRC, London) to P. M. Stewart (POWRA), 16 February 1942. 22 HRO, 5M/​79 A24, H.  Setchell (commercial attaché, Berne) to Sir G.  Warner (FO, POW Department), 19 February 1941; TNA, WO 258/​14, Maj. Gen. Sir A. Hunter (Director, POWs, WO) to G. W. Lambert (WO), n.d. 23 TNA, WO 366/​26, Col. N. J. Phillimore, ‘The Second World War 1939–​1945: Army. Prisoners of War’, May 1949, p. 51. 24 AICRC, D EUR GB1-​02, Chetwode to Haccius (ICRC, London), 17 April 1941.

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25 BRCA, JWO/​1/​1/​2. JWO Executive Committee, 11 December 1940; JWO/​1/​1/​9, minutes of Inner Cabinet meetings, note of 2 September 1941. Adams agreed to have statements regarding relations with POWRA approved before publication, and not to privilege POWRA’s News-​ Sheet over other press outlets. 26 BRCS, Confidential Supplement, Vol. I, pp. 276–​7. 27 TNA, PREM 4/​98/​1, note by P. J. Grigg (WO), 26 November 1940. 28 BRCA, JWO/​1/​1/​2, minutes, JWO Executive Committee, 13 November 1940. 29 WCT, fol. 3543, Professor Zimmerman (Balliol College, Oxford) to W. Coombe Tennant, 4 November 1940. 30 WCT, fols 3542, 3543, anon., undated report circulated by W. Coombe Tennant, 8 November 1940. 31 R. Gill, Calculating Compassion: Humanity and Relief in War, Britain 1870–​1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), passim. 32 AICRC, G3/​22, Carton 80, ‘Rapport de Mlle Odier sur son voyage à Londres’, 17 July–​9 August 1940. 33 See ‘An Attempt to Hush Up the Red Cross Muddle’, Sunday Express (15 December 1940). 34 WCT, fol. 3552, J.  Roper-​Bingham (private secretary to the War Minister) to W.  Coombe Tennant, 25 January 1941. 35 Chetwode to P. J. Grigg (WO), 5 August 1942, cited in D. Rolf, ‘ “Blind Bureaucracy”: The British Government and POWs in German Captivity, 1939–​ 1945’, in B. Moore and K. Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II (Oxford: Berg, 1996), pp. 47–​97 (p. 53). 36 This reflected the arrangements in force during the Great War and the stipulations outlined in the Hague regulations of 1899 (Article 16). 37 Hansard, House of Commons Debates, Vol. CCCLXV (5 November 1940), cols 1186, 1184, 1347. 38 Ibid., 1186. 39 AICRC, ‘Rapport de Mlle Odier sur son voyage à Londres’. 40 Hansard, House of Commons Debates, Vol. CCCLXVIII (4 February 1941), fol. 779. 41 See BRCS, Confidential Supplement, Vol. I, pp. 250–​1, citing POWRA News-​Sheet for February 1941. WCT, fol. 3554, circular by W. Coombe Tennant, 5 February 1941. 42 TNA, FO 916/​45, US embassy, Berlin, to US embassy, London, 15 November 1941. 43 Fewer than 0.15 per cent of parcels were lost over the course of 1942. 44 BRCA, JWO 1/​1/​2, minutes, JWO Emergency Committee, 9 October 1940, 12 February and 14 May 1941. P. H. Gordon, Fifty Years in the Canadian Red Cross (Toronto:  McClelland & Stewart, 1969), pp. 68–​73. 45 For BRCS reliance on the ICRC’s advice, see TNA, FO 916/​2570, minutes of inter-​ departmental meeting, 21 November 1940:  comment by Chetwode; J.  Jackson (Lisbon) to Clarendon (POW Department), 2 and 10 December 1940. 46 In early October the BRCS predicted that ‘a food parcel for each prisoner would be despatched to Germany every week’ by late November; TNA, FO 916/​2569, minutes of interdepartmental meeting, 3 October 1940. 47 AICRC, D EUR GB1-​02, notes of meeting held between JWO and ICRC, 21 March 1941. TNA, FO 916/​2570, minute by Sir George Warner, 17 December 1940, on Chetwode’s comments to the Evening Standard, 16 December 1940. 48 ICRC, Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on Its Activities during the Second World War (September 1, 1939–​June 30, 1947), Vol. III: Relief Activities (Geneva: ICRC, 1948),

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pp. 39–​40, and for various initiatives along these lines, pp. 127–​65. TNA, FO 916/​14, ‘R. B.’, memo, 7 April 1941. 49 AICRC, D EUR GB1-​02, J. Jackson ( JWO), ‘Prisoners of War: Final Report on Visit to Lisbon, November 23rd–​December 25th 1940’, p. 3. 50 See W. N. Medlicott, The Economic Blockade (London: HMSO, 1952), pp. 549–​65. Even after London grudgingly relaxed its restrictions to bulk shipments, efforts continued to limit French access to overseas sources of supply. See National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland, USA (NARA), RG200, Group 3, Box 992, Helm (British embassy, Washington) to E. Swift (ARC vice-​chairman), 25 November 1940. TNA, FO 916/​2570, FO to Butler (British embassy, Washington), 24 November 1940. 51 For British attitudes towards the ICRC’s ‘Whitsun’ appeal of 12 March 1940, see TNA, FO 372/​3354; T3495, minute by Cox (FO), 20 March 1940. See James Crossland, Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1939–​1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), passim. 52 BRCA, JWO 1/​1/​2, JWO Executive Committee, 11 May 1940. 53 ICRC, Report, Vol. III, p. 39. 54 Haccius had been delegate to Hungary, the Near East, Ireland and Morocco. He often offered advice to the FO and POWRA. For the BRCS’s tendency to ignore him, much to the FRD’s irritation, see AICRC, D EUR GB1-​02, Miss S.  J. Warner (FRD, JWO) to Lord Clarendon (POW Department, JWO), 26 February 1941. 55 D. A. Reid and P. F. Gilbo, Beyond Conflict: The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1919–​1994 (Geneva: IFRC, 1997), pp. 120–​1. 56 See AICRC, 0 CMS A-​001, Joint Relief Commission of the International Red Cross, meeting of October 16 1941. 57 AICRC, G3/​43, Carton 200, C. J. Burckhardt (ICRC) to M. Huber (ICRC), 20 December 1941. 58 AICRC, D EUR GB1-​02, Chetwode to senior British officers and men of confidence in German POW camps, n.d. 59 AICRC, C11, Commission Centrale, minutes of meeting on 12 July 1940. 60 The other items were civilian relief, British internees in occupied France, the reduction of food rations for POWs in Germany and arrangements for the transport of POW parcels to India. AICRC, D EUR GB1-​02, W. St J. Roberts (FO) to R. Haccius (ICRC), 7 November 1941. For Junod’s visit: AICRC, G85/​038, C. Burckhardt to D. Kelly (British minister, Berne), 3 December 1940. 61 AICRC, G3/​30, Carton 166. ‘Rapport de M. Junod’, 5 May 1941. 62 AICRC, G3/​43, Carton 200, ‘Rapport de M. Carl J. Burckhardt sur sa mission à Londres’. 63 AICRC, G3/​43, Carton 200, Sir Arthur Stanley (BRCS) to Max Huber (ICRC), 21 August 1941 64 AICRC, G3/​43, Carton 200, C. Burckhardt to M. Huber (ICRC), 20 December 1941. 65 For this episode, see J.-​C. Favez, The Red Cross and the Holocaust (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 87–​91; and I. Vonèche Cardia, Neutralité et engagement: Les relations entre le Comité International de la Croix-​Rouge et le gouvernement suisse pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Geneva: Société d’histoire de la Suisse romande, 2012), passim. 66 Edward Hogg was sent out to Ankara to coordinate relief shipments to British POWs in Greece. Expected in early August, he only arrived on the 26th, having routed his journey through Lagos. For a defence of the BRCS’s response to Greece, see TNA, FO 916/​214, FO to British embassy, Ankara, 12 September 1941. 67 D. Rolf, Prisoners of the Reich (London: Coronet, 1988), p. 160. 68 TNA, FO 916/​14, marginal note on R. A. Butler (FO) to R. Law (WO), 18 June 1941.

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69 B. Bond, British Military Policy between the Two World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 67. 70 TNA, WO 32/​14423, Chetwode to P.  J. Grigg (WO), 22 April 1942, cited in Rolf, ‘Blind Bureaucracy’, p. 52. 71 TNA, FO 916/​15, minute by W. St C. Roberts (FO), 13 June 1941. 72 NARA, RG 200, Group 3, Box 991, 619.2/​02, Mrs G. B. Holmes (relief to POW, American Red Cross), memo to Miss A. Lockett (Chief Inquiry Unit, ARC), 10 August 1944. 73 TNA, FO 916/​15, R. A. Butler (FO) to R. Law (WO), 19 June 1941. 74 See N. Wylie, Barbed Wire Diplomacy:  Britain, Germany and the Politics of Prisoners of War, 1939–​1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 85–​91.

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The Red Cross in wartime Macau and its global connections Helena F. S. Lopes

In a 1946 report reviewing its activities during the Second World War, the Portuguese Red Cross Society (PRCS) praised its Macau delegation for its impressive performance: High were the amounts remitted by the Macau delegation to the prisoners interned in Shanghai and Hong Kong, as well as those it spent with the poor refugees who took shelter in our possession in the Far East … As for its correspondence service, it was truly admirable. To these headquarters alone the delegation sent around 1,000 telegrams from refugees –​telegrams that were retransmitted by our central services to different parts of the world … This well-​set-​up telegraphic message service merited a special reference from the British Red Cross, which praised it a lot.1

The quote above alludes to multiple dimensions in which the wartime Red Cross in Macau can be historicised: as a temporary branch connecting the world at a time of disruption of communications; as a link to Japanese-​occupied Hong Kong and Shanghai; and as a subtle way of aiding Portugal’s old ally, Britain.2 This chapter will explore these issues, arguing that this delegation of the PRCS facilitated regional and global contacts under the exceptional circumstances of the conflict because of the ambiguous practice of neutrality in Macau, a territory at the intersection of different empires. Remaining neutral throughout the Second World War, Portugal and its then imperial outposts played a prominent role in humanitarian relief during the conflict, of which Red Cross endeavours were an important part. In the South China enclave of Macau, which had been under Portuguese administration since the sixteenth century, an unprecedented number of people sought shelter from the outbreak of the Second Sino-​Japanese War in 1937 until the Allied victory in 1945. During that time the population of Macau increased almost threefold, reaching around half-​a-​ million people, who overcrowded a peninsula and two islands that extended for a mere 15 kilometres.2 Exact figures are impossible to ascertain but primary and

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secondary sources point to numbers ranging from 400,000 to 650,000 wartime residents.3 Most of the refugees were Chinese fleeing occupied Shanghai and the neighbouring Guangdong province but thousands, including many British subjects, came from Hong Kong after it was occupied by Japanese forces in December 1941. A great number of refugees in Macau had family and professional connections with people interned in Hong Kong and in Shanghai. Wartime operations hampered communications and supplies by land and sea that were the lifeblood of Macau’s swollen population. However, its centuries-​old experience of smuggling networks proved crucial in the Second World War –​including to Red Cross operations, as will be addressed later. Whilst humanitarian relief in Macau was provided by a myriad of new and old charitable institutions, none had the international reach of the Red Cross. The activities of its Macau branch were, however, significant not primarily for what they achieved locally but for the way in which they connected people, in the region and globally. The wartime modus operandi of the Macau delegation will be detailed below after a short introduction to the connections between Portuguese neutrality and Red Cross activities. Portuguese neutrality and Red Cross activities Portuguese neutrality in the Second World War was never formally declared.4 The main goal of the country’s neutrality was the maintenance of the authoritarian Estado Novo (New State) regime and its colonial empire. That neutrality was only allowed to last until the end of the conflict because it also served the interests of other actors. As António José Telo, eminent Portuguese historian of the country’s international position during the Second World War, concluded, Portugal remained neutral because both the Germans and the Allies got what they wanted without it becoming a belligerent.5 Although Telo is less concerned with the Asian theatre of the conflict, Portuguese neutrality in the region was nominally kept precisely because it served the interests of the key belligerents there –​notably Japan, China and Britain –​as well as it did those in Europe.6 Thus, partly because of the way wartime neutrality was conducted, the Estado Novo survived into the postwar period, and the effects of the erosion of European imperial control and critiques of its legitimacy that affected other European colonial powers spared the Portuguese colonies. An imperial dimension had always been a part of the PRCS. The institution has been present in Portugal since the nineteenth century. First set up as the Portuguese Commission for Assistance to the Military Wounded and Sick in Times of War (Comissão Portuguesa de Socorros a Feridos e Doentes Militares em Tempos de Guerra) in 1865, it was renamed as the Portuguese Red Cross Society (Cruz Vermelha Portuguesa) in 1887. Several local delegations (that is, branches) have been in operation since the 1870s. Some of the first, as well as some of its first hospitals, were set up in Angola and Mozambique.7 The connection with the Portuguese colonial world was also evident at the institution’s top levels. One of the first presidents

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of the PRCS, General Joaquim José Machado, had been governor of Mozambique, and another, Henrique José Monteiro Mendonça, had been a plantation owner in São Tomé and Príncipe. Portuguese elites’ conceptions of national prestige and its affirmation in the international arena were linked to both Red Cross activities and colonial projects, and these were sometimes intertwined. Given its long history, imperial connections and domestic respectability, it is somewhat puzzling that the PRCS has not merited much attention from historians. Two monographs published in the 1920s and 1940s remain the only books solely dedicated to an institution that was involved in some of the key moments of twentieth-​century Portuguese history, from the First World War to decolonisation in the mid-​1970s.8 One of these was undoubtedly the Second World War. A number of PRCS delegations were set up in Portugal and in several of its then colonies overseas, including Macau, during the conflict. Not only did the PRCS expand, Portugal and its imperial outposts were also important for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and other national societies. In Lisbon alone, there were representatives from the ICRC and from the Belgium, Brazilian, Finish, French, French North African, German, British, Greek, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Thai, American, and Yugoslavian Red Cross Societies.9 The Portuguese capital hosted ‘the key neutral European port during the war’.10 It was a relevant node in networks for distributing correspondence and parcels to prisoners of war (POWs) and others in Europe and beyond. Portugal was also a stopover for tens of thousands of European, notably Jewish, refugees.11 In Asia, Portuguese neutrality provided the geographical framework for rare Red Cross exchanges with Japanese-​occupied areas, permitting much-​needed relief supplies to go through.12 The only Anglo-​Japanese exchange took place in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), capital of Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony, in August 1942. Two exchanges between the United States and Japan also occurred in neutral Portuguese-​administered territories:  Lourenço Marques in July 1942 and Mormugão, Goa, in September 1943.13 These exchanges were the only opportunities for Red Cross parcels to be handed over for delivery to camps in Asia, although how many of these reached their intended destinations is impossible to know since the Japanese refused to sign receipts for individual parcels.14 With one of the largest Chinese communities in the Portuguese Empire, Lourenço Marques was also a postal stopover for Red Cross messages to be transmitted to China.15 These exchanges were of such importance that, in 1943, Washington expressed concern that events in Macau could lead to Portugal breaking off relations with Japan, compromising the pending exchange.16 Macau had experienced one of the most serious attacks on Allied nationals in the territory when a ship full of refugees from Hong Kong, the Sai On, was captured in August 1943. It was taken –​without resistance from the local authorities –​in the middle of the night by a group of ‘pirates’, possibly connected to Chinese collaborators and/​or Japanese military forces. Amongst those on board were several Filipinos who were under American protection. The fact that

