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Chapter 7 - A Labour of Love: 1919–1922
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2022
Summary
We have to go back to our beginnings to understand our growth and see our objective … A boy in the War gains more by going to the Old House and imagining the refreshment of the tired soldier than by listening to many poor reminiscences … [It] is more than a place of sentiment – it is a fact of history. I know fellows of straight and simple mind who have found the depths of Toc H in no crowded Guest Night, but in the strange simplicity of a Belgian house where it all began.
Alexander PatersonMaurice Waller was determined to inaugurate a more liberal regime in English prison administration. With this end in view he took the unprecedented step of recommending the appointment of a Commissioner from outside the prison service and the Home Office – Alexander Paterson – and so introduced a creative force which was to affect within the next twenty-five years the transformation of the theory and practice of imprisonment, not only in England but throughout the world.
Harold ScottWhen Alec finally returned home, he took up residence in the old ‘barrack block’ before moving to 9 Grange Road, where he would stay with Tom Angliss and his parents for six years. While working for the Ministry of Labour, he remained deeply involved in the local area and devoted his leisure time to his old interests. He found that Bermondsey, along with the rest of the post-war world, was much changed. For the first time the word ‘Mission’ had an old-fashioned Victorian ring, denoting an age of noblesse oblige. This would no longer do. Equality had always been integral to ‘the Doctor’s’ dream and could be better expressed by another slight change of name. The Oxford and Bermondsey Mission became the Oxford and Bermondsey Club.
As the ‘Bermondsey boys’ were demobilised and came home there was a move for a new and enlarged club, composed of them but reinforced each autumn by drafts of eighteen-year-olds from junior clubs. Men and boys ‘cemented together by memories of club-camps and campaigns abroad will grow up to make their mark in local history’; so it was expected, so it was hoped.
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- Alexander Paterson, Prison Reformer , pp. 155 - 172Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022