Educated at Charterhouse School, Baden-Powell served in the British Army from 1876 until 1910 in India and Africa.[6] In 1899, during the Second Boer War in South Africa, Baden-Powell defended the town in the Siege of Mafeking.[7] His books, written for military reconnaissance and scout training, were also read by boys and used by teachers and youth organisations. In August 1907, he held an experimental camp, the Brownsea Island Scout camp to test his ideas for training boys in scouting.[8] He wrote Scouting for Boys,[9] published in 1908 by C. Arthur Pearson Limited, for boy readership. In 1910 Baden-Powell retired from the army and formed The Scout Association.
He gave guidance to The Scout Association and Girl Guides Association until retiring in 1937. Baden-Powell lived his last years in Nyeri, Kenya, where he died and was buried in 1941. His grave is a national monument.[10]
Baden-Powell's father's family originated in Suffolk.[12] His mother's earliest known Smyth ancestor was a Royalist American colonist; her mother's father Thomas Warington was the British Consul in Naples around 1800.[13]
Baden-Powell was born Robert Stephenson Smyth Powell at 6 Stanhope Street (now 11 Stanhope Terrace), Paddington, London, on 22 February 1857. He was called Stephe (pronounced "Stevie") by his family.[14] He was named after his godfather, Robert Stephenson, the railway and civil engineer,[15] and his third name was his mother's surname.[16]
Baden-Powell had four older half-siblings from the second of his father's two previous marriages and was the fifth surviving child of his father's third marriage:[17]
The three children immediately preceding Baden-Powell had all died very young before he was born, so there was a seven-year gap between him and his next older brother Frank; so he and his two younger siblings were almost like a separate family, of which he was the eldest.[14]
His father died when Baden-Powell was three, so he was raised by his single mother, a strong woman who was determined that her children would succeed. In 1933 he said of her "The whole secret of my getting on, lay with my mother."[14][18][19]
He attended Rose Hill School, Tunbridge Wells and was given a scholarship to Charterhouse, a prestigious public school named after the ancient Carthusian monastery buildings it occupied in the City of London.[20] However, while he was a pupil there, the school moved out to new purpose-built premises in the countryside near Godalming in Surrey. He played with dolls and learnt the piano and violin, was an ambidextrous artist, and enjoyed acting. Holidays were spent on yachting or canoeing expeditions with his brothers. Baden-Powell's first introduction to outdoor skills was through stalking and cooking games while avoiding teachers in the nearby woods, which were strictly out-of-bounds.[14][21]
Military career
In 1876, Baden-Powell joined the 13th Hussars in India with the rank of lieutenant. In 1880 he was charged with the task of drawing maps of the Battle of Maiwand. He enhanced and honed his military scouting skills amidst the Zulu in the early 1880s in the Natal Province of South Africa, where his regiment had been posted, and where he was mentioned in dispatches. In 1890, he was brevetted Major as military secretary and senior aide-de-camp to the Commander-in-Chief and Governor of Malta, his uncle General Sir Henry Augustus Smyth.[14] He was posted to Malta for three years, also working as an intelligence officer for the Mediterranean for the Director of Military Intelligence.[14] He wrote that he once travelled disguised as a butterfly collector, incorporating plans of military installations into his drawings of butterfly wings.[22] In 1884 he published Reconnaissance and Scouting.[23]
Baden-Powell returned to Africa in 1896, and served in the Second Matabele War, in the expedition to relieve British South Africa Company personnel under siege in Bulawayo.[24] This was a formative experience for him not only because he commanded reconnaissance missions into enemy territory in the Matopos Hills, but because many of his later Boy Scout ideas took hold here.[25] It was during this campaign that he first met and befriended the American scout Frederick Russell Burnham, who introduced Baden-Powell to stories of the American Old West and woodcraft (i.e., Scoutcraft), and here that he was introduced to Montana Peaked version of a western cowboy hat, of which Stetson was a prolific manufacturer, and which also came to be known as a campaign hat and the many versatile and practical uses of a neckerchief.[14]
