‘Another naughty scout-master’, remarks Lord Sebastian Flyte to Charles Ryder as they sit with the Sunday papers in the colonnade at Brideshead. The lamented Bobby Corbett, Christ Church chum of Auberon Waugh (himself a Wolf Cub troop leader in his day), used to echo this line over breakfast at Rowallan in Ayrshire, when he would tease his father, the 1st Lord Rowallan, Chief Scout of the British Commonwealth and Empire: ‘Wouldn’t read the News of the World, if I were you, this morning, Daddy.’

Lord Rowallan’s predecessor, Lieutenant-General the 1st Lord Baden-Powell, who founded the Scout Movement 100 years ago with an experimental camp for twenty boys on Brownsea Island off the Dorset coast, has been subjected to some rough debunking since his death in 1941. Yet his legacies are impressive: the Scout Movement