Remembering 1st Long Melford Girl Guides
by Sheila Cadge
with additional reminiscences from Sarah
Once a Guide Always a Guide
Preface
When I was tidying up in the loft a few months ago, I came across an old toffee tin containing all my Girl Guide badges and some other items. There weren’t any photos in there, but a few had been published on Long Melford Facebook pages, and so I decided it would be a good idea to write about my experiences in the 1960s when 1st Long Melford Guides was formed (for the third time, although I didn’t actually know that then). I had really enjoyed my time in the Guides, and my original idea was to write a short Melford Memories-style reminiscence – a snapshot in time, complete with memories of what it was like to live in Melford then. However, once I had started on this, I discovered that there had been two earlier companies, and I also began to receive material from several other sources. Suddenly my idea took on a life of its own and turned into a history of Guiding in Long Melford, drawn from accounts of Guides and Guiders over the last century. Sarah Boosé has been a major source of material in this respect, and she has worked alongside me in compiling and collating the information received. It would not have been possible to write this history without her collaboration.
While I have been researching this, it really struck me how many girls from Melford remember their time in Guiding with nostalgia and pleasure, and that for some of them, a hobby or interest awakened in Guides has stayed all through their life. I could not have written this history without the help of many other people, listed at the end of this article, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.
Sheila Cadge – June 2023
1 How the Movement began
During the Siege of Mafeking (1899-1900) in the 2nd Anglo-Boer War, Lieutenant-General Robert Baden-Powell saw how young boys were useful for carrying messages for the soldiers. Back in England he decided to try this at a more general level and began by taking 21 boys camping in 1907. The camp was a success, and he followed this up with the book Scouting for Boys. The book covered topics such as tracking, signalling, and cooking, as well as ‘instruction in good citizenship’. Boys (and some girls as well) started forming patrols and troops, calling themselves ‘Boy Scouts’ or ‘Girl Scouts’.
It was not common for girls to go camping and hiking then. The Boy Scouts Headquarters Gazette of 1909 asked: ‘If a girl is not allowed to run, or even hurry, to swim, ride a bike, or raise her arms above her head, how can she become a Scout?’ However, some girls, who refused to accept that Scouting was ‘just for boys’, were registered at Scout Headquarters. In 1909, the first-ever Boy Scout rally took place at Crystal Palace in London. A group of girls from Peckham Rye gate-crashed this event. Following some negative publicity in the press, Baden-Powell decided that a separate, single-sex organisation would be best. His sister, Agnes Baden-Powell, was tasked with organising this, and subsequently in 1910, the Girl Guides Association was formed in the United Kingdom. Soon, these young women began completing badges in sailing, aviation, and home electrics among other things.
There was no Girl Guide company in Long Melford until more than a decade later, a few years after the end of World War 1. During the war women took on many of the traditionally male roles, and Girl Guides were making important contributions to the First World War effort – growing food, acting as messengers for government organisations and working in hospitals, factories, and soup kitchens. Although we know from census returns and many other sources that it was common for young girls to work in factories before they got married, or to move away from home to go into service, the idea of going camping and doing outdoor activities for enjoyment would probably have seemed quite alien. For local girls especially it would have been a very novel, and exciting, experience to go camping without their family for example.
The world and social values had changed hugely at the end of the war, and this change would also have contributed towards the formation of a Guide company in Melford.
2 The early years
According to records from Girl Guide Headquarters, the earliest incarnation of 1st Long Melford Guide Company was in February 1922, with the first registration being on 2nd July 1923. Leaders at the time were Miss E. B. Harris (Captain), Miss Molly Hyde Parker (Lieutenant), and Miss E. L. Sillitoe (Lieutenant). At some point later during this period Miss Maisie Andrews became Captain and Miss Kathleen Deeks Lieutenant.
In 1966, Maureen Baker, who was then Captain, appealed for information about the earlier companies and received this letter from Mrs E. L. Smith [née Sillitoe]: ‘Having seen your appeal in the Parish Magazine for information of past Guide Companies, in the village, the only one I know of was started by Miss Doreen Robinson of Pound Hall, Miss Gertrude Brockwell and myself (Miss Sillitoe). Miss Robinson was captain, but I am sorry to say, not a very energetic one, so the running of the company was left to Miss Brockwell and myself as the two Lts. Mrs Mabel Clover (Mabel Ringer) was a patrol leader, the other names I cannot remember. The girls wore navy cotton tunics and felt hats and pale blue ties. We held a very successful garden fete at Melford Place. As far as I can remember this all happened around 1919-23. I left the village in 1923 and went to Boxford and joined a very good company there, afterwards becoming Brown Owl. No one came forward to help the company here, so it just faded out. I haven’t a photograph and cannot remember how many girls there were. If I can think of anything more, I will let you know.’
