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Read by Anthony Cassidy :-

I only got to know Robert during the past 20 years when he and Patience moved to Albury. Therefore, when he very rashly asked me to deliver his eulogy, I agreed, but on one condition – that we composed it together. I therefore ask you to accept that I have, in effect, been little more than his ghost-writer, and that today my role is pretty much one of being the narrator of his story – and a remarkable story it is.

On 15th October 1936, in a small mining town on the outskirts of Johannesburg, Robert Crause Baden-Powell was born, the eldest grandson of the great man himself, the First Chief Scout. Whilst Robert was downright dismissive of his own mother, and of his father,[1] circumstances enabled him to spend special time with both pairs of grandparents.[2] Particularly, for some months, when his mother, who had already lost one baby in childbirth, was preparing to deliver a second son, Michael. His sister, Wendy, was safely delivered 3 years later.

When with his adoring and adored grandparents, there was never a dull moment as all four of them positively enjoyed answering Robert’s endless stream of questions. His parents, on the other hand, were much more inclined to shout “Oh, Robert, do shut up”. He always felt that the exciting times spent with his grandparents was to prove hugely influential on the way he would come to live his life.

When 10 years old, Robert was despatched home to the UK to be educated; first at Dane Court, a disastrous Prep School that soon collapsed, then Edgeborough, which he loved, before going on to Bryanston. It was at Dane Court that he first applied to join the Scouts[3], but, and this you may find hard to believe, he was rejected - on the grounds that he proved incapable of lighting a fire. Instead, he joined the Sea Cadets.

Probably due to his lack of early grounding in the 3 Rs, Robert’s academic career was never distinguished, but he demonstrated that he had an excellent memory and a mind that was endlessly enquiring. The latter, he used to say, was in his genes.

His great grandfather, known within the family as the Reverend Professor[4], was the foremost mathematician of his day; the Savillian Professor of Mathematics at Oxford; and the inventor of the binary scale; and we all know the extraordinary story of his grandfather, the First Chief Scout. Interestingly, Robert did say of the great man, that, quite possibly, he became great because he had to over-achieve to match the high expectations of his mother and brilliant father.[5]

To my mind, that was an interesting observation, because my conviction is that if only Robert had been subjected to a more ordered family life, and a much more disciplined education – such as he might have received at Wellington or Marlborough,[6] followed by Oxbridge, then he too would have been capable of great things.

For instance, at Bryanston, a very liberal school, Robert’s grandmother had paid for him to have viola lessons rather than his preferred option – the piano; so Robert, true to form, taught himself. Furthermore, in later years, he also taught himself to play the organ – no mean feat, and he was often to be heard playing to a high standard on the organ in the chapel of the Mercers’ Company, the Livery Company of which he was a Liveryman and his grandfather had been Master.

During school holidays, Robert used to head west to join the Copeland family at Trelissick[7], their splendid home, now National Trust, overlooking the mouth of the Fal Estuary in Cornwall. Ronald and Ida Copeland[8] had started the Scouts and Guides in Staffordshire and, over time, they had become good friends of Robert’s grandfather. Robert liked to tell the story of how, at dinner, he was required to sit, freshly bathed, in his pyjamas and dressing gown amongst the grandees in their black ties and evening gowns. If and when silence prevailed for more than a moment, Ida Copeland would shout “Utter, child, utter”. A hard call for any youngster, but one evening Robert brought the habit to an abrupt end. When the cry next came, “Utter, child, utter”, Robert responded by telling a typically smutty prep school joke – quite unrepeatable here. It was a classic B-P moment. Unsurprisingly, he was despatched to early bed in the servants’ quarters, but thereafter the cry “utter, child, utter” passed into history.

All this may help us to recognise that Robert’s upbringing was not that of your ordinary young man – separated from his immediate family, and the grandparents he loved,[9] he emerged undisciplined, strong-willed, stubborn, impulsive and forever inquisitive - never settling to concentrate on any single subject.

Also, it helps to explain why he opted to do his National Service in the Royal Navy. Here, after a series of IQ tests, one of which was accidentally included twice, Able Seaman Baden-Powell was deemed too bright to cook and peel spuds. Instead, he was appointed Leading Radar Mechanic and posted to HMS Bulwark, which was experiencing severe problems with its radar systems – largely, it seems, because aircraft flying speeds had increased beyond the capabilities of the set. Whilst Robert thoroughly enjoyed being able to dash up to the bridge and ask the captain for a fly past of Gannets and Seahawks so that he could test his latest modification, he freely admitted that he never succeeded in getting the systems to work. His time in National Service included the Suez crisis, and HMS Bulwark was heavily involved transporting supplies between Portsmouth, Alexandria and Malta. For Robert, these were happy days.[10]

After National Service, Robert flitted opportunistically between one type of work and another until he found something he enjoyed doing. So it was that, after spells in car sales; joining the BBC as a studio manager; owning a number of off-licences;[11] and acting as a driving instructor; he recognised that he was a good salesman and that, on occasions, his name had a value.^11[12]

And so it was that, when asked by a friend of his father to join his small firm in The City, Robert agreed and for the next 25 years much enjoyed the life and the people he met. When he joined Marshalls, the leading firm of money brokers in the City, he discovered that his natural talent lay in raising money from banks, Lloyd’s agents and other City institutions that were flush with cash – money that in the main was then channelled by him to become loans to local authorities all over the UK.[13] He also proved that he had a good eye for spotting shares that were undervalued on the Stock Market, and it was on the strength of this that he was invited to join the boards of a number of City institutions, amongst others, the Bolton Building Society and the City Share Investment Trust.

On his father’s death on 2nd December 1962, Robert succeeded to the titles,[14] and he became a regular attendee at the House of Lords. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his maiden speech concerned the imposition of sanctions on Rhodesia.[15] Over time, however, whilst enjoying the Lords as a jolly nice club and an intelligent talking shop where he mixed with many brilliant people, he found that attending the House and earning a living proved incompatible, and his attendance fell sharply because it had to.[16]

Robert enjoyed being a grandee, but freely admitted to feeling a bit of a fraud when institutions appointed him to their boards, often as President, simply because of his name, and he quickly ceased agreeing to such appointments.¹¹ On the other hand, posterity will record his unfailing willingness to undertake much voluntary work for charities and associations involving his favourite concerns – young people and animals – too many to detail now, but one should record that he was Vice President of the Scouting Association for some 34 years.

In fact, it wasn’t until 1964, when Robert was 28, that he first became involved with the scout movement. At the time, he happened to be lodging with a retired policeman who was a Scout Leader. He ran a camp on an island and needed someone to help him to maintain the boats and be willing to stay overnight on the island with the scouts. Robert applied for the necessary Leader’s Warrant, but his application was spotted by the then Chief Scout, Sir “Chips” McLean, who immediately recognised the potential from having Lord Baden-Powell as one of his Commissioners.

Robert agreed, stating plainly that he would give the Scouts 25 years. As a Commissioner, he also became a Headquarter Speaker. This required him to speak all over the country and in Europe, keeping associations motivated and abreast of latest developments in the Scouts movement. Sensibly, he attended a public speaking course.

Just as well, as there was one year when he performed his oratorical duties 51 weekends out of 52. His greatest speaking challenge, totally self-imposed, of course, was to travel to Holland one weekend to address Scouting Nederland when they were launching a joint scouts/guides movement in Holland. He delivered it in Dutch!

Time for a hymn

Part 2

It was in 1964 that Robert met Patience - again. I say again, because they had met once before, in Rhodesia when both were 5 years old. On this latter occasion, Robert had been down staying with his mother near Farnham.

 

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