Baden-Powell was accused of illegally executing a prisoner of war in 1896, the Matabele chief Uwini, who had been promised his life would be spared if he surrendered.[26] Uwini was sentenced to be shot by firing squad by a military court, a sentence Baden-Powell confirmed. Baden-Powell was cleared by a military court of inquiry, but the colonial civil authorities wanted a civil investigation and trial. Baden-Powell later claimed he was "released without a stain on my character".[27]
After Rhodesia, Baden-Powell served in the Fourth Ashanti War on the Gold Coast. In 1897, at the age of 40, he was brevetted colonel (the youngest colonel in the British Army) and given command of the 5th Dragoon Guards in India.[28] A few years later he wrote a small manual, entitled Aids to Scouting, a summary of lectures he had given on the subject of military scouting, much of it a written explanation of the lessons he had learned from Burnham, to help train recruits.[29]
Mafeking
Baden-Powell returned to South Africa before the Second Boer War. Although instructed to maintain a mobile mounted force on the frontier with the Boer Republics, Baden-Powell amassed stores and established a garrison at Mafeking. The subsequent Siege of Mafeking lasted 217 days. Although Baden-Powell could have destroyed his stores and had sufficient forces to break out throughout much of the siege, especially since the Boers lacked adequate artillery to shell the town or its forces, he remained in the town to the point of his intended mounted soldiers eating their horses. The town had been surrounded by a Boer army, at times above 8,000 men.[30]
The siege of the small town received much attention from both the Boers and international media because Lord Edward Cecil, the son of the British Prime Minister, was besieged in the town.[31][32] The garrison held out until relieved, in part thanks to cunning deceptions, many devised by Baden-Powell. Fake minefields were planted and his soldiers pretended to avoid non-existent barbed wire while moving between trenches.[33] Baden-Powell did much reconnaissance work himself.[34] In one instance, noting that the Boers had not removed the rail line, Baden-Powell loaded an armoured locomotive with sharpshooters and sent it down the rails into the heart of the Boer encampment and back again in a successful attack.[32]
A view expressed by historian Thomas Pakenham of Baden-Powell's actions during the siege argued that his success in resisting the Boers was secured at the expense of the lives of the native African soldiers and civilians, including members of his own African garrison. Pakenham claimed that Baden-Powell drastically reduced the rations to the native garrison.[35] However, in 2001, after subsequent research, Pakenham changed this view.[14][31]
During the siege, the Mafeking Cadet Corps of white boys below fighting age stood guard, carried messages, assisted in hospitals and so on, freeing grown men to fight. Baden-Powell did not form the Cadet Corps himself, and there is no evidence that he took much notice of them during the Siege. However, he was sufficiently impressed with both their courage and the equanimity with which they performed their tasks to use them later as an object lesson in the first chapter of Scouting for Boys.[36]
The siege was lifted on 17 May 1900.[37] Baden-Powell was promoted to major-general and became a national hero.[38] However, British military commanders were more critical of his performance and even less impressed with his subsequent choices to again allow himself to be besieged.[32][35] Ultimately, his failure to understand properly the situation, and abandonment of the soldiers, mostly Australians and Rhodesians, at the Battle of Elands River Pakenham claimed led to his being removed from action.[31][32]
Baden-Powell was given the role of organising the South African Constabulary, a colonial police force,[32] but during this phase, Baden-Powell was sent to Britain on sick leave, so he was only in command for seven months.[32]
Baden-Powell returned to England to take up the post of Inspector-General of Cavalry in 1903. While holding this position, he was instrumental in reforming reconnaissance training in British cavalry, giving the force an important advantage in scouting ability over continental rivals.[41] Baden-Powell was a career cavalryman, but realised that cavalry was no match against the machine gun; however, his superiors, Kitchener and French, the latter also a career cavalryman, still regarded the cavalry as indispensable, with the result that cavalry was used in the First World War with little effect, yet the major item exported from Britain to Flanders during the War was horse fodder.[42]
