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.

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