‘Our comrades beyond the seas’ Colonial youth movements 1880-1920

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 12, Issue 2, 1 October 1979, Page 73

‘Our comrades beyond the seas’ Colonial youth movements 1880-1920

MICHAEL E. HOARE

On 11 October 1906 William Alexander Smith (later Sir William), founder, and later Secretary, of The Boys’ Brigade in Glasgow in 1883, wrote to A. B. Field at the Australasian headquarters of the movement in Melbourne: It is a great stimulus to us in the old country to know that there are thousands of our comrades beyond the seas enrolling in the Boys’ Brigade, and helping to keep the flag flying for all that is good and true in Boyhood and Manhood.

Bringing a message for New Year 1907, he further hoped that antipodean boys ‘may grow up to be worthy sons of your great country, worthy citizens of our great empire . . .h 1 Smith, as John Springhall in his researches into the history of youth movements in Britain has shown, was the first to found a mass voluntary youth movement fully in tune with the social-political-religious mood of his times: among the first to realize in late Victorian Britain ‘. that the successful propagation of a “manly” religion required it to be articulated in cultural and organizational forms more in keeping with an age of nationalism and militarism . . .’ 2 and that youth movements could, indeed, be seen (and by some used) as important and sensitive social barometers of an era. Smith’s ‘Brigade idea’ soon found imitators and emulators in such movements as the Jewish Lads’ Brigade (1895); the Church (C. of E.) Lads’ Brigade (1891); the Boys’ Life Brigade (1899); the Girls’ Guildry (1900); the Girls’ Brigade and Girls’ Life Brigade. Two other mass movements, the Boy Scouts (1908) and Girl Guides (1909) were formed a generation later than the brigades but they were, in the same way, responses to contemporary socio-political and intellectual currents of a different kind. They, too, spawned competitors and imitators. 3

The writings of a new ‘school’ of social historians concerned with youth work and recreational or leisure-time pursuits in Britain and North America have, as yet, made little or no impact upon historical research in New Zealand. In recent years there has, it is true, been a spate of writing in this country on more contemporary sociological issues in the field of recreational, leisure-time and youth work activities but, so far as I can discern, to date very little of a really critical, penetrating or even useful nature historically has appeared. 4

In this article I wish to suggest some possible themes, problems and sources for the study of youth work history in New Zealand, relating those suggestions to some of my own researches and, more especially, to the more recent projects in this field overseas, both published and in prospect. The Turnbull Library, possessing already, for instance, the records of the Young Women’s Christian Association 5 and the Boys’ Brigade in New Zealand (Inc), 6 has demonstrated an on-going commitment to collect and provide research opportunities in what will undoubtedly become an expanding field of enquiry. The Library’s holdings in the records of individual churches and congregations in Wellington (with their Bible Class, Christian Endeavour, Sunday School and other ‘sub-groups’); of CORSO and other recreational, religious, social welfare and similar bodies also provide a wealth of material for social historical enquiry into the concerns, aspirations and pastimes of young New Zealanders in the twentieth century. 7

There are, it is true, more cogent reasons for pursuing this line of historical enquiry than those of the simple expediency—so long a tradition in much New Zealand historical writing—of following stimulating overseas research. Admittedly, such overseas research has produced in very recent years some interesting findings on the socialisation of young people—one of any society’s major preoccupations—and therefore about the peculiar experience of being (or becoming) an American or a Scotsman or whatever. Joseph F. Kett’s Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1190 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977) is one very recent parallel—although covering a wider spectrum—to Springhall’s work in the United Kingdom, and is a book based upon a much longer tradition and commitment to intensive local, state and national historical writing on youth work and related themes than has been the case elsewhere, even in Britain. 8

The Boys’ Brigade was spawned in working-class and lowermiddle class Glasgow of the early 1880 s and has retained since a strong —outwardly at least—Scottish ‘flavour’, whilst spreading to some sixty to seventy countries in the intervening ninety odd years. It is still the stronger boys’ organisation in Scotland and Ireland. The Boy Scout movement, however, remained, especially in its infancy, more obdurately ‘English’ but —not surprisingly considering the number of ‘unemployed’ ex-British Army and colonial officers who became its leaders —managed to transplant some of its Edwardian mystique and ritual very successfully throughout the Empire. Of German youth movements, their roots and proneness to social manipulation much, too, might be (and has been) written. 9 My initial surveys of the literature have shown that New Zealand, too, has spawned some unique and unexpected experiments in the

youth work-recreational field, and that there are themes enough worthy of closer historical investigation. The Bible Class Movement, so strong in New Zealand until the 19605; the very early arrival of the Young Men’s Christian Association (1853) and of the Boys’ Brigade (1887); the work of Lt.-Col. D. Cossgrove and others in the founding of Scouting and Girl Peace Scouting contemporaneously and almost in anticipation of Baden-Powell’s work; the response of working-class and religious pacifist groups to the all-embracing Defence Act (1909) and its subsequent amendments 1910-1912; the work of the rurally important Boys’ and Girls’ Agricultural Club Movement, all are topics demanding closer study. As Springhall writes, speaking of W. A. Smith and the Boys’ Brigade, ‘great acts of creative synthesis are seldom performed in a

vacuum’. 10 He then proceeds to analyse the social and cultural milieux in which the brigades and their lineal successors were founded. There were, for instance, factors of social ‘anxiety’ and ‘conformity’ in a fin de siecle middle-class and Edwardian Britain worried about the health of youth; the decline of the ‘race’ and Empire; the leisure of working classes now finding political muscle; the almost disastrous consequences of the military engagements in South Africa; competition from the United States and Germany and there was, too, the later growing concern with ‘national efficiency’ at all levels. After the middle-class concern over delinquency (‘larrickinism’ and other manifestations), ‘values’, morality and crime declined, the ‘cycle of anxiety’ —as Springhall calls it—became involved with issues of imperial defence, racial survival and the ‘brotherhood’ of Anglo-Saxons, themes with which early Scouting concerned itself. Later, of course, the peace mood of post-World War I would also leave its mark on mass youth movements. In short, as agents of‘socialisation’ and ‘legitimation’, particularly as seen by those with the biggest stake in society’s on-going norms and conventions, youth movements are important historical and social phenomena. They ‘were, for the most part, developed as instruments for the reinforcement of social conformity’. 11

