Роберт Баден-Поуэлл: Скаут қозғалысының негізін қалаушысы

British Army officer and Scout Movement founder (1857–1941)
the Canadian politician

Lieutenant General Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden Powell, 1st Baron Baden Powell, ('/b//eɪ//d//ən// /'/p//oʊ//əl/ BAYdən POHəl; 22 February 1857 – 8 January 1941) was a British Army officer, writer, founder and first Chief Scout of the world wide Scout Movement, and founder, with his sister Agnes, of the world wide Girl Guide/Girl Scout Movement. Baden Powell wrote the seminal work Scouting for Boys, which, with his previous 1899 book Aids to Scouting for N. C. Os and Men (intended for the military) captured the imagination of the boys of Britain and led to the creation of the Scout Movement. Educated at Charterhouse School, Baden Powell served in the British Army from 1876 until 1910 in India and Africa. In 1899, during the Second Boer War in South Africa, Baden Powell successfully defended the town in the Siege of Mafeking. Several of his books, written for military reconnaissance and scout training in his African years, were also read by boys. In August 1907, he held a demonstration camp, the Brownsea Island Scout camp, which is now seen as the beginning of Scouting. Based on his earlier books, particularly Aids to Scouting, he wrote Scouting for Boys, published in 1908 by Sir Arthur Pearson, for boy readership. In 1910 Baden Powell retired from the army and formed The Scout Association. The first Scout Rally was held at The Crystal Palace in 1909. Girls in Scout uniform attended, telling Baden Powell that they were the "Girl Scouts". In 1910, Baden Powell and his sister Agnes Baden Powell started the Girl Guide and Girl Scout organisation. In 1912 he married Olave St Clair Soames. He gave guidance to the Scout and Girl Guide movements until retiring in 1937. Baden Powell lived his last years in Nyeri, Kenya, where he died and was buried in 1941. His grave is a national monument.

In 1876, Baden Powell joined the 13th Hussars in India with the rank of lieutenant. In 1880 he was charged with the task of drawing maps of the Battle of Maiwand. He enhanced and honed his military scouting skills amidst the Zulu in the early 1880s in the Natal Province of South Africa, where his regiment had been posted, and where he was mentioned in dispatches. Baden Powell's skills impressed his superiors and in 1890 he was brevetted Major as military secretary and senior aide de camp to the Commander in Chief and Governor of Malta, his uncle General Sir Henry Augustus Smyth. In 1884 he published Reconnaissance and Scouting. Baden Powell returned to Africa in 1896, and served in the Second Matabele War, in the expedition to relieve British South Africa Company personnel under siege in Bulawayo. This was a formative experience for him not only because he commanded reconnaissance missions into enemy territory in the Matopos Hills, but because many of his later Boy Scout ideas took hold here. It was during this campaign that he first met and befriended the American scout Frederick Russell Burnham, who introduced Baden Powell to stories of the American Old West and woodcraft (i. e., Scoutcraft), and here that he was introduced to Montana Peaked version of a western cowboy hat, of which Stetson was a prolific manufacturer, and which also came to be known as a campaign hat and the many versatile and practical uses of a neckerchief. Uwini was sentenced to be shot by firing squad by a military court, a sentence Baden Powell confirmed. Baden Powell was cleared by a military court of inquiry, but the colonial civil authorities wanted a civil investigation and trial. Baden Powell later claimed he was "released without a stain on my character". After Rhodesia, Baden Powell served in the Fourth Ashanti War on the Gold Coast. In 1897, at the age of 40, he was brevetted colonel (the youngest colonel in the British Army) and given command of the 5th Dragoon Guards in India. A few years later he wrote a small manual, entitled Aids to Scouting, a summary of lectures he had given on the subject of military scouting, much of it a written explanation of the lessons he had learned from Burnham, to help train recruits.

