THE GIS IS A LITTLE-KNOWN CHAPTER IN GUIDING HISTORY, BUT DESERVES TO BE KNOWN ABOUT BY EVERY GUIDING MEMBER. NEVERTHELESS, IT IS ONLY FAIR TO WARN THAT THEY DEALT WITH HARROWING SITUATIONS, AND AS SUCH, THIS SECTION MAY NOT BE AN EASY READ. BUT, THEIR STORY SHOULD BE TOLD . . .
The idea behind the GIS
During the 1920s and 1930s, Guiding had spread internationally, and lasting friendships had been built up, not least through the opening of the World Centres, firstly in Switzerland in 1932, and then in London in 1939. There was also the memory of how the ambition held at the conclusion of the 1914-1919 world war as being ‘the war to end all wars’ had sadly not come to pass, after less than 20 years of peace. The presence of the ‘Golondrinas’ who started arriving in the late 1930s, especially, meant that British Guides and Leaders were receiving first-hand accounts of some of the terrible experiences sister Guides in occupied countries were having. Some stories, too, leaked out from Europe during the early 1940s, also describing hardships and horrors. It is, however, surprising that as early as 1940, at a time when it still looked quite likely that Britain could itself be invaded, that Guiding members started to write to Guide headquarters asking what the movement could directly do for the invaded countries when war ended. As Rose Kerr, the International Commissioner, wrote, “More important even than winning the war is the question of winning the peace. Whatever happens, Europe will be left weak and exhausted and will need an Army of Goodwill composed of women, ready to bind up the wounds of those who have suffered. For this, no training can begin too early.”
Following these letters, the Girl Guides Association Executive started to do research, asking experienced relief organisers from groups such as the Society of Friends for advice and insights. They advised that relief workers should be ‘ready to specialise in the impossible’. At this stage the government’s focus was on winning the war, not on what might follow. Lobbying from the Society of Friends, Red Cross, Salvation Army and Guides followed, and finally the Government agreed that they would welcome suitable volunteers and give matching funding for funds raised towards this purpose. With this encouraging information, a sub-committee was formed in April 1942 to investigate how to raise funds, recruit volunteers, select them, and train them – and for what. Although ‘army of goodwill had been considered as a name, it was felt that ‘army’ would give the wrong signal, so the name “Guide International Service” was chosen.
GIS Fundraising
Funding for the GIS had to be found from scratch, so an appeal was sent out across Britain and beyond in July 1943. £100,000 in funds would be needed to buy equipment, buy and run vehicles, buy supplies, and pay a living allowance of £1 per week to each volunteer, to cover their basic personal expenses while they were serving. The appeal launched in the Guiding magazines, and funds flowed in from across Britain and over 30 countries beyond. The funds were earned in many ways, from those who donated portions of salaries or pocket monies, or saved pennies by forgoing the occasional luxury they might have otherwise enjoyed, or walking instead of using public transport and donating the fare. Funds swelled, and reached £120,000 by the summer of 1945, every pound of it earned by the girls themselves, something unheard of in relief work.
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Early recruitment and planning
Once the initial funding was available, the recruiting of volunteers could follow. The immediate difficulty was availability – the aim was for Rangers and Guiders aged over 21, but all young and middle-aged women who were not already in essential jobs pre-war had been called up for war work and could not tell when they might be allowed to be released from that work in order to serve with the GIS – so they could only volunteer provisionally. They had to be recommended by their County Commissioner, be in good health, and be able to serve for a minimum time of one year.
It was made clear that pre-requisites for applying would include a week spent working at a land-work, forestry or hop-picking camp, or at one of the special training camps; and H.E.S. l, or Camper’s Licence, or Campcraft badge, or Explorer badge. The application form asked for details of Guiding service and achievements, camping experience and qualifications, practical experience such as doing blitz cooking for large numbers over an extended period. It also asked whether the candidate had qualifications in medicine, nursing, massage, dietetics, child welfare, car maintenance, or experience in agriculture, horticulture, or other relevant subjects. Information on employment and knowledge of languages, potential availability and ability to fund own expenses were also sought. It also stated that “Applicants should realise that those volunteering for service abroad may be called up on to work under extreme conditions of heat and cold, and endure great physical hardships and discomforts. This will necessitate a Doctor’s certificate of exceptional physical fitness.” About three hundred applied initially, with further applications following nearer the end of the war, as it became easier to get releases from war work.
