by Sheila Ray
A brief history of the Guides
The Girl Guides began in 1909, three years after their brother organisation, the Boy Scouts. Though not the first organisation for girls, they were to prove far and away the most popular. Lord Baden-Powell took the credit for both Guides and Scouts, but in reality the Guides were more or less thrust upon him, and somewhat against his will. He had not at first envisaged scouting activities as suitable for girls. But within two years of the establishment of the Boy Scouts, at least 6,000 girls had set up their own troops in imitation. To rid the Scouts of these hangers-on — some of whom even gate-crashed Boy Scout events — the General (as he was then) drew up a schedule of aims and regulations for a proposed parallel association for girls.
Their zeal for activities exactly like the Scouts’ was, however, quickly diverted into more feminine channels once the Baden-Powells (the General, his sister and his wife) took control. The Schedule of 1909 set the tone:
If we want the future manhood of the country to be men of character — which is the only guarantee for [sic] safety for the nation — it is essential in the first place that the mothers, and the future wives (the guides of those men), should also be women of character.48
By 1909 British feminists had fought for and won a wide range of new rights and opportunities for women in education, work, the law and politics, and had been vigorously campaigning for votes for women for over half a century. The suffragettes were making their presence felt by the use of militant tactics which challenged every Victorian tenet about women’s nature. But General Baden-Powell’s document was not framed in terms of the rights or even needs of girls per se — only as future wives and mothers of men.
Decadence is going on in the nation, both moral and physical; proofs are only too plentiful . . . Much of this decadence is due to ignorance or supineness of mothers, who have never been taught themselves.
How was this to be achieved?
As things are, one sees the streets crowded after business hours, and the watering-places crammed with girls over-dressed and idling, learning to lead aimless, profitless lives; whereas, if an attractive way were shown, their enthusiasm would at once lead them to take up useful work with zeal.49
What Baden-Powell meant by “useful work” was, of course, the traditional servicing role of women: nursing, cooking, sewing. What the girls who had set up informal Girl Scout troops in imitation of the boys had wanted were all the interesting parts of Scout work like tracking, signalling and camping. Not surprisingly, many were reluctant to give up their Scouting for the new feminine offering.
Knowing this, the compilers of the first Handbook of the Girl Guides (1912, titled How Girls Can Help to Build Up the Empire) contrived to incorporate all the popular skills and training from the Boy Scouts’ handbook which they were adapting, disguising them where necessary by the insertion of a “Womanly Purpose”.
For instance, the section devoted to stalking, tracking, signalling, camping, and all the out-door pursuits the girls had seized upon with such avidity, was cleverly camouflaged with the heading “Finding the Injured” . . . 50
By 1935 there were 600,000 Guides in Britain and another 400,000 around the world (though they were banned in Nazi Germany).51 As well as separate organisations for younger (Brownies) and older girls (Rangers), there were Cadets who were training for Guiding work, Lone Guides in isolated places, Sea Rangers, and an Extension branch of troops of girls with disabilities. Badges were awarded for achievement in activities ranging from “Home Craft” to all the outdoor skills.
“Basket-worker for me,” proclaimed Joey that morning, as she was putting on her stockings. “Also, I rather want a shot at Pioneer.”
“I will do Basket-worker too,” agreed Frieda. “And I should like to take Boatswain, if I may. I have done the Turk’s Head, and I know all the knots, and can swim.”52
As for camping, the word became synonymous with the Girl Guides. The first recorded girls’ camp was held in a private garden in 1910. It represented something of a radical departure for girls, and was at first strenuously opposed. An article in the Glasgow Herald in 1909 protested:
It can hardly be desirable that this new movement among girls should be taken seriously when it is remembered how much independence, fatigue, and exposure to all weathers are the unavoidable experiences of the Boy Scout. That the healthy young boy suffers no harm from these necessities of the work, all interested in the question appear to agree. But few will, I think, allow that it is wise to allow girls of the same tender age equal freedom and equal opportunities of “roughing it”.53
Very soon camping became the high point of every Guide’s experience, as both the ideal testing ground for so many of the more interesting skills and the first opportunity for most girls to get away from home with others of their kind. The Chalet Girls in Camp (1932) is an English version of a genre much more common in American girls’ fiction54: the novel which is wholly devoted to the story of a summer camp in the school holidays. Here the Chalet Guides camp on the shores of a particularly lovely lake in the Austrian Tyrol, experiencing the joys of self-sufficiency in the outdoors. The message that women can rough it too, unprotected by men, is somewhat muted by the greater emphasis on the acquisition of useful domestic skills by these pampered middle-class girls, accustomed to having everything done for them by mothers or, more probably, maids. An amusing incident revolving around the Middles’ attempt to launder their own clothes provides an opportunity for Miss Wilson to announce that the school is planning to introduce Domestic Science lessons into the curriculum the following term.55
Girls’ Guildry
Two comparable organisations much featured in girls’ school stories were Girls’ Guildry, beloved of Dorita Fairlie Bruce, and Camp Fire, most closely associated with Elsie Oxenham. The Girls’ Guildry was started in Glasgow in 1900 by Dr W. F. Somerville. He had observed the work of the Boys’ Brigade and, regretting that there was nothing similar for girls, planned the Girls’ Guildry to fill the leisure hours of listless young women with organised Christian activity.
