The Wolf That Never Sleeps E-Book

Walter Hansen

• Herausgeber: Spurbuchverlag
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 253

Beschreibung

Impeesa – The Wolf That Never Sleeps This was one of the respectful nicknames of an extraordinary man whose ideas became the cornerstone for a worldwide movement. A love of peace, a willingness to lend a hand, a sense of duty and a bond with nature are the mainstays of the Scout Movement, "whose remarkable growth has surprised its promoters as much as its outside sympathisers," said its founder, Lord Baden-Powell. This modern biography tells the impressive story of the adventurous life of this astonishing man. scouting

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1. print run octobre 2017

The Wolf that never sleeps - the adventurous life of Robert Baden-Powell

The founder of the Scout Movement

Walter Hansen

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Table of contents

The Wolf That Never Sleeps

Preface by Hartmut Keyler

The Scouts and Me

By Walter Hansen

Introduction

Nicknames, Swear Words, Orders, Honors

Childhood and Youth

Adventurer, Artist, Scientist

The Wilderness of Hyde Park

In the Jungle of the Big City

Scout for the first Time

Ship in Distress

Never give up the Ship!

Fairness and Stubborness

The Mentor: a Devil of a good Fellow

Africa in front of the College Gate

Actors and Ballad Singers

A great Embarrassment

Splendid Success

Adventures and Experiences

Fairyland, World of Wonders and Masquerade Ball

The eagerly awaited Land: a Powder Keg

Drilling, Signalling, Tactics and Ballistics

The Story of a young Scout

Expeditions into the Indian Quarter

Hunting with Pencil and Paper

The System of small Groups

A Horse that needs no Food

The Lonely Ride to Afghanistan

The Horrors of War

The Pirates and the General

Escaping a Blaze of Gunfire

Starting Shot at Midnight

The Story of the Glove

Hering’s Park and Base Wallah

Boers, Slaves and Gold Diggers

Westward along the Drakensberg

Guest in the Kraal of the Zulus

The Death of the little Zulu Girl

Ingonyama – gonyama

The Pathmarks

The Hiding Place of the Chief

The black King and the Gallows Bird

Her Majesty’s Secret Agent

The Man with the wide Hat

The Krobos: Secret Society on the Gold Coast

The Wolf that doesn’t sleep

Sherlock Holmes

The Medicine Man

The Boer War

Trapped

The Boys of Mafeking

Attack and Liberation

The War Hero who was declared dead

Boy Scouting

“I don’t want to be a War Hero”

The Key

Purpose, Principles, Methods

Scout Lily, Motto, Promise and Law

Greeting, Whistle and System of Small Groups

Totem Animal, good Deed, Patron and Jamboree

An Audience with the King

The first Scout Camp

“A Boy is not a Stay-at-Home”

The Pied Piper of Hameln

A bomb – into the heart of the retired general

The Evil Rumor

The Lord of Gilwell

Fear of War – Premonition of Death

The last Messages

The Heritage

Scouting today

The Wolf That Never Sleeps

Preface by Hartmut Keyler

I certainly do not doubt that Robert Baden Powell, with the founding of the world’s largest youth organization, is one of the outstanding personalities of the twentieth century because he envisaged an educational goal that was closely related to his personal life experiences, because he found a method to achieve this goal and because he was able to successfully apply this method during his lifetime.

One tried to approach his adventurous life story. His invention of the scout movement was regarded as an ingenious breakthrough. Anecdotes have been circulated, reported, interpreted, poeticized and heroized, even fabulated – depending on desire, inclination or alleged need.

My friend Walter Hansen, an old scout, renowned writer, youth book award-winner and committed investigator, recognized the connections between the life and work of Baden-Powell.

We studied sources for hours and tried to separate essential details from marginal ones - it was an interesting and exciting collaboration.

Above all, Walter Hansen has achieved something few authors had achieved before: he penetrated and worked through the history of Baden-Powell’s life and work in every chapter.

His style of writing appeals to young people in particular. I wish that many of them would read this book and be fascinated by the story of a personality that has presented millions of boys and girls with perspectives for their own lives.

