By Tony Watts, (St Catharine’s, 1960)

Long vacations are precious spaces, providing opportunities for students to engage, alone or together, in exciting projects. In the early 1960s, the massive refugee crisis that had followed the dislocations of the Second World War was still leaving its scars. A group of us at St Catharine’s, led inspirationally by Roger Catchpole (1959, NatSci) and John Foskett (1959, Theology; deceased), decided that was where we wanted to make our contribution.

After the War many refugees were settled temporarily in Austria and Germany in Displaced Person camps, often previous concentration camps, in conditions of abject poverty. Among them were Volksdeutsche – ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the Balkans. There were also more recent arrivals, including from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. World Refugee Year (1959/60) aimed to complete the clearance of people from these camps, but this process continued into the early 1960s. It included provision to help families build their own homes. Our initiative was designed to support this by taking their male children away for a holiday. Continue reading →