The Ramsden Committee and the Founding of the British Council

Official interest in developing student exchanges as a means to increase international interaction and spread ‘British thought’ dated back to the First World War.Footnote ¹⁵ However, during the 1920s both the FO and the private organisations it might have worked with – for instance the All Peoples’ Association or the English Speaking Union – lacked the funds to implement any wider-ranging programme. Even when the Treasury was persuaded to allocate a small grant to the Travel Association in 1928 this was not sufficient to match private sector funding, meaning that business interests continued to override those of international understanding.Footnote ¹⁶ The need to support British businesses would provide the key to breaking down Treasury resistance to financing cultural and educational activities overseas.

The origins of the British Council's student policy can be found in the Committee on the Education and Training of Students from Overseas. This committee was set up on the recommendation of the Overseas Trade Development Council with the aim of boosting British trade in the wake of economic and trade missions to South America (1929), the Far East (1930–1) and Scandinavia (1933). The belief that trade no longer simply ‘followed the flag’ but also, in the words of Philip Taylor, ‘the newspaper, the schoolteacher and the language of a country’, was gaining traction beyond the confines of the FO's News Department.Footnote ¹⁷ That the impetus for the creation of the committee came from concerns about the United Kingdom's export trade and ability to compete in world markets was reflected in the decision to invite the chairman of the Trade and Industry Committee of the House of Commons, Sir Eugene Ramsden, to act as chair. Furthermore, the composition of the committee was heavily weighted towards industrial and commercial interests. The committee was formally established in June 1933 under the aegis of the Boards of Trade and Education and given the following terms of reference: ‘to consider what steps could usefully be taken to encourage suitable students to come to the United Kingdom for education and training – general, commercial or technical; and to make recommendations’.Footnote ¹⁸ This broad remit had implications for how students were defined, encompassing those in higher and further education, however brief their visit.

Reflecting these economic concerns, one of the objectives of the committee was to encourage students in engineering and technical fields to acquire some of their training or early work experience in the United Kingdom. In consultation with official and voluntary bodies, the committee also collected evidence about the presence of international students in the universities and existing exchange programmes. Certain groups of students appeared to be well catered for, thanks to work by official bodies such as the Office of the High Commissioner for India and the Office of the Egyptian Ministry of Education. However, the United Kingdom lacked a single recognisable office which could disseminate information about the facilities offered by UK educational establishments and field inquiries from potential students. The committee concluded that an official overseas student office would not only be efficient but would ‘provide testimony to the interest taken by His Majesty's Government in the problem of attracting overseas students to this country and to counteract the prevalent contrary impression’.Footnote ¹⁹ From the outset, therefore, being seen to take an interest in overseas students, thereby generating positive publicity for the United Kingdom abroad, was deemed equally as important as the long term impact on students. The committee discovered that its enquiries had generated ‘interest and expectation’ from countries within and beyond the empire, and particularly in Scandinavia. Noting that it ‘would be undesirable to disappoint those expectations’, in November 1934 the Committee recommended the immediate creation of such an office, jointly run by the Board of Education and Department of Overseas Trade, aided by a committee made up of representatives of educational authorities as well as industry and commerce. Furthermore, reciprocal relations were to be established wherever possible, differential fees for overseas students abolished and government-sponsored scholarships provided.

By this time, members of what had become known as the Ramsden Committee had been drawn into more ambitious plans emanating from the Foreign Office. The Committee's interim report of June 1934 argued strongly that the question of overseas students could not be divorced from that of the United Kingdom's broader international cultural policy, particularly in relation to the teaching of English. The development of cultural and commercial relations was a prerequisite for attracting good students in the first place and for maintaining a long-term relationship with them once they returned home. As such, it welcomed news that the Foreign Office was working on a scheme for the promotion of cultural relations. Rex Leeper's initial attempts to use the private sector to set up a new organisation floundered on the differing objectives of the FO and its sponsors. Finally, Leeper brought together representatives of government departments as well as those of education and industry to form the British Committee for Relations with Other Countries, chaired by former ambassador William Tyrrell. With Treasury opposition finally overcome, the FO was able to offer modest financial support to what soon became known as the British Council. Its first meeting was held in December 1934, a few weeks before the Ramsden Committee submitted its final report.

