The founder of the Scouts once hid military plans inside drawings of butterflies
Before he started the Boy Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell was an army intelligence officer who claimed he posed as a butterfly collector, sketching enemy fortifications into the patterns on the wings. His military manuals on scouting ended up being read by schoolboys, and that accident launched a worldwide youth movement.
He was born Robert Stephenson Smyth Powell in Paddington, London, on 22 February 1857, named after his godfather, the railway engineer Robert Stephenson; his family called him Stephe. His father, an Oxford geometry professor and clergyman, died when the boy was three. His mother then attached the name Baden to the surname to keep her late husband's fame attached to the children, a change made legal by Royal Licence in 1902. Baden-Powell later credited her with the whole secret of his success.
At Charterhouse he acted, painted with either hand and played piano and violin, but his real education in woodcraft came from sneaking into forbidden woods to stalk and cook game unseen by teachers. He joined the 13th Hussars in India in 1876, mapped the Battle of Maiwand in 1880, and sharpened his scouting in Natal in the early 1880s. In 1884 he published Reconnaissance and Scouting, and in Malta he served his uncle, the governor, while gathering intelligence across the Mediterranean.
Fame arrived in 1899, when he held the South African town of Mafeking under siege during the Second Boer War. Teachers and youth groups were already borrowing his military manuals. In August 1907 he tested his ideas at an experimental camp on Brownsea Island, and Scouting for Boys appeared the following year. He left the army in 1910 to run the Scout movement full time.
Girls forced the next step. At a 1909 rally at the Crystal Palace, a small group in Scout uniform told him, with reporters watching, that they were Girl Scouts. In 1910 he and his sister Agnes founded the Girl Guides Association. He married Olave St Clair Soames in 1912, retired from leading both movements in 1937, and spent his last years in Nyeri, Kenya, where he died on 8 January 1941. His grave there is a national monument.
Source: Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell
