Opening GambitPaving the way for women in chess

Opening Gambit
Paving the way for women in chess

Jul 23, 2021 | Articles, History, Recent Articles

 

The Chess Game, Sofonisba Anguissola (1555 – National Museum Poznań)

By Lauren Hepburn

The Queen’s Gambit, the Netflix series about a troubled chess prodigy named Beth Harman, first aired in October, 2020. Within a month, it had been viewed by 62 million households worldwide. The Queen’s Gambit has become the platform’s most-watched series in 63 countries and, according to the streaming service, is also its most successful scripted limited series ever. Since then, chess websites and coaches have reported soaring interest in online matches, club membership, and private tuition. eBay alone saw a 276% increase in searches for chess sets following the show’s airing (The Guardian). Perhaps most remarkable is that an unusual proportion of those signing up are women; by December, 2020, chess.com had already seen a 15% uplift in female registerees (New York Times). To contextualise the significance of this, globally the ratio of male to female chess grandmasters (a prestigious title for the world’s best players) is, today, around 85 : 2. To put this another way, of roughly 1,700 chess grandmasters currently, fewer than 40 of them are women.  

When Mrs. W. J. Baird’s The Twentieth Century Retractor, Chess Fantasies, and Letter Problems was published in 1907, prominent women chess players were even fewer and further between. Edith Baird was one of the most prolific composers of chess problems of her day and was sometimes referred to in the press as ‘The Queen of Chess’. A quote from one of her male contemporaries in Lasker’s Chess Magazine neatly demonstrates, however, that her reception in the male-dominated sport would not always have been so plauditory: the author asserts that women simply lack the ‘qualities of concentration, comprehensiveness, impartiality and, above all, a spark of originality’ required in order to become great chess players.  

CHESS – BAIRD, Mrs W. J. The Twentieth Century Retractor, Chess Fantasies, and Letter Problems. 1907, £1,250.00.

The critique in Lasker’s Chess Magazine is echoed in comments made by male players decades later. Bobby Fischer, a chess legend and arguably the best player of all time, was deeply misogynistic as a precocious teen. In a 1962 interview, 19 years old and already a champion, he explained why women cannot play. 

Interviewer: Do women make bad chess players? 

Fischer: Oh, they’re terrible chess players… I don’t know why, I just guess they’re not so smart. […] They have never turned out a good woman chess player. Never one that could stand up to a man in the history of chess. 

Fischer goes on to say that women shouldn’t ‘ with intellectual affairs’ but ‘should keep strictly to the home’ (though not cooking, he says, they aren’t good at that either). It should be noted that, when asked a similar question in the 1970s, Fischer did in fact express support for female inclusivity in chess. However, similarly sexist views continue to pervade the sport. In 2015, English grandmaster Nigel Short suggested that people “gracefully accept it as a fact” that men will always be inherently better players: “we just have different skills,” he argued (Time magazine). Short failed to mention the irony that he has been defeated by women (ibid.). 

It is important to highlight that women have played chess for centuries. The Chess Game, a 1555 painting by Sofonisba Anguissola, depicts an intimate family scene in which Anguissola’s own sisters play together under the supervision of a governess. The patron saint of chess, is St Teresa of Avila, who wrote, as a senior nun in 1566, The Way of Perfection, a guide for her charges in which she playfully compared contemplative prayer to the discipline of mastering the game. 

Now you will reprove me for talking about games, as we do not play them in this house and are forbidden to do so. That will show you what kind of a mother God has given you —— she even knows about vanities like this! However, they say that the game is sometimes legitimate. How legitimate it will be for us to play it in this way, and, if we play it frequently, how quickly we shall give checkmate to this Divine King! He will not be able to move out of our check nor will he desire to do so. (christianhistoryinstitute.org)

St Teresa later removed this analogy but modern editors reintroduced it. According to the Christian History Institute, The Way of Perfection aimed to ‘enthuse with a love of prayer and teach them how to practice it and therefore grow spiritually’. It continues to be influential in the Catholic approach to prayer.