Munich, August 2017

Hartmut Keyler

Member of the European Scout Committee 1968 – 1972 and 1977 – 1980

Member of the World Scout Committee 1971 – 1975 and 1985 – 1993

The Scouts and Me

By Walter Hansen

“You’re a Scout”, the publisher said to me, “and you’re a journalist and an author”. You wrote the biography of Lord Baden-Powell. So why don’t you write about what the Scout Movement means to you, about the role it plays in your life?”

All right then:

It all started with me and my friends at the age of around eleven years old, sitting in a field in front of a man who introduced himself as a Scoutmaster. He was wearing a green and yellow shirt with a sewed-on fleur-de-lis symbol, a neckerchief and an unusual, wide-rimmed hat – the traditional Scout hat I am sure you are familiar with. But none of us had ever seen a hat like this before. We though it was great. It conveyed a sense of adventure, trappers and red Indians – all at the same time The man with the hat told us about the Scouts, the biggest youth organisation in the world, which had been founded by the British general Baden-Powell, a war hero who turned into a freedom fighter. And who strongly believed that wars could only be avoided if young people were able to develop friendships across borders and if boys and girls were allowed to come into contact with each other as early as possible. And so he founded the international youth movement of Boy Scouts Girl Guides. Every Scout is the brother of all other Scouts!

A few weeks later I made the Scout promise in front of a huge campfire. The Scoutmaster said the following: „I hereby welcome you to the huge brotherhood of Scouts“. And today I still feel a connection to this big brotherhood. When I bump into a friend from back then and we greet each other from afar with the Scout whistle, I immediately relive the joy I experienced during my time as a Scout. There was so much to do and experience then!

We spent most of our time playing in fields, forests and in the mountains. We spent our holidays in tent camps. And in the process, we learned all about map reading, following tracks, making fire without matches, Morse code, meteorology, survival techniques, emergency signals, secret codes and more. We sang Scouting songs. We wrote short plays, put them on as theatre performances and acted in them ourselves. We met Scouts – boys and girls – from different countries and learned about one of the key principles of Scouting education: that differences in terms of nationality, race, religion, traditions and ideology are not a problem.

Finally, there is one particular success story from this time that I would like to talk about. Our geography teacher was working on an unusual doctoral thesis – a geologically annotated map of a mountain massif. On occasion he used to take pupils with him to help with the survey work. And he was completely bemused when I showed him that geographic north could not only be found with a compass and a set of survey instruments, or with the aid of the sun or Ursa Major in the night sky, but also by looking at the growth of moss on trees, beetle colonies under tree bark and distortions in the growth rings that can be seen on the stumps of felled trees. Or from the wind erosion in the mountains we were climbing in.

After graduating from high school in Germany, I studied at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. I became a journalist, editor and very soon head of department at big daily newspapers. Occasionally I went on reporting trips across countries like Turkey, Syria and Iraq. And Scouting came into play again here! In those days, anyone who travelled like me as a journalist to the Middle East was immediately introduced to the local „high society“. In particular, nearly all of the local politicians and industrialists were Scouts, as were the British and US diplomats. Whenever it somehow came out that I was a member of the Scouts, the warm hand of friendship was immediately extended to me – as if was „among brothers“ – and a special trust was offered that provided unique advantages for a journalist far away from home.

One day, I found out by chance that there was no Scout Book in Germany. So I set out to write one. I remembered back to my Scouting days, visited young Scouts in tent camps along with adults who had made the Scout promise and now worked either professionally or on a voluntary basis within the individual Scouting organisations. Straight away we used the informal German „du“ when addressing each other, extended our left hands for the Scout handshake, and all of them offered tips to help me with my book. I felt it clearly that there was a willingness to help, itself one of the most important virtues of a Scout. After spending a year researching the world of Scouting, it was a great pleasure to write „Das große Pfadfinderbuch“ (The Big Scout Book)

based on my own experiences and up-to-date information. It became a standard reference work and sold upwards of half a million copies.