Baden Powell returned to South Africa before the Second Boer War. Although instructed to maintain a mobile mounted force on the frontier with the Boer Republics, Baden Powell amassed stores and established a garrison at Mafeking. The subsequent Siege of Mafeking lasted 217 days. Although Baden Powell could have destroyed his stores and had sufficient forces to break out throughout much of the siege, especially since the Boers lacked adequate artillery to shell the town or its forces, he remained in the town to the point of his intended mounted soldiers eating their horses. The town had been surrounded by a Boer army, at times above 8,000 men. The siege of the small town received much attention from both the Boers and international media because Lord Edward Cecil, the son of the British Prime Minister, was besieged in the town. The garrison held out until relieved, in part thanks to cunning deceptions, many devised by Baden Powell. Fake minefields were planted and his soldiers pretended to avoid non existent barbed wire while moving between trenches. Baden Powell did much reconnaissance work himself. In one instance, noting that the Boers had not removed the rail line, Baden Powell loaded an armoured locomotive with sharpshooters and sent it down the rails into the heart of the Boer encampment and back again in a successful attack. However, in 2001, after subsequent research, Pakenham changed this view. During the siege, the Mafeking Cadet Corps of white boys below fighting age stood guard, carried messages, assisted in hospitals and so on, freeing grown men to fight. Baden Powell did not form the Cadet Corps himself, and there is no evidence that he took much notice of them during the Siege. However, he was sufficiently impressed with both their courage and the equanimity with which they performed their tasks to use them later as an object lesson in the first chapter of Scouting for Boys. The siege was lifted on 17 May 1900. Baden Powell was promoted to major general and became a national hero. However, British military commanders were more critical of his performance and even less impressed with his subsequent choices to again allow himself to be besieged. Baden Powell was given the role of organising the South African Constabulary, a colonial police force, Also during this appointment, Baden Powell selected the location of Catterick Garrison to replace Richmond Castle which was then the Headquarters of the Northumbrian Division. Baden Powell was a career cavalryman, but realised that cavalry was no match against the machine gun; however, his superiors, Kitchener and French, the latter also a career cavalryman, still regarded the cavalry as indispensable, with the result that cavalry was used in the First World War with little effect, yet the major item exported from Britain to Flanders during the War was horse fodder. In 1907, Baden Powell was promoted to Lieutenant General but was on the inactive list possibly at his request, for this was when the Scout Movement was starting to "move", and Baden Powell had his experimental camp on Brownsea Island (see below). On 19 February 1909, Baden Powell sailed in the SS Aragon via Portugal and Spain to South America, for what seems to have been just a holiday, a trip not related to either the Army or to Scouting. However, the Foreign Intelligence section in the Belfast Newsletter reported that when in March 1909 he visited Santiago de Chile for three days, "He was given a warmer reception than had ever been afforded a foreigner in South America." He sailed back in the RMS Danube by 1 May 1909. In 1910, aged 53, Baden Powell retired from the Army. Baden Powell wrote that this came from the King, which seems more likely, as the King had introduced the King's Scout Award in 1909 and Army officers held a Commission signed by the King, while Kitchener had nothing to do with the Scout Movement. In 1915, Baden Powell's book "My Adventures as a Spy" was published, which was interpreted as indicating that he had been active as a spy during that war.

Baden Powell's father often sketched caricatures of those present at meetings, while his maternal grandmother was also artistic. Baden Powell painted or sketched almost every day of his life, and with equal competence with either hand. Most of his works have a humorous or informative character.