There is, of course, ancient precedent for hostility towards women’s participation in chess. From its earliest days, chess was an intensely and inherently gendered game. Before the 15th century the movement of the queen was limited to just one diagonal square: ‘“aslant only”, as a medieval chess treatise put it, “because women are so greedy that they will take nothing except by rapine and injustice”’ (The Economist). It was around 1500 when the Queen was liberated and given free rein to traverse the chess board in one move. This apparently resulted in a new nickname for the game, ‘“madwoman’s chess” (The Independent). Nonetheless it is this later version that we know and play today. 

Illustration of King Otto IV of Brandenburg playing chess with an unidentified woman, Manasse Codex, Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift, Cod. Pal. germ. 848, f. 13r. Heidelberg University Library.

Although The Queen’s Gambit was praised for its technical precision (thanks to the guidance of former world chess champion Garry Kasparov), female experts identified a subtle yet crucial inaccuracy: the male characters were simply “too nice” to Beth Harman: this was the verdict of the world’s greatest woman chess champion, Judit Polgár, who has won more accolades than can be feasibly listed (though highlights include becoming International Grandmaster at just 15 years old, the youngest Grandmaster ever, as well as being the first woman to participate in a men’s world championship final). Sadly, Polgár was (and remains) an outlier. Today, only one of the world’s top 100 players is a woman, China’s Hou Yifan, and she is still just the third woman to have ever broken into this group. Polgár’s career continued to flourish until 2014, when she retired. She now runs a foundation and festival which promote and encourage chess among children and particularly girls. 

After The Queen’s Gambit aired, The New York Times published an article in which it quoted sisters Rowan Field, 12, and Lila, 11, who both auditioned for the role of Beth Harman and have competed in prestigious international competitions. Their response to the series is poignant: simply that it “shows that there are female chess players who can be extremely good”. 

In 1907, Edith Baird broke the norm with her chess , challenged expectations and became a leading voice in chess. Her Twentieth Century Retractor offers stimulating challenges to its owner; in Baird’s career she “composed more than 2,000 problems which… were noted for their soundness” (Hooper & Whyld 27), and there are remarkably few errors detected in her body of work. The book is also handsome – one of “the most elegant chess books ever to appear” (Hooper & Whyld 27), and uses Shakespearean quotes to enrich the solving experience and provide hints towards the solution.  

But Baird’s work also represents what female chess players – and women in general – can achieve when defying stereotype threat and misogyny. Baird regularly contributed to newspapers, as well as the British Chess Magazine, and was a pioneer in multi-move retractor problems, chess puzzles in which the solver must work backwards, taking back a specified number of moves before a forward mating move can be performed; The Twentieth Century Retractor is, in fact, one of the first known collections of such problems. Now seems the perfect time to celebrate this important book. 

 

Baird’s Twentieth Century Retractor is included in our catalogue Summer 2021.

Our regularly scheduled miscellany for the summer months, this catalogue showcases a selection of new acquisitions to our shelves.

For this catalogue, we are proud to partner with Beat – the UK’s leading eating disorder charity. Peter Harrington will donate 20 per cent of the list price of all catalogue orders to Beat to support its efforts to provide prompt help to those affected.

 

View PDF catalogue

From Manchu to MaoCollecting Chinese history in print by Dr Matt Wills

From Manchu to Mao
Collecting Chinese history in print by Dr Matt Wills

Jun 22, 2021 | Articles, Recent Articles

With the recent addition of Matt Wills – specialist in the history of the book in China – to the team at Peter Harrington, we are pleased to present a series of curated selections focusing on Chinese books, which will showcase our rapidly expanding acquisitions in this area.

Matt came to Peter Harrington from the University of California, San Diego, where he recently finished a PhD in History, specialising in the history of the book in China. Matt spent much of his graduate school career assembling a sizeable collection of modern Chinese propaganda which won both the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest in 2019 and the inaugural California Young Book Collector’s Prize. He has also published in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America and is currently writing a chapter on reading in modern China for the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature.

This selection exhibits the range of material available to the prospective collector of China-related materials. Earlier editions of Mao’s Little Red Book are probably the most well-known collectable Chinese book out there at the moment, and the historian in me relishes every chance I get to hold one.

