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, near
Mount Kenya. His gravestone bears a circle with a dot
in the center, which is the trail sign for "Going Home",
or "I have gone home". When his wife Olave died, her ashes
were sent to Kenya and interred beside her husband. Kenya
has declared B.-P.'s grave a national monument.
The Baden-Powells
had three children — one son and two daughters (who gained
the courtesy titles of
Honourable in
1929; the son later succeeding his father in
1941):
Military
career
In
1876, Baden-Powell joined the 13th
Hussars in
India. In
1895, he held special service in
Africa and returned to India in
1897 to command the 5th
Dragoon Guards.
Baden-Powell
enhanced and honed his Scouting skills amidst the
Zulu tribesmen in the early
1880s in the
Natal province of
South Africa, where his regiment had been posted, and
where he was
mentioned in dispatches. During one of his dispatches,
he came across a large string of wooden beads, worn by the
Zulu king
Dinizulu, which was later incorporated into the
Wood Badge training program he started after he
founded the Scouting movement. His skills impressed his
superiors and he was soon transferred to the
British secret service.
Baden-Powell
was subsequently posted for three years as intelligence
officer for the
Mediterranean based in
Malta. He frequently traveled disguised as a
butterfly collector, incorporating plans of military
installations into his drawings of butterfly wings. He
then led a successful campaign in
Ashanti, Africa, and at the age of 40 was promoted to
lead the 5th Dragoon Guards in 1897.
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, to help train recruits. Using this
and other methods he was able to train them to think
independently, use their initiative, and survive in the
wilderness.
He returned
to South Africa prior to the
Second Boer War and was engaged in a number of actions
against the Zulus. By this time, he had been promoted as
the youngest
colonel in the
British army. He was responsible for the organization
of a force of frontiersmen to assist the regular army.
Whilst arranging this, he was trapped in the
Siege of Mafeking, and surrounded by a Boer army of in
excess of 8,000 men. Although wholly outnumbered, the
garrison withstood the siege for 217 days. Much of this is
attributable to some of the cunning military deceptions
instituted at Baden-Powell's behest as commander of the
garrison. Fake minefields were planted and his soldiers
were ordered to simulate avoiding non-existent
barbed wire while moving between trenches.
Baden-Powell did most of the reconnaissance work himself.
During the siege, a cadet corps
(consisting of white boys below fighting age) was used to
stand guard, carry messages, assist in hospitals and so
on, freeing up the men for military service. Although
Baden-Powell did not form this cadet corps himself, and
there is no evidence that he took much notice of them
during the Siege, 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.The siege was lifted in the Relief of
Mafeking on
May 16,
1900. Promoted to
Major-General, Baden-Powell became a national hero.
After organizing the
South African Constabulary (police), he returned to
England to take up a post as Inspector General of Cavalry
in 1903
Founder of
Scouting
On his
return, Baden-Powell found that his military training
manual, "Aids to Scouting", had become something of a
best-seller, and was being used by teachers and youth
organizations. Following a meeting with the founder of the
Boys' Brigade, Sir
William Alexander Smith, Baden-Powell decided to
re-write Aids to Scouting to suit a youth
readership, and in 1907 held a camp on
Brownsea Island for 22 boys of mixed social background
to test out some of his ideas. Scouting for Boys
was subsequently published in 1908 in six installments.
Boys and girls spontaneously formed Scout Troops and the
Scouting movement had inadvertently started, first a
national, and soon an international obsession. The
Scouting movement was to grow up in friendly parallel
relations with the Boys' Brigade. A rally for all
Scouts was held at
Crystal Palace in London in 1908, at which
Baden-Powell discovered the first
Girl Scouts. The
Girl Guides movement was subsequently founded in 1910
under the auspices of Baden-Powell's sister,
Agnes Baden-Powell.Although he could have doubtless
become
Field Marshal, Baden-Powell decided to retire from the
Army in 1910 with the rank of Lieutenant-General on the
advice of
King Edward VII, who suggested that he could better
serve his country by promoting Scouting.On the outbreak of
World War I in
1914, Baden-Powell put himself at the disposal of the
War Office. No command, however, was given him, for, as
Lord Kitchener said: "he could lay his hand on several
competent divisional generals but could find no one who
could carry on the invaluable work of the Boy Scouts." It
was widely rumored that Baden-Powell was engaged in
spying, and intelligence officers took great care to
foster and inculcate the myth.Baden-Powell and his wife
moved to
Pax Hill near
Bentley, Hampshire, a gift of her father in 1918. They
established their family home there for over twenty years.