On 19 February 1909, facing censure for his public comments about Germany as an enemy, Baden-Powell abruptly sailed in the SS Aragon via Portugal and Spain to South America. The Belfast Newsletter reported that when in March 1909 he visited Santiago de Chile for three days, "He was given a warmer reception than had ever been afforded a foreigner in South America."[44] He sailed back in the RMS Danube by 1 May 1909.[45]
In 1910, aged 53, Baden-Powell was retired from the Army.[14]
In 1915, Baden-Powell's book "My Adventures as a Spy" was published, lending to false suggestions he had been active as a spy during the war.[46]
On his return from Africa in 1903, Baden-Powell found that his military training manual, Aids to Scouting, had become a best-seller, and was being used by teachers and youth organisations,[48] including Charlotte Mason's House of Education.[49] Following his involvement in the Boys' Brigade as a Brigade vice-president and officer in charge of its scouting section, with encouragement from Sir William Alexander Smith, Baden-Powell decided to re-write Aids to Scouting to suit a youth readership. In August 1907, he held a camp on Brownsea Island to test out his ideas. About twenty boys attended: eight from local Boys' Brigade companies, and about twelve public school boys, mostly sons of his friends.[50]
Baden-Powell was also influenced by Ernest Thompson Seton, who founded the Woodcraft Indians. Seton gave Baden-Powell a copy of his book The Birch Bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians and they met in 1906.[51][52] Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys was published in six installments in 1908 and has sold approximately 150 million copies as the fourth best-selling book of the 20th century.[53]
Boys and girls[54] spontaneously formed Scout troops. The Scout Movement had started by itself, first as a national, and soon an international phenomenon.[55]A rally of Scouts was held at Crystal Palace in London in 1909, at which Baden-Powell met some of the first Girl Scouts of whom 6,000 had already been registered as Scouts. In 1910, Baden-Powell and his sister, Agnes Baden-Powell, formed The Girl Guides Association.[56]
In 1912, Baden-Powell started a world tour with a voyage to the Caribbean. Another passenger was Juliette Gordon Low, an American who had been running a Guide Company in Scotland and was returning to the U.S.A. Baden-Powell encouraged her to found the Girl Scouts of the USA.[57]
In 1929, during the 3rd World Scout Jamboree, he received as a present a new 20-horsepower Rolls-Royce car (chassis number GVO-40, registration OU 2938) and an Eccles Caravan.[58] This combination well served the Baden-Powells in their further travels around Europe. The caravan was nicknamed Eccles and is now on display at Gilwell Park. The car, nicknamed Jam Roll, was sold after his death by Olave Baden-Powell in 1945. Jam Roll and Eccles were reunited at Gilwell for the 21st World Scout Jamboree in 2007 and it has been purchased by a charity, B–P Jam Roll Ltd. Funds are being raised to repay the loan that was used to purchase the car.[58][59]
Baden-Powell also had impacts on youth education.[60] By 1922, there were more than a million Scouts in 32 countries; by 1939 the number of Scouts was over 3.3 million.[61]
Early Scout Association "Thanks badges" (from 1911) and The Scout Association "Medal of Merit" badge had a swastika symbol on them.[62][63] This was undoubtedly influenced by the use by Rudyard Kipling of the swastika on the jacket of his published books,[64] including The Jungle Book, which was used by Baden-Powell as a basis for the Wolf Cubs. The swastika had been a symbol of luck in India long before being adopted by the Nazi Party in 1920, and when Nazi use of the swastika became more widespread, the Scouts stopped using it.[62]
Nazi Germany banned Scouting, a competitor to the Hitler Youth, in June 1934, seeing it as "a haven for young men opposed to the new State".[65] Based on the regime's view of Scouting as a dangerous espionage organisation, Baden-Powell's name was included in "The Black Book", a 1940 secret list of people to be detained following the planned conquest of the United Kingdom.[66][67][68] A drawing by Baden-Powell depicts Scouts assisting refugees fleeing from the Nazis and Hitler.[69][70]Tim Jeal, the author of the biography Baden-Powell, gives his opinion that "Baden-Powell's distrust of communism led to his implicit support, through naïveté, of fascism", an opinion based on two of B-P's diary entries. Baden-Powell met Benito Mussolini on 2 March 1933, and in his diary described him as "small, stout, human and genial. Told me about Balilla and workmen's outdoor recreations which he imposed through 'moral force'". On 17 October 1939, Baden-Powell wrote in his diary: "Lay up all day. Read Mein Kampf. A wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation etc. – and ideals which Hitler does not practice himself."[14]
