ROBERT BADEN-POWELL'S SEXUAL ORIENTATION

While early biographies mentioned nothing on this subject, modern authors are persuaded that "[t]he available evidence points inexorably to the conclusion that Baden-Powell was a repressed homosexual." Gender studies scholar Geoffrey Bateman, summing up current scholarship, states that "Baden-Powell was probably a homosexual. Certainly, most of his life was spent in same-sex environments and his deepest emotional commitment was with another man."^[1]
Kenneth Morgan refers to Baden-Powell's "probable pederasty" as a character defect covered up by the media of his time.^[2] Nonetheless, despite his alleged attraction to youths, Baden-Powell is thought to always have remained chaste with his scouts, and he did not tolerate Scoutmasters who indulged in sexual 'escapades' with their charges.^[3]

Contents

Alleged erotic influences in his work

On his relationships with women

Footnotes

References

Alleged erotic influences in his work

Two modern biographers of Baden-Powell, Michael Rosenthal of Columbia University and Tim Jeal, consider him to have been a repressed homosexual. Tim Jeal's work, researched over five years, was published by Yale University Press and well-reviewed by the New York Times^[4] and other publications.^[5] As James Casada writes in his review for Library Journal, it is "a balanced, definitive assessment which so far transcends previous treatments as to make them almost meaningless."^[6]
For much of his life, Baden-Powell's closest friend was Kenneth McLaren, a boyish looking British Army officer whom Baden-Powell had grown fond of when they first served together in India. Baden-Powell called McLaren his "best friend in the world," and affectionately nicknamed him "the Boy."^[7] They remained close until McLaren chose to marry — against Baden-Powell's advice — a woman below his station. Their friendship was the cause of intense jealousy on the part of Baden-Powell's wife.^[8]
Along with many other pieces of evidence for his contention, Jeal mentions as illustrative an episode which occurred in November 1919. While on a visit to Charterhouse, his old public school, he stayed with an old friend, A. H. Tod, a bachelor teacher and housemaster who had taken large numbers of nude photographs of his pupils as part of a photographic record of public school life. Baden-Powell's diary entry about his stay reads: "Stayed with Tod. Tod's photos of naked boys and trees. Excellent." In a subsequent communication to Tod regarding starting up a Scout troop at the school, Baden-Powell mentions his impending return visit and adds: "Possibly I might get a further look at those wonderful photographs of yours."^[9]
Tod's pictures survived until the 1960s, when they were destroyed reportedly in order to "protect Tod's reputation."^[10] According to R. Jenkyns, the album contained nude boys in poses which were in his opinion "contrived and artificial."^[11] Neither Tod nor Powell's relations are suspected of being anything but chaste, and the pictures were in keeping with the contemporary tradition of male homoerotic art exemplified by Henry Scott Tuke's paintings, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden's photography, and others.
Jeal also mentions that Baden-Powell "…consistently praised the male body when naked and denigrated the female. At Gilwell Park, the Scouts' camping ground in Epping Forest, he always enjoyed watching the boys swimming naked, and would sometimes chat with them after they had just 'stripped off.'"^[12]
Despite his stated appreciation for the beauty of males Baden-Powell is not known to have acted on his suspected attraction with any of the boys, nor did he tolerate scoutmasters who indulged in sexual escapades with their charges, recommending flogging for such offenses.^[13] Indeed, he was adamant about the need to restrain the sexual impulse, especially in his communications with boys. He incorporated a graphic prohibition against masturbation in early scouting manuals (so graphic that Cox, his printer, refused to run the presses till the mention was watered down), and into his eighties carried on correspondences with individual Scouts exhorting them to control their urge for "self-abuse." He subscribed to the commonly held turn-of-the-century opinion that the practice led to disease, madness and sexual impotence. His views were not shared by all. Dr. F. W. W. Griffin, editor of ''The Scouter,'' wrote in 1930 in a book for Rover Scouts that the temptation to masturbate was "a quite natural stage of development" and steered scouts to a text by H. Havelock Ellis that held that "the effort to achieve complete abstinence was a very serious error."^[14]
Baden-Powell regarded the body as the best example of the beauty of nature, and with that of God, the creator: "A clean young man in his prime of health and strength is the finest creature God has made in the world." This is conformal with a lot of his other writing in which he stressed the important of being healthy and strong. As an example he told about some Swazi chiefs with whom he met some gymnastic instructors. The chiefs were not fully satisfied until they had had the men stripped and had examined themselves their muscular development. This can be compared with the masculine culture for instance of weightlifters. In contrary, Baden-Powell never wrote or made drawings (he was a good amateur-artist) about males in a sense which can be regarded as erotic.^[15]

On his relationships with women

At age fifty-five, and despite his frequently-expressed horror of the female body (in contrast to his appreciation for male ones, which he admired and found "clean"){cite}, Baden-Powell married twenty-three-year-old Olave St Clair Soames. To please her husband Olave flattened her breasts, cut her hair, and wore her scout-like Guide uniform;{cite - what's the relevance of the Chief Guide wearing her uniform?}^[16] "With every hint of sex removed from a relationship he [Baden-Powell] could get on reasonably well with women."{cite} Nevertheless, shortly after the marriage Baden-Powell began to suffer from agonizing headaches; these left him abruptly two years after the birth of their third child he began sleeping apart from his wife, on a balcony.^[17]

Footnotes

1. Geoffrey W. Bateman, in Baden-Powell biography in glbtq [1]
2. Morgan, K.O. "The Boer War and the Media (1899–1902)." ''Twentieth Century British History'' 13 (2002), pp. 1-16.
3. Jeal 1989, p. unknown
4. The New York Times.
5. Cushman, Joseph D. Review of ''The Boy-Man: the life of Lord Baden-Powell'', by Tim Jeal. ''Sewanee Review'' 100 (Winter 1992). [2]
6. Casada, James. Review of ''The Boy-Man: the life of Lord Baden-Powell'', ''Library Journal'' 115, Mar. 1990, p. 98. Quoted on Amazon USA.
7. Jeal, p. 74.
8. Jeal, op.cit. ''passim''
9. Jeal, pp. 93.
10. Jeal, p. 93; p. 606, n. 50.
11. Jeal, p. 93.
12. Jeal, pp. 92.
13. Jeal, p. 510.
14. Jeal, pp.93–94.
15. Jeal, p.83.
16. "She altered her appearance to suit him, flattening her breasts and shearing her hair."Geoffrey W. Bateman, in Baden-Powell biography in glbtq
17. Jeal, op.cit. p.101

References

★ Baden-Powell, , Tim, Jeal, Hutchinson, 1989,

★ , , Michael, Rosenthal, , ,