So far so good. But the question that work such as Springhall’s leaves unanswered for us is ‘what did the Empire think about youth and society?’ As one object of imperial preservation ‘colonials’, particularly those on the verge of nationhood, would presumably have aspirations and norms for their own young which either mirrored, paralleled or contradicted the ideas from ‘home’. The striking fact about both Smith’s Boys’ Brigade and Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movements, indeed, was their migration, their universality and their spontaneous acceptance around the world within a few short years of foundation in Britain. Since 1 have already written at some length elsewhere about the Boys’ Brigade in Australia and Papua New Guinea 12 1 will take this movement as the point of departure. The first identified units (companies) outside Scotland and England were in St Louis, Missouri, and in Auckland (at St James’ Presbyterian Church). 13 Thereafter W. A. Smith’s ‘work abroad’, as he termed it, grew steadily throughout the British Empire and the United States. In New Zealand, where over one dozen companies were formed by 1900-1901 in places as far apart as Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Timaru and Dunedin, the movement attracted leaders of such calibre as George Hogben, 14 the Congregationalist, educationist and scientist; Rev. William Millar Nicholson, DSC, an accomplished former scholar in

Edinburgh and from 1900 Presbyterian minister of Ravensbourne and St Leonard’s in Otago, 15 and Laurence Birks, BSC, a prominent engineer, who worked with a Christchurch Baptist company. 16 Significantly, too, Birks had originally been active in the movement in Australia, first in Adelaide and then in Sydney as honorary assistant secretary to the Australian Council. As early as 1891 a company had also been formed at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Dunedin, the pulpit of that ‘rather delicate, sensitive and cultured’ pioneer social reformer and preacher Rev. Dr Rutherford Waddell.

Already in 1884 Waddell had started the Young Christians’ Band to link the Sunday School more closely with the Church, but by September 1890 the boys’ attendance had dropped off markedly and the congregation was exhorted ‘to remedy our defects in this direction’. The following year the brigade was started. 17 In Wellington the movement, as in many other parts of Australasia, was linked with boys’ institute work, mostly in inner-suburban locations. 18 One of the most influential institutions from the 1890 s in Wellington concerned with the welfare and training of young people was the St John’s Presbyterian Church Young Men’s Bible Class, and one of its most successful leaders was George Alexander Troup (later Sir George). Arriving in the capital in April 1888, Troup galvanised the six young men he found at the St John’s Bible Class into the prototype class for the Bible Class movement throughout the Dominion. By introducing new ideas on co-opera-tion and interchange of personnel, under Troup’s ‘inspiring guidance, [the] St John’s Class became the pattern on which all the future work of the denomination [Presbyterian] for youth proceeded’. Once Troup became ‘. . . convinced that it was no longer possible to hold and effectively interest young people by the methods then prevailing he decided to adopt methods which gave to each member work and responsibility’. 19 In under ten years this pioneer class attained a roll of over one hundred members and remained as large until Troup’s retirement in 1908.

The original Wellington Boys’ Institute arose, it seems, out of a Sunday evening mission school held from the early 1880 s by the YMCA. The first moves to start the work came in 1891 and by June 1892 a building was opened (on reclaimed land at the corner of Cuba and Victoria Streets), following active promotion by prominent citizens. A Boys’ Brigade Company was formed at the Institute in December 1892. When the parent Institute’s work was on the verge of languishing, however, the St John’s Bible Class stepped in to keep it going. After resumption of the original building by the City Corporation another was eventually purchased in Arthur Street and then, in 1914, the present Tasman Street building was opened. 20

The ‘four-fold nature’ of the Wellington Boys’ Institute in 1910: physical (a gymnasium, football, cricket and athletics), social (‘occasionally ladies of the city give a spread to the boys’), religious (‘not conducted, perhaps, on very orthodox lines’) and training (two Boy Scout troops and a rifle cadet volunteer corps) attracted some 230 working class boys. The backers were, however, at great pains to stress ‘the quite unsectarian . . . character and purely altruistic’ nature of their work: ‘any boy be he Jew or Gentile, Roman Catholic or Protestant, or of any denomination or no denomination may become a member without taking part in any of its religious services’. 21 By 1910 it was also filling ‘to some extent . . . the place of [a] boy labour bureau’ in Wellington, directing youngsters towards rural employment possibilities. In the Edwardian era the Institute saw its role quite clearly: ‘Prevention is better than cure.’ It must be evident to all that it is cheaper and wiser to build a simple fence at the top of the precipice than an elaborate hospital at the bottom. So it is better to catch the young early, than merely provide for an asylum for the infirm before they go astray, and to save lives before they are lost than to provide, as Lowell puts it, ‘an ambulance to fetch life’s wounded and malingerers in’.

‘A rescued lad’ was better than ‘a rescued man’; his cure might be permanent and he had before him ‘a life of usefulness and great possibilities’. The ‘rescued man’ could only offer the ‘dregs of a wasted life for the Public Service’. ‘The lack of discipline amongst New Zealand boys’, noted the same organisers of 1910, ‘is very marked, and it is just here that a work such as is carried out at the Institute is most valuable’. 22 Since example and public testimony were important openers of purses, the promoters also proudly displayed photos of former Institute members who had become achievers: young men such as Farrier-Major W. J. Hardham,vc — decorated for gallantry at Naawport, South Africa on 10 January 1901—and one G. Hill, another Institute graduate, who had saved the life of another boy in a boating mishap off the Te Aro reclamation. History, too, was appealed to from Sir Richard Arkwright to President Grant. All manner of boys of lowly parentage who had attained prominence were paraded before the hopefully generous benefactors of Wellington and the Dominion. Indeed, it was claimed,