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American authorities were not willing to risk cancelling a Red Cross exchange on account of an attack on other Allied nationals in Macau suggests that humanitarian concerns, especially for those in formal captivity, assumed a high degree of relevance in wartime decisions regarding Portugal, allowing certain abuses of its neutrality to be overlooked. A similar dynamic was observed in British–​Swiss wartime relations. Switzerland’s prominence in humanitarian activities in favour of British POWs made the country’s neutrality of particular importance to Britain, which, on account of this, tolerated some of Berne’s actions that favoured the Axis.17 Although the relevance of neutral Portugal as a protecting power was negligible, the country and its colonial territories provided the space for humanitarian activities to take place –​such as refugee relief and Red Cross exchanges –​as well as for intelligence to be collected and transmitted.18 In the Asian theatre, these activities were allowed to proceed, as Portuguese neutrality had its advantages for Japan as well. Switzerland, Sweden and Spain may have been more significant protecting powers and, in the case of Spain, more enthusiastic supporters of Japan during the early phases of the war in China, but it was the Japanese embassy in Lisbon that was deemed second only to Berlin in terms of its relevance in Europe.19 It is important to stress that relief efforts such as the re-​establishment of a Macau branch of the PRCS during the Second World War were often spearheaded by joint endeavours involving ordinary civilians and State representatives. Even if the Portuguese State sought to capitalise on its eventual legitimising potential, its operations went beyond the national or colonial level. As will be seen in the following section, the wartime Macau delegation of the PRCS was set up by a local merchant, and the British consulate in Macau was involved in some of its activities. This British consulate was the only functioning British diplomatic representation in the region, with the exception of ‘Free China’, after the occupation of Hong Kong and of the colonial territories in South-​East Asia. In Macau, the consulate oversaw not only British citizens but a variety of others, including North Americans. Its connections with the local Red Cross delegation were, then, significant precisely because of the wide number of people they could represent at a time of particularly difficult communications and relief provision. Reviving the Red Cross in Macau The presence of the Red Cross in Macau dates back to the 1920s. A branch of the PRCS was established in the enclave after the First World War but it was a short-​ lived experience. It closed down in 1922, reportedly for lack of engagement by its members in the setting up of a health centre.20 The branch was revived in 1943, when the territory entered a critical period during the Second World War, but it closed again in 1946. Three years later, when China was consumed by its civil war, the PRCS resumed its activities in Macau. This later branch has remained active until now although, with the transfer of sovereignty to Macau in 1999, it ceased to belong to

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the PRCS and became an autonomous branch of the Red Cross Society of China, operating in similar ways to the Hong Kong Red Cross, which had been a branch of the British Red Cross from 1950 until the 1997 handover.21 The second founding of the Macau delegation of the PRCS was linked to the experience of the Second World War in East Asia. The region had been engulfed in conflict since 1937, when an undeclared war broke out between Japan and China. The conflict had even earlier roots, with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 creating an international crisis that led to Japan leaving the League of Nations two years later. Causing the deaths of millions and a flood of refugees, the Sino-​Japanese war spilt out into Macau, particularly from 1938 onwards, when Japanese advances in South China led great numbers of people to pour into the neutral enclave. Most of the refugees were Chinese from Shanghai and Guangdong Province, but there were also many Portuguese Eurasians –​one of the largest, most economically vulnerable and forgotten communities in China. The social impact of the war in Macau became particularly acute from December 1941, when the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, led to thousands of new arrivals from the neighbouring British colony. Although the number of people who sought refuge in Macau during the war is likely to have been much larger than those who transited through continental Portugal during the war in Europe, their experiences have been noticeably absent from published scholarship on the Second World War despite the many international links they possessed.22 Thus, the Macau delegation of the PRCS was re-​established to deal with the effects of a global conflict. Even in its infancy, the Macau delegation had something of an international character. Discussions for establishing a Red Cross branch in Macau began in 1942, when the Portuguese governor, Gabriel Maurício Teixeira, suggested to the British consul that a permanent delegate should operate in the enclave to assist in relief to thousands of destitute Chinese refugees. He recommended that, to ease matters with Japanese forces, the delegate should be from a South American republic that had relations with Japan.23 Although this never came to fruition, these prior discussions reveal the international scope that framed the genesis of the wartime Macau Red Cross. The Macau delegation did, however, have an important local connection to Hong Kong. Before the latter became a British crown Colony in 1842, Macau had been an important base for European traders in South China, who had to relocate there for part of the year when they were not allowed to live in China.24 These traders then moved to Hong Kong, with their Chinese compradors and many Macau-​born Portuguese Eurasians who staffed a number of lower and mid-​level positions in the colony’s administration, banking, commercial, publishing and other sectors. As Hong Kong prospered, Macau’s decline accelerated, becoming associated with negative images of vice and exploitation and, in British eyes, connoting, with ‘unwelcome compromise and cohabitation,’ a constant ‘source of British colonial anxiety’.25 However, when Britain’s imperial might in East Asia crumbled in the early 1940s, Macau gained new-​found importance. Thousands of people of various nationalities

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moved from Hong Kong to the Portuguese-​ruled enclave from late 1941 until the last days of the war in 1945. Most were in contact with the British consulate that functioned in Macau during the war. Led by the resourceful consul John Reeves, it supported thousands of refugees financially. As the governor of Macau informed Lisbon in 1942, ‘rare is the family of those who came to Macau that does not have a member [in the] Hong Kong concentration camps’.26 Communication with those in civilian and POW camps was a matter of urgency, and although informal and clandestine information channels existed, the maintenance of official contact with the camps was beyond the capacity of the British consulate. Portuguese assistance was not an obvious choice. As Britain’s protecting power, Switzerland played an important role and, particularly in Europe, ‘Swiss relief operations, and frequently merely the presence of Swiss officials, was the only fragile thread linking British POWs to the outside world and salvation.’27 But in East Asia the situation was considerably more uncertain, and ad hoc transnational efforts proved key to mitigating the bleak extremes of life behind barbed wire. Despite some variation between the situation in POW and civilian internment camps, it is widely acknowledged that Japanese authorities ‘repeatedly denied ICRC delegates the access they needed’.28 Difficulties in visiting POWs were also noted by the Swiss minister in Tokyo, Camille Gorgé.29 Japan only authorised two delegates to operate in China: Edouard Egle in Shanghai and, later, Rudolf Zindel in Hong Kong.30 Red Cross delegates in Japanese-​occupied areas worked in less-​than-​ideal conditions, subjected to different forms of surveillance; pressures; and, sometimes, mortal threats, as was demonstrated by the execution of two Swiss missionaries who were acting as unofficial delegates in Borneo in 1943.31 However, in Hong Kong there was one important difference:  from 1943 onwards, the ICRC could count on the Macau Delegation of the PRCS as a supporting branch. The British connection was of particular importance to the Macau Red Cross.32 It is significant that it began operating in 1943, the same year that Portuguese neutrality was seen as having leant decisively to the side of the Allies.33 The Macau delegation was re-​established in January of that year, officially referred to as a ‘war delegation’ (delegação de guerra) or ‘POW service’ (serviço de prisioneiros de guerra), epithets that hint at the non-​Portuguese concerns of the branch.34 The increasing operational difficulties of the ICRC in Hong Kong alongside the failure to negotiate an Anglo-​ Japanese exchange that included the Hong Kong internees made the Macau Red Cross a sort of unofficial branch of the ICRC. Indicative of this is a reference in postwar documents to the presence of F.  A. Suter in Macau. A  former employee at Standard Vacuum Oil Company, he is mentioned as having been Zindel’s secretary in the Rosary Hill Red Cross Home in Hong Kong –​an initiative that will be addressed later. He remained connected to the ICRC once he moved to Macau, where he is said to have handled a Red Cross centre with great tact and discretion.35 Despite facilitating regional and global connections, the Macau delegation was also a local endeavour, and the agency of its president, the Macau businessman

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Fernando de Senna Fernandes Rodrigues, should not be underestimated. In fact, this is an interesting case study to assess the importance that individual actions have for enabling Red Cross activities. The Macau delegation’s headquarters, initially considered temporary, was housed in Rodrigues’s company building (‘F. Rodrigues’) at 71 Rua da Praia Grande, one of the main avenues in Macau.36 In a letter to the ICRC in Shanghai he stated he had been appointed by the PRCS in Lisbon; however, it is likely that the Macau delegation was a product of his own initiative.37 Although it is unclear how Rodrigues came to decide to revive the Red Cross in Macau, he appears to have had high ambitions for his humanitarian role. Amongst Governor Teixeira’s papers in the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Historical Overseas Archives) in Lisbon is a personal letter from the British consul, with a postscript that reads: ‘Fernando Rodrigues had stated that either he will take over relief questions here from me or the Japanese will take Macao.’38 Reeves was not worried, as Rodrigues’s temper was famously problematic.39 However, the provocative remark could mean a number of things, from hinting at Rodrigues’s possible contacts with the Japanese, to a desire to relieve the British consulate of activities that were being closely monitored by enemy agents, as well as Rodrigues’s personal desire to play a prominent role in giving assistance to refugees, which was a very well-​regarded activity that carried social capital in a land that a contemporaneous newspaper article called the largest ‘centre of charity’ (‘Centro da Caridade’) in South China.40 The exceptional circumstances of Red Cross activities in Japanese-​occupied Asia led to the emergence of a sort of ‘humanitarian private contractor’, of which Rodrigues can be seen as an example.41 Indeed, he was central to the whole undertaking of the Red Cross in Macau during the war. His local and international contacts; financial means; and, possibly, his storage facilities were likely to have been advantageous for starting a Red Cross branch. He owned a merchant establishment that sold various types of products and was an agent for several foreign and Portuguese import–​export and insurance firms, including Japanese-​owned concerns.42 As will be addressed later, Rodrigues also had ties to smuggling networks active in Macau during the war. A man of many parts, Rodrigues was ideal for the role of Red Cross delegate in Macau. From local to global The relative success of the Macau delegation was owed to its multiple levels of operation. It was simultaneously a personal and a local endeavour, part of the national and imperial network of the PRCS, and a transnational institution with global reach, with close links to the ICRC.43 Apart from the connections, noted earlier, to the British consulate and the ICRC delegate in Hong Kong, this Red Cross branch had obvious colonial characteristics. The first board members of the delegation were all Portuguese and Macanese men, including serving officers.44 The supervision

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of the local colonial administration was also evidenced by the fact that the governor instructed that all activities had to be exercised according to directives emanating from the Civil Administration Services.45 However, local participation went beyond the Portuguese establishment. Chinese people were involved in the Macau Red Cross in different capacities, from a Hong Kong-​born Chinese former clerk of the Union Insurance Society of Canton who ended up finding employment in the Portuguese Red Cross in Macau, to Gao Kening, one of the enclave’s leading businessmen, who had links to the gambling sector. He was one of the major Macau philanthropists during the war, and a prominent Red Cross donor.46 The activities of the Macau delegation were particularly concerned with connecting people in the enclave with those in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where official ICRC delegates operated. These connections took the form of messages, comfort parcels, and even money transfers when this was possible.47 The most comprehensive connection between the ICRC in Hong Kong and the Macau delegation was maintained via the civilian centre, Rosary Hill. In September 1943 the ICRC delegate in Hong Kong set up this centre for POW and civilian internees’ dependants in a Dominican convent that he rented for the purpose. Initially, it housed 670 people, most of them women and children. The residents had diverse origins:  Eurasian, Portuguese, British by marriage, Chinese, Russian, Indian, Czech, Iranian, French, Estonian, Swiss, Irish, American Chinese, Latvian,

Figure 16.1  Form for Red Cross messages used by the Macau Red Cross, May 1943. The header includes references to both the PRCS and to the ICRC. Historical Archives of the Portuguese Red Cross Society. Photo by Helena F. S. Lopes.

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Colombian and stateless.48 This multinational population posed its own challenges.49 The number of residents varied and it declined sharply in the last two years of the war. Rising living costs and the suspension of rice rations forced Zindel to encourage the relocation of the inhabitants, hundreds of them, to Macau and into the care of the delegation there.50 Amongst the evacuees from Rosary Hill to Macau was Ellen Field. An Englishwoman who had pretended to be Irish so as not to be interned, Field wrote a memoir of her wartime experience, which included assisting Dr Selwyn-​ Clarke, the Director of Medical Services in Hong Kong, in getting supplies to POW camps, and helping a Chinese agent with escapes from the occupied colony. During the war she was helped by a Japanese army interpreter who was also a Lutheran minister. Her detailed description of the two-​day voyage between Hong Kong and Macau on a convoy of junks alludes to the international co-​operation that made the evacuation possible. Japanese trucks took people from Rosary Hill to the harbour, the voyage to Macau was made via Chinese junks, and, on arrival, ‘Portuguese Red Cross and consular officials were on hand to welcome’ the refugees, together with ‘several Portuguese and Irish Catholic priests’.51 This case illustrates how the Macau Red Cross was enmeshed in ad hoc concerted efforts that linked people and authorities with different motivations in occupied, unoccupied and neutral territories. The British consulate also funded most of the Rosary Hill evacuees, the money being sent by British agents in Lisbon to the Macau governor via the Portuguese ministry of foreign affairs.52 Those who were not initially deemed ‘legitimate dependants of the British prisoners of war or internees’ were taken care of by the Macau delegation, to whom expenses were later reimbursed by the British authorities.53 The relocation of Rosary Hill residents to Macau is a clear example of the international connections framing the Macau Red Cross wartime activities. The intertwined links to Hong Kong were paralleled with a strong connection to Shanghai, where a large and financially distressed Portuguese Eurasian community lived.54 In the final stages of the war, this community was a specific beneficiary of campaigns by the Red Cross in Macau.55 This is probably because the ICRC in Shanghai did not assist the Portuguese in the city, arguing that they fell under the responsibility of the local Portuguese consulate.56 The Shanghai case also provides a clear link between the activities of the Macau Red Cross during and after the war. During the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s and after the Communist victory in 1949, the Portuguese in Shanghai, who mostly worked for Euro-​American companies, once again found themselves in dire straits, and the Red Cross in Macau was one of the key entities that provided them with assistance.57 The significance of the Macau delegation was much wider than its links to Hong Kong and Shanghai. Its reach was global. Messages transmitted to and from Macau via the ICRC in Geneva or the PRCS headquarters in Lisbon hailed from many different locations all over the world. Importantly, these included the Chinese wartime capital Chongqing, to which not even the Portuguese minister to China had relocated, suggesting again that the branch was not a mere national enterprise.58

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Although postal services ran between occupied and unoccupied China, Macau seems to have been the only part of Free China to which POWs and internees in Hong Kong were allowed to send messages through Red Cross channels.59 Given that many escapees from Hong Kong and families of POWs and civilian internees found their way into Chongqing, the Macau link in their communications was significant. The names of those who used the services of the Macau Red Cross paint a picture of diverse foreign communities living in the Portuguese-​administered territory during the 1940s: a new-​found cosmopolitanism that had been an unintended consequence of the war. Macau became a temporary global city, housing hundreds of thousands of refugees from China, Britain, France, Germany, Latin America, India, Russia and other places. Some had moved several times before reaching Macau, as was the case with several Jewish refugees.60 From Macau, messages were exchanged with Russians in Shanghai, North American and French missionaries, internees in Hong Kong, and Chinese in the USA and South Africa.61 Correspondence came from various Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, including those of India, Germany, South Africa and Turkey.62 Sometimes those being enquired about were not even in the enclave. For example, enquiries in Macau about a Chinese Maritime Customs employee whose last known address had been Xiamen (Amoy) were returned to Lisbon saying he had been first sent to Shanghai and then repatriated via Lourenço Marques on one of the exchange ships.63 Although the files at the ICRC and the PRCS Archives do not appear to contain the full texts of all the messages that were delivered, they nevertheless demonstrate the wide array of people who found themselves stranded in Macau or were in contact with people there, highlighting the enclave’s role as a global nexus during the conflict. To respond to requests for information, the Macau Red Cross resorted to personal relations, such as asking relatives or acquaintances in the city, but it also had relatively easy access to diplomatic channels via the British consulate and the Portuguese administration in Macau, both of which had direct contact with Lisbon. These could be reached to ensure help was provided when needed, sometimes adding a dose of local self-​interest to the obvious humanitarian cause. For example, in the summer of 1943 Rodrigues urged the secretary-​general of the Red Cross in Lisbon to contact the ministers of North and South American countries, so that relatives of hundreds of refugee Chinese families in Macau could be remitted the monetary support that had been discontinued after the fall of Hong Kong. This was done primarily to ease the financial burden of the local Portuguese colonial authorities, whose resources were critically strained because of the great numbers of people requiring assistance in Macau.64 Sometimes requests sent via diplomatic correspondence were also referred to the Red Cross in Macau. The Portuguese embassy in London enquired whether a British subject who worked for the E. D. Sassoon Banking Company in Hong Kong and had served in the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps was a refugee in Macau. After the request was forwarded to Rodrigues, he informed them that the person in

