ABSTRACT
From its beginnings in the second half of the nineteenth century the youth service has defined the needs of girls and boys as entirely different. Then, as now, the primary targets of the service were the poor urban working class, who were, and still are, regarded as being in need of particular guidance to prevent their becoming, in the case of boys, dangerously criminal, and in the case of girls, morally degenerate. The service was intended to extend the moral values of the middle and upper classes who funded it and to a great extent ran it, to these ‘at risk’ young people. For girls this generally meant providing Bible study and training in how to serve and to excel in the domestic arts. For boys a rather different agenda was operating. Any leisure time that they might have was seen as a potential hazard to the community, and there was a pressing need to ‘keep them off the streets’. William Smith, founder of the Boys’ Brigade, stated the aims of the organisation as being ‘to promote habits of obedience, reverence, discipline, self respect and all that tends towards the Christian manliness’ (quoted in Davies 1986:93). To this he could have added the need to foster jingoistic patriotism and pride in the British Empire. Working-class lads could be needed as cannonfodder in a potential war, and had to be kept in a state of readiness: competitive and aggressive but obedient and loyal to the Establishment.
