Scouting began as a week-long experiment with 21 boys on an English island
In August 1907 a retired general took 21 boys of mixed social backgrounds to Brownsea Island in Dorset to test some ideas. Within two years 11,000 uniformed Scouts packed a rally in London. By 2019 more than 55 million Scouts and Guides were active in at least 155 countries.
Robert Baden-Powell was already famous as a hero of the Second Boer War, and his manual on military reconnaissance, Aids to Scouting, was being used by teachers and youth leaders to train children. Encouraged by William Smith of the Boys' Brigade and by his publisher, and worried by how poorly prepared army recruits were, he set out to write for boys. A key influence was the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, who sent him a book on his Woodcraft Indians in 1906 and met him that October. Earlier, scouting patrols in Southern Rhodesia with the American Frederick Russell Burnham had sharpened his woodcraft and seeded much of the later programme.
At Brownsea, following Seton's model, boys split into small patrols with elected leaders. The camp was followed by a promotional tour, and in 1908 Scouting for Boys appeared in six fortnightly instalments. It stripped out most military content, recasting survival skills around backwoodsmen and explorers, and aimed at character, citizenship and fitness. Scouts pledged to do their best to help others whatever it cost them, and the law told them to be trustworthy, thrifty and kind to animals.
Growth was explosive. Baden-Powell formed the Boy Scouts Association in 1910, whose first census claimed 100,000 members. Troops sprang up across the empire by 1908, and Chile may have been the first country outside the British dominions with a national body. Girls joined from the start, but Edwardian propriety frowned on mixed rough play, so Baden-Powell and his sister Agnes set up the Girl Guides in 1910. By the 1990s, though, two thirds of member organisations in the world scout body had gone co-educational.
The movement is plural, not a single organisation. Uniforms were meant to hide differences of class, and insignia include the fleur-de-lis, or a trefoil for many Guide groups. Wolf Cubs arrived in 1916 and Rovers in 1918, and Gilwell Park near London began training adult leaders in 1919 with the Wood Badge.
Source: Scouting
