The ‘Red Scout’: how a boy from Brislington became caught up in anti-communist hysteria
In 1954, Paul Garland’s ejection from the Scout movement over his communist links drew international attention
Exactly 70 years ago, the eyes of the world were on a young member of the Scouts from Brislington, who found himself caught up in a bitter political row during the height of the postwar ‘Red Scare’ era.
Paul Garland worked at the Bristol Aeroplane Company in Filton and was still living with his parents at the lodge house of Brislington House, a former private mental institution on Bath Road.
A Scout since the age of eight, and a member of the 5th Bristol troop, he had only recently been made a Queen’s Scout, the highest award a Scout can receive. But he also had interests that went well beyond the Scout movement – including taking part in youth festivals behind the Iron Curtain.
And in February 1954, he was made secretary of the local branch of the Young Communist League, a section of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
In a newspaper interview he gave three decades later, Paul would explain that he came from a strongly left-wing family and that becoming a Communist hadn’t seemed in any way unusual to him. As a child during the Second World War, he remembered how, with Nazi Germany a common enemy, “Churchill was praising the Soviet Union to the skies and old Joe Stalin was a great ally.”
Rooting out Reds
The world was moving at a dizzying pace in 1954. Stalin had been dead only a few months. The Cuban Revolution was underway. And in America, Eisenhower had become president and the notorious senator Joseph McCarthy was hellbent on rooting out ‘Reds’ wherever they could be found.
The Scouts organisation itself had recently published a pamphlet entitled ‘The Menace of Communism’, and did not take kindly to reports of Paul Garland’s new job. In February 1954, he received a letter from the local headquarters demanding that he hand back his badges and agree never to wear his uniform again.
The local county commissioner argued that whereas Scouts must promise to do their duty to God and the Queen, Communists don’t believe in religion and wish to see an end to monarchy. “Scouting and Communism are not compatible,” he announced, and Paul Garland, “because of his Communist activities, is no longer a Scout.”
But Paul was made of sterner stuff. “I am not going to hand in my badges,” he announced, standing outside St Luke’s Church Hall. This was where Brislington Scouts were putting on their new show – which, with delicious irony, happened to be ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.
“I believe the teachings of Jesus Christ are the finest foundations for my ideals,” Paul said, “and I find I can best express them in practice through the Communist Party.” As for Her Majesty, “I am a loyal subject of the Queen,” he said.
With the row threatening to escalate, the UK’s chief scout, Lord Rowallan, stepped in. A former soldier and banker, and a future governor of Tasmania, he said his movement had “a duty to parents to protect their children from undue influence and lies”.
These words were ridiculed by the leadership of the Young Communists, and Lord Rowallan would be picketed in public for months afterwards. But they were also criticised by people who were suspicious of Paul Garland and felt that the Scouts had turned him into a martyr and even played into Moscow’s hands.
Debates in Parliament
Paul’s MP, however, took a much more supportive stance. Tony Benn, then the Labour member for Bristol South East, pointed out that there weren’t just Christians in the Scouts, but Jews and non-believers too, and that for all their supposed atheism, Communists were permitted to attend services in the Church of England.
But when he invited the chief scout to debate the issue, Lord Rowallan declined, saying he simply didn’t have the time.
An intervention from the other side of the House of Commons proved more effective. Paul had been interviewed in the preceding few days by a reporter from the BBC, but at the behest of Robert Crouch, the Conservative MP for North Dorset, the interview was withdrawn from the schedules. Paul had, in fact, told the reporter that he saw no contradiction between communism and scout membership, since both were in favour of “world brotherhood”.
And though Paul’s voice was destined to go unheard, his case continued to attract attention, even making it into the pages of Time magazine and, on 11 March 1954, into debate in the House of Lords.
Paul himself was present in the chamber that day, wearing – the newspapers couldn’t resist pointing out – a deep red tie. And he heard Labour peer (and father of Tony Benn) Viscount Stansgate say that the way he had been treated was “repugnant to our national tradition of liberty and conscience”.
This time Lord Rowallan did find time to speak – and did not mince his words. He demanded that the Scouts stay true to their principles, and he even suggested Paul might be a Communist “plant”.
Hearing at Portland Square
The following day, the case was given a final airing, back in Bristol, in front of a local Scout Association committee. The venue for it was a fine Georgian building in Portland Square, St Paul’s, where three of the oldest, largest Scouts stood guard on the door.
Speaking to reporters outside the building, Paul’s father said that his son had received two hundred letters since the row first blew up, and that while one or two of them – “unsigned, of course” – had contained threats, fully three-quarters supported him.
The committee comprised more than 30 Bristol Scoutmasters, who spent several hours debating the rights and wrongs of the case. And when news came through that Paul had, after all, been expelled, he took it in his stride.
“I hope this intolerance will not extend in the future,” Paul said. “I have always been loyal to the movement and the way things have been done grieves me very much.”
In time, Paul Garland married, set up home in Clifton and had children. He worked for the Co-op, went off to France to live a self-sufficient life for a while, and then he came back to a job with Foster Electrical (which became part of Thorn EMI). He also formed the Great Western Marching Band, which was a familiar sight in and around Bristol.
He remained active in politics throughout all this, joining the Labour party after leaving communism behind. He served on Bristol Trades Council, and after several unsuccessful attempts, finally won a city council seat, in Lockleaze ward in 1996. He was made deputy lord mayor of Bristol three years later, but he died only a few months into his period of office.
Throughout his life Paul kept a scrapbook of letters, newspaper articles and cartoons from the time he became known as the ‘Red Scout’. And he didn’t let his own experiences prevent one of his sons from joining the movement.
But if he was able to look back on those days with a measure of affection, his convictions remained undimmed. In his 1980s newspaper interview, when he talked about his plans for the rest of his life, he revealed that he had already chosen the music to be played at his funeral.
It included, he said with a wry smile, the celebrated socialist anthem, ‘The Internationale’.
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