| Kibbo Kift | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 'Kinsmen' in ceremonial robes at the opening ceremony of the 1927 Althing, the Kibbo Kift annual general meeting | |||
| Country | England | ||
| Founded | 18 August 1920 | ||
| Defunct | 1935 | ||
| Founder | John Hargrave | ||
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The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift was a camping, hiking and handicraft group with ambitions to bring world peace. It was the first of three movements in England associated with the charismatic artist and writer John Hargrave (1894–1982). The Kindred was founded in 1920. Some members continued into Hargrave's Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit, which was established in 1931–32, and which became in 1935 the Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This was wound up in 1951.
Hargrave claimed all three organisations to be part of one mission, telling his followers after the last title-change: 'We are the Green Shirts – indeed we are the Kindred – calling ourselves the Social Credit Party of Great Britain officially, but knowing full well who and what we are. "Whelm on me ye Resurrected Men!" – I give you that outcry of the Kin in 1927.'[1]
The mission was the belief that Kibbo Kift training would produce a core of healthy and creative individuals through whom the human race would evolve into a society without war, poverty and wasted lives. The Kibbo Kift held that individual character strengthened by mental discipline was the key to the future, not mass movements based on groups defined by class, race or nation states.
- ^ Ross, Cathy, and Bennett, Oliver (2015). Designing Utopia: John Hargrave and the Kibbo Kift. London: Philip Wilson Publishers. p. 48. ISBN 978-1-781-30-040-4.
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