| As a matter of fact I didn't really start the Scout Movement 
| | Because the blooming thing started itself. Somewhere in about 1893, I started teaching Scouting to young boy soldiers in my regiment. When these young fellows joined the Army, they had learned reading, writing and arithmetic in school, but as a rule, not much else. They were nice lads and made good parade soldiers, obeyed orders, kept themselves clean and all that, but they had never been taught to be men, how to take responsibility and so on. They had not had my chances of education outside the classroom. | | In 1899, I wrote a little book called Aids to Scouting for soldiers. It taught them observation. Or how to track, and it taught them deduction, or how to read the information given by tracks. When we were besieged at Mafeking in 1900 my Chief Staff Officer got together the boys in the place and made them into a cadet corps for carrying orders and messages and acting as orderlies and so on in place of the soldiers who were thus released to go and strengthen the firing line. We then discovered that boys when trusted and relied upon were just as capable and reliable as men Also, from experience of Boys Brigade I realised that men could be got voluntarily to sacrifice time and energy to training boys. | | 
| | Then my idea that Scouting could be educative was strengthened too. Then in 1907 I as a General was inspecting 7000 of the Boys Brigade at Glasgow on its 20th Anniversary and the founder Sir William Smith was very pleased because of the total strength of his movement 54000. I agreed that it was a big number, but added that if the training really appealed to the boys, there ought to be many times that number. "How would you make it appeal?" he asked. "Well look how the young fellows in the cavalry enjoy the game of Scouting, which makes them into real men and good soldiers." "Could you rewrite Aids to Scouting" he wondered, "so it appeals to boys instead of to soldiers and make them into real men and good citizens?" So I did that. | |  | | But before writing the book, I planned out the idea and then tested it. I got together some 20 boys of all sorts, some form Eaton and Harrow, some from the East of London, some country lads and some shop lads and I mixed them up like plums in a pudding to live together in a camp. I wanted to see how far the idea would interest the different kinds of lads. I told a friend what I was doing, and said that I wanted a quiet place out of press reporters and inquisitive people where I could do the experiment: she offered me her property at Brownsea Island in Dorsetshire. And there we set up camp for a fortnight. I had Major MacLaren and Sir Percy Everett to help me and we taught the boys Camping, cooking, observation, deduction, woodcraft, chivalry, boatmanship, lifesaving, health, Patrolmanship and such things. The results upon the boys in that short space of time taught me the possibilities which Scout training held for boys. So I set at once to work and wrote the handbook Scouting for Boys, intending it to be useful to the existing organisations like Boys Brigade, the Churches Lads Brigade, the YMCA and others. | | 
| | The book came out in a fortnightly parts at 4d a copy. Before many of the parts had been published, I began to get letters from boys who had taken up the game for themselves, boys not belonging to boys brigade or any other organisation. All the following year, boys were writing to me tellinmg me how they had started Patrols and Troops and had got men to come and act as their Scoutmasters. So we had to start a Headquarters office in a tiny room to deal with the correspondence and supple equipment. | |  | | In the year 1909 I arranged to have a meeting of the would-be Scouts at Crystal Palace on a certain day. When we got there, my wig, there were a lot of them.. Rain threatened. So we mustered them inside the palace and arranged a march past and counted them as they entered at one door and went out the other. There were 11000 of them- 11000 who had taken it up of their own accord! That's why I sat that one didn't see he start: Scouting started itself. |  Lord Robert Baden-Powell World Chief Scout written in 1934 |
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