At the 5th World Scout Jamboree in 1937, Baden-Powell gave his farewell to Scouting and retired from public Scouting life. 22 February, the joint birthday of Robert and Olave Baden-Powell, continues to be marked as Founder's Day by Scouts and World Thinking Day by Guides to remember and celebrate the work of the Chief Scout and Chief Guide of the World.[71]
In his final letter to the Scouts, Baden-Powell wrote:
I have had a most happy life and I want each one of you to have a happy life too. I believe that God put us in this jolly world to be happy and enjoy life. Happiness does not come from being rich, nor merely being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence. One step towards happiness is to make yourself healthy and strong while you are a boy, so that you can be useful and so you can enjoy life when you are a man. Nature study will show you how full of beautiful and wonderful things God has made the world for you to enjoy. Be contented with what you have got and make the best of it. Look on the bright side of things instead of the gloomy one. But the real way to get happiness is by giving out happiness to other people. Try and leave this world a little better than you found it and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate you have not wasted your time but have done your best. "Be prepared" in this way, to live happy and to die happy – stick to your Scout Promise always – even after you have ceased to be a boy – and God help you to do it.[72]
Baden-Powell died on 8 January 1941: his grave is in St Peter's Cemetery in Nyeri, Kenya.[68] His gravestone bears a circle with a dot in the centre "ʘ", which is the trail sign for "Going home", or "I have gone home". His wife Olave moved back to England in 1942; after she died in 1977, her ashes were taken to Kenya by her grandson Robert and interred beside her husband.[73] In 2001, the Kenyan government declared Baden-Powell's grave a national monument.[74]
Baden-Powell was regarded as an excellent storyteller. During his whole life he told "ripping yarns" to audiences. After having published Scouting for Boys, Baden-Powell kept on writing more handbooks and educative materials for all Scouts, as well as directives for Scout Leaders. In his later years, he also wrote about the Scout movement and his ideas for its future. He spent most of the last two years of his life in Africa, and many of his later books had African themes.[14]
1930: Fifty years against the stream: The story of a school in Kashmir, 1880–1930 by E.D. Tyndale-Biscoe about the Tyndale Biscoe School[84][83]
A comprehensive bibliography of his original works has been published by Biblioteca Frati Minori Cappuccini.[85]
Art
Baden-Powell's father often sketched caricatures of those present at meetings, while his maternal grandmother was also artistic. Baden-Powell painted or sketched almost every day of his life, and with equal competence with either hand. Most of his works have a humorous or informative character.[14] His books are scattered with his pen-and-ink sketches, frequently whimsical. He did a largely unknown number of pen-and-ink sketches; he always travelled with a sketchpad that he used frequently for pencil sketches and "cartoons" for later watercolour paintings. He also created a few sculptures. There is no catalogue of his works, many of which appear in his books, and twelve paintings hang in the British Scout Headquarters at Gilwell Park. There was an exhibition of his work at the Willmer House Museum, Farnham, Surrey, from 11 April – 12 May 1967; a text-only catalogue was produced.[86]
Personal life
In January 1912, Baden-Powell was en route to New York on a world speaking tour, on the ocean liner SS Arcadian, when he met Olave St Clair Soames.[87][88] She was 23, while he was 55; they shared the same birthday, 22 February. They became engaged in September of the same year, causing a media sensation due to Baden-Powell's fame. To avoid press intrusion, they married in private on 30 October 1912, at St. Peter's Church, Parkstone.[89] 100,000 Scouts had each donated a penny (1d) to buy Baden-Powell a wedding gift, a 20 h.p. Standard motor car (not the Rolls-Royce they were presented in 1929).[90] There is a display about their marriage inside St Peter's Church, Parkstone.[91]
