Planning, Remembering & BP

When we worked out the Scout’s programme for the rest of this year, we noticed that Remembrance Day, 11th November, fell on a Troop meeting night. So we decided that this would be the theme for the evening and then left it at that.

Last night I started to look at some ideas of what to do during the evening. The first thing that came to mind was to print out the certificates of Remembrance for each of our Scouts who have been killed in wars from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s web site to put around the Hall. See the Troop’s Remembrance Site and an example of a certificate.

Then with this year being the 90th anniversary of the end of the Great War, I thought I’d see if I could find what BP had to say about it. On the World Organisation of the Scout Movement’s web site, I found this quote that he wrote in 1917 –

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.

It is apparent that he found the whole idea of the Great War horrific and decided to make Scouting less militaristic and move towards an international outlook and promoting friendship through understanding. This, of course, is still very relevant today.

Then I came across this sound clip of BP talking about the start of Scouting in around 1930 – click here. In it he talks about Scouts being the world wide brotherhood that the movement has now become (perhaps I should substitute family for brotherhood, due the fact girls are now in many Scout organisations across the world). Quite fascinating to hear it all from THE Chief Scout.

So now I have my print outs, a couple of quotes from BP and I can tie the events of over 90 years ago to our Troop to bring home to our present Scouts that wars don’t happen to ‘other people’. I’ve still got a way to go before the night’s programme is complete, but it’s a start.

Has anyone out there in cyberspace, run an evening’s programme on such a theme? I’d be interested to hear what ideas you came up with.