100 years to shout about (From Surrey Comet)

100 years to shout about

2:55pm Tuesday 27th February 2007

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Empire Day on May 24 was always a proud occasion in bygone Kingston. But never more so than in 1909, when crowds packed the roadsides in unprecedented numbers. For it marked the first major public display by the newly registered Kingston and District Baden Powell Boy Scouts Association.

This included some of Britain's very first scout troops, and people were keen to see more of a movement that was swiftly motivating lads all over the UK.

A good scout trains himself pretty well to do without liquid. It is very much a matter of habit. If you keep your mouth shut when walking or running, or chew on a pebble (which also makes you keep your mouth shut) you do not get thirsty like you do when you go along with your mouth open sucking in the air and dry dust....if you keep drinking in the line of march, or while playing games, it helps to tire you and spoil your wind.”

Baden Powell

Earlier in the day the 1st and 2nd Kingston troops had given a demonstration of camp life in Richmond Road Schools.

Later they were among the 200 scouts who paraded on the Fairfield before marching to the town hall (now the Market House) to salute the flag, sing the National Anthem and receive a red dahlia each from Henry Shepherd, the town's best known Market Place trader.

The Comet described the lads' accoutrements: "They were in their simple but picturesque and serviceable uniform consisting of a slouch hat, jersey, with haversack slung over the shoulders on the centre of the back, and jackets rolled up and fastened to the buckle of the belt.

"Each boy also carried a water bottle and hatchet, slung at his side, and each had in his hand a stave about six feet long."

Led by a bugle band, they then marched round the main streets of Kingston and Surbiton, commanded by Warrant Scoutmaster W G White, and watched by hundreds of spectators all the way.

Baden Powell Boy Scouts, as they were known in their first decades, had been founded in Kingston more than a year earlier.

In fact, the Royal borough may have been THE first, and was certainly ONE of the first places in the world to found a troop, following the publication of Major-General Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys in January 1908.

Who did what and when is, alas, something we shall never know for sure.

The earliest troops, formed initially in ad hoc fashion, were only registered by the district committees that followed a year or so later, and there was no central national register until 1919.

Thus masses of local documentation, informally filed by whoever was the honorary district secretary at the time, have been lost.

So it has taken weeks of trawling through newspapers, parish magazines and odd scraps of archive material to learn something of the first years of scouting in the Kingston area.

The seeds were planted in August 1907 when Baden-Powell (known as B-P) organised an experimental training camp for boys on Brownsea Island, Dorset.

He was already one of the great military heroes of all time, following his outstanding leadership during the Boer War in South Africa, and had noted how well young lads rose to a challenge when they were given responsible jobs during the gruelling 217 day siege of Mafeking.

Could the qualities he had instilled so successfully in war - initiative, self-reliance, endurance, consideration for others - be equally well instilled in boys in peacetime Britain?

That first camp proved they could. Indeed, the campers found B-P-s philosophy and training so inspirational that in January 1908 he published the first edition of his Scouting for Boys. It was issued in fortnightly parts at 4d each, and was so successful that three months later he launched a penny weekly, The Scout.

The response to both was astonishing. Boys of all types and backgrounds began organising themselves into ad hoc patrols, and trying to live up to B-P's ideals. But when was the first group formed? That's impossible to say, though many have claimed this distinction.

According to the National Scout Information Centre, Sunderland is a strong contender because it was the first to be inspected by B-P - a fact recorded in the great man's diary for February 22, 1908.

But 1st Kingston Hill has an equal claim. It was in existence at that time and so, give or take a few weeks, was 1st Kingston and 1st Surrey.

This we know because of a little-known memoir by Walter White, the first scoutmaster of 1st Kingston Hill, and a master at St Paul's School.

White, who became a captain while serving in World War 1, recorded the moment that was to change his life. "The year was 1908...when for the first time in my life I saw a scout and found out what scouting meant," he wrote. "It happened during a walk I was taking in Richmond Park early one Saturday afternoon.

"Just after entering Kingston Gate, I saw four or five boys dressed up in what I thought was a funny rig-out. Three had scout hats, one or two had shoulder knobs and all had broomsticks.