At the time, the idea of such a movement was relatively new. The Church of England had its Girls’ Friendly Society, founded in 1877, but this was English and generally confined to girls from working-class districts. Somerville’s concern was for those young women of the middle class who were too old for children’s play but not yet admitted to adult society — a need much more apparent at the close of the 19th century than it had been when life for women was more domestic and confined.
The Girls’ Guildry had a religious though non-sectarian base. Initially each company was attached to a church. There were several ranks of membership, Maid, Maid of Merit, Maid of Honour, Maid in Waiting, each dependent on awards won; every Company was headed by a Guardian who might have one or more assistants. The distinctive uniform of blue skirt, white blouse and red sash was deliberately both patriotic and para-military. It was also simple and had the effect of submerging class differences among members, an important objective at a time when dress was so clear a class indicator. The organisation prided itself on the fact that well-to-do girls who joined Guildry were sartorially indistinguishable from the working-class Guildswomen whom the officials increasingly tried to recruit.
With the uniform the girls wore a white panama (later, a blue felt) together with a badge in the form of a lamp, the symbol of service. Herein lay the clue to the movement’s aims. In 1903 the President stated that its object was:
to induce girls to become Christian women in the truest sense, and to develop those qualities of womanly helpfulness by which they might become potent factors in brightening and improving the world.56
The activities arranged for members were designed to further this aim — learning First Aid, for example. Some were of less obvious benefit, such as the practice of drill. Drill seems to have been immensely popular with girls at the beginning of the 20th century, doubtless because more strenuous forms of physical activity were denied them.57 It gave
healthy exercise, at the same time inculcating the virtues of team-work, grace and style. Its military potential may have been a reflection of the times (the Boer War was in progress at the date of the Guildry’s foundation) as well as a recognition of the lack of other models for young people’s clubs.
Other Guildry activities included sewing; nursing; dancing (allowed from 1910, when country dancing superseded the more frivolous type); “domestic economy”; camping; and — from the 1930s — zealous social and mission work among Depression-torn poorer districts and a new emphasis on “citizenship”, particularly appropriate following the extension of the vote to all women over 21. The movement quickly spread to England, Ireland and Wales and later to Canada, Livingstonia (in Africa) and Jamaica; but remained most popular in Scotland.
Dorita Fairlie Bruce was closely associated with the Girls’ Guildry for well over 30 years. In December 1916 the Girls’ Guildry Gazette reported that the No. 1 Ealing Company had performed a pageant entitled The Daughters of Britain, “specially written for the girls by one of the Assistant Guardians, Miss D. Bruce”. In 1920 she took on a company set up to train Guardians in Ealing, and by 1926 she was one of the Vice-Presidents of the London Centre. When Guildry in the capital became large enough to support three centres, Bruce was elevated to “Centre President” of the West London Centre.58 By this time her name was one of those most frequently found in the Gazette’s successor organ, the Lamp of the Girls’ Guildry. Her novels were reviewed therein, and she contributed articles on various Guildry events and activities.
That Bruce should have espoused the Girls’ Guildry rather than Guides or Camp Fire is not surprising given that she herself came from the west coast of Scotland. She was a fervent advocate, arguing that even in areas where Girl Guides were strong, there was a place for the Girls’ Guildry; “the Guides themselves say that the Guildry can reach and help girls to whom Guiding makes no appeal”.59 But she does not tell us who these girls were and why Guildry succeeded where the Guides failed.
The movement features most importantly in the Maudsley books.60 But although Nancy and her friends are keen Guildry Maids, Bruce makes it clear that the role of middle-class girls within the organisation was largely missionary. A distinction is drawn between the leaders (and those destined to be leaders, like Nancy) and the led — the rank and file. In a movement which aimed to reduce class differences, Bruce really only identified with her bourgeois heroines. In one of her articles in the Lamp, Bruce’s plea for more women to come forward as Guardians included the remark, “there is actually one perfectly good slum Company, complete in every particular except an officer”.61 In her fiction, the point is most forcibly exemplified in Dimsie Intervenes (1937). Here Erica Innes, former Head Girl of the Jane Willard Foundation, sets up a Guildry company for the local girls, gets the rector’s daughter to run it and asks her girlfriends to “take a kindly interest” in it. She observes that:
If I’m to be a politician some day, as I hope and intend, I’ve got to learn something about social work, and naturally I’m interested in girls. They learn order and discipline and self-control in the Guildry, and to go to church on Sundays . . . 62
Camp Fire
Many writers for girls wrote about Camp Fire, but in Britain it was dearest to the heart of Elsie J. Oxenham. A School Camp Fire, her first novel on the subject, was published in 1917. Dedicated “To the girls who sit with me around the Camp Fire . . . with love and all best wishes from their Guardian”, it was to be followed over the next 20 years by 13 more stories in which Camp Fire was central to the plot, as well as several in which it played a subsidiary role.
