JANIE HAMPTON

How the Girl Guides Won the War

To my mother, who throughout her long life as both

a Guide and a Brown Owl, has demonstrated that

keeping to the rules is not nearly as

important as Robert Baden-Powell’s maxim:

‘I wouldn’t give tuppence for you if you are not jolly and laughing.’

Contents

Cover

Title page

Illustrations

Introduction

Prologue: Pax Ting

1 We are the Girl Scouts

2 Brownies and Bluebirds

3 Marching in Gas Masks

4 Kinder-Guides

5 Golondrinas

6 The Clover Union of Poland

7 Blackout Blues

8 Dampers and Doodlebugs

9 Brownies in China

10 Thrift and Gift

11 Princesses and Paupers

12 Baedeker Bombing

13 Jersey Island Guides

14 Japanese Internment

15 The Warsaw Uprising

16 Three Aunties

17 Guides in Auschwitz

18 Giant Pandas and Frozen Alligators

19 The City of Polish Children

20 The Armored Angel of China

21 The Army of Goodwill

22 Into the Twenty-First Century

Acknowledgements

Bibliography and Sources

Index

Copyright

About the Publisher

Illustrations

Robert Baden-Powell talking to the first Girl Guides in Brighton, 1910. (© Girlguiding UK)

Guide messengers at the Peace Conference, Versailles, 1919. (© Daily Mail)

Olave Baden-Powell, with Brownies at the Essex County Rally in 1921. (© Girlguiding UK)

Guides enjoying an excursion on the Danube during the Pax Ting International Camp in Hungary, August 1939. (© Girlguiding UK)

Guides helping at a club for evacuees in the Corn Exchange at Bishop’s Stortford in autumn 1939. (© Getty Images)

The 1st Eynsham Brownie Pack on holiday in Swanage in the last week of August 1939. (Private collection)

Guides learning how to use a stirrup pump in 1940. (© Girlguiding UK)

Guides help to run an infant school in Ilford. (© Getty Images)

Guides bathing an evacuee child. (© Girlguiding UK)

The vicar of Claybury Park, Ilford, Essex asked Guides to run a nursery in his church hall, 1940. (© Girlguiding UK)

Olga Malkowska being presented with the Bronze Cross by Queen Elizabeth in December 1939. (© Getty Images)

Brownies of the 21st Glasgow Brownie Pack, at the Glasgow School for the Deaf, meet a real Brown Owl. (© Girlguiding UK)

Cockley Cley Kindertransport Guides in Norfolk, 1940. (© Sir Samuel Roberts)

An Extension Guide taking her fire-lighting test in hospital in 1943. (© Girlguiding UK)

The 1st Littleport Company collecting waste paper in Cambridgeshire in 1940. (© Girlguiding UK)

Maps hidden inside the cotton reels collected by Brownies for MI9. (© Trustees of the Royal Air Force Museum, X003-6003/017)

Guides and Rangers roll up their bedding at the end of camp. (© Girlguiding UK)

Guides cleaning their teeth beside the latrine at Luccombe Camp, Isle of Wight, 1944. (© Girlguiding UK)

Guides of the 1st Disley Company near Manchester welcome refugee children from Guernsey on their arrival in June 1940. (© Allied Newspapers Manchester)

A Guide carrying messages gets directions from a policeman. (© Fox/Getty)

Guides salvaging a wheelchair during the London Blitz. (© Wimbledon Borough News)

The 5th Canterbury Company running a soup kitchen after the bombing of Canterbury, 1 June 1942. (© Getty Images)

The 2nd Gloucester Guide Company cooking sausages after an air raid in 1942. (© Girlguiding UK)

The 1st Cockington Company collecting jam pots around Torquay in 1942. (© Girlguiding UK)

Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret sending a message by carrier pigeon on Thinking Day 1943. (© Girlguiding UK)

The Princess Royal, President of Girl Guides, sending a message by pigeon to the World Chief Guide on Thinking Day, 1943. (© Ross Parry Syndication: Yorkshire Post)

Chefoo Brownies in Weihsien Camp, China, 1943.

The log book of the Kingfisher Patrol of the Chefoo School Guide Company, Weihsien camp, 1943–44. (Private collection)

A woman buys National Savings stamps from a Girl Guide, assisted by a Sea Ranger in 1944. (© Imperial War Museum)

The Guide International Service mobile canteen in Holland, March 1945. (© Girlguiding UK)

Alison Duke of the Guide International Service in a camp for Greek refugees in Egypt in 1944. (© Girlguiding UK)

German girls learning to be Guide leaders on camp, 1948. (© Girlguiding UK)

Guiders from Bromley, Kent, sing at the National Guide Festival in 1972. (© John Warburton)

While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future editions.

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 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.

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 compared with boys; needlework, painting and music were almost the only activities considered suitable for young ladies. Years later Olave wrote, ‘Guiding opened up new and appealing vistas to young females, visions of a life where women could face the world on equal terms with men, where they would be trained and equipped to cope with whatever emergencies might arise.’ The idea chimed perfectly with the growing demand for women’s suffrage. After centuries as second-class citizens, women were beginning to dream of freedom and equality with men.

The First World War provided girls with an opportunity to show that they could be as good as, if not better than, boys. At the start of the war, Boy Scouts were employed as messengers at the London headquarters of Military Intelligence, MI5. But they were soon found to be ‘very troublesome. The considerable periods of inactivity which fell to their share usually resulted in their getting into mischief,’ stated MI5 report KV/49. On 15 September 1915, MI5 replaced the Scouts with Girl Guides, aged between fourteen and sixteen, who were entrusted to carry secret counter-espionage memoranda and reports. ‘They proved more amenable and their methods of getting into mischief were on the whole less distressing to those who had to deal with them than were those of the boys,’ MI5 reported.

Within just a few months of the outbreak of war, silent films were made with such titles as The German Spy Peril, Guarding Britain’s Secrets and The Kaiser’s Spies. These featured rather stupid German villains, overcome by clever Girl Guides who trick them into giving themselves up, or falling off cliffs. Spy-mania was rife, with people looking under their beds or in woodsheds, and turning against anyone with a whiff of German ancestry.

Before a Guide could start work at MI5, she had to sign a contract confirming that she had permission from both of her parents and the Guide Captain who had recommended her. She pledged with her honour not to read the papers she carried, and was paid ten shillings a week for fifty hours of work, with only a short lunch break. The Guides’ working day began at 9 a.m. and finished at 7 p.m., and as well as carrying messages they were responsible for keeping inkpots filled. Some were also trained to clean and repair typewriters. By January 1917 these select girls had been formed into a special MI5 Guide Company with its own Captain, with each Patrol assigned to a separate floor of the Military Intelligence headquarters. Every Monday afternoon they paraded across the roof of Waterloo House for inspection.

Their enthusiasm could sometimes be too much, as Miss M.S. Aslin of MI5 Registry reported after working with Guides for several days. Commenting on one of the MI5 Guides, she described how ‘She speeds from floor to floor, bearing messages of good will, and no obstacle is too great for her to fall over in her devotion to this happy task. Released for the moment, she retires to her attractive little sitting room, where she reads and writes or converses quietly (?) on high topics with her friends.’

All the women employed by MI5, of whatever age, education or competence, had to fight to be recognised as colleagues rather than regarded as mere skivvies. In ‘H Branch’, women were employed as secretaries (a new idea), to run the photographic section and to staff the switchboard. They also cleaned, cooked and drove cars. The Guides became so much a part of the fabric of the organisation that the journal edited by its female employees, The Nameless Magazine, featured a cartoon of four Guides sitting in their uniforms in a corridor captioned, ‘The Electric Bells having broken, the GGs (not the Grenadier Guards) sit outside Maj. D’s door in case he wants them.’ From 1915 to 1918, Girl Guides even took over from Scouts in the Postal Censorship office. In less than ten years since their formation, Guides had demonstrated to the establishment that girls were reliable members of society who could play useful roles beyond the purely domestic.

It didn’t take long for other employers to realise that Guides were honest, trustworthy and loyal, and soon many factories only employed them. In some munitions factories, where safety was paramount, all the workers were Guides aged from fourteen up. During their lunch hour they would assemble in the factory yard and remove their working overalls and caps to reveal their Guide uniforms and their hair in long, single plaits. Their Captain wore a long skirt, navy blouse and white kid gloves to go with her felt hat and lanyard. They practised first-aid on each other, and learned new skills towards more badges. When the factory whistle went they would put their overalls and caps back on, and return to making armaments. Some employers paid for the Guides’ uniforms and outings. Even after the school-leaving age was raised to fourteen in 1918, there were still many working Guides: in 1921 the 9th Oxford Guide Company was registered in the Savernake glove factory off Botley Road.

When the First World War ended, Guides were considered so reliable by the War Office that a contingent was taken with the British delegation to France. British Guides ran errands at the Palace of Versailles for the Paris Peace Conference in June 1919, and sixteen Ranger Guides were invited to witness the signing of the treaty.

Five months later, Baden-Powell made a speech at a Guide peace rally in a packed Albert Hall. He told the 8,000 Guides present that it was small, unselfish deeds that led to peace and greater understanding between people. ‘Each of you can go further and take a valuable part in this great work,’ he said. ‘There is no doubt that you can do this. The only question is — will you do it?’ There was a resounding cheer in response: ‘Yes we can!’

With so many men lost during the war, the Guide movement was a blessing for many young women who had been left with little chance of finding a husband. They had to learn to support themselves, and needed all the skills they could muster for employment. Child Nurse, Toy-Maker and Gymnast Proficiency Badges were all useful for future nannies; and before the introduction of the national driving test, Mechanic and Map-Reading Badges could lead to chauffeur or taxi-driving jobs. ‘The Artist’s Badge helped me to get a job designing toffee papers,’ said former Guide Verily Anderson. Not all badges meant hard work: for the Dancer’s Badge, ‘the Irish jig should be danced with plenty of spirit and abandon’, wrote Mrs Janson Potts in Guide Badges and How to Win Them.

Among the proposed names for older Guides, aged sixteen to twenty-one, were ‘Citizen-Guides’, ‘Torchbearers’, ‘Eagerhearts’, ‘Pilots’, ‘Pioneers’ and ‘Guide-women’. Baden-Powell had a sound sense of marketing: he pointed out that a vague name, without any historical connotations, would be best, as it could acquire its own meaning. He suggested ‘Rangers’, and ‘Sea Rangers’ for those who lived near the sea or rivers. These young women were at ‘the age of fullest sexual development’, wrote Olave Baden-Powell to new Guiders, ‘when a real love for the out-of-doors can give her many healthy interests and a wholesome tone. Beware of any tendency of allowing the idealism of the age to be fixed on ourselves [leaders] with our human failings, which must inevitably disappoint.’

