Nick's Ramblings

I saw this Tweet this morning from Don District Scouts about the book The Scouting Trail. The book is written by Scouts Ireland and is another useful book showing Scouting skills, and best of all it’s available to download for free! Take a look here.

Many thanks to Don District for publicising this book!

I was sent this list over 8 years ago and found the email again the other day. See how many ring true to you –

I. The number of matches it takes to get the fire going is inversely proportional to the number that were in the box when you started.

2. If you are tired, your Scouts will not be at all tired, and will keep you awake all night.

3. Never turn your back for a moment.

4. Silly hats are practical – they keep your head warm and ensure that no one will ever take you seriously again.

5. The length of time for the water to boll is proportional to how desperate you are for a cup of tea or coffee or hot chocolate.

6. Happiness is a cup of hot coffee (or tea) outside your tent when you get up in the morning.

7. Scouts have endless supplies of energy until they have to walk somewhere.

8. Scouts are allergic to washing up liquid.

9. A Scout’s alarm clock is always set either two hours earlier or two hours later than the leader’s.

10. Be nice to the caterer, or they might put food in your dinner.

11. There is always an unclaimed piece of underwear at the end of camp, but you never find the woggle that was lost at the beginning.

12. Smoke gets in your eyes.

13. Smoke will follow every individual around any given fire – no matter where they move, in which direction, where the wind is coming from, or even if there Is any wind at all for that matter.

14. A shower to a Scout is when it is raining.

15. Scouts do it in hiking boots and waterproofs with rucksacks.

16. If you stand and stare at a tent long enough it will pitch itself.

17. Don’t just do something – stand there!

18. If it’s burnt on the outside it must be cooked.

19. A Scout can cook anything, unsupervised and unassisted, as long as it’s a sausage.

20. A Scout is to be trusted – to do something really stupid and dangerous, usually involving fire, blades, food, vegetation, another Scout or any combination of me above.

21 .A Scout always takes their underwear home, clean, dry and unpacked.

22. When everyone is asleep at night a big spoon comes and stirs the contents of your tent around, so you’ll never find anything again.

23. No matter how large the rucksack or how numerous they are, there is always the plastic carrier bag.

24. I like Scouts, but I couldn’t eat a whole one.

25. The purpose of wide games is to get as many Scouts as possible lost, in the woods, preferably at night.

26. Ask a Scout to build a one man bivouac and you’ll get a cow shed, ask them to build a three man bivouac and you’ll get something just big enough for a Beaver or a cuddly toy.

27. Camping is good for me soul -it must be – anything this much hard work has to be good for you.

28. Trying to remember how many loaves of bread (or pints of milk) you bought. and how many were either left over at the end or had to be bought half way through the last camp, is the second sign of madness.

29. The first step on the road to madness is being a leader.

30. You can always tell where a Scouts’ tent was from me sweet wrappers.

31. You can always tell where a Venture’s tent was from me burnt out beer cans.

32. To estimate the length of time it will take to complete an activity at camp; think of how long it should take, multiply that figure by the number of Scouts doing it, take off me number you first thought of, halve that figure and finally move the decimal point one place to the right. Hence we can allocate four hours and ten minutes for six Scouts to complete a ten minute activity.

33. If at first you don’t succeed – cheat. Just don’t let anyone see you doing it.

34. You know you have picked a bad site when me tent pegs are held in by suction.

35. Anyone who goes camping between November and March deserves what they get.

36. The average Scouts’ First Aid Kit contains: three sticking plasters (one opened), two antiseptic wipes, one sewing needle (unsterilized) and thirty seven safety pins.

37. Building the fire up for the night to leave embers in the morning does not require an imitation of the towering Inferno, but this is what usually happens anyway.

38. When whittling, whatever you produce is what you set out to make.

39. You always remember the laughter.

40. Always stick to what you said.

41. There is no 41.

42. Life, the Universe, and Everything.

I thought this list would make a nice change from the seriousness of my last post!

I’ve been reading a few of my American Scouting friends’ blogs and they regularly talk about their Boy Led Troops. Also, there is this post from Lotta in Sweden about her Group’s and District’s Annual General Meetings.

In both these cases, Scouts are given the considerable responsibility of either running their Troops or having a major say and input into their important meetings.

The thing is, and I hope you don’t think I’m being rude about our Scouts, I don’t believe we would be able to do those things here in the UK.

First of all, the Scout Troop being run by the Scouts themselves like in the USA is unlikely due to the ages of the Scouts.

Scouts leave the Troop when they are 14 to join Explorers. This is run by the Explorers themselves, and very successfully as their ages go from 14 – 18. But with Scouts being in the 10 – 14 age range this doesn’t work.