Oxenham set her fictional Camp Fires in Sussex, Oxfordshire, Wales and even Switzerland; yet for all her allegiance to things English and folk, this favourite movement was an American idea, whose lineage went back no further than 1912. Camp Fire set out to provide girls of 12 to 18 with “romance, beauty and adventure in everyday life, and to make the homely task contribute to the joy of everyday living”.63 What this meant was that girls worked towards honours in specified useful subjects, as in Guildry and Guides; and that among the seven categories of “Craft”, the first was labelled “Home”. (The others were Health, Camp, Hand, Nature, Business and Patriotism, later retitled Citizenship.) The honours were not badges, as in Guides, but beads of different colours, which were strung on leather thongs around the wearer’s neck. The beads went with the Camp Fire “uniform”, which was based on the dress of the native American, partly as a concession to the national heritage of the movement. The fact that it had no real basis in native American culture made it no more irrelevant when transplanted to Britain.
The founders of Camp Fire, Dr Luther H. Gulick and his wife, expressed the firm belief that men and women were inherently different and that society benefited most when those differences were recognised and catered to, not diminished. For this reason alone, “to copy the Boy Scout movement would be utterly and fundamentally evil”. Girls should be encouraged to be “womanly”, and for the Gulicks that meant domestic.
The bearing and rearing of children has always been the first duty of most women, and that must always continue to be. This involves service, constant service, self-forgetfulness and always service.64
When they expounded their ideal of service, however, it was not confined (as was Lord Baden-Powell’s, for example) to service of husband and children.
Teach her the possibility of leading other girls — one of the greatest services that she can render
. . . Try to teach the girls how to do for other girls what has been done for them . . . The factory girls, for instance, the city girls, the country girls.65
In Oxenham’s novels the Abbey girls also exemplify this ideal of leading girls less fortunate than themselves; and though only Maidlin (the dreamy, sensitive one) joins Camp Fire, she does it for this very reason — as a service to the village girls.66
Alongside service, another womanly ideal which Camp Fire fostered was “beauty”. Gulick argued that throughout history, “beauty has been in the custody of women”, and that it likewise deserved a place in public life. But its espousal had a pragmatic purpose too:
Teach the old folk lore, the old folk dances, the old customs, sometimes dancing and singing by night about a fire — have that combined effect upon the senses, and you can make people over in the process and do it pretty quickly.67
This stunningly cynical observation makes it clear that Gulick envisaged Camp Fire as a form of social engineering — admittedly, not such a dirty word then as it is now — by seducing its victims with ritual and romance.
The Gulicks articulated a feminine version of a theme familiar in the closing years of the preceding century, that industrialisation had created an alienated workforce, deprived of beauty, variety and the opportunity to make meaningful human relationships. “So monotonous is the daily work in the shop, school, or home, that some inner vision is needed to show the real beauty that is back of daily work.” The increased employment of women and girls, they felt, was taking women away from the secure home environment with its ready-made social circle, and nothing had replaced it.
The net result is loneliness. It is not enough to provide things to do. Somehow or other the opportunity which we now lack for affection, friendship, comradeship, must be given; it is as basic as hunger . . . It is necessary to have games, and to camp out, and to build up better celebrations and a thousand different things, good in themselves, but the main significance of which is the human relations that are established in the process of doing things that we like, and having common experiences which we share.68
With these words, Dr Gulick got closer to the true meaning of these organisations for girls than any of the pious exponents of women’s role. In the end, it did not matter what you did in Guildry, Guides or Camp Fire, although naturally there was pride in doing something you believed was worthwhile. What really mattered was that you were doing it with other girls and women who became your friends.
By 1925, Camp Fire had spread to 21 countries, and 600,000 girls had passed through its ranks. It had also spawned several sets of novels in the United States. In Ven at Gregory’s (1925), Barbara declares: “I get every Camp Fire yarn I can get hold of, English or American.”70 Elinor Brent-Dyer, a keen fan of Elsie Oxenham’s work, paid homage to Camp Fire in the opening scene of The Chalet School Wins the Trick (1961), where Rosalie Dene surprises Audrey and her friends in the process of making a camp fire on the Chalet School’s cricket pitch. We learn later that Audrey has always longed to be a Guide, but because the meetings take place on Friday nights after school and would involve a long walk home in the dark, her parents refuse to allow her to join. When an American mistress comes to the school on exchange, a Camp Fire is planned, with meetings on Saturday mornings which Audrey could attend; but “then we had to come to Switzerland because of Dad and I’m out of it all”.