Our own country certainly has a most honourable record of those who have graduated from the toilers’ tasks and risen to the highest and most honoured positions in the Dominion. . . . Poverty is no crime, frequently it is a blessing; for many a poor lad has been strengthened by the buffetings received in the rough sea of adversity during his life time. The fighting made him strong. 23 Rarely could the working class boys of Te Aro, Mount Cook and Newtown have ever had such a persuasive extolling of their many

virtues and possibilities. The Governor, the press, local businessmen and Wellington prominenti were marshalled most effectively to support the cause. I have dwelt on the Wellington Boys’ Institute since it seems to reflect in microcosm what was going on in different forms elsewhere in Australasian cities. The Boys’ Brigade was the Institute’s first uniformed training arm, boasting two companies and ninety boys in the early 1890 s under Captain Alfred Armstrong, a warehouseman and traveller. But he was also a petty officer in the Wellington Naval Artillery 24 and it came as no surprise therefore when in 1896, ‘The Boys’ Brigade, which has done such useful work at the Institute was gazetted as a naval cadet Company’. The Institute Committee was guided in this move by ‘several local volunteer Officers’ anxious, it seems, to ‘improve the drill and esprit de corps of the brigade’. 25 The naval brigade, which also took some root at Port Chalmers, was a peculiarly Australasian and American deviation from W. A. Smith’s norms, and was particularly successful in Melbourne between 1902—1910. 26

After about 1908-1910 when the ‘scouting mania’ gripped the boy (and girl) world of Britain and the Empire, the Institute moved quickly to organize its own troops and, still very much in keeping with the times, the Boys’ Institute Cadets were formed circa 1907 and flourished sixty-three strong in 1910. ‘The Cadet Corps, the

Boy Scouts, the Gymnasium, the Educational Classes and the Religious exercises all make for discipline’. Before the advent of Scouting, however, the Boys’ Brigade had shown a quite remarkable growth throughout the world. By 1902 there were 35,000 members outside Britain and 50,000 in the British Isles. Outside the United Kingdom there was evidence of strong work in theU.S., Canada, the West Indies, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India, Ceylon and New Guinea. As one leader pointed out at the Annual Council in Newcastle, England, in September 1902 ‘the BB had become more than national; it had become Imperial’. 27 Some writers went even further in seeing ‘the Boys’ Brigade as a factor in Imperial Unity’ that ‘so powerful an organization is a boon and a blessing to the Empire’. The Boys’ Brigade is not confined to those of British blood, for in its ranks are many black and coloured members, and the day is not far distant when the youth of the yellow races also will be recruiting under its banner. To one who is at present unable to take an active part in Brigade work it is an inspiration to read that 87,000 Boys are standing shoulder to shoulder in the one great cause and pressing forward to the one ideal. 28

The previous January one writer in the Boys’ Brigade Gazette had achieved immense, if somewhat silly and almost blasphemous allegorical heights, as he surveyed the ‘Symbol of the Union Jack’: ‘But there dawns on me an allegory. I seem to see Christ approaching the threshold of the British Empire . . . “let all who own my Father rally round this Union Jack”.’ 29 Fortunately for the movement not all of W. A. Smith’s colonial emissaries or article writers were as naive and disastrous as this one. Smith himself subscribed little or nothing to Imperial and Anglo-Saxon jingoism: he was more interested in the spiritual, moral and material welfare of boys. He made only two visits overseas to review the progress of the work he had founded and these trips were both to North America in 1895 and 1907. His attitude was made clear after a visit to Boston in 1895: . . . we felt that The Boys’ Brigade represented a kingdom grander and wider than either the United States or the British Empire and that, without losing anything of the feeling of patriotism which has made both our countries what they are today, we could sink all national differences in the spirit of brotherhood which is born of such teaching as that of The Boys’ Brigade. . . . 30

Smith’s tenets were uncomplicated and they were simply and effectively expounded by some very powerful brigade ‘missionaries’ to the Empire. Among these were Professor Henry Drummond (1851—1897), a prolific and influential writer on religious and scientific themes and Professor of Natural Science at the Free Church College in Glasgow from 1877, and John Campbell

Gordon (1847-1934) first Marquess of Aberdeen and Temair, and Governor-General of Canada, 1893-1898. 31 Drummond, a lecturer much in demand in the North American colleges, was instrumental in founding the Boys’ Brigade in Melbourne in 1891 during a lecture tour and Lord Aberdeen, ‘a strong liberal’, became President of the movement in Canada where it had been started in St John, New Brunswick, in 1889. 32 By 1891 there was a national executive at work in Canada, which enrolled over 200 companies before 1908, and in 1899 an Australian Council of the movement was formed in Sydney. 33 Smith, who had been greatly influenced by the successful evangelical work of Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey in Britain during the early 1870 s, was a close friend of both Drummond and Lord Aberdeen.

Drummond’s influence on youth was perhaps strongest in the United States, where he assisted Moody and was very involved in lecturing and students’ work. The Boys’ Brigade grew swiftly throughout the United States, especially after it became more organised from 1889 onwards with a headquarters base in San Francisco, although the centre of gravity throughout the 1890 s moved gradually eastwards via Cincinnati to Pittsburgh and Baltimore. 34 At its peak in the early 1900 s the movement, known as the United Boys’ Brigades of America (U.8.8.A.), had some 20-30,000 members in the U.S. 35 Drummond’s writings on the movement and his strong public advocacy of it were potent factors in its spread throughout the North American churches, where it attracted strong support from big business, especially from the ‘steel men’ of Pennsylvania. 36

Undoubtedly the Boys’ Brigade took root so widely in the 1890 s for the very same reasons as under Waddell in Dunedin, in the Boys’ Institute in Wellington and under the sponsorship of the Fairfax newspaper interests in Sydney: it provided a ready-made method —although adaptable in the colonies —to socialise and, if needs be, evangelise and train working-class boys. It had reached Honolulu by 1899, where training was provided in manual arts as well as in physical, moral and spiritual virtues, and Toronto, Canada, by 1894 where boys’ institute work soon flourished as an adjunct to it in the same way. 37 The Brigade method also became popular amongst emigre European congregations in places like Rangoon (Burma), Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo before 1910, and from here, particularly among the Chinese, it took firm local roots. There was also a strong recurrent belief in the literature of the period (i.e. circa 1890-1910) that such movements, with common roots, were strong unifying influences among the ‘Anglo-Saxon races’. Religion, discipline and training were delicately combined in a voluntary association: boys got into uniform, drilled and received

religious and physical instruction of their own free will. The organisational structure of the Brigade was moreover, democratic and locally autonomous. Smith advised anyone who asked, but scrupulously never sought to build up a strong central, ‘imperial’ organisation. One commentator wrote in March 1903* It is not without significance that the Brigade idea seems to catch on wherever the free atmosphere of Britain and America make drill an attraction to the Boys, while it finds comparatively little favour among the youth of the conscription countries of the Continent of Europe. 38

