John Hargrave

John Gordon Hargrave (6 June 1894 – 21 November 1982), (woodcraft name 'White Fox'), was described in his obituary as an 'author, cartoonist, inventor, lexicographer, artist and psychic healer'. As Head Man of the Kibbo Kift, he was a prominent youth leader in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. He was a Utopian thinker, a believer in both science and magic, and a figure-head for the Social Credit movement in British politics.

Born in Midhurst, Sussex, into an itinerant Quaker family, Hargrave was the son of painter Gordon Hargrave and his wife Babette Bing, of Jewish Hungarian descent. A bohemian childhood, spent partly in the Lake District, left him with a passion for Nature and a fierce propensity for self-education through reading books and observing the world around him. In 1908, the family moved to Latimer where, in 1909 Hargrave joined the First Chorleywood Scouts, a group of Baden Powell's Boy Scouts. In 1910 his career as a published book illustrator began when a few of his vignettes appeared in an edition of Gulliver in Liliiput, published by Thomas Nelson & Sons, a commission almost certainly arranged through the patronage of Lady Chesham. He was also given a year-long trial as a cartoonist on the Evening Times. He became a devotee of the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, and one of the leading Scout authorities on Woodcraft. His interests in scouting, nature and art combined to produce the book that made his name, or rather his scouting name of 'White Fox'. This was Lonecraft published by Constable in 1913 and introducing the characteristic 'White Fox' style of no-nonsense text, interspersed with pictures and diagrams. Rising up the Scout hierarchy, Hargrave produced a succession of scouting and woodcraft books for C. Arthur Pearson Ltd, who offered him a position of staff artist in 1914, his first salaried job.

When World War I broke out, Hargrave joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, and saw action at the Battle of Gallipoli. Hargrave's Quaker pacifism was reinforced by the horrors of war. The experience convinced him that modern civilisation had gone awry and he voiced his feelings in his angry polemic of 1919, The Great War Brings It Home. This was a call to action for all groups concerned with the health and character of future generations. Hargrave called for a new national scheme for character-building and physical training, and the result was the foundation of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift in August 1920. Intended as a movement for all ages and genders, the Kibbo Kift provided a co-educational, and therefore progressive, alternative to the Boy Scouts. Hargrave was initially appointed 'Head Man' as a temporary measure, but by 1924 had succeeded in becoming the undisputed leader. As Head Man he imported into the Kindred his interest in ritual and art, along with his own views about self-education, science, magic, and healthy behaviour. He was a strong believer in Darwinian evolution, holding that Kibbo Kift training would produce morally upright and healthy individuals, through whom the human race as a whole would evolve into a better state. He believed that building better individuals was the way of building a better society, thus standing apart from those on the left and right who believed in the State as the main vehicle for social change. Hargrave's vision of the better society to come owed much to his Quaker roots: he saw a future society without war, poverty or wasted lives, all kept together by the self-discipline of enlightened individuals.

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