As a semi-autonomous organisation, the British Council was a compromise solution allowing the FO to direct policy while maintaining a façade of independence.Footnote ²⁰ For Tyrrell, cultural diplomacy represented ‘work of real importance . . . not only in national interest, but also in that of a return to sanity in international relations’, highlighting the FO view that national interests and internationalism were not only compatible but complementary.Footnote ²¹ This position was reflected in the Council's mission statement, which assigned it the dual task of making ‘the life and thought of the British peoples more widely known abroad’ with promoting ‘a mutual interchange of knowledge and ideas with other peoples’.Footnote ²²

The British Council quickly set up its first specialist committee, the Students Committee, which included many members of the original committee, as well as its chair, Sir Eugene Ramsden. This committee was clearly geared towards implementing the recommendations of the Ramsden Report within the parameters of the FO's new commitment to deploying cultural diplomacy in the national interest. Despite the large degree of continuity with the Ramsden Committee, power relations within the new committee were altered by the presence of representatives from the Foreign and Colonial Offices and by the fact that representatives of higher education establishments henceforth outnumbered those from commerce and industry.Footnote ²³

Implementing the Ramsden Report: The Students Committee 1935–7

The British Council's Students Committee began its work in the spring of 1935. Although it declared its long-term goal to be the development of the two-way traffic of students, it was decided that it would confine itself initially to encouraging overseas students to come to the United Kingdom.Footnote ²⁴ Priority was to be given to the placing of trainees in British companies, the dissemination of information about UK universities and technical colleges abroad and the creation of scholarships, within the limits imposed by the British Council's minimal budget. These tasks reflected the Ramsden Committee's original terms of reference and the recommendations made in its final report, but the Students Committee differed from its predecessor in that its work would ultimately be guided by the FO which had founded the British Council primarily as an adjunct to diplomacy. Hence the placing of trainees, which was never wholeheartedly embraced by industry, in practice remained a peripheral concern and was eventually transferred to a specialised sub-committee. This proximity to the FO meant that the Students Committee could draw on the resources of UK diplomatic missions abroad, but also that it would have to mould its proposals to match plans for cultural diplomacy in specific regions.

The first region to be targeted by the British Council was Scandinavia. The 1933 trade mission to Scandinavia, which had led to the creation of the Ramsden Committee, had highlighted the dominant position of German engineering in this region, due in part to its role in training Scandinavian students. A visit the following year by an official from the FO's News Department confirmed the decline of interest in British culture in the region, leading the British Council to make Scandinavia its first target.Footnote ²⁵ H. M. Legation in Oslo supported the work of the Students Committee by agreeing to allocate some of the funds assigned to improving cultural relations with Norway to sending selected students to study English in the United Kingdom. Three students, selected by a panel composed of H. M. Minister in Oslo, the Rector of Oslo University and representatives of local Anglophile associations, began courses in October 1935.Footnote ²⁶ Conversely, the Legation in Stockholm considered that English was already well taught in Sweden and expressed a desire for its cultural propaganda funds to be used in other ways.Footnote ²⁷ The establishment of the Students Committee indicated the importance the newly formed British Council accorded to increasing the flow of overseas students to the United Kingdom but, as long as the organisation was in its infancy, diplomatic missions on the spot would play a decisive role in deciding how limited funds were spent.

In practice there was a broad consensus as to the desirability of providing some financial assistance to enable selected foreign students of English to study at one of the UK universities. The reasons for this were manifold. Firstly, encouraging the spread of the English language was seen as the core of British cultural diplomacy, whether its ultimate aim was primarily political or commercial. Here British commentators looked to France whose cultural diplomacy drew strength from the Alliance Française's well-established international network of language teaching institutes as well as the weighty university and school section of the official Œuvres françaises à l’étranger founded in 1920.Footnote ²⁸ Rex Leeper specifically cited the ‘French example’ when explaining the British Council's objectives in a 1935 article.Footnote ²⁹ Given that it was considered ‘impracticable’ for the Council to set up British schools in foreign countries, the best method for promoting the study of English appeared to be by bringing foreign teachers of English to the United Kingdom for part of their training. This approach presented an added advantage: future teachers would gain not only knowledge of the English language and literature but also of ‘British life and culture’, which they would then be able to pass on to their pupils. It was therefore decided that scholarships to study in the United Kingdom should be confined to those destined to teach in secondary schools ‘in order that the influence of the scholarship scheme may be as widespread as possible’ (my emphasis).Footnote ³⁰ This was already an established practice within the empire as ‘educating the educators’ was a tenet of those organisations which had been organising teachers’ tours of empire since before the First World War.Footnote ³¹ Finally, offering bursaries to future teachers of English would enable the British Council to respond positively to a number of governments which had requested help in precisely this area.