"Well-filled haversacks - made and stocked by mother - promised an expedition of some sort or other into the land of make believe.This was their complete uniform. They had no scout shirt, belts, shorts of scarves.

"However, what they lacked in uniform they made up for in keeness and enthusiam....To my surprise, as I walked past them, I was greeted with a smart salute, and then I observed that all the boys were attending the school at which I was a master. We became friends at once, and they all began to explain why they were in "uniform" and what they were doing."

The lads explained they were trying to follow B-P's Scouting for Boys, adding "We are supposed to have a scoutmaster. Will you be ours?"

White agreed, and for the next 40 years was one of the many dedicated men across the UK who helped scouting to become the world's largest voluntary youth organisation.

His account, never published before and not in the national records, is valuable in illustrating how most troops began: a few boys taking the initiative, starting a patrol then finding a scoutmaster.

White recalls that his fledgling group had no money, no headquarters, nothing except Scouting for Boys and half a dozen eager lads under 12. Meetings were held in Richmond Park or on Ham Common where all important decisions were made, including one to allow only boys from St Paul's School to join.

He continues: "In our wanderings we had seen other scouts about and found they belonged to the 1st Kingston group under a Mr Gerald O'Rourke and to the 1st Surrey troop, under a Mr Gay. The thing to do in those days was to be "first" something or other, we called ourselves "1st Kingston Hill."

By 1909 six local troops had been formed and it was decided to set up the Kingston District Association of Baden Boy Scouts, with Capt White as its first honorary secretary.

By January 1911 the association comprised 404 scouts in 13 troops - the Kingston ones plus Surbiton, Hook, Tolworth, Surbiton Park, Malden, New Malden, Esher, Claygate, Thames Ditton, Oxshott and Walton.

The first unregistered local groups were paid little heed in the press. But from 1909 that changed. The earliest Comet reference I've found concerns 2nd Kingston, 1st Thames Valley, and 1st Earlsfield uniting for shooting practice on Wimbledon Common.

We learn that "after tea it was decided to spend an hour in the attack on the camp of the Earlsfield scouts. A quarter of an hour was given to post their sentries and the 2nd Kingston and 1st Thames Valley divided into two sections. After an hour's good work in attack and defence, which was made very exciting by 1st Kensington Troop joining in, hostilities ceased, and the remainder of the evening was spent very pleasantly round the camp fire."

The 2nd Kingston evolved into today's Leander Sea Scouts, changing its name after it was given a new boat, Leander, in 1913. The vessel was presented in memory of the late Captain Francis Grove, and dedicated by scout commissioner the Rev R S Marsden at a service on Tatham's Eyot, off Canbury Gardens.

The 2nd Kingston's HQ had been at the Wesleyan Sunday School in Eden Street, but was later transferred to Burgoyne's boathouse on the Kingston riverside.

It is interesting to see that when scout troops were being born the Comet, like most other newspapers in the land, was ardently campaigning for recruits to the recently-formed Territorial Army, or exhorting readers to take up shooting. For, as the Comet pointed out, the war in South Africa had taught the British they weren't the skilled marksmen they had fondly imagined themselves to be It was, said the Comet, "a bitter pill to swallow" that had led to the proliferation of rifle clubs everywhere, including four in Kingston and Surbiton.

This, and other humiliating British deficiencies thrown up by the Boer War, had a powerful influence on B-P's thinking and his choice of the scouting motto, "Be Prepared".

For he believed the qualities and skills that brought honour in war applied equally to life in general.

Thus 1st Kingston Hill, by then based in St Paul's School, and 1st Surbiton, at St Mark's Church Hall, had established rifle clubs by 1910. And probably other local troops had as well.

The same military thinking was demonstrated in March 1909 when 40 scouts from 1st Kingston gave a display at Kingston Baths. It was organised by their scoutmaster, Gerald O'Rourke, and the empty bath was made to look like an English common where the boys acted out camping for the night before taking a train to South Africa.

