History

Baden-Powell: The story of a complicated man

Baden-Powell with his African koodoo horn, used to wake the pioneering Brownsea Island boy scouts PHOTO: Scouts Heritage

In bizarre scenes at Poole quay in the fetid, pandemic-ridden summer of 2020, Scouts clashed with political activists as crowds of bewildered locals looked on.

The Scouts formed a human shield around Baden-Powell’s statue as protesters threatened to tear it down and throw it in the harbour, as was the fate of slave trader Edward Colston’s effigy in Bristol just days before.

Many onlookers wondered aloud about what the man who invented the Boy Scouts had done that was so bad? Was he really a racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, imperialist, as some were saying? Hadn’t he been about all about peace, happiness and woggles?

I wanted to give them answers but didn’t have all of them myself. I decided to delve further and write a feature on the light and shade of BadenPowell.

As a former Bournemouth Echo journalist, I knew Robert Stephenson Smyth BadenPowell through articles we’d written about him, mainly based on his connection to Brownsea Island, location of his 1907 experimental scouting camp and launchpad for what’s now the world’s biggest, nondenominational youth movement.

I was also aware of aspects of his darker, more controversial side that were driving the accusations. However, the more I researched, the more astonishing his life story became.

This was no feature, this was a book. My book, Robert Baden-Powell: A biography, which opens with the brouhaha on Poole Quay, scene of my inspiration, then travels back to 1857 and his ill-timed birth to a bereft mother grieving three dead siblings who’d preceded him. His father dies shortly after, leaving him vying for his mother’s love in a brood of ten children and dodging school lessons by scarpering into the woods to track, hunt and study nature and, subsequently, fail to get a place at Oxford, unlike his father and most of his brothers.

Later, his dreams of being an artist are dashed when he’s forced into the Army and sent to India. A pale, freckled redhead, he finds the heat and disease unbearable and once stationed in Lucknow has to convince even himself that he’s a competent officer, aged just 19.

Unremittingly obedient, though, he gets stuck in and proves to be a practical, naturally-instinctive soldier, who also happens to love acting in drag. Soon he is managing his men and entertaining the regiment as Madame Butterfly whenever they need cheering up, which, with typhoid rampaging, is most of the time.

I follow him to India, where he meets a man who’ll be his ‘best friend in the world’ for 30 years, and to Kandahar, South Africa, the Gold Coast (Ghana) and back to wartime Britain, considering the main events that motivated the Poole protesters on the way.

Back in England in the early 1900s, both weary and wary of wars, he’s dismayed at the unhealthy state of poorer children, especially boys, who may be called upon to defend Britain. He begins devising a system, based on his highlyrespected military scout-training programme for soldiers, which he believes might help boys become healthier, more selfsufficient and good soldiers who can protect the realm – or even better, become the sort of men who can put a stop to wars, rather than fight them.

A chance meeting with a wealthy stranger who owns a private island – Brownsea – where Baden-Powell illegally landed to camp with his brothers as a child, leads him back there to test his scouting scheme and, perhaps, write a book based on the results.

The rest, as they say, is history and Scouts membership around the world now stands at 54 million and counting. n Robert Baden-Powell: A biography, by Lorraine Gibson, with foreword by Bear Grylls OBE, is available for order from bookshops and www.pen-andsword.co.uk/Robert-BadenPowell-Hardback/p/21626

Everyone knows that Robert Baden-Powell was the chap who founded the Scout movement, right here in Dorset.

But did you know that years before even landing on Brownsea Island to set up his experimental camp, he was the 20th century’s most famous Englishman?

During the Second Boer War, the first conflict to be covered in-depth by the world’s media, his unorthodox methods of keeping a Boer army at bay while hopelessly outnumbered during the Siege of Mafeking in 1899/90, were slavishly reported, making him an unwitting global celebrity.

New Blackmore Vale reporter LORRAINE GIBSON writes about these and other fascinating aspects of the complicated man who lived two lives – both of them extraordinary – in her latest book.