One of the first concrete measures adopted by the Students Committee was the allocation of bursaries to students in eleven countries which had expressed a desire for ‘furthering the study of English’: Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Spain and Portugal. Forty-four students in all were to share a budget of £2,200 which, although a small sum, represented almost half of the Council's grant from the FO for 1935–6.Footnote ³² In the states which had emerged from the turmoil of the First World War, language policy was linked to nation building and the choice of foreign languages available in schools could indicate the government's orientation in terms of international relations. For instance, in the Baltic states, which had been ruled by a German nobility within the Russian Empire, the decision to make English the first compulsory foreign language in secondary schools was a clear break with the past. The Council's grants to the Baltic states were therefore a way of recognising and supporting this policy in an area which acted as a buffer zone between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. It also enabled the United Kingdom to respond favourably to requests for such aid from Lithuania and Latvia which had been turned down in the 1920s due to Treasury opposition.Footnote ³³ In the case of Yugoslavia, the FO believed German influence in the Ministry of Education was seeking to delay the implementation of a 1935 decree announcing the introduction of English classes in state schools.Footnote ³⁴ Contributing to the training of four future teachers might have little concrete impact in the short to medium term but at least it provided tangible evidence of British interest in and support for the teaching of English in Yugoslav schools.

Although the principal objective was the long-term one of spreading knowledge of the English language and British life and culture, short-term political considerations also came into play. Offering bursaries to Spanish students was seen as a ‘desirable’ quid pro quo given the Spanish government's provision of scholarships to nine British students in Madrid. Similarly, Czechoslovakia was described as being worthy of special attention in order ‘to make use of the influence and support of President Masaryk’, as well as in recognition of the Czech generosity towards English education.Footnote ³⁵ Economic and geopolitical considerations, although never stated explicitly, obviously carried great weight in the choice of recipient countries. Cultural diplomacy reinforced the British drive to win export markets through the signing of bilateral trade agreements between 1933 and 1934 with the Baltic and Nordic states, where the United Kingdom found itself in direct competition with Germany.Footnote ³⁶ The Baltic region and Central and South-Eastern Europe were at the heart of the diplomatic manoeuvres which marked the 1930s, while the Iberian Peninsula and Scandinavia were also of prime strategic importance. Given the diplomatic context, when rapid increases to the Council's budget in 1936 and 1937 made it possible to extend the scheme, it is not surprising to discover that applications were invited from Austria, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary and Italy. As early as November 1935 the then Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, had identified Finland, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria as the main targets for British Council activities for both commercial and political reasons, arguing that,

The countries of Western Europe are notable by their absence from this programme. Such countries were not accorded priority status by the Foreign Office and so were unlikely to benefit from the limited resources of the British Council in its early years. There was less need for British Council intervention in this region since there was a tradition of student mobility as well as official exchanges such as the German Rhodes scholarships that were re-established in 1930 and which ran until the outbreak of war. English was already widely taught across the region and future teachers could travel to the United Kingdom to improve their language skills and acquire professional experience under the language teaching assistant exchange programme launched before the First World War. As will be seen, students from Western Europe also tended to dominate the student exchanges run by the National Union of Students.

The bursaries scheme was mainly directed at Europe but was quickly extended to countries from the Council's other priority regions, namely the Near and Middle East and Latin America.Footnote ³⁸ By 1937 the Near East Committee was in charge of seventeen students from Cyprus, Greece, Iraq, Transjordan, Turkey and Malta. Although the last of these countries was also the smallest, it received the lion's share of the Near East budget with seven bursaries. This was no doubt due not only to the strategic importance of Malta as home to the Mediterranean fleet but also its geographical and cultural proximity to Italy, all of which made it a prime target for Italian cultural propaganda. Given that Italian had only lost its status as one of Malta's official languages around the time of the creation of the British Council, and that Italian universities attracted large numbers of Maltese students (especially those who could not meet the demanding English language requirements of the University of Malta), the teaching of English was an acutely political issue in Malta with obvious diplomatic ramifications.Footnote ³⁹ In contrast, Latin America (initially Argentina and Uruguay) only received five bursaries which were administered by the Council's Ibero-American Committee. The Colonial Office received a similar number, despite the fact that the British Council's original mission statement had specifically assigned it an imperial mission, including encouraging ‘the study and use of the English language’ in the colonies.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Student Committee also turned to a more systematic advertisement of British universities abroad. Although it developed quickly, the Student Committee's bursary scheme for future teachers of English could only hope to bring a handful of students to the United Kingdom. At the beginning of the 1930s France dominated the international student market, attracting 17,000 students to its universities while the United Kingdom trailed behind both the United States and Germany with only 5,000 international students.Footnote ⁴¹ This data suggests that the Committee's implicit premise was correct, namely that the United Kingdom was failing to attract as many students as its rivals. As a 1938 memorandum would later point out, the reasons for this were also structural: since British universities were independent, the government could not oblige them to welcome large numbers of foreign students at ‘uneconomic rates’. State-run French and German universities were popular as they combined academic merit and care for their foreign students with cheaper fees, even if British universities benefitted from a reputation for ‘relative exclusiveness’ and ‘freedom from political infection’.Footnote ⁴² For that reason, greater efforts needed to be made in communicating to students abroad and offering assistance to potential candidates if the United Kingdom was to attract significantly more overseas students.