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question had died, but took the opportunity to provide information on other staff members of the company, of whom some were interned in Hong Kong, one was in Australia, one in Macau, and several in different parts of China.65 In wartime Macau, the Red Cross label was regarded as particularly powerful, and its initiatives were sometimes linked to other relief efforts. However, it could also be caught up in the precarious balance among humanitarian assistance, contacts with the Japanese authorities, and Portuguese concerns over perceptions of colonial prestige. An illustrative case is given by discussions around the possible use of the Panamanian ship Masbate, which had been docked in Macau since late 1941. In a context of increasing Japanese pressure to acquire or make use of vessels in Macau at a time of serious food and energy shortages, the plan was devised to sail the Masbate to Indochina to get supplies under a Red Cross flag. The idea was to use the Red Cross symbol to protect the supply ship from military attacks while in transit. This was a particularly urgent problem to address, as the last available Portuguese supply ship to travel between Macau and Indochina, the Wing Wah, had been torpedoed and sunk by an American submarine near Haiphong.66 For the governor, using the Masbate under Red Cross procurement was more convenient because the Portuguese authorities would be exempt from any compensation payments if it too were torpedoed.67 With the prior knowledge of the Macau governor, Rodrigues wrote to Geneva requesting authorisation for the deployment of the Masbate to supply Macau under a Red Cross flag, and a few months later pressured the Macau governor and, via the Lisbon headquarters of the PRCS, the Portuguese Government, to make sure the Japanese consented to the Masbate sailing to Indochina.68 The Portuguese authorities were reluctant to accept this. They preferred the ship to travel under a Portuguese flag to prevent others thinking that ‘the Portuguese Government … has to depend on the Red Cross to supply its territory’, with the Portuguese ministry of foreign affairs only agreeing to use the Red Cross flag if it was stated that it was ‘for the benefit of the refugees’.69 The Portuguese authorities in Macau, through the mediation of the influential head of the Economic Services Bureau, Pedro José Lobo, contacted Allied intelligence services in South China to guarantee the safe passage of the ship.70 In the end the Masbate sailed not under the Red Cross flag but under the Portuguese one, with a safe-​conduct issued by the British consul.71 As this case illustrates, the Macau Red Cross could occasionally be drawn into complex issues of supplying the overpopulated enclave, with its symbol being considered a possible safety measure against the threats and tensions in the region. Diplomatic relations between Portugal and Japan were never broken during the war, which no doubt facilitated Red Cross operations in Macau. Moments of great pressure and tension did nevertheless occur. As recognised by Morishima Morito, Japan’s minister to Portugal from 1941, there was a constant latent threat of a military occupation of Macau –​as East Timor had been occupied in 1942 –​if the Portuguese authorities decided to ally with the British or Americans.72 Therefore, Red Cross

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activities such as transmitting messages and remitting funds, even if ultimately primarily benefiting the Allies, had to be made with great care. The tragic fate of the Macau delegation’s president is indicative of how dangerous Macau could be.

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Death of a president and the temporary death of a branch If food shortages and supply difficulties were key features of everyday life in wartime Macau, so was urban crime. Assassinations were not an uncommon occurrence. One of the highest-​profile victims was none other than the president of the local Red Cross. Fernando Rodrigues was shot dead in the middle of a Macau street after returning from a funeral with his two daughters (who were injured) on 10 July 1945. The reasons for his death remain unclear. However, existing accounts point to his connections to and possible involvement in smuggling networks. His well-​known hot temper may also have played a part. According to British sources the reasons had been ‘non-​cooperation [with the enemy] and some financial issue’.73 Reporting the case to Lisbon, the Macau governor wrote that, although impossible to prove, the motive of the crime had been the ‘close relations’ that Rodrigues had with the Chinese leader of a group that had supported the collaborationist Government based in Nanjing which, a few months earlier, had secretly turned to the side of the Chinese central Government, which was resisting Japan from Chongqing. The man had been assassinated in neighbouring Zhongshan with part of his gang, and the Japanese were considered to be behind it.74 Two other Portuguese accounts state that Rodrigues was assassinated by an agent of Huang Gongjie (Wong Kong Kit), arguably the number-​one pro-​Japanese Chinese criminal in Macau during the war. Monsignor Manuel Teixeira, a Portuguese missionary who lived in Macau for most of his life, including during the war, wrote that Rodrigues was killed by one of Huang’s men after refusing to end his activity as a rice merchant whose imports were transported by smugglers from Chinese territory.75 An article by a Portuguese journalist citing unnamed ‘witnesses from that time’ presented an alternative hypothesis:  that Rodrigues was killed on account of his friendship with three Chinese brothers, patriotic smugglers who helped four American airmen escape from Macau, particularly after his vocal protests against the killing of one of the brothers by Huang’s men.76 Leo D’Almada e Castro, a member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council who was a representative of refugees from that colony in Macau during the war and escaped to London in 1945 to participate in the Hong Kong Planning Unit, believed the incident could have been the ‘result of some personal grudge’.77 Although the police arrested a man reported to be the bodyguard of an enemy agent, the different accounts as to why the Red Cross president was murdered reveal the tense, and often confusing, atmosphere in Macau, and the scope of personal connections Rodrigues had, including underground contacts that were so crucial for his relief work and yet, seemingly, proved his undoing.

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After his death, Rodrigues was replaced as president of the Macau delegation by Lieutenant José Peixoto Lima; the secretariat passed to Leopoldo Danilo Barreiros; and Rodrigues’s Dutch wife, Neeltje Adriana van Woerkom, was nominated a voting member (vogal).78 However, the Macau delegation did not outlive its president for long. It stopped its activities in 1946. With the war over, its ‘POW service’ had no further purpose. In Lisbon, the PRCS decorated several of its members, including the posthumous award of ‘Praise’ (Louvor) medal to Rodrigues.79 A few years later, in the midst of the civil war in China, the Red Cross was revived in Macau. Alberto Pacheco Jorge, who had been involved in the wartime branch, was chosen as the new president, a position he would occupy until 1971. This third life of the Red Cross in Macau has lasted until the present, albeit now operating under the umbrella of a different national society. The know-​how acquired during the Second World War was invaluable for informing its subsequent activities, which included dealing with new waves of refugees fleeing war in China and in Vietnam. Conclusion The story of the Macau delegation of the PRCS offers insight into the roles played by small neutral territories in Red Cross activities during major conflicts. Under severe constraints in the exercise of regular visits to those interned by Japan, in relief efforts and in postal communications, neutral Macau proved to be a welcome supporting base for Allied refugees and for the relatives of POWs and civilian internees in East Asia. The presence of a functioning British consulate and of many people engaged in Allied (including, naturally, Chinese) underground resistance was of obvious relevance, but so was the relatively accommodating stance Japanese authorities had towards Portugal. Indeed, despite a few peaks of tension, throughout the war all belligerents –​in Asia as in Europe –​tolerated Portuguese neutrality for the advantages it brought to each of them. This, in turn, allowed some Red Cross activities that could not take place elsewhere to be undertaken in Portuguese-​ruled territories. Whilst analyses of the connections of the Red Cross and the practice of neutrality during the Second World War tend to focus on Switzerland, the relatively understudied case of Portugal reveals a surprising number of global connections. In particular, the Macau case attests to the complex layers of interactions and unexpected opportunities linking the European and the Asian theatres of the war. The revival of this colonial branch of the PRCS was inextricably linked to the relations of the many refugees in the enclave –​most of whom were Chinese or British citizens –​to those interned or destitute in occupied Hong Kong and Shanghai, as well as to the ICRC efforts in East Asia. A web of personal and international connections allowed the Red Cross in Macau to have a truly global reach. Although its activities suffered a severe blow with the assassination of its enterprising president, they set an influential model to the Red Cross branch that was re-​established in Macau in 1949 and continues to operate to this day under the Red Cross Society of China.

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The wartime Macau Red Cross –​however small its territorial base and lifespan –​ played a relevant role in the midst of a great conflict, linking people near and far with very few resources but taking advantage of different local, regional and transnational networks. Its actors and their actions were moved by a variety of concerns, from personal to imperial, including humanitarian solidarity and the desire for national prestige. This case study shows how the dangers and opportunities of Portuguese neutrality were played out not only by ministers and diplomats in capital-​city offices, but also in the field, in small enclaves far from the seats of imperial power, by people such as Rodrigues, whose forgotten –​and fatal –​boldness made a real difference to so many. Notes 1 Research for this article was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (SFRH/​ BD/​93872/​2013), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/​K503198/​1), and St Antony’s College, Oxford. Arquivo Histórico da Cruz Vermelha Portuguesa (AHCVP), CV/​4742–​805, ‘Elementos estatísticos da acção da Cruz Vermelha Portuguesa durante a Guerra de 1939–​1945’ (‘Statistical Elements on the Actions of the Portuguese Red Cross during the 1939–​1945 War’); my translation. 2 The Anglo-​Portuguese alliance dates back to the fourteenth century. On the role of the Red Cross in Macau as a vehicle for assistance to the British see H. F.  S. Lopes, ‘Inter-​Imperial Humanitarianism:  The Macau Delegation of the Portuguese Red Cross during the Second World War’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46:6 (2018), 1125–​47. 3 AHCVP, CV/​3513–​14, e.g. president of the Macau delegation of the Portuguese Red Cross to Portuguese Red Cross in Lisbon, 19 May 1943; M. Teixeira, ‘Macau durante a guerra: Doce visão de paz! [Macau during the war:  Sweet vision of peace!]’, Boletim eclesiástico da diocese de Macau 885 (1978), 497–​518 (p. 498); N. P.  S. Cónim and M. F.  B. Teixeira, Macau e a sua população, 1500–​2000: Aspectos demográficos, sociais e económicos (Macau: Direcção dos Serviços de Estatística e Censos de Macau, 1998), p. 188; J. P. Reeves, The Lone Flag: Memoir of the British Consul in Macau during World War II (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014), p. 14. 4 A. J. Telo, A neutralidade portuguesa e o ouro Nazi (Portuguese Neutrality and Nazi Gold) (Lisbon: Quetzal, 2000), pp. 19, 38. 5 Ibid., p. 360. 6 H. F. S. Lopes, ‘Questioning Neutrality: Sino-​Portuguese Relations during the War and the Post-​War Periods, 1937–​1949’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2018). 7 Cruz Vermelha Portuguesa 1865 a 1925 (Lisbon: Centro Tipografico Colonial, 1926), pp. 301–​ 2; A Cruz Vermelha Portuguesa: Sua génese e sua actividade em 80 anos (Lisbon: Secretariado Nacional de Informação, 1945), p. 25. 8 Cruz Vermelha Portuguesa 1865 a 1925; A Cruz Vermelha Portuguesa. 9 There were no representatives of either the Japanese or the Chinese Red Cross; AHCVP: Legações Estrangeiras, China, Chinese minister in Lisbon to president of the PRCS, 10 April 1944. 10 J. Crossland, Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1939–​1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 70.

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1 1 I. F. Pimentel and C. Ninhos, Salazar, Portugal e o Holocausto (Lisbon: Temas e Debates, 2013). 12 E.g. ‘Relief to Prisoners of War in the Far East’, Prisoners of War Bulletin, 1:1 (1943), 4. 13 On the American–​Japanese exchanges see P. S. Corbett, Quiet Passages:  The Exchange of Civilians between the United States and Japan during the Second World War (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987), pp. 56–​95; AHCVP, CV/​3213–​465, Proc. no. 3322, correspondence with the PRCS about the exchange. 14 Crossland, Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, p. 89. 15 Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (AICRC), BG 017 07–​015, ICRC delegate in Shanghai to ICRC, 9[?]‌December 1942. On the Portuguese community in Mozambique see L. Macagno, ‘From Mozambique to Brazil: The “Good Portuguese” of the Chinese Athletic Club’, in E. Morier-​Genoud and M. Cahen (eds), Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 239–​62. 16 The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA), FO 371/​35736, Department of State to Foreign Office, 10 October 1943. 17 N. Wylie, Britain, Switzerland, and the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 337–​8. 18 Portugal represented Brazilian interests in Japan and Japanese interests in Mexico, but not those of the major Allied powers. 19 P. Lottaz, ‘Neutral States and Wartime Japan:  The Diplomacy of Sweden, Spain and Switzerland toward the Empire’ (Ph.D.  dissertation, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, 2018); F. Rodao, Franco y el emperio japonés:  Imágenes y propaganda en tiempos de guerra (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 2002); Lopes, ‘Questioning Neutrality’, p. 185. 20 AHCVP, Delegação de Macau, 1ª Pasta (1915–​74), minutes of the Macau delegation of the PRCS, 23 April 1922. 21 ‘History,’ Macau Red Cross, www.redcross.org.mo/​en/​rc_​history.htm (accessed 1 June 2016); ‘History,’ Hong Kong Cross, www.redcross.org.hk/​en/​about_​hkrc/​history.html (accessed 18 January 2019). 22 In his biography of the Portuguese authoritarian leader António de Oliveira Salazar, Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses estimates that ‘some 100,000 refugees passed through Portugal, fleeing the  Nazis’; F. R. de Meneses, Salazar:  A Political Biography (New  York:  Enigma, 2009), pp. 236–​7. On refugees in Macau during the war, see Lopes, ‘Questioning Neutrality’, pp. 108–​ 56, 230–​43; H. F. S. Lopes, ‘Something Serious Can Happen Here: Refugees in Macau during the Sino-​Japanese War, 1937–​1945’ (M.A.  dissertation, SOAS, University of London, 2013). Although not exclusively dedicated to refugees, a few works on wartime Macau have alluded to some aspects of their experiences, e.g. I. L. F. Barreto (ed.), Macau during the Sino-​Japanese War (Macau: Macau Cultural Institute/​Museum of Macau, 2002); J. F. O. Botas, Macau 1937–​ 1945: Os anos da guerra (Macau: Instituto Internacional de Macau, 2012); F. Lin and X. Wang (eds), Gudao yingxiang: Aomen yu kangRi zhanzheng tuzhi (Guangzhou: Guangdong jiaoyu chubanshe, 2015); G. C. Gunn (ed.), Wartime Macau:  Under the Japanese Shadow (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016). 23 Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Historical Overseas Archives, Portugal) (AHU), 236, 1E, MU, GM, 1942, governor of Macau to minister of colonies, 12 August 1942. 24 A. Coates, Macau and the British 1637–​1842: Prelude to Hong Kong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); R. M. Puga, The British Presence in Macau, 1635–​1793 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013). 25 R. Bickers, ‘On Not Being Macao(ed) in Hong Kong: British Official Minds and Actions in 1967’, in R. Bickers and R. Yep (eds), May Days in Hong Kong:  Riot and Emergency in 1967

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(Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), pp, 54–​67 (p. 54). On the stereotypical image of Macau as a vice-​ridden place see H. De Leeuw, Cities of Sin (London: Noel Douglas, 1934), pp. 146–​90. 26 Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo (National Archives, Portugal) (ANTT), AOS, UL-​10A1, cx. 767, governor of Macau to ministry of colonies, 4 April 1942. 27 Wylie, Britain, Switzerland, and the Second World War, pp. 328–​9. 28 W. P. Brecher, Honored and Dishored Guests:  Westerners in Wartime Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), p. 226. 29 P. Y. Donzé, C. Hauser, P. Lottaz and A. Maître (eds), ‘Journal d’un témoin’: Camille Gorgé, diplomate suisse dans le Japon en guerre (1940–​1945) (Berne: Documents Diplomatiques Suisses, 2018), pp. 122–​3. 30 AICRC, BG 017 07–​012, ICRC delegate in Shanghai to ICRC, 16 May 1942. 31 E.g. Crossland, Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, pp. 90–​7; ‘60 Prison Camps Concealed  –​Red Cross Handicaps in Far East War  –​Japanese Opposition’, South China Morning Post (23 November 1945). 32 Lopes, ‘Inter-​Imperial Humanitarianism’. 33 Ibid., p. 1128. 34 Arquivo de Macau (Archives of Macau) (AM), MO/​AH/​AC/​SA/​01/​25736, e.g. president of the Macau delegation of the PRCS to head of the Macau Civil Administration Services, 28 April 1944. 35 Hong Kong Public Records Office (HKPRO), HKRS 41-​1-​3961. 36 AM, MO/​AH/​AC/​SA/​01/​18566, president of the Macau delegation of the PRCS to head of the Macau Civil Administration Services, 26 February 1943. 37 AICRC, D AO CHINE1 01-​086, president of the Macau delegation of the PRCS to ICRC in Shanghai, 27 February 1943. 38 AHU, Espólio Gabriel Teixeira, Reeves to Teixeira, 26 February 1943. 39 In 1941 he was tried in Macau for shooting a man over a land issue. He was initially sentenced to fifteen years in exile but that sentence was revoked by a higher court in Goa; ‘Condenado ao degredo [Sentenced to Exile]’, Voz de Macau (4 April 1941), p. 3; Teixeira, ‘Macau durante a guerra’, p. 533. 40 ‘Ainda o torneio de bridge’, Voz de Macau (23 April 1943), p. 3; my translation. 41 James Crossland uses the term to refer to the ICRC representative in Singapore; Crossland, Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, p. 92. 42 E.g. Directório de Macau 1937 (Macau: Repartição Central dos Serviços Económicos, 1937), pp. 1, 3, 5; Anuário de Macau 1938 (Macau: Repartição Central dos Serviços Económicos, 1938), pp. 22, 37–​8; Anuário de Macau 1939 (Macau: Repartição Central dos Serviços Económicos, 1939), pp. 3, 5, 9, 10, 12–​19; Arquivo Histórico-​Diplomático (Historical Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Portugal) (AHD), 3P, A9, M135, Portuguese consul in Guangzhou to Portuguese minister to China, 19 March 1940. 43 Lopes, ‘Inter-​Imperial Humanitarianism’, p. 1132. 44 AM, MO/​AH/​AC/​SA/​01/​18566:  Fernando de Sena Fernandes Rodrigues (president); Lieutenant José Peixoto de Lima (secretary); Lieutenant Manuel Gedeão (treasurer); and, as voting members (vogais), Captain José Joaquim da Silva e Costa, Alberto Pacheco Jorge, retired Lieutenant Augusto Teixeira Ponto and João Correia Paes d’Assunção. The latter died in 1944 and was replaced by Leopoldo Danilo Barreiros. 45 AM, MO/​AH/​AC/​SA/​01/​18566, head of the Macau Civil Administration Services to president of the Macau delegation of the PRCS, 12 March 1943.