Running Brownie packs and Guide companies proved an invaluable outlet for the energies of many unmarried women at a time when they were beginning to express a desire for equality. The Guide movement filled a gaping hole in contributing to social order, education and entertainment. Badges now included Landworker and International Knowledge, the latter requiring an understanding of the League of Nations and the International Labour Office. The ‘Badge of Fortitude’ was created in honour of Nurse Edith Cavell, who had been executed by a German firing squad in October 1915 for helping British soldiers to escape. This special badge was awarded to Guides with physical disabilities who showed extra fortitude.

By the end of the war, relations between Olave and Agnes were still strained, and there was nothing Agnes could do to prevent her young sister-in-law from appointing her own secretarial staff, taking charge of the training department and writing her own book, Training Girls as Guides. When Olave was appointed first Chief Commissioner, and then in 1918 Chief Guide, Agnes had to throw in the towel and content herself with the title ‘the Grandmother of Guiding’.

The following year, the Baden-Powell family settled down in Hampshire, in Pax Hill, a house big enough for entertaining, run by domestic servants, many of whom were young enough to be enrolled as Guides and Scouts. It was quite normal for the Baden-Powells to have up to 150 people to a garden party, with Guides providing country dancing. The three Baden-Powell children were allowed to come down from the nursery with their nanny and join in the fun.

‘Guiding 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 a different church. I don’t think my parents forbade me to join, it just never came up.’ In fact Guides met in church halls simply because they were the cheapest or only available places to rent.

While the movement was designed to be based on neither creed nor race, Baden-Powell protested that in some countries, such as Barbados and South Africa, Guides and Scouts were organised in separate white and black companies and troops. Despite his early career as a soldier fighting in Africa and India, and his exposure to the army’s institutional racism, over the years his ideas had progressed. He insisted on ‘One Nation, One Movement’, and wanted complete racial integration. In India by 1920 there were several separate Scouting organizations — Muslim, Hindu, Seva-Samiti and ‘Mrs Annie Besant’s’ — none of them affiliated to each other or to London. In 1921 the Baden-Powells were invited to India to discuss the problem with Scout and Guide leaders. They travelled all over the country in a special carriage attached to the back of any train going in the right direction. At every station, enthusiastic Guides and Scouts greeted them, whatever the time of day or night: ‘We hung out of the train to talk to them and clasp their hands — and I hope that they did not notice we were both wearing uniform jackets and hats over our pyjamas.’ Olave met Hindu, Parsee, Anglo-Indian and European Guides, who all agreed to work together. ‘Once the Indian women took it up,’ she wrote, ‘the barriers between the races began to come down. Guiding could help break down the traditional conventions that kept Indian women in the background.’ By the end of the tour, the rival factions had all agreed to unite.

In South Africa, by contrast, Baden-Powell only managed to persuade the organisers to agree that Guides and Scouts would form one movement and wear the same uniform. They were still split into separate companies and troops for Africans, Europeans and Indians. It was not until 1936 that the Wayfarers — black South African Guides — were accepted into the Guide Association of South Africa. ‘At last,’ wrote Olave in 1973, ‘white had joined hands with black on equal terms. It was a giant stride for South Africa, even if it has taken several steps backwards since!’

By 1931, worldwide membership of the Guides was over a million, and in 1932 the first World Centre — ‘Our Chalet’ in Switzerland — was opened. Olave was delighted when she was appointed the World Chief Guide in 1930, and in 1932 she was awarded the Grand Cross of the British Empire. By the late 1930s Guiding had become international rather than Imperial, though Britain still had the largest number, with 525,276 Guides enrolled. Poland was next with 62,857, and in France there were 24,087. On the Atlantic island of St Helena there were 140 Guides to the sixty Scouts.

2 Brownies and Bluebirds

Younger girls had not been forgotten, and ‘Brownies’, for girls aged from seven to eleven, were formed in July 1914, just before war broke out. Each Brownie pack was divided into ‘Sixes’ of up to six girls, named after Fairies, Goblins and other phantasmagoria. From the age of about eight a Brownie could assume responsibility as a Seconder, second-in-command of her Six, and then work her way up to lead it as a Sixer. The pack’s leaders were called Brown Owl, assisted by Tawny Owl, to continue the woodland theme.

Baden-Powell had always been keen on small people. ‘In our army we have a battalion of very small men called Bantams who were not big enough for the ordinary regiments,’ he wrote in The Handbook for Brownies. ‘They very soon showed that at fighting they were as good as anybody else. A small man can have a big heart and plenty of pluck in him. So even though a Brownie is small, she too can be just as brave and strong as a bigger girl if she likes to make herself so. The Brownies are little people who do good to Big people. Boggarts are little people who do no good — they are ugly and noisy and dirty and selfish — so we have no use for Boggarts among the Brownies.’

Baden-Powell realised that the name Brownies ‘might be incongruous in some parts of the Empire’, and suggested the alternative ‘Bluebirds’ in parts of the world where girls had darker skin. However, in southern Africa they were called Brownies, whatever their race.

Baden-Powell suggested that each Brownie pack make a toadstool as their totem. ‘Like true fairies, Brownies can make their ring anywhere, not only in the woods or out on the grass, but even in the town and in a room.’ Toadstools were easy to make out of papier-mâché, and could be stored in a cupboard. ‘We all joined hands round the toadstool and danced around it singing,’ remembered Mary Allingham, a former Brownie. ‘“We’re the Brownies. Here’s our Aim: Lend a hand and Play the Game.” Then everyone shouted LAH, LAH, LAH, and saluted. It all seemed magic to me.’

Baden-Powell took on the important job of writing The Handbook for Brownies himself. His understanding of tracking animals was better than his knowledge of biology, and he was very worried about germs: ‘There are little beasts floating about in the air called Germs. They are squirmy-looking little beggars, and very dangerous, because if they get inside you they will give you an illness of one kind or another.’ These squirmy-looking little beggars were more likely to attack Brownies who breathed with their mouths: ‘Nose Breathing, with real cold fresh air out of doors, alone will help you to grow and to be strong.’

Brownies were encouraged to exercise their imaginations, but only within limits — too much imagination might lead them astray. Good Brown Owls had read Esterel Pelly’s Brownie Games: ‘Brown Owl must keep the games going and never for a minute let the pack come back to earth with a bump,’ she wrote. ‘Brown Owl must lead her Brownies from one excitement to another, and they will follow her blissfully, and she will keep the right atmosphere to the very end of the game.’

At her enrolment, each new Brownie makes the Brownie promise while saluting with her right hand vertical, the palm facing outwards. Pointing to the sky, the two middle fingers represent the two promises. ‘The first law is that Brownies give in to Older Folk,’ said Baden-Powell. ‘The second is that a Brownie does not give in to Herself.’ This two-fingered salute came long before Churchill’s V-for-victory sign, and many Brownies confused it with the ruder version with the palm facing inwards.

Each Six then danced round the toadstool singing its own special song. The Pixies sing: ‘Look out! We’re the jolly Pixies, Helping people when in fixes.’ The Imps: ‘We’re the ever helpful Imps, Quick and quiet as any shrimps.’ There were also Welsh fairies: ‘We’re the Bwbachod from Wales, Filling farmers’ milking pails.’

For great occasions, such as visits from the District Commissioner, there was a Grand Salute. ‘The Brownies form a circle and squat on their heels,’ wrote Baden-Powell, ‘with both hands on the ground between their feet. When the important person comes in, they howl very gently all together. “Tu-whit-to-who-oo-ooo. Tu-whit-to-who-oo-ooo,” the second time raising the voice and gradually rising to a standing position. “Tu-whit-to-who-oo-ooo.” The third time it is louder and the forefinger of the right hand is placed to the lips and made to revolve, the noise getting louder and louder until it ends in a shriek, a leap in the air, and a clap of the hands. The clap comes as the feet reach the ground. This action will slay the Boggarts. Then the Brownies are absolutely silent, and raise their right hands to the full salute.’ The Baden-Powells advised Brown Owls that a pack was ‘not a family, but a happy family’, and that ‘laughter counteracts most of the evils of the very young and makes for cheery companionship and open-mindedness. The one who laughs much, lies little.’

Once enrolled, a Brownie began her Second-Class Test, for which she was expected to know the history of the Union Jack, tie four complicated knots, make a useful article with a hem and decorative tacking, sew on two types of buttons, understand the importance of clean teeth, bowl a hoop, skip twenty times backwards, catch a ball six times and lay a table for dinner. Quite an accomplishment for an eight-year-old.

To attain First-Class standard, a Brownie had to understand semaphore, have grown a bulb, tie up a parcel, knit a jumper, lay and light a fire, cook a milk pudding, make tea, memorise a message, fold clothes neatly, skip with her feet crossing, bandage a grazed knee, know how to put out a person on fire, throw a ball accurately overarm and sing ‘God Save the King’.

From the start, all Brownies wore the same basic uniform, wherever they were in the world, so that they could be ‘One Sisterhood’. Brownie uniform included a knitted beret or woven rush hat, brown leather belt, brown shoes, brown hair ribbons and brown cotton knickers. The brown cotton shift-dress was designed to accommodate the growth of both the legs and bosom. In India, ‘Bluebirds’ wore thick black stockings and white sola topees. Taking into account the fact that many families had little money, girls were allowed to wear their Brownie uniforms for up to a year after becoming Guides. Brownies were often photographed in their uniform — the only presentable outfit they owned.

Not everyone approved of Brownie uniforms. ‘In the pack, no element of individuality was entertained,’ wrote Kate Adie in Corsets to Camouflage, a history of women in uniform. ‘All Brownies wore turd-coloured bag-like shifts, with a leather belt and custard-yellow tie. Fatter Brownies looked like hamsters feeding permanently on bananas. The outfit was surmounted by a chocolate-coloured knitted Thing, which slid off your head the moment you had to do some Brownie ritual, usually involving imaginary toadstools. If you were diligent your sleeve was peppered with weird symbols, proclaiming your status as a girl well-versed in raffia craft or whatever. The good aspect of the uniform was that it blended into the dust and dirt which was swirled up by Brownie games in dingy huts. In other words, it worked, but did nothing for you.’

