The New Philanthropy of the Edwardian Age: the Guild of Help and the Halifax Citizens’ Guild, 1905-1918

In the decade before the First World War many of the social and intellectual tensions that existed in Britain were evident in the debate within the philanthropic community about how to deal with poverty.Central to this debate was the work of the Guild of Help, an organisation which sought to offer a new more community-based solution.Yet in the end, the Guild of Help movement failed to provide an answer to poverty since its approach was chiefly designed to endorse the existing class distinctions, the moral responsibility of the middle classes to the poor and the moral discipline of the recipient, and lacked the resources to achieve its objectives.Although it became the most important agency of voluntary help to the poor in Britain, outstripping the Charity Organisation Society (COS) by 1909, it veered little from that organisation, its resources and concerns.It might have wished to work with the public bodies and the state, in a way which was anathema to the COS but its commitment was firmly tied to a society in which laissez faire and local community action predominated.In the end the wartime state intervention of 1914-1918 turned the Guild of Help into part of a mass relief agency working with other voluntary bodies, an action which ultimately led to the formation of the National Council of Social Services in 1919.Nevertheless, the New Philanthropy which the guilds encouraged, was a fascinating attempt by the middle classes to work through the local community, still the locus of power in early Edwardian Britain, to tackle poverty, to establish a partnership between philanthropy, the community and, ultimately, the state, in an attempt to ward off the rising threat of state socialism in a climate of social crisis.It was also a movement which saw the transition from charity to social work, and one in which environmental and health considerations, began to rival the moral control of working-class life.This Edwardian New Philanthropy was powerfully represented in the Halifax Citizens' Guild of Help which was organised in 1905 and publicly launched on 12 December 1905 by a groups of citizens, including the two MPs of Halifax,

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