From comparatively early in Guiding’s history, there was a need to communicate with the membership, and the most effective way of doing this was via magazines. Initially, this was by taking pages in existing magazines – “Home Notes” and “Golden Rule” – it was in 1914 that Guiding took the plunge and launched it’s own magazine, the Girl Guides’ Gazette.
For my own research use, I have photographed past Guiding magazines. To assist others, I plan to start sharing these images. My apologies in regards of quality – these are rough photographs, not professional scans, some from my collection and some photographed in other locations – mainly Broneirion, Waddow Hall, and Foxlease. Some magazines which were photographed had sections missing where images had been cut out, some had whole pages absent. But given the current difficulty in accessing archives with so many inaccessible in storage units, I hope that the pages of the photographs will be helpful for researchers. There are some magazines missing – ones I haven’t been able to get hold of yet. And at the moment I’m only including the ‘leader magazines’ – it may be some time before I can add Guide, Ranger, and Trefoil Guild magazines. I have numbered the leader magazines, from zero for home notes, starting from 1 for January 1914, the first Gazette issue. The Home Notes pages are drawn from a collection in the Foxlease archives, which did not feature details of the issues from which they were drawn. Nevertheless, my thanks to the Foxlease archive team for the access to these which they provided.
As the pages have become slower to load as copies are added, I have opted to split them between this page and separate ones for each decade. This page will cover the magazines up to December 1919, with a fresh page for the issues from January 1920 onwards, and so on. Hopefully this will reduce loading issues for readers, but if there is any difficulty, please let me know.
Leslie's Guiding History 