How the Girl Guides Won the War. Janie Hampton

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СКАЧАТЬ was in the Indian army. In 1910 the Girl Guides were formed as a separate organisation, which could develop independently from boys, for girls over the age of ten years. After their foundation, Baden Powell stated adamantly that he had not started the Girl Guides — ‘they started themselves’.

      He asked his fifty-two-year-old sister Agnes to organise the girls. The unmarried Agnes enjoyed steel engraving, ballooning, making aeroplanes and playing bicycle polo. Despite these modern hobbies, she held traditional Victorian views, and believed that a Guide would be horrified to be mistaken for an imitation Scout, or to be regarded as merely mimicking boys’ activities. She warned that ‘violent jerks and jars’ could ‘fatally damage a woman’s interior economy’, and that girls who went in for ‘rough games and exposure’ would ruin their delicate hands. She also believed that too much exercise led to girls growing moustaches. ‘Silly vulgar slang’ such as ‘topping, ripping and What ho!’ was definitely to be avoided.

      Respectable girls and young ladies in 1910 never went out without their mother or a chaperone. Guide meetings gave them the opportunity to gather with their peers, and as there was no danger of meeting the opposite sex, they didn’t have to take their mothers. They also learned independence, self-confidence and life skills.

      On 27 July 1910, Jackson’s Oxford Journal, a weekly local paper, reported: ‘Since the Guide movement first originated, many have swollen its ranks. We believe that there are about 60 in the Oxford region.’ Many existing groups of girls, such as the Girls Friendly Society, the Catholic Women’s League, and the Better Britain Brigade (BBB), changed themselves into Guide companies. ‘A girl came down the drive on her bicycle with all kinds of things dangling from it,’ wrote a new recruit in Oxford. ‘She told us she was a Girl Guide looking for Accidents and Good Turns. She had with her everything she thought might be useful, first-aid box, rope and frying pan. I was fascinated.’

      Agnes Baden-Powell, an efficient organiser, gathered round her all her doughtiest lady friends to sit on committees. She adored travelling up and down Britain inspecting groups of Guides, appointing Commissioners and being treated like minor royalty. In between all this, she set about writing, with her brother’s help, a handbook which she called How Girls can Help to Build up the Empire. In the foreword she wrote: ‘The Girl Guides is an organisation for character training much on the lines of Boy Scouts. Its Aim is to get girls to learn how to be women — self-helpful, happy, prosperous, and capable of keeping good homes and bringing up good children. The Method of training is to give the girls pursuits which appeal to them, such as games and recreative exercises which lead them on to learn for themselves many useful crafts.’

      Agnes’s book was mainly copied from Scouting for Boys, but it included extra chapters on nursing, childcare and housekeeping. Girls, like boys, were advised strongly against trade unions and masturbation: ‘When in doubt, don’t,’ they were warned. ‘These bad habits can quickly lead to blindness, paralysis and loss of memory.’

      Baden-Powell was modern in his ideas about gender-specific jobs: Boy Scouts learned traditional women’s skills such as sewing and cooking, and Guides were encouraged to learn mechanics and carpentry.

      ‘Girls must be partners and comrades rather than dolls,’ said Robert Baden-Powell. Educated Guides were encouraged to become translators, pharmacists, stockbrokers, laundry managers or accountants. Their role models were Joan of Arc, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Marie Curie. Working-class Guides were encouraged to be efficient and honest domestic and factory workers. All Guides, it was hoped, of whatever class, would make better mothers and wives. ‘A Guide prides herself on being able to look after a house well,’ wrote Agnes. ‘She must be able to cook, to sew, and to do laundry work: she must know simple first-aid, sick nursing and how to look after children. Her knowledge must be sound, so that she can be counted on in an emergency to care for other people as well as herself.’

      The book was full of health-giving advice.

      The blood to your body is what steam is to the engine. It makes it go well or badly. But also your blood is food to the body, like water to a plant; if your body doesn’t get enough, it remains small and weak and often withers and dies. You must take in food that is good for making blood, and avoid sweeties. When you have taken in your food and have chewed it well and have swallowed it, it goes down to your stomach and the good parts go off into the blood, and the useless part of it passes out of you at the other end. If you let this useless part stay in you too long — that is, for more than a day — it begins to poison the blood and so to undo the good of taking in good food. So you should be very careful to get rid of the poisonous part of your food at least once a day regularly.

      Unless a girl can chew her food well the goodness does not come out of it in her stomach to go to make blood. So try to keep your teeth sound and strong.

      If a girl could not afford a toothbrush, she could make one, just like the children Baden-Powell had met in Africa. ‘Take a short stick and hammer the end of it until it is all frayed out like a paint-brush. Use it every morning and evening. Attack those germs and get them out from their hiding places between the teeth, and swill them out with mouthfuls of water, so they don’t get a chance of destroying your grinders.’

      The book included the Guide Law:

      1 A Guide’s honour is to be trusted.

      2 A Guide is loyal, to her King, and her Guiders, her parents, her country and her employers or employees.

      3 A Guide’s duty is to be useful and to help others.

      4 A Guide is a friend to all, and a sister to every other Guide no matter to what social class she belongs.

      5 A Guide is courteous.

      6 A Guide is a friend to animals.

      7 A Guide obeys orders of her parents, patrol leader, or captain without question.

      8 A Guide smiles and sings under all difficulties.

      9 A Guide is thrifty.

      10 A Guide is pure in thought, in word and in deed.

      Robert Baden-Powell sometimes added an eleventh law: ‘(This law is unwritten but is understood: A Guide is not a Fool.)’

      One reviewer commented, ‘This book is vastly more than it professes to be. It not only teaches girls to be women of the best but is one of the best aids to nature study that we have seen.’ Baden-Powell, however, thought his sister’s popular pocket book rather confusing, and later described it as ‘The Little Blue Muddly’.

      In 1909 it was almost twenty years before all British women were allowed to vote, and the editor of the Spectator wrote of the Guides that ‘it is time to stop this mischievous new development’, while one of his readers commented, ‘This is a foolish and pernicious movement.’ But Guiding was just what girls wanted, and within months 6,000 of them had enrolled. A year later, the uniform of navy blue serge skirt, cotton multi-pocketed shirt and wide-brimmed hat had been established. ‘We wore ETBs,’ remembered Mary Allingham. ‘Elastic top and bottom. They were navy blue, thick worsted woollen material knickers.’ Baden-Powell was clear that the uniform should be smart, yet not too military — he also hoped that it ‘makes for equality… it covers the difference of country and race, and makes all feel that they are members of one organization’. For girls who normally wore old or ragged clothes, to wear a uniform was empowering. ‘We all wore these huge floppy hats,’ said Eileen Mitchell, ‘and cotton scarves, tied at the back with a reef knot, right over left, left over right.’ A metal trefoil badge, always highly polished, was worn on the scarf, the three leaves representing the threefold Guide promise.

      Agnes СКАЧАТЬ