As an example, I will tell you about one of our Scouts who has moved to Explorers in the last 4 – 5 months. He’d come through Beavers and Cubs and was a generally pleasant 10 year old. But when he was 11 & 12 he was a little  _________ (insert choice expletive here!). In fact, he was close to being chucked out of the Troop for his behaviour. Then, virtually overnight, his attitude changed. He worked hard and gained his Chief Scout’s Gold Award and started to help out with the Beavers. He’s now in the Explorers and a Young Leader with the Group (and a valued one too).  Now he only ‘grew up’ around 6  – 8 months before he was due to leave the Troop.

And this is where the difficulty lies within the Troop. Just as the Scouts start to become more experienced and are able to do tasks themselves, show others how to do things and show leadership skills, they leave the Troop! Now this is where I go a little ‘off message’ and say that having Scouts leaving the Troop to go to Explorers at 14 was a mistake! It means the experienced Scouts are not around long enough to pass on that experience to the younger ones.

Secondly, getting the young people interested in the actual running of the Group (for example) by suggesting items at a meeting would be a struggle. I don’t know whether this is just the young people in our Group, in our area or a UK thing, but when doing something that is ‘serious’ they tend to have the attention span of a goldfish! Is that our fault as Leaders by not presenting things in a way that grabs their attention, or just symptomatic of the time we live in where everything is instant and on a screen? I agree with Lotta when she says that getting the young people interested  and “involved in other circumstances, like student councils, political youth movements and so on” is an excellent idea, (and a necessary one really)  but for the Beavers, Cubs & Scouts are they interested / do they even care?

I don’t know. And maybe I am being unfair to the young people, but that’s the way I see it. Would anyone care to change my mind?

This is a rather good new video from the Scout Association.

Last night I was chatting to the Mums of two new Beavers. As our conversation progressed, one of the Mums whose daughter had just joined the Colony, asked me if Brownies still existed.

Now I have to admit this kind of surprised me. Girl Guiding UK, of which the Brownies are the section for 7 – 10 year old girls, is celebrating its centenary this year and there has been quite a bit in the media about their celebrations.

Quick bit of history. Girl Guides was started in 1910 by the founder of the Scout movement, Baden-Powell and his sister, as girls had started to form their own Scout patrols. The convention of the Edwardian society was that girls were delicate things who couldn’t possibly do the activities that the Scouts did and so the Guides were created to provide suitable activities for the girls. There is some evidence, however, that BP did want girls in Scouts. And it remained this way until girls could join Scouts in the early 1990s (Ventures from 1976). However, only girls can join Guides.

Now does the Mum asking if Brownies are still around, show a failure of Girl Guiding nationally or locally in the North Staffordshire area to promote themselves sufficiently? I know there has been plenty of coverage about their centenary and they do have an interesting campaign about the airbrushing of women in photographs. But do I notice these stories because they are related to Scouting, and would I notice them if I wasn’t in Scouting? The other thing is that the Scout Association does seem, from my point of view, to have a stronger PR department. A huge thing was made about Bear Grylls becoming and being the Chief Scout. Do the Guides have a similar person? The SA are also good at putting good news stories into the press. Again, locally Guides do seem to get less publicity than Scouts and their general organisation (locally) seems weaker. Or is that my perception?

Interestingly, when the Guides publish their membership figures they have more members than the SA, yet the Scouts are seen as the ‘bigger’ organisation.

If any Guides reading this have any views or points they’d like to share about this, I’d love to hear from you.

I was chatting to my Group’s Beaver Leader about the forthcoming Beaver camp (of course Beavers don’t actually camp as such, they have to stay indoors) and she was concerned about the costs.

A little background: Beavers can only stay in indoor accommodation and cannot stay away from their parents for more than 24 hours. This means that when going ‘camping’ buildings have to be hired. On most campsites this means that you have to hire the buildings for the whole weekend and not for a 24 hour period. The other thing to bear in mind is that you can’t really charge a Beaver the same as, say a Cub, ‘camping’ in the same building for a whole weekend.

All this means that a Beaver camp is relatively expensive to run and will most likely run at a loss. So with this in mind, do we then think that we cannot run the camp as we will lose money?

Well, no. That is what the Group’s funds are for. If we take the attitude that we cannot run the camp then the Beavers don’t get to enjoy the experience of being at a campsite with all their friends, being away from Mum and Dad and family, in some cases for the first time and experiencing Scouting activities for the first time, for example climbing or cooking on a fire. If we as a Group have the money available then this is what it is there for. it’s kind of nice to know we have £xxx in the bank, but it was raised for the kids in the Group.