Many Brownies loved their yellow triangular ties. ‘Learning how to make a yellow triangle into a tie was an art that, once achieved, felt unique,’ recalled Mary Allingham. ‘First there was the folding, to make it as thin as possible. Then that special knot that could look like a messy bunch if you weren’t careful, then you had to tie it with a reef knot. This was an extraordinary piece of manual engineering — done at the back of your neck, without being able to see it. Brown Owl always checked for granny knots, which were somehow rather immoral. Why grannies were given this insult, I never knew.’ The Brownie tie was designed to do many things. ‘It was comforting to know that at any time, around your neck was an arm sling, a bandage for cut legs, a sieve for dirty water; you could even carry your rabbit in it or boil up a pudding.’

In August 1914, only a month after Brownies began, Miss Richenda Gurney set up a Brownie pack for her many nieces and cousins holidaying in north Norfolk. She wore a uniform made for her by Stones & Sons, the Norwich military tailor. The day after their first meeting, war with Germany was declared and the 1st Northrepps Brownie Pack practised bandaging their uncles and the gardener, using their triangular ties as slings. During the General Strike of 1926, Brownies collected clothes for striking miners, and they would later knit blankets in squares for families hit by the Great Depression. Christine Hinkley, the daughter of a Scoutmaster in Ruislip, Middlesex, became a Brownie when she was eight: ‘I joined the Little People Six. We sang as we danced around our toadstool: “We though known as little people, aim as high as any steeple.” We played feet-off-ground games, Kim’s game, stepping-stones with newspaper. We learned how to make cups of tea and set a table for our Hostess Badge. For Homemaker Badge we kept our rooms tidy, dusted, swept, washed a tea towel and washed up. We had an annual get-together in Ruislip called Brownie Revels, held in the gardens of a very large house, with woodland around; about a hundred of us. We played lots of games in the woods, culminating in a wonderful picnic tea.’

The transition from Brownies to Guides was marked at the ‘Flying-Up’ ceremony, at which eleven-year-old Brownies who had achieved the First Class Test jumped off a bench to ‘fly up’ to Guides. The Chorlton-cum-Hardy pack had a Fly-Up on 1 November 1926. ‘Had any strangers peeped into our clubroom they would have watched one of the nicest of all ceremonies, a “Brownie Fly-Up”,’ reported their log book. ‘While the Brownie Pack stand in the Fairy Ring round their Totem, and the Guide company in Horse-shoe formation, four Brownies leave the pack and fly to Guides. Brown Owl fastens on their wings, then bids them go forward and do well. Then each Brownie gives the salute and handshake, and the whole pack give the Grand Howl.’ Less-qualified Brownies were only allowed to walk up to Guides. Christine Hinkley remembered: ‘I tried to get my Brownie Wings, but could not get enough badges. Much to my father’s disappointment, I failed my Semaphore Badge. So I could not fly up to Guides with that special ceremony.’ Christine would have been less downhearted if she had known that Baden-Powell once said, ‘It is a greater thing to try without succeeding than to succeed without trying.’

In 1920 the Princess Royal, Princess Mary, only daughter of George V, became President of the Girl Guide Association. This was no nominal title — she insisted on being properly enrolled by Olave Baden-Powell and making her Guide Promise, and she took her role seriously, travelling all over the country visiting Brownies and Guides. On May Day 1930 she found herself in a field in Kingston Maurward, Dorset, inspecting several thousand Brownies. Each pack had to welcome the Princess into a ‘Brownie Land Flower Garden’. The 1st Swanage chose to be delphiniums and poppies, with nine-year-old Irene Makin as one of two raindrops, wearing a gauze veil over her head. ‘Irene was so excited she couldn’t keep still,’ wrote her friend Audrey Pembroke. ‘Not many little girls got to meet a real live princess. Irene kept jumping about in her headdress in the hallway, and singing until her father had had enough. “If you don’t dry up,” he told her, “this little raindrop won’t be going!”’ Irene went with her pack in a charabanc. After a grand march-past, accompanied by the Dorchester town band, the Brownies danced up to the Princess Royal to the tune of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’. They were led by the ‘Spirit of the Garden’, a sixteen-year-old Ranger dressed in white, and when each Brownie reached the princess, she had to stop and curtsey. ‘Irene found herself gazing down at a smart pair of brown lace-up shoes. Shyly she lifted her eyes, to look up through her veil at the tall figure of the Princess.’ Princess Mary was wearing her navy-blue uniform, belted at the waist, the white cords of office held up with the Guide badge on her lapel, and on her felt hat was a gold cockade. She smiled at Irene and whispered, ‘Hello.’

When Irene got home her mother asked her if she had seen the Princess.

‘Oh yes,’ said Irene, ‘she looked just like Brown Owl.’

When the girls of Herstmonceux village in East Sussex wanted to start a Brownie pack in 1934, a notice was read out in church that the first meeting would be held at the rectory the following Saturday morning. ‘Twenty little girls turned up mostly with their mothers who, when told about the uniform, shook their heads,’ remembered their Brown Owl. ‘“All right then,” I said, “we will start the pack without uniforms and think of a way of raising the funds.”’ So the would-be Brownies organised a concert, and charged a penny a peep to look at The Brownie magazine. With the proceeds, they bought a paper dressmaking pattern for sixpence and brown cotton curtain material at 9d a yard. ‘Already a dab hand at making my sisters’ party dresses from Woolworth patterns, I set about cutting out and machining twenty little uniforms. The most expensive parts were the Brownie belts, and these we persuaded the saddler to cut up out of old but well-polished leading reins. After a pathetic attempt to embroider the badges myself, we had to buy them from Guide Headquarters.’ The toadstool was made of papier mâché from old copies of The Times donated by the local rector.

Not all Brown Owls were perfect. Carol Snape was seven years old when she became a Brownie in Albrighton, near Wolverhampton. ‘My Brownie uniform was handed down from my elder sister — everything was, in spite of her being smaller than me,’ she recalls. ‘As it was rather short it showed my large brown inter-lock knickers. My brown beret soon got lost. I was always being told off by Brown Owl, who was Doctor’s wife — a very bossy lady. We assembled in the yard outside the surgery. One day she was very cross indeed because I had got ice-cream all down my front. She held me under the pump because we were going on parade in the village.’ Despite these horrors, Carol was enrolled as a Girl Guide twice. ‘I liked the enrolment ceremony so much that when we moved house, I never let on I had done it before.’

Some Brownies, such as Lucy Worthing from Sussex, felt the pressure to do Good Deeds could be too strong:

Before I was enrolled as a Brownie, my fellow candidates and I were each given a paper cat with a string tail about six inches long. We had to tie a knot in the string every time we did a Good Deed. One Good Deed a day was the recommended aim. A week later we brought our crumpled cats to the Brownie meeting and we compared knotted cats’ tails. I was proud to show Brown Owl that I’d achieved six deeds, mostly on my grandmother who lived next door. She had happily accepted my tepid cups of tea and efforts to untangle her knitting bag. I even picked her a fistful of buttercups from the verge. But one girl had surpassed us all. Molly had added an arm’s length of string to her cat’s tail, all tightly knotted. ‘How did you do it?’ we asked in awe. ‘Mummy helped me,’ she gloated. ‘She found me lots of good deeds to do, like cleaning the silver napkin rings, and tidying the fish fork drawer. Daddy gave me his best shoes to polish.’ I felt that this did not count — you had to spot your own Good Deeds, and anyway being quite so competitive annulled them altogether.

From the start, Baden-Powell made it clear that in addition to doing Good Deeds, it was the duty of every Brownie and Guide to ‘Keep Smiling’. To illustrate this, he told the story of Francis Palmer. ‘He was a very young boy belonging to the Wolf Cubs of the 18th Bristol troop, who was knocked down by a motor-car. His left leg was broken in two places, and the side of his face badly cut. The boy was naturally in great pain; but to the astonishment of the doctors and nurses, never cried or complained. One of the doctors asked him why he was so brave, and his answer was: “I am a Wolf Cub, and so must not cry.” So whenever you break your leg just smile if you can. If you cannot — well — then grin!’

Although Baden-Powell had emphasised the importance of adaptability, and that a Brownie pack could meet anywhere, and under any circumstances, by the late 1930s rules had crept in. The outbreak of war changed everything. ‘We used to think you need a hall or roomy headquarters, we now know that anywhere will do, even Brown Owl’s home, or sitting under a tree,’ wrote Violet Smith, the Chief Brown Owl, in 1940. ‘Recipe for being a Brown Owl: Take the Brownie Handbook, a limited number of girls aged 7 to 10 years old, consider their needs and, using your own commonsense, carry on. Your Commissioner will back you up, but will not always be available.’

3 Marching in Gas Masks

As Neville Chamberlain attempted to negotiate with Hitler in September 1938 to prevent the outbreak of war, the real possibility of hostilities was brought home to ordinary British people when ‘respirators’ or gas masks were made available to the public. Despite Chamberlain’s promise of ‘peace in our time’, the government began to plan ‘Operation Pied Piper’ to evacuate children from cities. It was expected that the Germans would attack from the air with bombs and biological or poison gas, so as soon as war seemed imminent, the plans were put into action.

In church halls, Guides began to learn how to put on and march in gas masks, and what to do during an air raid. ‘Guide meetings were dominated by putting our gas masks on with our eyes shut, in case it was dark when the time came,’ said Lucy Worthing. ‘Our Captain seemed to be obsessed with our houses catching fire. We were always rolling each other up in hearth rugs or blankets.’ Guides also helped to distribute gas masks. As well as adjusting the devices to fit correctly, they had to reassure anxious mothers who feared that the masks would introduce head lice into their homes, and frightened children who believed that the smell of Izal disinfectant was poison gas. The number of mothers who appeared with previously unregistered illegitimate children surprised the Guides. They also noticed that some Christians were reluctant to use masks that might have been touched by Jews.

Iris O’Dell was a Brownie living at Hitchin, Hertfordshire, with her younger brothers Bill and Bob. ‘At St John’s Hall gas masks were allotted — it was chaos! We each had to be fitted and tested. Bill had a Mickey Mouse gas mask, which used to send Mum off into peels of laughter, and baby Bob had a huge contraption to put him in. School was strict about bringing one’s gas mask and you were sent home to get it if forgotten. All of them started off in very smart boxes, but the original boxes in pretty covers gave way to all manner of new covers including those which looked like a horse’s nose-bag. At school we were given gas-mask drill where we were timed to see how quickly they could be put on. The teachers came around the desks with a piece of paper and you breathed in and hoped the paper stuck on the end of the mask.’

