About 18 months ago with the build up to the 2007 Scouting Centenary celebrations looming, I thought I’d look into my own Group’s history. We’d (the Scout Group) always known that there had been Scouts in Porthill since 1908, but could I actually prove it?
That’s where life started to get interesting! I got in touch with the Scout Association and they told me of a leader who was registered as holding a warrant in December 1908 as a Leader, but, and of course there is a but, there are no details about which Troop!
The problem is that Scouting started started rather quickly with no real ‘organisation’ as such until BP retired from the Army in 1908. Boys just set up their own patrols and followed what was written in ‘Scouting for Boys’.
There is documentation from 1915 from our District, of which I have a copy, but no where does anything say a thing about 1908.
Looking at the War Memorial for the members of the Troop killed in the Great War and checking their details on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s web site it was noticeable that most of them would have been between the ages of ten and twelve in 1908. However, this is not absolute proof.
A few people in administrative positions within the District have said we started in 1908 and in fact wrote so in an article in the local newspaper written in 1983 when we restarted our Scout Troop (we’d only had Cubs for about 20 years).
So it was time to dig deeper. It seems that none of the Church’s (who sponsor us and let us use the Hall for free) records before 1920 have survived. Although having said that, I’m going to our county record office to look at them this weekend.
I was getting a bit stuck at this point! I decided to take a look at some of the old local newspapers from 1908. These are available at our local library on microfilm.
Looking through the Staffordshire Sentinel football edition of Saturday 5th December 1908, I saw this in the Stop Press –
And there it is – Porthill Scouts 4 : May Bank Boys 1.
The bit about Mr. Lloyd George and the Suffragettes gives it quite a nice ‘timely’ feel.
In the same paper the following week, Saturday 12th December 1908 is this –
So there we are. I think it highly unlikely there were to groups of young people called Porthill Scouts!
It might be an interesting idea to hold a football match on 5th December this year to commemorate this. Perhaps our friends from Basford Scouts could fill in for May Bank Boys? It would be nice to think that we would win đŸ˜‰