Songs of Innocence (9 page)

And here, Baden-Powell came into his own. Already, a group of Cheshire choirboys, who had been corresponding with him about non-smoking pledges, had set up a Baden-Powell League of Health and
Manliness. Now the former commander became Vice President of the Boys’ Brigade, which had recruited several thousand members since
its inception in Glasgow in the
1880s. Baden-Powell saw a way forward – the Mafeking cadet model could help save the Empire, he thought.

The first Scout camp was held on Brownsea Island, Dorset, in the summer of 1907 and featured nature-study, hunting, the art of camping and yarns told around the campfire by Baden-Powell himself.
The following year,
Scouting for Boys
was published, and included the first of many ‘Camp Fire Yarns’ written by Baden-Powell: ‘I suppose every British boy wants to help
his country in some way or other,’ he wrote: ‘Perhaps you don’t see how a mere small boy can be of use to the great British Empire, but by becoming a Scout and carrying out the
Scout Laws every boy can be of use. “Country first, self second” should be your motto.’

Fun, ancient and modern

‘My brother Leslie was continually falling into ponds,’ Olive Everson recalled. ‘In winter he would slide on too-thin ice, and in Summer, wading in streams in
order to catch “tiddlers”, he would suddenly find himself in deep water and arrive home soaked and miserable. My mother never knew what to expect at the end of the day, when he was due
to arrive home . . . he loved to go off on his own for a day’s fishing, with a bent pin, a worm and some string.’
¹²

Baden-Powell tapped into some powerful forces when he founded the Scout movement. There was the age-old tendency for boys – who always had more freedom – to go off exploring their
environment, and also this renewed sense that there was something fundamentally character-building and life-affirming about allowing children to roam the countryside, to breathe its healthy air and
even occasionally to come into contact with cold water or mud.

The first weekly comic strip, which had appeared in 1884, had featured a raffish character called Ally Slope, who was always getting
into scrapes. But it was during the
Edwardian period that children’s comics began to come into their own, with Alfred Harmsworth’s Amalgamated Press launching the
Daily Mail
on the profits from its
Comic
Cuts
and
Illustrated Chips
.
¹³
But the big excitement of the age, for the working-class child at least, was the cinema. The first films
were shown in the late nineteenth century at travelling fairground shows, and graduated to small shops known as ‘Penny Gaffs’. By 1909, larger cinemas were being built, licensed by
local authorities.
¹⁴
Yet these picture-houses were a working-class domain, not considered entirely safe or respectable for the more affluent
child. Elsie Oman, born around 1904 into a very poor family in Salford, remembered her local picture-house as a chaotic place:
¹⁵
‘Sometimes
Auntie would give my cousin and I a penny each to go to the pictures matinée – “the bug house”, we called it. Sometimes we got a free orange or a comic as we entered. It
was like a madhouse inside. Some children got their entrance fee by taking empty jam jars or bottles back to the shops – they got a penny for three. The place reeked of oranges and every now
and then lumps of peel would come whizzing round our earholes . . . it was a good job they were silent pictures, as with the noise of the children it would have been difficult to hear.’

The premises in which films were shown to children were often unsanitary and even unsafe. But it was the content of the films, and their possible effect on the morals of the children of the
urban poor, which now began to cause serious concern. The first known case of a film being blamed for encouraging juvenile delinquency occurred in 1913:
¹⁶
a magistrate named Mr Wallace, dealing at the London Sessions with a boy who pleaded guilty to burglary, blamed the pictures for the offence, according to the following
day’s newspaper: ‘Many of the lads who came before him owed their position to having been influenced by pictures of burglaries and thefts at such shows . . . these shows, as far as
young boys were concerned, were a grave danger to the community.’

Similarly, the following year a group of boys who came before the Sutton Coldfield magistrates accused of theft were bound over not to enter a picture-house for twelve
months: ‘The chairman said the town had been made notorious as a den of young thieves, and shopkeepers had been terrorised. A petition, signed by clergy and ministers of religion and by the
local branch of the Women’s Temperance Association, was presented, suggesting the closer supervision of picture theatres. They urged that no picture should be allowed to be shown which
represented violence and wrongdoing, and objected to certain posters.’

