Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell

British military leader

• Born: February 22, 1857
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: January 8, 1941
• Place of death: Nyeri, Kenya

A celebrated military hero of the South African (Boer) War, Baden-Powell gained universal and lasting fame as the founder of the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides. He was revered as the “chief scout” of the movement, shaped its ideals, and provided its essential literature.

Early Life

Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell was the sixth son of an ordained professor of geometry at Oxford University. His mother, his father’s third wife, was the daughter of an admiral. Because Baden-Powell’s father died when he was three, his mother, whom he always admired greatly, had to raise a family of ten children with extremely limited financial resources. She encouraged the study of natural history and took her children on holidays that featured camping and boating. Nevertheless, Baden-Powell was sent to a famous private school, Charterhouse, where he was very happy.

Baden-Powell participated intensely in school activities, and while he did not make a mark as a scholar or as an athlete, he excelled in theatrical performances and cartooning. He also spent much time learning woodcraft. Later he would borrow much from the principles and practices of his exclusive education for the mass movement that scouting became. Denied admission to Oxford because of his scholarly weaknesses, Baden-Powell took the open examination for direct commission in the army and scored so high that he did not have to attend Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point.

Baden-Powell was commissioned as an officer in the Thirteenth Hussars, a cavalry regiment that was stationed in India at the time. He proved to be particularly skillful on reconnaissance missions, which enabled him to develop various scouting techniques. In the military sense, scouting meant sneaking up to spy in order to find out where the enemy was, where they stationed their forces, what their regular routines were, how many men they had, and what kind of equipment they used. The first of his many books were on scouting and boar hunting. He was also a noted polo player.

Baden-Powell’s skills were augmented as he fulfilled various military assignments in the empire. He scouted the lesser-known passes of the Drakensberg Mountains of Natal in South Africa disguised as a reporter. He took part in the Southern African campaigns in Zululand and Matabeleland, later to become part of Zimbabwe. He also took part in the West African campaign against the Ashanti in the area that later became Ghana. Adroit scouting of enemy positions, particularly at night, became one of his special talents. While stationed once again in India, he sought to institute training in scouting as a regular feature of soldiers’ preparation.

Life’s Work

Baden-Powell was slender and of medium height for his day. He was sandy haired, mustached, and freckled and liked to wear American Western-style hats. He was a warm, friendly, and modest person who nonetheless had a gift for advertising his activities. Before the South African War , commonly known as the Boer War, Baden-Powell was a colonel with a good reputation but no particular fame. He emerged from that war as the youngest major general in the British army and famous throughout the world as a legendary hero. The queen of England honored him, and the public revered him.

Baden-Powell was sent to South Africa as war threatened to break out between the British and the descendants of Dutch settlers, the Afrikaners, who were strongest in the Afrikaner republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. His mission was to organize two regiments of local forces to defend the British colonies of Bechuanaland (which became Botswana) and Matabeleland. He became the commander in charge during the siege of the small but strategic Southern African town of Mafeking for 217 days in 1899 and 1900.

Throughout the early stages of the war, while the British suffered a string of defeats, Mafeking held out and would not surrender despite the constant bombardment, the horde of enemies surrounding it, and dwindling supplies. Baden-Powell distinguished himself by holding up the morale of his troops and the inhabitants. He did so by keeping everybody busy and providing entertainment designed to promote cheerfulness. The defenders enjoyed theatrical productions and cricket games in between bouts of fending off attacks by the numerically superior enemy, often by cleverly outsmarting them. Throughout the siege, Baden-Powell was brave, resourceful, and optimistic and expressed himself in the style of confident understatement so loved by the British public. Because mail could get out, the siege was followed very closely in Great Britain, and its importance was exaggerated in the press. Therefore, there were massive celebrations when the siege was lifted, and Baden-Powell found that he had been made into a hero.

One particular aspect of the siege of Mafeking led to the creation of the scouting movement and thereby determined Baden-Powell’s whole future. Baden-Powell organized the young cadets in the town to carry on routine work and thereby free older men for defense. They were so useful that they inspired Baden-Powell to try to organize youth for peaceful pursuits after the war. Another significant accomplishment at this time was the publication of Aids to Scouting for N.C.O.s and Men (1899). Noncommissioned officers (NCOs) were subordinate officers, while the “men” in the title were ordinary enlisted soldiers. Baden-Powell was surprised to learn that the book was widely used by teachers and read by boys in Britain.

Baden-Powell’s military career continued after Mafeking. He was selected to raise and train a police force, called a constabulary, for South Africa. After that he became inspector general of the cavalry. He established a cavalry school and a journal to aid training. He also commanded a division of the Territorial Army, which was similar to a division of the National Guard in the United States. Lieutenant General Baden-Powell retired from the army in 1910 at the age of fifty-three so that he could devote himself full time to the scouting movement.

Baden-Powell was impressed by the religiously oriented Boy’s Brigade movement and sought to create a program that would involve masses of boys from all backgrounds and creeds. To this end he rewrote his popular Aids to Scouting for N.C.O.s and Men to create the enormously popular Scouting for Boys (1908), a book that changed through many editions published over decades. The book led to the sprouting of Boy Scout troops all over Britain and then in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and, finally, throughout the world. Rallies, called jamborees, brought together scouts from all over the world. Girls demanded a similar organization; with the help of his sister, Agnes, Baden-Powell established the Girl Guides (called the Girl Scouts in the United States). Several other variations of the movement appeared to satisfy different age groups and interest areas.

