My Double Life

In the words of Baden-Powell, from "Lessons on the 'Varsity of Life."

I have had the rather unique experience of having in my time lived a double life.

I don’t mean exactly what you would infer from this!

Life Number One. No, I mean that I first started out in life, after leaving school, as a young officer in the Army, and, by extraordinary luck coupled with an unaccountable love for my work, I gained rapid promotion through all the successive ranks.

There was in this life the romance of seeing strange lands at my country’s expense, through serving successively in India, Afghanistan, South Africa, West Africa and Egypt. There was the campaigning, the sport, and the comradeship; there were hardships and sickness and partings, the shadows which enabled one the better to appreciate the sunshine.

Big jobs as well as little fell to my lot. As Adjutant, as Squadron Commander, and finally as Colonel commanding my Regiment, I had in turn what I thought the most enjoyable bits of responsibility that could fall to any man, and in which I was in close touch with my men.

But bigger jobs came to me, of which I will tell in a later chapter, such as, for instance, raising a contingent of native scouts for the Ashanti expedition, acting as Chief Staff Officer in the campaign in Matabeleland, commanding that grand lot of men and women who held Mafeking in the Boer War, and, biggest of all, organizing the South African Constabulary for the settlement of that country after the campaign.

Eventually I reached the top of the tree in my branch of the Service as Inspector-General of Cavalry, with its inspiring opportunities of preparing our horsemen for the Great War when it came. Thus, at the comparatively early age of forty-two I found myself a Major-General, and at fifty-three, after a marvelous run of luck, I had completed my career as a soldier and retired on a pension.

Life Number Two. Then I started on life Number Two, beginning an altogether new life, one on an entirely different plane, but, like Number One, it includes Scouting.

I married her who was to be my right hand in bringing up, not only our own children, but the vast family of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides which then came into being.

We have enjoyed the extraordinary experience of seeing this Movement grow from the tiny acorn of twenty-five boys encamped on Brownsea Island into a Brotherhood and Sisterhood which embraces almost every civilized country in the world, with a census, this year (1933), of two million, nine hundred thousand.

Well, that is the brief outline of my life.