The Copse

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

       When I was a small boy at Charterhouse, outside the school walls was “The Copse,” a long stretch of woodland on a steep hill- side, extending for a mile or so round the playing fields.
       It was here that I used to imagine myself a backwoodsman trapper and Scout. I used to creep about warily looking for “sign” and getting “close up” observation of rabbits, squirrels, rats, and birds.
       As a trapper I set my snares, and when I caught a rabbit or hare (which wasn’t often) I learned by painful experiment to skin, clean, and cook him. But knowing that the Redskins were about, in the shape of masters looking for boys out of bounds, I used a very small non-smoky fire for fear of giving away my whereabouts.
       Incidentally, also, I gained sufficient cunning to hide up in trees when danger of this kind threatened, since experience told me that masters hunting for boys seldom looked upward. The Greeks made a bloomer when they styled man “anthropos,” or “he who looks up,” since in practice he generally fails to look above his own level.
       Thus, without knowing it I was gaining an education that was to be of infinite value to me later.
       It proved not only a help to me in the hunting of big game and also in the conduct of Scouting, but incidentally it started in me the habit of noticing small details or “sign” and of putting this and that together and so reading a meaning from them — in other words the invaluable habit of Observation and Deduction.

Scouting - The Connecting Link

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

Through the whole of my career in the Army there ran a vein — a fad or whatever you like to call it — that obsessed me and which, while adding zest to my work, came to be of use for the service. Later on it proved the connecting link between my two otherwise dissimilar lives. This was Scouting.      

Scouting includes a rather wide range of work. Briefly, it is the art or science of gaining information. Before or during war information about the enemy’s preparations, his strength, his intentions, his country, his circumstances, his moves, etc., is vitally essential to a commander if he is to win success. The enemy, therefore, on his part, naturally keeps such details as secret as he can.

Thus the job which falls to the fellow who has got to find these out is a difficult one and risky. If he does it in disguise he is called a spy, and is liable to be shot, while in uniform he is more conspicuous as a Scout and equally liable to meet his end.

To do effective work demands a good knowledge of military tactics and organisations. It demands  also, to a very high degree, the qualities of personal initiative and imagination, as well as of the four Cs, which I have elsewhere said go to make a soldier, namely, Courage, Commonsense, Cunning,  and Cheerful Co-operation.

     Consideration for self, for one’s ease or one’s safety doesn’t come in.
     Scouting is certainly a fascinating game for the performer and worth all the risk, because of its immense value to his side.

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.