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46 HKPRO, HKRS 170-1-359; AHCVP, Delegação de Macau, 1ª Pasta (1915–1974), Macau Delegation to Secretary General of the Portuguese Red Cross, 12 May 1955. 47 AICRC, D AO CHINE1 01-​086, ICRC delegate in Shanghai to president of the Macau delegation of the PRCS, 24 January 1944. 48 AICRC, BG 017 07-​063, ICRC delegate in Hong Kong to ICRC, 20 December 1943. 49 V. England, ‘Zindel’s Rosary Hill –​Hong Kong’s Forgotten War’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch, 57 (2017), 36–​66. 50 For example, between January and November 1944, over 200 dependants left Rosary Hill, and in May 1945, 281 dependants left for Macau; AICRC, BG 017 07-​063, ICRC delegate in Hong Kong, ‘Memorandum on Proposed Measures to Ensure the Future Maintenance of the “Rosary Hill” Red Cross Home’, 30 April 1945; and ICRC delegate in Hong Kong to ICRC, 20 June 1945. The arrival of the Rosary Hill refugees was reported in a local paper, ‘Refugiados de Hong Kong’, Voz de Macau (10 May 1945), p. 4. 51 E. Field, Twilight in Hong Kong (London: F. Muller, 1960), pp. 220–​1. 52 ICRC, BG 017 07-​077, British vice-​consul at Geneva to ICRC, 28 May 1945; TNA, FO 369/​ 3267, Foreign Office to Colonial Office, 16 August 1945. 53 TNA, FO 369/​3267, Jean Cellérier of the London delegation of the Central Agency for Prisoners of War of the ICRC to Colonial Office, 5 July 1945. 54 On the Portuguese community in Shanghai, see A. G. Dias, Diáspora macaense: Macau, Hong Kong, Xangai, 1850–​1952 (Lisbon: Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau, 2014); and A. M. P. J. Silva, The Portuguese Community in Shanghai:  A Pictorial History (Macau:  Conselho das Comunidades Macaenses/​Instituto Internacional de Macau, 2012). 55 ‘Cruz Vermelha Portuguesa’, Voz de Macau (7 December 1944), p.  4; ‘Como socorrer os portugueses de Shanghai, vítimas da guerra?’, Renascimento (23 March 1945), p. 6; ‘Portugueses! Centenas de familias portuguesas estão destruidas em Shanghai! Assinem, conforme a sua posse, a subscrição pública!’, Renascimento (29 March 1945), p.  6; ‘Para os portugueses de Xangai’, Renascimento (26 June 1945), p. 4. 56 ICRC, BG 017 07-​015, ICRC delegate in Shanghai to ICRC, 3 December 1942. 57 On the activities of the Macau Red Cross regarding the Shanghai Portuguese in the 1950s see AHCVP, Delegação de Macau, 1ª Pasta (1915–​74). 58 Controversially, he stayed in occupied Shanghai throughout the war, although Portugal continued to recognise the Chinese central Government based in Chongqing and led by Chiang Kai-​shek, and did not recognise the Chinese-​collaborationist Reorganised National Government led by Wang Jingwei, which had its capital in Nanjing. 59 ICRC, D AO CHINE1 01–​024, ICRC delegate in Hong Kong to ICRC via ICRC delegate in Yokohama, 21 June 1943. 60 P. French, ‘Strangers on the Praia’. Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 33 (September 2016), www. asiancha.com/​content/​view/​2431/​581/​ (accessed 14 September 2016). 61 ICRC, D AO CHINE1 01–​086, ICRC assistant delegate in Shanghai to president of the Macau delegation of the PRCS, 6 July, 29 September, 14 October, 16 October and 15 November 1943; AHCVP, Livro de correspondência expedida 1945, Vol. IV; AM, MO/​AH/​AC/​SA/​01/​18566, PRCS to American Red Cross, 14 May 1945. 62 ICRC, D AO CHINE1 01–​086, ICRC assistant delegate in Shanghai to president of the Macau delegation of the PRCS, 23 March and 16 November 1944; president of the Macau delegation of the PRCS to ICRC delegate in Shanghai, 2 May 1944. AM, MO/​AH/​AC/​SA/​01/​18566, secretary-​general of the PRCS to the Macau Government secretary, 21 November 1942, transmitted to the president of the Macau delegation of the PRCS on 30 August 1943.

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6 3 Correspondence in AM, MO/​AH/​AC/​SA/​01/​18566. 64 AHCVP, CV/​3513–​14, president of the Macau delegation of the PRCS to secretary-​general of the PRCS, 5 June 1943. 65 AM, MO/​AH/​AC/​SA/​01/​18566, president of the Macau delegation of the PRCS to head of the Macau Civil Administration Services, 18 July 1943. 66 The names of the few who survived amongst the hundreds onboard the Wing Wah were later communicated to Rodrigues by the French Red Cross in Hanoi; ‘Sobreviventes do “Wing Wah” ’, Voz de Macau (25 June 1943), p. 3. 67 ANTT, Arquivo Salazar, NE-​10A2, cx, 768, governor of Macau to ministry of colonies, 8 June 1943. 68 ANTT, Arquivo Salazar, NE-​10A2, cx, 768, governor of Macau to ministry of colonies, 17 May 1943. 69 AHCVP, CV/​3513–​14, ministry of colonies to secretary-​general of the PRCS, 24 December 1943; my translation. 70 ANTT, Arquivo Salazar, NE-​10A2, cx, 768, governor of Macau to ministry of colonies, 5 February 1944. 71 ANTT, Arquivo Salazar, NE-​10A2, cx, 768, governor of Macau to ministry of colonies, 8 February and 22 March 1944. 72 M. Morishima, Pearl Harbor Lisboa Tóquio:  Memórias de um diplomata, trans. Yuko Kase (Almada: Ad Litteram, 2017), p. 101 (first published in Japanese, 1950). 73 TNA, FO 371/​46199, British embassy in Chongqing to Foreign Office, 24 July 1945. 74 ANTT, Arquivo Salazar, NE-​10A2, cx, 768, governor of Macau to minister of colonies, 14 July 1945. 75 Teixeira, ‘Macau durante a Guerra’, pp.  530–​1; and M. Teixeira, ‘The Bonnie and Clyde of Macao’, in D. Pittis and S. J. Henders (eds), Macao:  Mysterious Decay and Romance (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 5–​7. 76 R. Pinto, ‘Guerra em paz’, Macau 45 (1995), p. 86. 77 TNA, FO 371/​46199, British embassy in Chongqing to Foreign Office, 24 July 1945. 78 AM, MO/​AH/​AC/​SA/​01/​18566, president of the Macau delegation of the PRCS to head of the Macau Civil Administration Services, 7 August 1945. 79 Rodrigues had already been awarded two other decorations by the PRCS, one for ‘Dedication’ (Dedicação) in 1920, and one for ‘Merit’ (Mérito) in 1943.

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A humanitarian and national obligation: A comparison between the Dutch Red Cross, 1940–​5, and the Dutch Indies Red Cross, 1942–​50 Leo van Bergen

This chapter is concerned with a case study of the activities, contexts and influences on Red Cross actions and thinking. In this instance, the context of war, colonialism and power will be the focus, and the question of how, theoretically at least, neutral Red Cross assistance to sick and wounded soldiers has been practised is central. This problem will be explored by a comparative analysis between the Nederlandse Rode Kruis (Dutch Red Cross (NRK)) in the years when Nazi Germany occupied the Netherlands (1940–​5) and the Nederlands-​Indische Rode Kruis (Dutch Indies Red Cross (NIRK)) through the years of Japanese occupation and the following war of decolonisation (1942–​50). The Dutch Red Cross Although some of the first people to applaud the ideas of Henry Dunant were Dutch –​most famously J. H. C. Basting, the supposed inventor of the concept of Red Cross neutrality –​several private initiatives to set up a Dutch Red Cross organisation in the wake of the 1864 Geneva Conference failed.1 It took four years to set up the Dutch Society for the Lending of Aid to Sick and Wounded Warriors in Time of War, ‘whether or not the Netherlands [were] involved’. This was not by private initiative, but came into being through a royal decree of King William III, after a suggestion from his conservative minister of war, J.  A.  van den Bosch.2 William, nicknamed the ‘Gorilla’, was not known for a deep interest in humanitarian action, something he shared with Bosch. In 1869, William made clear that he supported the idea of the Red Cross, but only insofar as the Red Cross organisation served the interests of the Dutch military.3 The first board was constituted after proposals from the ministry of war and the ministry of the navy, giving it a noble, conservative, protestant, military and male character. Of the twenty-​eight members, twelve were military men, including four military doctors and one future minister of war.4 This militarised character of the original board determined the actions and ideas of the NRK at least up until the Second World War. For example, around the turn of the

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twentieth century, ‘peace work’ was accepted because without it the NRK would face an uncertain future owing to the lack of conflict. Without peacetime work, it was felt, it would be impossible to be prepared for the task of supporting the Dutch military health service (MHS) in the eventuality of war. The actions undertaken under the denominator ‘peace work’, however, had to be geared towards preparing for war.5 At the beginning of the First World War the NRK decided that no person or aid was to be sent beyond its borders. The NRK wanted to be able to give its best for the Dutch armed forces in the event the Netherlands became involved in the war. When asked when this would be the case, the answer was: after a peace treaty has been signed.6 In stark contrast to other national societies, aid to Belgian refugees was only provided after the military had declared them a military problem in the autumn of 1918.7 In 1917 the NRK officially declared its work to be driven ‘solely out of humanitarian considerations’. However, in that same year it was officially declared an extension of the MHS, a situation that in practice had already existed long before. Military, and not humanitarian, considerations had the upper hand.8 The above shows that, as a result of its military-​influenced board and the nature and character of the men on it, obeying authority was second nature for the NRK. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in 1940 the NRK remained intact after the German authorities made known that it could stay in operation, albeit alongside the Nazified German Red Cross and under the leadership of a Dutch National Socialist.9 This development contradicted Red Cross principles, but it did not contradict NRK history. As Dutch historian L.  de Jong put it, ‘The Netherlands were occupied. That’s just the way it was. The authority of the occupied nation had to be acknowledged. There could be no mention of resistance whatsoever.’10 This was, of course, done in order to prevent worse from happening. However, as always, the remaining question is: when does trying to prevent the worst evolve into utter failure for a humanitarian organisation? When is a line crossed that, from a humanitarian point of view and from a Red Cross point of view, should never have been crossed? The NRK board and the Second World War At the end of 1944 the NRK board finally decided that the limit to co-​operation had been reached. It stepped down and ended all its activities. The decision was promoted by the news that C. Piek, the head of the ‘humanitarian’ national-​socialist organisation Winter Aid, was to become secretary-​general of the NRK. The board presented its decision as a choice in favour of Red Cross principles and against Nazi involvement, but the time of its departure near the end of occupation raises doubts.11 For example, before stepping down it supported the protest of its chair, W. Engelbrecht –​who was a member of the most important Dutch national socialist party, the Nationaal-​Socialistische Beweging (Nationalist Socialist Movement) –​on

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the grounds that Piek was not very popular among Party members.12 And then there are earlier activities during the war. The NRK not only lauded Franco as a symbol of humanitarianism and applauded the activities of the Nazified German Red Cross.13 It had also excluded Jews from its organisation, and in 1941 assisted in carrying out the so-​called Anti-​Jewish Blood Transfusion Measure:  a policy of not transfusing Jewish blood into Aryan bodies. Jews, or those defined as such by Nazi regulations, were only permitted to donate blood to other Jews. The board co-​operated, in spite of the fact that it told donors who protested against the possibility of their blood ending up in the veins of German occupiers that this kind of thinking completely contradicted Red Cross principles.14 It was not that the board did not protest at all, but that the form the protest took was of a practical and selfish nature, rather than based on broader humanitarian principles and morals. The NRK wrote to the ministry of social affairs saying that no one could be forced to receive blood from someone from whom they did not wish to receive it. Precedence for this was cited via a reference to the practice of blood-​transfusion refusal taking place in the 1930s at the Harbour Hospital, Rotterdam, where it was agreed that ‘Americans and Englishmen do not receive blood from negroes.’15 Germans or Dutchmen not wanting to receive ‘Jewish’ blood, therefore, were merely continuing the practices of the pre-​Nazi era. Had this proposition gone further it would likely have led to unpopularity and the withdrawal of donors from the blood transfusion service. This would not only harm Dutchmen, but Germans as well. Therefore, the German Government was asked to change the measure insofar that it would not apply to Dutchmen who did not protest against Jewish blood transfusions.16 This proposition was not accepted, and the NRK board thereupon ordered the head of the blood transfusion service to co-​operate fully with all the measures the German Government deemed necessary, including handing in addresses of Jewish donors to the German authorities.17 In addition to this issue over Jewish blood transfusions, the NRK was also compliant with the German wish to equip and pay for an ambulance for the Dutch SS Eastern Front volunteers, who, in the words of the NRK, went away ‘to fight world bolshevism’.18 Although the neutrality of this ambulance was highly questionable, the NRK agreed, in no small part out of a shared condemnation of Communism on the part of the Calvinist board members. It is unclear what exactly the Dutch doctors and nurses of the Eastern Front ambulance achieved during their active service but their actions featured prominently in Dutch Nazi magazines. Indeed, the articles filled some of the main board members with pride.19 Although the SS volunteers fought in the service of a foreign occupying country, the board defended its actions by pointing out that assisting SS volunteers could be compared to those who helped wounded rebels during a civil war, which would be perfectly normal for the Red Cross.20 The NRK was also aware of what awaited the Dutch Jews who were being transported east. In early 1942, it was said at a NRK board meeting that all the Jews

