Back in 1944, despite the War, there was an enviable certainty to life as my mother helped fill Red Cross parcels for British prisoners of war.
The parcels assembly line at St Peter’s hospital, Chertsey, was organised by her great aunt May Bowen, a tiny but indomitable baronet’s widow who resembled a miniature Margaret Rutherford.
The dowager ran an efficient assembly line, and my mother, aged ten, had to stay alert in order to insert one Mars Bar into each box as it whooshed past her.Â
Other objects in Red Cross parcels could include Nestle’s dried milk, Lusty’s collops (meat slices), Crosse & Blackwell herrings, Peek Frean biscuits, Marmite and a small drum of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes.
After being sealed with the Red Cross’s distinctive symbol, the parcels would be flown to Switzerland and then taken by lorry to German PoW camps to be distributed – with remarkably little larceny, it seems – to captured Allied servicemen.
Four British Red Cross nurses carrying gift parcels from the USA and elsewhere which are to be distributed to patients in various hospitals in March 1941
Princess Diana poses in her uniform as a patron for the British Red Cross YouthÂ
Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross (pictured around 1900)Â
That Red Cross logo, an inversion of the Swiss flag, overcame all manner of bureaucratic obstruction. It had a magic, almost spiritual power that tended to suppress the usual venalities.
My mother had a particular interest in Red Cross parcels, because her Uncle Peter, an officer in the Tank Regiment, was being held in a PoW camp in Germany. When Peter Johnstone eventually returned home, in 1945, he was skeletal.
My grandmother’s friends donated bread units from their ration books, and the newly liberated Peter sat there for days eating loaf after loaf until he slowly returned to a more normal size.
Red Cross parcels were important not just for morale, but also for the physical survival of thousands of starved PoWs. In my family, when we heard mention of that charity, it was therefore always ‘the good old Red Cross’.
But that was in the days of simpler notions of right and wrong, when a few revered institutions occupied a precious no-man’s-land in the public imagination. The same was true of the BBC, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the RSPCA and the British Legion: solid, constant, dependable. That was then. And now? Well, at least the British Legion is still unaffected. But the others?
Yesterday’s Mail reported that the British Red Cross had issued a 12-page guide telling staff what to say and think. They should no longer address a gathering with the term ‘ladies and gentlemen’, because that would be insufficiently inclusive and might omit those who are neither male nor female.
Likewise, they should not say someone was ‘born as a woman’ or ‘born as a man’, because that could distress a trans person.
Terms such as ‘pensioner’, ‘youngster’ and ‘elderly’ are also out of bounds – hors de combat, as might once have been said about poor Peter –because they could perpetuate negative stereotypes.
Red Cross employees should instead use terms such as ‘everyone’, ‘all’ or ‘folk’. Oh, and one should never refer to a woman’s ‘maiden name’. Sexist, you see.
The flag of the International Red Cross flies as refugees fleeing Ukraine arrive at the Vysne Nemecke border crossing on March 13, 2022 in Slovakia
Women wearing duster coats on a production line packing American Red Cross prisoner of war food packages in 1943
Princess Diana signs a guest book while visiting a Red Cross centre on March 2, 1993 in Kathmandu, Nepal
Reading the report, I was struck not only by the silliness and corporate arrogance but also by the intellectual laziness. This sort of wokery is not exactly novel. Swathes of Whitehall and the charity world – the third sector as, pompously, it now likes to be called – have already fallen for its linguistic tyranny, and there has been plenty of criticism. So in some senses the Red Cross is only treading well-shelled ground.
But that possibly makes its involvement all the worse. It should have known this was bad territory.
Politicised pettiness about language has, in the past decade or so, driven otherwise intelligent souls on Left and Right round the twist. Even by using the expression ’round the twist’, I may be laying myself open to furious denunciation by mental-health campaigners who may claim, wrongly, that I am seeking to make light of mental illness.
Such are the habitual, dreary realities of today’s identity politics, which are fuelled by a charity-lobbying sector that pays top managers hundreds of thousands of pounds. The 2023 accounts of the British Red Cross, since you ask, show that it had 17 employees on more than £100,000 a year. One of them was on as much as £190,000.
The Red Cross’s language code falls into what has become known as ‘culture wars’. That term was initially adopted playfully from the 19th century expression Kulturkampf that described tensions between the Roman Catholic Church and the Prussian government of Otto von Bismarck.
Since their modern inception, culture wars have become anything but ironic and, as can be seen daily on social media, they are now genuinely bellicose.
The Red Cross was founded to rise above warfare. In the early 1860s, a prosperous Calvinist, Henry Dunant, from neutral Switzerland, proposed a network of national societies that could cooperate on relieving the suffering caused by war.
The original oil painting for a WWII Red Cross poster
A woman works on baskets for Red Cross medical supplies in June 1941Â
M Dunant happened to be in the vicinity when Napoleon beat the Austrian army at the Battle of Solferino.
He was so distressed by the plight of thousands of wounded and captured soldiers stumbling through the streets that he vowed to improve their lot.
In those days, and indeed for a long time thereafter, the Red Cross was run on a voluntary basis. Aunty May received no spondoolicks for her work in Chertsey. There were no third-sector mega-salaries in those days.
Henry Dunant’s admirable campaign, which saw the Red Cross created in 1863, was important both in its humanitarian instincts and in establishing the value of an organisation that could be trusted on all sides in a combat. As was evident 81 years later, when my dear mother was doing her bit, the Red Cross could act as a go-between, not quite as a peacemaker, but as a conduit for pacific gestures.
Unless a few such institutions exist, peace becomes much harder to achieve.
Since the 1940s, the Red Cross has, to use a business term, diversified. There are still plenty of war zones around the world, not least Ukraine and the Middle East, in both of which regions the International Red Cross is at work, but the exigencies of professional corporatism have pushed the brand into wider activities.
The British Red Cross is now active in areas that might surprise some small donors (though not, presumably, our government, which in 2022, provided nearly 20 per cent of the charity’s funds).
Today, it busies itself in ‘cost of living support’ – inverted commas seem advisable because the term has a party-political flavour – and in providing help for refugees. It also offers to help migrants bring their families to Britain. This may be a clement thing to do, but it is not meticulously neutral behaviour.
A soldier receiving a Christmas gift from the mission of the American Red Cross in Italy during World War I
Red cross flags fly in Italy to mark the 150th anniversary of the International Red Cross which was founded by Switss Henry Dunant after the battle of Solferino
The same British Red Cross, whose patron is the King, waded into politics in 2017, when it claimed that the government’s handling of the NHS had led to a ‘humanitarian crisis’, a hyperbolic assertion immediately jumped on by the then leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.
Celebrity backers of the British Red Cross include that noted non-combatant in politics, Gary Lineker.
The bossy little rulebook about language to staff can be seen in the same light. It stands in direct contravention of the Red Cross’s important heritage of staying out of the fight.
Still the ‘good old Red Cross’? Only, perhaps, if you consider maiden names a sexist atrocity. The rest of us might conclude that another of life’s certainties has been taken captive by the enemy.
