Seeking Answers to Unanswerable Questions: The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift

There is a Woodcraft Kindred

A Brotherhood of strong

Hale, hearty men and women

Who hike the roads along

But if you ask me why, sir,

It’s Booms Va-la-ra

To which there is no answer

Save Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

[The Kin Marching Song, 1927]

If you had happened through the woods and country lanes of the south of England on any weekend in the 1920s, you could easily have chanced upon a striking group of hikers marching in triangular formation, dressed in hooded cloaks and jerkins in shades of Lincoln green, singing songs of their own composition under cryptic, colourful banners of abstract design. If you stopped to find out more, you might have been astonished to receive salutations in Anglo-Saxon and the new international language of Esperanto, and to be introduced to men and women with names like Blue Falcon and Deathwatch Beetle.

While open-air pursuits such as rambling and camping grew dramatically in popularity in the interwar period, such an encounter would have been as arresting in its own time as it would be in ours, for the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift were no ordinary outdoor enthusiasts. If you were invited back to camp, the sight of members arrayed in futuristic ceremonial garb, alongside the enigmatic symbolism of their hand-decorated tents and their crudely carved totems might have convinced you that this was — in the group’s own words — a ‘confraternity’ of elites and not ‘a tennis club’.

What was the Kibbo Kift? John Hargrave, the group’s founder-leader, asserted in typically flamboyant style that such a question was ultimately unanswerable, yet it was one that needed to be asked again and again by group members as well as strangers. Beginning with the challenge of their unfamiliar name — taken from an antiquarian dictionary of colloquial Cheshire terminology and meaning ‘proof of strength’ — and continuing into their outlandish visual style and remarkably diverse purposes and practices, Kibbo Kift’s sometimes bewildering aims and methods ranged across health and handicraft, pacifism and propaganda, myth and magic, education and economics.

Kibbo Kift was far more than an all-ages alternative to the Scouts. The wide range of their interests and the large scale of their ambitions was necessitated, they believed, by the peculiar conditions of their time: so-called civilisation had been corrupted and was on the brink of collapse; the mass ‘mechanised death’ of the Great War had demonstrated the logical outcome of industrial modernisation; dynamic new dreams were needed to overcome the nightmares of early twentieth century existence.

While Kibbo Kift was undoubtedly highly idiosyncratic and its numbers relatively small — never rising to many more than a thousand members in total, and never more than a few hundred at any one time — the group made a distinctive contribution to English oppositional culture in the heady moment of the 1920s between world war and economic crisis, where radical change was called for and radical experiments were welcomed. Kibbo Kift’s offer, however marginal it may seem in retrospect, appealed to an impressive range of high-profile campaigners, writers, politicians and visionaries who lent their endorsement, if not their membership, to the group. While Kibbo Kift’s unique revivalist-futurist Utopia never came to pass, they offered a comprehensive vision for designing social change.

Kibbo Kift boasted a wide range of visual practitioners among its number — not least in Hargrave, who earned his living as a commercial artist in the advertising industry and was a prolific and highly adaptable designer. In addition, talented artists, poets, playwrights and photographers were attracted to, and subsequently advanced, Kibbo Kift’s original, hybrid medieval-modernist style. The fusion of often avant-garde ideas with occasionally homely production methods can be seen across an extensive range of handcrafted objects from ceremonial regalia to camping equipment, set designs and theatrical sketches, parade banners and organisational log books, insignia and articles of dress. These artefacts embodied Kibbo Kift’s complex and distinctive philosophies about creative play in a machine age.

Among Kibbo Kift’s sweeping aims was nothing less than the restoration of spiritual values to a material world. The calendar activities of the group, from council meetings to camps and hikes, were each imbued with an elevated, sanctified quality through the group’s innovative use of ceremony. On a practical level this offered a disciplined mode of operation that opposed military organisational tactics, but at a more profound level it expressed Kibbo Kift’s deep-rooted interest in comparative religion, their pantheistic belief in the spiritual immanence of all things — not least in the ancient rural English landscape — and a modern world infused with the myths and mysteries of an earlier, more ‘primitive’, age. Kibbo Kift’s membership of ‘more than usually conscious individuals’ was comprised of a range of seekers of spiritual as well as social solutions to contemporary problems and these included mystics of various stripes. Kibbo Kift’s occult interests informed their core spiritual purpose. This was made manifest in illuminated manuscripts, symbolic language and ritual drama.

Kibbo Kift, as an outdoor woodcraft organisation, lasted little more than a decade. By the early 1930s, it was no more. At their most ambitious, they aimed to deliver a radical new world. They were certain that historians of the future would need to know how the new world had been built. Consequently, they left an abundance of material for researchers to consult, including designs and drawings, dress and sculpture, photographs and paintings. It is through their visual and material culture that we can know them; we can travel back in time to enter Kibbo Kift camp circles and follow Kinsfolk as they journey in unexpected directions over the ancient hills of rural England.

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