In Ottawa’s snow free months, I work part time leading walking tours in downtown Ottawa. I love this job and has just made me fall even more in love with Ottawa. A few months ago, I thought I would give myself a challenge and try to combine two of my great loves, Girl Guide history and walking tours. I wanted to see if I could create a 45mins to 1 hour tour about early Girl Guides of Canada history using landmarks already around the downtown core. I’m not done but thought I would give you a little sneak peak of the first stop.
So enjoy this work in progress and thanks for reading! - Em
South African War Memorial in Confederation Park (Elgin St, Ottawa, ON K1P 5J2) (5-10 mins)
Today we’re starting off our tour at the South African War Memorial. The South African War or the Boer War was fought between the British Empire and two independent Boer States over British influence in South Africa between 1899-1902. The Boers were self-governing republics formed by Dutch-speaking inhabitants of the Cape Colony and the conflict was triggered due to the discovery of diamond and gold in the area. This statue shows what a uniform used by the British Empire would have looked like and honors the sixteen Ottawa Volunteers who died in the conflict in which 267 Canadians lost their lives.
Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouts and the Guiding movements, was a veteran of the Boer war. Throughout his military career, Baden-Powell or BP as he would later become known would publish several books and texts both to educate his military man and to finance his life. Before Scouting, BP was most well known for his role in the ‘Siege of Mafeking’ and became recognized as a British hero although now that is a more complex legacy when we consider BP and the British government’s role in colonialism in South Africa and it is always a topic I would encourage you to do your own research on. During the 217 day battle, Baden-Powell took notice of the Mafeking Cadet Corp, which was a group formed of white boys below fighting age. Baden-Powell was impressed with their courage and their ability to perform tasks and would later used them as an lesson in his first chapter of “Scouting for Boy’.
When BP returned to England in 1903, he was surprised to find that his military training manual, ‘Aids to Scouting’, had become a best-seller, and was being used by a number of different youth organizations. He was encouraged by his friend, William Alexander Smith, founder of the youth organization, ‘the Boy Bridge’ and taking inspiration from other youth programs, PB rewrote ‘Aids to Scouting’ to better fit a younger male audience. In the August of 1907, BP held a camp on Brownsea Island with 20 boys to test his idea for his new youth movement. Soon children all over England were becoming Boy and Girl Scouts.
This statue was helped paid for by thirty thousand school children who donated pennies and was sculpted in 1902 by the artist Hamilton McCarthy. Some of these children would go on to be Ottawa’s first Guiding and Scouting members. It was also common for veterans of the Boar to become leaders in Scouting and their wives involved in Guiding and the National Scouting HQ location in Ottawa would later have a number of Boer War veterans working there.
One example of this is Major Edgar Charles Woolsey who served with the Canadian Artillery in the Boer war and after his marriage to Mary Townley Keeling in 1910, both took on an active role in Ottawa’s Guiding and Scouting with Mary acting as the president of the Local Guiding Association throughout the 1930s and early ‘40s and Major Woolsey in 1958 he was appointed as the honorary vice-president of the Boy Scouts of Canada in 1958. Before the Girl Guides and scouts had a camp of their own the Woolsey’s would allow units to camp at their cottage along the Quebec side of the Ottawa River near Quyon. The Woolsey’s also helped find and fundraise for the old local Girl Guide Camp called Camp Woolsey (1937 - 2021) which was then named in their honor and decades later, the First Ottawa Trefoil Guild petitioned the Canada Government to rename that part of the river as the Woolsey Narrows in recognition of the family’s generosity.
(This tour is written in the summer of 2021 and any Guider who leads it should do additional research to make sure the information is up to date and still culturally appropriated.)