How the Girl Guides Won the War. Janie Hampton

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