stouravonmagazine.co.uk
44 New Stour & Avon, July 29, 2022
Arts & Entertainments
Scouting legend was a real high-flier In bizarre scenes at Poole Quay in the summer of 2020, Scouts clashed with activists while crowds watched in bewilderment as they formed a human shield around BadenPowell’s statue to prevent protesters from tearing it down and chucking it in the harbour. Some onlookers wondered aloud about what the inventor of the Boy Scouts had done to make the protesters so angry. Was he really that bad? I wanted to give them answers, but didn’t have them all. I decided to delve further and write a feature shedding light on the shade of B-P. As a former Bournemouth Echo journalist, I knew him through articles we’d written, often linked to the 1907 Brownsea test camp, launchpad for what’s now the world’s biggest, nondenominational youth movement. I’d read about his controversial side but the more I researched, the more astonishing his story became. The feature became my book, Robert Baden-Powell: A Biography, which opens with the Poole Quay debacle, then
Everyone knows that Robert Baden-Powell founded the Scout movement, right here in Dorset. But did you know that his fiancée lived in Lilliput and that they married at St. Peter’s Church, Parkstone? Or that, years before setting-up his Brownsea Island experimental scouting camp, he was the 20th century’s most famous Englishman? In the Second Boer War, the first conflict covered in-depth by the world’s media, his widely-reported unorthodox methods of fending off a Boer army at the Siege of Mafeking made him a global celebrity. New Stour & Avon reporter, Lorraine Gibson, writes about these and other aspects of the man who lived two lives, both extraordinary, in her latest book.
travels back to 1857 and his illtimed birth to a bereft mother grieving her three recentlydeceased infants. His father dies shortly after, leaving him vying for attention in a brood of 10 children and at school he dodges lessons by hiding in the woods to hunt and study nature. Later, his dream of being an artist is dashed when he’s forced into the Army and sent to Lucknow, India, and has to convince even himself
that he’s a competent officer at just 19. Eventually he proves to be a practical, naturally-instinctive soldier - and great drag artist, entertaining the regiment as Madame Butterfly to cheer them up. I follow him to India where he meets the man he called his ‘best friend in the world’ for 30 years, to Kandahar, South Africa, the Gold Coast (Ghana) and back to Britain, all the while considering the events that motivated the Poole protesters. Home in London in the early 1900s and weary of wars, he’s dismayed at the unhealthy state of poorer boys who may need
to defend Britain. He devises a system, based on his Army scout-training system, to help them become healthier, more self-sufficient and the sort of men who will stop wars, not fight them. A chance meeting leads him to Brownsea where he’d camped with his brothers as a boy, to trial his scouting scheme. The rest is history and Scout membership now stands at 54 million. Robert Baden-Powell: A biography by Lorraine Gibson with foreword by Bear Grylls OBE. Available August 30, or pre-order now from all good bookshops and pen-and-sword. co.uk/Robert-Baden-PowellHardback/p/21626
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