Yet the cinema was here to stay. In 1914, research by Manchester’s Director of Education, Spurley Hey, revealed that half the city’s pupils were attending at least once a week.
Indeed, Mr Hey told a commission of inquiry, many of them were prepared to beg or steal to do so. One enterprising group had formed a begging circle for the purpose, which had met its demise when
one member had stolen the group’s hidden boots and stockings – removed to increase the impression of poverty – and had pawned them for cinema tickets. But
The Times
weighed
in on the child’s part. Criticism of the cinema as immoral was ‘an expression of the type of mind which regards all pleasure as evil’, the paper said in a leader column in January
1914. But the biggest question was: What would children do instead if the picture-houses were closed to them? ‘Are their homes better ventilated than the palaces, or the street corners less
draughty? Will they go to bed any earlier, or sleep any sounder for being left at home?’

Sonia Keppel, growing up in a wealthy household in London, would have had no such japes. However, her mother would occasionally take her to a matinée at the theatre, which in itself was a
far from sedate experience.
¹⁷
‘Clearly I remember that it was a matinée about Nero, fiddling madly before the burning of Rome. A
deafening thunderstorm went on in the background, through which Agrippina
shrieked valedictions to her insensitive son. Alternately, the stage glowed red from the flames
consuming Rome, or was blacked out altogether while the thunder lasted, or flared white with the lightning. Through all these extremes of heat and shade and light I clung to Mamma, protesting
loudly that I was not frightened.’

Nor was the experience entirely free from violence: the Keppels had taken along a friend, Sir Hedworth Williamson, ‘who appeared to treat the appalling scene in front of him with
comforting levity’. Halfway through the performance, a lady arrived late and groped her way to a seat in the row behind. ‘Then she took the long pins out of her hat and pinned it to the
back of the seat in front of her. On the stage the lightning flared, and by its light I beheld the terrifying spectacle of Sir Hedworth Williamson impaled, like a gigantic butterfly, on the back of
his seat. And a doctor had to be sent for to dress the wound and to treat him for shock.’

The Keppels evidently gained endless amusement from retelling the story later. Yet these excursions with her mother were rare, Sonia said, and mostly she ‘accepted the current theory that
a child must not be too much with its parents’. Yet, despite her admission that she longed to spend more time with her parents, she described the times she did spend with them –
shopping trips, even a holiday in St Moritz – as times filled with fun and affection. The Edwardian age, Sonia said, was a time when the heavy mantle of Victoria’s solemnity was lifted,
and when both children and adults indulged – at least sometimes – in childish behaviour.

The world intrudes

Yet this was a turbulent age, with Britain preparing for war and with tension mounting over women’s suffrage, Irish home rule and the reform of the House of Lords. And
children were not immune to
their odd outbreak of social unrest. In 1911, a wave of school strikes swept the country, during which pupils refused to work in protest at
perceived injustices in their schools. It all began in Llanelli, in south Wales, when pupils had marched out of their classrooms in protest at the hitting of a child by an assistant
teacher.
¹⁸
Similar strikes followed across the country, highlighting grievances over hours, leaving ages, holidays and discipline. By the end of
a week, pupils had walked out of lessons in Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham, London and Glasgow, as well as in other cities. In the East End, school strikers armed themselves with iron bars,
sticks and belts, though eventually their protest ended peacefully.
The Times
, while condemning the action, took a notably relaxed stance. Describing the outbreaks of unrest as ‘a
popular method of escape from the dullness of discipline and scholastic routine’, the paper’s leader-writer pointed out that none of this was new: ‘The incident may serve to
remind us, and especially those who are disposed to regard ill-disciplined boyhood as the peculiar product of twentieth-century legislation, that schoolboy strikes are probably as old as organized
education itself,’ the paper said. A school striker had lost his life at the Edinburgh High School in 1595, and those of a classical bent would recall that a similar incident had taken place
in one of the Mimes of Herondas.