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deported just a couple of months before from the city of Enschede and its vicinity had been declared dead.21 The NRK was also reticent to send food packages to prisoners of war, political prisoners or deported Jews; the board always deferred to the German authorities for permission before considering such actions. The result of this inertia was never in doubt. Contrary to the support given to the inmates of other nationalities, at no time did Dutch prisoners of war, political prisoners and Jewish deportees receive food parcels or anything else that could have made their lives more bearable.22 It was this aspect of the NRK’s wartime work that received most attention and criticism later.23 After the war, many said that the NRK had violated Red Cross principles and had collaborated with the Nazis. On 15 May 1940 it had changed its identity from a humanitarian organisation to one aligned with the invaders, and returned to its prewar state once the war was over. This is roughly what a recent work on NRK history suggests; according to the authors, the Second World War was a nasty intermezzo in a history filled with good deeds.24 Again, questions can be raised. The NRK was accused of having made several, serious mistakes during the years of occupation, but was this really the case? Mistakes are made in a policy generally considered justified. Therefore, the word ‘failure’ is more appropriate here. The NRK policy was aimed at staying in office, rather than delivering humanitarian aid to people in need, even if this meant taking decisions contrary to what it thought was in accordance with its humanitarian mission. It acted according to the wording of judicial texts instead of being inspired by their spirit. From an international legal point of view, the Nazi occupation posed problems for the NRK board that it had never considered before; however, the attitude of the NRK during the war years should not be treated or seen as a caesura. It was a more-​or-​less logical outcome of its co-​operation with and obedience to political and military authorities throughout its entire history since 1867. Generally it had not looked at the needs of wounded and sick individuals irrespective of race, religion, country or creed; rather, it had considered first and foremost the needs of the Dutch army. The Dutch Indies Red Cross When focusing on the role of power and the absence of power, it is interesting to look at colonial situations, for, what is colonialism if not the exercise of power by one –​in its own eyes –​superior nation over another?25 This highly influences medical work. For a very long time in the Dutch Indies medical assistance had been military-​ medical assistance, and military-​medical men remained highly influential after the establishment of a Dienst Volksgezondheid (Public Health Service (DVG)) at the beginning of the twentieth century. The DVG in the Dutch Indies, however, had a keen eye on Dutch military power and economic profit and therefore was mainly concerned with the health of the Europeans and those working for them. In this respect, it shared some key characteristics with the NIRK.26

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The NIRK was established in 1870. Officially, it was a branch of the NRK, but in effect, because of the enormous distance and very differing circumstances it faced, it operated independently. Although aligned to universalist Red Cross principles in theory, in practice the NIRK had no other interest than meeting the needs of the Koninklijk Nederlands-​Indische Leger (Royal Dutch Indies Army (KNIL)). It was a tool of empire. This became clear when, in 1911, it refused to deliver aid during a fierce plague epidemic on Java, because it wanted to restrict itself entirely to wartime tasks. As a result, in 1914 it was left to the NRK to send a couple of ambulances, albeit –​ tellingly –​because it considered the plague an issue of national-​colonial importance. Nevertheless, Europeans in the archipelago itself did not understand the motives of the NRK, because the plague was not threatening European lives. Delivering aid in this instance was, therefore, widely considered to be a waste of money.27 Five years later, however, the NIRK hailed the act of deploying the ambulances as proof of its humanity and commitment to broad Red Cross principles.28 Beneath the veneer of civic humanitarianism, however, the NIRK was adamant that it was an organisation tasked with distributing ‘aid in times of war, insurgency, resistance and other circumstances requiring the use of armed forces in our Dutch East Indies possessions’.29 Colonialism soon came to the fore when, in 1870, peace ‘once again’ had to be restored in Borneo. This took place not only using the Dutch flag but Red Cross banners as well, and was cheered on by the NIRK, who saw it as part of a wider civilising mission to the island’s inhabitants, whose methods of warfare had until then had been characterised ‘by all possible kinds of inhumanity’.30 When the Aceh war broke out in 1873, the NIRK’s board –​mainly consisting of individuals drawn from military and political circles –​continued this trend by setting aside Dunant’s notion of ‘tutti fratelli’ despite the lip service paid to the founder’s ideal during the organisation’s early days.31 Instead, it was declared that the Dutch were fighting a just war ‘for the honour and rights of the Fatherland’ against a bunch of rebellious insurgents.32 This idea was not completely unheard of. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the neutrality of the Red Cross was restricted to European-​style wars between two civilised countries, and not applicable in guerrilla jungle-​warfare against barbarous tribes.33 The NIRK, therefore, delivered aid  –​only in the form of goods, not medical assistance (this was left to the MHS) –​that was completely in line with the demands of the KNIL, including a pool table, cigars for European officers and cheap cigarettes for (mostly indigenous) soldiers.34 The fact that one could speak not of a rebellion, but rather of resistance by a free nation to foreign invasion, was of no concern. The people of Aceh were not civilised, as evidence by the fact that they did not respect the Red Cross emblem.35 This trend of the NIRK lending support to colonial power structures continued into the twentieth century. Indeed, during the interwar years its assistance to colonial governing interests was given more prominence in its attempts to set up public health initiatives in case further rebellions against Dutch colonial rule broke out. In

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comparison to the NRK and other national Red Cross organisations, the NIRK was late in embracing social aid work. When it did, it was solely as part of its preparations for future defensive wars.36 The Japanese invasion of 1941–2, however, was so swift and successful that all such plans turned out to be of little use. In a matter of weeks, power had been reversed in the Dutch Indies. It was now the Dutch who were in the position that had long been occupied by the Indonesians. The Nederlands-​Indische Rode Kruis (NIRK) during the Second World War Although not all western physicians and nurses were interned during the Japanese occupation, in the years 1942–​5 the Red Cross medical story in the Dutch Indies is mostly one of Japanese internment camps. The prewar NIRK  –​comprising doctors, nurses, assistant nurses, transport sections, other personnel and a blood-​ transfusion service –​fell apart swiftly during the invasion. Neither it, nor any other Dutch medical organisation, was recognised by the Japanese. By May 1942, the NIRK had effectively ceased to exist. Its assets worth 150,000 guilders –​comparable to 1 million Euros today –​were confiscated. Contrary to the situation in the Netherlands, where the NRK existed alongside the Nazified German Red Cross, in the Dutch Indies, only the Japanese Red Cross was recognised.37 On a local level, however, in places such as Malang and Surabaya, some Red Cross activity remained possible, although these local departments were recognised as part only of the ICRC, not of the NIRK. Recognition, however, was not an act of humanitarianism on the part of the conquerors, but a result of Japanese interests. Assistance to the sick and needy by those western doctors and nurses not yet interned had its uses for the Japanese authorities. As soon as their services were no longer required, however, medical assistance, and therefore also Red Cross assistance, was terminated.38 In practice, however, this local and temporary character of Red Cross aid was not much better than that which had been provided before the war, when it had been minimal. The European medical services were far from sufficient to assist the huge Indonesian population, and the NIRK was merely a minor part of the medical system. Additionally, and perhaps even more importantly, Red Cross assistance had always been coordinated in co-​operation with Government authorities. Therefore, the war meant that there was a transition not only from Dutch power to Dutch powerlessness, but also from planned and prepared, Government-​approved NIRK-​ assistance to sheer improvisation. On several occasions, the local branches asked for assistance from the Japanese authorities.39 The small amount of local aid became progressively scarcer as more Red Cross men and women were put behind barbed wire. If only because this was already a Sisyphean task, those who stayed outside the camps focused on aiding those interned, even though the needs of the Indonesians were often greater. The death toll among Indonesian workers was higher than that of the westerners detained in the internment camps:  some 300,000 Indonesians against approximately 20,000

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Europeans.40 Nevertheless, even regarding this understandable limitation on those who received assistance, the aid delivered would have been little more than half a drop in the ocean. The advantage of these harsh circumstances was that after the war, unlike the NRK, no one accused the NIRK of failing in its humanitarian duties. In some ways, therefore, inactivity could be construed as an act of neutrality. Certainly, when looking at what work was done or not done, questions can be raised. The lack of interest in the fate of the Indonesian people, which existed before the war, did not magically vanish after the Japanese invasion, and this too may have been a reason to limit assistance to Europeans within the camps. For instance, one of the local sub-​ branches erected an information bureau to collect data, as one of its employees put it, ‘on a basis as broad as humanly possible without any racial criteria’. During the war this same individual said that, financially, the branch did a good job, which was entirely due to the fact that its bookkeeper was a European.41 Questions of race and racism were not asked. Although ideas on racial superiority and inferiority were anything but absent in the Dutch colony during the war, the distinction was more or less seen as an objective, scientific fact, which, by the way, made the Japanese occupation even harder to bear. The NIRK and the war of decolonisation Shortly after the Japanese surrender in September 1945, the Indonesian leaders Sukarno and Mohammed Hatta declared independence. Not long after, the first aid organisations began to arrive on the beaches of the archipelago now called Indonesia. Many would follow this initial wave during the period of post-​invasion reconstruction, so much so that chaos ensued, blighting the already challenging humanitarian relief operation.42 This led, in 1946, to the erection of the Medical Co-​ordination Council, the Indies counterpart of the Medical Co-​ordination Commission that had been set up in May 1945 in the Netherlands. Its task was to further co-​operation between the military health services of the KNIL; the Dutch land-​and-​sea forces; the DVG; and the NIRK, which a year later was renamed the Nederlandse Rode Kruis, Afdeling Indonesië (Dutch Red Cross, Department of Indonesia (NERKAI)). As part of this rebranding, and much against the will of some of its board members, the NIRK was partially demilitarised, for the contextually appropriate purpose of not unnecessarily alienating the Indonesian population. This was done, however, in pursuit of the Dutch authorities’ ultimate goal of luring the Indonesians back into the Dutch fold.43 In 1944, it was said in Dutch governmental circles that bringing Indonesia back under colonial rule should be of greatest priority. The medical care distributed by the Dutch expedition force would have to meet all the requirements necessary, even at the expense of rendering medical assistance in the Netherlands itself. Political power had to be re-​established in the East Indies, and medicine was to play its part in the process. To achieve this, a group of medical specialists had to be installed, who

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‘would be a welcome addition to the military work in order to liberate the Dutch East Indies’.44 Except for the medical teams –​twenty-​two in total –​and the feeding, blood-​transfusion, transport and repatriation teams, population teams, mobile teams and social assistance teams were also formed, as well as professional military-​ medical teams. These served with the DVG or in military hospitals, and showed, according to H. J. van Ketwich Verschuur, chairman of the NRK in the first postwar years, that the distribution of medical aid in Indonesia was not only a humanitarian, but also a national, obligation.45 In truth, the specialist teams came into being to fill the vacuum between the late but more or less permanent aid delivered by the DVG, and the early but very temporary aid distributed by the MHS. Medical orderly Anton de Graaff wrote in his Brieven uit het veld (Letters from the Field), ‘Around noon a message arrives that post Buaran has two wounded. They are natives. I cannot get used to it. If two Dutchmen are wounded, we immediately have to rush to the rescue. Now the order is: meal comes first.’46 Between March 1946 and March 1948 approximately 2.5 million people visited the polyclinics of the teams, and they too were looked upon with prejudice. Besides a Java and a Sumatra room for military wounded and a Borneo and Great East room for native wounded, the field-​hospital team of four also had a ‘Troubles’ (Onrust) room for so-​called ‘terrorists’.47 Gradually, among the Dutch patients more and more psychiatric cases were detected, but the fighting was not to blame for this –​so claimed psychiatrist W. Kramer. Rather, he concluded that individual mental health profited from war. Therefore, those who could not stand the strain were weak of character and had to be sent to a camp where ‘under harsh regime and fierce discipline they had to execute hard physical labour’.48 Military power and medical power had become one again. Though certain medical men differed on this or related issues, all were agreed that Indonesia had to be the Dutch Indies again. Almost all medical reports breathed an anti-​Republican attitude. The Indonesian people, so it was said, wanted to get back under Dutch rule, because that would bring back rest; order; welfare; security; and, ‘as in the colonial days of old’, happiness and health. Because the Indonesians had been intimidated by a handful of ‘extremists’, or ‘Hirohito-​ collaborators’, they had anxiously turned their back on the Dutch, but that would be over once these extremists had been brought to justice by ‘Dutch police troops’.49 Therefore, even if they were a result of attempts to maintain medical neutrality, contacts with Republican medics or Republican medical organisations such as the Palang Merah Indonesia (Indonesian Red Cross (PMI)), established immediately after the declaration of independence, were discouraged. One of the few who tried to co-​operate with the PMI –​precisely because he was convinced that medical aid should be neutral and therefore without enemies or borders  –​ had to stop his activities because it meant dealing with a ‘rebel government’, with which the NIRK, having a ‘semi-​official status’, should never engage itself. This did not contradict medical neutrality, because, according to the anti-​Republicans, it

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was the Republic that had constantly violated this pillar of true humanitarianism.50 This absence of neutrality, or better, this presence of prejudicial animosity, was not without consequence. Although visiting the polyclinics, the population remained restrained in seeking contact with any medical personnel who had the words ‘Netherlands’ or ‘Dutch Indies’ in their titles or on their badges. This rejection was widespread and not solely the result of Republican intimidation. Already in the first year after the war secret reports frequently indicated that the anti-​Dutch attitude was not restricted to extremists. Even a part of the Indonesian medical personnel of the NIRK/​NERKAI shared it.51 Nevertheless, medical assistance was not without political influence and effect. A British general wrote that two mobile teams were of more value to him than a complete battalion.52 The question, of course, was whether this was, in times of war, an unintended but inevitable consequence, or the goal of a planned policy by political and military authorities, not unlike the American Medical Civic Actions Program deployed two decades later in Vietnam.53 The report of an inspection journey through the archipelago by Medical Co-​ordination Committee chair, E. Kits van Waveren, published in November 1947 and written on request of the minister of overseas territories, speaks volumes to this. ‘As was providing food’, the goal of medical aid in the archipelago was to ‘raise within the Indonesian people trust in and preparedness to co-​operate with the Dutch’. To achieve this, ‘bringing western medical aid was the pre-​eminent and approved means of time immemorial’. The army authorities stimulated aid to the population delivered by the Red Cross, the military health service and the DVG, because they expected that this would lead to ‘more co-​operation of the population in pointing out terrorists, handing in weaponry, providing information on enemy activities etc.’.54 In other words, according to Kits van Waveren, the provision of medical care in the archipelago would make an enormous contribution to Dutch interests. Dutch medical aid and Dutch Red Cross aid was the carrot to balance the stick wielded by the Dutch and Dutch Indies armies. Kits van Waveren’s report was full of racial prejudice, and because of this he was forced to resign. However, as with the change of name from NIRK to NERKAI, this was probably more a political than a moral-​ethical decision. First, Kits van Waveren pointed out that these were not his opinions; he had merely quoted the Dutch caregivers he had interviewed.55 Second, one of the caregivers who joined the choir of Kits van Waveren’s critics was a psychologist and the chair of the Medical Co-​ordination Council, P. M. van Wulfften Palthe. Two years earlier, Van Wulfften Pathe had published an article in the Nederlands tijdschrift voor geneeskunde (Dutch Medical Journal) that in substance and argument indicated that he was cut from the same cloth as the Dutch doctors interviewed by Kits van Waveren. According to Van Wulfften Palthe, insight into the psychological state of the Indonesian, with his ‘high emotionality’, had taught him that a soft encounter to prevent bloodshed

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would only lead to more bloodshed. After the war with Japan, the Indonesian people had regressed into a primitive developmental stage, leading to ‘all kinds of infantile reactions’. Therefore, every sort of gathering, by him described with the words ‘the forming of hordes’, had to be quashed.56 But, in spite of all the criticism of the words used, the point of Kits van Waveren’s article –​that medical aid served not only a humanitarian aim but also, and above all, a national agenda –​was rarely criticised. In the Report Regarding the Activities of the Department Inspection and Mobile Teams of the Dutch East Indies Red Cross, it was stated that the unofficial task of the mobile medical teams was to ‘convince the population that the Allied troops also had the welfare of the population in mind’. The teams, therefore, were meant to serve as a ‘pacifying element’, something that had not stayed unnoticed with ‘military and civil authorities’.57 Although this does not prove that the pacifying effect of medical care had been an intended purpose behind the lending of aid, it does suggest that once this effect was noticed it was generally welcomed, gratefully used and translated into official policy. Medical care had once again become a Dutch weapon of colonial power, a tool of empire, as it had been before the Japanese invasion. This did not go unnoticed, as Indonesian colonel A. H. Nasution, in his Fundamentals of Guerrilla Warfare, dedicated ten pages to the political use or abuse of medical aid.58 Conclusion The NRK and, at least officially, its South-​East Asian branch, the NIRK, were both servants of Dutch national and military interests from the beginning. Universalist humanitarianism was not their most important concern, but rather the interests of Dutch and Dutch Indian soldiers. To meet these needs, the two organisations placed themselves under the command of the Dutch and Dutch Indian military and political authorities. During the war of decolonisation, this resulted in the fusing of the distribution of medical aid to a clear strategic objective. During the Second World War, it brought difficulties for the NRK and NIRK, as these authorities were commanded themselves, or even interned, by a foreign invader. From a tool of either the Dutch armed forces or Dutch colonialism, they both turned into toys of occupation. Comparing the work of the NRK and the NIRK, one cannot help but conclude that both had to assist political and military authorities in order to carry out their activities. Likewise, because the interests of State and army are non-​neutral and also not invariably humanitarian, these activities will not always coincide with the Red Cross ideals of impartial, neutral aid blind to race, sex, religion, country or creed. For remaining loyal to these ideals, for not only ‘achieving something’ but ‘achieving something in the spirit of Dunant’, critical distance, and independence, from national authorities is to be recommended.