As preparation, would-be applicants were encouraged to sleep on the floor for at least seven consecutive nights, be able to put up a bed and dress in the dark, practice walking and navigating at night without a torch, light three consecutive fires in the open with one match for each and cook three good two-course meals in the wet without artificial shelter, learn at least one extra language, obtain practical experience in dealing with hair nits, and learn how to treat fear, loss of self-confidence or mental breakdown. They should seek to train when hungry, thirsty, tired – or all three. Other skills such as ambulance work and truck driving and repair were encouraged too.
GIS volunteer training
Once the applications were received, it was time to set up selection weekends, to assess the potential volunteers. What was being sought was more about character and personality, intelligence and physical fitness, than about ‘toughness’. It involved hauling trek cards without rest breaks and sometimes without food and drink, and working with people in institutions and children’s homes, staying in improvised accommodation. Some candidates were sent to work in psychiatric hospitals, children’s hospitals, workhouses, or schools for disabled children.
An account of a “Test Camp” was given in the February 1943 issue of “The Guider”. This camp was held in the Welsh mountains, from 1-4 January. The aim was to see if the candidates could cope with living and working under circumstances which bore relation to what they might experience for real. On getting off the train, they loaded their luggage onto the waiting trek cart, and hauled it the mile and a half uphill through a gale to the first billet, an empty school. The next day was Saturday and saw the group heading up high into the hills on a hike of several hours, before reaching the ridge in mid-afternoon, before heading down into a farmyard. The top storey of the horse barn was to be their accommodation for the night, accessed by a small ladder which was set above the dung heap, with all luggage having to be carried up the ladder and through the narrow window above – the horses were stabled below. Half the group were directed to another barn, a mile and a half further on. The groups gathered firewood to cook an evening meal, but no sooner was there a pot of stew cooking, than the car holding the two observers set off into the snow. Soon it was bogged down in snow and mud, and the candidates had to extract it – by the time this was achieved, beds were only reached after 1am. On the next day the candidates were due to cook lunch for the Home Guard up in the hills – at short notice a letter was received to advise that the rendezvous location had been altered, to an unidentifiable spot 5 miles away. Sunday breakfast was a scant portion of biscuits or dried fruit, before they headed to the rendezvous point to prepare food for over 80 Home Guard members. Preparation was interrupted by the ‘unexpected’ visit of a nursery school who all wanted to see what the ladies were doing. Once the catering was done and cleared up the candidates headed for the Scout and Guide huts at Denbigh, to clean up before attending church. On the Monday the group was split in two, half looking after children on the playing fields, the others being given a whistlestop tour of Denbigh Castle. In the afternoon the group went to a local asylum for patients with mental health conditions and made tea for 200 patients on a camp fire outside the walls, then served it in the recreation ground, before touring some of the wards.
Those who were selected had to attend a number of training and assessment weekends during 1943 and 1944, as well as taking further practical classes and sessions in their own time, including courses organised by the Society of Friends and The Council of British Societies for Relief Abroad (COBSRA). It was clear that conditions would be difficult – chaotic in the lands which had been over-run, the needs of uprooted people would be immense, the destruction and disruption with risk of spreading illness and disease. As one tutor advised, “There is only one thing certain about relief work – all things will be uncertain. You may find yourself struggling with something with which you are unqualified, in a field where you did not expect to serve, or taking responsibility far beyond anything you believed you could carry.”
Training weekends were often held in the winter, in improvised accommodation such as barns. Early morning starts, washing in cold water and hiking cross-country to do voluntary work, often coming upon ‘good turns’ which had been planted en-route. Each night the team might be woken up to deal with an ‘incident’ or have to be packed and ready to move in five minutes.
Different teams had different specialisms – some trained in hospital work, some in canteen work, and some in relief and rehabilitation work. Uniform was also a consideration – navy blue was deemed unsuitable for dusty, dirty places, plus lack of ‘clothing coupons’ was an issue. In the end, the army supplied khaki uniforms, and two pairs of leather shoes per person, and special Guide badges were sewn on.
