The Boy Scouts, the English Folk-Dance Society and the Espérance Morris movement were all founded in the Edwardian period, a golden age of Englishness that was also a golden age for worrying about England's identity and future. Robert Baden-Powell, Cecil Sharp and Mary Neal, their respective founders, confronted what they saw as a crisis in the social fabric of England by instigating voluntary movements for the recovery of healthy national bodies, the establishment of healthy national minds and the revival of healthy national traditions. The Scouts and the two folk-dance movements provide instructive case studies of the contradictions inherent in such projects of national revival. For example, Baden-Powell, Sharp and Neal all argued that the decay of character, physique and traditional knowledge in English youth was due to the destructive effects of industrial and urban modernity, and each advocated a restorative primitivism applied through adventure, dance or song. Yet all three were also notable for their skilful exploitation of new technologies of communication. Each also confronted significant theoretical and practical problems in the foundation and conduct of their organisations which suggested the difficult roles of class, gender and race in the construction of a new Englishness. The camp grounds and village halls of the Scout troops and folk-dance groups proved to be less venues for the consolidation of English national identity than public theatres for the performance of conflicts inherent in that identity.