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Notes 1 L. van Bergen, De zwaargewonden eerst? Het Nederlandsche Roode Kruis en het vraagstuk van oorlog en vrede 1867–​1945 (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 1994), pp. 44–​7, 108–​13; J. Hutchinson, Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 35–​6. 2 Van Bergen, De awaargewonden eerst?, pp. 114–​18, 132. 3 Handelingen der Nederlandsche Vereeniging tot het Verleenen van Hulp aan Zieke en Gewonde Krijgslieden in Tijd van Oorlog (hereafter Hand. NRK), Part I (The Hague, 1870), p. 89. 4 Ibid., p. 13; G. M. Verspijck, Het Nederlandsche Roode Kruis (1867–​1967) (Nijkerk: Callenbach, 1967), p. 65. 5 Van Bergen, De zwaargewonden eerst?, pp. 181–​99. 6 Algemeen Rijksarchief (ARA), NRK main board 1867–​1945, inv. no.  1, box 2, extraordinary meeting, 1 October 1914; for the neutrality of the Netherlands see M. Abbenhuis, The Art of Staying Neutral: The Netherlands in the First World War, 1914–​1918 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014). 7 Leo van Bergen, ‘Dutch Ambulances and Neutrality’, in S. C. Craig and D. C. Smith (eds), Glimpsing Modernity:  Military Medicine in World War I (Cambridge:  Cambridge Scholars, 2015), pp. 239–​63 (pp. 240–​4). 8 Het Nederlandsche Roode Kruis (The Hague:  NRK, 1937); Van Bergen, De zwaargewonden eerst?, pp. 251–​4. 9 Van Bergen, De zwaargewonden eerst?, pp. 431, 437, 443, 446–​7, 459, 465; R. Grüter, Kwesties van leven en dood: Het Nederlandse Rode Kruis in de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam: Boom, 2017), pp. 29, 107, 118, 124, 127. 10 L. De Jong, Het koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, Vol. VIII: Gevangenen en gedeporteerden (The Hague: Staatsuitgeverij, 1978), p. 912. 11 ARA, NRK main board 1867–​1945, inv. no. 39, daily board meeting, 16 November 1944. 12 Archive of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD), doc. II, map B, no.  8; ARA, NRK main board 1867–​1945, inv. no.  39, daily board meeting, 16 November 1944. 13 H. Beelarts van Blokland, ‘Bescherming van de burgerbevolking tegen luchtaanvallen’, Het Nederlandsche Roode Kruis, 5 ( January 1944), 7–​10; Ch. W. F. Winckel, ‘Distributie versus honger’, Het Nederlandsche Roode Kruis, 4 ( July 1943), 157–​8. 14 ARA, NRK main board 1867–​1945, inv. no. 2, meetings, 22 November 1940 (p. 5), 14 February 1941 (p. 4); ‘Bloedtransfusie’, Ziekenhuiswezen, 14 (1941), p. 98; Grüter, Kwesties van leven en dood, pp. 298–​503. 15 Archive of the Ministry of Health, Dienst Volksgezondheid (DVG) , inv. no. 1277, NRK main board to assistant secretary-​general of social affairs, 27 February 1941. 16 ARA, NRK main board 1867–​1945, inv. no. 2, meeting, 28 February 1941, p. 3. 17 NIOD, doc. II, map C, no. 1, NRK to Eijkel, 11 March 1941; Eijkel to blood transfusion services, 12 March 1941; NRK to mayors, 14 March 1941. 18 ‘De Materieele Verzorging door het Nederlandsche Roode Kruis ingevolge opdracht d.d. 24 juli 1941 van de Rijkscommissaris voor het bezette gebied van de ambulance naar het oostfront 1941–​1942’ (1942, unpublished manuscript), p. 2. 19 ARA, NRK main board 1867–​1945, inv. no. 3, daily meeting, 27 August 1942, p. 4. 20 Enquêtecommissie inzake het Regeringsbeleid 1940–​1945: Het beleid ten aanzien van Nederlanders die tengevolge van de oorlog hulp van node hadden (Part 6c) (The Hague: Staatsdrukkerij, 1952), p. 282; Van Bergen, De zwaargewonden eerst?, pp. 454–​65; Grüter, Kwesties van leven en dood, pp. 111–​20.

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21 ARA, NRK main board 1867–​1945, inv. no. 3, meetings, 2 January 1942 (p. 2), 13 February 1942 (p. 1). J.-​C. Favez, Une mission impossible? Le CICR, les déportations et les camps de concentration nazis (Lausanne: Editions Payot, 1988), p. 250. 22 Grüter, Kwesties van leven en dood, pp. 267–​382; J. Presser, Ondergang: De vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse jodendom 1940–​45, 7th edn (The Hague: Staatsuitgeverij, 1977), Part II, pp. 131–​2,  499. 23 Rapport van de Commissie van Onderzoek inzake het verstrekken van pakketten door het Rode Kruis en andere instanties aan Nederlandse politieke gevangenen in het buitenland gedurende de bezettingstijd alsmede inzake het evacueren van Nederlandse gevangenen kort voor en na het einde van de oorlog (Amsterdam: Het Koggeschip, 1947). 24 A. van Liempt and M. van Kooten, Hier om te helpen:  150 jaar Nederlandse Rode Kruis (Amsterdam: Boom, 2017). 25 J. A. A. H. de Beaufort, De herziening der Conventie van Genève (Amersfoort: Valkhoff, 1903), pp. 43–​4, 56–​9; G. Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 20, 141. 26 A. H.  M. Kerkhoff, ‘The Organization of the Military and Civil Medical Service in the Nineteenth Century’, in G. M. van Heteren, A. de Knecht-​van Eekelen and M. J. D. Poulissen (eds), Dutch Medicine in the Malay Archipelago 1816–​1942 (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1989), pp. 9–​24; L. Hesselink, Healers on the Colonial Market:  Native Doctors and Midwives in the Dutch East Indies (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011), pp. 270–​1; L. van Bergen, Van koloniale geneeskunde tot internationale gezondheidszorg: Een geschiedenis van honderd jaar Nederlandse Vereniging voor Tropische Geneeskunde (Amsterdam: KIT, 2007), pp. 13–​14. 27 H. Bakker, ‘Het Roode Kruis in Ned.-​Indië’, Indische gids (February–​March 1932), 97–​113, 196–​211 (pp.  200–​1); 1e Congres van de Afdeeling Nederlandsch-​Indië van de Vereeniging ‘Het Nederlandsche Roode Kruis’ gehouden te Batavia-​centrum op 21 April 1936, 3 parts (n.p., n.d.), Part III, p. 34; J. W. F. A. Berg de Bruyn, Voordracht over organisatie, wezen en doel van het Roode Kruis (n.p., 1935), pp. 3–​4, 11; J. H. Rombach, Nederland en het Roode Kruis (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1992), pp. 67–​8; H. Ch. G. J. van der Mandere, Gedenkboek: Het Nederlandsche Roode Kruis 1867–​1927 (Amsterdam: Van Looy, 1927), p. 36; ARA, NRK Archive, no. 51 (map, 1915–​ 25), Lingbeek to main committee, 25 August 1915; L. van Bergen, Een menslievende en nationale taak: Oorlog, kolonialisme en het Rode Kruis in Nederlandsch-​Indië (Soesterberg: Aspekt, 2004), p. 82; Grüter, Kwesties van leven en dood, p. 37. 28 Verslag der verrigtingen van het Centraal-​Comité in Nederlandsch-​Indië van de Nederlandsche Vereeniging tot het Verleenen van Hulp aan Zieke en Gewonde Krijgslieden in Tijd van Oorlog (1919) (Batavia, 1921), p. 4. 29 Hand. NRK, Part VIII (The Hague, 1883), pp. 12–​13; Bakker, ‘Het Roode Kruis’, pp. 109–​10. 30 Hand. NRK, Part II (The Hague, 1872), pp. 9–​10; Part III (The Hague, 1874), pp. 104; Verslag der Verrigtingen (8 October 1870–​1 June 1873) (Batavia: Buitenzorg, 1873), p. 40. 31 Verslag der Verrichtingen (1870–​3), pp. 3–​4. 32 Hand. NRK, Part III, p. 17. 33 H. M. Andrée Wiltens and A. J. W. van Delden, Het Roode Kruis in Nederlandsch-​Indië: Bulletin over Junij en Julij 1873 (Batavia, 1873), pp. 14–​16. 34 Verslag der Verrigtingen (1870–​3), p. 56; Verslag der Verrigtingen (1875), pp. 56–​7, 133, 147; B. E. J. H. Becking, ‘Verslag der verrichtingen van den Geneeskundigen Dienst bij de eerste expeditie tegen het Rijk van Atjeh’, Geneeskundig tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-​Indië, Part XVI (1874), pp. 433–​537 (pp. 505–​7); W. J. F. Nuyens, Het Roode Kruis: Een woord tot mijne landgenooten (Haarlem: Van den Heuvel, 1870), p. 34; H. den Hertog, De militair-​geneeskundige verzorging in Atjeh 1873–​1904 (Amsterdam: Thesis, 1991), p. 23.

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3 5 Verslag der Verrigtingen (1919), p. 4; Van den Berg de Bruyn, Voordracht, p. 11. 36 Van Bergen, Een menslievende en nationale taak, pp. 81–​94. 37 NIOD, Indies Department, doc. no.  055288; J. van de Vosse, Het Informatiebureau van het Nederlandsche Roode Kruis:  Verslag over zijne werkzaamheden van 1939 tot en met 1947 (The Hague: NRK, 1948), p. 42; D. van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen van Burgers gedurende de Tweede Wereldoorlog, 4th edn (Franeker: Wever, 1985), p. 184; Grüter, Kwesties van leven en dood, pp. 13, 39. 38 NIOD, Indies Department, doc. no. 016366; De Jong, Het koninkrijk der Nederlanden, Vol. XI (The Hague, Staatsuitgeverij, 1985), p. 383; Van Velden, De Japanse interneringskampen, p. 185. 39 NIOD, Indies Department, doc. no. 004415; De Jong, Het koninkrijk der Nederlanden, Vol. XI, p. 384. 40 R. Kousbroek, Het Oost-​Indisch kampsyndroom (Amsterdam:  Meulenhof, 1992), pp. 481–​2; Van Bergen, Een menslievende en nationale taak, pp. 113–​14. 41 NIOD, Indies Department, doc. nos. 004397–​004427 (004416). 42 P. J. Drooglever and M. B. Schouten (eds), Officiële bescheiden betreffende de Nederlands-​ Indonesische betrekkingen 1945–​1950 (The Hague:  Staatsdrukkerij, 1971–​), Vol. I, no.  36; C. L. Bensem, Jr, ‘Het huidige medische werk in Indië’, Nederlands tijdschrift voor geneeskunde (Ntvg) (1 April 1946), 1548–​50. For the Red Cross aid during the war of decolonisation see also L. van Bergen, ‘Medical Care as the Carrot: The Red Cross in Indonesia during the War of Decolonization, 1945–​1950’, Medicine, Conflict and Survival, 29:3 ( July–​September 2013), 216–​43. 43 Drooglever and Schouten, Officiële bescheiden, Vol. II, no.  100; Archive of the Ministry of Defence, Kabinet legercommandant Indonesië, 4.1, ‘Medische toestanden en verzorging’, J. W. Wolff to governor-​general, 2 April 1946; ‘Ontwerp-​besluit’, April 1946, J.W. Wolff (DVG) to Spoor, 2 April 1946, pp. 2–​3. Archive of the Ministry of Defence, Kabinet legercommandant Indonesië, 33.2, ‘Status Rode Kruis’, minister of war to main board NRK, 7 May 1946; Spoor to minister of war, September 1946. Archive of the Ministry of Health, DVG, 1216, W.  B. Doorenbos, ‘Verslag van het NRK in Indië, 1 October 1945–​1 October 1946’, p. 28. NRK, Indies Archive, Box 8, map 3, reports of the Oost-​Indische Kamer (OIK), 1 July 1946–​July 1947, p. 8. NRK, Indies Archive, H.  J. V.  O. Kluit-​Kelder, Eindverslag van de werkzaamheden door het Nederlandse Rode Kruis gedurende vele jaren in Nederlands Indië verricht, p. 26. C. J. Brenkman, ‘Overheidszorg voor de volksgezondheid in Indonesië’, Tijdschrift voor sociale geneeskunde (15 August 1947), 231–​2. E. Kits van Waveren, ‘De artsenpositie in Indonesië: Verslag uitgebracht naar aanleiding van een inspectiereis in de archipel van 5 september tot 15 october 1947, op verzoek van het ministerie van Overzeese Gebiedsdelen’, Ntvg (29 November 1947), 3430–​69 (p. 3459). Van Bergen, Een menslievende en nationale taak, p. 225. 44 NRK, Indies Archive, Box 8, map 3: OIK reports, 15 June 1945–​1 July 1946, p. 3; Rapport inzake de taak en de organisatie van het Nederlandsche Roode Kruis (n.p., n.d.), p. 3. 45 Rede van den Heer H. P. J. van Ketwich Verschuur: Ter gelegenheid van den Roode Kruis-​Dag te Brummen op 10 Augustus 1946 (The Hague: NRK, 1946), p. 27. 46 Ant. P. de Graaff, Brieven uit het veld: Het vergeten leger thuis (Franeker: Van Wijnen, 1989), p. 23. 47 ‘Uit het dagboek van team IV’, Nederlandsche Roode Kruis (October 1946); NRK Archive, Kluit-​Kelder, Eindverslag, p. 28. 48 W. Kramer, ‘Een jaar militaire psychiatrie bij troepeneenheden der Koninklijke Landmacht in Indonesie’, Nederlands militair geneeskundig tijdschrift (October 1948), 336–​49 (pp. 337–​8, 341, 349); also, ‘Militaire psychiatrie bij de troepen in Indonesië’, Ntvg (22 January 1948), p. 280. 49 Archive of the Ministry of General Affairs, 1064, ‘Belevenissen van Rode-​Kruispersoneel werkzaam in pas bevrijd gebied’ (n.p., [ January 1948]); ‘Herinneringen van H. A. Wicherts’

