Saturday, 27 June 2026

The First Chief Scout Baden-Powell 1857-1941 (43)


Who was the first chief scout?
It was Lieutenant-General Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell 1857-1941. Clearly a man of his time, he has subsequeently been criticised by later generations for some of his ideas.

Find South Africa on your globe

Discott, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons (modified)

Tell what you know of the cubs, brownies, scouts and guides
I was never a boy scout, although my mother was always quite keen to get me into a scout troop. She did not mange it for some reason. My sister was in the brownies and then the guides and did some of the various badges. It is a large and strange phenonemon still going and getting into the news from time to time when it is considered controversial.

Saturday, 20 June 2026

A Great Quaker Lady Elizabeth Fry 1780-1845 (40)


1. Which people did Elizabeth Fry want to help?
Purton decribes how Fry heard about Newgate prison and how badly women and children were treated there. She determined to try and help these rejected and forgotten people.
2. Why was the prisoner governor surprised?
Fry was a repsectable and demure woman but she wated to be amongst the dregs of society, women who had stolen and killed and who knows what else. Yet she wanted to be with them. (It is quite messianic and incarnational some extent).
3. What can you find out aboit the Quakers?
Quaker is a nickname given because one of their founders George Fox told a judge to quake before God. The Religious Society of Friends, originally known simply as the Society of Friends started as a restorationist denomination of Christians. They believe in each person's ability to be guided by the inward light to "make the witness of God" known to everyone. To differing extents, the Friends have avoided creeds and hierarchical strucures and so having begun as a broadly evangelical sect in the seventeenth century, by today all sorts of things are believed as the Bible has increasingly been left out of things.

Thursday, 18 June 2026

Robin Hood (24)


1. What do you know about Robin Hood?
Robin Hood to us ehis pseudonym appears to have been a crusader who when he returned to England lost lands he once had because of the policies of bad King John who was in power at the time, Richard I being absent. The story is that Robin lived in Sherwood Forest with a band of other outlaws who made their living by hunting the King's deer and robbing the rich. Men like Friar Tuck, Little John and Will Scarlet became almost as famouos as Robin himself, not forgetting Maid Marion too, of course.

2. Some of the outlaws





Saturday, 13 June 2026

And One More