My scouting skills, in particular my skills at map reading, proved invaluable to me when I toured the active volcanic regions of Iceland over the course of several summers armed with just a tent and a sleeping bag. One of Europe‘s last wilderness reserves, this is a wondrous world of volcanoes, solidified lava flows, sand deserts, glaciers and rivers that demanded a smart approach in order to navigate them in off-road vehicles. In these volcanic zones I searched for the sources of the Edda legends, following the paths of the writers who had recorded the tales of Northern mythology while wandering through this isolation and solitude many centuries ago. I then wrote my book „Asgard“ and a 16-page report for GEO magazine.

Since then, the books I have written have all covered a wide range of different and unconnected topics: Medieval knights for example, and Eugène François Vidocq, the inventor of criminology; the Minnesingers (who formed a tradition of lyric and song writing in Germany in the 12th–14th centuries) and Daniel Boone, the most famous trapper in the Wild West; survival techniques and Richard Wagner, the world-famous composer and a dazzling figure in cultural history; or the Thirty Years‘ War – and Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouting Movement.

When I researched Lord Baden-Powell and started writing about his utterly incredible adventures on three continents, about his philosophies and about his theory of education, I was particularly moved as a Scout. I learned at first hand how Baden-Powell had arrived at the understanding that more trust than is generally assumed should be placed in young people. How he evolved from a war hero to a friend and spokesperson for peace. And how his Scouting Movement conquered the whole world.

There is nothing more to say about my book. You are already holding a copy of it in your hands – I hope you enjoy reading it!

Introduction

Nicknames, Swear Words, Orders, Honors

Baden-Powell had four nicknames: Katankya – the man with the wide-rimmed hat. Larkwei – the man who holds his head high. Impeesa – the wolf that never sleeps. And Sherlock Holmes – because his powers of reasoning and acumen were indeed comparable to those of the famous fictional detective.

Some people also had many rude names for him. His enviers called him an over-protected child, a braggart and a megalomaniac, a dreamer with his head in the clouds, a vain peacock, a soldier of fortune or even the Pied Piper.

But Baden-Powell was completely adored by his supporters as an exemplary character, as a hero, an artist, a best-selling author and as one of the most significant youth educators of the 20th century. University professors described his educational system as brilliant.

He was not a good pupil at school. He only managed to get through secondary school by the skin of his teeth, but then failed the entrance exam required to study at the world-famous university of Oxford. But later on in life he received an honorary doctorate not only from this university, but also from the University of Toronto, and he was also made an honorary citizen of London and granted the title of a Lord.

He was one of the most-honoured personalities of his day, receiving the Order of the Bath, the Royal Victorian Order, the Order of the Garter, the Order of Merit, the Order of the Foreign Legion and many other decorations and medals.

Rumours have followed him around all of his life. Twice it was even claimed that he was dead. The first time, it was said that he had fallen as a hero aged 42 – bleeding to death as the victim of an assassination.

On another occasion, Fama reported that he had been executed in 1916 and hastily and informally buried outside a cemetery – as a traitor to be despised even beyond his death. The fact is that he died peacefully in 1941 at the age of 83. It is also a fact that six years after his death – in 1947 – a memorial stone was erected in his name in Westminster Abbey, which is one of the most venerable sites in England, a place where Kings and Queens are crowned and memorial stones bear inscriptions with some of the most famous names in the history of Great Britain, including William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, David Livingstone, Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton.

Baden-Powell’s first drawing of a Boy Scout

The man we are talking about here is Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, Lord of Gilwell. He is the founder of the Scouting Movement,

the biggest and most successful youth organisation in the world, a brotherhood that welcomes 48 million boys and 20 million girls in 178 – plus around 180 million former Scouts who made the Scout promise in their youth and will thus always remain members of the large brotherhood for the rest of their lives.

Since this youth organisation was first founded there has been a total of some 250 million Scouts around the entire world, including significant and famous personalities, artists, sportsmen, scientists and politicians. Most US presidents, members of European ruling families or astronauts are or have been at some point in their lives a member of the Scouts – including, for example, John F. Kennedy, King Carl Gustaf XVI of Sweden or Neil Armstrong, who wore his World Scout Membership Badge under his space suit when he was the first man to set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Other prominent Scouts included Thor Heyerdahl, who made the adventurous journey from Peru to the Eastern Islands of Polynesia on a hand-built raft named Kon-Tiki in 1947; or Folke Graf Bernadotte, who was murdered in 1948 as a peace negotiator of the United Nations; or Werner Heisenberg, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933.

