Education for Social Change: The many histories of Woodcraft Folk

12 Themes Archives

 How far can the aims and principles of Woodcraft Folk, and its activities (, group night activities, badge work, etc) be understood in terms of progressive education? To what TBC extent do these mirror or oppose practices of other youth organisations?  To what extent can Woodcraft Folk be positioned at the vanguard of progressive educational practice in Britain? Has Woodcraft Folk influenced progressive educational develop- ments, and/or does it adopt and adapt ideas and practices from elsewhere?  To what extent has Woodcraft Folk had a clear relationship with the Labour Movement? To what extent has Woodcraft Folk provided a political education similar to that of other socialist and democratic youth movements (e.g., Internation- al Falcon Movement / Socialist Education International)?  In what ways has co-operative learning been central to Woodcraft Folk? How can this be understood as part of its relationship with the Co-operative Movement? How has that relationship shifted over time?  How far have the educational practices and objectives of Woodcraft Folk been able to reflect and adapt to changing priorities and struggles in society, such as pacifism, feminism, environmental politics, anti-racism, civil rights, LGBTQ+ and disabled rights? Can we characterise Woodcraft Folk as a radical and disruptive organization or a more guarded and traditional one?  Woodcraft Folk has a strong and proud tradition of internationalism. What has this meant for the educational work and other activities of the organisation? What are its relationships with international youth groups, past and present? How has internationalism impacted on members and their sense of a global outlook?

2 11 and World Programme Citizenship Professor Douglas Bourn, UCL Institute of Education 10.30 Registration and coffee - Drama Studio, IOE, 20 Bedford Way

11.00 Welcome and Introductions by Lloyd Russell-Moyle,MP

Throughout its history the Woodcraft Folk has had a strong internationalist 11.15 Outline of the Day – and Chair of first sessions: Professor tradition and this has been reflected in a range educational initiatives from the Douglas Bourn, UCL 1930s onwards that promote a sense of being a ‘world citizen’. 11.25 Progressive Cultures in Inter-War Britain—Situating Leslie The Folk’s engagement with this theme mirrors broader educational initiatives in Paul – Dr. Annebella Pollen the 1930s in response to the threat of fascism and the promotion of ‘education for world citizenship’, the emergence in the 1960s and 1970s of social 11.45 Woodcraft, the International Union of Socialist Youth and New movements around internationalism and in the last decade or so around in Germany after the First World War - Dr Susanne ‘education for global citizenship.’ Rappe-Weber

This paper will review specific Woodcraft Folk educational materials from the late 12.05 Group Discussions on themes emerging from the morning 1960s, the 1970s and over the last decade in terms of different sociological and session philosophical interpretations of world and global citizenship. It will conclude by posing some questions around the extent to which the term ‘global citizenship’ 12.40 Introduction to the Archives – Dr Andrew Flinn could be interpreted as a ‘western construction’, as a form of critical 12.45-13.40 Lunch and opportunity to see archives and watch films ‘cosmopolitanism” or as a term to engage young people around the world or to have a sense of global social responsibility. 13.40 Session chaired by Annebella Pollen, University of Brighton: , Eugenics and the Woodcraft Folk in the inter-war

years – Rich Palser Professor Douglas Bourn is Co-Director of Development Education Research Centre, UCL-IOE, author of the Theory and Practice of Development Education 14.00 It Was Natural for Youth to be rebels - The Woodcraft Folk, (2015) and Understanding Global Skills for 21st Century Professions (2018). He the British labour movement and autonomy of youth previously worked for the Woodcraft Folk from 1977 to 1983 as its first Northern movements - Dr Andrew Flinn Officer and from 1983 to 1990 as its National Secretary. [email protected] 14.20 Group Discussions on 2 Presentations

14.55-15.10 Tea Break

15.10 Final Session Chaired by Andrew Flinn, UCL: Blue Skies: The Woodcraft Folk, and Landscape – Forging New Spaces in Old Woods - Suzanne Joinson

15.30 Woodcraft Folk and World Citizenship- Douglas Bourn

16.00 Discussion on 2 presentations in groups

16.30 Final Reflections and Observations

16.45 End of Symposium

10 3 Abstracts of presentations branch (where my children currently attend as Pioneers and Elfins).The talk looks at the idealisation of Sussex landscapes as part of Woodcraft Folk’s ethos in the past and how Woodcraft Folk's engagement with independent and natural spaces is even more relevant today as we exist in an increasingly less 'natural' and more digital world.

