Kibbo Kift - Origins

Origins

The organisation was founded by the charismatic Englishman John Hargrave (aka 'White Fox'), artist, author and Boy Scout Commissioner for Woodcraft and Camping, who had become disenchanted with the increasingly militaristic tendency in the Scout movement after World War I.

Hargrave was promptly expelled from the Scouts by Scout founder Robert Baden-Powell. With a small group of like-minded, dissident, anti-war Scoutmasters and Scoutmistresses under his own direct leadership, he set about building an alternative and very different movement. Baden-Powell expelled Hargrave with extreme reluctance, and only after some wealthy backers had threatened to withdraw funding from the Scouts unless he was expelled.

The Kibbo Kift (archaic Kentish dialect for 'proof of great strength') has been described as 'the only genuine English national movement of modern times' and was certainly very different from Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts.

Based on the woodcraft principles of naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton that had been a key part of the early Scout programme, the Kibbo Kift was to be not merely a youth organisation but was to involve all ages and, very daring for the times, it was open to both sexes. The ideas of world peace and the regeneration of urban man through the open-air life replaced the nationalism and militarism Hargrave had detested in the post-World War I Scouts.