‘Boy Scouts around the Camp Fire’ was photographed in 1908. This postcard was sent, without any message, to a young lady card collector in Southampton in November 1909.
In the closing years of the Edwardian era, being a boy scout was a novelty. The scout movement grew out of a first boys’ camp organised by Lord Robert Baden-Powell on Brownsea Island off the Dorset coast in 1907. In the following year – at about the time the photograph above was taken – Baden-Powell published Scouting For Boys, six fortnightly publications at 4d each, which collectively became the scouting’s first manual. It was this publication that formally launched the Boy Scout movement.
Initially, interest in scouting was passed amongst boys by word of mouth, with independent scout troops being formed throughout the country, giving boys a focus for team activities, sports and the pursuit of knowledge. It was, said Baden-Powell, to be a movement devoted to the development of the ideals of good citizenship.
By 1910, the movement had grown enormously, and as the reign of King Edward VII came to an end, there were believed to be something approaching 150,000 boy scouts – 125,000 of them in troops throughout the British Empire.
Many postcards were produced of local scout troops – for sale to families and friends – but few were produced by the mainstream postcard publishers for general sale.
Not to be left out, the Girl Guide movement was started in 1910 after several groups of girls got together to emulate their brothers. Baden-Powell’s sister joined him in formalising the Girl Guides that same year.
Catlin’s Royal Pierrots perform by the walls of Aberystwyth Castle in 1906. Catlin’s troupe was one of the more famous of the touring pierrot groups who performed in the Edwardian era. Will Catlin, an early impressario, had several pierrot groups touring each summer, usually putting on four shows a day on beaches, on makeshift stages, and occasionally in more traditional theatres and music halls. They were well known on both the Yorkshire coast and the North Wales coast and members of each troupe regularly met excursion trains as they arrived at the local railway station to promote their shows by passing out flyers to the arriving holidaymakers.
A minstrel group performing on Mablethorpe’s beach in 1904. Six performers and a pianist have attracted a considerable crowd on an otherwise very quiet beach.
An amateur pierrot group performing in a Lancashire village hall, photographed c.1906.
Large crowds regularly gathered in Llandudno’s Happy Valley for performances by visiting pierrot and minstrel groups. This postcard dates from c.1907, ten years after the park opened.
The word ‘pierrot’ can be traced back to eighteenth-century France – being used to describe a pantomime character – and was taken over by the French from the seventeenth-century Italian theatre. Later, however, it was used to identify itinerant minstrels with whitened faces and baggy white costumes who went from town to town giving impromptu performances. Later still, it described the travelling concert parties and minstrel groups who put on concerts on beaches and in village halls. Pierrot and Minstrel groups could be found in just about every seaside town, with the same groups returning to the same resorts year after year and building up a loyal following from returning holidaymakers. For those who could not afford to get away from the towns and cities, local parks and town squares were turned into makeshift open-air theatres when the travelling minstrels and pierrots were in town.
A professional minstrel group, with the politically incorrect name of ‘Harry Frewin’s White Coons’, perform for an afternoon audience in a makeshift theatre near Clacton Jetty in the summer of 1910. Popular open-air entertainment like this cost much less than the summer shows staged in the nearby pavilions and music halls, and were sometimes free for those standing at the back.