The Committee thus identified the need for – but struggled to establish – an organisation that could produce and distribute a pamphlet aimed at this market and also act as a clearing house for applications.Footnote ⁴³ Rather than assume this role itself, the Committee sought to work with the Universities Bureau of the British Empire which was already active in this field and was better placed to cooperate with the fiercely independent British universities than any official body.Footnote ⁴⁴ At the end of the First World War, the lack of a unified structure had been identified by the FO as rendering the UK higher education system opaque for foreign students, particularly Americans, but it remained circumspect in its dealings with the universities.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although the Students Committee had good reason to turn to the Universities Bureau, there were drawbacks to working through this organisation. Whereas the FO was primarily interested in harnessing the potential of UK higher education to extend British influence in Europe and the Near East, the University Bureau's internationalism was very much framed by its imperialism: its overriding ambition was to foster what Tamson Pietsch has termed an ‘expansive British community’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Moreover, the Bureau only represented universities and not the technical institutes to which the government also hoped to attract overseas students. Despite this, the Universities Bureau did not accept the Committee's proposal to set up a joint committee including representatives of the Board of Education and the Association of Technical Institutes to deal with the needs of overseas students. Such was the Bureau's resistance to state interference that it even rejected funding from the Committee in order to maintain full responsibility for dealing with the projected handbook and related enquiries from international students.Footnote ⁴⁷ Ultimately, the British Council had to bring out a publication bearing its own name, comprised of separate contributions by the Universities Bureau, the Board of Education and the educational departments of Scotland and Northern Ireland. In August 1936 the bulk of the first edition, entitled Higher Education in Great Britain and Ireland, was sent to diplomatic and consular posts and Anglo-Foreign Societies, while a smaller proportion was reserved for the Dominions and colonies.Footnote ⁴⁸ The following year the handbook was issued as a joint publication between the British Council and the Universities Bureau of the British Empire with the former assuming the cost of subsequent revisions.Footnote ⁴⁹ While this episode underlines the Committee's commitment to promoting British universities and technical institutions across the world, it also illustrates its initial difficulties in cooperating with longer-standing organisations, particularly in the field of higher education.

Accommodation, Hospitality and Welfare: Provisions and Partnerships

In addition to attracting overseas students, the Committee was also aware of the need to look after them once they arrived in the United Kingdom. The principal challenge was accommodation, though directly linked to this was the integration of international students into the host community. For this reason, ‘hospitality’ – welcoming international students, enabling them to experience the British ‘way of life’ and giving them opportunities to mix with UK students – was far from trivial. If the Committee's objective was to produce not only future consumers of British products, but also to create a sympathetic attitude to the United Kingdom abroad, ensuring students came away with a positive view of the country and its people was key. As the secretary of the National Union of Students (NUS) had noted, accommodation problems combined with the ‘coldness’ of English colleagues meant that overseas students ‘could leave after two or three years with no better understanding of, and even dislike for, the English’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Here the pursuit of national interests – engendering positive attitudes towards the United Kingdom among foreign citizens – led the Committee to adopt methods long advocated by cultural internationalists, who believed that person-to-person contact would lead to mutual understanding and ultimately peace. The empire movement provided a similar model. Organisations such as the School Empire Tour Committee placed great emphasis on personal contact in the belief that schoolboys would ‘return home Empire-minded with a knowledge of and an affection for the Empire which will find a vent in Parliament, in education or in any other career’.Footnote ⁵¹ The lack of interaction between overseas students and British people was a particularly acute problem in London, partly because its universities were traditionally non-residential but also because it acted as a magnet for international students. The Students Committee's sub-committee on student accommodation and hospitality, which reported in 1937, therefore concentrated on the capital.Footnote ⁵²

