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A ‘Sound Investment’? British Cultural Diplomacy and Overseas Students: The British Council's Students Committee, 1935–1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2021

Alice Byrne*
Affiliation:
LERMA, Aix Marseille Université, 29 avenue Robert Schuman, 13621Aix-en-Provence, France

Abstract

This article explores the UK government's first foray into cultural diplomacy by focusing on the activities of the British Council's Students Committee in the run-up to the Second World War. Students were placed at the heart of British cultural diplomacy, which drew on foreign models as well as the experience of intra-empire exchanges. While employing cultural internationalist discourse, the drive to attract more overseas students to the United Kingdom was intended to bring economic and political advantages to the host country. The British Council pursued its policy in cooperation with non-state actors but ultimately was guided by the Foreign Office, which led it to target key strategic regions, principally in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 White, A. J. S., The British Council. The First Twenty-Five Years (London: British Council, 1965), 22Google Scholar.

2 Haigh, Anthony, Cultural Diplomacy in Europe (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1974), 28Google Scholar, 36.

3 Nicholas J. Cull, Public Diplomacy: Foundations for Global Engagement in the Digital Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 70, 62.

4 Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). One exception is Tamara van Kessel's Foreign Cultural Policy in the Interbellum: The Italian Dante Alighieri Society and the British Council Contesting the Mediterranean (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016). There are also two official histories: A. J. S. White, The British Council: The First Twenty-Five Years, cited above; Frances Donaldson, The British Council: The First Fifty Years (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984).

5 Examples of studies published in the last twenty years include: Edward Corse, A Battle for Neutral Europe: British Cultural Propaganda during the Second World War (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Mark Hampton, ‘Projecting Britishness to Hong King: The British Council and Hong Kong House, Nineteen-Fifties to Nineteen-Seventies’, Institute of Historical Research, Aug. 2012; John Morris, Culture and Propaganda in World War II: Music Film and the Battle for National Identity (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014); Christine Okret-Manville, ‘La politique étrangère culturelle, outil de la démocratie, du fascisme et du communisme. L'exemple du British Council, 1934–1953’, Relations Internationales, 115 (2003); James Vaughan, ‘“A Certain Idea of Britain”: British Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, 1945–1957’, Contemporary British History, 19, 2 (2005).

6 Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Hilary Perraton, A History of Foreign Students in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Tomás Irish, The University at War, 1914–25 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

7 Patricia M. Goff, ‘Cultural Diplomacy’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 420.

8 Alain Dubosclard, ‘Diplomatie culturelle et propagande françaises aux États-Unis pendant le premier vingtième siècle’, Revue d'histoire moderne & contemporaine, 48, 1 (2001), 105. Robert Frank, ‘La machine diplomatique française au xxe siècle’, Relations internationales, 115 (2003), 326. Katharina Rietzler, ‘Before the Cultural Cold Wars: American Philanthropy and Cultural Diplomacy in the Inter-War Years’, Historical Research, 84, 223 (2011), 148–64; Scott Lucas, ‘“Total Culture” and the State-Private Network’, in Jessica Gienow-Hecht and Franck Schumacher, eds., Culture and International History (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), 206–14.

9 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 3–8.

10 Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 72–3. More recently Daniel Laqua in particular has explored the role of international education and student mobility in interwar internationalism in ‘Transnational Intellectual Cooperation, the League of Nations, and the Problem of Order’, Journal of Global History, 6, 2 (2011), 239–41 and ‘Activism in the “Students’ League of Nations”: International Student Politics and the Confédération Internationale des Étudiants, 1919–1939’, The English Historical Review, 132, 556 (2017), 624–31.

11 Jean-Jacques Renoliet, L'UNESCO oubliée. La Société des Nations et la cooperation intellectuelle (1919–1946) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), 21–31.

12 Guillaume Tronchet, ‘The Defeat of University Autonomy: French Academic Diplomacy, Mobility Scholarships and Exchange Programs (1880s–1930s)’, in Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith eds., Global Exchanges: Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012), 55–8.