However, collecting Chinese books has always been a joy because of the range and depth of rarities out there for collectors of any persuasion. In this list you will find materials as different as the first Chinese translation of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, an album exhibiting the early work of the renowned painter Zhang Daqian, and a collection of the Four Books of Confucianism inscribed by the prominent Republican intellectual Jiang Kanghu. For those looking for something a little unusual, there is this collection of postcards of Mount Everest issued following a successful Chinese expedition to the summit in 1975.

In addition to this range of subjects, one of the exciting things about working with Chinese books is the range of languages you encounter. For example, the arresting set of French-language propaganda posters we acquired recently were composed by a state publisher in Beijing to spread Maoism abroad during the Cultural Revolution. Go further back to the 17th and 18th centuries and you will find that China was a plurilingual empire; officials working at different levels of the government could look to books like this Chinese-Manchu dictionary to help them navigate the ins-and-outs of the Qing’s paper-based bureaucracy. Once foreign powers had established a foothold in China in the 19th century there was a proliferation of works in English, like this bilingual translation of Aesop’s Fables published in Canton in 1840.

Another element that makes Chinese books such interesting items for any bibliophile is their innate visuality. China’s great Mao-era propaganda publishers excelled in producing bright and eye-catching books and posters to spread the gospel of socialism, and some of the posters of Mao we currently have in stock hold your gaze rather like looking at the Mona Lisa. Older Chinese books were nearly always printed as string-bound volumes, often in blue folding cases, and these provide a marvellous aesthetic for the bookshelf. Since the shift to more Westernized hardback and paperback publishing in China, publishers have kept alive older book-binding techniques though special and limited editions, with the Zhang Daqian album (complete with silk brocade case and rich blue paper wrappers) being a perfect example.

I hope this has given you a window into the world of Chinese book collecting and all of its possibilities, and we trust that you will enjoy browsing the full range of materials in our first selection. Watch out for further announcements of new acquisitions, and I will be posting another blog entry soon. In the meantime I would be delighted to hear from you by email.

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The Searchers: London’s Great Plague and the Bills of Mortality

The Searchers: London’s Great Plague and the Bills of Mortality

Jun 3, 2021 | Articles, Featured, Recent Articles, Science & Technology

By Andrew Stewart MacKay

Comprised of information collected by knowledgeable local women known as Searchers, and printed by a respected City businesswoman named Ellen Cotes, the 1665 Bills of Mortality are a rare and unique record of life and death during the Great Plague of London. With title pages edged in black and decorated with striking memento mori of skulls and skeletons the Bills record how at least seventy percent of those who died that year perished of the dreaded bubonic plague. By insisting on recording and publishing all reported deaths – alongside enforcing household quarantines and ensuring food supplies – Lord Mayor of the City of London, Sir John Lawrence, gained praise for including the public in managing the evolving health crisis.

With the re-emergence of bubonic plague in the port cities of Hamburg and Amsterdam, in May 1664 quarantines had sensibly, if unpopularly, been imposed by the English government on all merchant-sailors entering the Thames estuary, as well as on the goods they brought with them. And at about the same, throughout that year – from the New England Colonies of British America to the ancient Kingdom of Korea – a fiery comet was observed in the night skies. By December 1664 it was widely witnessed in England by, amongst many others, naval-administrator Samuel Pepys, and Cambridge undergraduate Isaac Newton. Even the “Merry Monarch” himself, King Charles II, and his Queen were said to have sat up late to behold it. The coffeehouses of London were abuzz – and some even claimed the comet had made an ominous roaring sound. Warily, wrote Pepys, “God avert its ill bodings (if it have any)”.

By the spring of 1665, the plague was spreading fast and household quarantines fully came into force just as the nation manoeuvred to war once again with the Netherlands. And as the Royal Society began publishing their first scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions, the Puritan preacher John Bunyan began writing The End of the World. Streets were emptied and shops shut-up. By the summer, those who could had fled to the relative safety of the countryside. Although Pepys remained quite happily – and profitably – in town, he sent his wife away carrying the family gold. With Cambridge University feeling it prudent to close its doors, the young Isaac Newton was sent into (what turned out to be a very learned) lockdown at home in Lincolnshire. Naturally, the King – described by contemporary libertine John Wilmot as “pretty, witty” and “foolish” – escaped London for Wiltshire and Devon; his Parliament choosing to sit in Oxford that autumn. And thanks to measures imposed by the Edinburgh government, although the plague reached as far north as the village of Eyam in Derbyshire – and with tragic consequences – it never reached Scotland.