The 1937 report found that there were about 12,000 overseas students in London, roughly half of whom were taking a short course, often at a language school. The latter group was made up predominantly of ‘foreign’ (i.e. non-empire) students, which meant that overall there were well over twice as many foreign students as empire students. Despite their much smaller numbers, however, students from the empire were relatively better catered for, mainly due to the many voluntary organisations concerned with imperial matters. Traditionally these had focused on students from the settler communities of the Dominions. As the report noted, the Victoria League and the Dominion Services and Students Hospitality Scheme together provided hospitality and accommodation for two hundred Dominion and British students. However, by the 1930s specific services were also being provided to colonial students. The Victoria League, which prior to the First World War had resisted working with Indian students, now launched hospitality programmes for students from Malaya and Hong Kong in the hope of retaining their loyalty to the Empire.Footnote ⁵³ Other organisations opened student centres with accommodation and club space targeted at specific groups or countries, for example the Indian Students Union and Hostel or Aggrey House for African and West Indian students. Although these services were offered by private organisations, they worked in close collaboration with public bodies. The Indian Hostel in Gower Street was run by the Indian YMCA but received funding from Indian provincial governments, while Aggrey House, despite being a charitable trust, was launched with Colonial Office backing and was financially dependent on colonial governments.Footnote ⁵⁴ In both cases, official support stemmed at least in part from fears that independent hostels would become hotbeds of anti-colonial agitation, while recognising that racial discrimination made it particularly difficult for colonial students to find lodgings. Student residences were not exempt from such discrimination; for example, London House, opened in 1937 (today's Goodenough College), was explicitly limited to empire students ‘of White Parentage’.Footnote ⁵⁵

The report's position regarding the provision of facilities to students of ‘non-European origin’ – principally Indian, colonial and Chinese – was ambiguous. Although it stated that these students ‘should not be excluded from any arrangement made for students in general’, it failed to condemn racial discrimination, concluding that, ‘the question of the extent to which they should be included in such arrangements and the method of selection should be further considered’. The Student Christian Movement's ‘Club for Students of All Nations’, which provided study and club facilities to all members regardless of their ‘country, race or creed’ was nonetheless praised by the report for its ‘valuable work’.Footnote ⁵⁶ It would have provided a rare opportunity for British, empire and foreign students to mix.

Students from outside the empire also faced discrimination in the housing market. A survey from the 1950s indicated that continental Europeans were considered less desirable tenants than students from the United States and ‘white dominions’, while the welcome offered to non-Europeans was directly proportional to the lightness of their skin tone.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Students Committee was particularly concerned about the lack of a centre that could provide temporary accommodation and assistance to foreign students, most of whom came to study the English language and were not necessarily enrolled at the University of London. It was not, however, in favour of providing facilities specifically for such students to complement those already in existence for empire students. Instead, it recommended capital investment in a Bloomsbury site offering accommodation and club facilities to selected British and overseas students, based on a quota system related to the number of students of each nationality present in London. The projected London centre was to be organised so as to ‘avoid predominance of one nationality or race’ and to create a ‘meeting ground for British and foreign students’ unlike the many nationally oriented centres already in existence in London. In this respect it followed the model of the Rockefeller-sponsored International Houses – the first of which was founded in New York in 1924 – which deliberately sought to bring local and foreign students together under one roof, mixing cultures and religions. In contrast the accommodation provided at the Cité Internationale Universitaire in Paris (1925) was divided into national houses, including the recently inaugurated Collège Franco-Britannique, whose very architecture was intended to express national differences. Although these projects were inspired, at least in part, by interwar cultural internationalism and the search for ‘international understanding’, they differed in their articulation of the national with the international.Footnote ⁵⁸ Since war interrupted the planning of the London centre it was never actually built, unlike similar accommodation in the United States and France.

In order to improve the welfare of international students, and out of principle as well as pragmatism, the Students Committee turned once again to a non-state actor, the NUS, which was already a key player in the field of student hospitality and exchanges. The roots of this organisation lay firmly within the internationalist student movement born after the First World War as it was specifically created to represent the United Kingdom at the International Confederation of Students (Confédération Internationale des Étudiants; CIE). Furthermore, its founding members were predominantly ex-servicemen, marked not only by the devastating destruction of war but also by the experience with foreign lands, peoples and cultures that came with it. Developing opportunities for student travel and exchange as a means of generating ‘knowledge and understanding’, was therefore at the heart of the NUS's mission.Footnote ⁵⁹ Its founding members hoped to pass on what the NUS secretary Ralph Nunn May termed the ‘international bias’ of the ex-servicemen generation of students to their successors while also promoting knowledge of the United Kingdom among foreign students. Tellingly, the report of the NUS's Hospitality Council for 1932 to 1933 starts with a quote from Sir Stephen Tallents’ pamphlet The Projection of England (1933), which called for the creation of a ‘school of national projection’ along the lines of the future British Council.Footnote ⁶⁰ There was not felt to be any contradiction between the NUS's cultural internationalist agenda of facilitating mutual understanding and the promotion of British culture and ‘way of life’. Hence the NUS Hospitality Council, quoting Tallents, described its purpose as providing a ‘homely window’ from which to view ‘England’ in a spirit of ‘genuine friendliness and in enlightened self-interest’. The report went on to argue that, ‘there is nothing that we, with our world-wide ramification of Empire and commerce, need more for our continued welfare than the friendly co-operation of other peoples’.Footnote ⁶¹ The NUS saw its participation in the international programmes of the CIE as a means to pursue British interests as well as international understanding. This was by no means an unusual attitude among CIE members, leading Daniel Laqua to conclude that: ‘rather than being the prerogative of high-minded idealists, internationalism offered opportunities to pursue national agendas’.Footnote ⁶² Furthermore, as the document quoted above suggests, the NUS conceived of internationalism as a means to consolidate the British Empire. It encouraged the students of the Dominions to set up their own unions and to join the CIE, thus contributing to what Daniel Gorman has described as the internationalisation of the British Empire.Footnote ⁶³

