Following the declaration of war on 4 August 1914, an outpouring of patriotism swept Britain as many sought to ‘do their bit’ for the war effort. Lord Robert Baden-Powell was quick respond to the situation, sending out word that Boy Scouts should be mobilised and ready to serve their country in whatever capacity was needed. To those yet to become part of the scouting movement, his public message was: To the boys of Britain: come and join the nearest troops in your district and do your duty like a man.

A former war hero (at the Boer War), Baden-Powell had founded the Boy Scouts in 1908 following the success of his book Scouting for Boys, a manual of observation, tracking, and woodcraft skills that encouraged self-discipline and self-improvement. By the end of that year, there were some 60,000 Boy Scouts, with new troops continuing to spring up both in Britain and across the Commonwealth; this represented a significant body of children and teenagers ready to take on some of the new tasks that a state of war demanded.

Coastal watchers
The first call upon the Scouts came within days of war being declared, with the Admiralty requesting that 1000 Sea Scouts form part of a network of watchers along the east coast, monitoring the seas for enemy vessels, collecting salvage from beaches and ensuring that vessels which landed had the appropriate fishing permits. During the course of the war, some 20,000 boys undertook this important role, many of whom were away from home for weeks at a time on these demanding tours of duty.

Other Scouts undertook guarding duties at important points of infrastructure, wary of the threat of spies, sabotage or invasion. We know that some guarded railway lines, telegraph and telephone exchanges, reservoirs and culverts. Scouts in Berwick-upon-Tweed even helped guard the military installations of the garrison town, while various troops in Essex patrolled local roads between 8pm and 8am, a potentially exhausting experience for the youngsters involved. We know that Sheffield Scouts were given instruction cards detailing their role in the event of an air raid over the city, and some 250 Birmingham Scouts were employed on local trams to free up men for military service.

Scouts often acted as messengers for public bodies such as the military, government and Post Office; this service was replicated throughout the Commonwealth, with there even being reports of Scouts serving as messengers and orderlies in the hospitals of Alexandria, where they must have seen war casualties at first hand. In many urban areas, Scout buglers found themselves in demand as they proved an effective way of sounding the all-clear after the threat of air raids from enemy airships had passed.

Some Scout leaders rallied to the call for children to collect conkers in the autumn of 1917 – not to play with, but for the extraction of a chemical called acetone used in making cordite for use in explosive manufacture. The War Office offered a bounty of seven shillings and sixpence for every hundredweight of conkers rounded up, and children managed to collect more than there were trains to transport them to the extraction plant in King’s Lynn. While around 3000 tonnes of conkers did reach their destination, the plan was something of a flop and many conkers were simply left to rot when extraction proved too troublesome.

Not all Scouts managed to embody the ‘Scout Spirit’, however, and some even took advantage of their uniform. In October 1914, nine Scouts from 3rd Hampstead Troop were reported to the police for attempting to collect money for Belgian refugees – something they were not authorised to do. When interviewed, it was discovered that the boys had been collecting between two and five shillings a day to spend on “sweets, picture palaces, etc”. The group, aged between 12 and 14, were “severely cautioned”, but no records remain as to whether they were allowed to remain part of their troop or not.

Girl Guides
The Girl Guides also displayed an eagerness to help the war effort. Founded in 1909 in response to the attempts of many young women to join the Boy Scouts, it was intended to provide a similar movement suited to the specific needs of girls and young women. With Baden-Powell’s sister Agnes at their head, the first troops were formed around core themes of good citizenship, doing good turns for others, and building useful practical and physical skills.

Within days of the declaration of war, Guiding Headquarters had issued a notice that read, “in this time of national crisis and grave danger the Girl Guides also can give valuable help to their country by carrying out the duties for which they have been organised and trained”. There followed a list of examples of the sort of appropriate services that the Guides could offer in their local communities. This differed from the expectations of the Boy Scouts, and included suggestions such as volunteering in crèches and soup kitchens, looking after children while their mothers went out to work, and offering services to the Red Cross and St John’s Ambulance divisions. There was a fear that if strict limits weren’t placed on the girls’ activities, the excessive physical exertion they experienced could damage their ‘interior economy’ and cause unattractive side effects such as hairy lips!

One of the more adventurous activities that Guides undertook was as messengers, either on foot or by bicycle for an assortment of organisations. A small number of girls aged between 14 and 16 were even employed by MI5 to ferry important war messages between offices. These positions had initially been filled by Boy Scouts early in the war, but they were “found to be very troublesome. The considerable periods of inactivity which fell to their share usually resulted in their getting into mischief”. Their replacements, however, “proved more amenable” to the task in hand. The MI5 Guides worked daily from 9am to 7pm with little time off and were paid ten shillings a week (about £43 in today’s values) plus dinner, but could only undertake such a role with permission of their parents. The girls were noted by the permanent staff to be eager and devoted to their work.

Feeding the nation
One area where both Scouts and Guides played a role was in providing food for the nation. German U-boat attacks on shipping had restricted food imports to Britain, making the country ever more reliant on home-grown produce just as the agricultural workforce was dwindling as workers left the land to take up military roles. Many Scouts helped bring in harvests; by the summer of 1918, 46 Scout troops from London’s East End were sending around 300 boys to the Peterborough area for this task, for example. Guides often tended vegetable gardens and allotments, and some picked fruit or helped on farms.

Scouts and Guides certainly played a valuable – and varied – role in the war effort, one that was welcomed by the public at large as making a significant contribution to the country. However, not everyone thought it was universally a good thing. Some commentators at the time expressed concern that children were being exploited for cheap labour, especially in agricultural work. Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour Party, spoke out strongly in one of his last parliamentary speeches in September 1915 about the practice. Children were legally able to leave school at 13 at this time, but education authorities in many areas were allowing those of 11 or 12 to leave so they could take up work in farming or factories, filling some of the thousands of jobs left vacant as workers left for the war. Hardie feared the erosion of a century of progress in children’s rights, accusing school boards of “robbing the child of the education which the law has provided for it”. Given the heavy demand for workers at the time, this plea largely fell on deaf ears. In other areas, local arrangements were made that Scouts of school age involved in overnight duties could be excused classes the following day without being branded truants – although the children were still expected to work long hours and keep up their schooling.