Without formalised medical training and unable to afford a doctor, it was ordinary women who nursed the dying and who gained an experienced understanding of the disease. For this precisely this reason, the City of London employed pairs of experienced local women from each parish as amateur coroners, or Searchers. If Anglican, when a person died their passing would be reported to the local parish church. Bells would ring, calling the Searchers to immediately attend the body and, through close inspection, determine the cause of death. Over an eighteen-month period an estimated 100,000 people died of the bubonic plague – almost a quarter of London’s then population. But whatever the Searchers concluded the cause of death to be, they would report their verdict to the local Constable. He would the pass it to the Parish Clerk who would, in his turn, pass it to the Clerk of the Company of Parish-Clerks, whose job it was to collate all the information received.

During the crisis of 1665 the Company clerk needed the numbers of dead and the causes of each death by the end of each Tuesday; setting and printing – by Ellen Cotes and her firm – would always occur on Wednesdays. Cotes’ press was so valuable it was triple-locked; key being held by three trusted souls. Such was the importance – and power – of public health information that any disruption of its established flow carried a punishment that could include flogging. Delivered to his door on Thursday mornings, the first recipient of the Bills was Sir John. Only then, on Thursday afternoon, were copies released to street vendors to sell to the buying public.

As such, according to historian Will Slauter, the Bills “depended upon the collective efforts of hundreds of individuals acting at the local parish level” and were “collaborative texts that fed back into the collective behaviour of the community”. Local knowledge combined with available data enabled policy-makers and the public alike to better understand the crisis and protect one another as much as was then possible.

Dr Philip W. Errington

Dr Philip W. Errington

May 27, 2021 | Articles, Harry Potter, Recent Articles, The Booksellers

Dr Philip W. Errington joined Peter Harrington in April 2021 after over 21 years at Sotheby’s where he was a director and senior specialist.  He received his BA, MA and PhD from the Department of English at University College where he is currently an honorary research associate. A bibliographer by training, he has published major bibliographies on John Masefield and J.K. Rowling. He has lectured and written widely on Masefield with his work published by Penguin Classics and Carcanet, and others. We talk to Philip about his career and role at Peter Harrington.

First thing’s first: you are a prolific bibliographer, but could you give us more detail about what this entails?

I like the idea of a “prolific bibliographer”: I’ve only published two! But they take such a long time that this is, I suppose, quite a large number. At the most basic level, a bibliography is about establishing a canon and chronology. My particular work is descriptive bibliography: the study and description of books as objects. 

A bibliographer doesn’t necessarily care about the artistic merit of a text, but rather the focus is on printing and production. It’s a distinct discipline and there are rules you have to follow in your methodology. I like to think of it as creating a map which – for a single author bibliography – helps researchers, critics, book collectors, etc., navigate a writer’s works. To mix analogies, it’s a bit like archaeology for books.

When did you decide you wanted to be a bibliographer?

As an undergraduate I discovered that there were huge gaps in a specific topic in which I was interested. I filled them in by sitting for days in a library with rolls and rolls of microfilm. (Today, of course, I could achieve the same result in a few hours using online databases). In many ways, this led to an M.A. and then a PhD. 

A few decades ago, a bibliography would provide very simple descriptions and that was that. Today there’s more scope to delve into authors’ and publishers’ archives. I’ve spent many happy hours in libraries across the world establishing various bibliographical facts. I particularly remember connecting correspondence between an author, his or her literary agent and the publisher. Until then, these collections had been split between several archives (and two continents). Pulling together a single narrative from different sources was exhilarating. I should say, of course, that I appreciate the contents of a book, too – but a bibliographer’s perspective adds another dimension to it!

Dr Errington’s two published biographies on John Masefield and J. K. Rowling

You were previously at Sotheby’s for 21 years – can you tell us more about what you did there and your career prior to joining Peter Harrington? 

