Lord Baden Powell attends scout training at Otimia during his visit to New Zealand in February 1935. Photo / NZ Herald
This year's Anzac Day services will be eerie affairs. They'll be silent, mostly private, with online gatherings instead of the usual bands, medals on veterans' / grandchildren's chests, uniformed figures at the corners of cenotaphs, the singing that sometimes reminds you of wind in power lines.
But if you think back to Anzac Days before the world stayed home, you may remember troops of young people in a different uniform. It's a uniform that still resembles the one I wore 60 years back. I'm talking about the members of Scouts NZ.
Indeed, it's six decades since I turned my back on being Loyal and Helpful, Brotherly, Courteous and Kind. That was when I left the Napier Trinity Boy Scout Troop. I'd been in Scouting all through the 1950s. A Wolf Cub first, in my green jersey and cap, squatting in a circle for the Grand Howl, chanting "Dyb! Dyb! Dyb! We'll Dob! Dob! Dob!" (Do Your Best and Do Our Best, as I'm sure you already knew.)
Then I moved to the Scouts, in their khaki shirts with epaulettes, triangular scarf (that was supposed to double as sling for broken limbs) that was held in place by a leather or cord ring gloriously called a woggle, knee-length socks with green garter tabs, and lemon-squeezer hat.
I began as a Tenderfoot. Oh, those frontier terms, most of them from the movement's founder and Boer War hero, Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell. B-P, as he came to be called by just about everyone, realised the potential of boys to be ... well, scouts (and runners and lookouts and first-aid helpers) during the South African War siege of Mafeking in 1899-1900, when his little garrison held off a much larger Boer force for 217 days. It made him an instant hero back home in the UK.
Writer, artist, soldier, backwoodsman, patriot (be honest – imperialist), and superb organiser, Baden-Powell was devoted to Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, from which lots of his movement's terminology ("pack....cubs.... tracking...." plus leaders called "Akela" and "Bagheera") came.
He was equally devoted to the need for regular bowel movements; Scouting For Boys insisted on the necessity for a daily "rear". Oh, and it also had a section warning me against something called "Beastliness". I never totally understood what Beastliness was, but B-P's accompanying sketch indicated it would make me skinny, hunched and a chain smoker.
I have to tell you the wondrous story of how he met his wife-to-be, Olive, who later founded the Girl Guide movement. B-P liked to think he could deduce a person's entire character from observing them. One day in a London street, he followed a young woman for a few minutes. He wrote subsequently that he could tell she was "sensible, thoughtful, alert, modest".
He followed a young woman?? "I was just trying to ascertain her character, constable." "Of course, sir. Now if you wouldn't mind accompanying me –"
In the Napier Trinity Troop, I moved up to be Patrol Second, then Patrol Leader. The ranks meant stripes on the pocket or badges on the sleeve and I was voracious for badges. I got my First Aid badge and my Handyman badge. Yes, I did, even though I still drive in screws with a hammer, and my first aid treatment would probably be similar. I got my Stargazer, Reader, Cook, Translator (as in Form 3 French), Naturalist (not as in clothes-free) and Swimmer badges. They, the attendant shirt, and my camp-fire blanket encrusted with similar tokens, disappeared decades ago. Pity: I could have made a killing on Antiques Roadshow.
Napier then had a population of just 20,000, with at least six scout troops: Trinity, Scinde, Napier South, Greendale, St Pat's (the movement crossed social boundaries but not necessarily religious ones). The seaside suburb of Westshore had a Sea Scout Troop, in navy-blue uniforms and sailor hats. Places like Whenuapai and Wigram even had Air Scouts, whose leaders were rumoured to sport RAF moustaches.
Our town also held several, separate Brownie and Girl Guide Troops. The latter wore jaunty blue berets and a matching uniform dress, often of startling brevity. It inflamed a Tenderloin – Tenderfoot, sorry – something awful.
Our Trinity Troop met every Friday from 6.30 – 8.30 pm, in a Church Hall near Napier's CBD, for an evening of knot-tying, limb-strapping, trail-laying through adjacent streets. We had a remarkable Scoutmaster. The term carried respect rather than implied mockery then, and Alan Masemann (he chose the scout name "Rua" in what must have been a startlingly progressive assertion of Kiwi identity for the 1950s) was a carpenter, a church elder, a man who made 30 disparate boys want to be useful, virtuous, even noble.
I learned things. Not just bandages and billy-boiling and making plaster casts of sheep hoof prints (true), but rituals, which every pre-adolescent boy loves, and how to get along with a range of socio-economic groups – even if that term hadn't been invented yet.
I had genuine adventures, especially on weekend or longer camps, where we learned how to handle the big, clumsy canvas tents. When I did my National Service Army training six years or so later, I startled our platoon sergeant by reminding him that tent guy-ropes needed slackening at night. You don't know why? Dear me.
I learned values as well, even if I didn't follow them much. The Scout Code "Trusty, Loyal and Helpful / Brotherly, Courteous, Kind / Obedient, Smiling and Thrifty / Pure as the rustling wind" may have scored an Epic Fail in scansion and rhyme, but it spoke to something, somewhere inside me.
Yet I faded out of Scouts as the 1960s got under way. Strange, because just a year before, I'd gone to the Pan-Pacific Jamboree at Auckland's Cornwall Park, along with 8000 others from most of those countries still coloured red on the map. Jamboree. Another great word, and one that Baden-Powell apparently invented. When asked why he called it that, he replied "What else could you call it?" Yes, he was a bit special.
My 1959 one was a week of marching, cooking over genuine campfires, bridge-building and flagpole raising contests, along with badge-swapping (mustn't forget the badge-swapping). The closing ceremony comprised an inflated, jingoistic, sentimental, sexist pageant of Empire, crammed with figures of medieval knights and Elizabethan heroes which left me aching with idealism. Plus there were still more badges for me to get.
But during the following summer, someone invented girls. In their floral cotton skirts, cardigans and white ankle-socks, they promenaded up and down Napier's Emerson St on Friday nights, the same time as our Scout meetings. What chance did idealism have against hormones? I drifted away.
So have others. Scouting numbers declined, like those of all youth groups, as we morphed into a less communal and biddable, more fragmented and challenging society – one that may well alter course and character after this year's lockdown. Scandals like those in the US this year, with multiple claims of sexual abuse by leaders, have seen that country's Scout movement file for partial bankruptcy, while its numbers sink and sink.
Donald Trump's 2017 speech to thousands of them at a jamboree probably didn't help much, either. He told rambling anecdotes about how to get rich while you're young and jibed that Barack Obama had never attended such a rally (Obama actually spoke to jamborees twice – admittedly by video-link).
But Scouts NZ emphatically continues, with more than 400 troops and some 20,000 members, male and female, aged 5-26. The names for the age groups remain wonderfully resonant – Keas, Cubs, Scouts, Venturers, Rovers. Dan Carter was one, not all that long ago. So was Ed Hillary, all that long ago.
They're always keen to get new members and / or leaders. I'm sure they won't mind if I say that you can contact them on (04) 815 9260, or at reception@scouts.nz. And when we can move around the country again, don't miss their museum in Kaiapoi.
As I say, a whole lot of them have been at Anzac services in past years. They will be there again in the future. Their values remain liberal and laudable; I wish them all the very best of lives. If I were a geological era younger and could be sure they still have lots of badges, I'd join in a flash.
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