Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [108]
Knowing that the women’s hearts with grief were torn
As they looked on their children’s faces that looked sad and forlorn.
For 217 days the Boers tried to obtain Mafeking’s surrender,
But their strategy was futile owing to its noble defender,
Colonel Baden-Powell, that hero of renown,
Who, by his masterly generalship, saved the town.
It was with this background that B-P’s most famous book, Scouting for Boys, appeared in 1908, if not quite as a celebrity memoir, then certainly with a celebrity author. His customary tone – part martinet and part breezy chorus-leader – pervades the whole text of a book now estimated to have sold over 150 million copies. The opening lines of the book make plain B-P’s purpose. ‘I suppose every boy wants to help his country in some way or other.’ He gave examples of the way in which his corps of teenage boys in Mafeking had cheerfully cycled through shot and shell delivering messages. The popularity of the book tells you something about the tone of British society at the time. But the really clever thing about it was that instead of merely telling young people what they ought to do to help the empire, Baden-Powell made Scouting a personal, homely adventure. For sure, there were plenty of instructions about attitudes – ‘ “Country first, self second” should be your motto,’ for example. Yet what child could resist the advice that every boy ought to know how to shoot, to fish or ‘to be very clever at passing news secretly from one place to another, or signalling to each other’? There was plenty more: ‘It is very necessary for a Scout to be able to swim, for he never knows when he may have to cross a river, to swim for his life, or to plunge in to save someone from drowning.’ B-P even managed to make keeping your room tidy sound exciting: ‘because he may yet be suddenly called upon to go off on an alarm, or something unexpected: and if he does not know exactly where to lay his hand on his things he will be a long time in turning out, especially if called up in the middle of the night’.
The nightmare lurking at the back of Baden-Powell’s mind was of a nation which no longer had the resources to defend either itself or its empire. Scouting was intended to do for poorer boys what the public schools aimed to achieve for the sons of the middle and upper classes. The urban slums in which army recruits grew up were having a catastrophic effect on their health: it was said that over half of the young men examined during the Boer War had failed relatively undemanding medical tests. In the aftermath of war, the government formed an Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration. B-P identified the problem at once. There were too many ‘loafers’ and ‘slackers’, hanging around on street corners with their hands in their pockets, smoking, drinking and watching sport instead of playing it. So Scouting for Boys had plenty of advice about well-being. ‘Scouts breathe through the nose, not through the mouth,’ runs one memorable admonition; ‘in this way they don’t get thirsty, they don’t get out of breath so quickly; they don’t suck into their insides all sorts of microbes or seeds of disease that are in the air; and they don’t snore at night, and so give themselves away to an enemy.’ In B-P’s original manuscript there had been more intimate advice, on the subject of sex, a matter which troubled him deeply: masturbation was a definite symptom of slackness, causing weakness, headaches, shyness, palpitations of the heart ‘and if he carries it on too far he very often goes out of his mind and becomes an idiot. A very large number of the lunatics in our asylums have made themselves mad by indulging in this vice although at one time they were sensible cheery boys like any one of you.’ A Scout, by contrast, was ‘clean in thought, word and deed’.
B-P had considered naming the youth organization which grew from these admonitions ‘Young Knights of the Empire’ (in one especially odd sentence, he even claimed the twelfth-century Crusader king Richard I – ‘the Lion Heart’ – as ‘one of the