The talk examines how what might be seen as rather old fashioned activities - camping, night walks, singing, bushcraft etc - in fact provide radical outdoor spaces offering a literal and metaphorical breather from normal school-enforced Progressive Cultures in Interwar Britain: educational expectations and digital realities. Crucially this activity is both extremely affordable and local. Sussex-related activities usually happen on Situating the edgelands of usual controlled zones such as school playgrounds or activity Dr Annebella Pollen, University of Brighton centres. Instead, Woodcraft Folk projects happen in the corners of farmland, along riverbanks and in woodlands. They also link to community and calendar- based activities such as Maypole dancing, harvest and Christmas festivals, and As the co-founder of Woodcraft Folk with Sidney Shaw in 1925, and as its first egg-rolling at Easter. ‘Head Man’, Leslie Paul was undoubtedly the most dominant influence on the policies and practices of the early years of the organisation. In part this was due My premise is that contemporary Woodcraft Folk activity is not nostalgic, despite to his insatiable energy and his prodigious abilities as a writer; he was the sole the fascinating and intriguing history, but rather in the past was way ahead of its author of the first generation of educational literature for Woodcraft Folk, from the time. It now finds itself relevant, useful and able to position itself as a local first pamphlet, The Child and the Race (1926), to his most substantial work of provider a radical, alternative forward-thinking educational space for young educational theory, The Republic of Children (1938). Through these works, Paul people. established an intellectual identity as well as a practical method for Woodcraft Folk, based on his socialist politics and his formative experiences in youth organisations from the Boy Scouts to the Kindred of the . Suzanne Joinson is a novelist, published by Bloomsbury (A Lady Cyclist's Guide This study seeks to understand the contributions of Paul to Woodcraft Folk in the to Kashgar and The Photographer's Wife), essayist (New York Times, Aeon, context of his wider writings and intellectual networks. During and after his Guardian and many other places), and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Woodcraft Folk years, Paul published extensively, far beyond education and youth University of Chichester where she teach creative non-fiction. She has a strong subjects, producing poetry, novels, journalism and book-length works of social interest in narratives and stories connected to Sussex.

and political theory; through these it is possible to chart his personal passions and political attitudes as they unfolded and, through his four autobiographical works produced between 1946 and 1977, in retrospect. Paul described himself and his friends in the interwar years as ‘inveterate joiners’ and this presentation also explores his cultural allegiances outside Woodcraft Folk, in particular his central role in the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals, an organisation founded in the early 1930s by H. G. Wells and C. E. M. Joad to create an alliance of Left interests. The broad remit of the organisation, encompassing reformist ideals in politics, economics, psychology, sex and architecture (to name but a few of its concerns), provides a wider framework for understanding Paul’s educational vision, and for understanding what it meant to be ‘progressive’ in interwar Britain.

4 9 disciplined and “be guided by the experience of elder persons” (LNV, August 1939). Dr Annebella Pollen teaches, researches and publishes cultural history across a range of periods and case studies. From 2015-17 she held an AHRC Fellowship This paper will examine the relationship between labour movement organisations examining the visual and material culture of British woodcraft groups. Related (including political parties, trade unions and the movement bodies) publications include The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians (Donlon and children’s and youth organisations between the 1920s and the 1950s, a Books, 2015, with accompanying exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery 2015-16), relationship that was often characterised by language of family, parental contributions to A People’s History of Woodcraft Folk (2016) and essays in Being authority and youthful rebellion. In examining this relationship the paper will look Modern (2018), Queer As Camp (2019) and Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in at the history of organising children and young people on the British left in the the Modern World (2019). [email protected] inter-war and immediate post-war period including the size of these bodies, the varied understandings of the purpose of such organisations, and the comparison

between Britain and other European social democratic and labour movement

organisations. In particular this paper will focus on the debates and disputes between youth organisations like the Woodcraft Folk and their ‘parent’ bodies with reference to political including cooperative education, empowerment and autonomy and the utilisation of the language of youth and newness, future and Woodcraft, the International Union of change, vigour and vitality, age and experience, respect and authority. Socialist Youth and New Scouting in

Andrew Flinn is a Reader in Archival Studies and Oral History at University Germany after the First World War College London and an active member of the Woodcraft Folk. Before UCL he worked at the People's History Museum in Manchester. His research interests Dr. Susanne Rappe-Weber, Archive of the German Youth including grassroots and community-based appproaches to history-making and Movement, Witzenhausen histories of labour movements and activists. Relevant publications include (with

