How the Girl Guides Won the War. Janie Hampton

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СКАЧАТЬ badge any day and any hour when you are doing what you think is right. It is only when you are doing wrong that you must take it off; as you would not then be keeping your Guide promise. Thus you should either take off the badge or stop doing what you think is wrong.’ Mary Allingham never forgot Agnes’s rule: ‘I was on my way to a date with my boyfriend when my knicker elastic went. Scrabbling in my handbag I found my Guide badge, which worked well as a safety pin. During the film he leant over to kiss me. Then his hand began to wander up my skirt. Now I knew that this was a Wrong Thing. But if I took off my badge, the situation would become untenable. What was I to do? Luckily the film became so exciting that he became distracted and my honour was saved.’

      The Guides’ motto was the same as the Boy Scouts’ — ‘Be Prepared’. In 1910 Captain Mrs Josephine Birch of the 1st Watford Company was so proud of two of her young Guides that she took a photograph of them with the old woman they had saved from being knocked down by a milk cart. It is subtitled ‘An example of Guides Being Prepared for any emergency’.

      To make sure that they were prepared for all eventualities, Guides learned a variety of skills; after an independent test they were awarded cloth ‘proficiency badges’ to sew on their sleeves. Among the first badges were Farmer, Electrician, Cyclist, Surveyor, Telegraphist and Braille. Two years later Geologist, Fire Brigade, Boatswain, Signaller and Rifle Shot were added.

      ‘The badge manual was the only reference book I owned,’ said Mary Allingham. ‘Thanks to that I learnt how to dress a wound, light a fire and do Morse code. Wrapping up a parcel was a science that if achieved culminated in another Guide badge. Getting those corners straight, like doing “hospital corners” on a bed, and tying the correct knots. Oh the horrors that might happen to a parcel not correctly wrapped. How the Postmaster would laugh and sneer!’

      Baden-Powell loved aphorisms, which often appeared in Guide diaries and magazines: ‘If you cannot find a bright side, then polish up the dark one’.

      He had a great sense of fun:

       Be kind to little animals Whatever sort they be, And give a stranded jellyfish A shove into the sea.

      By 1912, just two years after the Guides began, the fifty-five-year-old bachelor was beginning to realise that if he didn’t get married soon he would end up living with his two overbearing sisters, Agnes and Jessie, for the rest of his life. He was on a cruise to New York when he met the twenty-three-year-old Olave St Claire Soames. ‘The only interesting person on board is the Boy Scout man,’ she wrote home to her mother, playing down the fact that when she was a child, Lieutenant-General Baden-Powell had been her hero. Romance quickly blossomed, and the thirty-two-year age difference meant little to either of them. While Baden-Powell continued on his world tour, they exchanged love letters, signed with drawings of robins. The daughter of a wealthy, poetic brewery owner, Olave had been brought up very comfortably in a series of beautiful houses. She was educated at home by a governess until she was twelve, and then learned about the world by travelling with her parents. She and her sister learned arithmetic by keeping their own hens and selling the eggs to the household. A tall, attractive, sporty girl, she enjoyed canoeing, skating, cycling, swimming and football, and teaching local boys with disabilities. She had already received several proposals of marriage, but she was looking for true love and a purpose in life. In Baden-Powell she had found both. She had no idea how to cook or sew, but she was determined to learn how, or at least how to manage servants. Baden-Powell described Olave to his mother as ‘very cheery and bright, a real playmate’. He also recognised in her a woman who could be trained up to help with the Guide movement.

      Despite the disapproval of Olave’s parents, the couple married ten months later, amidst huge media interest. The Scouts gave them a twenty-horsepower Standard Laundalette car, painted in the dark-green Scout colour. The couple appeared to have little in common, apart from being madly in love, and their shared birthday — 22 February, the day they later designated Guides’ Thinking Day and Founder’s Day for Scouts. For their honeymoon, Baden-Powell took his new wife camping in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria, where she learned to cook on a campfire and to scrub out the single pan with earth and dried grass.

      The Scouting movement was concerned that Baden-Powell would have less time to spend on it, but there was no need to worry — he remained as involved as ever. The following year, Olave gave birth to their first son, Peter, named after their favourite fictional character, Peter Pan. She was happy to produce babies, but not very keen on looking after them — she did not like small children. Leaving her own in the care of a nanny and nursery maids, Olave had time on her hands, and was thus a serious threat to her sister-in-law. When in 1914 Olave offered her services to Guiding, Agnes was determined not to be displaced from her position as Chief Guide. Undeterred, Olave trained as a Guider and became a Company Captain. With her natural common sense she had a way with the girls, and proved to be popular, which further strained her relationship with Agnes.

      As soon as war was declared in August 1914, young women, many of them Girl Guides, began training as nurses with the Voluntary Aid Detachment, First-Aid Nursing Yeomanry and with the Guides themselves. Several thousand other Guides volunteered as part of a ready-made workforce to replace the young men sent to the trenches, and they soon demonstrated that young women could be as brave and useful as men. They looked after children, worked on farms, practised fire-drill by carrying each other out of first-floor windows and down ladders, and demonstrated how to give artificial respiration.

      By this time Guide badges had increased to include Air Mechanic, Astronomer, Bee Farmer and Dairymaid, along with Lacemaker, Interpreter, Masseuse and Poultry Farmer. The outbreak of war meant that even more badges were created: the Telegraphist’s Badge required a Guide to be able to construct her own wireless receiver and to send messages in Morse code at a speed of thirty letters a minute.

      As well as contributing to the war effort by working in farms and factories, Guides raised enough money with ‘Sales of Work’ to buy a large motor ambulance built by Clement-Talbot of Wormwood Scrubs. Guides in Western Australia collected used baler twine from farmers and made fly-veils for the Light Horse Brigade in Egypt. Tasmanian Guides carried out rifle practice by shooting rabbits, then cooked them over campfires and made rabbit-skin jackets for soldiers.

      At railway stations all over Britain Guides set up feeding points for returning soldiers and acted as messengers for Marconi Wireless Telegraphs. Guides in London helped to organise a sports day for wounded soldiers. In a silent film made of the event, five Australian soldiers demonstrate their prosthetic dexterity by lying on the grass and racing to see who can be the first to stand up. Soldiers stand in a line, their trousers rolled up to show their artificial limbs. A one-legged soldier executes a hop, skip and jump as a hop, hop and hop into a sandpit. Then Guides offer up their long hair for a hairdressing contest. The men have to brush and plait the hair, then pin it up neatly and quickly, causing much amusement and giggling.

      Olave threw herself into Guiding during the war, and in 1916 she became Sussex County Commissioner. With her husband’s encouragement she then left her two babies at home for several months while she ran a rest hut for soldiers in Calais. Relations with her sister-in-law remained difficult. Agnes, much to her annoyance, was slowly sidelined, and had to be content with the non-executive position of President of the Guides.

      Guiding wasn’t just for schoolgirls — the movement also helped girls once they had left school. Until 1918, education was compulsory for children only up to the age of twelve, and most teenage working-class girls found employment in domestic service or in factories. ‘Guiding is so vitally needed by the girls of the factories and of the alleys of the great cities, who after they leave school, get no restraining influence and who, nevertheless, should be the character trainers of the future men of our nation,’ wrote Agnes Baden-Powell.

      Even well-educated women had no freedom of action, no training for life, and little education СКАЧАТЬ