Vera Barclay

Vera Charlesworth Barclay (1893–1989) was a British pioneer of Scouting and an author.

Barclay was born on 10 November 1893, one of eight children of the Reverend Charles W. Barclay, a Church of England clergyman and his wife, Florence Louisa Charlesworth, a successful novelist. The family lived in the village of Hertford Heath in Hertfordshire to the north of London, where Reverend Barclay was the vicar from 1881 to 1920. The family were frequent visitors to St Moritz in the Swiss Alps; Barclay was an enthusiastic tobogganist and one of the few females to tackle the Cresta Run, often dressed in skirts or riding jodhpurs.

Barclay joined the Scout movement and took charge of the village Boy Scout Troop in 1912. In 1913, the founder of the Scout movement, Robert Baden-Powell, had launched a provisional scheme for boys who were too young to join the Scouts at the age of 11 years. Originally called "Junior Scouts", it had been renamed "Wolf Cubs" by January 1914. Barclay was regularly pestered by younger village boys wanting to join the Troop, so she opened the 1st Hertford Heath Wolf Cub Pack and persuaded her younger sister Angela to lead it. Barclay realised that there would be many women willing to run Cub Packs and wrote an article entitled "How a Lady Can Train the Cubs"; it was published in the official Scout magazine, the Headquarters Gazette, in January 1915.

In June 1916, Barclay attended a meeting of Wolf Cub leaders at the Scout Association Headquarters in London. The article had obviously caught Baden-Powell's attention, because he approached her to become the Wolf Cub Secretary at Imperial Headquarters. She accepted Baden-Powell's offer as her war work with the British Red Cross at a hospital in Netley in Hampshire was becoming impossible due to a pre-war knee injury incurred whilst skiing. One of her first tasks was to help Baden-Powell to edit the drafts for The Wolf Cub's Handbook, which was published in December 1916. She devised many of the tests and badges that appeared in this first edition. In 1920, she organised a Grand Howl by 500 Cubs at the 1st World Scout Jamboree at Olympia, London; at the end of the ceremony, she was presented with the Silver Wolf for services "of the most exceptional character" to Scouting.

...
Wikipedia