BOY SCOUTS INTERNATIONAL BUREAU 50

CHAPTER II STORY OF INDIAN SCOUTING

“Though Scouting was presented to the world through the experimental camp which B.P. conducted on Brownsea Island in August. 1907 ’’says Col. J.S. Wilson in his book “Scouting Round the World’, “it had been a long time in the making.” From the accounts left behind by the close associates of B.P., it would appear that the ideas for the development of basic values of a human being, so that he could be a worthy citizen of his country, had occupied his mind for a long time. He had confided to his close friends and co-workers that the story of the qualities which the Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table were supposed to have possessed and influenced him to a great extent in thinking out the qualities which a good citizen was expected to imbibe. These ideas were working in his mind from as far as 1890. This can be confirmed from different sources and documents. Hence the Camp at Brownsea Island could well be regarded as firm evidence of the crystalisation of his thoughts and his first attempt to apply them in practice. Thus it was in 1907 that Scouting could be said to have been born officially. Since then it has grown steadily and spread beyond the frontiers of the country of its birth.

Scouting for Boys was a programme conceived and planned mainly for the benefit of British boys who were thrown out of their traditional environment in the wake of the industrial revolution, and also for those who had to go out to new lands with their parents who had left their mother country to find out new careers for themselves as traders, administrators, technicians and settlers in the colonies and countries under the English Crown. The ideas and programmes set out in the Scouting for Boys were, however, so universal that it was not long before they had travelled across the English Channel to many lands beyond the seas.

In India Scouting first came in for the benefit of British and AngloIndian boys, as a measure to bring home to them the traditional values of the British society so that the environment in a country so far away from their homefront might not obscure their ultimate duties and responsibilities as sons of Britain.

Understandably, the authorities of the newly formed movement did not envisage that the programme and ideals would be suitable for Indian boys, Col. J.S. Wilson, while describing his role as a