Somebody should wrap BP’s coffin in copper wire and furnish energy to the world.
Tim Jeal’s exhaustive biography of B-P, The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell, was published in 1990. He speculated that B-P could have been a repressed homosexual. Jeal's conclusion was shared by some biographers and disputed by others, but has not yet been examined in any detail by scholars.
1. His father was an Anglican minister. He died when B-P was 3 years old. His widowed mother raised him along with 6 siblings. She was a strong woman who was determined that her children would succeed.
2. B-P had a very close friendship with Kenneth McLaren in their early army service years. McLaren would later marry and die while relatively young.
3. He had very few, if any, female friends over the course of his life.
4. There is no evidence of him ever having a romantic girl friend.
5. His record of correspondence showed apathy for the female body.
6. His record of correspondence showed a keen appreciation for the male body.
7. His record of correspondence with the headmaster of his old public school, Charterhouse School, included a request to see, again, a photo album of nude male students. (Such photos were taken in those days for medical evaluation of range of motion of the limbs, to assess spinal alignment (detect scoliosis) and polio development. This was done for males and females, and was part of medical training in orthopedics and pediatrics and was a standard of medical practice. It was done in the U.S. starting in the 1880’s in the Ivy League colleges. Charterhouse was a school for the affluent.)
8. As a child, his sense of dramatics was encouraged which developed into a fondness for acting out skits and plays.
9. He was especially fond of the play/book, “Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up” which appeared in 1904.
10. He married Olave St Clair Soames in 1912 when he was 55 and she was 23 (5 years after he founded the Scouting movement in the UK.) Her father thought B-P led her own in hopes of marriage. The evidence does not indicate B-P behaved improprely. Her father would have publicly humiliated B-P had B-P not married his daughter.
11. The evidence suggested that their marriage was not romantically passionate.
12. After siring 3 children with Olave, he arranged separate bedrooms for Olave and him in their home for the rest of his life.
13. It’s been 10+ years since I read this book. I recall an account which happened in the earlier years of Scouting in the U.K. B-P was pioneering the start of a long term encampment for boys (i.e., summer camp) and training center for adult volunteers. His friend, William McLaren, purchased the Cranshaw estate in Sewardstonebury, Epping Forest, close to Chingford, London. He went on to donate the property to the Scout Association in 1919. This property became known as Gilwell Park and is still in use today. Anyway, there were several incidents in the 1920s at Gilwell Park where adult Scouters sexually molested youth Scouts during encampments. This problem has plagued Scouting since its earliest days.