The Scouts Stave

First a confession. I was never a scout. Second confession, I got kicked out of Cubs. Too much misapplied energy, according to my dad. That is still pretty much the case. I applied some of that energy to this fun piece. It was great to research because I am a fan of walking sticks over poles.

A Scout staff or Scout stave is a shoulder-high wooden pole or quarterstaff, traditionally carried by Boy Scouts as part of their accoutrements. Its main purpose was as a walking stick, but it had a number of other uses. Those ranged from the fantastic to the highly practical.

Scouts founder, Robert Baden-Powell, commanded that Scouts carry "a strong stick, about as high as your nose, marked in feet and inches for measuring". Baden-Powell claimed the cultural roots of the Scout staff were, "the scouts of Cuhulain, the pilgrims... with their cockle-shells and staffs, the 'prentice bands of London with their cloth yards and their staffs, the merry men of Robin Hood with bows and quarter staffs, down to the present-day mountaineers, war-scouts, and explorers.” He saw a clear lineage and use for the staff.

Meanwhile, detractors saw the Scouts organization as paramilitary. This has some basis as Baden-Powell was an army officer who frequently dressed down scout units that did not employ the staff. If you were to witness the young lads in formation, they resembled an infantry unit, with the staff acting as substitute for a rifle. When numerous staff held flags and hosted ornamental eagles on top, the rallies and jamborees looked very Nuremberg-ish.

Long before the Scouts encountered their current dark criticisms, astute observers wondered why the organization should exist when its founder is credited with inventing concentration camps. But I digress.

The staff was basically a wooden Swiss army knife. Consider this from Scout instruction materials: “The staff is very useful for beating out brush fires and outbreaks which occur on open heaths. Wading a stream. Both patrol tents and tepees can be made with the aid of the Staff. An improvised stretcher of coats and staves. A line of Scouts linked together on a night march.

When anyone falls through some ice, throw him your Staff so that he can grasp it like this until you can get a rope and pull him out. When climbing gates you can give yourself a push up with your Staff. For erecting a flagstaff and forming a fence, the Staff is very useful. A clear view can be had by looking through a small hole drilled in the Staff.”

Then there was self-defence, making splints, jumping ditches, making rafts, bridge building, levering up logs and stones, stopping an aggressive animal, feeling the way over marshy ground, recovering objects in the water. The militaristic complaint may be found in a few other uses the scouts trained for with the staff. This included holding back a crowd and stopping a car by jamming a staff through the spokes of the wheel!

At the 3rd World Scout Jamboree in 1929, French Scouts constructed an 80-foot (24-metre) replica of the Eiffel Tower entirely of lashed Scout staves. This reminds me of the kit issued in the Canadian army. Three ponchos strung together made a tent but the sleeping was all too cozy with your mates. In hindsight, the staves were really amazing when used together for various things, such as, tables, water filtration stands, and clothes dryers.

By 1966, the Scouts organization did away with staves. Their Advance Party Report recommended that "With the exception of a knife, no present optional items of uniform (e.g. staff, thumbstick, haversack) may in future be worn". I imagine a lot of injuries had resulted among the boys just in innocent fun. 

I make walking sticks out of wood I find on hikes. This amounts to no more than sanding, painting and varnishing. Sometimes I attach an end cap to the bottom. It is time for me to add more adornments like handles and decoration. Baden-Powell was a fan of each scout personalizing his stave.

He wrote to scout leaders to, “expect of the boy a reverence and affection for his staff -- such as the swordsman has for his sword, or the hunter for his rifle. Let the Scout individualize his own staff, even to decorate it in his own way if he likes, but let him keep to his staff. To jumble all staffs into a bundle and put them away in a corner after parade, or, worse, to let them get lost and thus excuse their appearance on parade, is to neglect a valuable help to the moral training of the lad.”

This is a surprising directive when most military and paramilitary training is predicated on losing individualism in support of the unit. Having latitude to gussy up the staff was recognition that boys will be boys.

What I can attest to is hiking sticks are great for hiking. Now I am going to start thinking of them as staves and what can be accomplished with a bunch of them working together. Hmm, in essence, that is military training.