Lieutenant-General Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell (22 February 1857 – 8 January 1941), was a British Army officer, writer, founder of The Boy Scouts Association and its first Chief Scout, and founder, with his sister Agnes, of The Girl Guides Association. Baden-Powell wrote Scouting for Boys, which with his previous books – such as his 1884 Reconnaissance and Scouting and his 1899 Aids to Scouting for N.-C.Os and Men, which was intended for the military, and The Scout magazine – helped the rapid growth of the Scout Movement.
Educated at Charterhouse School, Baden-Powell served in the British Army from 1876 until 1910 in India and Africa. In 1899, during the Second Boer War in South Africa, Baden-Powell defended the town in the Siege of Mafeking. His books, written for military reconnaissance and scout training, were also read by boys and used by teachers and youth organisations. In August 1907, he held an experimental camp, the Brownsea Island Scout camp to test his ideas for training boys in scouting. He wrote Scouting for Boys, published in 1908 by C. Arthur Pearson Limited, for boy readership. In 1910, Baden-Powell retired from the army and formed The Scout Association.
In 1909, a rally of Scouts was held at The Crystal Palace. Many girls in Scout uniform attended and, in front of the press, a small group told Baden-Powell that they were the "Girl Scouts". In 1910, Baden-Powell and his sister Agnes started The Girl Guides Association. In 1912, Baden-Powell married Olave St Clair Soames. He gave guidance to The Scout Association and Girl Guides Association until retiring in 1937. Baden-Powell lived his last years in Nyeri, Kenya, where he died and was buried in 1941. His grave is a national monument.
Baden-Powell was the second youngest son of Baden Powell, the Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford and Church of England priest, and his third wife, Henrietta Grace née Smyth, eldest daughter of Admiral William Henry Smyth. After his father died in 1860, his mother, to identify her children with her late husband's fame, styled the family name Baden-Powell. The name was eventually legally changed by Royal Licence on 30 April 1902. Baden-Powell's father's family originated in Suffolk. His mother's earliest known Smyth ancestor was a Royalist American colonist; her mother's father Thomas Warington was the British Consul in Naples around 1800.
Baden-Powell was born Robert Stephenson Smyth Powell at 6 Stanhope Street (now 11 Stanhope Terrace), Paddington, London, on 22 February 1857. He was called Stephe (pronounced "Stevie") by his family. He was named after his godfather, Robert Stephenson, the railway and civil engineer, and his third name was his mother's surname. Baden-Powell had four older half-siblings from the second of his father's two previous marriages and was the fifth surviving child of his father's third marriage:
Augustus ("Gus") (1849–1863), who was often ill and died young
Henrietta Smyth, 28 October 1851 – 9 March 1854
John Penrose Smyth, 21 December 1852 – 14 December 1855
Jessie Smyth 25 November 1855 – 24 July 1856
Robert (22 February 1857 – 8 January 1941)
The three children immediately preceding Baden-Powell had all died very young before he was born, so there was a seven-year gap between him and his next older brother Frank; so he and his two younger siblings were almost like a separate family, of which he was the eldest. His father died when Baden-Powell was three, so he was raised by his single mother, a strong woman who was determined that her children would succeed. In 1933, he said of her, "The whole secret of my getting on, lay with my mother."
Baden-Powell attended Rose Hill School, Tunbridge Wells, and was given a scholarship to Charterhouse, a prestigious public school named after the ancient Carthusian monastery buildings it occupied in the City of London. While he was a pupil there, the school moved out to new purpose-built premises in the countryside near Godalming in Surrey. He played with dolls and learnt the piano and violin, was an ambidextrous artist, and enjoyed acting. Holidays were spent on yachting or canoeing expeditions with his brothers. Baden-Powell's first introduction to outdoor skills was through stalking and cooking game while avoiding teachers in the nearby woods, which were strictly out-of-bounds.
In 1876, Baden-Powell joined the 13th Hussars in India with the rank of lieutenant. In 1880 he was charged with the task of drawing maps of the Battle of Maiwand. He enhanced and honed his military scouting skills amidst the Zulu in the early 1880s in the Natal Province of South Africa, where his regiment had been posted, and where he was mentioned in dispatches. In 1890, he was brevetted Major as military secretary and senior aide-de-camp to the Commander-in-Chief and Governor of Malta, his uncle General Sir Henry Augustus Smyth. He was posted to Malta for three years, also working as an intelligence officer for the Mediterranean for the Director of Military Intelligence. He wrote that he once travelled disguised as a butterfly collector, incorporating plans of military installations into his drawings of butterfly wings. In 1884 he published Reconnaissance and Scouting.
Baden-Powell returned to Africa in 1896, and served in the Second Matabele War, in the expedition to relieve British South Africa Company personnel under siege in Bulawayo. This was a formative experience for him not only because he commanded reconnaissance missions into enemy territory in the Matopos Hills, but because many of his later Boy Scout ideas took hold here. It was during this campaign that he first met and befriended the American scout Frederick Russell Burnham, who introduced Baden-Powell to stories of the American Old West and woodcraft (i.e., Scoutcraft), and here that he was introduced to Montana Peaked version of a western cowboy hat, of which Stetson was a prolific manufacturer, and which also came to be known as a campaign hat and the many versatile and practical uses of a neckerchief.
Baden-Powell was accused of illegally executing a prisoner of war in 1896, the Matabele chief Uwini, who had been promised his life would be spared if he surrendered. Uwini was sentenced to be shot by firing squad by a military court, a sentence Baden-Powell confirmed. Baden-Powell was cleared by a military court of inquiry, but the colonial civil authorities wanted a civil investigation and trial. Baden-Powell later claimed he was "released without a stain on my character".
After Rhodesia, Baden-Powell served in the Fourth Ashanti War on the Gold Coast. In 1897, at the age of 40, he was brevetted colonel (the youngest colonel in the British Army) and given command of the 5th Dragoon Guards in India. A few years later he wrote a small manual, entitled Aids to Scouting, a summary of lectures he had given on the subject of military scouting, much of it a written explanation of the lessons he had learned from Burnham, to help train recruits.
Baden-Powell returned to South Africa before the Second Boer War. In July 1899, under orders from Sir John Ardagh, Major A. E. Latham from the South African section of the Intelligence Department tasked Baden-Powell to travel to Mafeking to collect intelligence on the Boers at the border with Transvaal. Although instructed to maintain a mobile mounted force on the frontier with the Boer Republics, Baden-Powell amassed stores and established a garrison at Mafeking. The subsequent Siege of Mafeking lasted 217 days. Although Baden-Powell could have destroyed his stores and had sufficient forces to break out throughout much of the siege, especially since the Boers lacked adequate artillery to shell the town or its forces, he remained in the town to the point of his intended mounted soldiers eating their horses. The town had been surrounded by a Boer army, at times above 8,000 men.
The siege of the small town received much attention from both the Boers and international media because Lord Edward Cecil, the son of the British Prime Minister, was besieged in the town. The garrison held out until relieved, in part thanks to cunning deceptions, many devised by Baden-Powell. Fake minefields were planted and his soldiers pretended to avoid non-existent barbed wire while moving between trenches. Baden-Powell did much reconnaissance work himself. In one instance, noting that the Boers had not removed the rail line, Baden-Powell loaded an armoured locomotive with sharpshooters and sent it down the rails into the heart of the Boer encampment and back again in a successful attack.