cover image Baden-Powell: A Family Album

Baden-Powell: A Family Album

Heather Baden-Powell. A. Sutton, $22.5 (118pp) ISBN 978-0-87052-315-1

Robert Baden-Powell is remembered in England not only as founder of the Boy Scout movement but as heroic defender of Mafeking during the Boer War. The only references to his military career here, however, are brief accounts of visits to South African and Indian battlefields. His second life, as he called it, centered around his travels as Chief Scout, delivering speeches at Jamborees, receiving honors and between times enjoying family activities to the fullestfishing, drawing, painting and writing. In this loving reminiscence, his daughter captures the last 26 years of that second life, from her earliest memory of him in 1915, when she was three, until his peaceful passing in Kenya in 1941. ""B-P'' comes across as a modest and uncomplicated gent (his recurring nightmare: appearing at a formal bash unsuitably attired) who was a marvelously attentive father. Two hundred photographs and illustrationsfamily snapshots, drawings and watercolors by father and daughterconvey a happy family life in a bygone era. (December 5)