Guides and Rangers across the country also offered their services to the newly formed city Air-Raid Precautions (ARP) organisation. When the North Berkshire Rangers joined the ARP, their canvas latrine cubicles were commandeered as ‘Decontamination Cubicles’ in case of gas attacks. The Rangers Decontamination Squad had to be prepared to erect them in two minutes. ‘At the practice sessions,’ wrote one Ranger, ‘we each put on a huge overall, rubber gloves, Wellington boots and a gas mask.’ They had to stand inside the cubicle armed with a bucket of whitewash and a massive decorating brush. They were not told what real casualties would have been painted with, though they knew it would not be whitewash. ‘As each mock casualty arrived, we had to instruct him (they were all men) to strip off his clothing, which was bagged up and would have been burnt in a real attack. Then we had to cover the “casualty” from head to foot with whitewash.’ One Ranger was horrified to find that her first ‘casualty’ was the local curate. She reported, ‘He kept his underpants on but I was scarlet with embarrassment. Goodness knows how I would have coped had we done it in earnest on naked bodies.’

In September 1938, Guiders working at headquarters in Buckingham Palace Road started to dig bomb shelters in nearby St James’s and Green Park. ‘Everyone did two hours’ digging a day,’ remembered Verily Anderson. ‘One hour came out of our lunch break.’ As a Guide in Sussex working for the Authoress Badge which had been introduced in 1920, she had followed the rules set out in Hints on Girl Guide Badges: ‘Know what you’ve driving at; mean what you say; never use a long word where a short one will do.’ Having ‘successfully written a dramatic sketch’, ‘expressed her own personal thoughts in an essay’ and ‘written an account of an event in her life’ she had passed the badge, which featured an inkstand, and was now employed as sub-editor of The Guide. As a Girl Guide Association employee Verily had to wear uniform at all times. She even wore it to meet her boyfriend in the pub for a beer after work.

‘Christian names were forbidden but nicknames were acceptable,’ she remembered. ‘The editor, a large, dark-haired woman called Miss Christian, decided that because my maiden name was Bruce, I should be called “Spider”. The senior editors were romantic novelists. Their salaries were so low that it was written into their contracts that, if time lay heavy, they could write their novels in the office.’

Like many Guiders in early 1939, Verily decided to graduate to a more adult uniformed service. She joined the First-Aid Nursing Yeomanry, or FANYs, as a part-time trainee ambulance driver. ‘Once a week I scrambled out of the blue Guide uniform and into khaki. We had to march up and down Birdcage Walk beside Wellington Barracks, overseen by a Guards Sergeant.’ The FANYs had begun in the Boer War, consisting of young ladies who drove horse-drawn ambulances. ‘Our training was more like a debutante’s tea-party,’ said Verily, who soon discovered that FANYs who had been Guides were at a distinct advantage. ‘We met in an Eaton Square drawing room, where those of us who had passed our Second-Class Guide Badge could advise on first-aid. We were told that the Cyclist’s Badge would come in handy for mending punctures on ambulances. A cabby was brought in from the local taxi rank to enlighten us further over inflating flat tyres. “Yer sticks a li’ll nozzle in yer nipp’ll and wiv one o’yer plates o’meat in yer strr’p, yer keeps at it.” When it came to training under canvas at Aldershot, those of us who were former Guides beat the rest in tent jargon — we tossed off our brailing strings and fouled our guys as we pitched and struck the Bells. We were all treated as officers, and wore Sam Browne belts, which we were told to take off when we went out dancing.’

At the end of August 1939 Verily Anderson took her first annual holiday from The Guide. She and two girlfriends, and their brothers who were on leave from the navy, went on a cycling tour of Brittany. As soon as they heard on the French news that war was imminent, they phoned home. Their parents told them that telegrams had already arrived demanding that they join their units forthwith. ‘After a night sleeping on the beach at St Malo, we boarded an overladen ferry, all ready to use our Life-Saving Guide Badge. Back in London I struggled into my Guider’s uniform to hand in my resignation at Guide HQ. Then I changed my mind and put on my FANY uniform, feeling that khaki would be more dramatic for the romantic novelists.’

The 1st Eynsham Brownie Pack also went on holiday in August 1939 — to Swanage in Dorset. ‘We went down on the shore and we dug. We ate some ices,’ wrote Sheila Harris in their Pack Holiday Log Book. She practised semaphore with Sonia Horwood for their Golden Hand Badge, while Brown Owl, a teacher called Miss Mary Oakley, held a skipping rope for their friends Joan and Audrey to jump over for their Athlete’s Badge, their uniforms tucked into their knickers. ‘Then we had our tea and played on the hill and went to bed.’ The Brownies were accompanied by Mrs Perkins, Miss Gibbons and Miss Betterton, who wore their coats on the beach as they watched the girls swimming in their knitted woollen costumes.

On Monday, 28 August, Gwyneth Batts of the Gnome Six wrote: ‘We went in the sea. It was nice and wet and we tried to swim. We went to the top of a long hill to see a monument. It was a very long way and we became very hot.’

On Tuesday, 29 August, Patsy Harling of the Fairy Six wrote: ‘We went to buy our presents. I got a vase for mummy, a shaving stick for daddy and a stick of rock for grandpa. When we got back we had Diana to tea. We met her on the beach in the morning. We did not like her much. She did not say thank you for her tea.’

On Wednesday, 30 August, Joan Brookes of the Gnome Six wrote: ‘It was a nasty morning and the sea was so rough we could not bathe. We found a lot of seaweed. We saw two funny poodles.’ Doreen Bray of the Fairy Six wrote: ‘After dinner we got ready to go down to the beach. We had a sandcastle competition which was won by Sylvia. We had a lovely bathe because it was so rough. It was fun jumping the waves. We played hide and seek and we sang God Save are [sic] King.’

On Thursday, 31 August, Joyce Betterton of the Elf Six wrote: ‘The sea was calm and we went on a boat. We had sausages for dinner and apple and custard. Then we did handstands.’ Sonia Horwood of the Sprite Six added: ‘The boat rocked. We picked some blackberries to eat. We sang in the boat coming home.’ Joan Winterbourne of the Sprite Six was the last Brownie to write, on Friday, 1 September: ‘While we were having our breakfast Brown Owl told us we were going home. We packed all our clothes and emptied all our beds.’

The Brownies spent the four-hour bus journey home singing songs such as ‘Rolling Down to Rio’ and ‘The Jolly Waggoner’. ‘We arrived back in Eynsham late on Saturday night,’ Brown Owl wrote in the log book. ‘Everyone was very glad to see us and we were only sorry we had missed one day of such a lovely holiday. The next day war broke out.’ Even so, some of the mothers complained that by coming home a day early, their daughters did not get their full fifteen shillings’ worth of holiday.

During the last week of August the 1st Kennington Girl Guide Company in Oxfordshire were looking forward to camping in the New Forest. ‘Our Captain, Miss Gandy, was excited too,’ said Sylvia Rivers, then aged thirteen. ‘She had cooked a ham for our first meal.’ However, just as they were about to set off Miss Gandy received a telegram advising them not to go because of the possibility of war: ‘She was almost in tears.’ Instead, the Guides took their packed lunches to nearby Bagley Wood and practised tracking. Then they set up camp in a field next to the Captain’s house in Kennington.

On Friday, 1 September, Germany invaded Poland, and it appeared inevitable that Britain would declare war on Germany. ‘By the Friday,’ said Sylvia, ‘as things were beginning to look dark in the Country, we were asked if some of us would go to Abingdon to help run messages to people preparing to take in evacuees.’ She and her patrol cycled the five miles to help prepare for children being evacuated to Abingdon from London: ‘We delivered notes to the families who were to care for the children.’ On the night of 2 September, trains travelled with no lights in the carriages, and families with relations in the country began to leave the capital. The following morning Britons sat by their radios waiting to hear Chamberlain’s broadcast on the BBC Home Service at 11.15 a.m.

Mary Yates was a Guide, a leader of her local Brownie pack and a choirgirl in a village in Oxfordshire. The vicar asked her to sit in his rectory and listen to the wireless. ‘I then had to hurry to church and hand to the vicar one or other order of service, depending on the news.’ Mary heard the tired voice of Chamberlain speaking to Britain: ‘This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’

‘I hurried down the church drive,’ remembered Mary. ‘As I moved from the vestry into the church I felt the atmosphere — the congregation seemed to be holding their breath waiting for the vicar’s words — “The Country is at War.”’

Edna Gertrude Cole was a sixteen-year-old Guide living in Davenport, ten miles south of Manchester. ‘We were in the process of building an air-raid shelter in the garden when we went indoors to hear the broadcast. War had been declared. Then we went out and got on with digging the shelter. It was a hole, propped up with railway sleepers. As fast as we dug, it filled with water.’

‘On the Sunday morning,’ said Sylvia Rivers, ‘my Patrol Leader and I cycled to Abingdon again and helped until afternoon. When we arrived back at camp there was no one there, an empty space. War had been declared. Captain had struck camp straight away. She had already lived through the First World War and had lost her brother.’

That evening, BBC radio announcer Bruce Belfrage read the nine o’clock news: ‘The following advice is given: to keep off the streets as much as possible; to carry a gas mask always; to make sure all members of the household have on them their name and address clearly written; to sew a label on children’s clothing so that they cannot pull it off…’ Up until then, all newsreaders had been anonymous, but now they were told to announce their names so that listeners would learn their voices and be able to tell if they were being impersonated by the enemy and giving false information. Guides invented a new game — who could name the newsreader quickest before he identified himself?

Iris O’Dell was shopping with her mother and her brothers in Hitchin when the announcement of war was made. ‘Mum was wearing a dark green coat with a fur collar and a green velvet hat when she went into Timothy White’s to buy a jar of cod-liver oil and malt. We were outside minding Bob in the brown pram. When she popped the big jar under the pram cover, she whispered, “We are at war.” That night I laid awake straining my ears to hear the tramp of Germans marching up our lane.’

Many adults also believed that war would begin immediately, and there were rumours that the Germans would launch gas attacks from the air. Guides all over Great Britain rushed to find their gas masks and to help other people get theirs together. They knew from the news that in Poland aerial bombing had rained down explosives on small wooden villages and beautiful towns, and thousands of people had been killed or wounded. On the first day of the war, Guides all over Britain braced themselves against the feeling of panic that was in the air. They were determined that whatever lay ahead they were going to think of others, remain cheerful and set a good example of courage to other people. As Baden-Powell said, ‘Look up and not down, look forward and not back. Look out, not in — and lend a hand.’

Operation Pied Piper was set in motion. A poster produced by the Ministry of Health Evacuation Scheme depicted a boy and girl looking miserable, and the words: ‘Mothers — let them go — give them a chance of greater safety and health.’ Every city railway station was soon crowded with children, some with their parents, some from homes and orphanages. There was plenty for Guides to do. Those in cities helped children leave, and those in safe areas helped to entertain them when they arrived. ‘In Ilford, Guides are “keeping school” for the infants,’ wrote The Guide. ‘Left behind by the tide of evacuation which had swept the teachers along, they were having dull days with no teachers.’ ‘Our Guide company had to clean out empty houses to take evacuees,’ said Iris O’Dell. ‘Mothers and children from Manchester. It was quite dirty, but we had fun. The billeting officer came and sorted the families out, and children were taken round private houses.’