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(1974, unpublished manuscript), pp. 52, 67; C. L. Bense, ‘Het huidige medische werk in Indië’, Ntvg (1 April 1946), 1548–​50; Het Nederlandse Rode Kruis Afdeling Indonesië (n.p., [1947]), pp. 5, 11, 14; M. Boerstra, ‘Het Nederlandsche Roode Kruis in Indië’, Nederlandsche Roode Kruis (April 1947), 5–​6; ‘De Oost-​Indische Kamer’, in Directieverslag Nederlandsche Roode Kruis 1949 (The Hague, n.d.), p. 57; P. W. L. Penris, ‘Medische bevolkingshulp in Indië’, Tijdschrift voor sociale geneeskunde (30 November 1946), 292–​7 (pp. 295–​6); P. W.  L. Penris, ‘Artsen voor Indië’, Ntvg (17 June 1947), 2867–​8; Kits van Waveren, ‘De artsenpositie in Indonesië’, pp.  3434–​5; T. B. Zaalberg and W. Willems, ‘Onmacht, ontkenning en onderschatting:  De evacuatie van Nederlanders uit Zuidoost-​Azië na de Tweede Wereldoorlog’, in C. Kristel (ed.), Binnenskamers:  Terugkeer en opvang na de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Besluitvorming (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2002), pp. 63–​92 (pp. 63–​4). 50 Wicherts, Herinneringen, p. 26; ‘Het Rode Kruis in Midden-​Java’, Nieuwsblad van Sumatra (28 December 1948); J. D. Edens, ‘De artsen en Indonesië’, Medisch contact (31 December 1947), 769–​70; Archive of the Ministry of Health, DGV, 1221, B. van Tricht, ‘Overzicht eerste fase van het Rode Kruiswerk’, p. 94; ARA, Algemene secretarie 1942–​50, no. 5169, ‘Verslag van de werkzaamheden op sociaal terrein in de nieuw bezette gebieden, afgesloten op 15 February 1949’, p. 5 and supplement; W. F. Wertheim, ‘Tussen Batavia en Djakarta’, Nieuwe stem ( January 1961), 7–​22 (pp. 7, 10). 51 NIOD, Collection De Weerd, 008877–​008879, declaration Soesman, 7 July 1946 (008877); Drooglever and Schouten, Officiële bescheiden, Vol. IV, no. 107, Nota van Wertheim, pp. 272–​4; De Graaf, Brieven uit het veld, p. 74. 52 Penris, ‘Artsen voor Indië’, p. 2877 n. 2. 53 R. J. Wilensky, Military Medicine to Win Hearts and Minds: Aid to Civilians in the Vietnam War (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2004). 54 Kits van Waveren, ‘De artsenpositie’, p. 3451. 55 Ibid., pp. 3432, 3437–​40; E. Kits van Waveren, ‘De artsensituatie in Indië’, Ntvg (6 December 1947), p.  3506; ‘Ingezonden:  Medische Coördinatie Commissie’, Ntvg (27 December 1947), 3755–​6. 56 P. M. van Wulfften Palthe, ‘Psychologische beschouwingen omtrent den huidigen toestand op Java’, Ntvg (28 January 1946), 425–​31 (pp. 426–​8); P. M. van Wulfften Palthe, ‘De artsenpositie in Indië’, Ntvg (14 January 1948), p. 122; Kits van Waveren, ‘De artsenpositie’, p. 3451. 57 Archive of the Ministry of General Affairs, 1064, ‘Rapport omtrent de werkzaamheden van de afdeling Inspection and Mobile Teams van het NIRK’, 1946, pp. 2, 4. 58 A. H. Nasution, Fundamentals of Guerrilla Warfare (London: Pall Mall Press, 1965), pp. 308–​18.

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Index

Abyssinia 154 Aceh War (1873–​1914) 286 Adams, Sir Stanley 250, 252, 253 Afghanistan 158, 193 AGF see Anglo-​German Fellowship Air Raid Precaution (ARP) 216 Aktion Deutschland Hilft 16 Alexander II, Tsar of Russia 68 Alfonso XII of Spain 63 Algeria (French) 154 Alliance universelle de l’ordre et de la civilisation 11, 67 America see United States of America American Association for the Relief of the Misery of Battlefields 56 American Civil War (1861–​5) 10, 48, 51, 55–​7, 67, 85, 87 American Medical Association 101 American Medical Civic Actions Program 290 American Red Cross Society (ARC) 3, 9, 12–​14, 47, 56–​7, 97–​109, 131–​3, 136, 140, 186, 187, 202, 205, 257, 258, 266 American Relief Clearing House/​War Relief Clearing House for France and Her Allies (ARCH/​WRCH)  100–​1 Amnesty International 175 Anderson, Mary B. 164 Anderson, Mrs N. P. 83, 86 Angebaud, Rodger 157 Angela, Countess of Limerick 154 Anglo-​German Fellowship (AGF) 218 Angola 265

apartheid 6, 194 appeasement 216–​20, 235, 240, 248 Appia, Louis 52, 56, 87 ARC see American Red Cross Society ARCH see American Relief Clearing House Argelès-​sur-​Mer, France 231, 233 Argentinian Red Cross 133 Armenian Relief Fund 138 Army Medical Bureau 52 ARP see Air Raid Precaution Atterbury, Dr B. C. 84, 86 AusRC see Australian Red Cross Society Australia 133–​5, 136, 139, 141, 274 Australian Red Cross Society (AusRC) 8, 14, 49, 131, 133–​6, 138, 140, 142, 159, 182, 194, 208 Austria 141, 216 Austria-​Hungary  102 Austrian succession wars (1740–​8) 217 Austria-​Prussian War (1866) 48 Auxiliary Relief Corps 52–​3 Balfour Declaration (1926) 133, 184 Bangladesh 158, 159 Barnett, Michael 151, 233 Barreiros, Leopoldo Danilo 276 Barton, Clara 12, 47, 56, 87, 93, 202 Bartt, Michael 28–​9, 36–​7 Basting, J. H. C. 282 Batters, George 70 Beaumont, Lord George 66, 67, 70

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Index Beaufort, Duchess of 218 Beeby, Clarence 190 Beer, Henrik 170, 171 Belgian Red Cross 205, 266 Belgian Relief Fund 105 Belgium 64, 101, 102, 141, 154, 245 Bellows, Henry Whitney 50, 51, 54, 56 Berge, Elias 168 Berlin blockade (1948–​9) 167 Bertemani, Manuel Misa 70 Best, S. H. 216 Bethisy, Marquis of 71 Beveridge, William 149–​50 Bhutan 3 Biafran War 3, 15, 30, 165–​75 Bicknell, Ernest P. 104, 106, 107 Bilbao 67, 70, 73 Black, Maggie 152, 153, 174 Blount, Henry 69, 71 BMRB see British Market Research Bureau Boardman, Mabel T. 97–​108 Boer War see South African War Bohny, Colonel 140 Bonney, Thérèse 153 Bossard, Leon 192 Bourgade, Count William de 67, 71, 74 Bowles, Charles 54, 55, 56, 58 Boxer movement and rebellion 91–​2 Brackenbury, Henry 66 Brazil 141 Brazilian Red Cross 133, 266 BRC see British Red Cross Society Brecknock, Countess of 219 British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) 155, 157–​8 British Medical Association 221 British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War (NAS) 65–​6, 69, 71–​2, 160 British Red Cross Society (BRC) 3, 8, 13–​18, 48, 49, 131–​4, 148–​52, 154–​60, 183, 184, 187, 200, 201, 203, 205–​8, 213–​20, 232–​41, 245–​59, 264, 266, 268 Brittain, Vera 154 Bryson, Lyman 140 Buckingham, Clyde 9 Budapest 103

Burckhardt, Carl 256, 257 Burgess, John 65, 66 Cadogan, Sir Alexander 239 Calderon, Madame 74 Cambodia 159 Cambodian-​Thai border dispute (2008) 193 Canadian Red Cross Society (CRC) 8, 13–​14, 133, 136, 182, 186, 187, 199–​210, 254 Carlist Wars (1833–​40, 1846–​9, 1872–​6) 11, 58, 63, 64, 68, 70, 73, 74, 234 Carlos VII of Spain 63 Cassin, René 171 Castro Uridales 73 Chad 1, 159 Chamberlain, Neville 216, 217, 220, 231 Champain, Hugh Bateman 185 Charity Organisation Society of the City of New York 105 Chaulnes, Duke of 71 Chechnya 193 Chetwode, Sir Philip 248–​52, 256, 258 Chile 154 China 152, 189, 265–​9, 271, 273–​6 Chinese Civil War (1927–​49) 267, 272, 276 Chinese Red Cross Society 6, 9, 11, 82, 86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 276, 268 Choate, Joseph 88 Christchurch earthquake (New Zealand, 2011) 16, 181, 195 Christian Aid 14, 153, 154 Christie, Dr Dugald 81, 82, 83, 85 Churchill, Sir Winston 252 Ciraolo, Senator 140 civilians 13, 20 civilising mission 34–​5 Clarendon, Lord 246, 250, 252, 253, 255 Clarke, Selwyn 272 Clemente, Josep Carles 233, 234 Cold War 5, 30, 148, 152, 159, 173 Collins, Dr William 185 colonialism 152, 166, 184, 185, 192, 195, 199, 200–​2, 205, 206, 208, 209, 259, 264–​8, 272, 274–​6, 277, 282, 285, 286, 289, 291 Commission for Assistance to the Military Wounded and Sick in Times of War 265

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298 Commission for Relief in Belgium 101, 103, 107 communism 6, 14, 19, 30, 284 compassion 39–​40 concentration camps 223, 224, 225, 230, 231, 233, 235, 240, 269 Congo 5, 153–​4 Coombe Tennant, Winifred 247, 248, 251, 253 Crane, Edward A. 57–​8 CRC see Canadian Red Cross Society Crete 248, 257 Crimean War (1853–​6) 65, 217 Crookston, William J. 103 Cuba 98 Cyprus 158 Czechoslovakia 152, 216, 240 Dachau 224, 233 Dale, Torstein 166, 167, 169–​71 D’Almada e Castro, Leo 271 Danish Red Cross 133 Davis, Norman 221 Davison, Henry Pomeroy 3, 12, 107, 108, 131 de Barrena, Manuel Fernandez 71 Declaration of Human Rights (UN) 171 decolonisation 154, 266, 282 de Forest, Robert W. 104–​7 de Gielgud, Lewis 189 de Gouttes, Paul 223 de Havilland, General John von Sonntag 66, 67, 70 de Jong, L. 283 de Kergorlay, Count Jean 132 de la Poer, Count Edmond 66, 70 de la Quintana Uribarri, Blas 70 de Larrea, Carlos 70 de la Tour d’Auvergne, Prince 69 de Michelis, Guiseppe 223 de Murrieta, Cristobal 70 Denmark 167, 170 de Olazabal, Tirso 71 des Graaf, Anton 289 Devonshire, Duchess of 218 Dienst Volksgezondheid (Public Health Service (DVG)) 285, 288–​90

Index disasters 4, 9, 16, 30, 31, 150–​4, 158, 181, 185, 188, 189, 194, 195, 207 Disasters Emergency Committee 16 diseases 4, 130, 138, 154, 165, 207, 231, 239, 286 displaced peoples 154 Dunant, Henri 4, 7, 10, 20–​1, 47, 49, 51, 52, 54–​8, 67, 68, 81, 93, 183, 199, 202, 217, 282, 286, 291 Duncan, Francis 65, 66 Dutch Indies campaign (1941–​2) 287, 288, 291 Dutch Indies Red Cross (NIRK) 18, 282, 286–​91 Dutch military health service (MHS) 283, 289 Dutch Red Cross (NRK) 266, 282–​91 Dutch Red Cross, Department of Indonesia (NERKAI) 288, 290 DVG see Dienst Volksgezondheid Dybbøl, battle of (1864) 1 Eden, Sir Anthony 252 Egle, Edouard 269 Eliot, Lord 65, 67, 68 Emergency Appeals Alliance 16 Engelbrecht, W. 283 English Society for the Relief of the Sick and Wounded of the Spanish War (ESR) 68–​71 Estella, Navarra (Spain) 66, 73 Evans, Thomas 57–​8 Faringdon, Lord 238 Fassin, Didier 29 Favez, Jean-​Claude  8, 224 Ferguson, Lady Helen Munro 131–​5 Field, Ellen 272 Field Relief Corps (FRC) 52, 53, 54, 57 Finland 253 Finnish Red Cross 266 first aid 158 first aid post 158 First World War (1914–​18) 5, 12–​14, 20, 21, 30, 49, 97, 107, 130, 131, 133, 136, 137, 283, 140, 142, 154, 181, 183, 199–​206, 209, 210, 214, 218, 219, 236, 246, 248, 266

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Index Fischer, Edmund Crisp 54, 55, 58 Fitzgerald, Alice 132 Fogg, Charles 54 Food and Agriculture Organization (UN) 153 Foreign Office, British (FO) 215, 217, 232–​9, 241, 252, 255, 257 Forsythe, David 20, 154, 232 France 17, 102, 141, 166, 184, 204, 205, 230–​2, 234–​8, 240, 245, 247, 248, 253, 254, 256, 259, 273 Franco, General Francisco 240, 283 Franco-​Prussian War (1870–​1) 5, 11, 48, 49, 57, 63, 64, 65, 69, 71, 72, 73 Frascara, Count 132 Fraser, Peter 190 FRC see Field Relief Corps; French Red Cross Society French North African Red Cross 266 French Red Cross Society (FRC) 3, 7, 8, 17, 48, 49, 58, 64, 71, 131, 132, 170, 205, 233, 234, 240, 266 fundraising 153, 159 Furley, Sir John 11, 64–​7, 71–​5 Gaeddert, Gustave R. 105–​6 Galloway, Malcom 181–​5, 192, 195 Galway, Lord 183 General Post Office (Britain) (GPO) 252–​4 Geneva Conventions 7, 68, 132, 151, 164, 171, 184, 200, 201, 214, 221 (1864) 2, 11, 12, 13, 47, 50, 52, 53, 56, 63–​5, 72–​5, 82, 86–​91, 160, 199, 282 (1868) (additional articles) 13, 68, 89, 199 (1906) 4, 132, 184, 199, 201, 208 (1929) 17, 223–​5, 247 (1949) 3, 41 3rd, prisoners of war 2 4th, civilian 2, 164, 166, 169, 171 (1977) (additional protocols) 15, 41 genocide 168, 173, 174 George, John St 65 German Red Cross Society (DRK) 8, 17, 48, 49, 57, 186, 214, 216, 217, 222, 224, 255, 266, 283, 284, 287 Germany 11, 17, 102, 141, 152, 184, 213, 215, 216, 218, 221, 233, 240, 245, 247–​9, 252–​7, 265, 273, 284, 285

299 Gillies, Alexander 189 Gongjie, Huang (Wong Kong Kit) 275 Gorgé, Camille 223, 269 Gottlieb, Julie 216, 218, 219 Gowon, Lieutenant General Yakabu 166, 168 GPO see General Post Office (Britain) Grawitz, Count Ernst 222 Great Britain 102, 141, 166, 183, 185, 203–​5, 208, 217–​19, 220, 225, 230–​2, 234, 236, 238, 247, 249, 250, 254, 257, 264, 265, 267, 269, 270, 272, 273, 275 Greece 154, 257 Greek Red Cross 266 Grenada 158 Grigg, Sir James 251–​2 Haas, Conkl-​General von 86 Haccius, Rodolphe 255–​6 Hague Conference and conventions (1899) 12, 13, 82, 86, 87, 88, 92, 246 Hartmann, Walther Georg 224 Harvey, J. Craig 250 Hatta, Mohammed 287 Hawkes Bay earthquake (New Zealand, 1931) 16, 181, 185, 187, 189 Hawkins, W. B. L. 65 Heenan, Joe 187 Hemming, Francis 237 Henderson, Sir David 132–​3 Herbert, Allan 67 historiography 27–​32 Hitler, Adolf 216, 217, 220, 221, 222, 224, 240 Hoey, John Casey 71 Holls, G. W. F. 89 Holocaust 3, 8, 16, 30, 165, 215, 257 Honduras 158 Hong Kong 152, 153, 154, 264–​74, 276 Hong Kong Red Cross 268 Hongzhang, Governor-​General Li 86 Hoover, Herbert C. 101 Houdetot, France-​Edgard d’ 67 Huber, Max 185, 221, 256 humanitarianism 5, 7, 9–​10, 15, 20, 27–​41, 140, 153, 154, 160, 164, 168, 170, 174, 175, 184, 194, 199, 203, 206, 208, 225, 233, 256, 258, 267, 277, 283–​91 Hungarian Relief 150