13 White, British Council, 12–3. In comparison, France and Germany were believed to be devoting over £1 million a year on cultural diplomacy while even small, neutral Switzerland was spending twice the amount of the United Kingdom. Taylor, Projection, 142–3.

14 Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith, ‘A World of Exchanges: Conceptualizing the History of International Scholarship Programs (Nineteenth to Twenty-First Centuries)’, in Tournès and Scott-Smith, Global Exchanges, 4–10.

15 Taylor, Projection, 129.

16 Ibid., 94–5.

17 Ibid., 87, 100, 146.

18 Committee on the Education and Training of Students from Overseas (Ramsden Committee), The National Archives, London (hereafter TNA), BW 82/1.

19 Amended interim report of the Ramsden Committee, 1 Nov. 1934, TNA BW 82/1.

20 Taylor, Projection, 146–53.

21 January 1935, quoted by Taylor, Projection, 161–2.

22 White, British Council, 7.

23 Students Committee, first meeting, 10 July 1935, TNA BW 2/19.

24 Draft Confidential Circular Despatch, Aug. 1935, TNA BW 2/19.

25 Taylor, Projection, 151.

26 Students Committee Paper no. 2, 15 June 1935, TNA BW 2/19.

27 Students Committee, Scholarships for 1936, 15 Nov. 1935, TNA BW 2/19.

28 Ruth McMurry and Muna Lee, The Cultural Approach: Another Way in International Relations (Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press, 1947), 25–6.

29 R. A. Leeper, ‘British Culture Abroad’, Contemporary Review, 148 (1935), 203.

30 Students Committee ‘Scholarships for 1936’, 15 Nov. 1935, TNA BW 2/19.

31 Marjory Harper, ‘“Personal Contact is Worth a Ton of Text-Books”: Educational Tours of the Empire, 1926–39’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 32, 3 (2004), 51–2.

32 Donaldson, The British Council, 382.

33 Taylor, Projection, 135.

34 ‘The British Council and the Maintenance of British Influence Abroad’, Sept.1938, 10, TNA FO 395/647A.

35 Students Committee ‘Scholarships for 1936’, 15 Nov. 1935, TNA BW 2/19.

36 Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 386–92.

37 Hoare to Foreign Representatives, 8 Nov. 1935, TNA FO 395/529/P3900, quoted by Victoria Louise Ramsden-Atherton, ‘Lord Lloyd: Cultural Diplomacy and Foreign Policy 1937–1941’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, 1988, 19.

38 White, British Council, 11. Hoare's circular of November 1935 also identified the Near East as a key area for the British Council to work in due to the extensive presence of Italian propaganda.

39 Lord Lloyd correspondence, 1939, GLLD 20/3, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge.

40 White, The British Council, 7. Once the administration of bursaries for Cyprus and Malta was taken over by the Near East Committee, the Colonial Office retained only five bursaries allotted to West African colonies (Nigeria, Gambia, Gold Coast and Sierra Leone). ‘Scholarships for Teachers of English’, Apr.–July 1936, TNA CO 323/1355/3.

41 Guillaume Tronchet, ‘The Defeat of University Autonomy’, 57. Perraton provides similar figures for 1931–2, with 4,865 full-time overseas students representing 10 per cent of all university enrollments. Perraton, Foreign Students, 56. According to Laqua, foreign students made up a higher percentage of the overall student population in French universities than in Germany or at Oxford. Laqua, ‘Activism’, 624.

42 ‘The Maintenance of British Influence Abroad’, 7.

43 Report of conference between the Students Committee, The Universities Bureau, the Association of Technical Institutes and the Educational Department of the Office of the High Commissioner for India, 23 Nov. 1935, TNA BW 2/19.

44 State funding of both institutions and students was a relatively recent phenomenon in the United Kingdom and even the Universities Bureau had struggled to encourage university cooperation. Christophe Charle, ‘Patterns’, in Walter Rüegg ed., A History of the University in Europe, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 62–4; Pietsch, Empire of Scholars, 156.

