Vera Barclay

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Vera Charlesworth Barclay (1893–1989) co-founder of Cubs 1916, was an English pioneer of scouting and an author. She was an early exponent of female leadership in the Scout movement and played a leading role in the introduction of the Wolf Cub programme for younger boys, both in the United Kingdom and in France. Barclay wrote numerous children's stories and instructional Scouting handbooks, and in later life wrote about her Christian faith.

Barclay was born on 10 November 1893,^[1] one of eight children of the Reverend Charles W. Barclay, a Church of England clergyman and his wife, Florence Louisa Charlesworth, a successful novelist - they were married in Stepney in Q1, 1881.^[2] The family lived in the village of Hertford Heath in Hertfordshire to the north of London, where Reverend Barclay was the vicar from 1881 to 1920.^[3] The family were frequent visitors to St Moritz in the Swiss Alps; Barclay was an enthusiastic tobogganist and one of the few females to tackle the Cresta Run, often dressed in skirts or riding jodhpurs.^[4]

Barclay joined the Scout movement and took charge of the village Boy Scout troop in 1912.^[5]

She later became involved in the newly formed Wolf Cubs. In 1913, the founder of the Scout movement, Robert Baden-Powell, had launched a provisional scheme for boys who were too young to join the Scouts at the age of 11 years. Originally called "Junior Scouts", it had been renamed "Wolf Cubs" by January 1914. Barclay was regularly pestered by younger village boys wanting to join the troop,^[6] so she opened the 1st Hertford Heath Wolf Cub Pack and persuaded her younger sister Angela to lead it. Barclay realised that there would be many women willing to run Cub packs and wrote an article entitled "How a Lady Can Train the Cubs"; it was published in the official Scout magazine, the Headquarters Gazette, in January 1915.

In June 1916, Barclay attended a meeting of Wolf Cub leaders at the Scout Association Headquarters in London.^[7] The article had obviously caught Baden-Powell's attention, because he approached her to become the Wolf Cub Secretary at Imperial Headquarters. She accepted Baden-Powell's offer as her war work with the British Red Cross at a hospital in Netley in Hampshire was becoming impossible due to a pre-war knee injury incurred whilst skiing. One of her first tasks was to help Baden-Powell to edit the drafts for The Wolf Cub's Handbook, which was published in December 1916. She devised many of the tests and badges that appeared in this first edition.^[7] In 1920, she organised a Grand Howl by 500 Cubs at the 1st World Scout Jamboree at Olympia, London; at the end of the ceremony, she was presented with the Silver Wolf for services "of the most exceptional character" to Scouting.

A recent convert to Roman Catholicism, Barclay spent a brief spell trying her vocation with the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. She later lived in Edgbaston in Birmingham, where she resumed her Scouting activities and was a leading member of the Catholic Scout Guild who ran a campsite at Hall Green for Cubs and Scouts from disadvantaged backgrounds.

In the early 1920s, Barclay was a frequent visitor to France, where she encouraged the development of Les Louveteaux or Wolf Cubs in the Scouts de France. In 1923, 1925 and 1927 she organised the first French Wolf Cub Wood Badge courses with Fr Jacques Sevin at the Château de Chamarande and was later awarded the Cross of St Louis by the Scouts de France. Her connection with Scouting ended in 1931, when she emigrated to France and then Switzerland.^[8]

Barclay was a prolific author, mainly of books for children, but also about Christianity and Scouting. Perhaps her best known works are the "Jane" series of stories for girls. She wrote some books under the pen names Margaret Beech and Vera Charlesworth,^[9] and one detective story was written under the name of Hugh Chichester.^[10]

Barclay was a Catholic creationist who rejected evolution. She was also critical of theistic evolution.^[11] She authored Darwin Is Not for Children (1950) and Challenge to the Darwinians (1951). The former book was negatively reviewed in The Quarterly Review of Biology as an "illogical" anti-evolution work.^[12]

Barclay returned to England before the start of World War II and lived in Felpham on the south coast from around 1938 and in 1939–1940 joined her brother, the Rev Cyril Charles Barclay (Vicar of Helmsley) with his wife Rose and daughter Mary-Rose, in a huge vicarage (now the North York Moors Trust) in the market town of Helmsley North Yorkshire, she started a small nursery school with her friend Ninette Hoffet which they ran in the vicarage, she later returned to The Midway, Felpham, long before the end of the war. After living in London and Seaview on the Isle of Wight where she began to lose her eyesight, she ended her days at Sheringham in Norfolk, being cared for by her niece Betty. She died on 19 September 1989^[13] at St Nicholas' Nursing Home, Sheringham, and is buried in Sheringham Cemetery.^[14]

• Works by Vera Barclay at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Vera Barclay at the Internet Archive
• Works by Vera Barclay at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)