The NUS and the British Council therefore shared a similar agenda and an interest in developing student travel and exchange as a means of pursuing it. One of the very first student trips organised by the NUS in 1922 was that of a group of British students to Germany, an act of practical and symbolic importance in re-establishing contact between the former enemies and one that demonstrated the political significance of student exchange.Footnote ⁶⁴ By the 1930s the NUS had developed considerable experience in welcoming foreign students from across Europe and the United States as well as, to a lesser extent, South America and the empire. It mostly worked by inviting individuals to social events hosted by British students but also organised tours for groups, often on a reciprocal basis. In addition, it acted as a clearing house for an exchange programme whereby families in the United Kingdom would receive a student, mainly from France or Germany, whose family took in their own son or daughter. This was, in many respects, the ideal solution to the problems identified by the British Council's Students Committee as it offered foreign students accommodation and a means to experience life as a local, hopefully developing genuine friendships with British people in the process.

The Committee was impressed by the NUS's record in this field, despite the financial restrictions placed upon it.Footnote ⁶⁵ Between 1928 and 1936 it had brought over 7,500 students to the United Kingdom on educational visits and arranged approximately 3,000 individual exchange and au pair visits. In 1935 alone it had coordinated over 5,000 initial invitations for foreign students to private homes. Its expertise in the field was such that by 1936 it was already being employed by the British Council to arrange visits for Belgian schoolchildren, Polish naval cadets and Austrian grantees. Nonetheless, the Committee felt that arrangements for foreign students were still not as extensive and well organised as those offered to empire students by associations like the Victoria League. It found that organisers of educational travel in foreign countries were confused by the multiplicity of agencies and lacked an interlocutor. As demand continued to grow, there was a need for a central organisation to organise exchange visits and hospitality for incoming and outgoing students. The Committee had neither the means nor the expertise to set up such a body and, as with the university handbook, preferred to work through pre-existing independent structures. It therefore decided to invite the NUS to act as the Council's agent in this respect, for which purpose it was allocated a yearly grant of £100 for 1936–7 rising to £500 in subsequent years. Plans to set up a board composed of various voluntary associations active in the field of student travel and hospitality, including the empire societies, did not come to fruition. The outbreak of war, coupled with internal divisions within the NUS, greatly reduced the extent of this partnership by the end of 1939. Whereas many of the founding leaders and staff of the NUS had developed close ties to the FO and were recruited to the wartime Ministry of Information, the Communist Party was by then exerting great influence over the NUS President and Congress.Footnote ⁶⁶ Despite this, the interwar efforts of the internationalist student and empire movements not only helped establish students as actors in international relations, they further developed models and machinery which could be adopted by the state once it had recognised their potential.

Expansion and Consolidation 1938–9

By 1937 the failure of collective security was evident, the post-war treaties of Versailles and Locarno were in shreds. Arguing that the threat to British interests from aggressive Italian and German propaganda was continuing to grow, the Chairman of the British Council sought additional funding, pleading: ‘the Council is no longer expected merely to rescue British prestige from neglect; it has to defend that prestige from deliberate attack. The political motive has become overwhelming; the “bread-and-butter” motive, always rather shadowy, has receded into the background.’Footnote ⁶⁷ His success resulted in the tripling of the Students Committee's budget, enabling it to submit proposals for a more ambitious programme in 1938–9 at a cost of £18,000. The extra money was mostly to be channelled directly to overseas students through the bursaries for future teachers of English and new scholarships for postgraduate students.

