How the Girl Guides Won the War

Introduction

In my mother’s attic is a green school exercise book. ‘Name: Janie Anderson. Subject: Writing. School: St Mary’s. 21.10.1960’. I turned to the first page. ‘Brownies’ was the title. Underneath I’d written:

On the 3rd of November I am going to be enrolled. Brown Owl gave me a paper cat to put a knot on the cat’s string tail when I do a good deed. I have at least sixty knots. I am a Sprite. I know the Brownie promise, law, motto and rymne, and I can plait. I am excited about wearing my Brownie tunick. I do not know wether a Commishner comes to be enrolled or just Brown Owl.

At just eight years old, I already had a sense of the structure of the Brownie movement, and knew that a Commissioner was more important than ‘just Brown Owl’. Fifty years later, I can still remember my promise — ‘I promise to do my best, to do my duty to God and the Queen, to help other people every day, especially those at home’ — and the Brownie song — ‘We’re the Brownies, here’s our aim: Lend a hand and play the game.’

But by the time I was a teenager later in the sixties, the Beatles had arrived and I reckoned that Guides were deeply uncool. Who would choose to wear a uniform, unless it was a Sergeant Pepper fancy dress one? Why would a teenager want to attend meetings punctually, and salute a fat old Captain? I did go to Guides for a year, but at camp in Sussex, Captain got her come-uppance when a ram trotted up behind her and tossed her in the air. She spent the rest of the week lying in her bell tent, moaning. After that, how could I possibly take her seriously?

When I began writing this book, my perspective was that of a flower-child of the 1960s, who shunned uniforms and rules. I intended to write a satire on Guides and Brownies, making fun of Ging-gang-goolies and dyb-dyb-dob, standing for ‘do your best, do our best’. But the more stories I read, and the more former Brownies and Guides I met, the more I came to realise what an important part of twentieth-century history the Guide movement was. Much to my amazement, I saw that Guides had played a crucial part in feminist history and the women’s equality movement. Their achievements, though, have been largely overlooked, their influence for the most part unrecorded.

The feminists of the 1960s and ’70s simply could not see past the blue, pocketed shirts and navy serge skirts of the Guide uniform to the impact these girls had on the lives of Britain’s women. As well as the importance of the work they did, I learned that Guide meetings were an affordable form of further education for girls who had left school at fourteen. I came to realise that the movement’s founder, Lieutenant-General Lord Baden-Powell, was not the old fuddy-duddy I had assumed, but a forward-thinking man who wanted to make a positive difference to the lives of both boys and girls, of every class, in every nation. I also learned that the Guides were never a paramilitary organisation for the Church of England middle-class. There have been companies in factories, hospitals, female Borstals, synagogues and Catholic orphanages. The uniform was designed not to force girls to conform, but to give them a sense of belonging, especially if they had few or no smart clothes.

Mention Girl Guides to many women, and the reaction will be strong. They will tell you either that they loved them or hated them; they were either proud to wear their uniform or refused to join. Once enrolled, they either adored tying knots or couldn’t see the point; revelled in campfire singing or loathed damp canvas tents. They either fell in love with their Captains, or thought they were fascists and sadists. Whatever their feelings, most former Girl Guides retain strong memories of their experiences.

A survey by Girlguiding UK in 2007 found that two-thirds of Britain’s most prominent women have been Guides, and three-quarters of them say they benefited from the experience. Yet few people realise the impact that the foundation of the Guide movement in 1910 had on women’s equality, and on society in general. From the very start, when Robert Baden-Powell asked his sister Agnes to form the Girl Guides, the organisation was separate from the Boy Scouts, and not subservient to them. Baden-Powell died in 1941, but how much has his vision affected the social and political history of feminism in the twentieth century? Nearly twenty years before all British women got the vote, Girl Guides were earning badges for proficiency as Electricians, Cyclists, Surveyors and Telegraphists.

In both world wars, Brownies and Guides took over the jobs of adults. When historians came to write up these wars, they spoke only to adults, who had either not been around or, if they had, were too busy to notice, and thus failed to mention the role of these girls and young women.

