12th Epsom Brownie Guides

We celebrated Chinese New Year, the year of the rabbit, with the girls making Chinese lanterns and red packets for chocolate buttons and they also enjoyed eating prawn crackers.

The next week we prepared for Valentine’s Day and the Brownies made cards and heart-shaped baskets and appropriately decorated some biscuits.

Our following meeting was a celebration for Thinking Day, and we took a collection for the Girlguiding Thinking Day Charity, raising £14. The Brownies learned a little about other Brownie Packs around the world and then each did some Russian spoon painting, made a friendship circle and a Korean fan.

Numbers continue to rise and we now have 17 Brownies in our Pack.

Last Saturday I took three Brownies along with a Mum, to pick snowdrops at ‘The Durdans’ The weather forecast for Saturday morning had been very unfavourable, but it wasn’t raining when we met at 10 a.m. so we decided to go ahead with the picking.

As work is being done on the old stables at the moment, we were asked to go to the top of the wood to meet the owner and then walk down to where we could pick the snowdrops. The owner of the stables met us and guided us along the path telling us as we went about the owner of The Durdans, Lord Rosebery, whose son went to fight in World War 1, when he left his home to go to fight, his father closed the iron gates behind him and vowed that they would not open again until his return. Unfortunately his son did not return from the war and so the gates remain closed even today. Lord Rosebery’s daughter, Lady Sybil Grant planted all the snowdrops in memory of her brother and would gather them from the grounds every spring and sell them to raise money for disabled soldiers who had been wounded in the First World War. In 1932, the Epsom branch of the Lest We Forget Association, began the tradition of picking them and raising money for their cause. Lady Sybil Grant put it in her will that this tradition was to continue forever.

On the route to the snowdrops we were also shown where there are several graves containing some very successful race horses, including Amato (Derby winner in 1838) and Ladas (Derby winner in 1894), we also saw a very large badgers’ sett and the ice house, where, before freezers had been invented, they could keep ice for the house throughout the year.

We were very glad that we had not cancelled the event as the new owner had made it very interesting for us, the rain had held off and we were able to produce 33 bunches of snowdrops for the congregations of the Epsom and Ewell United Reformed Churches to take for a small donation. A total of £15 was collected for the ‘Lest We Forget Association’, thank you.