‘These Heroic Days’: Marxist Internationalism, Masculinity, and Young British Scientists, 1930s–40s

Abstract

While both youth and internationalism have, for many years, been seen as vital hallmarks of the interwar period by historians, studies have tended to focus on particular youth movements, youth subcultures and attempts by national governments or other agencies to organize young people. Such movements are almost always identified with strict age cohorts and leave less room for investigating the broader cultural significance of both the idea and discourse of ‘youth’ in society.1 The growing public role and prominence of science and technology, which provides the focus for this chapter, is another major feature of the interwar years and of studies of internationalism in this period; yet it is a topic rarely examined in the context of the history of childhood and youth. In the course of this chapter, I want to explore for what purposes, with what effects and by whom the idea and discourse of youth, rather than ‘youth’ as a narrowly defined social population, were deployed within the complex and shifting world of British science in the 1930s and early 1940s.