But, as the fear of war loomed closer in the early 1900 s, governments grew more mindful of the value of mass youth organisations such as the brigades as training grounds for future ‘soldiers’. In Britain, however, Smith’s ‘clear-sighted and skilful management’ steered the movement ‘away from the seductive shoals of co-operation with the War Office and Haldane’s famous second line ’of national defence’. 39 Haldane’s plan, given effect in the Army Council’s Cadet Regulations of 1910, was to take over all uniformed groups and affiliate them as cadet units and therefore training grounds for the Territorials. W. A. Smith, however, resisted these efforts root and branch and, despite the earlier criticisms of some pacifist Churchmen about the too ‘military’ nature of his Brigade, succeeded in marshalling massive Church (particularly dissenting) opinion against the War Office plans. His strong political and social affiliations also helped. 40 At home Smith resisted overtures to combine his pioneering Brigade with the burgeoning work of Scouting under Robert Baden-Powell after 1908. Baden-Powell’s ideas had, indeed, initially been strongly supported as part of the Boys’ Brigade training until it became clear that a separate movement was necessary. Smith, it seems, never resisted separation: indeed he welcomed plurality of efforts.

But in outposts of Empire the brigade movement succumbed very often to more stringent government legislation concerning compulsory military training. In New Zealand the Defence Act of 1909 decimated the few units still in existence, and similar regulations in Australia did the same. The ‘universal obligation to be trained’ applied in New Zealand to boys in the age ranges 12-14 years (Junior Cadets’) and 14—18 years (‘Senior Cadets’) before they entered the general scheme at eighteen years of age. 41 In Canada the same propositions were made by government and courted by the Boys’ Brigade secretary there in 1914. On 5 May 1914 Smith wrote to the Canadian Secretary, F. V. Longstaff, cautioning against an official ‘merger’ with the Cadets: ... it has been proved by experience in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand that it is an end of the Boys’ Brigade, so far as its main purpose is concerned, if you attempt to run it on the footing of Government Cadets. 42

But neither Australia nor New Zealand had strong advocates at home to resist in Brigade circles the official pressures. In Australia, indeed, the movement had grown recognisably more ‘military’ and ‘naval’ by the end of the first decade of this century. In New Zealand there is some evidence that this same trend took place. By 1914, however, in both countries the Boys’ Brigade had lost all vestiges of its identity, except in Brisbane where one of Smith’s own Glasgow lieutenants, George Orr, had started a unit which flourished and grew throughout World War I, a living proof of Smith’s own dictums. 43

The role of pacifist and anti-militarist working-class groups in resisting the Defence Act in New Zealand has already been examined in detail for the Senior Cadets and General Training Sections (14 to 21 years). 44 The Defence Act regulations of 1909 had struck viciously, however, at the roots of any boys’ work after the age of twelve. Boys of 12 to 14 were required to do 52 hours training a year ‘under the direction and to the satisfaction of the Commandant of Junior Cadets’, appointed by the Minister of Education. Officers were to be appointed either from Reservists, other trainees in the General Training Section, or ‘from amongst the male teachers in the staffs of schools’. Section 39 of the Act did not specifically mention the Boys’ Brigade but it did single out another organisation for special mention. The Minister of Education was empowered to ‘. . . take over control of The Boy Scouts in such manner and to such extent as he thinks fit, and when so taken over they shall form part of the Junior Cadets, and be subject to the provisions of this Act. . .’ 45

As S. G. Culliford in his undocumented yet frankly critical study of the first fifty years of Scouting in New Zealand (1908—1958) has shown, these regulations cut at the heart of a movement which had grown spectacularly to some 15,000 to 16,000 boys by 1911. 46 The moving force behind the autonomous start of New Zealand Scouting was David Cossgrove who was instrumental, too, in giving the impetus for work among girls to start on a more organised basis earlier than among their British counterparts when he published his immensely popular Peace Scouting for Girls (Christchurch, 1910). The amended Defence Act of 1910 did allow Scouting and Cadet training to coexist uneasily but the matter was not resolved to the satisfaction and benefit of Scouting until the visit of Baden-Powell to New Zealand in 1912. In the same year the Defence Act was amended yet again and all regulations regarding training for 12 to 14 year olds were repealed. 47 Thereafter Scouting and Girl Peace Scouting went its own independent and usually successful way under Cossgrove until his death in 1920. Only two factors overshadowed the growth: Cossgrove’s sometimes bitter

wranglings with Baden-Powell’s Imperial Headquarters in London over control, and the elitism and growing remoteness of the central controlling body of the movement in New Zealand. 48 In its founding of Scouting, however, New Zealand had displayed a remarkable independence and influence far beyond its own shores. It was an interesting example of how the original idea could be adapted swiftly and skilfully to a new environment. Recent writing on the Scouting movement’s history has indeed been increasingly critical of Baden-Powell’s motives and methods in promoting his cause. His approach was much more imperial, patriotic, jingoistic and military-dominated thanW. A. Smith’s. As Springhall writes, ‘leaders like Baden-Powell strategically preempted certain cultural norms of legitimation in order to strengthen their power bases by manipulating the symbols of authority’. It is a movement with ‘more of the folk-ways of Boer War England’ than any other surviving ‘British social institution’. 49