The impact of the Guides in World War II is particularly clear. Their activities were not confined to Britain, but also included the Commonwealth, Nazi-occupied Europe and Japanese-occupied Asia. It was World War II that brought the philosophy of the Guides to the fore, and released their skills and training to the benefit of everyone around them.

This book explores how being a Brownie or a Guide was essential training for war work. How did a Guide gaining a badge in Morse code aid fighter pilots? How did collecting 15,000 wooden cotton reels help RAF prisoners of war? And how does Guiding in those times influence the lives of women in the twenty-first century? Within days of the declaration of war with Germany in September 1939, young women were being called up to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), Women’s Royal Navy (Wrens), and the Female Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANYs). The military services soon realised that Guides with badges sewn on their sleeves had skills that were not only life-enhancing, but also life-saving.

Guides from all walks of life threw themselves into war work. Even Princess Elizabeth, a Guide, and Princess Margaret, a Brownie, learned how to cook on a campfire and promised, like thousands of other Guides, ‘to help other people every day, specially those at home’. When the Blitz began, Guides kept up morale in bomb shelters with ‘Blackout Blues’ sing-songs. They built emergency ovens from the bricks of bombed houses. They grew food on company allotments, and knitted for England. They became the embodiment of the Home Front spirit, digging shelters and providing first-aid. All over Britain, Guides held bazaars and pushed wooden two-wheeled trek carts around the streets, collecting jam jars and newspapers for recycling. In one week in 1940 they raised £50,000 to buy ambulances and a lifeboat which saved lives at Dunkirk.

Guides painted kerbs with white paint to help people find their way around in the blackout. They collected sphagnum moss to dress wounds. They helped evacuated children leave the cities, and helped to care for them when they arrived in the country. War Service Badges were awarded to Guides after ninety-six hours of work, washing up in children’s homes, caring for the elderly, feeding bombed families and Air-Raid Wardens.

Their contribution was noted at the highest levels. At the Lord Mayor’s Show in London in 1942, Winston Churchill took off his hat in salute as the Guides marched past. Movietone newsreels featured Guides putting out incendiary bombs, marching with gas masks and sending messages by semaphore. Older Guides were shown helping on a farm and rowing on a river (they may have been looking out for German parachutists disguised as nuns, a common fear at the time).

Exploring archives, I stumbled across extraordinary stories. A Brownie log book from 1944 surprised me halfway through with a song the pack sang on Christmas Day:

We might have been shipped to Timbuctoo

We might have been shipped Kalamazoo

It’s not repatriation nor is it yet starvation

It’s simply Concentration in Chefoo!

I discovered that from 1942 to 1945 the 1st Chefoo Brownie Pack was based in a Japanese concentration camp. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, an entire boarding school of British children was interned in eastern China along with Trappist monks, White Russian prostitutes, businessmen and Cuban jazz players. The morale of the girls and their teachers was greatly improved by their continuing as Brownies and Guides. Their sports were organised by Eric Liddell, the 1924 Olympic gold-medal winner and hero of the film Chariots of Fire. I tracked down their Brown Owl, aged ninety-three and living in Seattle, and several of the girls, who told me how being Brownies had given them stability and normality during those four long years when they were separated from their parents. They led me to other Brownies who had been captured by pirates in the South China Seas in 1935, while on their way to school by ship.

Letters to local newspapers produced wonderful stories, photographs and more log books. The 1st Wantage Brownies went on a camp at the end of August 1939, and although their Brown Owl must have known that war was imminent, you would never guess it from the pictures of them swimming and standing on their heads, or from the brief note that they had had to return home a day early, on Saturday, 2 September.

A scrapbook in the Imperial War Museum revealed that during the war three spinsters from Kent ran a hostel near Perth which was filled with sixty children evacuated from Glasgow. They set up a Brownie pack, a Cub pack and a Guide company which were so well run that Guiders were sent from all over Scotland to train there. When I wrote to the house, the current owner phoned me back: ‘I had no idea of the importance of guiding here. Lady Baden-Powell was my grand-mother-in-law. I knew her well.’ I found one of the Brownies who had lived at the hostel, in Weymouth. Brought up in a tenement in Glasgow, she went on to become Mayor of Weymouth, and put it all down to being a Brownie.

