David Hill: Scouts may raise a snigger, but their honour is admirable

Which English-language book has sold more copies in the last century than anything except the Bible?

Scouting for Boys, the handbook of the Boy Scout movement, which was first published 97 years ago next week.

The first instalment hit bookshops on January 24, 1908. (The book came out in six parts - publishers feared it might not sell, and wanted to cut their losses.)

By year's end, it had been reprinted seven times.

Soldier, painter, Boer War hero and puritan Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell - the Scout movement called him BP - adapted his book from an army manual. Almost 100 years later, the movement he began is still the world's pre-eminent youth organisation.

There are an estimated 28 million Scouts, Cubs, Keas, Girl Guides, Pippins, Rangers, Rovers and other subdivisions in 216 countries and territories.

The organisation has been criticised as militaristic, sexually repressive and that it fosters a pack mentality, but numbers keep growing. New Zealand has 23,000 members.

Scouting has just been re-established in Iraq. Former Scout Neil Armstrong took a badge to the moon.

Baden-Powell started the Scout movement out of Edwardian upper-class concern at the idle, unhealthy lifestyle of so many British boys. He wanted to lift their physical and mental levels, for their sake and for the sake of the Empire.

At a camp on Brownsea Island, Dorset, in 1907, 20 boys from a cross-section of British society were divided into patrols identified by coloured shoulder cords, and spent a week learning bushcraft, campfire songs and physical training.

It was a huge success. Baden-Powell received so many requests for information that he began writing Scouting for Boys.

I was in the Scouts for six years. Its appeal waned only when I discovered girls. I learned how to treat a broken arm, recognise certain stars, cook an eel on a stick, make a bridge, keep my lemon-squeezer hat in shape and wear socks with funny tabs. I'm still glad I belonged.

But do the Scouts have any relevance today, where society seems to have moved from paternalism to permissiveness, and where the term 'Scoutmaster' has sadly acquired sniggery overtones?

The group emphasis, patriotic and religious tones are still there, though much more low-key. Baden-Powell's own preoccupation with regular bowel movements has been discreetly dropped, along with his harangues against trashy books and lewd pictures.

Now, the movement has a mission statement: "Scouting is Education for Life". Those who join promise "with the help of my God, to be true to myself, to do my best to help my country, and to live by the Guide/Scout Law".

That law emphasises honesty, friendliness, being a good team-member, taking responsibility, and caring for the environment. Any teacher would love to have such kids in his or her class.

Scouting has links with UN organisations that combat child labour and child prostitution. It has also moved with the times; it has the Jamboree (a big Scout knees-up) of the Air, and the Jamboree of the internet. For an essentially conservative organisation it is up with the play.

I'm an outsider now, but I find myself nodding approvingly at the way Scouting encourages boys to co-operate as well as compete; its mind-body health balance; its respect for the natural world.

I'm glad the lemon-squeezers have gone, but I'm sorry Scouts no longer learn how to make a plaster-cast of cow tracks.

Tim Jeal, in his biography of Baden-Powell, notes: "He subscribed to the Victorian-Edwardian belief that people could improve by choosing a virtuous course and rejecting baser urges."

The Scout promise of my era paraphrased that with a vow to work towards being "pure in thought, word and deed".

Nearly a century on, we might chuckle at such attitudes, but we'd love it if all our kids aspired to them.