As with Smith’s Boys’ Brigade the work of Baden-Powell’s Scouting in the Empire still has to undergo the test of more rigorous historical research. But, if we take Baden-Powell’s account of his 1912 world tour Boy Scouts Beyond the Seas . . . (London, 1913) as one example of his writings of this period, it would be hard to imagine a more biassed and inaccurate piece of writing on imperial history. Thus, in a chapter on ‘How our Empire Grew’ (pp.sß-85), we learn that all British territories ‘were won by the hard work and hard fighting of our forefathers’. Cook outstripped all ‘other nations’ to win Australia and New Zealand; in South Africa ‘we had to fight the natives for our foothold, which once gained we never let go ... we have got it now’; in Canada ‘the French-Canadians, deserted by their countrymen, like the brave and manly fellows they were, accepted their defeat in the best spirit—just like a team which has got the worst of a football match’ and so on. In Australia and New Zealand ‘B.P.’ found ‘much more enthusiasm for our great Empire than we do [have] at home’, and praised the military awareness of both countries. His interpretation of Maori-Pakeha relations is very bizarre. When peace came for instance, after the Land Wars, ‘both sides were all the better friends . . .’ 50 and

It has been just the same for us in other parts of the world; in India where we fought the Sikhs, in Africa where we fought the Zulus, in Egypt where we fought the Sudanese, in South Africa where we fought the Boers, we have all become the better friends for it . . , S 1

His interpretation of recent South African history was even more extraordinary and in this book he strongly urged ‘young colonists’ to emigrate to ‘the rising and prosperous country’ of Rhodesia, where the British had only just once more established ‘peace’.

Indeed If every farm had its little fort or fortified building always ready, and its men and women and boys all trained to shoot, there would be very few of the murders and raids which have been so common in the country when the defenceless state of the farmers invited attack.

These were the reasons why we encourage Scouts to learn marksmanship—-just on the same principle as they learn boxing—not in order that they should go and attack everyone they see, but that they should be able to defend themselves and those who are dear to them should it ever be necessary to do so. 52

Indeed, Baden-Powell reminded his readers, they might one day ‘go out to an Oversea Dominion, and it may very easily cost you your life if you don’t know how to use a rifle’. Baden-Powell’s account gives some clear insights into the effective use of‘cultural norms’ and ‘legitimation’ to support and further a certain world view: upon such fare part of one pre-World War I generation of Scouting was nurtured. Baden-Powell’s visit to New Zealand in 1912 and the mana he brought to the Scouting movement and youth work undoubtedly persuaded Government more speedily to ‘demilitarise’ the training of boys 12-14 years of age. Scouting was seen as a perfectly adequate alternative means of ‘national training’. As Roger Openshaw has recently shown, ‘patriotism’ in New Zealand before the Great War was characterised —at least in the primary schools —‘by a romantic idealism reflecting a smug confidence in British military superiority and racial destiny’. 53 The mood, of course, did change rapidly as news of the reality and horrors of trench warfare and waste reached home again when, once more, youth movements and educational institutions underwent further shifts of emphasis to accommodate changing public opinion. The Turnbull Library possesses a range of pamphlet and periodical literature from the first two decades of this century which, if culled effectively, give a good idea of the attempts to capture the minds of the Dominion’s young people on issues of militarism and pacifism and on compulsory versus non-compul-sory military training.

Cossgrove’s own writings, apart from demonstrating the independence and resourcefulness of New Zealand thinking, reflect the rapidly changing moods of the period. From his above-men-tioned Peace Scouting for Girls (1910) which was recommended to ‘Schoolmistresses, Sunday-School teachers, Y.W.C.A’s, Young Women’s Clubs, managers of factories, and to all interested in the welfare of OUR GIRLS’ and included an illustrated section on ‘Jiu Jitsu for Girls’ —lest any Scout ‘may find herself in ... a

predicament’—Cossgrove went on to write several more influential manuals. In 1918 there appeared The Fairy Scouts of New Zealand (Christchurch), ‘a scheme of training for little girls’—drawing upon the expertise of Elsdon Best and George Grey’s Polynesian Mythology —and The Story of a Bull Pup (Christchurch). For older young people Cossgrove also felt a burden:

Although it is recognised that the Boy Scout scheme of training is unrivalled as a scheme for training in manliness, chivalry and handiness, it is a fact that a large majority of the lads leave the Organisation—especially in Australia and New Zealand where compulsory military training is in force —before they have had time to imbibe its high ideals. Many Scoutmasters ‘do not touch the chief aim of the movement, namely’ definite training in honouring God, as the Great Ruling Force in the Universe, Loyalty to King and Country, patriotism, self sacrifice if necessary in service to others, i.e. National training. . . , 54

Published in 1918 Cossgrove’s The Empire Sentinel’s Handbook and Ritual (Christchurch) was an elaborate masonic-inspired code of initiations and meetings to ‘band together the young men of the Empire in a non-military, non-political and non-sectarian organisation’ beyond the traditional Boy Scouts’ age range. It did not succeed. It did, however, reflect a new less belligerent, more romantic post-war mood, as ‘patriotic fervour’ declined. 55 Earlier, in his Peace Scouting for Girls (1910), Cossgrove had more positively reflected an Imperial, military view concerning the current fierce debate upon universal training and conscription. In a section entitled ‘Our Army and Navy’ Cossgrove advised the girls that,

Although you are ‘Peace Scouts’, and have nothing to do with war or the quarrels of nations, you should know that without our Army and Navy we might be speaking French, German or Japanese today, and instead of belonging to the grandest Empire in the world —an Empire on which the sun never sets, with the easiest and fairest laws for everybody, we might have shared the fate of the conquered, and been forced to own the Yellow Man as our master. 56 Sentiments such as these and encouragement from ‘home’ had motivated the setting up of the National League of New Zealand in August 1906 (its name was changed to National Defence League of New Zealand in April 1908). Through its many branches and a strident monthly called Defence (1906-1910), the League strove inter alia to secure ‘universal defensive training, either ashore or afloat, of all boys and young men until the age of 21, with encouragement of defensive training’. 57 Well organized, clamorous and drawing upon a vast ‘militaristic’ literature from overseas the League exerted tremendous influence until its aims for universal training were written into the 1909 Defence Act. 58

One youth organisation to gain positively from this sort of lobbying and sentiment was the school cadet movement, whose history has been traced by Roger Openshaw in his thesis ‘The Patriot Band —the school cadets from their evolution to the Great War’. 59 The years 1902 to 1910, the period following George Hogben’s educational reforms, was the ‘heyday of cadets’.

