Furious locals rally to save Baden-powell

TEMPERS flared after it was revealed a statue of Scouts’ founder Robert Baden-powell was to be taken down amid the frenzy sweeping the country.

Angry residents in Poole, Dorset, formed a protective ring around it.

The council said it was to be temporarily moved because it was on a campaigners’ hit list. Baden-powell is a controversial figure because of alleged associations with the Hitler Youth and his supposed military actions.

But yesterday ex-scout Len Bannister, 79, roared: “If they want to knock this down they’ll have to knock me down first. It’s crazy.”

The statue overlooks

Brownsea Island where

Baden-powell held his first

Scout camp in 1907.

Yesterday the statue of slaver

Edward Colston was craned from the Bristol dock where campaigners dumped it on Sunday and put in store before going into a museum.

Police in the city are probing a suspected bleach attack on a statue of a black playwright Alfred Fagon days after the Colston statue fell. Meanwhile at Oxford University vicechancellor Baroness Valerie Amos joined the clamour for the statue of colonialist Cecil Rhodes to go.

And a descendant of Waterloo hero and slave trader Sir Thomas Picton has called for his statue to be removed from Cardiff City Hall.

Aled Thomas said he was “rather embarrassed” to be related to Sir Thomas, the “Tyrant of Trinidad”. Charlie Gladstone, great-greatgrandson of the 19th-century politician William Gladstone, said the former PM would not have stood in the way if there was “democratic will” to remove statues of him. A petition is calling for Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, North Wales, to be renamed due to family slave links. However in Whitby, North Yorks, MP Robert Goodwill said a statue of explorer James Cook would only be removed “over my dead body”. Rapper Stormzy has pledged £10million over 10 years to UK movements tackling racial inequality.