One afternoon I told my husband about a story published in 1947 about a Dutch family who rowed across the English Channel in May 1940. The thirteen-year-old daughter was a Guide, and had used her skills to keep them afloat. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could find her now?’ said my husband. ‘Well, she was called Josephine Klein,’ I replied. He dashed out of the room and returned with a pile of books. ‘These are by Josephine Klein. She’s a leading London psychotherapist. I’ve seen her give a talk, and she’s the right age.’ I found her in Waterloo, and she invited me to visit. We spent a morning with her lying on her therapist’s couch, telling me the whole story, and how Guiding had provided her with instant friendship in a country where she knew nobody.

Guides were among the first civilians to enter Belsen concentration camp, and in the aftermath of World War II their outstanding service continued. Financed by Guides and Brownies from all over the Commonwealth, teams of former Guides and Guiders worked with refugees in Holland, Germany, Greece and Malaya.

When you go camping with only a rucksack, you cannot take all the things you want: you have to choose the most important, and leave the rest behind. I have almost certainly left things out of this book that some people will feel should have been included. Brownies and Guides did so much in World War II that it is impossible to cover even a small amount of it. I hope, however, to give some understanding of the extraordinary and important part that Guides and Brownies played during that time of crisis.

Their stories form an unofficial history, told by the girls themselves, first-hand as well as through letters, diaries and log books. Celebrities and ordinary women describe the fun and frustration, the characters they met, the places they went, the art of tying a reef knot behind your head during a blackout and the thrill of a midnight feast in an Anderson shelter during the Blitz.

I realise now that it was through Brownies that I learned about values, caring for other people, and trying to do a Good Deed every day. This book gives a taste of one of the most extraordinary movements of the twentieth century, and how it influenced people all over the world.

Janie Hampton

Oxford

Prologue: Pax Ting

On a hot evening in mid-August 1939, silver trumpets sounded from the battlements of an old castle in a forest in Hungary to mark the end of an extraordinary meeting. The blue and gold Guides’ World Trefoil flag which had flown from the main tower for just over two weeks was hauled down for the last time. The first world gathering of 5,800 Girl Guides from thirty-two countries, as far apart as India, Holland and Estonia, had set up camp on the royal hunting estate of Gödöllőo. In typical international style, Lord Baden-Powell had put together Latin and Norse words to name the occasion ‘Pax Ting’, or Peace Parliament.

Gödöllőo was twenty-two miles from Budapest, and was described by the Guides of Hungary as ‘in a very healthy wooded part, surrounded by vineyards on the plain of the river Rakos. Its principal curiosity is the famous royal castle, now residence of the Regent of Hungary, a one-floor building built in French rococo style, with more than a hundred chambers. 3/5 of which estate being wood and excellent hunting ground, and the station for potato researches.’

The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS), founded in 1928, was already the largest organisation of its kind anywhere on earth, with a mission ‘to enable girls and young women to develop their fullest potential as responsible citizens of the world’. When WAGGGS decided to gather in Hungary, the association had ignored the signs of impending war.

There were 246,202 Guides in Great Britain, but only two hundred were invited to go on this epic trip. The lucky few who were chosen had to be physically fit for the long journey by train and the dry heat of Hungary in August, as well as keen campers and efficient Guides who would both give a good impression of British Guiding and have the wits to bring back useful observations of the gathering.

Leading the British contingent was twenty-four-year-old Alison Duke, who had recently graduated from Cambridge with a first-class degree in Classics. She was known as ‘Chick’ and had joined the 1st Cambridge Guide Company as a girl; now she was the company’s Captain. With the Nazis already in control of Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Alison’s fluent German had helped to secure her selection as leader, and it was her task to escort the British Guides across Europe. As their train passed through Germany, at each station they were greeted by members of the Girls’ Hitler Youth Movement, the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM). A group of BDM girls were at Aachen station at 3 a.m. to present the British Guides with fruit and flowers. Their leader travelled to Cologne with the party to ensure that more BDM girls further down the track provided breakfast. ‘Nothing could have been more friendly or helpful,’ said the Guides later.

