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Girl Guides doesn’t really have a good reputation.

 

Well, no. Reputation isn’t the right word. It’s not the sort of thing people want to involved with; they think it’s old-fashioned and for teacher’s pet sort of people.

 

It’s got a new name – Girlguiding UK – and a new uniform but that doesn’t seem to have helped it much. The general image of Guides is much the same as it was right back in 1910 and all the efforts of the Powers That Be to modernise the organisation seem to make no difference to the general public.

 

First off, Girlguiding covers much more than just Guides – ie, girls aged around eleven to around fourteen. You can join Rainbows at about four or five, Brownies at seven and after Guides, you can continue with a range of different things in the Senior Section. You can go down the leadership route and become a Young Leader, or carry on with the same sort of thing as Guides but up a level and be a Ranger. You can be a member of a group that follows a very specific programme called Look Wider, be an In4mer, a DofE Senior Section group, a lone member or a mixture. You can be a Senior Section member up until your 26^th birthday, so you can also be an adult leader or a member of Trefoil Guild once you’re eighteen. As an adult, you can be a leader, a Trefoil Guild member, a Commissioner, a unit helper or just a Girlguiding member.

 

I’ve been in Girlguiding since I was tiny; I don’t really know anything else and I’ve done an extraordinary array of things from finger-painting to visiting world centres. I’ve done outdoor things like camping, hiking, orienteering, archery, kayaking, climbing, pioneering, high ropes, swimming, wide games, night hikes and eating fish and chips in the rain. I’ve done indoor things like glass painting, glass engraving, candle making, jewellery making, toymaking (a lot of making) wand making, cooking, writing, scientific experiments, flower arranging, first aid, deaf awareness and sight awareness. I’ve used Girlguiding for the Trident Scheme and for the Duke of Edinburgh Award and it impressed my current employer enough on my CV for him to employ me.

 

I’m currently a pre-warranted Ranger Leader, which means that I’m in the process of training, which is done on-the-job, as it were. I have a bookful of tasks to complete, such as planning and carrying out the programme, looking after records and accounts and the sorts of things that you complete by being the leader and I’m very much enjoying it. I’m also an unofficial but fairly omnipresent Guide Unit Helper, for lack of any other title.

 

Rangers have no set programme to follow. Rainbows have something called Roundabout, Brownies have the Brownie Adventure, Guides have Go For It! and everyone, including Rangers, has the option of doing Right Now. So, with no rigid structure, the Rangers can do whatever they choose to do. They bring their own materials, for which they can be reimbursed from Ranger funds, and they may ask me for whatever help they want. The new strapline for Girlguiding is “Girls in the Lead” and I think nowhere is that truer than in Senior Section.

 

Over the last year, our activities have ranged from a night of board games to St Patrick’s Day crafts, a Chinese takeaway, and nights where each girl takes charge to teach or demonstrate something she’s interested in. They’ve recruited friends from school to come and join and we’ve had plenty of visitors come to see what Rangers is about.

 

I write this because unfortunately, despite visits, the ingrained idea that Guides is sad has been too much for some people. We’ve had messages of “thank you, we enjoyed it very much – but it’s not for us” and it’s impossible to get girls of Guide or Ranger age to wear their uniform where they might be seen in public.

 

I mentioned new uniforms. Mothers, aunts and grandmothers will probably tell you all about the little brown or blue dress they used to wear and the crossover tie, and how they ironed it every week and polished their shoes. Obviously, this just isn’t practical these days and if you tried to enforce a uniform like that, you’d have no members left. Rainbows up to Senior Section all have polo shirts, t-shirts, hoodies and rugby shirts and the Senior Section hoodie is particularly popular, having as it does such an incredibly subtle logo.

 

Guides, incidentally, is still a girls-only organisation. Men are allowed only as adult members or unit helpers. There are no Boy Brownies or Boy Guides. There was a vote on the subject a few years ago and the decision was to keep Girlguiding only for girls. On the other hand, girls may join Scouts, which was previously the male equivalent.

 

Camping is an old tradition of Guiding and it holds strong to this day. True, the old green canvas bell or ridge tents have been replaced by lightweight nylon dome tents but everything else remains essentially the same. Our Guides and Rangers still use poles and string to construct camp gadgets, such as bag racks, draining racks and washstands. They’ve do it every year and although they need reminding of how to do it every year, they seem to enjoy it. The draining racks take a long time but not a lot of thought is needed so it’s a good time to sit in the sun and talk and eat sweets and children still enjoy anything that involves use of a mallet. We cook outdoors on anything we like; gas cookers mainly, but we use trangias, barbecues and open fires too. The Guides take it in turns to help with tasks like fetching the water – a mini expedition across the field to the tap, pulling a little trolley – preparing the food and the job they all hate, and with good reason, emptying the latrines. Yes, there are still some things about camping that are bad but occasionally, we’re lucky and use a Scout site which tends to already have on-site toilets.

 

On camp we always have a theme and our activities are based around the theme. Each patrol has a new themed name, as does each leader. We play wide games in the day and in the dark, we go for walks in the country, we take the train into town and we go swimming just to get them clean. In the evenings, there’s the camp fire, the smores – and in the event of anyone living under a rock and not knowing, smores are melted marshmallows sandwiched between biscuits and often with a chocolate button – the sketches, which are usually the highlight of the camp, and the staying up talking by torchlight all night.

 

Your personal camping equipment includes a groundsheet, a foam mat, a sleeping bag and a camp blanket. I’m not sure many of our Guides these days have camp blankets, but all the leaders do and we’ve been collecting the badges on them for years. Most blankets I’ve seen have their badges sewn on in perfect formation, in lines and columns with even gaps between them. Mine are very higgledy-piggledy and flow from Rainbow to Brownie to Guide to Senior Section to adult with no spaces to distinguish the separate sections. Camp blankets, I think, are very personal and very individual and it’s always fascinating to get a look at someone else’s. Our main leader, for example, has the perfect formation and has collected badges all her life, not just from Guiding, but from places she visits and her friends frequently bring her back badges to sew on. The girl training to be a Guide leader has her badges in several short lines, organised fairly strictly by type – a line of Go For It badges, below a line of interest badges, below a line of Brownie badges. A lot of mine were sewn on by me or my gran many years ago and so are coming loose. I’ve resewn a lot of them, got them in the right order or just made them more secure and apart from anything else, I can use it to look back at what I’ve done. A final word on camp blankets – they not just for spreading over beds, people often wear them. They cut a hole or a T in the centre and wear them as a poncho round the campfire. That doesn’t work for me because the idea of a blanket with a huge hole in the middle seems wrong. I therefore have a button and a buttonhole along one edge and I can wear it as a big cloak and still stay warm.

 

Now, the point of all this is that Girlguiding desperately needs more adult volunteers to give girls the opportunity to join in. There are hundreds of thousands of girls on waiting lists but until more adults are found, they will have to stay on waiting lists. It’s fun, you get even more out of it than you put in and you get to take part in so many activities. We don’t want much – enthusiasm and a few hours a month is all you need.

 

www.girlguiding.org.uk