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The Man Who Started It All
Robert Baden Powell, the man who started the Scouting Movement, spent over 30 years as an officer in the British army. It was while he was soldiering that he began to develop a number of ideas about how soldiers-especially military scouts-should be trained.
B.P. was a soldier before there was aircraft to spot enemy locations and movements. In his time, if an army wanted to know what the enemy was doing, it had to send out military scouts to do a reconnaissance. B.-P. though that such scouts would be more effective if they were self-reliant. To encourage his military scouts to develop this self-reliance, B.-P. organized them into small groups with their own leaders. His ideas were published in an army booklet called Aids to Scouting.
In 1904 B.-P. was invited to inspect the Boy's Brigade. B.-P. offered to rewrite his book for young boys. The book called Scouting for Boys was released in Serial form over a period of three months in 1908.
Four years passed while B.-P. did the necessary research. In 1907, he took 21 boys between the ages of 11 and 16 to Brownsea Island off the Southern coast of England. There he organized them into patrols and taught them self-reliance skills. During the week, they pitched tents, swam, cooked meals outdoors, learned to track, and to tie knots.
When B.-P. wrote Scouting for Boys, he did not intend to start another organization. Boys did, because scout patrols and scout troops began springing up entirely on their own all over England. By 1909, there were already about 1,000,000 scouts. In 1910, the King of England asked Baden-Powell to resign from the army and devote his full time to the Scouting Movement.
| For a more comprehensive history of the life of Lord Baden-Powell, see: |
Scouting in Canada
Copies of Scouting for Boys found their way overseas and into Canada and Quebec. Boys got together to form patrols and sought out adult leadership to help them. By
1909, the need for some sort of organization became apparent and resulted in
the formation of the first "Baden-Powell Scout Troop" in Montreal. This was
followed by similar developments in Quebec City and other communities across
the province.
By the time B-P made his first visit to Canada (Montreal and Quebec City),
in 1910, he was greeted at the docks by a Scout Guard of Honor.
At this time, there were 12 troops in the Montreal area and the "Montreal
District Committee" was formed. This was quickly replaced with the
"Montreal Council" and although there was still no Provincial Organization,
B-P appointed Colonel Geoffrey Burland as the first Provincial Commissioner.
Baden Powell soon persuaded Earl Grey the Governor General to become Chief Scout of Canada. On June 12, 1917, the Boy Scouts of Canada was incorporated by an Act of Parliament. The Canadian General Council was a branch of the Boy Scout Association until October 30, 1946, when it became an independent member of the Boy Scout World Conference. A subsequent amendment changed the name to Boy Scouts of Canada. In 1976 the Scouts Canada logo was introduced an since then Scouting in Canada has become commonly referred to as SCOUTS CANADA.
Scouting has continued to grow, and now there are more than 25 million members in 216 countries and territories around the globe.
Contributed in part by Marc Levasseur
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