For two whole years, the 7,500 Guides of Hungary had been preparing for Pax Ting. They had learned new languages and garnered badges such as Health, Fire, Gymnast and Police; older Guides and Rangers (aged sixteen to twenty-one) had learned about the local history so they could lead expeditions to places of interest. ‘No time and no trouble had been spared to ensure the great gathering being well organised and the guests well cared for,’ said the official programme. However, in the summer of 1939 most adults in Europe knew that war might break out at any moment. It took much courage on the part of Guide leaders to allow the camp to go ahead. If war had begun while 5,000 girls were hundreds of miles away from their homes, what would have happened to them all? The Polish contingent understood better than anyone the threat of war, and at the last moment they altered their plans. The night before they left for Hungary, the younger Guides were replaced with First Class Rangers experienced in mountain expeditions. They were issued with special maps which they sewed into their uniforms, so that even if they lost their haversacks they could find their way home. If, as was thought likely, the German army invaded Poland during Pax Ting, these Guides were to return home on foot over the Carpathian mountains that separated Hungary and Poland, in small groups or alone. ‘Be prepared’ had always been the Guides’ motto; now these girls might have to put it to the ultimate test. Only weeks later, many of them would travel in the opposite direction, out of Poland, on even more dangerous adventures.

At Pax Ting, Guides from each country pitched their ridge tents in circles or rows in the pine woods, each encampment marked with a gateway featuring their national emblem or a peace symbol. The British camp’s gate was flanked by a lion and a unicorn made from painted cardboard; the Danes had constructed a pair of giant doves. The Hungarian Guides had never camped under canvas before, and their tents were quite a spectacle: ‘They varied enormously, from holding 16 children to two,’ wrote Christie Miller, a Guide from Oxfordshire. ‘They nearly all had their beds raised off the ground, and were covered in the most beautifully embroidered counterpanes. The tent pole was decorated with coloured ornaments. All tents were trenched but judging by the effects of the first thunderstorm, not very effectively.’

The Finnish Guides brought tepees, like those still used by the Suomi people in Lapland, and invited everyone to autograph them. These tepees fascinated the British Guides: they had their ground-sheets sewn to the tops, and were held up by bent bamboo poles threaded into the canvas — a foretaste of twenty-first-century tents.

The Guides from Poland were the ‘real heavyweight campers’, wrote Christie Miller. ‘All the beds were made of wooden planks raised off the ground on logs. They made shelves for shoes, rucksacks etc. Each Guide carved an emblem at the doorway of her tent. In their grey uniforms they were one of the smartest contingents. In the evening they all wore long cloaks.’

At all camps, including Pax Ting, the Guides wore their camp uniform. For the British this was a blue cotton tunic with a leather belt, a triangular cotton scarf and a floppy cotton hat. At a time when most girls had few clothes, wearing a uniform gave them both a smart outfit and a sense of belonging. The early uniform reflected the relaxed post-Edwardian approach to women’s wear: an A-line skirt above the ankle and a practical, comfortable shirt — often a cricket shirt borrowed from a brother and dyed blue.

Lord Baden-Powell had also designed the Guides’ equipment to be practical: the long wooden staffs they carried were marked in feet and inches so they could measure objects and the depth of streams. They could be used for rescuing struggling swimmers, scything a path through nettles or brambles, or vaulting streams. Two staffs with a coat fastened around them could form a stretcher, and several strung together made a tent frame. The scarf was used as a handkerchief, bandage, sling, pressure pad to prevent bleeding, or to tie on a splint. The whistle could be used to send Morse messages or to summon help. The hats not only kept off the sun and rain, but could also be used for carrying water or fruit, or fanning a reluctant fire.

Once the Pax Ting camp was set up, all the Guides were led by a Hungarian army band on a parade through the local town. They then spent the fortnight occupied by the usual camping activities such as constructing drying-up stands with sticks and fancy knots, collecting firewood, cooking dampers (a kind of doughy bread made from flour and water) and singing around the campfire before going to bed. The Hungarian Guides had laid on a programme which included ‘Move in open air; an excursion by steamer to Esztergom; and Funny Evening in the English Garden (not obligatory)’.

