The Woodcraft Folk want a world built on equality and peace. That’s not such an old-fashioned idea, writes Michael Williams

IT WAS a levelling experience in every sense, standing in a field in Dorset at 7am trying to cook 50 poached eggs in lukewarm water, helped by the leader of a left-wing council, a communist-leaning theatre impresario, a teenage delinquent and a couple of shivering six-year-olds. No one could pull rank because we were the Woodcraft Folk.
The moment we stepped into that field for Camden Woodcraft’s annual camp, the rules were unambiguous: we were all equals. It was ‘inclusiveness’ long before the Walworth Road apparatchiks stumbled across the word.
As a middle class media type, I suppose I was an unlikely recruit as a youth leader for an organisation founded 80 years ago by the Labour Party, which seemed a cross between Outward Bound, the Co-Operative movement and Lord of the Rings. Moreover, I had fled the whole idea of youth groups at age 11 after the Church Lads Brigade tried to recruit me from the Cubs, and Akela accused the vicar of backing the Hitler Youth.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this was precisely why the Woodcraft Folk came about – as a split from Scouting by people who believed a wholesome outdoors movement, free of the jingoistic ideas of Baden Powell, or allegiance to the Crown or God, was preferable for their children. And it was my thoroughly modern daughters who dragged me in.
They didn’t think Woodcraft’s aim “to create a world built on equality, friendship, peace and co-operation” was in any way old fashioned.
And so for years we’d pack our tents to spend summer weeks in soggy fields, living in a parallel world of ‘clans’, playing “co-operative” games which no one could win, learning to navigate by the stars and being bossed about by infants delighted they had been awarded the same rights as their parents.
On the last night, with the sparks from the camp fire streaming into the sky, we’d strum along to the Woodcraft Songbook, singing “This Land is My Land” – and convince ourselves that the world wasn’t such an unfair place after all.
This is the charm of Woodcraft – that it is still infused with a fast-vanishing, innocent idealism, untainted by political correctness. In that sense you can see why it is probably anathema to Margaret Hodge and her friends.