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I Ser BADEN ROBERT BADEN-POWELL
Lieutenant-General Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell (pronounced "bayd' uhn poh' uhl"), 1st Baron Baden-Powell, OM, GCMG, GCVO, KCB (February 22, 1857 – January 8, 1941), also known as B-P, was a soldier, writer, and founder of the world Scouting Movement.
Early life
Baden-Powell was born in Paddington in London in 1857. He was the sixth of eight sons among ten children of a Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford University. To his family and friends he was known as Stephe (rhymes with Livy). His father, Reverend Harry Baden-Powell, died when he was three. Subsequently, he was raised by his mother, Henrietta Grace, a strong woman who was determined that her children would succeed. Baden-Powell would say of her in 1933, "The whole secret of my getting on lay with my mother". After attending Rose Hill School, Tunbridge Wells, Baden-Powell was awarded a scholarship to Charterhouse, a prestigious public school. His first introduction to Scouting skills was through stalking and cooking game while avoiding teachers in the nearby woods, which were strictly out-of-bounds. He also played the piano and violin, was an ambidextrous artist of some talent, and enjoyed acting. Holidays were usually spent on yachting or canoeing expeditions with his brothers In a short verse he wrote, he mischievously described how to pronounce his surname:
Man, Nation, Maiden
Please call it Baden.
Further, for Powell
Rhyme it with Noėl.
Family life Olave St Clair Soames in a picture likely taken by her husband around the time of their marriage In January 1912, Baden-Powell met his future wife, Olave Soames, on an ocean liner (Arcadia) on the way to New York to start one of his Scouting World Tours. She was a young woman of 23, while he was 55, and they shared the same birthday. They became engaged in September of the same year, causing a media sensation. However, it was perhaps due to Baden-Powell's fame, as such an age difference was not uncommon at the time. To avoid press intrusion, they married in secret on October 30, 1912. The Scouts of England each donated a penny to buy Baden-Powell a wedding gift, a car (note that this is not the Rolls Royce they were presented with in 1929). Before he got married to Olave, Baden-Powell was briefly engaged to Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of American Girl Scouting and showed interest in other women.[1] Baden-Powell and Olave lived in Pax Hill from about 1919 until 1939. Soon after he had married, Baden-Powell had begun to have problems with his health, suffering several bouts of illness. He complained of persistent headaches, which were considered by his doctor to be of psychosomatic origin and treated with dream analysis. The headaches subsided upon his ceasing to sleep with Olave and moving into a makeshift bedroom set up on his balcony. In 1934, his prostate was removed. In 1939, he moved to a house he had commissioned in Kenya, a country he had previously visited to recuperate. He died on January 8, 1941 and is buried in Nyeri, Kenya,