In January 1912, Baden Powell was en route to New York on a Scouting World Tour, on the ocean liner , when he met Olave St Clair Soames. She was 23, while he was 55; they shared the same birthday, 22 February. They became engaged in September of the same year, causing a media sensation due to Baden Powell's fame. To avoid press intrusion, they married in private on 30 October 1912, at St. Peter's Church, Parkstone. 100,000 Scouts had each donated a penny (1d) to buy Baden Powell a wedding gift, a 20 h. p. Standard motor car (not the Rolls Royce they were presented in 1929). There is a display about their marriage inside St Peter's Church, Parkstone. The couple lived at Pax Hill near Bentley, Hampshire, named as such as it was bought on Armistice Day (11 November 1918). The Bentley house was a gift from her father. After they married, Baden Powell began to suffer persistent headaches which were only relieved when he left the bed he and his wife shared. The headaches were considered by his doctor to be psychosomatic and were treated with dream analysis. In 1939, they moved to a cottage he had commissioned in Nyeri, Kenya, near Mount Kenya, where he had previously been to recuperate. The small one room house, which he named Paxtu, was located on the grounds of the Outspan Hotel, owned by Eric Sherbrooke Walker, Baden Powell's first private secretary and one of the first Scout inspectors. Baden Powell and his wife were parents of Arthur Robert Peter (1913–1962), who succeeded his father in the barony; Heather Grace (1915–1986), who married John Hall King (1913–2004) and had two sons, the elder of whom, Michael, was drowned in the sinking of in 1966; and Betty St Clair (1917–2004). When Olave's sister Auriol Davidson (née Soames) died in 1919, Olave and Robert took her three daughters into their family and brought them up. Three of Baden Powell's many biographers comment on his sexuality; the first two (in 1979 and 1986) focused on his relationship with his close friend Kenneth McLaren. Tim Jeal's later (1989) biography discusses the relationship and finds no evidence that this friendship was erotic.

In 1937, Baden Powell was appointed to the Order of Merit, one of the most exclusive awards in the British honours system, and he was also awarded 28 decorations by foreign states, including the Grand Officer of the Portuguese Order of Christ, the Grand Commander of the Greek Order of the Redeemer (1920), the Commander of the French Légion d'honneur (1925), the First Class of the Hungarian Order of Merit (1929), the Grand Cross of the Order of the Dannebrog of Denmark, the Grand Cross of the Order of the White Lion, the Grand Cross of the Order of the Phoenix, and the Order of Polonia Restituta. The Silver Wolf Award was originally worn by Robert Baden Powell. The Bronze Wolf Award, the only distinction of the World Organization of the Scout Movement, awarded by the World Scout Committee for exceptional services to world Scouting, was first awarded to Baden Powell by a unanimous decision of the then International Committee on the day of the institution of the Bronze Wolf in Stockholm in 1935. He was also the first recipient of the Silver Buffalo Award in 1926, the highest award conferred by the Boy Scouts of America. In 1927, at the Swedish National Jamboree, he was awarded by the Österreichischer Pfadfinderbund with the "Großes Dankabzeichen des ÖPB. In 1931, Baden Powell received the highest award of the First Austrian Republic (Großes Ehrenzeichen der Republik am Bande) out of the hands of President Wilhelm Miklas. In 1931, Major Frederick Russell Burnham dedicated Mount Baden Powell in California to his old Scouting friend from forty years before. Today, their friendship is honoured in perpetuity with the dedication of the adjoining peak, Mount Burnham. Baden Powell was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize on numerous occasions, including 10 separate nominations in 1928. He was awarded the Wateler Peace Prize in 1937. In 2002, Baden Powell was named 13th in the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK wide vote. As part of the Scouting 2007 Centenary, Nepal renamed Urkema Peak to Baden Powell Peak. In June 2020, following the George Floyd protests in Britain and the removal of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council (BCP Council) announced that a statue of Baden Powell on Poole Quay would be removed temporarily for its protection, amid fears for its safety. Police believed it was on a list of monuments to be destroyed or removed, and that it was a target for protestors due to perceptions that Baden Powell had held homophobic and racist views. The statue was installed by the BCP Council in 2008. Following opposition to its removal, including from residents, and past and present scouts, some of whom camped nearby to ensure it stayed in place, BCP Council had the statue boarded up instead. Mark Howell, deputy leader of the BCP Council was quoted as saying, "It is our intention that the boarding is removed at the earliest, safe opportunity."

Actor Ron Moody portrays Baden Powell in the 1972–1973 miniseries The Edwardians.