THE statement that he was approaching the authorities of the King George the Fifth Jubilee Trust to try to get some change or variation in its administration was made at Sheffield, yesterday, by Mr. H. E. G. West, Deputy County Commissioner of Boy Scouts for the Yorkshire West Riding (Southern).
He expressed his concern over what he said he regarded as the tragedy of the trust. A fund of £1,000,000 was being treated as capital and distributed in driblets to existing organisations to improve premises, to buy billiard tables, footballs, and the like.
"I have always maintained that the capital of the youth organisations of the country is not in bricks and mortar, premises and billiard tables, but in the personnel trained to capture the buys," Mr. West went on.
"What we need is to have that money spent in five or ten years on the training of men to lead boys. This would have a snowball effect which would result in a living memorial to our beloved King. I am quite certain that the process of giving £25 here and £25 there to a club is just going to dissipate the fund without making any definite impression on the country."
THE above cutting from the Liverpool Post, giving a news item which has appeared in other papers, conveys a narrow outlook which we are confident is not shared by his lordship, the Chief Scout. We well remember him as Inspector- General of Cavalry; we remember when, in Service circles, he was almost pitied for "masquerading in shorts and a funny hat with a parcel of boys," as a general officer of the period said in our hearing. But Baden Powell had a breadth of outlook above such evidence of limited understanding; he went ahead with his "parcel of boys," and the world to-day salutes the result.
Football can take care of itself, but we have to say that to talk about money being wasted on billiard tables for the boys is a negation of all that is best in the tolerant attitude of the scout movement; it excites a measure of deplorable antagonism, a taking of sides for and against such a splendid thing as the movement. We feel sure that Mr. H. E. G. West did not consider this aspect when he made his remarks. He rightly stresses the importance of trained personnel, but how that personnel is to function effectively without premises, footballs, billiard tables and the like is a mystery, and a mystery it must remain until Mr. West can particularise his, we fear, hasty generalisation.
It reminds us, rather, of a conference we attended in Whitehall when the revival of the Army Billiard Championship after the end of the Great War came up for discussion and settlement. The: "Why waste time, money and effort on this sort of thing?" argument was very well put by most capable personnel. Then an old medical officer said quietly: "May I suggest to the conference that the troops cannot be always either working out-of-doors, or playing in gymnasiums indoors? There are far worse things the troops might be doing than playing billiards sometimes of an evening."
So, we should like to suggest to Mr. West, "there are far worse things" the boy scouts might be doing than playing billiards "sometimes of an evening." We would even venture to suggest that trained personnel is imperfect if unable to interest the boys in fit recreations for the complete citizen, and we are sure that Mr. West would include billiards in such fit recreations. He cannot be a survival from those bigots of the discredited past who were beaten and silenced when billiards was introduced into the Y.M.C.A., and hundreds of recreational institutes attached to religious denominations belonging to all creeds.