"The most curious" of all "queer societies"? Sexuality and Gender in British Woodcraft Camps, 1916–2016

Annebella Pollen

In the years during and after the Great War, disaffected with the apparent militarism and imperialism of Boy Scouts, British pacifists established rival outdoor youth organizations. These new organizations returned to some of the founding ideas of Scouting in the form of the "woodcraft" system of outdoor education pioneered at the turn of the twentieth century by Ernest Thompson Seton and latterly absorbed into Baden-Powell's organization. To these ideas each of the new organizations — the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, and Woodcraft Folk — added their own distinctive philosophies, drawing on psychology, spirituality, art and politics, to provide idiosyncratic camping experiences across genders and ages. Camp in this context was more than leisure, and more than an escape from encroaching industrialization — it was a personally and socially trans- formative space, rich with utopian possibility.

The British woodcraft movement's subversions represent a distinctive and elaborate queering of the Boy Scout ideal. Through their futurist visions and revivalist performances, members acted out their radical ideals for a hybrid new/old world. Alongside these activities, each group developed detailed and sometimes unorthodox ideas about "sex instruction" and "sex equality" interlinked with complex theories of camping. As such, new ideas about social relationships ran through woodcraft organizations' vision and were played out under canvas. In the temporary worlds of primitivist camps in the heady period of change after the Great War, alternatives to so-called civilized life could be tried on for size. Gender and sexuality became prime sites where the limits of experimental practices were tested and contested, and aspects of these challenges continue in the organizations' twenty-first century manifestations.

Through an investigation of woodcraft theories and practices, this essay examines the movement as a case study of oppositional ideals in the interwar period, when camping and experiments in living intertwined. While woodcraft organizations in Britain have always been much smaller in scale than numbers of Scouts and Guides, and their founding ideas were far from mainstream, their position as aspiring cultural revolutionaries meant that they inhabited a space — literally and figuratively — as outsiders. This essay presents views from the three most prominent woodcraft organizations, each founded during or shortly after the Great War. The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry was the first pacifist coeducational breakaway from Scouts. Founded in 1916, it was at its most productive in the 1920s and 1930s with public projects including the progressive Forest School for children and Grith Fyrd craft training camp for unemployed men. The organization recently celebrated its centenary; it is now a very small cluster of descendants of early members. The flamboyant, artistic Kindred of the Kibbo Kift was established as an all-ages, mixed-gender alternative to Scouts in 1920 but only lasted just over a decade as a woodcraft organiza- tion before being radically remodeled into an economic campaign group (The Green Shirts) and latterly a short-lived political party (The Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Ireland). Finally, Woodcraft Folk was founded in 1925 following a schism in Kibbo Kift over political direction; it continues to thrive as an outdoor-focused and democratic organization with around 15,000 adult and child members in groups spread across the United Kingdom.

Camping as an Oppositional Practice

Camping may seem to be an innocuous leisure activity, merely providing a low-budget holiday; as such, it could be of little social or political consequence. Yet camping has also been described as essentially socialist in character. In G. A. Cohen's analysis, as a system based on collective property and mutual giving, camping demonstrates in miniature "that society-wide socialism is equally feasible and equally desirable" (11). Camps are clearly diverse in their organization and ideologies, but they have nevertheless been characterized as extraordinary and exceptional places; as philosopher Giorgio Agamben has put it, the camp is "a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order" (1). For their capacity to stand outside conventional social structures, camps have become utilized for protest and as sites where the building blocks of society can be symbolically deconstructed and remade. Angela Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel, and Patrick McCurdy, for example, have argued that the collective nature of camps has been particularly effective in forging "communities of understanding." In their conception, camp is a "unique structural, spatial and temporal form that shapes those who live, work, play and create within it" (8). A further essential aspect of camp — its transitory nature — necessarily results in a shift in everyday practices. To use the anarchist Hakim Bey's terminology, camps encapsulate a "temporary autonomous zone" where intentional com- munities can form "pirate utopias." The temporary nature of camping allows for the suspension of norms and the trying on of new worlds for size. As camping historian Matthew de Abaitua writes, "Camping promises nothing permanent. It is a way of trafficking between what was and what could yet be" (60).

The romantic promise of camping has long held an allure for reformers at odds with the modern world. Since the writings of Henry David Thoreau in the mid-nineteenth century, a substantial body of literature has been produced in Britain and America espousing the ostensibly moral value...