Janie Hampton - How the Girl Guides Won the War

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.’

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.