How the Girl Guides Won the War. Janie Hampton

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       1 We are the Girl Scouts

      Thirty years before Pax Ting, in 1909, there were no Guides, only a few intrepid girls who had begun to discover the excitement of the Scouting movement, which had been started that year by the distinguished Boer War hero and former spy, Robert Baden-Powell.

      Conscripting soldiers for the Anglo-Boer War had revealed the poor state of health of the youth of Britain, a weakness which was interpreted by doctors, eugenicists and psychologists as both physical and moral. They decided that the country was in a state of decline, and desperately needed to be regenerated and revitalised. Foreign elements, homosexuality, mental instability and female hysterics — all had to be weeded out. Popular opinion was crying out for another war to ‘cleanse’ Britain of its social ills and weakness.

      Robert Baden-Powell had been brought up with the self-discipline of ‘Christian Socialism’. ‘You must try very hard to be good,’ he had written at eight years old. He was a good shot, a brilliant tracker and a talented artist. Posing as a harmless tourist he could sketch a town plan, or the outline of a fort with gun emplacements, and then disguise it as a butterfly. He was a man of energy and efficiency who wanted to ensure that boys lived more fruitful lives. He believed that in order to prevent them hanging around on street corners and getting up to mischief, their aimlessness had to be replaced with a sense of ‘fun and excitement’. In 1907, when he was already fifty years old, Baden-Powell tried out his ideas at a camp on Brownsea Island, Dorset. A mixture of private- and state-educated boys slept in bell tents, cooked over a campfire and practised woodcraft, stalking and tracking, all of which were designed to teach them new skills. When a year later Baden-Powell’s book Scouting for Boys was published in six parts at fourpence each, it was a best-seller. The book was intended merely to offer new ideas gleaned from his life as a soldier and from the Brownsea Island camp to existing youth leaders. Baden-Powell was surprised by the reaction: immediately, thousands of boys asked how they could become Scouts or started their own groups. He had unwittingly spawned a whole new youth movement.

      Unknown to Baden-Powell, by 1909 girls were forming their own Scout troops in several parts of the country, from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Clacton-on-Sea. They too had read Scouting for Boys, and in response they formed patrols and marched around with staves and lanyards, their haversacks filled with bandages in case they came upon an injured person. They cobbled together their own uniforms: Miss Elise Lee, the first Girl Scout in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, wore a Boy Scout hat and her own blouse. Winnie Mason of Southsea, Hampshire, wore a Boy Scout shirt and scarf, a long straight skirt and lace-up boots, and carried a staff. The first Mayfair Group, formed by three sisters, Eleanor, Laura and Jean Trotter, wore serge skirts just below the knee, navy jerseys and shiny leather belts. In Scotland, Girl Scouts wore kilts and woollen jerseys. The thirty Gillingham Girl Scouts in Kent went on cycle outings in their uniforms in 1909. These early Girl Scouts even managed to obtain badges from Scout headquarters by indicating that they had achieved the desired standard in tests, and only giving their initials rather than their full Christian names. It was some time before the Boy Scouts noticed, and then demanded the return of the badges.

      Just a year after Boy Scouts had started, Baden-Powell left the army to devote himself to the movement. The uniform worn by his waxwork in Madame Tussaud’s was changed from that of a General to a Scout, in his trademark shorts and broad-brimmed hat. Baden-Powell knew that more and more boys were joining the Scouts, but he wanted to find out just how popular the movement had become. He organised a rally at the Crystal Palace for 4 September 1909, to see how many would attend. Not only did 11,000 Scouts turn up, but much to Baden-Powell’s surprise, standing in the front row was a group of girls wearing Scout hats and holding staves.

      ‘What the dickens are you doing here?’ he asked.

      ‘Oh, we are the Girl Scouts,’ they said. Sybil Carradine, from Peckham in South London, and her friends had seen the boys going off to have fun with the Scouts and decided to copy them. When they heard about the Crystal Palace rally they put on their uniforms and marched straight through the turnstiles.

      ‘The devil you are!’ Baden-Powell declared.

      ‘Please, please,’ they replied, ‘we want something for the girls.’ To their utter amazement he said, ‘You’d better take part in the march-past at the end.’ At that moment Sybil and her friends knew they had won; and it was the girls whom the photograph of the event in the Daily Mirror depicted standing at the front of the crowd.

      In May 1908 Baden-Powell had already rhetorically asked the question, ‘Can girls be Scouts?’ in The Scout magazine. He considered that ‘girls can get as much healthy fun out of scouting as boys can… and prove themselves good Scouts in a very short time’. However, while he was certainly impressed by the turn-out of the girls at Crystal Palace, his attitude towards women was typical of his time. He was not a misogynist; rather, he was a military man who just didn’t quite know what to make of the female sex. In his book Rovering to Success (1922) he would write: ‘The four rocks which prevent a man from achieving happiness: Horses, wine, women and irreligion.’ Yet despite putting women in the same category as horses and wine, he did look up to them, and tried to resist the ‘temptation to forget the reverence due to women. The bright side is safe-guarding oneself against temptation through the cultivation of chivalry. Sexual temptations come from perfectly natural causes, viz sap.’

      By the end of 1908, Baden-Powell was enthusiastic about girls joining his new movement: ‘I’ve had several quite pathetic letters from little girls asking me if they can share the delights of the scouting life with the boys. But of course they may! I’m always glad to hear of girls’ patrols being formed.’ A year later he wrote, ‘I have had greetings from many patrols of Girl Scouts, for which I am very grateful. They make me feel very guilty at not having yet found time to devise a scheme of Scouting better adapted to them; but I hope to get an early opportunity of starting upon it. In the meantime, they seem to get a good deal of fun and instruction out of Scouting for Boys and some of them are capable Scouts.’

      Baden-Powell was very concerned that girls should not become ‘coarsened’ or ‘over-toughened’ by engaging in Scouting. ‘You do not want to make tomboys of refined girls, yet you want to attract and thus to raise the slum girl from the gutter,’ he wrote in The Scout Headquarters Gazette. A month before the Crystal Palace rally, he decided that if there were to be Girl Scouts, they should be called something different. He chose ‘Guides’, СКАЧАТЬ