Summertime will probably always make me feel nostalgic for the decade I spent working at three of the different Ontario Girl Guide Summer Camps. I will always have certain things that remind me of those special places and, when they announced the sale of the camps in 2017, I spent some time on eBay trying to hunt down copies of certain Girl Guide memorabilia that hung at those camps. One of these items was a framed 75th anniversary tea towel that hung in the main lodge at Camp Woolsey and another was a trefoil door knocker that was on a door of the old cottage.
The metal door knocker had a trefoil in the center with a leaf design on the top part that attaches to the door with two holes you can put nails through. After some online research I discovered that It was the World Trefoil which is the unifying symbol of WAGGGS (World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts) and each part carries a special meeting. The three leaves represent the original three-fold promise written by Lord Baden-Powell, which involved duty to God or belief, duty to country, and keeping the Guiding law. The stalk of the trefoil represents the flame of the love of humanity. In the center there is a compass needle that points the way and the two stars that represent the promise and the law. The world flag and badge which features the world trefoil was incorporated in 1946 at the 11th World Conference in France.
The door knocker that belonged to Camp Woolsey hung on the front door of Pinhey’s cottage, a heritage building on the property. Pinhey’s Cottage was built around 200 years ago and it's the only building leftover from the property’s farm days. The outside of the building is a designated heritage site and the cottage was used in the camp’s early days as the hospital building. However, the last few decades saw the local Trefoil Guild caring for the cottage and using it for meetings. A member of the Guild may have been the origin of that door knocker and, when I first saw it, I thought it had been made out of a belt buckle or something. I was surprised when I found out a few years later that Girl Guides of Canada used to have them available for purchase. I’m not sure what happened to the door knocker that used to be at camp but I hope that it found a safe home.
I have a copy of older Girl Guides of Canada sales catalogs so I decided to look up the price of the door knocker. According to the sale listing it’s brass with a lacquer to prevent tarnishing. The 1962 catalog lists it for $2.75, while the 1978-1979 lists it for $6.25 and, given inflation, that would be around $25 today. There was also an owl version for sale but I haven't come across it on the resale market. Due to the use of the World Trefoil rather than the Canadian one, I wanted to check to see if it was already anywhere in the world. I posted in the Facebook group ‘I Love GirlGuiding History’, which is based in the UK, and people remember it being available for purchase overseas and this is most likely when it first originated from.
I was pretty pleased when I tracked down this door knocker and from the comments on my post in the “I Love GirlGuiding History’ it seems that this item does pop up for sale on eBay and Esty but you may have to wait a bit. Currently, my door knocker is sitting in a display case with the rest of my vintage Girl Guide collection. I don’t have any plans to hang it currently but maybe one day if I ever have a home office.
Thanks for Reading
- Em