Openshaw estimates that some two-thirds of New Zealand males between 12 to 14 years donned cadet uniforms for weekly drills, and that in high schools the proportion was larger still. 60 Openshaw describes the years 1909—1914 as a period of‘critical readjustment’ for New Zealand as it faced up to the realities of defence —following the Dreadnought ‘scare’ of 1909 —and moved from being a frontier-rural to an urban society. 61 The cadets were part of the country’s ‘cordon sanitaire’ against outside threats and even against internal social problems such as larrikinism and working-class drunkenness. Defence, in February 1908, had been quick to point out that the ‘Radical statesman’, Sir John Gorst, although silent on the issue of universal training whilst in New Zealand, had come strongly out in favour of it on his return to Britain. Universal training, opined Gorst, ‘would open the eyes of the country to the physique of the children, and they would be

astonished at the deterioration which had taken place from preventable causes’. 62 ‘Begin with the Boy’ advocated one authority, whilst a ‘Civil Servant’, given Defence's editorial column to state his case, thought that compulsory universal training would counteract a boy’s preference for idle ‘billiards and football, tennis and how-to-speak French, sweethearting and choir singing, and every pursuit and hobby under the sun’. 63 In August 1912 a party of twenty specially selected and Trentham-trained cadets left Auckland under Captain J. G. Fullarton to travel to Canada at the invitation of the Government in Ottawa and to compete in the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto the following month. In Toronto the New Zealand cadets acquitted themselves favourably in military exercises against cadet corps from throughout Canada and from Britain and Australia, winning ‘everything but the shooting’. Following their tour of Canada a Vancouver unit followed the New Zealanders back to the Dominion. As a result ‘hundreds of cadets who had been only lukewarm, and probably not a few who were opposed to the universal system, have seen what can be done by proper discipline and efficient training . . ,’. 64 Such visits, too, ‘would tend to link together more closely the different parts of the Empire’.

But, as Weitzel has shown, there was in New Zealand between 1909 and 1914 a strong yet ‘somewhat improbable alliance between middle-class liberalism and militant labour’ to combat compulsory universal military training. 65 Christchurch was at first the principal centre of resistance against the Defence Act measures, but the movement soon gained more universal support. In the Turnbull Library pamphlet collection is T. C. Gregory’s Conscription in New Zealand and Australia (Bristol, 1912) containing a selection of anti-conscriptionist letters and reports from the English and Australasian press and advising people to think seriously before emigrating. In arguments reminiscent of compulsory conscription during the Viet Nam War, intending and actual emigrants were warned about the dangers to their and their sons’ freedoms. Gregory, secretary of the Bristol Peace Federation, also published Plain Facts about Conscription (Bristol, 1912) a one penny pamphlet criticising, amongst other measures, the ‘absurd age at which training commences’. Under the Defence Act ‘at the early age of twelve’ boys are

given a sham rifle, marched out to military exercises, and are inevitably introduced to thoughts of power by force —are made familiar with the wretched spirit masquerading as ‘patriotism’, which teaches that duty to country lies principally, if not solely, in learning to shoot the citizens of some other country. Even our girls are not to be left free from the spirit of militarism. 66

Taking children at twelve ‘and giving them military training under the guise of physical drill’, insisted Gregory, was to ‘bias them in favour of a more complete military training later on’. He made no secret either of the fact that he saw Baden-Powell through his Scouting movement as ‘a rival trainer of lads for war’ vis-a-vis the cadets. 67

The attack on the personal freedom of parents and children —‘our home life will be interfered with, the Militarist coming between the parents and the children’ —and the alleged complicity of the British National Service League in sending ‘literature and employed agents’ to the overseas Dominions to agitate for compulsory military training ‘knowing full well that once the measure was adopted in the Colonies it would follow as a matter of course in the Home Land’ —were two of the most effective arguments used by Charles R. N. Mackie of the National Peace Council of New Zealand to arouse opposition to the current defence legislation. 68 Australia and New Zealand were seen, therefore, as the testing ground for universal training: to fail there would be to make the experiment null and void in Britain. 69 C. Reginald Ford, who was also a member of the Peace Council, was another strident anti-militarist whose articles and pamphlets gained a wide circulation. In his pamphlet The Case Against Compulsory Military Training (Wellington, 1912), a reprint of articles originally published in the Maoriland Worker, Ford refuted the moral, physical, disciplinary and efficiency arguments used in favour of training the young for military service. ‘The greatest evil’ of the regulations, wrote Ford, ‘is the inclusion in it of children, even of the early age of twelve’ (p. 15). 70 Similar sentiments were expressed in Ford’s pamphlet The Defence Act: A Criticism (Christchurch, 1911).

In examining the fortunes of three major mass youth movements of the British Empire, especially in New Zealand, from the 1880 s to 1920, we have seen that colonials and new nation-builders were often eager and willing to experiment with British ideas in youth work but usually ultimately only on their own terms. To the more ‘democratic’ leaders like William Alexander Smith it appeared reasonable and acceptable that men far away should control their own destinies, but to the more military and imperially and autocratically motivated founder of Scouting, Baden-Powell, the matter was not as simple. He preferred direct intervention to Smith’s distant advisory role. Militarists everywhere, swayed more by government legislation and the public purse, found ready support for their plans to take over already existing youth movements in Australasia, and the Dominions were used as a sort of experimental ground for the possible later introduction of such

measures into Britain. In the latter country, however, W. A. Smith and his brigades’ movement, backed by the Churches and other powerful influences, successfully resisted such designs. Between the two extremes of Brigades and Cadets the Scouting movement steered a somewhat ambivalent course until the changing post-War mood made ‘internationalism’ a more acceptable theme. But, although the conscriptionists were initially successful in both Australia and New Zealand, public agitation and a strong religious and working-class reaction soon ameliorated the earlier more draconian measures.