In 1920, at
Olympia, the first World Scout
Jamboree took place, and Baden-Powell was acclaimed
Chief Scout of the World. Baden-Powell was made a
Baronet in 1922.In 1929, during the third World
Scout
Jamboree he received as a present a new car, which
happened to be a
Rolls Royce. This car was soon nicknamed
Jam-Roll. He also received an
Eccles
Caravan, which was nicknamed
Eccles Cake, so the Scouts attending the event were
treated with a Jam-Roll towing an Eccles Cake. This
combination served well the Baden-Powells in their further
travels around
Europe. During the same event, Baden-Powell was
created Baron Baden-Powell, of Gilwell in the County of
Essex, in 1929,
Gilwell Park being the International Scout Leader
training center. B.-P. also had a positive impact on
improvements in youth education. Under his dedicated
command the world
Scouting movement grew. By 1922 there were more than a
million Scouts in 32 countries; by 1939 the number of
Scouts was in excess of 3.3 million. Scouts and Guides
mark
February 22 as "Founder's Day" (Scouts) and "Thinking
Day" (Guides), the joint birthdays of Robert and Olave
Baden-Powell, to remember and celebrate the work of the
Chief Scout and Chief Guide of the World.
On his
sexual orientation
Main
article:
Robert Baden-Powell's sexual orientation
A number of
modern authors, upon examining Baden-Powell's life and
papers from the perspective of late-twentieth century
understanding of sexuality, have explained his life-long
interest in boys as the result of a strong attraction to
masculine beauty, principally in the form of young males.
Among these historians are Tim Jeal, the author of
Baden-Powell: Founder of the Boy Scouts a
biography which takes a compassionate view of a man he
considers to have lived a life of repressed
homosexuality, and Michael Rosenthal of
Columbia University, in his The character factory:
Baden-Powell and the origins of the Boy Scout
movement.Other historians have commented less favorably on
his presumed attractions, such as Kenneth Morgan of
Oxford who in his The Boer War and the Media refers to
Baden-Powell's "probable
pederasty" as a character defect covered up by the
media of his time.[4]
Nonetheless, despite his alleged attraction to youths,
Baden-Powell is thought to always have remained chaste
with his Scouts, and he did not tolerate Scoutmasters
indulging in sexual escapades with their charges
Awards
He was
appointed to the
Order of Merit of the
British honours system in 1937, and was also awarded
28 decorations from foreign states.The Bronze Wolf,
the only distinction of the
World Organization of the Scout Movement, awarded by
the
World Scout Committee for exceptional services to
world Scouting, was first awarded to Lord Baden-Powell by
a unanimous decision of the then-International
Committee on the day of the institution of the Bronze
Wolf in
Stockholm in 1935. He was also the first recipient of
the
Silver Buffalo Award in 1926, the highest award
conferred by the
Boy Scouts of America .Lord Baden-Powell was nominated
for the
Nobel Peace Prize for the year 1939, but the Norwegian
Nobel Committee decided not to award any prize for that
year, due to the beginning of
World War II .
Messages
Last Message
to Scouts
References
Baden-Powell,
Robert (1907). Scouting for Boys,
Oxford World's Classics.
(republished many times)
Hillcourt,
William (with Olave, Lady Baden-Powell) (1964).
Baden-Powell, Two Lives Of A Hero,
Putnam .
Saunders,
Hilary Saint George (1948). The
Left Handshake,
(unknown publisher).