So who was this Lord Baden-Powell who founded the large brotherhood of the Scouts? Who was this man who responded with the same equanimity to all of these nicknames, the name-calling and the medals and honours?

Childhood and Youth

Adventurer, Artist, Scientist

In his temperament, the inherited talents of highly different ancestors were present. One of his forefathers was, for example, John Smyth of Willoughby (1579-1631), Captain of Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth of England, an adventurer, a seafarer and a hunter of legendary reputation who sailed to North America in 1606 on behalf of the British Crown, met with Indian warriors and escaped death at the stake in the very last second. Little is known of his immediate descendants, except that they had inherited the temper, the bravado and the thirst for adventure of old Smyth. More precise details are known about one of his great-grandchildren – the great-grandfather of Baden-Powell – who emigrated to North America around 1770, befriended Indians and returned to England, where he married an artistic painter. Four children emerged from this marriage, among them William Smyth, born in 1788, who became a navigator, the title of a royal admiral, and, like his father, took an artist to wife. His daughter, Henriette Grace, born in 1824, who was attractive and energetic, had devoted herself to charitable work in a London hospital for the poor, and in 1846 she married the 50-year-old HG Baden-Powell, a member of the royal society, professor of Theology and Geometry at the University of Oxford, a twice-widowed scholar and educator, who could stare at the faded paintings of serious-looking merchants, theologians and scholars in the ancestral gallery of his paternal manor.

Baden-Powell’s father, Professor Baden-Powell, in the academic gown as the Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford.

Baden-Powell’s mother Henrietta, Professor Powell’s third wife. She was a socially involved woman who always wanted the best for her children.

On February 22, 1857, the fourth child was born of this marriage: Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, freckle-faced, red-haired, with water-blue eyes, an animated boy who embodied, like no one else in the family, the combined propensities of his ancestors: adventurousness, uproariousness and wanderlust on the one hand, but also a tendency towards artistry, science, and charitable activity on the other. Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell lacked, however, the commercial talent of his paternal ancestors. Business talents, nevertheless, were in demand at this time, which was called the Victorian era.

The Wilderness of Hyde Park

The Victorian era, named after the Queen Victoria (1837-1901), was a glorious period for the merchant population, the complacent civil society. It was a period marked by the hunt for money and property, economic and political influence.

With many colonies, including in India, Afghanistan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Africa, Great Britain had developed into the world’s leading empire, but not without sacrifices. Wars threatened to break out everywhere. In 1856, the Crimean War with Russia, defined by heavy losses, had just ended, and a year later, in the year of Robert Baden-Powell’s birth, the indigenous troops mutinied in India. Bloodshed and massacres on both sides. In Africa, armed conflicts with rebellious natives and other colonial powers were to be feared.

There were domestic tensions between the upper classes and the poor, who had been left behind along the kingdom’s path to imperial majesty, who were densely crowded in slums, living in misery, suffering from hunger and dying as a result of relentless diseases and rampant epidemics.

Now, having been cornered, with their backs to the wall and facing despair, they began to fight back. They demanded more money, an organized health service, more doctors, more hospitals, decent housing, and they also insisted that their children learn to read and write, just like the sons and daughters of the wealthy. Moreover, they even dared to call for the twelve-hour workday, much to the indignation of many merchants who felt that a worker, even his children, should work every day for 14 and 16 hours and more, six days a week, or even seven.

Little Baden-Powell, well-guarded at his parents’ house along London’s Stanhope Street, did not notice, in his early childhood, the sea of urban poverty whose waves surged up against the islets of the fine quarters of London.

He was then called Ste, after his second name Stephenson, whom he owed to his godfather. By the way, this godfather was the son of Georg Stephenson, the famous railway pioneer and builder of steam locomotives.

