Free Songs of Innocence by Fran Abrams

criminal offence for mothers to attempt to impose their personality on their children,’ he wrote in 1911. 19 ‘Certain things have been proved to be of use in this world. Hardness. Truth. Keenness and quickness of mind. Indifference to pleasure. Honesty and energy in work.
Hatred of dirt in all its forms. I believe they can best be taught by men. You can’t get them from the average mother. They aren’t in her. The world has gone steadily downhill in all
manly qualities since the “mother’s personality” became what is called a “factor in education”.’
    The best kind of childhood, then, was spent outdoors in the countryside, largely free from the ministrations of the adult world but always under its watchful gaze, and with regular parental
interventions. This growing obsession with the virtues of the countryside and fresh air had its roots in mythology, then, in a desire to return to something that resembled the core of what the
nation thought of as ‘Englishness’. ‘The English are by nature a country people. The very manner in which they neglect their towns proves that,’
The
Times
20 explained. Yet there was an even more pressing, more pragmatic urge to find a healthier way of life for the next generation: the very
future of the Empire was at stake.

3  Scout’s Honour
    As Sonia Keppel’s mother had celebrated the Relief of Mafeking astride a Trafalgar Square lion in May 1900, Robert Baden-Powell – commander of the British troops
– had been reflecting on a job well done. The siege had lasted 217 days and its victorious end turned him into a national hero. Yet a few years on Baden-Powell had concerns on his mind, too
– about the future of Britain’s young. His intervention would have a profound effect on attitudes to, and the lives of, millions of children and young people – an effect whose
ripples still spread today.
    The youth of Mafeking had done sterling work during the siege. Organized into a well-run cadet force in khaki uniforms and wide-brimmed hats and with a thirteen-year-old named Warner Goodyear as
Sergeant Major, they had acted as lookouts and had carried messages, often as far as a mile over open ground. Back in Britain, and with time to reflect, Baden-Powell now wondered whether the
children of the English slums would have been up to the job.
    Even before the Boer War, the future founder of the Scout movement had been worrying about this issue. He had been very struck by a book called
Degeneration
, which had made quite a stir
in the early 1890s. Its author, Max Nordau, had claimed that a wave of degenerate writers and artists – Oscar Wilde and Henrik Ibsen, toname but two – was
symptomatic of a deeper malaise. Socialism, anarchism and the demand for women’s rights were corroding the values of European societies, Nordau said. As a result they were ‘marching to
certain ruin because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great tasks’. 1
    In fact, Britain’s eventual victory in the Boer War masked the fact that throughout the conflict there had been concern about the physical fitness of many of the British troops. In 1900,
the army had been forced to cut the minimum height requirement for infantry soldiers from five foot three and a half inches to five foot three, yet even so almost three out of ten prospective
recruits were rejected.
    Now, Baden-Powell became a leading voice in the national debate about where the youth of Britain’s industrial cities was headed. In February 1904, in an address to the Liverpool Patriotic
Society, he described working-class teenage boys as ‘loafers’ and ‘wasters’. They drank, smoked and watched – rather than played – sports. They gambled and spent
hours on street corners. Even the public schoolboy was not immune to slouching around with a cigarette in his mouth and his hands in his pockets. The message hit home, not least because it chimed
with an already rising note of alarm in the public discourse on