Everything Is Better With Dragons

Description

A History of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts: Brownies, Rainbows and WAGGGS charts the evolution of the Girl Guides and Girl Scouts from its early days as a movement started before WW1 right through to the modern day. With real life interviews with Girl Guides and Girl Scouts from their 90s down to young children, this book looks at what being a Girl Guide has meant through the ages up to the present day. With dramatic and often emotional stories of what it was like to be an evacuated Brownie in the Second World War, a disabled Girl Guide and with tales of girls’ heroism throughout the two great wars both in the UK and the United States, this book extols the Guiding and Scouting movement as one that has evolved with women and girls’ rights and its hopes for the future.

My Review

Thanks to Rosie Crofts at Pen & Sword for sending me a copy of this book, way back in 2022. I was sent it in return for an honest review.

I wanted to review this book because I was in Brownies and Guides, and have some really good memories of being part of the Guiding movement. I got me through most of my teens and gave me something to do on a Wednesday evening for 7 years, and trips away. I still see my Brownie leader. I was also her Young Leader in a different Guide group when I was 17/18 after I left my original Guide group just before I turned 16. I managed a whole year out of Guides. When I went to university, I joined the Guides and Scouts association there, but didn’t do anything with them. There were so many people and they were not as welcoming as you would expect.

Reading this book brought back memories. I’d completely forgotten about the toadstool and mirror we used as a pool in Brownies to do our Promise. I can’t remember what Six I was in, but I think my sister made it to Seconder in her Six. I must have joined in 1990, or 1991, because I had the ‘new uniform’, a pair of trousers and a jumper, while my sister had the old brown dress and she joined a year before me. You had to wait until there was space before you could join. The leaders, Brownie Owl and Tawny Owl, were school teachers at my cousins’ primary school. We used to play games and make things. My best friend also went to that Brownies, but didn’t stay long because a lot of our games were floor based and she couldn’t take part, and I can’t remember her from then; we met in secondary school in 1994 and we’ve been friends ever since she talked at me until I finally responded. I did a few badges, mostly the walking and camping related ones. I think I tired to do some of the more domestic ones, but I wasn’t very good at the.

I went up to Guides in 1993 when I turned 10. My Guide leader was the vicar’s wife and a Marie Curie nurse. Our Guides, and the Brownies, were attached to the local C of E church. We did a lot of stuff in and around the church and the vicarage, because they had a huge garden, and knew a lot of people. We went camping, to adventure centres, did flower arranging, candle making and jam making, we went to The Body Shop for a special visit about make-up for beauty related stuff, followed by a trip to McDonalds, we went ice skating and to Cleethorpes swimming pool for a special treat. We went to Poacher 96, a big international camp help every four years at Lincolnshire Show Ground. We learnt about child safety and care. I got badges in walking, camping and other random stuff. We got new neckers around 1998, in Royal Stuart Tartan. Before that, I can’t remember what colour we had, or if we even had one.

There was one camp where I wanted to try climbing and abseiling, but I only just managed to climb the climbing wall and had to be helped down the internal stairs of the climbing tower, because I was too scared to abseil once I got to the top. I wet the sleeping bag every night of that camp. I was still bed wetting at that point. Luckily I was sleeping in my own tent, although I shared it with one other Guide who was as anxious as I was. I’d have preferred to have my own tent to myself. That was the camp where the leader went to buy ‘Seventeen’ magazine for a group of fifteen year old Guides (so I must have been 12 or 13) and was scandalised when she realised what was in Seventeen magazine. Some of those girls seemed impossibly more mature and sophisticated than me, even though they weren’t much older really.

At another camp, we stayed in dorms (I had adult nappies for this occasion) at an adventure centre and I fell in a river while canoeing. I don’t mind falling in rivers, that’s fun. We also went climbing on that trip too. I got sunburnt and hid under a rock after doing the easiest climb and abseil.

On one weekend trip to a local water sports centre, my sister and I had a dome tent and we played ‘how many guides can you get in a 2-person dome tent’.

The answer is 12. Twelve teenage Guides full of sugar, who’d just spent the day canoeing around an old clay pit.

I’m sure my experience in a Guide group in the 1990s in a small town in northern Lincolnshire will be different from a Guide in 1990s London or a coastal town in Cornwall.

This book isn’t a deep archival research based book, it outlines the story of Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting in Britain and the US in 1910, and shares the stories of Guides, Scouts, and Brownies from the last 80 years. It was written during the pandemic lockdowns, so the interviews were performed over video calls. Some of the quotes come from previously published memoirs to illustrate the experiences of other Guides.

The book shows there’s a rich social history to be found in the stories of Guides and Girl Scouts, ready to be mined. There are bits and pieces of information in this book that every Guide and Girl Scout should know – like who founded them (Agnes Baden-Powell in the UK, Juliette Gordon-Low in the US) and when, the origins of the names and uniforms, that sort of thing. It also looks to the future and the current needs of girls. GirlGuiding UK regularly surveys members in about the things that are currently important to them and has found some disturbing things about the way girls feel about their bodies and abilities.

Guides and Girl Scouts did consider opening to boys when I was a member, just after Scouting UK and Boy Scouts of American opened up to girls, but they decided that girls need a place away from boys, to develop their identities away from the influence of social expectations of the way children and teenagers of different genders should interact. The GirlGuiding UK website makes it clear that men can volunteer to help units in some capacities, but it is a girls-only organisation and the leaders are all women, for instance, had my grandad still been alive while I was a Guide, he could have taught us knots for a badge and been a tester, but he couldn’t have been a leader, although he’d been a Scout Leader in South Shields while my Dad and Uncle were in the Cub Scouts.

This book was fascinating and reminded me of the fun and adventures I had in my Guiding days. A great addition to any Guide’s library.