The First Mission – Greece 1944
Early in 1944, Greece requested volunteer teams, and the Guides were one of the few voluntary organisations who had a team ready to offer, Relief and Rehabilitation Unit No. 7 (RRU7). They were called up in April 1994 and lodged at ‘Our Ark’, the world centre in London, while collecting and packing their equipment. The team consisted of 8 Guiders – Leader Alison Duke, an Adjutant, Mechanic, Interpreter, Nurse, Caterer, and two Assistants (one specialising in Sanitation), and two Scouters – a Sanitation Officer, and a Quartermaster/Driver. Once the group was gathered in London, they continued training, and at these trainings met volunteers from other organisations. Alison was a Classics lecturer, so began teaching the team Greek, initially by correspondence, later in person.
Meantime, the team had to wait for a departure date. There were a few false starts, and the team did some other work running a meals on wheels service in Tilbury, and helping at a WVS camp in Ambereley which was being prepared for French people displaced by the D-Day invasion which was due shortly. Eventually, they were sent to Liverpool and finally departed in May 1944. During the 10-day voyage, civil war in Greece meant they were diverted to Egypt, meantime the team worked at learning Greek. From Cairo, they travelled to an army camp near Maadi; it was due to be a three months’ orientation and intensive training course, but owing to the troubled situation in Greece it lasted longer – initially with seven lectures per day, in time reduced to four a day, some of which were more relevant than others. Following this the team were sent to a Displaced Persons’ camp at Moses Wells near Suez. Finally, in November, it was time to set off, by train to Alexandra then by boat – but then there was a further delay, as trouble had broken out again. It was early 1945 before the team finally entered Greece – on the day the civil war’s armistice had been signed.
Greece had been invaded twice – by the Italians and then by the Germans – but was also affected by civil war between differing political groups. The initial priorities were rescuing hostages from up-country and preparing a reception centre in Athens, ferrying food stuck in the docks to the warehouses, and helping sort out difficulties at a detention camp containing some 1000 political detainees though designed for half that number. In many of these centres there was no food, no beds, no medical supplies, inadequate sanitation, in buildings with no heating or window panes. The team worked to organise basic facilities. (Soon after came the team’s first contact with Greek Guides, who were serving in a NAAFI canteen. Their help was invaluable, and in return, the team was able to help with restarting Greek Guiding.)
Athens was still disorganised, with the streets littered with burn-out buses and discarded, now-worthless currency. Food was scarce and beyond the reach of most of the population. People who had been taken to the hills around Athens as hostages were streaming into Athens, starving, with blistered feet – some of the team looked after the arrivals while others headed 40 miles into the hills to help those still en route, taking supplies by pack-mule. Soon they were working in Athens to house and feed 250 soldiers in a building with no water, light, fuel, sanitation or stores at half an hour’s notice. By nightfall, they had fed the soldiers, and 36 women and 10 babies as well, having persuaded the British army to supply rations and Dixies, and a water cart. 400 blankets sourced from the Red Cross were used to bed down their charges for the night.
Next the team were reunited and sent to Livadhia, to deal with healthcare and supplies distribution, but were then split, with a sub-team heading to Lamia to assist the army with food distribution. The district served from Lamia contained many mountain villages which were cut off for about five months each year, so enough supplies had to arrive in them by the end of October, to survive through the winter. A hospital was also reorganised, and the assistance of the Greek Red Cross obtained for it. The team were also asked, as civilians, to help with supervising prisoner exchanges. Another key part of the work was sorting and distributing clothing donations, sorting the useful from the impractical, and working out fair shares of what there was.
Next a sub-team was sent to Amphissa, an area with no British Army cover. They soon found themselves faced with 400 guerillas coming down from the mountains to surrender, and managed to arrange transport for those unfit, while the rest were escorted over the pass. Once the winter had passed the team were better able to reach remote villages to distribute clothing and rations. In order to share clothing fairly, the priest and village head of each village was tasked with carrying out a census to confirm the age and gender of the members of each household; clothing bundles were made up accordingly, with a coat or trousers for men, a coat or two dresses for women. The bundles were then transported, sometimes by truck, sometimes partly by mule. The bundles would be taken to whichever building survived – usually a church or school – and the head of each family queued outside. The team explained that as no measurements had been taken, what size clothes they received was down to luck, and it would be up to them to swap thereafter. When the clothes were issued, the people wanted to give food in return, from their limited supplies – sometimes eggs, honey, or live chickens – or a larger village might prepare a meal for the aid workers, in thanks.
