Kibbo Kift

The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift was a camping, hiking and handicraft group with ambitions to bring world peace. It was the first of three movements in England associated with the charismatic artist and writer John Hargrave (1894–1982). The Kindred was founded in 1920. Some members continued into Hargrave's Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit, which was established in 1931–32, and which became in 1935 the Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This was wound up in 1951.

Hargrave claimed all three organisations to be part of one mission, telling his followers after the last title-change: 'We are the Green Shirts – indeed we are the Kindred – calling ourselves the Social Credit Party of Great Britain officially, but knowing full well who and what we are. "Whelm on me ye Resurrected Men!" – I give you that outcry of the Kin in 1927.'

The mission was the belief that Kibbo Kift training would produce a core of healthy and creative individuals through whom the human race would evolve into a society without war, poverty and wasted lives. The Kibbo Kift held that individual character strengthened by mental discipline was the key to the future, not mass movements based on groups defined by class, race or nation states.

The Kindred was formed at a meeting held on 18 August 1920 at the offices of the Charity Organisation Society. Besides Hargrave, the movers were Mrs Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, a former suffragette and Theosophist-inclined pacifist; and Dr C. K. Cullen, socialist-inclined medical officer in East London and a youth leader at the Camelot Youth Club in Poplar. All three shared a broad vision of creating a new model for character–building youth groups, a progressive, co-educational and non-militaristic alternative to The Boy Scouts Association. However, there were differences. In the early years of the Kibbo Kift, there were ideological and personal wranglings over the new organisation, from which Hargrave emerged in 1924 as the 'Head Man'.

Hargrave (aka 'White Fox'), artist, author and The Boy Scouts Association's Commissioner for Woodcraft and Camping, had become disenchanted with the increasingly militaristic tendency in The Boy Scouts Association after World War I. Soon after the formation of the Kindred, Hargrave was expelled from The Boy Scouts Association by its chief, Robert Baden-Powell. According to Hargrave, Baden-Powell acted with extreme reluctance and only after some wealthy backers had threatened to withdraw funding from The Boy Scouts Association unless he was expelled.

The Kibbo Kift did indeed offer an alternative to The Boy Scouts Association: it was open to both sexes and all ages. 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 Boy Scouts Association. In its mixture of woodcraft, ritual and handicraft, it had much in common with the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry and the British Camp Fire Girls, which Hargrave knew through his wife, Ruth Clark, who led a Camp Fire Girls group at the Garden School run by the Theosophical Educational Trust in St John's Wood. The school moved in 1920 to Ballinger Grange in Buckinghamshire where it became something of a Kibbo Kift centre.

The words Kibbo Kift come from a Cheshire dialect term used to indicate 'proof of great strength', specifically lifting a heavy bag of grain (about 142 kg, or 325 lb) onto one's shoulders. The group's initials have led some to assume a relationship to the Ku Klux Klan but this has no basis in fact (and Hargrave took great pains to correct this misapprehension in the popular press during the group's lifetime). Kibbo Kift had interests in regional geography and world culture that coexisted with passionate ideas about national identity. The group has been claimed to be 'the only genuine English national movement of modern times'.

In 1920 Hargrave explained what the distinctive words meant: