BOY SCOUTS.

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20278, 21 August 1937, Page 28 (Supplement)

BOY SCOUTS.

A GREAT MOVEMENT. PILGRIMAGE OF YOUTH. | I ITS POUNDER VINDICATED. j (Times Air Mail Service.) j LONDON. July 29. Thirty years ago (comments the Daily Telegraph) the diary of Lord Baden-Powell bore the entry: “ Going to camp.” The little party of boys from public and elementary schools who took part in that first experimental camp on Brownsea I-sland can hardly have realised that they were forming the nucleus of the Scout movement. It was a brave thing to suggest then that an organisation tha* Imposed upon its members the obligation to perform one good turn a drp would ever attract the harum-scarum boy. Still braver to claim that th' “ Game of Scouting,” as the Chic' Scout insisted upon calling it, was. r new educational system, in face o r the criticism advanced. “It can’t be education —why, they like it!” Hov right the Chief Scout was. and ho'wrong his critics, has been proved Iv the phenomenal growth of the move ment. Bcoutlng Still Popular. To-day, despite wireless, the internal combustion engine, and th oinema. Scouting still holds the be*Last year’s increase in membership 300,000, was a record. A more important vindication still, perhaps, ha' been the gradual absorption of Lord Baden-Powell’s principles into the educational system. Certainly the movement can take a good deal of credit for the present-day cult of the open air. To-night, exactly thirty years after the Brownsea camp, by a happy coincidence, over 8000 Scouts from every part of Britain and the Empire leave this country to take part in the Fifth World Jamboree in Holland. For the next fortnight 25,000 boys, from 34 different nations, will live together under canvas, among them Scouts from China and Japan. What boys who differ in colour, class and tongue can achieve in mutual understanding and friendship only those who have attended a Jamboree can be aware There are many boys—and perhaps grown-ups too —who will wish they could Join the expedition that sets forth to-night. There will be none who will not wish them Bon Voyage and Good Camping.