I joined the auction world straight after my PhD, and it was my introduction to the commercial world of antiquarian books and manuscripts. Twenty-one years was a long time to stay in my first job and I slowly climbed the slippery Sotheby’s slope to become a director, senior specialist and auctioneer. I worked on English Literature sales, together with children’s literature, private press and original illustrations. There are many, many career highlights and I worked with some phenomenal collections, wonderful collectors and many authors or illustrators. But my arrival at Peter Harrington has rekindled the excitement and joy of the book trade for me. It’s refreshing to join a place where a passion for books is shared by all.

Your PhD on John Masefield was published by the British Library – and that was just the beginning of your expertise. What particularly draws you to his work?

Unless you’d like to do a feature on Masefield, I’d better be brief… In 1952, writing of second-hand bookstalls, Masefield stated that the “out-of-fashion is always cheap, and usually much better than the fashion has the wit to think”. I think it’s a great epitaph on Masefield’s own work. I’ve published editions of Masefield’s work with Penguin Classics, Carcanet, Pen and Sword, Egmont, New York Review of Books and The Folio Society. I’ve given lectures and seminars. I’ve appeared on TV and made newspaper headlines. But the joy of reading Masefield is constant. Although many people now only remember him as the author of the children’s fantasy The Box of Delights or as a poet, some of his prose is magnificent. He writes with the precision of a poet and has never failed to inspire me.

First edition of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights, 1935, £175.00. (BOOK SOLD)

Having made record sales of J. K. Rowling’s work – The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which sold for £1.95M, and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which sold in 2013 for £150,000 – it’s safe to say that you are a Rowling expert in the rare books industry. How did you come to focus on her work?

Because I was responsible for children’s literature at Sotheby’s, I got to run the show when Jo Rowling decided to sell a seventh manuscript copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard for her charity, Lumos, in 2007. I visited her at home in Edinburgh and discussed the project, catalogued the item and took it on exhibition to New York. There were specific reasons why it sold for £1.95M (including two very committed bidders) and I’m very proud it’s still the world record for a modern literary manuscript sold at auction. When human rights organisation English PEN then organised a charity sale in 2013, I approached Jo for a contribution and an annotated copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was the result. 

One significant achievement of my work with the author is my second bibliography. I well remember Pom Harrington viewing a copy of Philosopher’s Stone at Sotheby’s and pointing out that the wealth of misleading information in the trade about what makes a copy of Harry Potter valuable meant a bibliography was needed. One thing led to another and the first edition of my book was published in 2015; an updated edition followed in 2017. I’m very conscious that one of the (if not the) leading dealers for Harry Potter material now has Rowling’s bibliographer as a member of its team. Combining everyone’s expertise makes me question why someone with a Harry Potter enquiry would do anything except come to us!

You have a great deal of experience in children’s literature, including visiting the studio of Quentin Blake and viewing his extensive archive, discussing rabbits with Richard Adams, achieving a world record for the sale of a book illustrator’s work – an unknown illustration by Beatrix Potter – and then beating your own record when you sold an original drawing of the ‘Hundred Acre Wood’ for £430,000! What led you to specialise in this area?

I love children’s books and, indeed, original book illustrations. Everyone remembers their early books and if, like me, you were fortunate to be surrounded by loads of books as a child, it’s part of who we are. Collecting children’s literature brings with it the big problem of condition. If a book has been read and loved by a child, it may not survive in a collectable state. But I challenge anyone to pick up a first edition of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Potter’s Peter Rabbit or Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and not get a little thrill from holding a copy of how the world first received these stories. 

With artwork there’s also the excitement that an original illustration frequently differs from its many reproductions in print. The wonderful illustrated books of the 1910s and ‘20s were gorgeous and beautifully produced, but look at an original Arthur Rackham watercolour and the colours’ vibrancy is unique. Likewise, E.H. Shepard’s work frequently has a texture that can’t be captured when reprinted; the snow scenes at the beginning of The House at Pooh Corner involved Shepard drawing in ink and then using a blade to scrape off a layer. Reproduced in black and white, it’s a wonderful image, but that original finish cannot be replicated.

First edition’s of J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1970) and Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902).

I often read and listened to the audio tape of The Tiger Who Came to Tea as a child and hear you have an excellent anecdote about having tea with the author herself. Were there any visiting tigers..?