45 Eric Ashby, Community of Universities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 19–22.

46 Pietsch, Empire of Scholars, 162–3.

47 Letter from W. B. Brander, secretary to the Universities Bureau to the Students Committee, 24 Feb. 1936, TNA BW 2/19.

48 Students Committee, Paper No. 25, 18 June 1936, TNA BW 2/19. The Committee's suggested title of Higher Education in the United Kingdom had to be modified to take account of the fact that the Bureau included information on the universities of the Irish Free State.

49 Brander to Lord Eustace Percy, 9 Mar. 1937, TNA BW 2/19.

50 Speech by Ralph Nunn May, secretary of the NUS, non-dated, c. 1931–32, TNA BW 82/1. Whitney Walton's study of American students’ experiences in interwar France similarly noted that while study abroad could help break down stereotypes and allow participants to develop a more balanced and realistic appreciation of the country, some students developed negative opinions of their hosts. Whitney Walton, ‘Internationalism and the Junior Year Abroad: American Students in France in the 1920s and 1930s’, Diplomatic History, 29, 2 (2005), 264–8.

51 Harper, ‘Educational Tours’, 57.

52 Report of the Sub-committee on student accommodation and hospitality, 20 Oct. 1937, TNA BW 2/19.

53 Matthew C. Hendley, Organized Patriotism and the Crucible of War: Popular Imperialism in Britain 1914–1932 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012), 197.

54 J. M. Lee, ‘Commonwealth Students in the United Kingdom, 1940–1960: Student Welfare and World Status’, Minerva, 44 (2006), 4; Daniel Whittall, ‘Creating Black Places in Imperial London: The League of Coloured Peoples and Aggrey House, 1931–1943’, The London Journal: A Review of Metropolitan Society Past and Present, 36, 3 (2011), 225–46. The experiences of West African and Indian students in the United Kingdom and their role in nationalist movements are documented in Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain 1900–1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998) and Sumita Mukherjee, Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities: The England-Returned (London: Routledge, 2010).

55 Hendley, Organized Patriotism, 292.

56 Letter to the Editor of The Spectator, 2 Sept. 1938 http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/2nd-september-1938/19/oversea-students-in-london (last visited 6 Sept. 2019); Emma Joly, ‘Cultural Imperialism at Home? Mary Trevelyan and Student Movement House, 1932–1946’, MA research dissertation, Sheffield Hallam University, 2014, 38–40.

57 Perraton, Foreign Students, 166.

58 Liping Bu, ‘Cultural Understanding and World Peace: The Roles of Private Institutions in the Interwar Years’, Peace & Change, 24 (1999), 156–61; Jehnie I. Reis, ‘Cultural Internationalism at the Cité Universitaire: International Education between the First and Second World Wars’, History of Education, 39, 2 (2010), 155–73.

59 Speech by Nunn May, TNA BW 82/1. See also Georgina Brewis, Sarah Hellawell and Daniel Laqua, ‘Rebuilding the Universities after the Great War: Ex-Service Students, Scholarships and the Reconstruction of Student Life in England’, History, 105, 364 (2020), 101–4.

60 Taylor, Projection, 112–3; The Projection of England has been re-edited in Scott Anthony, Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain: Stephen Tallents and the Birth of a Progressive Media Profession (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).

61 Report of the Hospitality Council of the NUS 1932–1933, TNA BW 82/1.

62 Laqua, ‘Activism’, 618.

63 Nigel Roy Moses, ‘Bonds of Empire: The Formation of the National Federation of Canadian University Students, 1922–1929’, Historical Studies in Education / Revue d'histoire de l’éducation, 31, 1 (2019), 66–92. Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 10.

64 Tara Windsor, ‘Rekindling Contact: Anglo-German Academic Exchange after the First World War’, in Heather Ellis and Ulrike Kirchberger, eds., Anglo-German Scholarly Networks in the Long Nineteenth Century (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 219.

65 In the absence of official support, the NUS had diverted profits from its student travel services to fund these hospitality and exchange programmes but could not meet expanding demand from abroad. Nunn May, TNA BW 82/1; Students Committee paper 30, 20 Oct. 1936 TNA BW 2/19.

66 Mike Day, National Union of Students 1922–2012 (London: Regal Press, 2012), 28–30. See also Georgina Brewis, A Social History of Student Volunteering. Britain and Beyond, 1880–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 111–6.

