Songs of Innocence by Fran Abrams

inner-city life. In Dundee, the school board authorized head teachers to offer ‘penny dinners’ of soup and
bread to the neediest children. For the first time, childcare manuals began to be distributed among poorer families, 8 many of them by organizations
such as the Ladies Sanitary Association and the Infant Health Societies of Marylebone and St Pancras. Some of the advice was brutal. In
Mrs Blossom on Babies
9 , Helen Hodgson, a Durham health worker, advised that dummies were ‘an invention of the devil to tempt mothers to harm their children. If the Lord had intended little
babies to be always sucking something, he’d have sent them with dummies round their necks already.’ More liberal was the St Pancras School for Mothers, set up in 1907, which offered a
‘Babies’ Welcome’ where infants could be weighed and examined free of charge by a doctor. Breastfeeding was recommended, and breastfeeding mothers were offered free dinners.
    At around this time, pasteurized milk began to be more widely available, as dairies were set up under the leadership of an American paediatrician called Luther Emmett Holt. Holt was the Gina
Ford ofhis day, and his
Care and Feeding of Children
, 10 originally written as a training manual for nurses in the
New York Babies’ Hospital, was revised twelve times during his lifetime. Recognizing that contaminated milk was a major cause of ill-health among children, he established a chain of
laboratories to deliver pasteurized milk in sealed bottles to doorsteps in the United States. In 1914, he began doing the same in England, from a dairy at Wembley.
    But measures designed to improve the nation’s health, and in particular that of its children, were not universally welcomed. As doctors pressed for more vaccination – smallpox jabs
had just become compulsory and had massively reduced the incidence of the disease – parents pressed for a right to choose. There was concern that the use of infected calves’ lymph in
the vaccinations would transmit tetanus, syphilis, tuberculosis and other diseases. Anti-vaccination societies began sending postcards to new parents, urging them to withdraw their babies from the
schemes.
    Such was the ferocity of the protests that the government was urged to withdraw the penalties it had previously imposed on recalcitrant parents. Sonia Jex-Blake, one of the pioneers of
women’s medical education, was horrified. ‘In civilised communities the wellbeing of the many must override the suicidal hobbies of the few,’ she wrote. 11 ‘Just as people should be stopped from setting their own houses on fire because of the danger to other people in the street, so parents should be forced to
vaccinate their children for the general good.’ Gradually, the fuss would die down, and children’s health would continue to improve – until the vicissitudes of the next war came
along to cause another setback.
    And here, Baden-Powell came into his own. Already, a group of Cheshire choirboys, who had been corresponding with him about non-smoking pledges, had set up a Baden-Powell League of Health and
Manliness. Now the former commander became Vice President of the Boys’ Brigade, which had recruited several thousand members sinceits inception in Glasgow in the
1880s. Baden-Powell saw a way forward – the Mafeking cadet model could help save the Empire, he thought.
    The first Scout camp was held on Brownsea Island, Dorset, in the summer of 1907 and featured nature-study, hunting, the art of camping and yarns told around the campfire by Baden-Powell himself.
The following year,
Scouting for Boys
was published, and included the first of many ‘Camp Fire Yarns’ written by Baden-Powell: ‘I suppose every British boy wants to help
his country in some way or other,’ he wrote: ‘Perhaps you don’t see how a mere small boy can be of use to the great British Empire, but by becoming a Scout and carrying out the
Scout Laws every boy can be of use. “Country