Shortly after Ste’s third birthday, his then 64-year-old father died, and now Admiral Smyth – the grandfather, retired and 73 years old – began to serve as an educator. Grandfather Smyth was especially inclined to the little Ste, for he recognized the temperament of the grandchild as a mirror of his own desire for adventure as well as the longing for nature and for distant countries.

The Admiral could not offer his favorite grandchild the remote lands, the wilderness, the virgin forests and the jungles, but a hidden wilderness instead, a primeval forest: Hyde Park, London’s largest park, where cows and sheep grazed between trees und bushes in the middle of the city, where ducks and geese chattered in and where frogs quacked in ponds. For little Ste, this was indeed a wilderness, which he immediately began to explore.

He and his grandfather left the gravel roads and ventured into the steppe-like pastures, into the jungle of trees and shrubs. In particular, he was keen on recognizing and pursuing animal trails, or observing the cows and sheep, ducks and geese from secret hiding places. Thereby, he saw some rather amazing things. One day, for example – he was around six years old – he noticed that the frogs before the beginning of a spell of fine weather only croaked in the evening, whereas they croaked during day if bad weather was on its way. Thereafter, he surprised his grandfather with reliable meteorological forecasts.

With 18 years of age painted Baden-Powell this watercolor painting, which depicts his school and its surroundings.

Under the guidance of his grandfather, Ste drew a map of Hyde Park with all its paths, ponds, trees and bushes, the breeding grounds for the birds and the preferred grazing areas of the cows and sheep.

His talent for drawing was striking. At home, he illustrated from memory the animals of Hyde Parks, as well as the people who had met them there. Indeed, in every detail. Thereby, he used both hands simultaneously: with the right hand, he drew the lines, with the left, the nuances of the shadows. Relying on his vivid imagination, he portrayed Indians and trappers, for his grandfather told him before going to bed adventurous stories from the Wild West, about Chief Tecumseh, for example, who fought for the freedom of the Indians and lost his life, or about Daniel Boone, the legendary trapper and explorer of Kentucky, as described by the author James Fenixo Cooper in his Leatherstocking Tales of the protagonist Natty Bumppo.

From these Leatherstocking Tales of the last of the Mohicans, of the savage or of the scout, Adam Smyth had to read aloud, but he did not forget to tell the grandson that the romanticism of the Wild West was long gone, that the Indians were almost exterminated, that they had to live in reservations – and that the white man even penetrated the reservations to plunder land treasures. Another book – a bestseller of his time – was Oliver Twist, written in 1839 by the English poet Charles Dickens. Grandfather Smyth read the story of a boy – Oliver Twist – who grew up as an orphan in truly miserable quarters, wandering around alleyways, always hungry, always humbled, until he fell into the hands of big city gangsters and, thanks to a wonderful coincidence, found his way out of this mess.

Pages of an album showing material from Baden-Powell’s youth, including early examples of his talent.

“Are there still such poor children today?” asked Ste. The admiral nodded. “Even today? The book is many years old! “ “Even today, more than ever before.”

Ste just could not believe it, for he had descended from a well-to-do family, having grown up in a distinguished quarter of London. How it looked behind the glamorous backdrops of the Victorian era, he had no idea. He only knew the wilderness of the Hyde Park. He had not yet become acquainted with the jungle of the big city.

That changed when his grandfather died in 1865. Driven by his irresistible hunger to learn, Ste made an adventurous trip into the notorious city districts in his seventh and eighth years of life: the London slums.

In the Jungle of the Big City

In London, the affluent neighborhoods and the slums were often separated from one another by merely a single boulevard, and it was easy for Ste to enter into the adventure land of the slums: those nooks and crannies full of warped, dilapidated houses; into the alleyways, which were so narrow that, even during the daytime, darkness descended upon them similar to nightfall. In order to re-emerge from the labyrinth of gorges and gullies, he used to memorize the intersections, the shapes of unusual street corners, archways, drawings on soot-smeared walls and other peculiarities. The more infamous areas of the time were Ratcliff Highway, St. Giles, Rosemary Lane or Seven Dials. They confronted the boy from the fine neighborhood with a strange, exotic world – the exoticism of the social difference. It smelt of alcohol, soot, and exhalations of all kinds, for there was no sewage system at that time. The mud of stinking broths clogged the gutters. Pale women gazed out of black windows. Children in rags stood everywhere. Outside the houses, sat slackers: the unemployed, who were staring emptily into space; crooks looking for victims; drinkers with glassy eyes.

