The Immortals: The Powells were the first family of boy scouts, girl guides

Lord Baden-Powell and his wife, Lady Olave Powell, famous for spearheading the worldwide Boy Scout and Girl Guide Movements, lived at ‘Paxtu’ Cottage at the Outspan Hotel in Nyeri County, after buying shares from their friend, Major Eric Sherbrooke Walker, who also owned the Treetops Hotel. ‘Paxtu’ Cottage is today a national monument.

“Closer to Nyeri, closer to bliss,” said the man from Pax Hill, Hampshire, England, and whose final resting place attracts over 50,000 visitors annually. Over 15,000 of those are foreigners, according Kenya Scouts Association. But despite being one of the world’s most famous graves, the site has no dedicated souvenir shop... or toilet!

Lord Baden-Powell: The decorated British military hero founded the 32-million strong Scouting Movement in 1907, and for which he wrote Scouting for Boys the following year. Initially meant for the military, it’s today the largest of its kind in the world.

American author, Brooke Allen wrote in the July 19, 2012 issue of the New York Times that Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell preferred toying with dolls as a child and playing female characters in army plays.

Fleshing from Briton Tim Jeal’s 1989 bio of Powell titled, The Boy Man, Brooke notes  that throughout his life, sensitive Baden-Powell “openly admired muscular men and pretty boys” and that “attractive women sent him into a state of anxiety; he was much more comfortable with plain, companionable ones.”

Powell married at 55 and he “panicked soon after the union...developing agonising headaches that were relieved only when he left the matrimonial bed and returned to his ascetic soldier’s cot,” writes Jeal, concluding that, “Available evidence points inexorably to the conclusion that Baden-Powell was a repressed homosexual” as he was fascinated by “boys and boyology.” The Chief Scout of the world retired in 1937 and died at 83 on July 8, 1941.

Lady Olave Powell: Olave St Clair Soames ran the Girl Guides and Brownies Movements founded in 1910 by Agnes Baden-Powell, the sister of the future hubby she met inside the Arcadian ocean liner in 1912. She was 23 and 32 years his junior. The media buzz generated forced them to marry secretly. Her father gifted them with their Pax Hill home. Their three children; Peter Baden-Powell, Hon Betty Clay and Hon Heather Grace Baden-Powell, all became decorated commissioners in the Scouting and Guiding movements.

Lady Powell died in England aged 88 in 1977. She was cremated and her ashes interred in Nyeri next to the man who left her a widow 36 years earlier.