Duff and Wallace) Archives & Social Justice (forthcoming 2019) and '͚Working with the past: making history of struggle part of the struggle' in Reflections on The German movement, which was strongly militaristic in its practice until Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements (eds Aziz & Vally, 2018). 1918, had to reorient itself after losing the First World War. The German youth traditions of Wandervogel and Freideutsche were influential, as was the reception

of 's interpretation of woodcraft. From 1921, German translations of Hargrave’s books were published by White Knight, which was at the same time

the publisher of White Knight: A Leader Magazine. This was founded by Franz Ludwig Habbel (1894-1964) who also headed the German youth organisation, Blue Skies: Woodcraft Folk, Sussex and Bund Deutscher Neupfadfinder. The forms of youth and self-education, nature education and Gemeinschaft (community) tested in this alliance were fundamental Landscape – Forging New Spaces in Old for the new formation of the Bündische Jugend of the Weimar Republic. The Central Archive of the German Youth Movement at Burg Ludwigstein contains, in Woods addition to historical literature, organisational documents and journals as well as Suzanne Joinson, University of Chichester personal papers such as those of the English-German youth activist Rolf Gardiner (1902-1971). Interesting references to Woodcraft programmes and to Kibbo Kift This presentation explores the relationship between Woodcraft Folk and can be found in the German discussions of scouting, which were conducted landscape, in particular Sussex. It examines the vision behind the original West intensively among Neupfadfinders. Hoathly campground, acquired by Henry Fair (who always signed off with Blue Skies), contrasting and comparing it with the current Woodcraft Folk camping site at Lurgashall, West Sussex and the countryside used by the Steyning

8 5 This presentation will ask how the woodcraft ideas of John Hargrave – ideas ● First, to unravel exactly how the early Woodcrafters saw eugenic and that were so influential in the early days of the Woodcraft Folk - were recorded, socialist philosophies being combined in the educational policy of the interpreted and put into practice in German scout circles. The personal and Woodcraft Folk organizational connections between English and German youth education ● Second, to examine the broader influence of eugenics on early British activists will also be taken into consideration, alongside the nationalist aspects youth movements, and the specific influences that led to these ideas that flowed into the criticism of scouting. These included specific German being adopted by the early Woodcraft Folk perceptions of key concepts, such as woodcraft and ‘tribal education’. Symbolic expressions such as Führung (leadership) and Gefolgschaft (loyalty) (as seen in ● Thirdly, to explore how and why the Woodcraft Folk came to abandon the "Prunner Gelöbnis" pledge of the Neupfadfinder, 1919) as well as Weißer the use of recapitulation theory in its educational policy, and how it Ritter (white knight), "Reich" (realm) and "Gral" (Grail) signal the new elitist arrived at a revised educational policy in in the face of the Second positioning of the Bündische Jugend - the alliance of German youth groups - World War which formed the nucleus of the concept of the ‘Neuer Mensch’ (New Man). The paper will review how, with the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, the Dr. Susanne Rappe-Weber was educated at the Universities of Hanover and Folk became torn between its long term goals of socialist renewal through the Potsdam, and undertook an archive clerkship at the Hessian State Archive education of children on the one hand, and the urgency of political activity Marburg. Since 2002 she has been the Director of the Archive of the German against fascism and war on the other. It will be argued that it was the Youth Movement at Burg Ludwigstein, where she edits and contributes to the involvement of the Folk in the Socialist Educational International which gave the Archive Yearbook and publishes research on historical youth. main stimulus to the abandonment of the recapitulation theory in favour of an Owenite educational practice. However, the Folk did not merely adapt itself to

the educational approaches of the SEI; it integrated its existing woodcraft practices into an Owenite framework, and so maintained its distinctiveness from, and distinctive contribution to, the SEI.

Rich Palser is a Lecturer in Access to Higher Education at Tower Hamlets Socialism, Eugenics and the Woodcraft College and the third of four generations of his family to have played active roles in Woodcraft Folk since the 1930s. He has published research on Folk in the inter-war years Woodcraft Folk in relation to 1960s youth culture in Socialist History journal. Rich Palser, Tower Hamlets College

At the time of its emergence from the Kibbo Kift Kindred in 1925, the Woodcraft Folk proclaimed its distinctiveness as a movement as being that it was ‘the only one in which the philosophies of eugenics and socialism are united and working in harness.’ The founders of the Woodcraft Folk clearly felt there was no “It was natural for youth...to be rebels”. The contradiction between eugenics and socialism. Indeed, they claimed that the Woodcraft Folk, the British labour movement originality of their contribution to socialism lay in the application of the theory of ‘recapitulation’ so as to improve the eugenic ‘stock’ of the working class. and the autonomy of youth movements Recapitulation theory remained a reference point both in its internal discussion Dr Andrew Flinn, UCL and its public pronouncements for the decade after its founding, and this theory was only publicly repudiated in 1938. Long before the ‘discovery’ of the teenager and ‘youth rebellion’ in the 1950s and 1960s, in 1939 Jack Munro, a longstanding and senior member of the This paper will be based on an on-going study which sets out to accomplish Manchester Labour movement, acknowledged the desire of young people to be three main things: rebellious but also emphasised that if they were to make the desired contribution to the struggles of the labour movement then they needed to be

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