Mrs. Gillies’s Fruit Cakes: New Education Fellowship Correspondence Between New Zealand and Bloomsbury, 1936-1945

• In Event: Power and the Development and Reorganization of Intellectual and Physical Spaces

Abstract

Founded in 1921, the New Education Fellowship (NEF) was a “grassroots” organisation to promote “New” (Progressive) Education. By the outbreak of World War Two, it had groups in all continents. In 1932 an International Head Office was set up in Bloomsbury, London, with Clare Soper as International Secretary. In wartime this became the hub for New Education communications for British Commonwealth countries. This paper studies letters between Clare Soper and secretaries of NEF groups in New Zealand. Drawing on sociological concepts of the “epistolary self” I demonstrate how, although shaped by epistolary templates of a formal organisation, the letters also perform the radical scripts of New Education. As historical resources these archival texts offer insight into an educational resistance movement.

Author

• Sue C. Middleton, University of Waikato