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.
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’