Founders Day is key in the history of world scouting
TODAY, February 22, is known throughout the world as Founders Day.
Founders Day is marked by the Scouting movement on this day because it is the birthday of its founder, Lord Robert Baden-powell.
Burton-based military historian Malcolm Goode has been documenting the key events of the Second World War and it was in January 1941, that Lord Baden-powell died.
Mr Goode explains: the Boy Scout Movement, as it was known then, learned of the very sad news that their founder Lord Robert Baden-powell had died at his home in Kenya.
Baden-powell was born in London in 1857. He was commissioned into the Army and served in India, Afghanistan and South Africa, taking part in the campaigns against the Zulus and the Boer War where he came into prominence for his part in the successful siege of Mafeking.
Here he resisted the attacks of the Boer troops by using very cunning plans he devised into lulling them into thinking that the town was much more heavily defended than it actually was.
At the end of the Boer War he returned to Britain where he was promoted to the rank of Major General and invested as a Companion of the Order of The Bath by King Edward VII.
He wrote a series of books about his experiences in Africa and his development of scouting in the Military.
After a conversation with King Edward he wrote his most famous book entitled Scouting for Boys in 1907. It sold millions of copies and was instrumental in the forming the Scout Movement in Britain and around the World.
In 1910 along with his sister Agnes founded the Girl Guides movement. The Scouts and Guides continue to flourish today.
During the Second World War, just as they did in the previous war, Boy Scouts played a very important role in assisting the ARPS and other national defence organisations in the protection of Britain.
Lord Robert Baden-powell died on 8 January 1941: his grave is in St Peter’s Cemetery in Nyeri, Kenya. gravestone bears a circle with a dot in the centre “O” which is the trail sign for “Going home” or “I have gone home.”
His wife Olave moved back to England in 1942, although after she died in 1977, her ashes were taken to Kenya by her grandhis son Robert and interred beside her husband. In 2001 the Kenyan government declared Baden-powell’s grave a National Monument.