The couple lived at Pax Hill near Bentley, Hampshire, named as such as it was bought on Armistice Day (11 November 1918).[92] The Bentley house was a gift from her father.[93] After they married, Baden-Powell began to suffer persistent headaches which were only relieved when he left the bed he and his wife shared. The headaches were considered by his doctor to be psychosomatic and were treated with dream analysis.[14][94]
In 1939, they moved to a cottage he had commissioned in Nyeri, Kenya, near Mount Kenya, where he had previously been to recuperate. The small one-room house, which he named Paxtu, was located on the grounds of the Outspan Hotel, owned by Eric Sherbrooke Walker, Baden-Powell's first private secretary and one of the first Scout inspectors.[14] Walker also owned the Treetops Hotel, approximately 10 miles (17 km) out in the Aberdare Mountains, often visited by Baden-Powell and people of the Happy Valley set. The Paxtu cottage is integrated into the Outspan Hotel buildings and serves as a small museum.[95]
Baden-Powell and his wife were parents of Arthur Robert Peter (1913–1962), who succeeded his father in the barony; Heather Grace (1915–1986), who married John Hall King (1913–2004) and had two sons, the elder of whom, Michael, was drowned in the sinking of SS Heraklion in 1966; and Betty St Clair (1917–2004).[96] When Olave's sister Auriol Davidson (née Soames) died in 1919, Olave and Robert took her three daughters into their family and brought them up.[97]
Three of Baden-Powell's many biographers comment on his sexuality; the first two (in 1979 and 1986) focused on his relationship with his close friend Kenneth McLaren.[98]: 217–218 [99]: 48 Tim Jeal's later (1989) biography discusses the relationship and finds no evidence that this friendship was erotic.[14]: 82 Jeal then examines Baden-Powell's views on women, his appreciation of the male form, his military relationships, and his marriage, concluding that, in his personal opinion, Baden-Powell was a repressed homosexual.[14]: 103 Jeal's arguments and conclusion are dismissed by Procter and Block (2009) as "amateur psychoanalysis", for which there is no physical evidence.[100]: 6
Commissions and promotions
Commissioned sub-lieutenant, 13th Hussars, 11 September 1876[101] (retroactively granted the rank of lieutenant from the same date on 17 September 1878[102])
In 1927, at the Swedish National Jamboree, he was awarded by the Österreichischer Pfadfinderbund with the "Großes Dankabzeichen des ÖPB.[117]: 113 In 1931, Baden-Powell received the highest award of the First Austrian Republic (Großes Ehrenzeichen der Republik am Bande) out of the hands of President Wilhelm Miklas.[117]: 101 Baden-Powell was also one of the first and few recipients of the Goldene Gemse, the highest award conferred by the Österreichischer Pfadfinderbund.[118]
Following opposition to its removal,[132] including from residents, and past and present scouts, some of whom camped nearby to ensure it stayed in place, BCP Council had the statue boarded up instead.[133] Mark Howell, deputy leader of the BCP Council was quoted as saying, "It is our intention that the boarding is removed at the earliest, safe opportunity."[134]
1st: a Lion passant Or in the paw a broken Tilting Spear in bend proper pendent therefrom by a Riband Gules an Escutcheon resting on a Wreath Sable charged with a Pheon Or (Powell); 2nd: out of a Crown Vallary Or a Demi Lion rampant Gules on the head a like Crown charged on the shoulders with a Cross Pattée Argent and supporting with the paws a Sword Erect proper Pommel and Hilt Gold (Baden).
Escutcheon
Quarterly: 1 and 4th, Per fess Or and Argent a Lion rampant gules between two Tilting Spears erect proper (Powell); 2nd and 3rd, Argent a Lion rampant proper on the head a Crown Vallary Or between four Crosses pattée Gules and as many Fleur-de-lis Azure alternately (Baden).
^Palstra, Theo P. M. (April 1967). Baden-Powell, zijn leven en werk [Baden-Powell, His Life and Work, a True Story] (in Dutch). Den Haag: De Nationale Padvindersraad.
^ abBaden-Powell, Lieuth.-Gen. Sir Robert (1915). "My Adventures As A Spy". C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd. Archived from the original on 19 September 2017. Retrieved 24 December 2017.
^Baden-Powell, Robert (1884). Reconnaissance and scouting. A practical course of instruction, in twenty plain lessons, for officers, non-commissioned officers, and men. London: W. Clowes and Sons. OCLC9913678.
^Baden-Powell, Robert (1897). The Matabele Campaign, 1896. Greenwood Press. ISBN0-8371-3566-4.
