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How the Girl Guides Won the War: Janie Hampton Harper Press 2010
Read over July and August 2011

The war in question is the second world war, and while the book itself doesn’t really bear out the claim of the title, it does show the extremely important role that Guiding played during that period in Great Britain, the Channel Islands, Continental resistance movements, internment camps on the other side of the world and afterwards. It’s woven together from all kinds of sources – the most gripping are usually the words of the girls and women themselves, either recorded at the time or speaking with hindsight.

We start with an overview of how the Guiding movement was set up – the well-known story of girls wanting to be Scouts too, briefly covering its development suggesting some of the attributes that would turn out to be valuable assets. I grew up knowing that the Guides existed, although they weren’t something that most girls of my background did at the time. I knew more about it through Catherine Christian and girls’ own books, than contemporary sources – the odd feature on TV shows like Blue Peter, maybe. Anyway, I hadn’t fully realised how widely the movement had spread so very quickly. Just before the second world war broke out, Guides from many countries were meeting at an international peace camp. Part of the preparations, in grim irony, involved plans as to what to do if war broke out.

War did break out and, suddenly, many of the practical skills these bands of girls had developed for badges, their teamwork, discipline and preparedness to help out and think of others became vital. Whether it was in the Blitz or in helping evacuees from bombing to rehabilitate elsewhere, Brownies, Guides, Rangers and their leaders did amazing things. While reading about heroism and good deeds, Hampton is careful to leaven her tales with humanising details and chapters about escapades at the camps that went on despite rationing and other difficulties. Girls, some not even teenagers, were needed to fill roles that men who had gone to war could not. In situations were levelheaded selflessness was needed, Hampton records how Guides and Guiders stepped up to be messengers, nurses, cooks and cleaners.

It is the stories of Guiding overseas that are the most sobering. A brief mention is made of Malta, whose Guides received a medal for bravery, but we return time and again to Poland, whose Guides were similarly decorated. After Germany invaded the country, Guiding was banned there. So it went underground and, as grim privations and hardship were endured, the Guides fought in their own way. The stories of what happened here, as in the Channel Islands, are very powerful. We also return over several chapters to the story of the children of Cheffoo – a British school in China mainly for missionaries’ children, which was sent to an internment camp run by the Japanese army for most of the war. There the Brownie and Guiding companies helped, as we see over and over, by giving children something positive to do in difficult situations.

The breadth of the book is one of its strengths – many stories are told. In some cases, we read about one thing that one Guide – perhaps unnamed – did. In others, we have more detail as the situation deserves further exploration. We are reminded that these were children, but in their uniforms (pride in their trefoil, uniform and badges is a recurring theme) as Guides, they were something else too. Something admirable: a key factor in how the war was faced and yes, perhaps, won. Certainly the chapter about the role of the Guide International Serivve in post-war relief work, where small teams of volunteering young women helped, as required, to bring medical aid or succour to displaced people is worth reading.

It’s hard to be critical about the book, and, to some extent, I think the author was led by the material her research uncovered, so although I preferred Bluestockings by Jane Robinson, which looked at the early female university students) I don’t know whether that was the author or the subject. But it throws a different light on the second world war, shows Guiding and what it made of many girls and young women at a particular time in a positive, useful light, plus it does so engrossingly. I didn't read it without pause, but the way that the chapters were organised helped with that.