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FROSTY'S RAMBLINGS Scouting for boys: imperialists vs the YCL

PETER FROST digs out his old Boy Scout uniform — including his leather woggle — and looks back to the history of red-baiting in what was once Britain’s biggest male youth movement

WE HADN’T long won the second world war, with our Soviet allies suffering 27 million dead, when in 1946 Winston Churchill made his “Iron Curtain” speech to launch the Cold War.

On both sides of the Atlantic red-baiting became an industry, and communists were persecuted everywhere from Hollywood to the Boy Scouts of Britain.

Paul Garland was a Queen’s Scout from Bristol. He was also a member of the Young Communist League (YCL). He could see no reason not to be a loyal member of both youth organisations.

The YCL had no objection to him being a Boy Scout, but the Scouts tried to throw him out. The media, in a frenzy, coined the term Red Scouts. The House of Lords debated Paul Garland.

Baden Powell, who had founded the Scout movement, was a typical British imperialist, a national hero in The Siege of Mafeking in South Africa. Baden-Powell had stolen Africans’ food for whites and expelled black women to be raped and murdered. Later he would illegally execute a prisoner of war and allowed the massacre of prisoners.

Baden Powell had another interest — an unhealthy one in very young boys. Today we would undoubtedly describe him as a paedophile, but that word wasn’t invented until 1886.

There is no doubt that Baden-Powell saw scouting as a way to steer youth towards maintaining the British empire, and a Christian and conservative Britain. It was also a handy way to surround himself with fit young lads.

Baden-Powell and his wife Olave fled Britain when WWII started in 1939. They took themselves off to a peaceful cottage in Nyeri in what was then British Kenya. Before the war he had admired Hitler’s book Mein Kampf. “A wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation,” he said and was invited to meet Hitler.

He visited Italy and thought Mussolini’s Fascist youth movement “augers well for the future of Italy.” By 1937, he stated that the Nazis were “most anxious that the Scouts should come into closer touch with the Hitler Youth movement in Germany.”

By the early 1950s with the Nazis defeated, interest in communism was growing. Some Scouts held communist views and also belonged to the YCL. Scout authorities saw these so-called red scouts as a threat to the ideological foundations of scouting, and as left-wing traitors. Some Scout leaders quietly expelled such left-leaning members.

In the 1920s too, YCL members had been expelled from Scout troops for similar reasons. Then the YCL saw scouting as a militaristic exploitation of the working class. They sent Baden-Powell a coffin symbolising the death of scouting.

The YCL challenged Baden-Powell to a public debate, which he refused, but exchanged letters with William Rust, the YCL’s national secretary. Rust was later to become the first editor of the Daily Worker — the predecessor of the Morning Star.

Baden-Powell, who camped with a Rolls Royce and luxury caravan, had started a scout fund to raise £50,000. Rust described this as asking the wealthy to fight communism and to poison the minds of young workers.

By the 1940s and early 1950s the supposedly non-political scout movement started to become far more interested in shaping the political opinions of its young members and leaders.

This was of course, part of the wider McCarthyite anti-communism that Britain shared with the US. Communists, socialists and left-wing thinkers were purged from all kinds of employment and positions.

In 1948 a new anti-communist government organisation — The Information Research Department (IRD) — was set up by right-wing Labour MP Christopher Mayhew in order, he said, “to counter Soviet propaganda and infiltration, particularly in the labour movement.”

Along with MI5 the IRD was soon harassing Communist Party and YCL members. They covered all society from ordinary workers, civil servants, intellectuals, BBC personnel, entertainers — and Boy Scouts.

But attitudes to empire were changing. Colonies were demanding independence. India won its freedom in 1947. The YCL organised anti-colonial campaigns and challenged the scouts.

Traditional scout leaders saw the scouting movement as a bulwark against radical youth and post-war teenage culture, a way to lead young men back to imperialistic, militaristic and generally conservative thinking.

Young communists were accused of threatening the principles of scouting. In 1951 British scouts published a rabidly anti-communist booklet — A Challenge to Scouting: The Menace of Communism.

In 1950, Jeffrey Hinkinson, a 17-year-old Scout, was expelled for collecting over 200 signatures on a peace petition. He was not a YCL member but had left-wing views.

Paul Garland, a 19-year-old toolmaker from Bristol, had been interviewed by the press after being elected West of England YCL district secretary. “Communism is not the only cause in which Paul Garland is active,” said the article. It reported that Garland had been a Boy Scout since the age of eight and was a Queen’s Scout.

His communist views had been known to his scoutmaster, but the publicity about his new YCL post was a step too far. The Scouts announced: “Paul will not be sacked, he will just cease to be a scout.”

In his scout uniform, Paul defiantly attended his local scout troop’s pantomime — Little Red Riding Hood. The press turned up in numbers and he told them he intended to appeal against his sacking.

His scoutmaster wrote “for reasons which must now be apparent to you I give you formal notice of your dismissal. I must ask you to return your badges.”

This case split the entire scout movement. The YCL mounted an immediate campaign to reverse Garland’s dismissal, even picketing the chief scout.

The YCL magazine Challenge and YCL leaflets made the case against the expulsion. The Daily Worker supported the young scout.

The BBC interviewed Paul but the scheduled programme was pulled by the BBC, bowing to pressure from Tory MPs.

One assistant district commissioner for scouting asked “if communist boys are barred, why not Conservatives, Liberals and Labour?”

YCL national secretary John Moss wrote to chief scout Lord Rowallan: “There is no question of Mr Garland’s deep interest, activity and loyalty to the scout movement as those of us in the YCL who have known him for a number of years can personally bear out. We believe that it is quite possible for a young person to be a scout and a communist.”

Another British scout hit the headlines in the same month as Paul Garland. He was Richard Etheridge from Birmingham, a 20- year-old YCL member. He had written to the Birmingham Gazette in support of Garland.

The paper didn’t publish his letter,but instead exposed him as another Red Scout. Members of Etheridge’s Scout troop were not surprised, as his communist views were well known.

As with Garland, the YCL defended Etheridge’s dual membership. Colin Williams, the Midlands YCL secretary, stated: “we deplore this attack on the sacred rights of an individual to follow whatever political and religious beliefs he may have.” Etheridge remained a scout.

The YCL used Etheridge’s reprieve to strengthen Garland’s case, stating that: “The scout officials in Birmingham have acted in a more sensible way than those still insisting on the expulsion of Paul Garland.

“The decision to allow Dick E. to stay in the scouts is a victory for democracy and a blow against the witch-hunt.”

Nobody knows why in these two virtually identical cases Etheridge won his appeal and Garland lost.

Richard Etheridge disappeared from the headlines, although his dad became quite famous as a convenor in the motor factories of Longbridge.

Paul Garland never returned to scouting and remained a committed member of the YCL, writing in Challenge. He went on to become a Labour city councillor. When he died in 1999 he was deputy mayor of Bristol.

It is an amazing story, how the whole weight of the British Establishment, the secret service and thousands of scoutmasters in khaki shorts and wide-brimmed hats used McCarthyite witch-hunts and expulsions against a few brave young men who chose only to think for themselves.

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