The Art of Camping by Matthew De Abaitua

Author:Matthew De Abaitua [Abaitua, Matthew De]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141968957
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

Byngham had sex with his girlfriend at camp and defended himself by pointing out that as the rest of nature at Sandy Balls was engaged in procreation, why shouldn’t he? Finally he was suspended from the Order for prancing naked around a Sussex field with a girlfriend and with various members of the press in attendance. To be fair to Byngham, his eugenics rhetoric was not atypical of the mid 1920s, and he was later horrified by what he saw of the Hitler Youth movement, witnessing first-hand their military rhetoric at a youth camp in Bavaria, what he called their ‘intensive death-culture’.

Throughout all this scandal he remained friends with Aubrey Westlake and together they attended a garden party at Kelmscott House, William Morris’s former residence in Hammersmith, in the summer of 1925. Gertrude Godden, an author who described Mussolini’s regime as the ‘birth of a new democracy’, reported her distaste to Special Branch about this gathering of various radical groups; their names make the garden party sound like a conference of superheroes: there were delegates from the Guild of the Citizens of Tomorrow, the World Federation of Young Theosophists and the Order of the Round Table. The principal speaker was Harold Bing, a conscientious objector who spent three years in prison and witnessed the suffering, madness and death inflicted upon those who refused to fight. In the words of Godden, he was ‘the virile, golden-haired, simple life type – sunburnt, and full of force; the driving power of the meeting’.

Gertrude Godden moved through the throng until she encountered Aubrey Westlake, whom she engaged in brief conversation, insisting that they had met previously at an Al-Thing of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift. Aubrey was adamant that they had not. Byngham was beside him. Both are described as repulsive types, with Byngham in particular being an ‘over-developed animal – exactly illustrating the cult of the body which marks these Movements’. There was something of the matinee idol about Dion Byngham; shorter than his fellow chieftains, with slicked-back hair, his collar open and his camper’s shorts held up by a leopard-skin belt.

At the garden party, the songs of the Wandervogel were sung, and militant pacifism espoused. In a report dripping with prejudice, Gertrude Godden nonetheless astutely diagnoses the danger facing these groups: ‘The real menace of the Movement lies in the fact that it is revolutionary propaganda, in romantic disguise, subtly preaching to immature youth the “ecstasy of demolition” of the foundations of civilization.’ ‘Ecstasy of demolition’, a phrase George Bernard Shaw coined in an essay on education, expressed the survivalist fantasy embedded in the British and German youth movements. Both the Order and the Kibbo Kift discussed a Noah’s Ark strategy of hiding out at Sandy Balls in the event of societal collapse. (The survivalist fantasy continues to be part of camping’s appeal. In the Age of Terror and Anxiety that followed 9/11, I was bedevilled by regular daydreams about dirty bombs in London, and planned my escape along the Eurotunnel with our trusty tent balanced on a pushchair.

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