Margaret Collins was a keen Guide living in Maidstone, Kent.

The actual moment that war was declared, I was helping out in the Town Hall. We listened in the Mayor’s parlour to the declaration of war and immediately afterwards the air-raid sirens all went. The Mayor got very agitated and sent us down to the cellar. He dashed out onto the Town Hall steps and directed people furiously to ‘get under cover’ but everyone was just gazing around. The sirens had gone off by mistake.

Various information offices were set up and I helped direct the evacuees. First, we Guides scrubbed the large old houses along the London Road, which had stood empty because of the Depression. They were taken over by the council and we got them ready for pregnant mothers.

We hardly went to school at all, even though it was my last year. Once air-raid shelters had been dug and blast walls put up, then we got back to school. Then we welcomed an evacuated school from Plumstead. We had three little boys to live with us: Alfie, Eric and Ernie Bell. They arrived with hardly any clothing, and were very unused to baths. The countryside was quite new to them, and they soon enjoyed apple scrumping. Their billeting fee was paid by the government but after things got better organised, their families were required to pay towards this. Then a lot of them went home to their parents.

A Kensington Brown Owl accompanied her Brownies when they were evacuated to Sussex by bus.

We loaded up with picnic food. The Brownies also took dressing-up clothes and a wind-up gramophone so that they could give a performance of their latest concert once they got there. The Brownies sang their songs, but travel sickness overcame Alice, one of the liveliest and naughtiest Brownies. A more pathetically deflated sight I never saw. She lay back green and limp and for once almost silent. ‘Never no more,’ she groaned, ‘will I roam.’ Barley sugar, a reminder of the Brownie smile in time of trouble, and an assurance that I didn’t mind a bit if she was sick, helped a little. For these things, when she recovered, she was touchingly grateful. She was led away by the billeting officer, a little less green.

During this turbulent time, children could see the distress, upheavals and deprivations that their parents were coping with. But older Brownies and Guides had the advantage that they could see how to make themselves useful, which also alleviated their own feelings of helplessness. Families were separated and children sent to live with strangers, often of a different class, creed or culture, perhaps hundreds of miles from home. The children had to undergo long journeys to unknown destinations on overcrowded trains and buses. The younger ones had no idea why they had been wrenched from their mothers’ arms; the older ones had to cope with their own homesickness and the distress of their younger siblings. Unqualified adults, often not parents themselves, became surrogate mothers and fathers overnight to severely homesick children.

There was no time to match children and foster parents — the evacuees were simply handed out by billeting officers at railway stations, or driven around and deposited on doorsteps. The countryside was filled with urban children wearing labels and carrying their gas masks. Rumours circulated about the horrors of children who knew nothing about closing farm gates, were covered in lice, wet their beds and never stopped crying for their mothers. Local Guides came to the rescue by helping to bath and feed evacuated babies, playing with toddlers and organising games for older children. Evacuee girls over seven became Brownies in their local packs, and the older girls became Guides; both organisations provided instant friends. Small village companies with only eight or ten girls were suddenly swelled to fifty or sixty. Most of the evacuated children were young, so Brownie packs grew overnight. ‘Life was disorganised for everyone,’ wrote The Guide’s Miss Christian. ‘Schools took place in shifts, so that in many cases there was half a day’s holiday at least every day in the week.’ With children spending less time at school, Guide meetings could be held more often than once a week.

In addition to their gas masks, evacuees were expected to bring with them ‘a change of underclothing, night clothes, house shoes or plimsolls, spare stockings or socks, a toothbrush, a comb, towel, soap and face cloth, handkerchiefs and, if possible, a warm coat or mackintosh’. Many children were too poor to own half of these things, and their foster parents had to find clothes for them too.

Within a few days 660,000 children and carers were evacuated from London, and 1,220,000 from other towns and cities. By the end of the war the General Post Office had registered thirty-nine million changes of address — for a total population of forty-seven million. Never before had so many people from different backgrounds — the country and the city, the rich and the poor — been thrown so closely together.

The war against Germany changed the role of Britain’s Guides in other, more profound ways. As well as assisting evacuated children, those Guides who had left school were called up to military service: they were ideal recruits for WAAFs, NAAFI (the Navy, Army and Air Force Institute, which provided the armed services with shops, restaurants and other facilities) and the FANYs. At the start of 1939 The Guide had featured a series called ‘What Shall I Be?’ By September of that year the series had reached ‘No. 9 — Domestic Servant’. The photo shows a pretty young woman with beautifully coiffed hair, ironing a shirt. ‘Cheery and trim,’ says the caption, ‘the domestic servant of today finds the varied work of a house gives her scope that is lacking in more mechanical occupations.’ The next month’s cover showed a female soldier apparently changing the track of a tank using a small spanner. Domestic service was off the agenda, and the Girl Guide Association now encouraged working Guides to join up. Over 1,000 Sea Rangers enlisted with the Wrens.

With many Guide Captains and Commissioners being called up as ambulance drivers, Air-Raid Wardens, nurses or into factories, thousands of Guide companies all over the country found themselves with no Captains. Patrol Leaders stepped into the breach, even though most of them were no more than fifteen years old. They offered their companies’ services to the billeting authorities, to town halls and airraid posts, asking, ‘Can you use us?’

People who had never heard of Guides before, suddenly realised how useful they could be. Guides carried messages, wrote down timetables, helped officials at railway stations. They waited on railway platforms all over the country. ‘Quiet, friendly, smiling figures in blue,’ wrote Miss Christian in The Guide, ‘waiting to meet the trains, to carry luggage for tired mothers, to take charge of crying toddlers, to give a friendly, reassuring greeting to the boys and girls of their own age, arriving lonely, homesick and perhaps scared, in utterly new surroundings.’ ‘I have never had much to do with girls,’ said a billeting officer, ‘but I find these Guides most level-headed and sensible. When you ask them to do a job they do get on with it, and they do it thoroughly.’

They tidied up rest centres in village halls and schools, and cleaned houses that evacuated families would live in. In Glasgow, the hostel for servicewomen was in such a dreadful state that the local Guides had to clean it from top to bottom before they could start running it. ‘They only acquired it a few days before the opening,’ reported The Guide. ‘Guides got down to it and scrubbed and scoured every evening after work to get it ready in time. The running of it in voluntary shifts entails more than would appear, for the trains deposit girls for interviews in the very early morning. It means an all-night shift of Guides every night. The Brownies are knitting dishcloths and intend to keep them steadily supplied.’

In Eastbourne, a large empty house was taken for fifty girls expected from London. The local Guides set to work scrubbing it. Then they went round to everyone they knew and begged for food, cooking pots, crockery and bedding. They even scrounged hessian to cut up and make into blackout blinds for the many windows. After ten hours’ hard work there was a knock at the door. There, standing on the pavement were not the fifty girls they expected, but seventy-one mothers and babies. ‘Never mind,’ said the Guides, ‘we know what to do.’ Kettles were boiled, tea made, bottles prepared for babies, and by midnight the new arrivals had settled down for the night.

Pamela Ruth Lawton was a Guide in Congleton, Cheshire. ‘On Saturday afternoons, two Guides had to walk the three miles to Astbury Vicarage to play with the evacuees and help with the teas. These were usually a large slice of bread (“door-steps”) covered in rhubarb and ginger jam, which ran all over it. We enjoyed a cup of tea and a bun.’

The skills that Guides had learned for their proficiency badges, some of which may have seemed utterly useless before the war, were now invaluable. By 1939, badges covered Air Mechanic, Bee Farmer, Carpenter, Boatswain, Interpreter and Surveyor. Suddenly, efficient camp organisation, cooking on campfires, knotting and remembering messages were vitally important. Guides with Child Nurse Badges turned up as willing helpers at evacuated nursery schools, which were often short-staffed and overcrowded. They bathed as many as eighty babies every morning, while those with a Needlewoman Badge mended the babies’ clothes. The badges worn on the arms of Guides were not just a way of showing off their achievements: they were the proof of their skills. Wherever Guides went, the people in charge could immediately see what they were capable of: Sick Nurse, First-Aid, Cook, Games, Entertainers, Friend to the Deaf — all were useful.

By Monday, 4 September, barrage balloons were hovering above cities, homes were prepared with blackout curtains and windows were sealed with paper sticky-tape and strips of blankets against gas attacks. A new 11th Guide Law was made: ‘A Guide always carries her gas mask.’ Guides all over Britain helped the ARP by acting as patients for first-aid exercises.

While Guide companies in the countryside expanded, in the towns and cities many vanished overnight or dwindled to just a few members. Church halls where Guide meetings were formerly held were taken over as gas-mask distribution centres and first-aid posts. The blackout meant that going out after dark became almost impossible. There was a solid, absolute darkness in even the biggest cities: the only light was from slowly moving cars’ headlights, covered in black paper apart from a small slit. People walking at night had to be careful not to bump into things, so Guides went out with whitewash and painted trees, lamp posts, kerbs and gateposts. Somehow Guide meetings carried on, the small groups often staying overnight at each other’s houses.

The 1st Langton Matravers Guide Company, near Swanage in Dorset, had been formed in 1925; by 1939 it had only a dozen members. Faced with the influx of evacuees, anyone in Langton with a spare room, even a front room, gave it up. Soon the Guide company had more than doubled in size. The Guides held a ‘penny party’, and made enough money to provide a filled Christmas stocking for every evacuee child under five years old in the village. When the RAF took over the local prep school, the Guides were invited to lay on games and sandwiches for children’s parties at Christmas. Together, the Guides and the RAF men went around the village singing carols with a portable organ.

Guides had never been trained for war or fighting, but like the skills they had acquired for their proficiency badges, the training they had received in their ordinary meetings and camps soon proved invaluable. During the past year, much had been done to prepare for war conditions. Now Guides came into their own, as men had to leave home to join the armed forces, and mothers who had stayed at home to look after their families had to work in factories to help the war effort. Overnight, the skills that Brownies and Guides had been learning became imperative for the survival of Britain. The school leaving age was fourteen years, so membership of the Guides was important for many young women who would otherwise never have learned dressmaking, carpentry and cooking. For the first month of war, everything closed down — from theatres to Brownie and Guide meetings. But after a month it was realised that these meetings were very important and should continue as normal, with extra care at night for the blackout.