The Committee's extended programme continued to give top priority to the bursary scheme, more than doubling its budget for Europe and the colonies to over £10,000 (bursaries for the Near East and Latin America were funded by the relevant regional committees). Rather than offering more bursaries or including new countries, the Committee instead opted to lengthen the period of study from one term to one year. This decision was influenced by reports received from the students themselves, the universities and UK diplomatic missions. The principal objective was not to improve the language skills of the recipients – the impact on the standard of English teaching abroad was already felt to be significant – but to give them the opportunity of becoming ‘acquainted with British students and the country generally’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The proposals insisted on the impossibility of making friends in as little as ten to twelve weeks. Enabling these foreign students to forge friendships with their British counterparts was presumably intended to create a lasting attachment to the country of potentially greater political value than mere technical competence. In this respect the scholarships drew upon the example of the Rhodes scholarships, which placed greater emphasis on the ‘affective ties’ acquired at Oxford than on the education itself.Footnote ⁶⁹

How should the Students Committee's preoccupation with enabling foreign and British students to become friends be understood in the light of research by scholars such as Oelsner, Koschut, Berenskoetter and van Hoef into the concept of friendship in international relations? Although the archival documents do not explicitly answer this question, certain hypotheses can be put forward. The FO seems to have seen the scholarship programmes as contributing to the development of ‘strategic’ friendships with states that were considered important geopolitically rather than states with which the United Kingdom already shared deep bonds and common values.Footnote ⁷⁰ Hence no change was made to the list of receiving countries apart from the disappearance of Spain, which had been plunged into civil war. All the recipient countries, whether in Europe, the Near East or Latin America, had been identified as priority targets by the FO in November 1937, either as Class A countries ‘in which important political or economic interests are in serious danger from foreign, cultural or commercial propaganda’, or Class B countries where it was considered desirable ‘to maintain the current degree of cultural propaganda and wherever possible, to intensify it’.Footnote ⁷¹ The countries which received the most bursaries, for example Poland and Yugoslavia, tended to come high up in the priority rankings. Only the five bursaries allotted to the West African colonies did not feature in the FO's directions to the Council. By the final year of the scheme, before it was disrupted by war, the Council was offering a total of ninety-three bursaries at a cost of £19,500; they were primarily divided between Europe (fifty-five bursaries) and the Near East (twenty-seven bursaries).Footnote ⁷²

The Students Committee's insistence on the importance of fostering friendship between individual students suggests that the extension of the bursary scheme was not primarily seen as a way of smoothing interstate relations but rather of developing mutual trust and affective bonds at the level of civil society. Teachers who had trained in the United Kingdom could be expected to pass on not only technical competence in the English language but also a positive appreciation of British culture, facilitating the emergence of an audience receptive to messages about British policy or values. International friendship could assist the development of networks in various fields, paving the way for political rapprochement while shaping the ‘mental frames’ which would influence the perceptions, and hence decisions, of those grantees who later found themselves in positions of responsibility.Footnote ⁷³ The emotions generated by such friendships are also worthy of interest: feelings of trust and empathy might counterbalance those of fear and awe elicited by German propaganda.Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed the 1938 memorandum referred to earlier predicted that students from the Balkans returning from trips to Germany were more likely to ‘retain an impression of a powerful and resolute organisation’ than become ‘Germanophiles’. The British Council's policy, on the other hand, aimed at showing ‘we are grateful to our friends and are prepared to welcome any additions to their number’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Such aims were not incompatible with the more idealistic one of promoting peace, particularly in the context of appeasement, although friendship is potentially exclusionary.Footnote ⁷⁶

A direct political intention was also evident in a new scholarship scheme for postgraduates to undertake one year of study and research in the United Kingdom. This was a logical extension of the Committee's programme and built on previous government encouragement to the universities to attract both foreign and empire students through the introduction of PhDs.Footnote ⁷⁷ The students were chosen by British diplomatic missions, the British Council and the Universities Bureau, according to academic merit, as well as political suitability.Footnote ⁷⁸ Applicants were to be drawn from the fields of engineering and applied science, architecture, medicine, journalism, law and the humanities, and while not all were destined to become opinion makers or join political elites, they could be expected to participate in professional networks and exercise some form of influence. In the long term, by bringing together scholars and practitioners in discrete fields, the scheme had the potential to nurture epistemic communities which could have an impact on national policy. It is noticeable that the scheme excluded pure science, seemingly favouring those disciplines which offered the best prospects for achieving political outcomes.Footnote ⁷⁹ The first call for applications in the spring of 1938 was addressed to single male students in those fourteen European countries where German economic, cultural and political penetration was most feared and the number of scholarships offered was proportional to their importance in foreign policy terms: Finland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Yugoslavia, which had received top priority ranking from the FO, were awarded two scholarships while the other countries (the Baltic states, Sweden, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Austria) only received one.

