Hargrave claimed all three organisations to be part of one mission, telling his followers after the last title-change: 'We are the Green Shirts – indeed we are the Kindred – calling ourselves the Social Credit Party of Great Britain officially, but knowing full well who and what we are.

'[1] The mission was the belief that Kibbo Kift training would produce a core of healthy and creative individuals through whom the human race would evolve into a society without war, poverty and wasted lives.

The Kibbo Kift held that individual character strengthened by mental discipline was the key to the future, not mass movements based on groups defined by class, race or nation states.

The ideas of world peace and the regeneration of urban man through the open-air life replaced the nationalism and militarism Hargrave had detested in the post-World War I Boy Scouts Association.

[1] The words Kibbo Kift come from a Cheshire dialect term used to indicate 'proof of great strength', specifically lifting a heavy bag of grain (about 142 kg, or 325 lb) onto one's shoulders.

[5] In the second half of the 1920s the Kindred's educational ideas tended to be swamped by Hargrave's enthusiasm for the economic theory of Social Credit, but the faith in ritual and ceremony remained strong.

The popular press also drew attention to the group's skimpy exercise costumes; these included brassiere-type tops for women and gee-strings or breech-clouts for men.

[5] By the late 1920s the movement's ceremonial occasions required brilliantly coloured surcoats or silk-embroidered robes, worn by the various office-holders such as the Tallykeeper, Campswarden, Ritesmaster and Gleeman.

The Kibbo Kift's central activities, hiking and camping, were elevated to the level of a spiritual exercise: all marked by colourful and impressive ritual, couched in language reminiscent of Norse Sagas and rich in Saxon archaisms.

Hikes could be turned into 'pilgrimages', as for example in 1924 when the Kibbo Kift made a pilgrimage to Piltdown in Sussex, in homage to 'Dawn Man', a supposed early humanoid whose skull had recently been unearthed (later found to be a hoax).

His designs for Kibbo Kift banners from the late 1920s are stronger and more graphic, probably a consequence of his work as a freelance advertising artist and copywriter, principally for Lever Brothers and Carlton Studios.

[5] Kinsmen and Kinswomen included former suffragettes Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Mary Neal and May Billinghurst, Evelyn Sharp (her husband, the journalist Henry Nevinson, was a passive supporter), the photographer Angus McBean, Ruth Clark, the mountaineer Mabel Barker (Patrick Geddes' god-daughter, through whom the Kindred became involved in Regional Survey work), the explorer Millican Dalton, Roland Berrill – later a founder of Mensa, and Rolf Gardiner – a folk-dance revivalist.

[citation needed] Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Rolf Gardiner tried to link the Kindred with European youth groups (arranging for Hargrave's woodcraft books to be translated and published in Germany in the early 1920s).

This was the culmination of a growing dissatisfaction with Hargrave's top-down decision-making structure and his tendency to make outlandish public claims for the organisation that deviated from the covenant and risked ridicule.

[5] At the 1924 Althing, Dr. Cullen, Gordon Ellis, and Joseph Reeves from the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society, which had supported the Kindred financially, led the formal walk out.

[15] By 1931, the Kibbo Kift was well on the way towards becoming a political movement with a single-minded mission: focussing on the state of the British nation and spreading social credit ideas among the unemployed ('surplus labour' in Hargrave's terms) in Britain's industrial cities.

The Public Order Act 1936, which banned the wearing of uniforms by political groups, was a great setback for a movement that relied on agit-prop, but it was World War II that provided the deathblow.

The collection features strongly in Designing Utopia: John Hargrave and the Kibbo Kift by Cathy Ross and Oliver Bennett, published by the museum in 2015.

An exhibition, "Intellectual Barbarians: The Kibbo Kift Kindred", exploring the group's artistic output, ran at Whitechapel Gallery, London from October 2015 to March 2016, co-curated by Annebella Pollen and Nayia Yiakoumaki.

Artists and designers including Olivia Plender, Steven Claydon and Liam Hodges, as well as novelists (Matthew De Abaitua, Kate Atkinson) and musicians (Ganser), have used Kibbo Kift ideas and imagery in their work.