Following VE day, the team was sent down to Athens, and regrouped there, with theiir equipment due to follow. Within hours of arriving at their new headquarters, and with no warning, they were told that 250 Greek soldiers, just arrived after 14 days on a boat from Albania and in a bad way, were arriving imminently and ‘something must be done about them’. In addition, rumours of a hostel being opened resulted in a group of 38 down-and-out women plus children being sent, 8 of the women being heavily pregnant. The team had immediately on arrival to dump their luggage and seek water, cooking utensils, rations, fuel and bedding. Promised rations not having arrived, the team pursued the authorities until they could get some food. By the light of one hurricane lamp, they were trying to open and slice up two hundred tins of meat using one tin opener and one knife which the team had in personal kit. The hostel became established, and equipment gathered. In time, clothing parcels arrived from the Australian Guides. In time it became possible to send displaced people home, as the hostel moved to more of a transit footing. At this time, too, some of the original team were reaching the end of their terms, and new team members had to be sourced, and integrated into the team. The remainder were also able to fit in some leave.
By VJ day the Greek Guides were becoming re-established and were able to take their place in the VJ day procession. Some of the team had helped that summer at the Greek Guiders Training Camp, for around 70-80 Guiders from across Greece. They were also involved in survey work for post-war planning travelling by mule from village to village to establish how each one was placed for sustainability, establishing soup kitchens and the supply of medicines, carrying out inoculations and arranging for the establishment of clinics. By April 1946 the Greek Government felt able to take over responsibility for the welfare work and social services. Reluctantly, given how much remained to be done, the team left on May 17th.
Netherlands – Hospital work, 1944/45
In November 1944, the GIS received a request for a team to operate a fifty bed mobile hospital with diagnostic laboratory ‘somewhere in Europe’. Bulk medical supplies were unobtainable, so Guides visited pharmacies across London to buy small quantities of the drugs they needed from each. Secure storage for their loaded trucks was a concern, until word of the difficulty reached the royal family, and the King offered space in the Royal Mews, opposite Guide Headquarters. They left London on 22 February 1945, along with other relief teams, and crossed the channel on an army landing craft,
Arnhem
After the liberation of France and Belgium in 1944, fighting had stalled near Arnhem, which had the effect of cutting off the north of the Netherlands from the liberated south. There were fears that damage to the dykes could lead to the north of the country being flooded, and that the poor condition of the people and infrastructure after five years of war left a high risk of infection spread. As a result, a GIS Mobile Hospital and Laboratory unit was sent, shortly followed by Kitchen and Canteen units. After brief halts en route to set up small hospitals, the medical unit reached Arnhem and joined the GIS Kitchen and Canteen units, already at work there from April. At this stage, the fighting was going on only three miles away, and the nearby land was sown with mines and strewn with debris. The teams provided food at several centres for 3000 Dutch people who had been taken for forced labour, and were now trekking back to the south, and also for Displaced Persons of a range of nationalities. The local Dutch people were starving, cut off from all normal sources of food supply, but the team were ordered not to deflect food from those travelling between transit camps, a task made more difficult by the hungry young faces peering in the windows and banging on the doors. The available food was dried peas, army biscuits, tinned evaporated milk, tinned meat and tinned vegetables – these were usually made into soup. A field with potatoes was discovered, along with stocks of coal and wood, which helped keep stoves going and add variety to the food. In early May 1945 rumours started to circulate that the Netherlands was free, then it was denied, finally it was confirmed that the Germans had surrendered.
Amersfoort
At their journey’s end, the Hospital, Kitchen and Canteen units found themselves in a concentration camp at Amersfoort. When the German authorities heard rumours of surrender they had cleared out, and by the time the teams arrived those prisoners who were strong enough had left too, but the prison hospital was still overcrowded with patients in the last stages of emaciation, who were in no condition to move. The team’s first job was to clean and disinfect the camp as much as possible. They could then begin the work of feeding, treating illness, and de-lousing. Once people’s health was built up, it was possible for them to leave the camp, and for the team to move to their next task, in Rotterdam.
