Kibbo Kift

Kibbo Kift
'Kinsmen' in ceremonial robes at the opening ceremony of the 1927 Althing, the Kibbo Kift annual general meeting
Country	England
Founded	18 August 1920
Defunct	1935
Founder	John Hargrave

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. 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 Boy Scout Commissioner for Woodcraft and Camping, had become disenchanted with the increasingly militaristic tendency in the Scout movement after World War I. Soon after the formation of the Kindred, Hargrave was expelled from the Scouts by Scout founder 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 Scouts unless he was expelled.