How the Girl Guides Won the War. Janie Hampton

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СКАЧАТЬ is a Game; Guiding is Fun; Guiding is an Adventure,’ declared Olave. In 1919 she formed the International Council, to help Guides and Scouts share their ideas around the world. Dispensing with Agnes’s older friends, she rallied some well-known and influential women to join the committee. A number of them had married older men, didn’t like children much and preferred uniform to civilian clothes. One of these was Violet Markham, who always used her maiden name even after she was married to a Lieutenant-Colonel. The daughter of a wealthy mine-owner, she first championed the causes of miners, and then female domestic servants. Olave’s Assistant Chief Commissioner was Katherine Furse, who had been brought up in Switzerland, and was an excellent skier and keen mountaineer. During the First World War she had worked for the Red Cross, and had then started the Women’s Royal Navy and the Voluntary Aid Detachment nursing service. An open-minded woman, she wanted Guides to be more socially responsible, and soon became head of the Sea Rangers, which had been started in 1920 by former Wrens. They sang shanties and learned how to handle small boats, to signal and lifesave, and to cook and keep their gear tidy in cramped quarters. Before enrolment, a Sea Ranger had to make a lanyard with at least eight different knots.

      In 1926 Dame Katherine founded the World Association, and was its director for ten years. A brilliant administrator and organiser, she once joked, ‘If I saw a child being run over by a tram, my first reaction would be to organise somebody else to rescue it.’ ‘Dame Katherine represented sheer slogging hard work,’ said Olave. ‘There was a strange unexpected streak of intolerance in her make-up and her critical, questioning mind made her appear slightly argumentative and unbending in temperament. She was so absolutely upright, that you could not but bow to her decisions.’

      In July 1925 the Girl Guides held a rally in Oxford. The Oxford Times reported the Chief Guide’s opening speech: ‘Our aim is to train young girls to develop themselves to be useful, loyal, honourable, capable and helpful. We want them to think not only for themselves, but of others.’ By then half a million girls had joined the Guides and Brownies in over thirty nations — nearly double the number of Boy Scouts and Cubs. In 1929 there were enough Guides all over the world to raise £60,000 to build substantial headquarters overlooking the Royal Stables in Buckingham Palace Road. Opening in 1931, these smart new offices housed the publisher of The Guide and The Brownie, as well as a tailoring department where uniforms were made — Guide overcoats cost two guineas.

      At a time when the mortality rate was still very high, anything that helped to reduce death and disease was appreciated. Guides couldn’t do much about sewers and clean water supplies, but they could learn about hygiene and be on hand for first-aid in emergencies. In 1927 the 46th Westminster Company demonstrated their skills as well-prepared first-aiders, making a 16mm film in which a woman crashes her horse cart. Luckily some passing Guides take control of the frightened horse, while others bandage up the woman’s leg and carry her to the village doctor. Then, as the Guides walk along a cliff, they see a boy fall over the edge. One Guide climbs down to him, while another swims across a river to alert a boatman. With the tide coming in, the unconscious boy is rescued in the nick of time.

      Within just ten years of the movement’s foundation, Guide companies had been started in penitentiaries, orphanages and care homes. Guiding was a way in which ‘the poor and needy’ could be encouraged to help themselves, and the better-off could learn to help others. When a Colonel Strover organised ‘The Woodlarks Camp for Cripples’, over a thousand children suffering from club feet, polio and TB of the spine arrived for a holiday in their wheelchairs or on crutches, and were cared for by eager Guides. Before the Welfare State or the National Health Service, disabled children had to rely on charities and volunteers. Extension Guides began in 1909 in St Mary’s Hospital, Surrey, then the largest children’s hospital in Europe. ‘The aim of Extension Guiding is to bring the blind, the crippled, the deaf and the mentally defective girl into closer touch with normal life,’ wrote the editor of The Extension Guide. Old-fashioned words, but modern ideas. ‘If we try do everything for the handicapped girl, we only increase her dependence on other people. If we do too little we miss the chance of helping her to find a way round the limitations of her disability.’ Proficiency badges were adapted to all abilities. Blind Guides were encouraged to take part in sports day and make dampers on campfires. Fire-lighting tests could be taken in bed with asbestos sheets laid over the counterpane.

      In 1921 ‘Post’ or ‘Lone’ Guides were set up for girls who were housebound, lived in isolated places or were at boarding schools where Guides were forbidden. They held ‘meetings’ by post: the Guide would post her reef knot and her ‘Second Class Useful Article’ to her Captain, and it would be returned with comments for the next ‘meeting’. At the age of sixteen a Lone Guide could become a Lone Ranger.

      In June 1941 Mrs Brash put on an exhibition at Guide headquarters of handicrafts made by ‘crippled and invalid Guides from all over the country’. She was a tough judge, and firmly told a Scottish Post Guide, ‘I would have passed that needlework from an ordinary Guide, Elspeth, but in the Extension branch we have especially high standards. You’ll have to do better than that.’

      Guiding pioneered the now-accepted attitude to children with disabilities: whatever her disability, no girl was ever turned away from Brownies or Guides. Kathleen Barlow belonged to an Extension company when she was a patient in a TB sanatorium. ‘Most of us were lying in bed, yet full of happiness. The walking Guides took the little ones for walks in the fields, the little children pretending they were with their own mummies. The Guides grew marigolds in pots from their beds and wheelchairs. The flagpole could be carried into the ward and Colours hoisted.’

      The Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Oxford had a hospital Guide company for long-stay patients. Children’s orthopaedic problems often entailed months of treatment lying flat in bed. The girls wore their Guide ties, badges and hats over their nightclothes for meetings held in wards. On sunny days they were pushed outdoors in basket-weave beds on wheels, and able-bodied Guides came to the hospital to work with them. When some Norfolk Guides discovered that many of the fifteen Guides of the Kelling Sanatorium Extension Company could not read, they paid for a teacher.

      In Scotland, the Guides set up the Trefoil School for disabled children who would otherwise have received no education at all. Whether in callipers or wheelchairs, the children received a full education at the boarding school, whose motto was ‘Undaunted’. The Trefoil School closed in 1975, by which time all disabled children were accepted in mainstream schools.

      Across the globe, the Guide movement was spreading fast — by 1920 there were Guides in North America, Egypt, Palestine, Armenia and France. In 1929 Guides were established in Italy. But in 1933 Mussolini closed down all youth movements and set up his own organisation, Balilla, which he claimed was an improvement on Guiding and Scouting. Baden-Powell met Mussolini and pointed out that Balilla was compulsory rather than voluntary, super-nationalistic rather than international, and was intended to mould a uniform character rather than encouraging individualism. He also said that although the Scouting and Guiding movement encouraged service to one’s nation, it never condoned the use of this for militaristic aggression. Guiding and Scouting had begun in Germany in 1914, and like Mussolini, Hitler banned them in 1933. Baden-Powell never met him to point out the deficiencies of Hitler-Jugend or the Bund Deutscher Mädel.

      There was a perception that Guides and Scouts were connected to Christianity, and this was compounded by the parades that often took place in churches of the established Church of England. But Baden-Powell always insisted that they were non-denominational. ‘The movement is based on faith but not a particular faith,’ he said.

      Joan Collinson was born in 1922 in Gateshead, where her Catholic father worked in the gasworks and led family prayers every night before bedtime. There was a Guide company nearby, but she never joined because its meetings were held in the Church of England church hall. ‘It wasn’t so much rivalry,’ she said, ‘as both sides felt we were the chosen ones, and that was that. As a Roman Catholic I never dreamed of going into СКАЧАТЬ