How the Girl Guides Won the War

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 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 Baden-Powell told Guides, ‘You can wear your 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.