Rotterdam
The Kitchen and Canteen teams were called to Rotterdam, and found themselves tasked with feeding a thousand people, some of whom literally had no clothes to wear nor houses to live in. With no firewood, they had burned furniture to keep warm, and the infrastructure – heat, water, sanitation, lighting – was gone. Those on the dockside had lived largely on sugar beet and potatoes. With the team’s efforts and those of other organisations, the Dutch social services were able to reorganise and start working, leaving most of the GIS units free to move on to work in Germany – except the Mobile Hospital Unit and it’s attached laboratory. It instead headed to Gorinchem.
Gorinchem
Typhoid had broken out in the neighbourhood of Rotterdam due to the sanitation problems – and with the people’s health so weak, it was spreading rapidly. Within 48 hours of receiving the call, the GIS team had arrived and converted a school in Gorinchem into a hospital, and were ready to receive patients. Typhoid was a difficult disease to treat – anything in contact with a patient was highly infectious and had to be sterilised, and no patient could be discharged until completely immune. The patients were rural people from nearby villages, and as a result, spoke only in local dialect, making communication more difficult. The laboratory was kept busy confirming whether cases were Typhoid or other conditions so appropriate nursing could be given to the patients. Meantime the drivers had to collect food rations, medical supplies, mail, petrol, general equipment, patients, and fresh food from farms. They took bedding to and from the town laundry and drums of surgical equipment to and from the local hospital for sterilisation.
As well as the relief work with the ill, poor and starving, specialist GIS teams also worked to support the resumption of Guiding. They organised a training camp for those in the then-liberated area of the Netherlands, and invited any who could come. With no postage system, the message spread by word-of-mouth, and it was not known how many leaders might participate, though around 25 were known of, not all of whom would necessarily be able to travel. Equipment was short as most had been destroyed, leaving only what could be collected together, which the team loaded into the truck and took to the site. Before long, over 50 trainees had arrived, not counting the staff.
Malaya 1946
There is a tendency to see WW2 as mainly a European war – but although some of it’s roots lay there, it genuinely was a world war. So when in 1945 there was a request from the British War Office for volunteers to serve urgently in Malaya, it was decided that volunteers should be sent from Australian and New Zealand Guiding members, with them being located so much nearer. The Australian and New Zealand Guide Headquarters were ready to co-operate, and they commenced training their volunteers. A team of four New Zealand relief workers arrived in Singapore on December 30th, but the Australian quartet could not sail from Sydney until March 1946, and reached Malaya a month later.
The New Zealanders had meantime travelled to Kuala Lumpur by night train, and were attached to the British Military Administration Feeding Unit, to advise on feeding scales for factory workers and prisoners, and to organise supplementary meals for schoolchildren, most of whom were suffering from illnesses such as beri-beri, scurvy, anaemia, hookworm or malaria. Food was hard to come by. The rest of the team worked in Malacca doing general relief work. Malaysians and Chinese returning from Siam, where they had worked on the Burma-Siam railway, were returning and in desperate need of food, clothing and money. The teams were tasked with taking supplies to outlying villages, and distributing them fairly.
When the Australian team arrived they went up-country to Khota Bahru, to take charge of an area where cholera was prevalent, and smallpox spreading rapidly. Within a week they had organised six centres in the jungle to which people from surrounding villages could come for vaccination. Once the initial treatment of smallpox was achieved they could then focus on the other diseases affecting the locals – malaria, tropical ulcers, yaws, cholera, tuberculosis, scabies, infected wounds and sores, and fevers. With medicines, especially Arsenic, in short supply, the team cabled to GIS Australia asking for ten thousand ampoules of Acety-larsen to be sent by air. None of the authorities believed the Guides could source this rare and expensive medication – then a cable arrived confirming it was on it’s way – £600 pounds of it.
Soon the orders came through for the teams to prepare to leave, the British Red Cross confirming that the villages would now be able to manage the remaining cases, the team left in September 1946.
Germany
Bergen Belsen
By September 1945, four months after the surrender, there were 13 million homeless people in Germany, and a further 2 million living in camps, caves or tents. The harvest had failed, and people were surviving on what they could scavenge.