As ‘at home’ in Britain, therefore, youth movements at our end of the Empire —the ‘comrades beyond the seas’ —proved just as susceptible to experimentation and manipulation as agents of social action and change or, at the very least, acted as barometers of the age. In New Zealand further research will undoubtedly show the social significance of these experiments and of others like the country’s own peculiar indigenous Bible Class movement, which arose at the same period and exhibited, too, a strong social relevance and influence. Of that movement one writer has said:

... in little more than one decade [circa 1904-1914] a Youth Movement, indigenous to New Zealand, bursting with vitality, had sprung up and established a strong organisational system in which warm fellowship prevailed and scope was afforded to the idealism and energy of youth. 71 Indigenous ‘independence' might, it could be argued, be seen as one mark of the New Zealand achievements in youth work experimentation over these four decades.

REFERENCES 1 The Australian Boys’ Paper, 1 January 1907, pp. 114-115. A copy of this rare journal (vol. IX, Aug. 1906-July 1907) is in the Hocken Library, Dunedin. It became the official organ of the Boys’ Brigade in Australia with Australasian headquarters at 313—315 Little Collins St, Melbourne. 2 John Springhall, Youth Empire and Society: British Youth Movements, 1883-1940 (London, 1977), p. 17. 3 Ibid., esp. pp. 53-97. For more penetrating historical critiques of Scouting see also J. Springhall, ‘The Boy Scouts, Class and Militarism in Relation to British Youth Movements, 1908-1930’, International Review of Social History ,XVI (2), 1971, pp. 125-158 and Paul Wilkinson, ‘English Youth Movements, 1908-1930’ Journal of Contemporary History, IV (2), 1969, pp. 3-23. Some of the imitators of the Scouting outdoor ethic and techniques were the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry (1916); Kibbo Kift Kindred (1920) and the Woodcraft Folk (1925). See Springhall (1977), ‘Green Jerkins and Back-to-Nature’, pp. 110-120. 4 For the paucity ofhistorical literature see e.g. Diana S. Neave, Recreation Studies in New Zealand: a Bibliography (Wellington, 1977) and for examples of the somewhat meagre historical offerings, Ronald N. Larkin (ed.), Recreation in New Zealand (2 vols, Auckland, 1971 and 1972). Some areas of sociology have, of course, yet to discover the historical dimension!

5 Covering the years 1919-1964; MS Papers 1536. 6 The Boys’ Brigade archive in the Library is receiving regular new additions and now spans the period 1929 to the present. 7 Records for the nineteenth century are seemingly scantier but more research on the role of young people and children in emigrant societies is likely to throw up new lines of investigation through Church records, newspapers, diaries, correspondence, photographic archives etc. 8 Cf. Springhall’s ‘Critical Bibliography’ in Youth, Empire and Society (1977), pp. 140-150 and the much fuller possibilities of Kett’s references. 9 See e.g. Hans-Christian Brandenburg, Die Geschichte der H-J: Wege und Irrwege ihrer Generation (Cologne, 1968). 10 Youth, Empire and Society, p. 24. 11 Ibid., p. 16. In my research on the history of science at this period, both in Australia and New Zealand, I have been struck by a strong parallel interest,

indeed almost obsession with, ‘national efficiency’. 12 M. E. Hoare,Boys, Urchins, Men: A History of The Boys’ Brigade in Australia and Papua New Guinea, 1882-1976 (Sydney, 1979). 13 Auckland Evening Bell, 14 May 1887, p. 3. The best guide to overseas companies is still the ‘Register of Colonial and Foreign Companies’ (hereafter ‘Register’) kept at Brigade HQ in London. The Ist St Louis Company was registered on 18 May 1887. Since commencing to write this article I have discovered evidence of Boys’ Brigades in Christchurch in 1886. 14 H. O. Roth, George Hogben, a Biography (Wellington, 1952), pp. 37-38. Although a strong ‘liberal’ Congregationalist Hogben had his own ideas on approaches to youth work and the Brigades. He warned the organisers ‘at the very first meeting that there must be no attempt to force religion on to the boys’. Hogben, out of a deep sense of social concern at a time of heavy unemployment, was also involved in the Christchurch YMC A, 1882—1884. He had had, indeed, such prior experience in London. Details of New Zealand companies have been gleaned from the Boys’ Brigade Gazette (published in Glasgow) from 1890 to 1914. Some references have also been found in local newspapers of the period.

15 Boys’ Brigade Gazette, X(3), November 1901, p. 41 and ‘Register’, 1902-1903. 16 See Hoare, Boys, Urchins, Men, Chapter IV. 17 NZ Mail, 16 December 1892. 18 In Sydney, for example, W. A. Smith’s ideas were taken over into the Newsboys’ Brigades formed by the powerful newspaper interests around the Fairfax family. The newsboys’ movement in Adelaide, Sydney and Broken Hill ran an almost nightly programme for bootblacks, newspaper nippers, messenger boys, unemployed and other socially disadvantaged of those cities. See esp. Chapters II and VI of Hoare, Boys, Urchins, Men (1979). 19 St John’s Presbyterian Bible Class, 1888-1938. Jubilee History (Wellington, 1938), p. 13. The next Bible Class formed was that at St Paul’s Christchurch in 1896, which also had a Boys’ Brigade Company formed in 1902. The first Bible Class Union for New Zealand was formed at Wainoni on Professor Alexander Bickerton’s property at Easter 1902.