As with any large organization, there were dissensions about strong leadership at the center, public recriminations, and forced resignations over various issues. Baden-Powell’s reputation survived all of the confrontations. One contentious issue for modern scholars about Baden-Powell’s leadership of the Boy Scouts centers on the question of militarism. Because he was a military man, critics perceived militaristic indoctrination as one of the goals of the movement and thought its aim was to strengthen the pool of able-bodied and obedient young men available for British forces. On the other hand, other writers cite the helpfulness, kindness, and generosity advocated in Scouting for Boys as well as the clear emphasis on peacetime pursuits. Baden-Powell himself brushed aside the matter by saying that the movement was aimed at developing qualities that served the nation best in peace or war.

Baden-Powell married at the age of fifty-five and had one son and two daughters. His wife, Olave, came to preside over the Girl Guide movement in place of Agnes. Baden-Powell always enjoyed sketching and was able to illustrate many of the books he wrote. He was a prolific and accomplished writer who produced thirty-five books from 1883 to 1940. Some were histories of his campaigns, some were accounts of his travel adventures, and the most widely circulated were about scouting. Scouting for Boys was his most famous work.

Baden-Powell was named chief scout of the whole world at one international jamboree. This was perhaps one of the greatest of the many honors of his life. Baden-Powell received nearly forty significant medals, the freedom of eleven cities in the United Kingdom, and six honorary doctorates. Nevertheless, he was a man who shied away from the hero worship he inspired and enjoyed the solitude that the hobby of fishing provided.

Significance

Since it began, the scouting movement has attracted approximately 500 million members and become the most successful and most enduring scheme for training youth ever known. It has had an enormously positive influence on youth through the organized practice of its ideals of loyalty, duty, honesty, kindness, helpfulness, self-reliance, and love of adventure and the outdoors. It was intended to be an inclusive movement, indifferent to class, creed, or ethnic background. It sought to incorporate boys who suffered from bad environments and excite them with adventures in the outdoors and romantic, noble ideals from knights and American Indians. Baden-Powell was the person who started this movement, sustained it, and provided its attractive ideology. From the creation of the scouts in 1908 until his death in East Africa in 1941, it absorbed all of his energies. The movement is his enduring legacy. He was also one of the most prolific and popular writers of the twentieth century. He wrote more than fifty books and pamphlets, gave countless addresses, and wrote countless articles.

Baden-Powell was a kind and cheerful person who shunned the hero worship he inspired. Nevertheless, he was a military man and an imperialist who fought in several colonial wars and made a name for himself by his very heroic and very colorful defense of Mafeking. In the first half of the twentieth century, he was usually revered as a selfless, secular saint. Some recent writers have been quite critical, pointing out how he naturally reflected some of the less pleasant ideas and assumptions of his background and time, such as militarism, racism, nationalism, and self-advertising. However, even the sharpest critics cannot deny the complexity of his character, his charisma, and his enduring influence throughout the world.

Bibliography

Baden-Powell of Gilwell, Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, Baron. Scouting for Boys. London: Pearson, 1967. First published in 1908 by the same publisher, this book has gone through many editions and gives good insight into the ideology of the scouting movement and how it evolved over the years. One author claimed that this book made Baden-Powell the most read of all British authors, with the single exception of William Shakespeare.

Brendon, Piers. Eminent Edwardians. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. An essay on Baden-Powell concludes this book, which examines several of the revered figures of the age with a critical eye. Brendon raises questions about Baden-Powell’s treatment of African peoples at Mafeking and unsubstantiated questions about his sexual orientation.

Churchill, Winston S. Great Contemporaries. New York: Macmillan, 1942. First published in 1937, this is a collection of Churchill’s sharp and witty character sketches that appeared in various magazines and newspapers. Churchill included a sketch of Baden-Powell in this collection. Always an admirer of men of action who upheld the British Empire, Churchill uses his considerable literary skills to present a kind and heroic depiction of Baden-Powell.

Hopkins, Pat, and Heather Dugmore. The Boy: Baden-Powell and the Siege of Mafeking. Rivonia, South Africa: Zebra Press, 1999. Revisionist history, maintaining Baden-Powell was a genocidal tyrant, responsible for untold suffering, during his command of the siege.

Jeal, Tim. The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell. New York: William Morrow, 1990. This modern biography is well written and sympathetic toward Baden-Powell. With a total of 670 pages, it chronicles every known episode of the subject’s life in considerable detail. Provides both sides of controversies.

MacDonald, Robert H. Sons of the Empire: The First Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890-1918. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Explores how the popular mythology of Edwardian Britain influenced Baden-Powell’s conception of the scouting movement. Places particular emphasis on the myth of the frontiersman/adventurer, a model of masculinity and preparedness.

Reynolds, Ernest Edwin. Baden-Powell: A Biography of Lord Baden-Powell of Gilwell, O.M., G.C.M.G., G.C.V.O., K.C.B. New York: Oxford University Press, 1943. This early biography was written shortly after Baden-Powell’s death and tends toward hero worship and an uncritical view of Baden-Powell’s shortcomings. Nevertheless, it gives a good idea of the tremendously high esteem in which Baden-Powell was held by nearly all contemporaries.

Rosenthal, Michael. The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. This is a work of sharp revisionism that seeks to knock the hero from his pedestal. The very worst things Baden-Powell said and did are highlighted, particularly his hypocrisy on racial matters. The book is more about the origins of the scouting movement than a biography, and it puts emphasis on the usefulness of the scouting movement for British military ends.