3/26/2021 0 Comments Brownsea Island Scouting Games
The eight-day encampment would spend a day on each of the six principles of Scouting: campaigning (living in the outdoors), observation, woodcraft, chivalry, saving life and patriotism.It is as if a shingle beach has had each of its small, seawashed gray stones replaced with a broken bit of red terra cotta pipe, creating a pottery beach that extends 100 feet into the water and stretches out of sight in both directions.It is a wondrously outlandish sight, helped along by historic association.At this place, in 1907, the international Scouting movement began.
![]() The old port city of Poole occupies its northern shore, part of a larger conurbation that stretches north through Bournemouth and Christchurch. The harbors southern shore is almost uninhabited, and hosts a series of internationally important wildlife refuges. Inside the harbor are eight nearly uninhabited islands, of which Brownsea is the largestroughly a mile and a half long, and a half-mile wide. It soon passed into private hands and was owned by a series of wealthy merchants and gentry. These owners not only transformed the blockhouse into a grand estate, they also created lavish private gardens and hundreds of acres of farmlands, giving Brownsea a permanent population in the process. In 1852 a new owner erected a huge pottery work at its western end, in the belief that Brownseas clays could be mined for fine china. They couldnt; but the plant limped along for 35 years producing clay sewage pipes. It is the broken refuse from this plant that forms the shingle in front of the first Scout camp. Under the van Raaltes, 200 islanders farmed and raised daffodils for the London fresh flower market, and furnished the large staff required by the van Raaltes lavish lifestyle. Two islanders ran the van Raaltes ferry, the Blunderbuss, along the half-mile passage between Brownsea Castle and Pooles beach suburb of Sandbanks. One of its regular passengers was Guglielmo Marconi, who was staying in a hotel beside the Sandbanks Pier as he conducted his wireless experiments; Marconi taught the van Raalte children to communicate in Morse code by blinking their eyes. But Marconi wasnt the only celebrity the van Raaltes had collected; Robert Baden-Powell was another of their friends. The bustling quayside of Poole stands in sharp contrast to the serenity of Brownsea Island, just moments away from the dock by boat. An experienced intelligence officer, Baden-Powell had already written a military manual for reconnaissance troops operating independently behind enemy lines, his Aids to Scouting. Brownsea Island Scouting Games Free Up FightingHe and his staff put these principles to use in organizing the underage British boys of Mafeking into the Mafeking Cadet Corps, assigned to duties (such as delivering messages and assisting in hospitals) that would free up fighting troops. Baden-Powells success in defending Mafeking (the siege lasted 217 days) marked the turning point of the Boer War, and made Baden-Powell a national hero. Back in England as a lieutenant general, he found that youth groups and schools were using his Aids to Scouting as a teaching resource. Baden-Powell began collaborating with other youth group organizers to develop a new approach to youth training, tentatively called Boy Patrols. Baden-Powell chose an open site on the shore near the abandoned pottery; the hard, dry fields reminded him of the veldt. He recruited 10 working-class boys from Poole, and 10 boys from the exclusive private schools known as public schools, and mixed them together into four patrolsthe organization used at Mafeking, and part of his military recon methods.
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