How the Girl Guides Won the War

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.