I never was a boy scout. Not because I had anything against camping, making fires, tying knots, reading maps, climbing trees, playing at soldiers or pretending to be a spy, but because the idea of doing all those things in uniform, under the supervision of a middle-aged man in short trousers, threatened to take the fun out of them.

The book that spawned the movement, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship by Lieut.-General R.S.S. Baden-Powell CB FRGS, first published in six fortnightly parts in 1908, is being reissued this month by Oxford University Press, with notes and an introduction by Elleke Boehmer, who teaches post-colonial literature at Nottingham Trent. In 'Camp Fire Yarn No. 1', Baden-Powell describes the inspiration for the organisation: the role played by a 'corps of boys' in the defence of Mafeking, of which Baden-Powell, in Boehmer's words, 'found himself in inadvertent command'. One of the boys' tasks was to carry messages between forts on their bicycles.

LRB 4 March 2004 | PDF Download