Surprisingly, unemployment among women actually rose after the outbreak of war. Those women in ‘light or inessential’ industries were laid off, and the Women’s Land Army and the Auxiliary Territorial Service could not cope with the huge numbers of applicants. Although 30,000 young women volunteered to join the Land Army, by January 1940 only 2,000 were employed in it. This gave Guiders a few more months to train Patrol Leaders, ready for when they had to take over running companies.

As the months went by, the gas attacks, aerial bombing and invasion that the British people had feared were imminent, did not come. For many people this period, known as the Phoney War, was an anticlimax, and some thought they had been deceived by the government. By Easter 1940 a feeling of security had returned, and not only did parents fetch their children home, but whole schools returned to the cities. A few Guiders carried on as if nothing had happened. In December 1939 the Oxford City Guide Commissioners held a badge meeting at which the Needlework Examiner complained that the standard of needlework was falling. She also objected to the use of French seams in garments, but the other commissioners decided that tidiness of sewing was more important than the type of seams.

Like many evacuee children, Alice the travel-sick Brownie was soon back at home. ‘When I saw her again, she would walk along with me, her hand tucked in mine,’ said her Brown Owl. ‘One day she announced perkily: “I’ve got to be good till tomorrow, Miss.” I expressed my pleasure and relief. “Till after my mother’s funeral at eleven,” she said. It turned out that she had been living with what she described as a “wicked step-aunt”.’

A week later, Brown Owl met Alice in the street when it was nearly dark. ‘I shan’t be coming to Brownies no more,’ the child said. ‘Brownies often said this, perhaps to get extra attention, but they did not usually mean it. One Brownie, who never missed a meeting in three years, said it frequently, giving such excuses as “because we’re getting a built-in fireplace” or “because Dad might be coming home.” But Alice, who was wearing her usual fur-lined boots and a coat but no frock, explained: “Auntie’s washing my frock, for going back to my dad. She’s putting me on the Glasgow bus tonight.”’

Brown Owl was appalled, and went home to find some barley sugar to give Alice for the journey. But she was too late. ‘Alice had already gone and I knew I should never see her again. I lay awake that night thinking of the bus creeping up England and Scotland with my naughtiest little Brownie slumped in a corner, moaning her vows never to go roaming no more.’

A few days later a letter came with a Glasgow postmark. The note inside was a bit sticky, but the message was a joy: ‘Dear Brown-Owl dear,’ Alice had written. ‘There was a woman on the bus worsen me. She felt a lot better when I gave her an emergency smile and told her I didn’t mind a wee bit if she threw up.’

4 Kinder-Guides

While people in Britain were living through the Phoney War, in Germany Jewish people had been suffering horrendous persecution since the start of the 1930s. Their shops were plagued by pickets, and in September 1935 Hitler had passed the Nuremburg Laws, depriving ‘non-Aryans’ of citizenship. Jews’ passports were marked with a large ‘J’, and they were forced to wear a yellow star as a means of identification. Jews were banned from public places and schools and had their property confiscated. In 1935 Samuel Hoare, the British Foreign Secretary, made it clear that Britain would be hospitable to individual Jewish refugees with sponsors, but not to Jews en masse. However, after the events of 9 November 1938 he rethought his policy.

On that night ‘The entire Jewish population of Germany was subjected to a reign of terror,’ reported the Daily Telegraph. ‘No attempt was made by the police to restrain the savagery of the mob. Almost every synagogue in the country was burnt to the ground. Scarcely a Jewish shop escaped being wrecked. Looting occurred on a great scale. Jews of all ages, of both sexes, were beaten in the streets and in their homes. Jewish patients in hospitals were dragged outside in their nightclothes.’ The Nazis imprisoned 30,000 Jewish men on what became known as ‘Kristallnacht’, or the Night of Broken Glass.

Two weeks later, Hoare, now Home Secretary, held a breakfast meeting with Jewish, Quaker and other religious leaders, and the Committee for the Care of Children from Germany was formed. He proposed that Britain should admit European Jewish children as long as organisations or families agreed to sponsor them once they arrived. He had been assured by Jewish organisations that in order to save their children from the Nazis, Jewish parents in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia were prepared to send their children to a strange country and an uncertain future.

Later that evening, a full-scale debate on refugee policy took place in the House of Commons. Hoare announced that the Home Office would allow entry to all child refugees whose maintenance could be guaranteed. The Commons resolved ‘That this House notes with profound concern the deplorable treatment suffered by certain racial, religious, and political minorities in Europe, and, in view of the growing gravity of the refugee problem, would welcome an immediate concerted effort amongst the nations.’

Hoare agreed immediately that in order to speed up the immigration process, travel documents would be issued on the basis of group lists rather than individual applications, and from December 1938 Jewish children began to arrive in Britain from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Their parents had taken the agonising decision to send them away, not knowing what the future held. The Nazi authorities decreed that leave-takings must happen quickly and without fuss, so farewells were brief. The trains carrying the children often left at night, and while some children saw the journey as an adventure, most were frightened and distressed. Few would see their parents again.

The first two hundred children of the ‘Kindertransport’ departed from Berlin on 1 December 1938. After that, an average of 250 children aged between four and seventeen left Germany and Austria every week, arriving by train at the Hook of Holland, where they were despatched onto night ferries to Harwich in Essex. A few travelled on to stay with relatives in America, others went to Paraguay, but the majority remained in Britain. Some went to live with Jewish relatives; others were offered homes with families of other religions, often Quakers. Upon arrival, many of them stayed in wooden chalets in Warner’s Holiday Camp at Dovercourt near Harwich. ‘The whole camp was charged with anxiety and fear,’ wrote Hugh Barret, a volunteer student. ‘It was there I first heard the word “angst” and appreciated what it meant.’ When the children heard a rumour about a pogrom in Vienna, they started wailing, and panic soon spread among the Viennese staff. Shouting above the noise that it was only a rumour did not help, and the refugees only calmed down when one of the older Jewish helpers started to sing a Hebrew song of courage and hope, that every child knew. Within minutes, the camp hall was filled with the sound of soothed voices, united in song.

Ingrid Jacoby, an eleven-year-old growing up in Vienna, was not a Guide, but her diary reveals the painful and challenging experiences endured by many Kindertransport girls. On 11 March 1938 she wrote: ‘My father is in a terrible state because Hitler has marched into Austria. It happened two days after my eleventh birthday and I couldn’t have my party. I cried. Still no period. I pray for it, but Granny says it’s wicked to think of God in the lavatory.’ Just over a year later, her aunt had secured visas for her and her older sister Lieselotte to go to England, and in a matter of days the girls were taken to a station in Vienna. ‘We were each given a cardboard number on a string, to hang round our necks. As I lay in Mummy’s arms, saying goodbye to her for heaven knows how long, I still didn’t realise what was happening. We joined a queue with hundreds of other children, and stood about for a very long time. Then suddenly we were on the train and waved to Mummy until the train took us out of sight. The other children were all talking and shouting and running about. We sang Viennese songs and some of the children cried. When we crossed the border into Holland and freedom, a great cheer went up. Some Dutch people handed each child a bar of Nestlé’s milk chocolate through the train windows.’ The children were all sick on the overnight Channel crossing. They then took a train from Harwich to London, where Ingrid and her sister were put on another train on their own to Exeter.

Three weeks later, now living in Falmouth with a solicitor’s family, Ingrid confessed to her diary in German: ‘I’m tortured by homesickness. If only I could be back in Vienna, going for walks with my parents. I wish Austria was a monarchy and that Hitler didn’t exist. Everything is destroyed. But I must keep telling myself that everything will be all right in the end. Now I must explain to you the meaning of the word “melancholy”. It is when one doesn’t feel like doing anything any more and believes that nothing will ever make one happy again. It is wanting to cry all the time. It is looking forward to nothing and suffering from homesickness and memories of the past.’ A week later: ‘Homesickness is terrible. I used to pray and pray and long and long for my visa to come to England. My wish was granted. Now I pray and long to be back in Vienna. To think I may be here for months, years! I feel I shall die of misery. If Mummy had the slightest suspicion, how upset and unhappy she’d be. She must never, never know!’

Unfortunately, Ingrid’s foster parents, Mr and Mrs Robins, never recognised this melancholy; they saw only a lazy girl who didn’t tidy her room, and wrote to her parents to tell them they preferred her older sister. They told the girls how to stand, sit, throw a ball and breathe; and then went on holiday for three weeks without them. On their return they announced that if Ingrid’s English didn’t improve they would send her away. ‘It seems I can’t do anything right,’ poor Ingrid wrote. On 2 September 1939 she wrote in her diary, ‘Hitler, I hate you even more than I hate Mrs Robins!’

On 18 April 1939, Ruth Wassermann, aged twelve, said goodbye to her family in Germany. Her father had been imprisoned on Kristallnacht, and her mother hoped to save their daughter’s life. She joined several hundred other children at Berlin station, each carrying one small suitcase. After arriving in Britain, Ruth lived with a Jewish family, but their children did not treat her well, and in July the Committee moved her to a hostel for refugee girls in Hackney run by B’nai B’rith — ‘Children of the Covenant’ — a Jewish welfare organisation set up in New York in 1843. The girls all went to Lauriston Road School in Hackney. Ruth shared a room with Gretel Heller from Berlin, also twelve years old, who had arrived in London in June 1939. Her father had also been imprisoned on Kristallnacht. Gretel had lived with a German Jewish family for a month, but then they had emigrated to the USA.

By the end of August 1939, over 10,000 children had come to Britain on the Kindertransport scheme. The last train left Germany a few days before war broke out, and from that moment the British government cancelled all outstanding visas, and borders were closed. The last children arrived in England on 2 September. Another train, containing 250 children, was about to leave Prague on 3 September, but the Germans did not let it leave the station. In future, for Kinder-transport children in Britain, communication with their parents was limited to twenty-five-word Red Cross postcards.

As soon as war seemed inevitable, the Committee for the Care of Children from Germany made plans to evacuate all the girls in the B’nai B’rith hostel out of London. They left on the morning of Saturday, 2 September with other children from Hackney. It took them all day to reach Swaffham in Norfolk, a journey that normally took about two hours. With two million children being evacuated from cities all over Britain and thousands of soldiers returning to their posts, the nation’s transport system was in chaos.

Village halls all over the country became billeting stations where anyone with a spare room or a warm heart turned up to collect as many children as they could manage. Not many people wanted children who spoke the language of the enemy, but in rural Norfolk lived a landowner who understood their predicament and wanted to help. Sir Samuel Roberts owned the small feudal village of Cockley Cley, close to Thetford Forest, and employed everyone who lived there apart from the postmistress.