More information surfaced in a letter from Cora Younger (née Woodhouse) written in 1987 in response to a request for information on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the company’s founding: ‘I can give you a little information of (I think) the first Girl Guide Group in the village around 1924, being one of them. Our Captain was a Miss Bessie Harris, who lived at the Bull Hotel (now Trust House) and a Miss Edith Sillitoe was Vice Captain. In those days we held our weekly meetings at the Parish Room at the Rectory. There was a lapse of a few years when these ladies married, and our next Guide Captain was a Miss Maisie Andrews from Waldingfield & Vice Captain was Miss Kathleen Deeks who lived at High Street Farm. Our meetings were then held at the Institute Rooms at Bull Lane and later at the Club room at the back of the Black Lion; a Miss Molly Hyde Parker from Bulmer, a Miss Stewart from Sudbury, and Miss Banks William from Glemsford were also Senior helpers. We held regular weekend camps at Acton Place by permission of Lady Pearson and our Guide Rallies were held every year at Holbrook Hall Great Waldingfield where our District Commissioner Lady St Leger Glyn lived. I would add that Miss Andrews is now Mrs Whitehouse and lives at The Ferns the Green Long Melford – and Miss Kathleen Deeks is now Mrs Phinney and lives at Greys Close Cavendish – there are still some old Guides living in the village: Phyllis Kemp [née Sansum], Violet Brown [née Sansum], Nellie Pettigrew [née Parmenter], Ethel Drury [née Long], Mary Springett, Cora Younger [née Woodhouse], Florrie Diggins [née Woodhouse] of Sudbury, and Vera Angell [née Woodhouse] of Cavendish. All senior citizens and I don’t think anyone would be able to attend the reunion. We all had some very happy times and can recall our Guiding Days as very useful and rewarding, remembering Once a Guide Always a Guide. Cora, Florrie and Vera were sisters. Cora was born in 1911, so she would have been 11 or 12 when she became a Guide. Cora died in 2007.
This company was disbanded in 1932.
3 1940s and 1950s
The Company was re-formed on 23 August 1948 and registered on 23 June 1949. The then Leader was Mrs Monica Hempstead, who was listed as Lieutenant on 6 September 1949. She is presently 93 years old. Her daughter, Debbie Capon, asked her recently what she remembered about those days, and her mum said she remembered saying Dib Dib Dib, Dob Dob Dob. She also remembered the Guide handshake was with the left hand, as they were told the right hand was used to hold a sword. Her husband Ted used to help with Guide Camps.
Sarah Boosé has the Guide Handbook which belonged to Marlene Blythe who lived at Melford House, and who remained a family friend until she passed away a few years ago. In the book she writes she was enrolled on 21 September 1948 so must have been one of the first Guides when the Company re-formed for the second time! Sarah says Marlene would have been thrilled to know it was being used in this history.
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| Photos: Sarah Boosé | |
That company lasted eight years and was disbanded on 16 November 1956.
4 1960s – based on the reminiscences of Sheila Cadge
In the mid-1960s 1st Long Melford Girl Guides came into being for the third time. The company re-formed on 12 January 1965 and was registered on 12 May of that year. When I heard that a Guide Company was being started in Long Melford, I was interested immediately and went along to the first meeting. My ideas of Guiding up to then had come from reading books like Judy, Patrol Leader by Dorothea Moore, which presented a rather more exciting experience of Guiding than we encountered in our meetings. (If I remember correctly, Judy managed to catch burglars and save someone from drowning in the course of the book.) Along with Sue Richardson, Roberta and Linda Nears and Vanessa Ingram, I was a founder member of the re-formed 1st Long Melford Guides in the mid-1960s, which meant that we could choose the names for our two patrols as well as our company scarf colour. There were about 12 of us at that time. We voted to have bright green for the scarf. At that time Guide patrols were named after either flowers or birds. We chose Daffodil (green and yellow shoulder flash for the old shirt-style uniform) and Fuchsia (maroon and dark blue) for the two patrols. (I would rather have had bird names and been a Swallow, but I was outvoted and ended up in Fuchsia patrol.) I eventually became Patrol Leader for Fuchsia.
