The beauty of listening to oral histories is sometimes you don’t get what you are expecting. I was given the recordings of Mr. William Hall, retired surveyor and engineer for Bedlingtonshire Urban District Council to transcribe. Given Mr. Hall’s former occupation I was expecting information about local mines, possibly the railways and something about the Council too. What I did not expect was to learn about the early days of the Scouting movement in the region.
It was 1908 that he read ‘Scouting for Boys’ by Robert Baden-Powell (founder of the Scouts movement, who Mr. Hall refers to as BP throughout the recordings). He had bought a copy for a shilling on the way home from school one day. Within a week, William and his friends had assembled themselves into a troop. The uniform included blue short-shorts, green jerseys, waistcoats insulated with corrugated card to keep warm even in the winter and scarfs that he made with the help of his grandmother, selling them for tuppence. They would parade at 8 am and march off towards Hartford at 8.30. This was before there was any formal organisation, having read the book was sufficient. Each member read the book that Mr. Hall had bought; extracts were shared amongst troop members.
The 1st Bedlington troop had 7 members and they called themselves the ‘wolf patrol’, within a month there was a 2nd troop which became the ‘peewit patrol’. A junior patrol, ‘the otters’, was also created for those aged about 10, usually those with an older brother who was already a member. Other troops started up soon after in Ashington, Nedderton village, Blyth and later Morpeth.
By 1910, with a growing number of troops a meeting with local citizens was held to discuss the aims of Scouting. This was the beginnings of a formal movement in the County; a Local Association was formed and Mr. Hall was appointed organising secretary of what was known as the Tynemouth Rural District. Mr. Hall talks proudly of speaking with BP when he inspected troops on Newcastle’s Town Moor in 1916 and discovering that he had been a scout longer than the Newcastle members. By the time they met again, whilst Mr. Hall was attending the 1931 international jamboree in Kandersteg, Switzerland, BP recognised him and referred to him as “the old hand”!.