Arriving from the Netherlands, the volunteers’ next stop was Bergen Belsen. The typhoid-infested huts of the concentration camp had been deliberately burned down, the result being the creation of a transit camp for 14,000 people from 22 countries, all cold and hungry. All were refugees who wanted to return home, but many were too ill for that to be possible. The GIS team’s nurses oversaw the ‘human laundry’ where the delousing of people was done by German nurses. Feeding was organised, and clothes commandeered from the Germans were issued. A Polish shoemaker found a box of tools and set to work repairing shoes, and also training others in the work. Others with skills also started to use them – hairdressers and barbers, teachers and clerks. As the camp residents’ health improved, so it became possible to organise entertainments such as dances.
Schleswig-Holstein
In early 1947 a team was sent to Schleswig-Holstein to deal with sixty refugee camps, housing 10,000 Germans who had trekked back from the east to end up in bare huts in bleak surroundings. As other organisations had to withdraw their teams, so more work fell to the GIS as one of the organisations which still had sufficient funding to continue. The team set up children’s feeding schemes, distributed food supplements, and supplied gifts of toys and books donated from Britain. In each camp they set up dressmaking rooms, educational classes, sporting activities, and children’s playrooms, each run by a committee of camp residents. They became skilled in making useful items out of scraps. They might be Germans and until recently ‘the enemy’, but now they were fellow individual humans in need. And as their health improved, they were desperate to to leave the camps and start new lives, some through repatriation to their home areas, and others to emigrate – but they faced the bureaucracy required to do this. So the role of the GIS volunteers gradually moved from feeding schemes and healthcare, to become resettlement work. This work was complex, and could involve hopes being raised or dashed. Some countries wanted only the fittest and most qualified, some wanted single men, others families but no grandparents, or wanted particular trades and not others. Sometimes part of a family might be fit to travel but certain members be too old or ill to be accepted, which could lead to families having to decide whether to split up. Alongside this work, the team also looked to restart Guiding in Germany. This had to be done carefully to avoid any link to the Bund Deutscher Maedel, founded by Hitler, and some of the GIS team joined a camp of the new Pfadfinderinnen organisation in 1948.
Wellbeing Work
Although the focus naturally enough was on the immediate needs of the people in Europe who were in post-war camps in respect of sanitation, feeding and hospitals, this alone could not be sufficient for wellbeing. So as well as providing for the basics, GIS teams were involved in supporting other activities to occupy time and boost morale. So they encouraged handcraft skills, such as through the sewing and needlecraft workshop in Hamelin, trade teaching such as cobbler or electrical skills, clubs for older people, schooling for children, and worked to celebrate Christmas and Thinking Day. Handcraft Competitions and Song and Folk Dance displays in national costume were organised, as well as art exhibitions and concerts. From 1946 work began on restarting Guiding in Displaced Persons camps, with a view to supporting the wider restarting of Guiding in Europe.
Displaced Persons
One of the major areas of work the GIS were involved in, especially after the initial postwar work to deal with starvation and disease, was dealing with ‘displaced persons’, or DPs. During the war, many people from countries across Europe were moved to prison and internment camps. Once the war in Europe ended, those who had survived had no possessions beyond the few clothes they stood up in, no money, and no means to go home – if they had homes to go back to, as most didn’t. As a result, work was needed to find countries willing to host displaced persons and to provide them with the means to travel to those countries and set up homes there.
Into the 1950s
As the work continued, so more of the organisations which were involved in relief work were facing the difficulty of funding their workers; most had to withdraw. As a result of the fundraising efforts of their members, Guiding was one of the few organisations able to continue working in West Germany non-stop for the 6 months until 30th June 1950, when responsibility for the last 60,000 “Displaced Persons” was then handed over to the German Federal Government. This generally involved people who were unable to work due to illness or disability, or who would need supportive care due to their mental state. However, although most of the teams were withdrawn in June 1950, thirteen of the volunteers were asked to stay on in resettlement camps, to continue providing support. The last three volunteers went home in April 1952. Nearly 200 volunteers from six countries had served in Europe, Egypt and Malaya, providing care and support to thousands of people. We should remember the work of the GIS.
Leslie's Guide War History 