Growing up in the 1950s in a small village in the Forest of Dean where her parents ran a newsagent, Jan Royall was told by her headteacher that she would not make it to university.
But the Labour peer and principal of Somerville College, Oxford, said Girlguiding gave her the confidence to be ambitious and navigate the many challenges she later faced as a woman in Westminster.
“Girlguiding certainly taught me that girls really can do anything. Our leader was kind but it was her deputy that truly inspired me. She was a local farmer’s wife; full of life and energy,” she said.
“I went to the local grammar school, which I loved, but I remember asking my headteacher: ‘What’s Oxbridge?’ and he said: ‘Don’t worry about that, dear, you probably won’t go to university anyway.’ When I told my deputy leader, she said: ‘Of course you can and will go’ – and I believed her.”
Lady Royall, 67, can remember putting up tents and “ridiculous things like crossing rope bridges” at her weekly Girlguiding meetings in the neighbouring village of Longhope.
“I came from I suppose what one might call a working-class background. We owned our own house and my parents were brilliant parents, but they didn’t have very wide horizons, and so Girlguiding enabled me to explore things that I would never have had the opportunity to do,” she said.
Royall, who went on to study French and Spanish at the University of London, said her experiences as a Brownie, Guide and Ranger gave her the resilience to take on the male-dominated world of politics in the early 1980s.
“When I got the politics bug, I did face barriers as a woman, but most importantly I could see the barriers for women in politics – there were just 19 women in a parliament of 635,” she said. “They expected a woman to make the tea, to pour the tea, and do everything else. And it wasn’t just like that in Westminster, it was like that in the Labour party full stop.”
When she became a senior adviser to the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock in the 1980s, Royall said there were still occasions when she went into meetings and was assumed to be the secretary.
“When I decided I wanted to be a Labour MP, I know the fact that I was a woman mitigated against me, especially when combined with the fact that I had young children; people just couldn’t understand it,” added Royall, who has a daughter and two sons.
“I think there was still the thought in many people’s minds – not just in men’s minds, but in the minds of some women – that if you’re a mother, you didn’t have the capacity to do other things. And that has definitely changed. I’m very proud of what the Labour party has done in terms of getting more and more women into parliament.”
Royall, who later served as chief whip in the House of Lords and then leader of the house from 2008 to 2010, added: “I would have dearly loved to have been an MP, but I didn’t succeed.” But she said Girlguiding, the UK’s largest organisation dedicated to girls, had helped her when she faced those setbacks.
“It gives you confidence and resilience, and when you come up against life’s knockbacks, as a Guide, you pick yourself up, dust yourself down and think: ‘OK, I will be even stronger next time,’” she said.
In recent months, the 114-year-old organisation, which welcomes transgender girls and non-binary young people, has been criticised in some corners of the press. It has been accused of abandoning more traditional activities and taking on a campaigning role, with some critics questioning whether the movement has lost its way in the modern world.
Royall, who is supporting Friends of Girlguiding, the charity’s new regular giving platform, said the pressures of the modern world made the organisation even more important today.
“The pressures on young women these days are enormous. Some of the barriers have gone in terms of overt sexism and political barriers but the pressures now on young women in terms of what they look like – they’ve got to be thin etc – I think they’re terrible pressures,” she said.
“I think that one of the most important things Girlguiding does is it provides a space for women of all backgrounds, cultures, creeds to get together and to kind of do things together to understand each other.
“There are so many divisions in our society, which are being exacerbated, for example, by social media. And so this is a means of nurturing understanding, which I think is fundamental.
“It’s also a place where difficult issues like sexual harassment, trans issues, all sorts of things can be discussed, where some of these girls, or many of them, might not be able to discuss these things at home and question them.”