20 Alexander Turnbull foresaw, it seems, the value to posterity in collecting pamphlets, appeal literature and other ephemera concerning such institutions. In The Wellington Boys’ Institute: A Statement & an Appeal (Wellington, 1910), there are several items bound in, including a typescript appeal (2pp), dated 14 March 1907 and signed by G. Troup, C. S. Moore, H. Drummond and W. Bruce and a 4pp pamphlet entitled Wellington Boys’ Institute and S. A. Rhodes’ Home for Boys: Opinions of The Late Governor-General and other Leading Public Men (Wellington, n.d.). 21 Wellington Boys’ Institute (1910), pp. 10-11. 22 Ibid., pp. 11-15. 23 Ibid., p. 17. 24 The Cyclopedia of New Zealand, vol. I (Wellington, 1897), pp. 360-61. 25 NZ Mail, 30 January 1896. I am grateful to Margery Walton for drawing these newspaper references to my attention. 26 Hoare, Boys, Urchins, Men. (1979). 27 Boys’ Brigade Gazette, XI (No. 2), November 1902, p. 24. 28 Ibid., XII (N0..5), January 1904, p. 70. 29 Ibid., X (No. 5), January 1902, p. 76. 30 Ibid., 11l (No. 8), April 1895, p. 230. 31 The best study of Drummond is still George Adam Smith’s The Life of Henry Drummond (London, 1899). See esp. pp. 440-461. I found Aberdeen’s Brigade work best portrayed in the contemporary Canadian newspapers, but see also J. C. and I. M. Gordon, ‘We Twa’: Reminiscences of Lord and Lady Aberdeen (2 vols, London, 1924) and The Canadian Journal of Lady Aberdeen 1893-1898, ed. John Saywell (Toronto, I 960).

32 Whilst in Canada early in 1978 I was privileged to work on MS records of the movement and to unearth a very important major record of the Boys’ Brigade in Canada in the papers of Frederick Victor Longstaff (1879-1961) under Add. MSS 677, British Columbia Provincial Archives, Victoria, 8.C., Canada. See esp. Longstaffs ‘An outline of the Boys’ Brigade in Canada, from 1889 until 1937’, typescript, 13 pp. 33 See Hoare, Boys, Urchins, Men (1979) esp. Chapter 111. 34 See Charles B. Morrell, Handbook of The Boys’ Brigade . . . with a History of the Boys’ Brigade (Cincinnati, 1894?). 35 ‘National Association and Board of Trustees Minutes, 1899-1915’, held at U.8.8.A. Headquarters, Baltimore, U.S.A. I am grateful to the former National Commander, Frank Butt, for access to these records whilst in Baltimore at Easter 1978.

36 See e.g. his ‘Manliness in Boys—By a New Process’ in McClure’s Magazine, December 1893, pp. 68—77. 37 See esp. Theodore Richards, ‘Development of the Boys’ Work in Honolulu’, The Friend, No. 9, 28 September 1928, pp. 207-208 and Taylor Statten, ‘The Genesis of Work with Boys in Canada’, Canadian Welfare, XVI (No. 2), 15 May 1940, pp.ls-18. 38 Boys’ Brigade Gazette XI (No. 7), March 1903, p. 98. 39 Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society (1977), p. 29. 40 Ibid., pp. 29-30. 41 NZ Statutes, 1909, No. 28 (9 Edward VII) esp. Sections 35-40, pp. 306-308. For the effect on the Australian Boys’ Brigade see Hoare, Boys, Urchins, Men, (1979), Chapter IV. 42 Smith to Longstaff, Glasgow 5 May 1914, Longstaff Papers, British Columbia Provincial Archives. 43 Boys, Urchins, Men, Chapter V. 44 R. L. Weitzel, ‘Pacifists and Anti-militarists in New Zealand, 1909-1914’, NZ Journal of History, VII (No. 2), October 1973, pp. 128—147. 45 Defence Act, 1909, Section 39. 46 S. G. Culliford, New Zealand Scouting: The First Fifty Years, 1908-1958

(Wellington, 1958), pp. 17-21. 47 Ibid., pp. 22^39. 48 Ibid., pp. 31-60. 49 Springhall, ‘The Boy Scouts, Class and Militarism . . .’, International Review of Social History, XVI (No. 2), 1971, pp. 126-127. See also Paul Wilkinson, note 3 above. 50 Baden-Powell, Boy Scouts Beyond the Seas, p. 149. 51 Ibid., p. 155. 52 Ibid., p. 237. 53 Roger Openshaw, ‘Patriotism in the Primary School Curriculum: 19001930’, Delta, No. 24, 1979, pp. 43-49. See also Culliford, 1958, p. 25. 54 D. Cossgrove, The Empire Sentinels Handbook . . . and . . . Ritual (Christchurch, 1918), pp. 1-2. 55 See also Openshaw, 1979, pp. 45-46. 56 Cossgrove, Peace Scouting for Girls (Christchurch, 1910), p. 153. 57 Defence (Official Organ of the National [Defence] League of New Zealand). I (No. 1), November 1906, p. 1. 58 Ibid., 11l (No. 27), March 1910, p. 5. 59 MA Thesis, Massey University, 1973, 64 pp. 60 Ibid., p. 5. 61 Ibid., pp. 7-9.

62 Defence, II (No. 14), February 1908, p. 12. 63 Ibid., vol. II (No. 13), January 1908, p. 5. 64 J. G. Fullarton, New Zealand Cadets in Canada: Story of the Tour (Dunedin, 1912), p. 39. This pamphlet was one acquired by Alexander Turnbull and bears his book plate. 65 Weitzel, ‘Pacifists and Anti-militarists in New Zealand, 1909-1914’, NZ Journal of History, VII (No. 2), p. 128. 66 T. C. Gregory, Plain Facts about Conscription (1912), pp. 9-10. 67 Gregory, Conscription in New Zealand and Australia (Bristol, 1912), p. 14. 68 In T. C. Gregory’s pamphlet To the Citizens of London and the United Kingdom . . . From the Peace Council of New Zealand (Bristol, 1912). Bound in PAM, 1912-13, Compulsory Service, Alexander Turnbull Library.

69 See ibid., Australia and New Zealand. Warning to Emigrants, p. 1, and the letter quoted therein of Lord Roberts to Colonel Allan Bell: ‘I hope your efforts to gain universal training in New Zealand will be ultimately successful, for if you fail there, it will mean we shall not get it here’. 70 See also Weitzel, 1973, p. 135. 71 E. P. Blamires, Youth Movement: the Story of the Rise and Development of the Christian Youth Movement in the Churches of New Zealand-as Seen by a Methodist (Auckland, 1952), p. 26. Note: The work by Dr Hoare referred to in footnotes 12, 18, 26, 33 and 41 is not now expected to be published until 1980 — Ed.