Like a reporter, Ste explored the slums. He noted that in many houses up to one hundred people lived, families with children were crammed together as in sardine cans. He also learned that there were houses in which the guests due to the sheer lack of space could not even lie down to sleep. These houses were called penny hangs, because ropes were strained there, in whose loops hung people were allowed to sleep for one penny for a night. In the moldy, mildewed houses without air and without light, the people were terminally ill, they infected each other with lung diseases and epidemic ailments.

They also died of harmless diseases, however, because they had far too little access to doctors, far too few hospitals, and they could not afford to buy medicines. They hardly even had the strength to survive a cough. Most starved – and many died indeed of hunger in the middle of the city, a stone’s throw from the finest boulevards.

Ste became acquainted with children in his age who were already trained pickpockets. He heard of robbery, of murder, of all kinds of crimes, which had never been investigated. It was commonplace, for the detectives of Scotland Yard hardly dared to enter the slums, and once they appeared, they faced a fearful wall of silence.

Only a few people trapped in that misery had a regular job, and it was usually work without hope: they worked 14 and 16 hours a day – and they earned so little that they would never really get a chance to escape from this milieu. On occasion, he saw men of better circles, recognizable by their clothes, scurrying through the alleyways, disappearing into houses to do dark business, to immerse into secret amusement, to attend a fighting between two dogs, or a dog and thirty rats in predator cages positioned by enterprising businessmen in the backyards. High bets were placed there on the victory or defeat of the fighting dogs.

The people in those slums were recognizable by clothes which, being torn and ragged and dreadfully wrinkled, could hardly be regarded as clothes. The men wore gray trousers, gray jackets, gray open shirts, the women gray skirts, gray coats, gray open blouses. Children were wrapped in gray rags. It was a gray uniform of poverty, which identified everyone who wore them as members of the lower class.

Ste always breathed a sigh of relief when emerging from his safari through the slums and returning to the broad streets and boulevards of his fine neighborhood. Even the clothing made it clear that this was another world. The men wore gray-striped piping pants, colorful waistcoats, white shirts with crochet collars, neckties or silk trousers, green or gray robes, cylinders made of silk felts and walking sticks with silver knobs. The dresses of the women were usually black, sometimes also in pastel colors, very narrow, buttoned up to the neck and with a sweeping form below. It was considered a fine thing to wear a so-called crinoline under the skirt, a hoop, which shaped the skirt from the waist downwards like a cone. Scoffers of the puritan and partly mendacious values of that era noticed that the crinolines made it nearly impossible to – in the truest sense of the word – get close to a woman in sophisticated circles.

The children were mostly dressed as adults. Little girls wore high-necked, ankle-length clothes and crinolines, even when they were playing. For younger boys, there were the mascot suits, white and blue, with hats, jackets, and knee breeches – attire which was loathed because it was not supposed to get dirty at all. Older boys were dressed similar to their fathers: tubular pants, frock coat, stand-up collar – buttoned up to the very top.

The clothing of the rich – it was also a uniform, a sign of the upper class.

Ste wanted to change everything someday. It occurred to him that all men should be dressed in the same way so that they could no longer be recognized as rich and poor. He wanted to abolish the contrast between the wealthy and the impoverished completely. At eight, he formulated “The law for the time when I am older.” It said, “I will ensure that the poor will be just as rich as we are. We should pray to God every day, as often as we can. But praying alone is no use, you have to actually do good.” Great tones for a small boy of eight years. Indeed, great goals. He did not reach them. But he contributed decisively to setting such goals and gradually approaching them. Many years later, when he founded the Scouting Movement, his new method of education raged like a whirlwind across the dusty landscape of prevailing pedagogics.