How the Girl Guides Won the War. Janie Hampton

      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