decline and fall raised by the Boer War, Robert Baden-Powell became increasingly concerned about the wellbeing of the nation, in particular that of young people. One report, published in 1904, claimed that out of every nine who volunteered to fight, only two were fit enough to do so. Physical deterioration and moral degeneracy became themes in many of the talks and speeches that Baden-Powell gave in the years that followed.
Soon he was exploring a ragbag of different schemes, mixing his experience of camping, woodcraft, military tactics and educational theories, and overlaying it all with his own vision of chivalry and empire. In August 1907, 11 months before the Olympics at Shepherd’s Bush in London, Baden-Powell conducted the famous Brownsea Island experimental camp. He wanted to test out the ideas he had been developing for his scheme of work for the Boy Scouts.
Modelled on his idiosyncratic vision of the hardy colonial frontiersmen, the ideal Boy Scout, disciplined and self-sacrificing, appeared as the culmination of a mythical lineage in British national history. He would embody the virtue and honour of the medieval knight and the stout-hearted courage of an Elizabethan explorer. The amount of energy that Baden-Powell expended in Scouting for Boys to encourage boys and men to hold the Empire together gives an indication of the level of British anxiety at this time, about both the state of the Empire and the state of the nation.
By 1900, Germany, the USA and Japan had started to challenge Britain’s leadership in terms of industrial production, and there were other threats to stability from within the British Isles, particularly from the newly organised Labour movement and the rise of the Women’s movement and demands for self-representation. Many chapters of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys lay huge emphasis on the dangers of deterioration of the British race and the physical breakdown of the rising generation; he expressed contempt for the working-class ‘loafer’.
One area of British life seemed to embody many of Baden-Powell’s values – the public school playing field. The games ethic perfected by public schoolboys and their teachers seemed to mesh fluidly with the ideals of imperial service. To show loyalty to the group, to practise honour, to smile even in the face of defeat, this was the ethic that seemed to guarantee success in the colonies as well as embody the qualities of true masculinity. Baden-Powell regarded the public school playing field very much as the cradle of so many of these qualities, and drummed home the message that to do one’s best for the country was the way to succeed.
‘Get the lads away from spectator sports,’ he urged. ‘Teach them to be manly, to play the game whatever it may be and not be merely onlookers and loafers.’
In Scouting for Boys he adapted Henry Newbold’s resonant poem ‘Vitai Lampada’ (‘They Pass On The Torch of Life’, published during the war in 1897) into a Scout tableau retitled ‘Play the Game’.
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’
Playing the game seemed to encapsulate the popular imperialism of the time and it was no wonder that it appealed to the young Wyndham Halswelle.
Baden-Powell certainly knew about winning. He was up for every trick of war, and was the first to pour scorn on the concept of fighting in bright, visible uniforms or to encourage using the cover of darkness, but always he managed to somehow combine this attitude with his own brand of British chivalry towards women, children and even the enemy.
‘As in sport, so in war,’ he said. ‘There is always room for chivalry when men fight fair.’
There was not a lot of time or room for chivalry in the rough, tough world of the Irish immigrant in New York at the turn of the century.
John Joseph Hayes was born in 1886 in Manhattan, New York. He was the son of Michael Hayes, born in September 1859, from Silver Street, Nenagh, County Tipperary. His mother was Ellen (or Nellie) O’Rourke, who was born in America but whose origins were in County Roscommon. The newly wed Hayes couple, Michael and Ellen, finally arrived on New York’s East Side to join the seemingly neverending procession of immigrants, with Michael hoping to find work as a baker.
The East Side of New York was Italy, Germany, Jewish Russia and Ireland in miniature. This was a melting pot and all the ingredients were there: those who daily fought poverty but still shared in the wealth of family support, enjoying the favours and help they could give each other, with each apartment building its own community, every block a village, every street a reflection of the country they had left behind.
It was not unusual for newly arrived immigrant families in Manhattan to occupy every inch of their cramped and run-down dwellings. Families of six or seven might live in one small room, then take on a boarder or two to help meet living expenses. Some lived in hallways, in basements or in alleyways – anywhere they could squeeze themselves in – and all too often the rents they paid were extortionate. Living and working quarters were often the same. A family would cook and eat in the overcrowded room where they made their living, and from the oldest to the youngest, everyone took whatever work they could find and did their part. Wages usually tottered at the brink of subsistence.
There was no margin for any error in the family budget, for survival could ride on a few cents. Day after day, the people of the lower East Side would grind out a living, working, saving and trying to move slowly ahead, and in so doing they would create a niche for themselves in the complex economic and cultural world of New York City.
It was in those circumstances, there in the railroad flats that once existed on the site of Tudor City, the site of slums and slaughterhouses, that Johnny Hayes grew up. There, local gangs thrived and could be powerful, but the local politicians could be even tougher too. The men from Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party’s bastion of corruption and power, knew that the Irish-American immigrants were like unformed clay and happy to be moulded in the ways of New York. And so they helped them to be a little more American, to feel a little more at home in their new world, and before long they were American citizens – and most of all, American voters.
The children of peasants – the shoemakers, bakers and so on who had been brave enough to cross the Atlantic – were not content to sit back and waste their lives amid the debris. What got them out of the slums and away from the clutches of the corruption that thrived during the 1890s was the determination to haul themselves up by their boot straps and to get out. To be an American was to climb into that great melting pot and to be poured out ready to take on the world as an American winner.
Johnny Hayes grew to be a small boy, but he was strong – strong enough to work while still a child, and he didn’t stay the baby of the family for too long. He was the firstborn, but was soon joined by another baby and then another. They were hungry mouths to feed, and Michael Hayes grabbed every hour to slave as a baker in the cauldron of the bakery at Cushman’s in New York. Soon even his 14-hour days were not enough and often he would bed down at the bakery, sleeping at the back in order to be up and ready for yet more overtime. Sometimes Johnny would join his father, earning a few more badly needed quarters long before he
