Scouting

My time as a senior

by: Jenneke JR.

One and a half-year I had nothing to do with Scouting till September 1972. One of my friends at the "Hugo de Groot Scholengemeenschap" told me about her Scouting group "De Mohicanen" and I went with her some day to see how it looked like and if I would like it there too. It was a nice building where they were located and I loved it from the beginning.

The group had opened a new groupshouse in 1969 called "De Wigwam" and the house laid in the woods. They also started with a part of girl guides in the same year. That was a revolution, because not many groups had girl guides and boy scouts under one roof then. I was 14 years old then and they just started with a senior part of the group as well, so when I joined them I became a senior right away and stayed there till I was 17 years old.

In the beginning the "headquarters" of the seniors wasn’t located in De Wigwam. No. We spent our days in the beginning in a small building called "De Ossenstal", but after awhile there were so many seniors that the group thought that it was time to build a part after De Wigwam for us. And so we moved some years later to the groupshouse as well.

In 1973 one of the English boy scouts stayed with us for one week.

I need to tell you something here now about the connection the (Dutch) Mohicans have with their English friends of the 1st Ben Rhydding Scoutinggroup of Ilkley in England.

In 1937, there was a fifth jamboree held in "Vogelenzang" in Noord-Holland. A young Englishman, with the name of R. Ibbetson, got lost between all the tents and a boyscout from Den Haag brought him back to his own camp. This boyscout’s father was a journalist and he received an invitation for an "international tea".

In 1938 the boyscout visited Mr. Ibbetson in England. During World War 2 it was hard to see each other, but soon the War was over, the visits were renewed especially when Mr. Ibbetson searched for a scoutinggroup in Den Haag for a "link-up". Of course, they had to organize a lot of things first and solve a lot of problems before in August 1948, Mr. Ibbetson (now Skipper Ibbetson) traveled to Rotterdam with some older boyscouts of the 1st Ben Rhydding Scoutgroup of Ilkley, England. The linking up was a fact.

In the early seventies, they asked or it wouldn’t be possible for the Dutch girl guides to go to England so they were able to camp there as well. But that was a big problem! You won’t find girl guides and boyscouts together in one group in England. The only possibility was to look around for a girl scoutgroup in England and they made contact with the 2nd Ilkley Guides. And so it was possible for the Dutch girlscouts to go to England as well in the future.

Later that year, on October 6, 1973 we went to Friesland to walk over the Wad. Oh boy that was really something. None of use had done such a thing before and we were not trained as well. We left Den Haag around 5 o’clock in the morning. It was very foggy and when arrived in Pieterburen it was still the same. So we started our walk, but the weather conditions became worser and worser and our guide decided not to walk over the whole Wad but just do a quick tour and then return to Pieterburen. But even that quick tour was something I’ll never forget. There was so much mud laying everywhere because it had rain for some days and it was very hard. Especially for the girls. The boys had to save us from time to time otherwise we had lost our group. When we knew this before, we had never done such a thing without any training. Anyway, when we returned in Pieterburen we were all so exhausted but we received our certificate as you can see below,

In 1974 we went all together to Zeddam for a camp. During this camp we had a hike by bike. That was very hard, because most of us never used their bike for more then riding to school and now we had a drive each day from early in the morning till late in the evening. When we then finally arrived on our next location, we had to put the tent up again and were mostly so exhausted that we went to bed right after dinner.

We also walked a "Duinenmars" together with the whole group that year. That was real nice to do. We were all wearing our uniform and sang songs when we were walking.