^Proctor, Tammy M. (July 2000). "A Separate Path: Scouting and Guiding in Interwar South Africa". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 42 (3): 605–631. doi:10.1017/S0010417500002954 (inactive 1 November 2024). ISSN0010-4175. S2CID146706169.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
^Barrett, C.R.B. (1911). History of The XIII. Hussars. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. Archived from the original on 21 October 2006. Retrieved 2 January 2007.
^"Court circular". The Times. No. 36585. London. 14 October 1901. p. 9.
^B-P wrote, "Summoned to Balmoral by King Edward for the weekend: "I have just had my interview with the King. Went to his study and had a long sit down talk alone with him. Then he rang and sent for the Queen who came in with the little Duke of York, and then we had a long chat chiefly about my Police, Lady Sarah, Alexander of Teck, Moncrieff, Duke of York's tour, present state of the war, colonials as troops etc, as well as about Mafeking. The King handed me C.B. and South Africa Medal. It was a very cheery interview, and the King asked me to stay till Monday", "The Piper of Pax" by Eileen K. Wade
^Reported as "a Yorkshire division" in The Times, 29 October 1907, p.6; the Dictionary of National Biography lists it as the Northumbrian Division, which encompassed units from the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire, as well as Northumbria proper.
^Extrapolation for global range of other language publications, and related to the number of Scouts, make a realistic estimate of 100 to 150 million books. Details from Jeal, Tim (1989). Baden-Powell. London: Hutchinson. ISBN0-09-170670-X.
^ abGresh, Lois H.; Weinberg, Robert (2008). Why Did It Have To Be Snakes: From Science to the Supernatural, The Many Mysteries of Indiana Jones. John Wiley & Sons. p. 127. ISBN978-0-470-22556-1. Archived from the original on 8 January 2014. Retrieved 18 December 2013. The symbol [swastika] was used on the Thanks Badge, created in 1911. The swastika had been a symbol for luck in India long before being adopted by the Nazis, and Baden-Powell would have come across it during his years serving in that country. In 1922, the swastika was incorporated into the design for the Medal of Merit. The symbol was dropped by the Boy Scouts in 1934 because of its use by the Nazi Party.
^West, James E.; Lamb, Peter O. (1932). He-who-sees-in-the-dark; the Boys' Story of Frederick Burnham, the American Scout. illustrated by Lord Baden-Powell. New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam; Boy Scouts of America.
^Baden-Powell, Olave. "Window on My Heart". The Autobiography of Olave, Lady Baden-Powell, G.B.E.as told to Mary Drewery. Hodder & Stoughton. Archived from the original on 21 October 2006. Retrieved 16 November 2006.
^Wade, Eileen Kirkpatrick (1957). "5. Pax Hill". 27 Years with Baden-Powell. Blandford Press. Archived from the original on 30 December 2017. Retrieved 29 December 2017.
^Block, Nelson R.; Proctor, Tammy M., eds. (2009). Scouting Frontiers: Youth and the Scout Movement's First Century. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 6. ISBN978-1-4438-0450-9.
^ abPribich, Kurt (2004). Logbuch der Pfadfinderverbände in Österreich (in German). Vienna: Pfadfinder-Gilde-Österreichs.
^Wilceczek, Hans Gregor (1931). Georgsbrief des Bundesfeldmeisters für das Jahr 1931 an die Wölflinge, Pfadfinder, Rover und Führer im Ö.P.B. (in German). Vienna: Österreichischer Pfadfinderbund. p. 4.
^B-P wrote, "Summoned to Balmoral by King Edward for the weekend: "I have just had my interview with the King. Went to his study and had a long sit down talk alone with him. Then he rang and sent for the Queen who came in with the little Duke of York, and then we had a long chat chiefly about my Police, Lady Sarah, Alexander of Teck, Moncrieff, Duke of York's tour, present state of the war, colonials as troops etc, as well as about Mafeking. The King handed me C.B. and South Africa Medal. It was a very cheery interview, and the King asked me to stay till Monday", "The Piper of Pax" by Eileen K. Wade
Hillcourt, William; Baden-Powell, Olave (1992). Baden-Powell: The Two Lives Of A Hero. New York: Gilwellian Press d/b/a Scouter's Journal Magazine. ISBN0-8395-3594-5.