67 Lord Eustace Percy to Foreign Secretary, 8 June 1937, quoted by Donaldson, The British Council, 56–7.

68 Students Committee Paper No. 38, extended programme, 1 Oct. 1937 TNA BW 2/19.

69 Pietsch, Empire of Scholars, 49.

70 Andrea Oelsner and Simon Koschut, ‘A Framework for the Study of International Friendship’, in Andrea Oelsner and Simon Koschut, eds., Friendship and International Relations (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 13–4.

71 List of Priorities for the British Council, 1938–9, K. Johnstone to E. Hale, 17 Nov. 1937, TNA T 161 1238/S 355581/8 quoted by Atherton, ‘Lord Lloyd’, 30–4.

72 Students Committee, Programme 1939–40 – students, 17 May 1939, TNA BW 2/20.

73 Felix Berenskoetter and Yuri van Hoef, ‘Friendship and Foreign Policy’, in Cameron G. Theis, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Foreign Policy Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3, 12–3.

74 Robert Cole, Britain and the War of Words in Neutral Europe, 1939–45: The Art of the Possible (New York: St Martin's Press, 1990), 16. The potential of the history of emotions for the study of internationalism is indicated by Ilaria Scaglia's The Emotions of Internationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

75 ‘The Maintenance of British Influence Abroad’, 9.

76 Oelsnet and Koschut, ‘Framework’, 19; Berenskoetter and van Hoef, ‘Friendship’, 7.

77 Ashby, Community, 22; Pietsch, Empire of Scholars, 156.

78 Memorandum sent to H.M. Missions, ‘Scholarships for Post-Graduate Students from other countries’, TNA BW 2/19.

79 Giles Scott-Smith, ‘Mapping the Undefinable: Some Thoughts on the Relevance of Exchange Programs within International Relations Theory’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 616 (Mar. 2008), 187–9; Peter M. Haas, ‘Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination’, International Organization, 46, 1 (1992), 1–35.

80 Students Committee Paper no. 42, ‘Post-Graduate Scholarships for Dominion Students’, memorandum by Dominions Office, 20 Nov. 1937, TNA BW 2/19. For more on the British Council's policy in relation to the Dominions, see Alice Byrne, ‘The British Council and the British World, 1939–1954’, GRAAT On-Line, 13 (Mar. 2013), 21–33.

81 Alice Byrne, ‘The British Council and Cultural Propaganda in the United States, 1938–1945’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 11, 3 (2013), 250–3.

82 Students Committee, Programme 1939–40 – students, 17 May 1939, TNA BW 2/20.

83 ‘The Maintenance of British Influence Abroad’, 5, 11.

84 Students Committee, Paper no. 52, ‘Scholarships and Grants for French Students’, 1 Mar. 1939, TNA BW 2/20. According to this report, German students far outnumbered the French, with 444 enrolments at British universities compared to fifty-one. However, as Perraton points out, the size of the former group had been swollen by refugees. Perraton, Foreign Students, 60.

85 Students Committee, Paper no. 50, ‘Scholarships for German students’, 9 Nov. 1938, TNA BW 2/20.

86 Atherton, ‘Lord Lloyd’, 113–8.

87 Ibid., 3.

88 Donaldson, British Council, 62.

89 Leeper to Vansittart, 14 Mar. 1935, TNA BW 82/5, quoted by Donaldson, British Council, 42.

90 Hilary Perraton, Learning Abroad: A History of the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 37–8.

91 Alice Byrne, ‘The Commonwealth University Interchange Scheme: Promoting Exchanges in a Changing World (1948–1960)’, in Global Exchanges, 65–78.

92 Kramer, Paul, ‘Is the World Our Campus? International Students and U.S. Global Power in the Long Twentieth Century’, Diplomatic History, 33, 5 (2009), 781CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 Pietsch, Tamson, ‘Many Rhodes: Travelling Scholarships and Imperial Citizenship in the British Academic World, 1880–1940’, History of Education, 40, 6 (2011), 729–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 Lee, ‘Commonwealth Students’, 2.