John Gordon Hargrave (6 June 1894 – 21 November 1982), (woodcraft name 'White Fox'), was a prominent youth leader in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s, Head Man of the Kibbo Kift, described in his obituary as an 'author, cartoonist, inventor, lexicographer, artist and psychic healer'.

[4] A bohemian childhood, spent partly in the Lake District, left him with a passion for Nature and a fierce propensity for self-education through reading books and observing the world around him.

[3] The experience convinced him that modern civilisation had gone awry and he voiced his feelings in his angry polemic of 1919, The Great War Brings It Home.

As Head Man, he imported into the Kindred his interest in ritual and art, along with his own views about self-education, science, magic, and healthy behaviour.

He was a strong believer in Darwinian evolution, holding that Kibbo Kift training would produce morally upright and healthy individuals, through whom the human species as a whole would evolve into a better state.

The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift took its name from an old Kentish term for a feat of strength[5] and it attracted support from a number of progressive thinkers, including: Patrick Geddes, Evelyn Sharp, H. G. Wells, and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence.

Many developed an intense personal loyalty to Hargrave, remaining with him throughout the Kindred's transformation into the Green Shirts, and the Social Credit Party.

[3] Hargrave designed a striking new flag for his Social Credit movements, the green and black double K device, which he christened the 'Key Symbol'.

Initially staying out of parliamentary politics, Hargrave changed his mind in 1935, re-branding the Green Shirt movement as the Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for the purposes of fighting the 1935 General Election.

He left Canada in 1936, returning to find the Social Credit Party in disarray after the Public Order Act 1936 banned the wearing of uniforms by non-military personnel.

[3] Undeterred, Hargrave steered the Social Credit Party into a more evangelical mood, adopting quasi-religious slogans ('God's Providence is Mine Inheritance') and organising public 'Services of National Regeneration'.

The invention lay fallow until 1976 when Hargrave sued the British Government, claiming that the moving map display supplied by Britain to the supersonic Concorde, was, in fact, his Automatic Navigator.

[3] During the war, Hargrave had returned to his interest in science and magic (he always considered both as equally valid methods for harnessing the forces of nature).

He submitted a stream of manuscripts, radio plays and film scripts to producers and publishers, always searching for opportunities to realise his ideas:[13] he continued to believe that Social Credit was the solution to the world's economic problems.

[4] John Hargrave's personal papers, including his diaries and unpublished mss., are held at the British Library of Political and Economic Science.