I don’t actually think that we will have to put too much Group money to the camp, but we will and it’ll mean that the Beavers have a great time at camp.

Rachael and I will be going out to see them all, although we’ll just be observers as I can’t do a great deal of Scouting activities with a baby with me!

In my last post I talked a bit about Escouts and the forums they provide. As well as the forums, until recently, they also provided free hosting for UK Scouting websites. This has been of enormous benefit to many Groups around the country who have been able to set up a sit without any cost.

However their free hosting service has been stopped recently due to a number of reasons, but mainly due to technical problems and the lack of time available to the Escouts owners. This is of course, because they have jobs, families and other Scouting commitments before they even think about the hosting. So they’ve called it a day.

Interestingly, by providing this service, they recon they’ve saved UK Scouting in the region of £100,000 – £150,000! Now if that’s not generous, I don’t know what is!

So a big thank you for all their hard work and generosity in providing that service!

One of the things that always impresses me about Scouting is the generosity of everyone who is involved. From the parent who is part of the cooking team at a Cub camp to the Leaders and so on. But it’s the stuff that people do which is ‘above and beyond’ that is always the most impressive.

For instance, I know if I have a question or problem, that as well as ringing the Info Centre at Gilwell and speaking to my District’s people, I can post a question on Escouts or PTC Media’s forums or email any number of Leaders in the UK, Europe or the USA. And by doing this, I will get the info I need. They don’t need to do this, but we always like to help our fellow Scouts (A Scout is a Member of the Worldwide Family of Scouts – UK Scout law number 4).

Another recent example of generosity is the creation of a WordPress theme for Scouting websites designed by Chris Hawes (see the Be Prepared link in the Scouts in the UK section of my links). Chris has made this theme for his District’s site and then offered it to anyone who wants it for their site! So I’ve used it on my District’s new site, which I’ve recently re-launched (after waiting since March to hear what the District wanted, I got bored and did it anyway!). You can see it here. Since the original release, Chris has made a couple of variations which can bee seen and downloaded from here.

So many thanks to Chris for his hard work and to all those Scouts out there who do that extra bit to help others!

If you live in the US, you’ll know who he is, but if you live anywhere else, like me, you’ll probably say ‘Who?’.

He is a TV host who hosts a show called Dirty Jobs, amongst others, and is someone who is promoting the importance on the ‘blue collar trades’ and the fact that there is a need for people to be trained in such areas (plumbing for example) and that everyone should not necessarily have a degree (as seems to be a common theme these days).

He was a Scout when he was a boy and is an Eagle Scout.

He has taken it upon himself to promote Scouting and it’s values and achievements. He will even send a personalised letter to any Eagle Scout who wants one (see the example here). He recently appeared at the BSA’s recent Jamboree (unlike a Mr. Obama who sent a video & went on a chat show, much to the annoyance of a lot of Scouts) and spoke to all the Scouts and their Leaders about the need to get out and get dirty while staying physically and mentally clean.

But the thing that interests me is that he has done all this off his own back. As far as I know, he doesn’t have an official position within the BSA, but has decided that Scouting is something that is important and relevant to the youth of America and he is going to tell people that.

However, I can’t think of anyone over here who is doing a similar thing. We obviously have Bear Grylls doing his thing as Chief Scout, but he, as are thousands of other adults, is a volunteer within Scouting. There is no one I can think of who is outside Scouting in an official capacity doing the same as Mike Rowe and I guess we’re the poorer for it. If we had someone who is in the media spotlight, be they a sports person, musician or politician, for example, who is willing to say ‘ this is my team, record or policies I’m promoting and I got here partially because of the skills, lessons and fun I had in Scouts / Guides etc as a kid. Take a look you might enjoy it’.

I wonder if anyone out there is prepared to say that?

Back in March, the UK Government released some previously classified files about the relationship between Scouting and the Hitler Youth (Hitler-Jugend). As usual the media made a big fuss about, well nothing really. There wasn’t a link between the two organisations and the WOSM put out a rather good press release explaining it all (read my post from March here).

One of the points they made was that Scouting was mentioned in the book “Informationsheft Groß Britannien”, which was to be issued to soldiers when the Germans invaded Britain.

I was in the library the other day and noticed a copy of this book, translated into English and now called “Invasion 1940 – The Nazi Invasion Plan for Britain by SS General Walter Schellenberg”. So I looked at the relevant section on Scouting and found that if anyone who had written about the supposed link between the Hitler Youth and Scouting had read this book, then they would have realised that there was no connection!