The theme of Pax Ting, suggested before the camp started by the British Guides, was ‘How can Guides help towards world peace?’, and it was decided that English should be adopted as their ‘agreed international language’. The host was Prince Horthy Miklos, Regent of Hungary, who rode to the camp on his horse. The aristocracy of Hungary were out in force: the Patroness of the Hungarian Girl Guides was the Archduchess Anna, daughter-in-law of the last Austro-Hungarian Emperor. Antonia Lindenmyer, President of the Hungarian Girl Guides and Chief of Pax Ting, was accompanied by the formidable Zimmermann Rozsi, Chief Secretary of the Hungarian Guides. Count Paul Telki, Prime Minister of Hungary and Chief Scout of Hungary, also came to sing round the campfire. Her Royal Highness Princess Sybilla of Sweden, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, was there too, eating roast cobs and slices of watermelon. Princess Ileana, daughter of the King of Romania, whose full title was ‘Her Imperial and Royal Highness, The Illustrious Ileana, Archduchess of Austria, Princess Imperial of Austria’, had been Chief of the Romanian Guides. After marrying the Archduke of Austria she became President of the Austrian Girl Guides, which had recently been banned by the Nazis, but she had come anyway. Lord Baden-Powell, now aged eighty-two, sent greetings from his home in Kenya. The Royal Hungarian Post designed ‘a fine collection of stempis’ to commemorate the occasion.

At the end of the camp, every Guide received a certificate signed by Lindenmyer, saying, ‘We believe that the Spirit of Guiding so splendidly manifested during the Pax Ting will bear its fruits for the common good of the world in time to come.’

A growl of thunder sounded menacingly as the trumpets called out on the last evening. As the Guides all said goodbye to each other on the following wet, stormy morning at the end of August, they must have wondered how long it would be before they would meet again. What might happen to the tall, fair-haired Guides in grey uniforms, strapping sixty-pound packs on their backs as if they were light haversacks? What would happen to the little round-faced Dutch Guide who came squelching through the rain to exchange an address with a Scottish Patrol Leader? ‘Surely,’ wrote Catherine Christian, editor of The Guide, ‘grown-ups were not going to be so crazy as to start a war, when people all over the world were so willing to be friendly, to discuss things, to be interested in each other?’

The British Guides sped home through Germany, waving to the uniformed BDM girls on railway station platforms. After three days of hot and sticky travelling, they walked into their headquarters in Buckingham Palace Road on a hot August evening. ‘They had sampled a lot of other nations’ queer cooking,’ wrote Christian, ‘and emphatically preferred their own. They all had noticed how the stormy gleam of sunset had struck across the World Flag that last night and how the trumpets had sounded. They couldn’t explain it; but they had noticed.’

In 1934, Guiders, leaders of Guide companies in Wetherby, Yorkshire, had written to Lady Baden-Powell asking her what they and their Guides should do if war broke out again. She replied:

Dear Guiders,

It is practically impossible for anyone to decide now ‘What we would do if England went to war’. Our whole thought and work should be directed into the prevention of such a thing, and I feel too much of this discussion of war and its horrors leads people to THINK about it too much, and thus to become what has been called ‘war minded’.

Should it ever come about that England does go to war again it would be none of OUR MAKING. This is far more difficult for MEN to consider. But for women there are always the all important matters and ways in which they can serve humanity — in peace and war — i.e. nursing, caring for children, alleviating suffering of all kinds, food production, and so on.

I also hope, MOST devoutly, that there will never come a time when you will have to face the question in earnest!. Good wishes to you, and your Brownies,

Olave Baden-Powell

On 3 September, a perfect Sunday morning, Guides all over Britain listened with their families to the wireless as the tired voice of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke to the nation: ‘This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note…’

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’, from the Queen’s Own Corps of Guides, a regiment in the North-West Frontier whose soldiers had impressed him with their bravery and efficiency when he 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