Launched in 1938, the postgraduate scholarship programme underwent a few instructive changes in the following years. For one, continued increases to the Student Committee's budget enabled it to grant some scholarships to students from the Dominions and colonies in 1939. However, despite pressure from the Dominions Office, the Dominions were awarded a mere four scholarships, compared to seven for the Far East (China and Siam), nine for South America and forty for Europe.Footnote ⁸⁰ No scholarships at all were allotted to the United States, reflecting the FO's reluctance to involve the British Council in Anglo-American relations for fear of provoking accusations of propaganda. A mooted project to offer government travel grants to US students explicitly rejected working through the Council.Footnote ⁸¹ The biggest change compared to the first year of the scheme concerned the Near East which, with sixty-one scholarships, far outstripped all other regions.Footnote ⁸² Over half of these were shared between Greece and Egypt, the countries which had topped the FO's priority ranking list at the end of 1937. While the Council's prime objective in Greece was defined by the FO as retaining the friendship which had been ‘taken for granted and so nearly lost through indifference’, its policy towards the latter was framed by the rise of nationalism which had rendered the Near and Middle East ‘susceptible to outside attention’. In this context, students were identified as the Council's most important target given their perceived receptiveness to ‘extreme ideas’. At the same time demand for ‘Western education and technical instruction’ was such that offering educational opportunities could enable the Council to overcome ‘political suspicions’.Footnote ⁸³

In 1939–40 the scheme was also extended to France which henceforth supplied the biggest contingent of postgraduates among the British Council's European scholars. This new policy was in direct response to a proposal put forward in March 1939 by the secretary of the Universities Bureau, an indication both of the more active role the Bureau was playing in European affairs and in advising the Student Committee of the British Council. A report to the Committee noted that the number of French students in the United Kingdom had fallen over the last five years due to the higher costs of UK universities and a weak Franc and that, although the French government offered grants to British graduates, those university bursaries open to French students were too limited in scope to be considered truly reciprocal.Footnote ⁸⁴ Within a few days of the presentation of this proposal to the Committee, Germany invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia, setting off a chain of events which tied the United Kingdom and France firmly together through their guarantees to Poland, Greece and Romania. It was within this context that the Universities Bureau's proposal for ten scholarships and a small grant to be used at the discretion of the Bureau and the British universities was subsequently accepted.

The same context put pay to another proposal, made in the aftermath of the Munich crisis, to extend the scholarship scheme to Germany. Based on the claim that, ‘many of the German students who were in London during the recent international crisis were very impressed by the British point of view and inclined to question the policy of the present regime in Germany’, the proposal argued that bringing more capable German students to the United Kingdom would enable the Council to address a German audience ‘without giving the impression of indulging in propaganda of an obvious kind’.Footnote ⁸⁵ This proposal was in fact part of a wider propaganda offensive on German public opinion discussed by Cabinet in December 1938 in which British Council student exchanges were seen as having an immediate short-term impact.Footnote ⁸⁶ Yet the proposal presented to the Students Committee emphasised the long term aim of undermining support for Hitler among the elite by claiming that, ‘there can be little doubt that a year at a British university would serve in time to create a body of educated Germans familiar with the British outlook and less inclined to unquestioned acceptance of totalitarian doctrines’. While such hopes disappeared following the occupation of Czechoslovakia, they demonstrate the extent to which immediate political and ideological considerations had come to inform the British Council's scholarship scheme.

When war broke out in September 1939 there were 121 British Council scholars due to start courses in UK universities, at a total cost of £32,515. The increase in the budgets allotted to the bursary and scholarship schemes bears witness to the success of the British Council's chairman in obtaining more funding from the government. Appointed in July 1937, Lord Lloyd was a former Governor of Bombay and High Commissioner, a diehard imperialist and proponent of rearmament who would become a fierce critic of appeasement. He was particularly interested in the Mediterranean region, which had led him to chair the British Council's Near East Committee and, although not officially a diplomat, he travelled widely and possessed an extensive network both within the United Kingdom and abroad. The chairmanship of the Council allowed him to deepen his involvement in British foreign policy in a semi-official capacity, particularly in the Balkans and Middle East, and the nomination of his close friend Lord Halifax as Foreign Secretary in February 1938 further strengthened his position. While his predecessor, Lord Percy, had been chosen for his experience as both an educationalist as well as a diplomat, Lloyd was more interested in the Council's potential as a strategic tool of ‘moral rearmament’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Under his leadership the government grant to the Council was more than doubled to £130,500 for 1938–9 before leaping to £330,249 for 1939–40.Footnote ⁸⁸ Although still small in comparison to the estimated budgets of Germany and Italy these increases allowed the Council to allocate more resources to attracting overseas students. By the outbreak of the war the Council had developed new operations, including the opening of British institutes and the appointment of official British Council representatives in the Middle East, Poland and Portugal. Despite this internal competition for resources, the Student Committee's share of the Council's budget remained at approximately twenty per cent. With £63,000 for 1939–40 the Students Committee was able to envisage a far broader programme than at its establishment less than five years earlier.