‘It seemed to take forever, sitting on railway platforms,’ recalled Gretel Heller. ‘We finally arrived in Cockley Cley village hall, along with some English children also evacuated from Lauriston Road School, Hackney. We were lined up and the villagers of Cockley Cley picked the children they wanted to take home. They were looking for children who spoke English, and who could be useful.’ This left a dozen girls from the B’nai B’rith hostel who spoke little or no English, including best friends Ruth Wassermann and Gretel Heller.

The Robertses had been expecting twenty-five children, but by the time Lady Roberts arrived at the corrugated-iron village hall, she found that most of them had already been billeted around the village. She took nine of the Kindertransport girls, aged eight to thirteen, back to Cockley Cley Hall, a four-storey Victorian house where she and her husband lived with the ancient Dowager Lady Roberts and their son Peter, who worked on the farm. Working for them were a butler, two teenage footmen, a lady’s maid, a cook, a scullery maid and a head housemaid with several maids under her.

Sir Samuel and Lady Roberts welcomed ‘the Jewish girls’, as they called them. Escorting them was their rather bossy matron, Miss Kohn, who had been a teacher in Germany, Mrs Reissner the cook, and her twelve-year-old daughter Hanna. Both women had arrived in London in early 1939 and found refuge in the B’nai B’rith hostel. Lady Roberts understood that they would need a special kosher kitchen, and gave them the scullery. ‘We had our own kitchen downstairs,’ said Gretel, ‘and the top floor for our bedrooms — five to a room — and a sitting room. We were not permitted to go into the Roberts family part of the house.’

‘We kept kosher in the sense that we did not eat any meat,’ said Ruth, ‘except on the rare occasions when it was sent from London. By the time it arrived in unrefrigerated trains, it was not the freshest, but “waste not want not” was the motto.’ The girls ate mainly turnips, potatoes, cabbages and greens grown in the Hall garden. In the summer, Lady Roberts treated them to baskets of soft fruit. ‘Lady Roberts was very elegant looking,’ said Gretel, ‘very stately, tall, always neat and properly dressed. She came into our sitting room about once a week and would pat a girl on the head.’ All the girls were homesick, but during the day they never showed it: they were expected to be grateful. At night their bedrooms were filled with the sound of muffled sobs as they cried into their pillows.

Not all the Kindertransport girls lived in the Hall. Mr and Mrs Howard, the cowman and the dairymaid of the Cockley Cley estate farm, picked twelve-year-old Cilly-Jutta Horwitz from Hamburg and Lotte Levy from Cologne. In the Howards’ cottage, water came from a well in the garden, the floors were made of stone and there was no electricity. Cilly-Jutta, later known as Celia, and Lotte were both used to living in middle-class urban homes. Celia had been learning English at grammar school in Hamburg for two years, and had arrived on the first Kindertransport train in December 1938, so her English was already good, but even so, things were very difficult. ‘Living with the Howards in a small village in Norfolk was a real culture shock,’ she remembered. ‘Everything was a blur. You no sooner seemed to have settled somewhere than you were off again. My first homes in Britain were two holiday camps in the south-east. After three cold months I was taken in by a Jewish family in Hackney and then by a hostel for young refugees.’

Lotte was braver than Celia, and told the cook, Mrs Reisner, that she was unhappy at the Howards’. The girls at the Hall were asked if any of them would swap places. ‘I was very stupid,’ said Gretel. ‘I said yes.’ Gretel, brought up in Berlin, found life with the Howards no easier than Lotte had: ‘There were paraffin lamps and we went to bed with a candle. Mrs Howard treated me and Celia like servants. There was no heating and I had perpetual colds living there. I soon regretted it, especially when winter came and it was so cold.’ The winter of 1939—40 was the coldest for decades: even the River Thames froze for the first time in over fifty years. ‘Mrs Howard cooked a delicious dumpling stew on our first night; she was a good plain cook,’ remembered Celia. ‘But after that she was quite mean with the bread and margarine. I liked the countryside, but not the outside toilets.’ Exiled from Germany for being Jewish, she was now taunted by some of the other refugee girls for being only half-Jewish — her mother had converted to Judaism before marrying her father. ‘That counted as Jewish to Hitler,’ she said. ‘When my parents divorced, my father insisted that my mother renounced being a Jew to save herself. In addition, standing up in class in England was agony when I had to say my name, “Cilly-Jutta”. The children always laughed.’ After she was married she changed her first name to Celia. Mr and Mrs Howard had two teenage sons — the oldest was Nigel, aged fifteen, who looked after the pigs and had a slight squint; his younger brother Geoffrey, who was fourteen, sometimes took Celia around the village on the horse-drawn milk cart, doling out fresh milk into housewives’ jugs. ‘I had a bit of a crush on Geoffrey,’ said Celia, ‘so that was always fun.’

Cockley Cley village school had closed down a few years earlier due to a shortage of children. The few local children went to school in Swaffham, three miles away, and did not mix much with the evacuees. The village school was reopened for the British children from Hackney and the eighteen Kindertransport girls. Two teachers were drafted in from London — Miss Gadsby and Miss Payne — one for the five-to-eight-year-olds, the other for nine-to-fourteen-year-olds. ‘They had to cope with a wide range of children,’ said Gretel, ‘including some very naughty London evacuee boys. One was beaten with a cane often.’

The teachers had to deal with both homesick London evacuees and girls who spoke little or no English and had even more reason to be homesick. ‘Miss Payne was a very good English teacher, especially for poetry,’ said Celia. Ruth described how the teachers ‘taught us songs and poetry by rote. Arithmetic was easier since they could use the blackboard. They also taught us drawing.’ Ruth enjoyed art: her grandfather had been a folk poet, and encouraged her to embellish his poetry with drawings while listening to music. The children learned English quickly: ‘The teachers took an interest in us, and found creative ways of teaching. We wrote essays, read English books and got a good appreciation of English songs, poetry and literature.’

Miss Gadsby had been a Guide, and after a couple of months she suggested starting a Guide company in Cockley Cley. ‘Those of us from Germany had never heard of such a thing,’ said Gretel Heller. ‘Miss Gadsby explained to us that Guides were about doing daily Good Deeds, and taking badges. We thought this all sounded like a good idea. But we couldn’t afford a full uniform.’ Each girl was issued with a hat, a maroon scarf and a Guide belt, donated by Lady Roberts. ‘The best part was learning Morse code and being able to signal secret messages to each other. We did a lot of stalking in the woods. We would have used these skills if the Germans had invaded.’

The 1st Cockley Cley Guide company had two patrols — the Sky Larks and the Swallows. Ruth was Patrol Leader of the Larks, with Gretel as her Second; Celia was in the Swallows. Miss Gadsby acknowledged that the Cockley Cley Guides were not British by amending part of their Guide promise from ‘ To do my duty to God and the King’ to ‘ To do my duty to God and the country in which I am a guest.’ ‘We enjoyed doing the Guide salute,’ said Gretel. ‘It helped us to connect to Britain, and to what was going on elsewhere in the country.’

Miss Gadsby was not alone: running companies near her in Norfolk were other Guide Captains such as Miss Twiddy, Miss Jolly, Miss Cocks, Miss Flowerday, Miss Sparrow and Miss Capon. One day the President of the Guides, the Princess Royal, came to Cockley Cley on her way to Sandringham. The Guides polished their badges and belts to perfection. ‘We knew she was the sister of King George,’ said Gretel. ‘We all lined up and curtsied to her.’

Lady Roberts had given the Guides a wind-up gramophone and a few records. Their favourite was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. ‘Dot-dot-dot-dash, the Morse code V for Victory opening, became a code of hope for victory throughout England,’ Ruth said. ‘We played it constantly; it gave us courage as well as an appreciation of classical music, which most of us had been accustomed to at home.’

The teachers started a Victory Garden at the school, where the Guides grew vegetables for themselves and to sell to the villagers. ‘I got terrible blisters,’ said Celia, ‘but it was a joy growing things like carrots.’ Ruth, Celia and Gretel made up a song, in English, which they sang while working in the garden:

For days work and weeks work, As we go on and on, Digging many trenches Which is not much fun.

Teacher saw as lazy She thought we never knew. Oh teachers who like gardening, You can do ours too.

‘We knew that the teachers were watching us and yet, apparently, we were lazy and did not care,’ said Gretel. ‘We also made up a lot of secret sentences, in German, that concerned our matron.’ Matron was not very popular, especially as she told the other girls not to talk to Celia because she was ‘not really Jewish’.

‘The Guides taught us self-discipline, responsibility, provided adventure, a good respect for self-reliance, and to be helpful to others,’ said Ruth. ‘It helped us to cope. We also learned path-finding, knotting and semaphore with flags. The Guide principles played a big role in our formative years, especially since we had no parents to guide us.’ ‘I was very proud of being a Guide,’ said Celia. Guide meetings were among the few times when she was happy, and she was delighted to be photographed giving her three-fingered promise salute in her uniform.

Lady Roberts’ lady’s maid was Ellen Richardson. She looked after her mistress’s clothes, and due to her well-corseted body she bent down with an absolutely straight back. She insisted that the Kinder-transport Guides did their housework properly, but also invited them into her parlour for tea and to listen to her wireless. ‘That was the only way we could hear the news,’ said Ruth. ‘When we needed advice, which we were afraid to ask matron, we went to Miss Richardson. She never divulged our secrets. Whenever she needed to correct us, she came to us directly; we were fond of her and trusted her.’ She also gave them scraps of wool and cloth with which they could make presents. ‘She showed us how to make small mending bags with a crocheted thimble-cover attached, a most useless but unique gift.’

None of the Kinder Guides had lived in the country before, but they came to appreciate the beauty of Norfolk. ‘Near the village were the Spring Woods,’ remembered Ruth, ‘with their early splendour of blooms. The Hall had a beautiful formal garden, leading to a lake with swans, where I learnt Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud…”’

With the fall of France in May 1940, the British public, encouraged by newspapers and Churchill, began to panic about ‘fifth columnists’ — saboteurs and spies in their midst. Guides all over the country were on full alert, watching for flashing torches that could be German spies sending Morse messages to each other: the BBC warned Germany that any parachutists not wearing uniform would be shot on sight, rather than taken as prisoners of war.

As Britain prepared for invasion, the Prime Minister issued a leaflet which declared: ‘STAND FIRM. Do not run away, or stop work. Do the shopping, send the children to school, do not evacuate to other areas… With a bit of common sense you can tell whether a soldier is really British or only pretending to be so. If in doubt, ask a policeman. Disable or hide your bicycle, destroy your maps.’

