4 INTELLECTUAL COOPERATION IN WAR-TIME AND PLANS ... 405Even before Education and the United Nations was issued, moves
were underway at an official level to organise post-war education. In the
autumn of 1942, at the prompting of the British Foreign Office and of
Richard Austen Butler, the president of the British Board of Education,
the chair of the British Council invited those ministers of education or act-
ing ministers of education of the Allied governments currently in exile in
the United Kingdom to a series of meetings. The purpose of these meet-
ings was to consider what assistance might be needed and what assistance
might be given in order to help occupied countries in the reconstruc-
tion of their educational systems.^231 The Conference of Allied Ministers
of Education (CAME) as these bi-monthly meetings came to be known,
was officially inaugurated on the 16 November in front of representatives
of occupied Europe: representatives of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France,
Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Yugoslavia.^232
At the time of its inauguration, CAME was a much less diverse body
than was the London International Assembly, some members of which were
also members of CAME. However, it was not long before CAME’s mem-
bership became more diverse: its meetings in the spring of 1943 would wit-
ness the presence of observers from Australia, Canada, China, India, New
Zealand, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of
America. In October of the same year, the British government invited these
observer states to join Britain and the continental governments in exile as
members of CAME.^233 This broadening of CAME’s base reflected the real-
isation that assistance would have to be forthcoming from a wide range of
countries and not just Britain, and that certain non-European countries,
China and the Philippines for example, also urgently required educational
reconstruction.^234
(^231) Laves and Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, 18.
(^232) Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics, 36. The chairman of the British Council,
Sir Malcolm Robertson, had met with the Allied Ministers of Education the month
before Richard Austen Butler convened the CAME meeting. See Cowell, ‘Planning the
Organisation of UNESCO, 1942–1946: A Personal Record,’ 210. See also ‘La coopération
intellectuelle internationale: U.N.E.S.C.O,’ Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, nos.
1–2 (1946): i–xxiii, ii.
(^233) Richard A. Johnson, ‘The Origin of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization,’ International Conciliation 24, no. 424 (1946): 441–48, 442. See also
Coopération Intellectuelle Internationale, nos. 1–2 (1946), ii.
(^234) Laves and Thomson, UNESCO: Purpose, Progress, Prospects, 5, 18.