I was asked to visit Judith Kerr at her home. She was a wonderful old lady, rather diminutive but with alert sparkling eyes. As she pulled out drawer after drawer of her original artwork we discussed her inspiration for Mog (one of my childhood favourites) and then, of course, Sophie’s tea-time guest. After carefully returning all the artwork to their drawers, she asked whether I would like a cup of tea! It was a wonderful treat, although I wondered whether I ought to eat all the food in the house before drinking all the water from the taps… I was, I’m afraid to say, terribly polite, but then… so was the tiger…

Another fascinating story surrounds your presentation of the Siegfried Sassoon Archive to MPs in the Houses of Parliament. Could you tell us more about the circumstances around this event?

In 2009 Sotheby’s was instructed to offer the remaining archive of Siegfried Sassoon for sale. Various experts took control of different parts of the collection and I had the pleasure of cataloguing the poet’s manuscript diaries. These included diaries from the first world war trenches with appropriate splashes of mud. There was one obvious place that this material should go and Cambridge University Library agreed to a private purchase. A significant contribution to the purchase price was provided by the National Heritage Memorial Fund and, as part of their own promotion, they requested that parts of the archive be shown to interested MPs in the Houses of Parliament. I visited (in order to report back to Sotheby’s’ security about the safety of the exhibition space) and, after that rather pointless bit of red tape, my colleagues and I had the pleasure of showing off some exhibition highlights. It was remarkable to see many MPs experience jaw-dropping moments of realisation about the power of original manuscript material.

Finally, what’s the next exciting project in the pipeline – is there anything in particular you are looking forward to working on with Peter Harrington?

Where do I start? Peter Harrington has the motto, “Where Rare Books Live”. For the last few years I’d been beginning to think rare books were seriously ill, so it’s brilliant to join the team for whom rare books are living and important and electrifying. And, who knows, there may even be another bibliography that needs to be researched…

BROWSE ALL BOOKS
No Small TaskThe utopian vision of the Kibbo Kift

No Small Task
The utopian vision of the Kibbo Kift

May 14, 2021 | Articles, Economics, Recent Articles, Uncategorized

By Lauren Hepburn

The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, a youth movement founded in 1920 by British artist, author, and former Scouts advocate John Hargrave, responded to the horrors of World War I with a utopian vision of the future. Hargrave was one of a number of troop leaders who abdicated leading positions in Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting organisation during and in the immediate aftermath of the war; as the Scouts adopted more military-style drills and discipline, its pacifist members disavowed what they viewed as an increasingly imperialist agenda. 

Hargrave’s alternative movement refocused on the socialist and naturalist ideals that had helped shape the British Scouting organisation at its inception, and was further characterised by wide-ranging global ambitions, infusing the camping and community focuses of Scouting with a zealous social vision and a mystical aesthetic. It was endorsed by authors, artists, scientists, theosophists, politicians, women’s rights activists and Nobel Prize winners, and members included several former suffragettes as well as photographer Angus McBean, folk-dance revivalist Rolf Gardiner (who interested his friend D. H. Lawrence in the movement and inspired Kibbo Kift qualities in Lady Chatterley’s Mellors), and Roland Berrill who later founded Mensa. A more remotely involved “Advisory Committee” included H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, Rabindranath Tagore, Maurice Maeterlink, and Havelock Ellis, and T. E. Lawrence is reputed to have permitted Kindred members to camp on his land. H. G. Wells, whose literature imagines a World State, was perhaps influential in the Kibbo Kift’s essential politics and philosophy of geopolitical unification, while some of its more mystical beliefs took inspiration from Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’ and the writings of Aleister Crowley. 

Left: John Hargrave, Head Man of the Kibbo Kift. Right: Cecil Watt Paul Jones (Old Mole) consecrating Old Sarum banner on the Wessex Pilgrimage, 1929. Images courtesy of the Kibbo Kift Foundation.

No small task, the Kindred strove for world peace. In practice, this would be achieved through a strong sense of community (members were collectively ‘Kinfolk’, wore stylised clothing and participated in group rituals and ceremonies), education (from Oceanography to the Occult, no subject was neglected), and immersion in nature. Outdoor sports, camping and woodcraft dominated the schedule. Nature and life were ‘frequently capitalised and personified with divine qualities’, with Life coming to resemble a ‘stand-alone philosophical category’ (Pollen). One risque Kibbo Kift banner depicting, with gold paint on black fabric, a sperm cell penetrating two symbolic circles, is inscribed by Hargrave as ‘The Genesis of life: a spermatozoon fertilising the ovum introducing two chromosomes’. 

