Hello,
I am currently researching history of Czech tramping movement in European context and I am looking around for resources related to one particular problem. Czech tramping (for a more detailed overview, see this article) is a romantic youth subculture evolved from scouting, but unorganized. Its participants were often called "wild scouts" in early 1920s and many of these people were former boy scouts, who left their troops after becoming older, but continued camping with friends on their own. This phenomenon took a very specific shape in Czech context and became a movement with its own fashion (mostly inspired by Wild West), slang, music, literature, sports etc.
However, I still do not know whether such massive continuation of camping-related activities outside scouting was a local phenomenon and what did former scouts do in countries like the US, Britain, Germany or Poland. Typical early Czech wild scouts/"tramps" were urban dwellers, mostly blue-collars or students, around 16-19 years old, used to camping from their time in organized scouting movement, but not continuing to participate in it as rovers or leaders. I suppose this is a social group that was present also in other industrialzed European cities of early 20th century, but I do not know what did these people do elsewhere. Were there, for example, some clubs or known groups of former scouts in your countries, who were no longer identifying themselves with scouting, but who were keeping its more technical aspects and general preference for outdoors? I know of groups like Edelweisspiraten in Germany, but what am I especially interested in is how common was a transition from a scout to member of some other similar non-scouting movement and what did former young scouts actually do.
Thank you,
Jan