"In South Africa," reported the Comet, "they were engaged as despatches running in a war with the Zulus. Subsequent events were of an exciting nature, including as they did the capture of the Zulu chief and his release by a "traitor" who was "shot" when his escape was discovered. At the end of the evening Captain C P Porch of the East Surrey Regiment addressed the boys and told them membership of the Scouts was calculated to make them healthier, stronger and manlier".

Kingston's first scout funeral took place in June 1909, following the death of 14-year-old Kenneth Bowskill of Queen's Road. Kenneth, a brilliant boy who had won a scholarship to Kingston Grammar School, and was a member of the 2nd Kingston troop, died uexpectedly of "acute rheumatism and pericarditis" and his funeral attracted much public interest as, to quote the Comet, "the first funeral in Kingston which has been attended by the Boy Scouts in uniform".

Scouts from the 2nd and 4th Kingston, and 1st Kingston Hill, all wearing black bands round their hats and black ribbons on their staves, met the cortege at the gates of Kingston Cemetery, then marched behind the mourners with reversed staves. And during the committal service they formed a cordon around the grave.

Early scouts revelled in camping. There was a typical example in 1911, when 130 boys from Kingston and District spent eight days under canvas. They set up 23 tents in a meadow by the River Wey, and took part in swimming, punting, fishing and shooting on a nearby rifle range. And, led by the 1st Kingston Hill band, they marched to church on Sunday.

This was their daily programme: 6am, reveille and swimming; 6.30am, coffee and biscuits; 7am, prayers and saluting the flag; 8am, breakfast; 9.15am, inspection; 9.30 to 12.30pm, shooting, expeditions, scoutwork; 1pm, dinner; 1.30 to 2.30pm, compulsory rest; 2.30pm, post; 2.30 to 4.30pm, scoutwork or shooting; 5pm, tea; 8pm, camp fire; 9.30pm, coffee and biscuits; 9.45pm, lights out.

The camp fire was a special feature, and each night crowds of townspeople gathered round the burning logs to listen to recitations by Rome Attwell, scoutmaster of The Dittons.

What were the precepts in B-P's original Scouting for Boys that so inspired the youths of Edwardian Britain?

B-P said the object was "to seize a boy's character in its red-hot stage of enthusiasm and to meld it into the right shape and to encourage and develop its individuality so that the boy may become a good man and a valuable citizen for our country in the immediate future, instead of being a waste of God's materials".

These were some of his scouting rules: "be chivalrous to the fair sex. Don't lark about with a girl you would not like your mother or sister to see you with. Don't make love to any girl unless you mean to marry her. Don't marry a girl unless you are in a position to support her and support some children". (note: "Making love" in those days merely meant courtship, not full sexual congress!) He suggested useful good turns for scouts to perform: "sprinkle sand on a frozen road where horses are liable to slip. Remove orange or banana skins from the pavement as they are apt to throw people down; Don't leave gates open and don't injure fences or walk over crops in the country. Help old people in drawing water or carrying fuel, etc, to their homes."

B-P loathed gratuities: "They are a very bad thing. Wherever you go people want to be tipped for doing the slightest thing which they ought to do out of common good feeling. A scout will never accept a tip unless it is to pay for work done. It is often difficult to refuse, but for a scout it is easy. He only has to say thank you, but I am a scout, and our rules don't allow us to accept anything for doing a good turn.'"

He added that "scouts do not smoke or drink anything stronger than ginger beer. A good scout trains himself pretty well to do without liquid. It is very much a matter of habit. If you keep your mouth shut when walking or running, or chew on a pebble (which also makes you keep your mouth shut) you do not get thirsty like you do when you go along with your mouth open sucking in the air and dry dust....if you keep drinking in the line of march, or while playing games, it helps to tire you and spoil your wind."

B-P had learnt these things at first-hand during his service as an outstanding army scout in India and Africa. And it was this service that also influenced the original boy scouts uniform, such as a wide-brimmed hat to protect against rain and sun and a stave marked in feet and inches. This was modelled on the poles carried by army engineers and had a two-fold purpose.

One was as a measuring tool. The other was that two staves put through the sleeves of a jacket could serve as a stretcher.

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