The English countryside in the mid-1920s, near Stonehenge perhaps, somewhere, ideally, with the afterglow of ancient strangeness about it: the first harbinger of the Kibbo Kift is the sound of distant music, the strumming of a lute, the singing of what White Fox, Kibbo Kift’s “Head Man,” John Hargrave, a compulsive manufacturer of hopefully evocative compound nouns, dubbed a waysong:
If you love the camp life,
Open air and sun,
Just fall in behind us ere the long trek’s done.
Swing along together, let your step be free
Hey ho! Hey ho! Kibbo Kift are we.
A group of young people come into view, hiking in wedge formations—dubbed “woks” by the Kibbo Kift, their lexicon an invented echo of Heorot.
To the Daily Sketch, struggling to summarize one of Britain’s more bewildering new movements, the practical, Utopian, playful, and earnest Kibbo Kift was a “camping fraternity” combining “the ideals of scientists and Red Indians.” Well, sort of/not really, but that’ll do for now.
A group of young people come into view, hiking in wedge formations.
If the woks aren’t singing, they may be walking in what Hargrave described in The Confession of The Kibbo Kift (1927) as “perfect silence” except, perhaps, for an “outcry of joy for the furze bush that bursts into a sunlit blaze.”
The men are wearing shorts, knee socks, stout shoes, and hooded jerkins. The women sport similarly sturdy footwear, simple one-piece