[Ansteorra] Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts

[Liz Wilson]

In Girl Scouts we are also celebrating the beginning of the international Scouting movement, for both boys and girls.  There were girls that followed Lord Baden Powell's group in England in 1910, pretty much from the beginning, asking for their own Guide groups.   Obviously these were formed fairly soon after the Boy Scouts.   We did the World Association of Girl Scouts and Girl Guides 100th anniversary patch yesterday in Girl Scouts, although the organization that is today known as WAGGS was not technically founded until 1928  (I didn't name the patch--it was obviously named by someone who didn't research it very much).

  I don't know much about the Boy Scout history but the Girl Scouts in the US are of course founded in 1912 in this country by Juliette Gordon Low (Daisy) from Savannah, who learned about the international Scouting Movement from Lord and Lady Baden-Powell (I know he was a Baron but he's always called Lord Baden-Powell in most of the materials I read).

It was a bit of a scandal when Lord and Lady Baden-Powell first met.  They met on a transatlantic crossing when she was travelling with her father in 1915.   He was 55 and she was 23 and wealthy, and I don't think her parents approved even though he was world famous by then.  However, the age difference turned out to be a bit of a blessing, in that she was able to promote the International Girl Scouts and Girl Guides movement into the 1970's, whereas he passed away in Kenya in 1941, well before WWII was over. I expect that she was welcomed often by the Boy Scouts as well.

In her autobiography, Olave Baden-Powell (who was named for King Olaf by her father, who was expecting a boy) says that she was first devoted to her husband and then to the international Scouting movement, and only third to her children (who were often left with nurses and such while she was travelling the world with her husband).  She says that she wasn't a very good mother and also that she didn't care much for Agnes, Lord Baden-Powell's sister, who also worked extensively with the Movement.  Her autobiography Window on My Heart makes interesting reading..  She worked with a writer in the 1970s on it, and she passed away in 1977, but she describes a grand passion for Lord Baden-Powell.

Christianna inghean Fearghus