Indeed, reproduction was considered another tool for the world’s improvement and eugenic principles were incorporated into Kibbo Kift philosophies. Hargrave, whose parents were Quakers, served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the first world war and his experience not only reinforced his pacifism, but also prompted a fear, repugnant to the modern reader, that the quality of future generations may be degraded by the post-war population: ‘Our best blood soaks into the sand of Sulva Bay, and into the mud and grass of Flanders. We have weeded out all our weaklings by medical examination, and they are left at home – to breed!’ (Hargrave, qtd. by Pollen). Though unimaginable today, prior to the Holocaust, eugenics had a place in mainstream philosophical and scientific thought: ‘Eugenics was a part of a general bundle of “modern” ideas about the reform of society’ (Bland and Hall, qtd. by Pollen). This may have also characterised the Kibbo Kift’s long term objective: a ‘confraternity of elites, comprised of fit, trained, virile and beautiful men and women who would marry, reproduce and thereby establish a ‘heritage of health’…’ (Pollen). Indeed, although kinswomen rarely held positions of authority, unlike the Scouts the Kindred allowed both genders and all ages to become members.

Kibbo Kift archers. Image courtesy of the Kibbo Kift Foundation.

The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift amalgamated skills, ethea and disciplines, in fact prioritising the breakdown of barriers between them. Their ‘practices were wide-ranging, extending across health and handicraft, pacifism and propaganda, myth and magic, education and economics’ (Donlon Books). Kinfolk were able to loan philosophical and scholarly texts from a circulating library; they were urged to study accessible sciences – those that can be explored locally without specialist equipment, such as geography, anthropology or psychology; and members could earn Scout-inspired ‘Badges of Knowledge’. An understanding of economics and politics was also necessary, since Kinfolk were expected to actively support ‘major political plans, such as reorganisation of industry on a non-competitive basis, synchronised international disarmament, the establishment of a single international currency, and a world council to include ‘every civilised and primitive nation’’ (Pollen). Though still couched in colonial language, allegiance to these goals meant advocating for the Kibbo Kift’s central goal: to reform the world socially and economically, and to ultimately unite it. 

Andrew Marr has described the slow dissolution of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift pithily: “The rambling stopped and the marching began” (qtd. by ‘The Guardian’). Hargrave’s growing interest in economics and disgust at the hefty profits shored up by banks drove him, toward the end of the 1920s, to create a more specific target for his organisation:  

‘… after the 1929 crash, Hargrave ditched all the costumes and archaic terminology: the group was restyled for a harsher decade with berets, green shirts and grey trousers. Soon to be called the Green Shirts, the members who stayed demonstrated in favour of the National Dividend, joining the throng of young men and women in uniform on the streets of England. In the 1930s, peace had become militancy’ (Savage, ‘The Guardian’).

HARGRAVE, John. The Confession of the Kibbo Kift. A Declaration and General Exposition of the Work of the Kindred. 1927.

As world-healing ambitions, crafting and camping fell to the wayside, Kindred membership declined. Pacifist, nature-loving artists and intellectuals who had helped build the movement were alienated by the shift towards a more aggressive form of activism, and perhaps knew not to challenge Hargrave’s new direction – in 1924 he had expelled dissenting members. However, parallel to the creation of Hargrave’s Green Shirts, another organisation was born which still exists today. This new youth movement, called Woodcraft Folk, had been subsequently founded by Leslie Paul, a former kinsmen who was ejected from the group in ‘24. Registered as a charity in 1965 and mostly run by volunteers, its intentions are not far from those of the Kibbo Kift in its beginning:

‘Through our activities, outings and camps we help our members to:

  • understand important issues like the environment, world debt and global conflict
  • develop activities focused on sustainable development
  • encourage children to think, hoping that they will help build a peaceful, fairer world.’ (woodcraftfolk.org.uk)

Although expressed in simpler, more achievable terms than Hargrave’s ideas were, the legacy of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift – its desire to reform the world and build a more peaceful society – continues.