THROUGH his manual of good citizenship, Scouting for Boys, Robert Baden-Powell encouraged young men to Be Prepared for any eventuality: runaway horses and trains, poisonous snakes, mad dogs and murderers, were all to be tackled with fervour, a selfless disregard for safety and a cheery smile.

Fast forward more than a century after its first publication in 1908, and the movement was facing a challenge even its illustrious founder could not have foreseen: promoting itself to an audience of 300 million people on the day the world awaited its first glimpse of a new royal baby.

It was the perfect PR opportunity: during her pregnancy the Duchess of Cambridge, an occasional but very real helper at a Scout group in Anglesey, had undertaken adult volunteer training at Great Tower Scout activity centre on the shores of Lake Windermere.

Asa Gurden of Askrigg, head of all the movements’ outdoor centres, had planned the day and accompanied the Duchess as she was put through her paces. Who better, then, to tell a global captive audience about the great Scouting adventure awaiting her new son, the heir to the throne?

BBC Television, Sky News, CBC, and television stations from Germany to New Zealand, India to Australia, Radio Five Live and a multitude of newspapers and magazines got the message: that if a Duchess, and now a young mother, with enormous demands on her time and energy, can find time to help out with a Scout group, so can they. That was the message Asa wanted to convey in the drive for more volunteers to cope with the year-on-year growth in membership.

But, significantly, he didn’t do it alone. Alongside and around him throughout the hectic days before and after the birth of the new prince, were groups of Explorer Scouts, trained not only in the traditional “hard” survival skills of fire-lighting and forest trekking, but also in the “soft” ones of public relations and communications.

“Young people are the heart of everything we do,”

says Asa. “It’s about developing and training them for the modern world.

“We want them to have confidence in themselves and that means being able to speak for the Scout movement in ways that were simply not possible, or even necessary, before the advent of the worldwide media.

“They tend to be confident anyway, so we’re really just giving them the tools. We teach them that journalists aren’t there to catch them out or be negative, and we train them to do interviews.

At times like this it really pays off. They can even earn badges for communication skills as well as for the traditional ones.”

It’s hardly surprising that Asa, 34, was himself a Cub and then a Scout, growing up in Oxford and attending Youlbury activity centre at Boar’s Hill, the longest-established in the country.

Now it’s one of nine such centres throughout the UK for which he has responsibility: when he took on the job eight years ago there were just four, which says something not only about his practical, management and development skills – all, he says, learnt through his scouting activities – but about the growth of the scout movement itself.

It certainly hasn’t been an unbridled success story. A recent survey put the organisation in the top ten of the most trusted in the country, but it was a reputation that had to be fought for, tooth and nail. Seen for decades as the natural home of white, middle-class, aspiring Sons of Empire, with a militaristic leaning and more rules and regulations than you could shake a stick at, it was an image of the Scouts that belied Baden-Powell’s radical views. Many people forget that the subtitle of Scouting for Boys was “A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship”. But perception, as so many organisations have learned to their cost, is all. If you don’t get the good stuff out there, the old images will become fixed in people’s minds.

Says Asa: “In 2002 there wasn’t a good feeling about Scouting. Our image was poor and numbers were falling. If we hadn’t done something drastic, the movement almost certainly would have failed. We set out a ten-year plan and now we’re in our eighth consecutive year of growth. There are half-a-million Scouts in the UK alone, and a waiting list of 35,000. We must be getting something right.”

The statistics tell their own story: there were 18,500 recruits in 2002, 39,000 in 2012. There are 70 per cent more girls in the Scouts than there were at the start of the review, and there are groups for Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities. Asa’s wife, Gemma, is a development officer for the movement, working closely with, among others, Eastern European immigrants in the East Midlands.

If it ever was, the Scout movement is no longer the preserve of a privileged white elite, but has established groups in some of the most deprived areas of the country and the world.

It could not have done any of this without a change not only of direction, but of perception.

Baden-Powell might not have been able to precisely foresee the challenges the 21st century world would bring, but the tools he gave to generations of young people, and probably a future king, have been sharply honed for the future.

  • Volunteering doesn’t have to be an ongoing, week-byweek commitment. Lots of different skills are in demand, there’s no age limit and training is given. Visit www.scouts.org.uk/get-involved.