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Hungarian uprising (1956) 152, 153 Hungary 153, 154 Hutchinson, John F. 55, 201 IC see International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain Icelandic Red Cross 172 ICRC see International Committee of the Red Cross IFRC see International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent IHL see International Humanitarian Law INALWA see International Airlift West Africa India 154, 181, 251, 273 Indian Red Cross Society 9, 208 Indonesia 1, 154, 287, 289, 290 Indonesian Red Cross (PMI) 1, 6, 289 Inskip, Sir Thomas 213 Institut de Detroit International of Ghent 68 International Airlift West Africa (INALWA) 166, 167, 168 International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain (IC) 232–​6 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 1–​3, 5–​9, 11–​13, 15–​20, 28, 35, 40–​1, 49, 53, 55–​7, 86, 130, 131–​5, 141, 158, 164–​8, 170–​2, 174, 182, 184–​5, 191, 192, 193, 202, 204, 206, 213, 214, 216, 217, 219, 221, 223–​5, 232–​4, 240, 246, 252, 254–​7, 259, 266, 269, 270, 272, 273, 276, 286–​7 International Conference of Aid Societies (1869) 65 International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC) 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 16, 19, 20, 21, 40, 41 International Humanitarian Law (IHL) 2, 4, 7, 11, 15, 16, 32, 164, 168, 169, 191, 223 International Labour Organization 222 International Welfare and Tracing 158 Iran 154 Iranian Red Lion and Star Society 6 Iraq 1, 158 Ireland 64, 253 Islamic Revolution of Iran (1979) 6 Israel Magen David Adom society 6

Index Italian Red Cross Society 3, 131, 132, 205, 223, 266 Italo-​Ethiopian war (1935–​6)  223 Italy 141, 240, 253 Jackson Judith 253, 254, 255, 258 Japan 6, 18, 58, 141, 181, 189, 191, 215, 264–​70, 274–​6 Japanese Red Cross Society ( JRC) 3, 6, 9, 49, 82, 83, 85, 86, 90, 131, 132, 287, 142, 190, 191 JCA see Joint Church Alliance Jebb, Gladwyn 239 Joint Church Alliance ( JCA) 164, 168 Joint War Organisation ( JWO) 246, 250, 251, 252, 253, 255, 258 Jones, Heather 184, 214, 219 Jorge, Alberto Pacheco 276 Jowitt, Sir William 258 JRC see Japanese Red Cross Society Junior Red Cross 3, 14, 130, 131, 134, 136–​42, 158, 189 Junod, Marcel 233, 256 JWO see Joint War Organisation Kabul 173 Kavanagh T. P., 237 Kening, Gao 271 Kennedy, President John F. 153 Kennedy, Sir John 234, 236–​8, 240, 256, 257 Kennett-​Barrington, Vincent 64, 66, 69–​71 Kenya 154 Ketwich Verschuur, H. J. 289 Kin-​Ta-​ting,  Dr  85 Koninklijk Nederlands-​Indische Leger (Royal Dutch Indies Army (KNIL)) 286, 288 Korea 152, 153, 154 Korean War 150 Kosovo 173 Kouchner, Bernhard 170 Kunyi, Liu, Governor-​General 86 Laboulaye, Edouard 69 La Caridad 66, 67, 69, 71–​4 Landa, Don Nicasio de 72 Lanord, Christophe 186 Lawley, Sir Arthur 132

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Index Lawrence, Sir Arthur 255 League of Nations 3, 4, 16, 132, 222, 268 League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS) 3, 5–​8, 12, 16, 20–​1, 130–​6, 140–​3, 157–​8, 170, 172, 181–​5, 188–​95, 207, 213, 221, 222, 224, 255 Lechmere, Sir Edmund A. H. 65, 66 Lee, General Robert E. 51 Lee, Ivy L. 107 Leiber, Francis 11 Lesaca (Spain) 67, 70, 71, 73 Letterman, Jonathan 58 Libya 173 Lima, Lieutenant José Peixoto 276 Lincoln, President Abraham 54 Lindt, August 166 Lisbon 159, 253, 254, 255, 258, 266, 267, 269, 270, 272, 275 Liverpool, Lord 183 Livingstone, Dame Adelaide 248, 258 Lloyd-​Lindsay, Robert  65, 66 see also Lord Wantage Lobo, Pedro José 274 Lohmann, Johann 223 Londonderry, Lady 214, 218, 219, 220, 222, 225 Longmore, Thomas 65, 66 Love, Albert 53, 54 Lowry, Helen 187, 188 Loyd, Archie 203 Lozano, Aurelio Romeo 216 LRCS see League of Red Cross Societies Macao 18, 264–​76 Macao Red Cross 268, 269, 271, 272, 273, 276, 277 Machado, General Joaquim José 266 Mackinnon, Eleanor 136, 137, 141 Malaya 154 Malayan Emergency 150 Malaysian Red Crescent Society 6 Malkki, Liisa 21, 29 Malmesbury, Countess of 218 Manley, William G. N. 65, 66 Marquis of Woolton, Frederick James 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 160 Martin, Dr Eric 19

301 Mathiesen, Haakon 166 Maunoir, Théodore 56 Maurer, Peter 19 Medical Co-​ordination Council 287, 290 Médicins sans frontières (MSF) 15, 30, 41, 164, 170, 173 Mendonça, Henrique José Monterio 266 Mexican–​American War (1846–​8)  67 Mexico 98 MHS see Dutch military health service Mitford, Nancy 238 Montagu, Grand Prior Sir William Drogo 65 Montagu-​Pollock, William 232–​5, 237–​9 Montclos, De 174–​5 Montenegrin Red Cross 205 Moorehead, Caroline 8, 217, 222 Morel, Dr George 192 Morgan, J. P. 107, 132 Morito, Morishima 274 Morris, Dorothy 238 Moynier, Gustav 4, 6, 56, 86 Mozambique 265, 266 MSF see Médicins sans frontières Munich Agreement (1938), 217 Myanmar (Burma) 1 Myers, Bernard 188 Napoleon III, Emperor of France 57 NAS see British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War National Aid Society (Britain) 251 National Blood Transfusion Council (New Zealand) 188 National Health Service (NHS) (British) 14, 148, 149, 150, 160 National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief (NJC) 234, 235, 238, 239 National Trading Centre 158 natural disasters see disasters Naville, Marcel A. 172 Nazis 186, 282, 284, 285, 216, 217, 218, 220, 222, 223, 225, 233, 245 Near East Foundation 103 NERKAI see Dutch Red Cross, Department of Indonesia Netherlands 64, 141, 245, 282, 283, 287, 288, 290

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302 Netherlands Red Cross Society 8, 18, 49 New Zealand 141, 181, 183–​6, 188–​95 New Zealand Red Cross Society (NZRC) 6, 8, 16, 181–​6, 188–​95, 205, 208 NHS see National Health Service Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia 87 Nigeria 1, 165–​72, 174 Nigerian Red Cross 171–​2 Nightingale, Florence 49, 83, 93, 183, 214, 216, 217 NIRK see Dutch Indies Red Cross Niuzhuang 81, 82, 83, 85 NJC see National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief Non-​Intervention Committee 230, 237 Norfolk, Duke of 69, 71 Northern Ireland 154, 220 North-​West rebellion, Canada (1885) 200 Norway 141, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 174, 181, 245, 248 Norwegian Red Cross (NRC) 8, 15, 165–​75, 266 NRK see Dutch Red Cross nursing 3, 9, 102, 122, 133, 134, 135, 151, 158, 159, 182, 188, 219 NZRC see New Zealand Red Cross Society OAU see Organisation of African Unity Odier, Lucie 256 O’Donovan, Edmund 73 O’Donovan, Henry 73 Ojukwu, Colonel Odumegwu 165–​9, 172, 173, 174 Okwechime, Mike 173 Oliver, Dame Beryl 218 Opium Wars (1839–​42; 1856–​60) 88 Order of St John of Jerusalem 11, 63, 64, 66, 75, 246 British 67, 150, 155–​7, 160, 248 English 64, 65, 68 New Zealand 183, 184, 186, 188 Organisation of African Unity (OAU) 166 Orgaz, Count of 69 Ottoman Empire 12, 91 Oxfam 14, 152, 153, 154, 157, 160, 174, 175 Pacific War (1941–​5) 191 Pakistan 154, 193

Index Palestine 152, 154 Paris Commune 73 Paris Universal Exhibition (1878) 75 Partition of India 152 Patel, Kiran Klaus 222 Paternalism 36 Pearl Harbor Attack 268 Pearson, J. A. 65 Persia 12, 91, 92 Philippines 1, 154 Philips, W. J. 149 Pictet, Jean 2, 3 Piek, C. 283 PMI see Indonesian Red Cross Poland 152, 245 Polish Red Cross 266 Pons, Francisco 233 Port Arthur 84 Portugal 18, 249, 254, 264–​77 Portugalete, Spain 70, 71, 73 Portuguese Red Cross Society (PRCS) 18, 254, 264–​74, 276 POW see prisoners of war POWRA see Prisoners of War Relatives Association PRCS see Portuguese Red Cross Society press 167 prisoners of war (POW) 17, 184, 191, 192, 205, 214, 223, 245–​7, 249–​59, 266, 269–​73, 276, 285 Prisoners of War Relatives Association (POWRA) 247, 248, 249, 250, 253, 255, 258 Prussia 11, 49 Prussian-​Denmark  War  48 public health 9, 21, 207, 208, 209 public relations 159 Pye, Edith 232, 235, 236, 240 Qing, Prince 90, 91, 92 Quakers 232, 235, 238 Quentin-​Maxwell, William  53, 54 R2P see ‘Responsibility to Protect’ Rappard, William E. 132 Rathbone, Eleanor 234 Rather, W. Kramer 289

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Index Red Cross activities 156 archives 8, 21–​2, 31, 38, 159, 273 Bulletin 5, 20, 53, 140, 191, 224 civilising mission 7, 12 conferences 5, 16, 19–​20, 54, 135, 171, 185, 213, 214, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223, 224, 225, 255 emblem 5, 11, 12, 41, 75, 81, 89, 91, 157, 166, 182, 191, 200, 217, 219, 222, 233, 274, 286 family 57 gender 20, 32 historiography 7, 8–​9, 21 identity 149, 150 neutrality 2, 4, 282, 284, 288, 170, 187, 205, 214, 217, 232, 235, 236, 237, 240, 252, 257, 264–​7, 269, 276, 277 principles 2, 4–​5, 10, 16, 41, 149, 174, 184, 192, 194–​5, 219, 224, 232, 236, 283–​6 symbol 1 see also national society by country; religion Red Cross Centenary 157 Reeves, John 269 refugees 9, 151–​4, 159, 188, 230, 231, 233–​6, 239–​41, 256, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 273, 276, 283 religion 5–​6, 31, 32, 35, 41, 63, 87, 91, 92, 165, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 175, 204, 233, 272 ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) 173 Rhodes, Sir Robert Heaton 187 Ricord, Philippe 69, 71 Ripalda, Count of 69, 71 Robertson, Philadelphia 135, 136, 139 Rockefeller Foundation 101, 106, 107 Rodd, Peter 238, 239 Rodogno, Davide 132, 153 Rodrigues, Fernando de Senna Fernandes 270, 273–​7 Romanian Red Cross 266 Romree, Count of 71 Rørholt, Arnold 169, 170, 171, 172 Russell, Audrey 235–​7, 239 Russia 102, 273 Russian Red Cross Society 48

Russian Revolution (1917) 130, 206 Russo-​Japanese War  49, 92 Russo-​Turkish War (1870s) 6, 70 Ryerson, George Sterling 200, 202, 207 Saint-​Cyprien, France  231 Samaritans 157 Santurce, northern Spain 67, 73, 74 Save the Children 153, 154, 175 Saxe-​Coburg, Duke of 17, 217, 220, 221, 222, 225 Schleswig-​Holstein  War  52 Schlotz-​Klink, Gertryd 218, 222 Schmid, Walter 191, 192 Schopenhauer, Arthur 40 Second World War (1939–​45) 14, 19, 30, 132, 148, 152–​5, 184–​5, 187–​91, 208, 220, 223–​5, 239, 255, 264–​8, 282, 285, 291 Serbia 102 Serbian Red Cross 133, 205 Serbo-​Bulgarian War (1885–​6)  70 Serrano, General 63, 70 Service National Welfare 158 Shanghai 82, 189, 264, 265, 268–​73, 276 Shanghai Chinese Red Cross Society 82, 86 Shepherd, Peter 65 Shikai, General Yuan 85 Shuckburgh, Sir Evelyn 155 Siam 12, 91, 92 Siberia, intervention in (1918–​22) 14 SICPOW see Société pour l’amelioration de sort des prisonniers de guerre Simpson, John Hope 234 Sino-​Japanese  War (1894–​5) 11, 81, 82, 85, 86, 88 (1937–​45) 189, 264, 268 Small, Leila 190 Smillie, Ian 174 Société de Secours aux Blessés 57, 72 Société de Secours aux Blessés Espangols (SSB) 68, 71 Société pour l’amelioration de sort des prisonniers de guerre (Society for the Improvement of the Condition of Prisoners of War (SICPOW)) 67

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304 Society for Aiding and Ameliorating the Condition of the Sick and Wounded of Armies in Times of War (SAA) 65, 66, 68 Solferino, battle of (1859) 10, 21, 182, 199 Somalia 1, 193 South Africa 194, 201, 202, 273, 251 South African Red Cross 208 South African War (1899–​1902) 13–​14, 102, 201–​4, 206 South Sudan 1, 193 Soviet Red Cross Society 9 Soviet Union 14 Spain 140, 231–​7, 239–​41, 254, 267 Spanish-​American War (1898) 13, 97 Spanish Civil War (1936–​9) 11, 17, 69, 214, 215, 216, 225, 230, 232, 233, 235, 240 Spanish Red Cross (SRC) 48, 49, 58, 64, 72, 73, 133, 215, 216, 217 Stamford, Countess of 218 Stanley, Sir Arthur 132, 215, 256 Starobinski, Jean 34–​5 Stewart, Mrs. P. M. 250 St John Ambulance Association 66, 151, 200 Strickland, Lady Edeline 137 Stroh, General Olof 172 Strong, Richard 132 Suakin Campaign in Egypt (1885–​6) 70 Sukarno, President 287 Suter, F. A. 269 Suvoong, V. P. 84 Sweden 18, 167, 254, 267 Swedish Red Cross 133, 154, 169, 172, 266 Swiss Red Cross Society 19, 133, 140, 141, 154 Switzerland 18, 41, 141, 223, 225, 232, 233, 255, 256, 267, 269, 276 Sylvia, Countess of Limerick 159 Taft, William H. 106, 107, 108 Talbot, Jerry 194 Tamblyn, George O. 107 Tansley Report (1975) 19, 157 Tarbell, Ida M. 107 Teixeira, Gabriel Maurício 268, 270, 275

Index Thailand see Siam Thai Red Cross 266 Tianjin 83, 85 Tibet 152 Tokugawa, Prince 215 Tomlinson, Barbara 193 Turkey 92, 181, 273 Turkish Red Cross 154 Turko-​Serbian War (1876–​7)  70 United Nations (UN) 152, 166, 174, 193 United States of America (USA) 64, 102, 132, 136, 140, 142, 185, 186, 202, 249, 253, 259, 266, 267, 273 United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) 10, 47–​58 Urbach, Karina 213, 217 USA see United States of America USSC see United States Sanitary Commission VAD see Voluntary Aid Detachment Vail, Theodore N. 107 van den Bosch, J. A. 282 van der Velde, Charles 52 van Waveren, Kit 291 van Woerkom, Neeltje Adriana 276 van Wulfften Palthe, P. M. 290 Versailles, Treaty of 208, 247 Victoria, Queen 217 Vietnam 152, 159, 193, 276, 290 Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) 131, 154, 185, 187, 203, 215, 219, 220 volunteerism 159, 169, 185, 193, 201, 203–​6, 219, 220, 251, 258 Von Rosen, Carl Gustav 169 Wadsworth, Eliot 106, 107, 108 Wallace, Sir Richard 69, 71 Wantage, Lord 201, 203 see also Lloyd-​Lindsay,  Robert War Office, British (WO) 203, 247, 249–​51, 255 War Relief Clearing House for France and Her Allies see American Relief Clearing House War on Want 14, 153, 154 Wells, Edgar H. 107

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Index Whyte, Graeme 193 Wilhelm I, King of Prussia 57 William III, King of the Netherlands 282 Williams, M. S. 241 Wilson, President Woodrow 100, 101, 106–​8 WO see War Office Women’s Royal Voluntary Service 156–​7 Women’s Voluntary Service 156 Women’s War Service Auxiliary 187 Wood, General Leonard 105–​6

World Refugee Year 152–​3 WRCH see American Relief Clearing House Yale Endowment Fund 107 Yang Ru, Minister 88–​92 Yemen 1 Young, Allen William 70 Young Mens’ Christian Association 139 Yugoslavian Red Cross 266 Zindel, Rudolf 269, 272