Here is what the book says (please don’t be offended by the language, it’s as originally written):

The International Boy Scout Movement

This was created in 1907 by the English military officer Lord Baden-Powell, who defended Mafeking in the Boer War. His organisation first limited its activities to England, later expanding over Europe (1911) thanks to propaganda from the British government and finally extended to the whole world. The Boy Scout Movement was established in the Dominions only after pressure from the English authorities.

Lord Baden-Powell is, as World Chief Scout, the leader of the International Boy Scout Movement. Its central headquarters is in London, in the so-called International Bureau which until recently has been managed by a half-Jew, Mr Martin, who was simultaneously the head of the Passport Office. The current manager of the International Bureau, John Wilson, also works at the Passport Office; for the previous eight years he was Chief of Police in Calcutta. It is possible that his successor there is a certain Mr Lunt. The International Bureau builds links between the individual national scout associations. An International Commissioner heads each national association and is responsible for maintaining the link with the International Bureau in London.The International Commissioner is required to draft monthly and quarterly reports on the economic, cultural and political situation of the relevant country and pass them to the International Bureau. In addition, any personal or written contact between groups have to go through him. The individual national Boy Scout sections are structured similarly to the International Bureau.

Although the individual Boy Scout organisations are ostensibly almost entirely devoted to pre-military youth education, the Boy Scout Movement is a disguised instrument of power for British cultural propaganda, and an excellent source of information for the British Intelligence Service. Lord Baden-Powell was run as an agent against Germany during the last war. The dissolution of the Austrian boy scout association has, amongst other things, provided proof of the link between the Boy Scout Movement and the Secret Service.

The English Boy Scout Movement follows a similar model, altered to fit English circumstances, to the German Free ~Youth Movement. Accordingly, there has been close personal contact between members of the German Free Youth Movement and the English Boy Scout Movement.

The 1926 Kanderstag Agreement on Minorities has special significance for international relations since it guarantees the constitution of minority scout groups in every country with a national scout association. The German Youth Front, a gathering of émigré youth leaders, also enjoys close ties with the International Bureau. Furthermore, it is suspected, due to its numerous connections abroad, the International Bureau works for British Intelligence.

Hahahahahahahaha! Well, when I was looking through the records of my District which were from the 1920’s onwards, I never noticed any reference to MI5 or MI6! I think the Nazis got their summery of Scouting a bit wrong (to use an understatement). The other interesting point is that, had Britain been invaded, BP was on the list of 2800 or so people to be rounded up and arrested (and probably shot). Of course BP was in Kenya by this time living out his last days.

It’s just a shame that when information is released, people don’t research things properly before coming out with the thought that Scouting was a right wing paramilitary organisation.

Last word to BP himself writing in 1917 after 3 years of the First World War –

The roots of Scouting have grown among young people of all civilised countries and are developing more each day. It might be thought that if in years to come, a considerable proportion of the future citizens of each nation forms part of this brotherhood, they will be joined by a bond of personal friendship and mutual understanding such as has never existed before, which will help to find a solution to terrible international conflicts.

Well all the schools have broken up for the summer holidays and the pupils / students and MOST of the staff (only 4 weeks until MY holidays – but that’s a rant I don’t want to go into here!) now have six weeks off.

The summer holidays bring an interesting dilemma for Scout Groups and their sections – whether to stay open or close for the holidays. To be honest, we normally close, so the Beavers and Cubs finish tonight and the Scouts are carrying on an extra couple of weeks because of a camp at the beginning of next month. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing for two reasons.

First of all, it’s the school holidays so families er, well, go on holiday! With all the kids scattering to the four corners of the globe, it’s nigh on impossible to know who is going to turn up from one week to another which means a normal programme can’t be run – you tend to end up playing games all night.

Secondly, it gives the Leaders a break. It gives them time off, to go their holidays and recharge the batteries ready for starting back refreshed, renewed and full of enthusiasm in September.

So have  great summer holiday and see you all in September (well actually not entirely true, of course, I’ll be posting here over the hols!).

At the Family Camp we held back in May, as well as taking a load of still pictures – see here, I managed to take some video with my little hand held Flip Video camera. I’ve finally got round to editing it all together and you can see the short version below (YouTube is limited to around 10 minutes).

 

If you want to see the full 40 minutes or so, then click here.

In the short version you can see the Beavers and Cubs making their pirate equipment(!), the BBQ we had on the Saturday evening and a few songs from the campfire.

If you watch the long version you can see the camp site in the rain (just for a change), the Beavers and Cubs making their pirate equipment, the BBQ and finally the full camp fire.

Hope you enjoy.