Maureen Baker from High Street was our Captain, and Ruth Nears (Roberta and Linda’s mum), who lived in Church Row, was our Lieutenant. They had never been Guiders before, so it was very much a case of everyone learning as we went along. Because we were forming the company from scratch, none of the girls had previous experience as Guides, and so four girls were chosen to become patrol leaders and seconds. We then all studied for the Tenderfoot test together so that we could be formally enrolled as Girl Guides. Among other things we had to: attend meetings regularly for at least a month; learn about the traditions and history of the movement; learn whistle and hand signals, basic knots (including how to tell a granny from a reef knot); know about the composition of the Union Jack and the right way to fly it (I automatically check flags even now to make sure they are the right way up); and finally (oh, the joys of being a girl in the mid-twentieth century) how to strip and make a bed. At the enrolment ceremony the threefold promise we made was as follows: A Guide promises on her honour that she will do her best, To do her duty to God and the Queen, To help other people at all times and To obey the Guide Law. We saluted and received our Tenderfoot badge in the form of a trefoil, which had to be polished with Brasso before every meeting as it tarnished really easily.
5 Uniform and Patrols
The uniforms we wore were old-style to start with, although the beret was no longer worn. (You can see from the pictures that we are wearing a mixture of the old and new style uniforms). Instead, we had an ‘air hostess’ style hat which didn’t always stay on your head easily. Along with a navy gored skirt we wore a blue shirt with our company name and flashes sewn on the shoulder – as I mentioned before, these were maroon and blue for Fuchsia, and yellow and green for Daffodil. The tie was actually a big piece of material, which could double as a triangular bandage. We had to fold it a specific way to make a tie to go round the neck of the shirt, and it was fastened with a reef knot at the back. The shirt was tucked into the skirt, and we wore tights or socks (we never wore trousers for regular meetings, only for activities such as camping). Badges had to be sewn on the shirt in specific places, e.g., the patrol badge was above the left pocket, and proficiency badges were sewn down the sleeve. Patrol leaders and seconds both wore lanyards with whistles attached, while patrol leaders had two stripes of white tape down their left pocket, seconds only had one. The uniform changed over to the new style around 1967 to 1968. The main difference was the shirt, which now had three-quarter length sleeves and was worn outside the skirt, and the way all the attached paraphernalia and badges were displayed. The tie became a neckerchief and lanyards were no longer worn (to my great sadness). Stripes for Patrol Leader and Second now became a badge worn under the patrol name badge, and the shoulder flashes were no longer used. I seem to remember we bought the shirts from Winch and Blatch, but all the badges etc were ordered through our Captain. All the insignia now went in different places on the shirt, and we were issued with a leaflet to make sure we sewed them on correctly. For some reason I never threw mine away, this might jog a few memories.
 L to R (back) Linda Haydon, Tessa Anthony, Roberta Nears, Pat Palmer, Susan Ward & Susan Richardson. (front) Sheila Cadge, Carol Totman & Linda Nears (Photo courtesy of Sue Smith) |
 Sue as Patrol Leader for the Daffodils, with her brother Peter, who was a Cub (image courtesy of Sue Smith) |
6 Where and when we met based on the reminiscences of Sheila Cadge
As I remember we met on Tuesday nights. Our meetings took place ln what had been the old Arnold and Gould horsehair factory. We shared this building with other youth associations. To get there you went down an alleyway between the Old House restaurant (passing the kitchens, often with lovely smells wafting out of the building) and the Co-op, and through an old orchard. It was also possible to get to it from round the back of St Catherines Road at that time. You would never be allowed to have young people meeting in a place like that today, we were warned not to go upstairs, as the stairs and floor weren’t safe. The upstairs was usually out of bounds although apparently there were a couple of heavy medicine balls stored up there that were used occasionally for exercises (however I can’t remember that personally). The wooden floors were quite uneven, and there were cobwebs in every corner of the ceiling. It was very cold there in the wintertime, with single glazed windows that iced up inside. There was a deactivated WW2 bomb hanging from the ceiling, which had been presented to the Scouts from USAF Sudbury. The factory grounds backed on to the lane and allotments by the side of Chad Brook, continuing round from Cock and Bell Lane. The lane became a footpath over to the allotments on the other side of the footbridge (there were far more allotments along there at that time than there are today, and there were always lots of people there during the growing season), and we sometimes went to the bridge across the stream. More often than not Ephraim Younger would be somewhere around, as not only did he have plots of his own there, but he was responsible for the allotment rents etc. We actually ranged all over the centre of Melford, down the back to the football field and round St Catherines Road when we were tracking or practising Scouts’ Pace during the long summer evenings. (One of the highlights of going to Guides was buying chips with scraps from the chip shop on the way home – wrapped in newspaper, of course. They always tasted so good!)