Parents could occasionally be part of the problem when school-children failed to behave, the paper added – ‘Difficulties have arisen from time to time from the fact that parents of
elementary school children, while anxious for good discipline, object to the use of ordinary instruments for maintaining it’ – and maybe the strikes would lead them to discipline their
own children better in future: ‘These school strikes may serve a useful purpose if they induce parents to realize the limits of peaceful persuasion as an educative force.’

The class divide, which remained stark, loomed large in the lives of many children. Olive Everson, in Suffolk, was very aware of her
social position.
¹⁹
‘Grannie was a person of refinement,’ she explained, because she had taught in a small village school, while Olive’s father was a worker
on a country estate. Yet the Eversons were very aware of the social gulf that divided them not just from the family in the ‘Big House’ but also from those who owned their own land:
‘I had a school friend whose parents lived at a farm. I often went there for tea, and on one occasion to their Christmas party,’ Olive wrote. ‘Relatives of the family were there
in full force, and one elderly friend of the family was a lady who lived at the Manor Farm. Sitting at the far end of the table she directed her glance at me, the little girl whose father was
merely a farm worker, and in a loud tone heard by everyone she remarked: “You don’t get anything like this at home, do you dear?” I could only have been nine or ten years old, but
I felt most embarrassed and resentful.’

Twice a year, ‘her ladyship’ would visit the village and leave parcels of her children’s outgrown clothes. And at Christmas the wives would be sure to show their gratitude as
they queued in the courtyard of the House to receive their annual joint of beef. Due respect was shown – on Sundays, when Olive sang in the church choir, she was exhorted by her parents not
to try to crane her head to see ‘the family’ in their special box pew.

Sonia Keppel, meanwhile, remembered being regularly incarcerated inside just such a box pew during her family’s regular visits to aristocratic friends in the country, and being completely
unable to see out. Her mother, Alice Keppel, had a social conscience, though, and rather enjoyed embarrassing her wealthy friends by showing it. Often, Lord Alington, who owned large amounts of
property in the East End, would call to invite Alice out for a drive: ‘One rather dull day, he called for her and as usual asked her where he should drive her. “Hoxton, please,”
she said.’ It transpired that Lord Alington had never actually been to Hoxton, despite owning large parts of it, and had no desire to go. But to Hoxton he now went, unable to
refuse a lady’s request: ‘From her subsequent description the drive was funereal. Along dreary streets the horses clopped slowly, the smart equipage jeered at or sullenly
watched by dull-eyed men and women and miserably-clad children. Through an occasionally open doorway the inmates of the carriage got a glimpse of disheartening squalor. Many of the window-frames
had lost their glass, and the holes had been stuffed up with old rags or newspaper, or just left empty. At the end of it Lord Alington was speechless and miserable. As he dropped her at home, Mamma
thanked him enthusiastically. “I do think it was charming of you to let me see Hoxton as it is now,” she said. “Next time I go there, I shan’t recognise
it.”’

On another occasion, during a Christmas shopping trip to Oxford Street, Sonia was entranced by a baby doll in a toyshop window. But so, too, was a ragged and dirty little girl of about her own
age who was also staring at the doll from the pavement: ‘Leaving me on the pavement and with bewildering speed, Mamma went into the shop, bought the doll and came out with it, still as it
was, without its wrappings. Instinctively the child lifted up her thin little arms for it and Mamma laid the doll in them . . . Mischievously, Mamma looked down at me, purple and furious. “I
thought she needed it more than you did.”’
²⁰

Sonia Keppel was ten when King Edward VII died of bronchitis and a series of heart attacks. The little girl had not been told the truth about her mother’s relationship with the monarch:
‘I was aware of some secret which even Violet shared, but which I was considered too young to understand.’
²¹
The King’s death
precipitated a family crisis for the Keppels. Alice and her husband George fled their home in the night; Sonia was taken the next day to join them at the house of some friends. Shortly afterwards,
Alice set off on a tour of the Far East, and continued travelling for some time. Sonia would spend months in Germany with her nanny and governess, and would not see her parents for the best part of
a year.