The fear was so great that 27,000 German and Austrian refugees were interned on the Isle of Man, many of them Jews who had only recently fled from their homes. ‘We were not aware that we were enemy aliens,’ said Gretel, ‘until the British government started to intern the men, and announced that no “enemy alien” women over the age of sixteen years could live anywhere near the south or east coast. Miss Kohn and Mrs Reissner had to go back to London.’ Mrs Reissner’s daughter Hanna remained at Cockley Cley, and took over the cooking.

All refugees were subjected to tribunals at which they had to prove their allegiance to Britain. The Germans had overrun Belgium and Holland with ease, and the girls remembered that when they had left Germany the Nazi guards had told them, ‘You can go now, but we’ll get you in the end.’ When Holland was invaded, Germans who had lived there for years rose up to support the Nazis. Would the same thing happen in Britain?

For their own protection, the girls at the Hall were told to destroy all letters from their parents written in German. ‘For me it felt like cutting out a part of my life,’ said Ruth. ‘I always carried these letters with me in my gas mask case. Once war started we seldom got word from our parents. We could receive messages of twenty-five words via the Swiss Red Cross. These came seldom and usually were very carefully worded because of the German censor. Even before the war, all letters were opened by the Nazis.’

Celia had to do any household chores that her hosts required. Only girls who had already left school had the protection of the Home Office ruling which stated that refugee girls under eighteen could only work as domestic staff ‘where there are trained domestic servants, so that they can receive proper training’. This was intended to prevent exploitation by hosts who could not afford to pay domestic staff. But it did not apply to refugees who were still at school. Celia had some respite from the Howards’ cottage when she caught ringworm from the cows. ‘It was very contagious, and Peter Roberts’ young wife, Judith, took me into the Dower House where she lived in the village. She was very kind to me, something I had not felt since I left home.’ When Judith Roberts’ first daughter, Jane, was born in October 1940, the Kinder Guides presented her with crocheted clothes-hangers. ‘Getting to see the new-born baby was a great event for us,’ said Ruth. This tiny new life brought them some hope for the future.

With so many farm workers serving in the forces, the Guides at Cockley Cley weeded sugar-beet fields to help with the war effort. They were paid 1½ pence an hour — worth about 25p in today’s money. Even though nearly all the land in Britain was by now under the plough, Cockley Cley still had woods and thick hedges. ‘There were gorgeous old trees,’ remembered Ruth. ‘We could climb to a comfortable spot in the low branches of the beech trees where we could read. Privacy was a very precious commodity for us who lived dormitory style.’ The Guides received sixpence a week pocket money, which they could spend in the village post office. ‘I splurged my chocolate ration on a Milky Way. I would take a bite a day to make it last longer.’ Ruth saved up enough of her sugar-beet earnings to buy wool to knit herself a jersey, which lasted the entire war. She was also working hard at her Guide badges. By the summer of 1941 she had learned the names of thirty-two English wild flowers she had spotted in the Norfolk meadows. They included Viper’s Bugloss, hare’s foot clover and the ubiquitous stinging nettle. She also learned to identify wild fruit that could be eaten, including the gooseberries and beech nuts that grew along the road to the Hall.

After Hitler’s Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess parachuted into Scotland in May 1941, the fear of invasion grew amongst the girls. ‘The Germans had been so successful at invading France, Poland and the Netherlands. Why would the English Channel stop them?’ said Gretel. ‘We knew we would have been the first to be imprisoned if the Germans came.’ ‘It affected us refugees especially,’ explained Ruth. ‘We Jewish, we feared that we would be the first victims and be caught. We started preparing ourselves to cope, defend ourselves and fight.’

The Swallow patrol decided that they must Be Prepared, so they worked out a plan: as soon as they heard that the invasion of Britain had started, the younger Guides would climb trees. If they saw the enemy approaching they would signal in Morse with their torches to the older Guides, including Ruth, waiting nearby. The older Guides would then lure the enemy soldiers into the stinging-nettle fields by running ahead of them. ‘When we had them in the field we would hit them in the face with the stinging nettles,’ said Ruth, ‘and then cut them with our Girl Guide penknives, which had blades about one inch long. In order to prepare for this grand plan we needed to make ourselves immune to the nettles’ sting. We began to run though the fields with our bare legs, and fought each other with the nettles. When we all came home with swollen legs, arms and faces, matron was very angry with us. We never revealed to her that all we really wanted to do was to protect England and ourselves.’

One day while Gretel and Ruth were hoeing a field they saw something that terrified them. ‘A white half-round shape appeared on the horizon,’ said Ruth. She and Gretel were sure it was a parachute, and that they would have to put their plan into action. ‘A few minutes later a man clad in khaki, with a gun slung over his shoulder, came by on a bicycle.’ The girls were certain that the invasion had begun. Panicked, they ran to the nearest house, which happened to be where Sir Samuel’s son Peter and his wife Judith lived. The door was answered by the butler, Arthur, a handsome young man, small, thin and dark-haired. ‘We told him what we had seen, and immediately he hurried with us back to the field with his Charlie-Chaplin-like stride. We arrived breathlessly at the field, to discover that our parachute had risen to become a bright, full moon. We were embarrassed. The man on the bicycle was a rabbit hunter coming home from a hunt. How could we have known?’

‘To begin with, the English evacuees stood apart, but once our English improved, we all mixed together,’ said Gretel. ‘But we foreign evacuees were quite a tight bunch. All of us had left our parents behind, so we stayed close together.’ The older girls — aged twelve or thirteen — set standards and tried to guide the younger ones. ‘We told the younger ones how to behave: we told them off if their behaviour was wrong. For example, all our possessions were kept in our suitcases under our beds. One by one we noticed that our underwear was going missing. One girl was very poor and had few clothes. When we asked her to open her suitcase, she had taken our knickers. We knew that her father had been deported from Germany to Poland, so we didn’t punish her, we just took the underwear back.’ ‘Whining was not tolerated,’ said Ruth. ‘We were all in the same boat and knew how the others felt. Our youth was over, and we had to look out for each other, like a family.’

In May 1941 Ruth led a discussion at a Guide meeting on ‘How do you think we the Guides can help win the war?’ She then taught the Sky Lark patrol the art of square-lashing two poles together with string, part of her Second-Class Test, which she completed later that year. The Guides put on entertainments in the Village Hall, including a ballet choreographed by Ruth. ‘Whenever I see a simplistically poorly performed ballet I think they must have seen mine.’

Even though they wore their Guide uniform and were learning English fast, the Kindertransport girls were constantly reminded that they were foreigners in a remote part of Britain. Some of the adult villagers made it very clear that they were not sure about these foreign children. When Miss Payne asked the senior class to sing the hymn ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken’, the girls refused. It wasn’t because they were Jews, but because the hymn shared the tune with the German national anthem. Only when the teacher threatened them with punishment did they comply. When a passerby heard them singing, he complained: ‘First the British children sing God Save the King, and then the Germans sing their national anthem. Are they spies?’ One of the London evacuee children called the girls ‘Nazis’, and others followed his taunting. ‘We just ignored them,’ said Celia, ‘but it hurt.’ The path the girls took to school ran through a wood in which a Scottish army battalion was camping. When the soldiers heard them speak in a mixture of broken English and German, Ruth felt even more alien when she heard one say, ‘Who are these children?’ His friend replied, ‘Oh, they’re prisoners of war.’

As the girls grew, they handed their clothes on to the younger ones. Harry Watts, a member of B’nai B’rith in London, brought them gym-dresses ‘which seemed to grow with us’. One memorable day, when all their shoes were worn out, he brought them each a pair of Wellington boots.

After 1941 any ‘enemy aliens’ over sixteen years of age with no passports could not live in Norfolk, which was considered too close to Germany for comfort. In August of that year, when Ruth, Gretel and Celia were fifteen, the Committee decided that it was time they left school and returned to London to begin work. The trio became such close friends that they were known as ‘the Clover Leaf’ — also the symbol of the Girl Guides. The Clover Leaf girls shared a room in a North London hostel. ‘Ruth had an older sister in London and she told us useful things like the facts of life,’ said Gretel. They volunteered as Air-Raid Wardens, and their friends were fellow refugees, musicians, artists and writers. Celia started work as a junior clerk in Marshall and Snelgrove’s department store in Oxford Street, but was soon trained to use a capstan lathe and found herself in an ammunitions factory. ‘I made the screws for the end of bombs,’ she said. ‘I had nightmares, because although I wanted Britain to win the war, I knew that any one of those bombs could have killed my parents. I wanted Germany to be taken off the map but not with my parents in it. I missed them terribly. I used to have this recurring dream where I was on one side of the road and they were on the other and this Doodlebug was going down the road on legs.’

Celia last heard of her father in 1941, when he was deported to the Minsk ghetto as slave labour — but he never returned. Her mother kept in touch with Red Cross letters. One day in 1945, as Celia was getting off a London bus, she met and instantly fell in love with Ken Lee, a British soldier on leave from serving in Germany. Ken later found her mother in Hamburg, but it was not until 1949, when they were married with a daughter, that Celia visited her for the first time in eleven years. She realised then how much living in Britain had changed her. ‘I was embarrassed by the big emotional show when I arrived,’ she recalls. ‘I’d become pretty English by then. That sort of thing wasn’t done.’ Although she continued to visit her mother, she never wanted to stay in Germany. ‘I felt horrible the first time I went back. I looked at everyone and wondered what the hell they had been doing during the war.’ Celia Lee now says emphatically, with a slight accent from her childhood, that her nationality is definitely British.

After the war, Ruth Wassermann settled and married in America, where she studied art in Chicago and worked with problem children. In late 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, Gretel Heller received word that her parents had managed to emigrate to the United States. She never saw her father again — he died two years later — but she met up with her brother and mother in the USA in 1946, and married a Kindertransport man originally from Austria.

On the night of 27 April 1942 the Luftwaffe bombed Norwich, destroying thousands of buildings and killing hundreds of people. Even Cockley Cley, thirty miles away, was not spared when an incendiary bomb dropped on the Hall roof. The remaining refugee girls were woken up and shepherded to the back staircase while the local Air-Raid Warden put it out.

By the end of 1942 only the oldest servants were left at Cockley Cley Hall; the Guides had all gone. Sir Samuel closed up his home and moved into a smaller house in the village. He wrote, ‘We are beaten. The army is all around us every day. We have hardly any servants left, and next winter it will be impossible to get fuel to heat this very large house… the little German Jewish girls have gone.’ The Hall became the headquarters of the 22nd Armoured Brigade in preparation for D-Day.

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