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Baden Powell’s experimental camp on Brownsea Island was
held in the summer of 1907, and Scouting for Boys was
published at the start of 1908. Highland boys were not
slow to take up Scouting. In Nairn, a patrol had
certainly formed by the summer of 1908, based around a
boy who worked in Harrow’s, the newsagent’s, and who
have read the book as it was published . A troop was
formed in the autumn of that year. In Inverness the
pattern is less clear, but the first patrol gathered in
a house in Victoria Crescent sometime in the summer of
1908, soon to be formalised into a troop, which by the
start of 1909 met at the High School (now the Crown
School building).
 A
troop was operating in Grantown-on-Spey by the beginning
of 1909, but activities probably date from the previous
summer. Troops were also soon started in Beauly, Fort
Augustus, Kingussie, Foyers and Kiltarlity, and slightly
later in Aviemore. Alvie and Cawdor both had Scout
Troops for a short period before the First World War.
The first major event for Highland Scouting was the
visit of Baden-Powell to the Northern Meeting Park in
Inverness in September 1911, and this indirectly led to
the formation of a second Inverness Troop at the
Cathedral the following year. The 1st Inverness Troop
was to claim a membership of 210 boys at the outbreak of
the First World War. In the opening weeks of the War,
Baden-Powell visited the Nairn Scouts carrying out coast
watching duties.
Sadly no Troop within the present Inverness Scout
District
can claim an unbroken record from the earliest days. The
Second World War had less effect than the First War on
local Scouting, but Scouts can claim a proud record of
service to their communities through the collection of
waste paper, aluminium and jam jars.
 Local
Scouts have attended most of the World Jamborees
including the 2007 Centenary Jamboree. Visits to foreign
countries in the last fifty years have ranged from
Switzerland to Denmark and Finland to America. In the
early 1990s local Venture Scouts visited Russia to
assist with the re-launch of Scouting, following the
collapse of communism.
Scouting in and around Inverness has now moved into its
second century serving the community in which it
thrives.
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Our History