7 Activities – based on the reminiscences of Sheila Cadge
During sessions we would do a variety of activities related to completing our 2nd Class syllabus and achieving badges, as well as games. (You can see from the photo of my (rather battered) test card here that I completed my 2nd Class test. We practised making phone calls from the phone boxes in Hall Street and at the top of Woollards Gardens, often having to take a break or give up because hardly any people had phones in their houses then, and so you could end up queuing for your turn. For an ordinary phone call, you needed to put in 4d in old pennies, dial the number and press Button A when someone answered, or Button B if there was no response, to get your money back. We practised dialling 999 for emergency services when it was dark by wearing a blindfold. (Find the dial and the finger holes, move your end finger one along, keep it there and turn the dial three times) I’m sure this must have been of use to somebody at some point, although fortunately I never had to use this knowledge. We built fires in the old orchard and cooked sausages, and damper bread on a stick (more than once resulting in indigestion!). We also practised square lashing, ending up with wobbly seats and shelves, neither of which I would have trusted to bear much weight. We were allowed to choose to a certain extent which proficiency badges we wanted to do, depending on whether testers were available for some of the more specialist ones. Along with my second class badge I completed First Aid, Child Nurse, Weatherman and Thrift badges. The Weatherman badge (green weathercock) was quite an easy one as we had covered nearly all of the syllabus in Geography at school. We had to keep a daily record of weather for one month as well as being able to describe various types of weather and make either a simple rain gauge or a wind vane and know how to use it to obtain reasonably reliable records. Nothing about global warming in those days. For my Thrift badge (green bee), among other things, I had to show that I had a savings account, bring a certificate from my parents stating that I was not wasteful in the home, and that I was keeping my clothes in good condition. Like many Melford families at that time, being thrifty was a way of life. Mum made most of our clothes, we very rarely bought anything from a shop. Dad grew all our vegetables and soft fruit, we went foraging for blackberries in the autumn, and Mum made jams and chutneys as well as ‘doing down’ eggs. This entailed buying eggs in summer when they were cheaper and dipping them in isinglass so that they lasted into the winter. The trays of eggs were stored on top of the wardrobe and used as needed for baking. In addition, I had to produce an article that proved I was thrifty. This was quite easy for me as my aunt Cookie Boreham worked in a silk factory in Welwyn Garden City and she used to save me scraps of brightly coloured material. I padded coat hangers with foam and covered them with silk on top, and I made a patchwork quilt for a doll’s cot. I also completed Child Nurse, a test which applied throughout to children of 3 to 5 years. The first part of the test involved general principles and common-sense knowledge, starting with: The candidate must have a sense of responsibility and a high standard of personal cleanliness; she must understand that when dealing with a child she must carry out whatever she has said that she will do, and must never resort to bribery. The second part of my test was taken under the supervision of Valerie Theobald, who had trained as a nursery nurse. I looked after her son, Peter, for an afternoon at Hanwell House, and had to take care of him while he was playing, tell him a story, and plan and prepare a meal for him. Obviously, I must have met with Valerie’s approval, as I passed this part of the test.
One of the highlights of being a Guide is going camping, and I vividly remember going to Tendring Hall Park near Stoke by Nayland for a District camp in the Whitsun school holidays, when the rhododendrons were in glorious bloom. I had never seen such beautiful flowers! We were accommodated in old-style heavy canvas army tents, with a cook tent as well, and a lot of the activities focussed around keeping everything very tidy, and campfires. We cooked, sang classic Guiding songs (not exclusive to us) such as Ging gang goolie, She’ll be coming round the mountain, and the Hearse Song (Don’t laugh if you see a hearse go by.). The weather was not the best, damp and rainy at times, and we all went home tired from lack of sleep, gnat-bitten and smelling of woodsmoke.
Vanessa Ingram also remembers the short camp at Tendring, but, along with several other Melford Guides, she went on a two-week camp in Thetford Forest in the mid ‘60s. Among their outings were trips to Norwich Castle and Grimes Graves. As the camp lasted two weeks, Vanessa’s family (and possibly other girls’ families as well, judging by the pictures) came to visit at the weekend. On the left of this photo you can see, among others, her parents and Grandad Moyle, and Linda Nears and Ardyn Smith on the right of the tent. There was a stream which they used for various activities, but unfortunately there were also a lot of mosquitoes, and Vanessa went home with poison legs from all the bites. No one had insect repellent or after-bite ointment with them then. Not a very happy souvenir!
Thetford Camp mid ‘60s (photo courtesy of Vanessa Ascott)