Heritage - Mafeking and the Boy Messengers
| Category: | Scouting Heritage |
|---|---|
| Notes: | For any meeting, or as a lead-in to the Brownsea Island minute. Keeps the focus on the cadets' responsibility rather than on the war itself. Part of a series on Scouting heritage - see the other heritage minutes in this category. |
Long before there was any such thing as a Scout, there was a town in South Africa called Mafeking. In 1899, during a war, the town was surrounded and cut off. The siege lasted 217 days. The officer in charge of defending it was Robert Baden-Powell.
Baden-Powell had a problem. He needed every grown man he had to help defend the town. But someone still had to carry messages from one post to another, deliver mail, and keep watch. So he turned to the town's boys.
They formed a group called the Mafeking Cadet Corps, boys around twelve to fifteen years old, led by one of their own, a thirteen-year-old sergeant-major. They rode bicycles across town carrying messages, sometimes while the town was under fire. As the story is told, Baden-Powell once warned a cadet that he'd be hit if he kept riding through such danger, and the boy answered that he pedaled too fast to be caught.
What stuck with Baden-Powell wasn't the danger. It was what those boys proved: that young people, given real responsibility and trusted to handle it, can do far more than adults expect of them.
He never forgot that. A few years later, when he started Scouting, that idea was at the center of it. Scouts would lead their own patrols. They would be trusted with real jobs. They would rise to meet them.
Every time a patrol leader in this troop runs a campout, or a young Scout teaches a skill, that idea from Mafeking is still at work.