Peter Baden-Powell, 2nd Baron Baden-Powell


Arthur Robert Peter Baden-Powell, 2nd Baron Baden-Powell, was the son of Lieutenant-General Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, and Olave St. Clair Soames. He served for two years in the British South Africa Police in Southern Rhodesia and then in the Southern Rhodesian Civil Service until the end of the Second World War, when he returned to Britain to assume his title and became a director of companies, and a Special Constable with the City of London Police.

Family life and work

He was born in England, the son of Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Baden-Powell and Olave St. Clair Soames. He attended Dane Court preparatory school in Pyrford and then followed in his father's footsteps to Charterhouse School, Godalming, Surrey. He entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst but did not complete the course. He served in the British South Africa Police in Southern Rhodesia from 1934 to 1937. He married Carine Crause Boardman, a nurse from Johannesburg, South Africa, on 3 January 1936. Marriage was forbidden by the BSAP terms of service, so he transferred to the Southern Rhodesia Native Affairs Department in 1937.
They had two sons and two daughters:
His father died in 1941, so he inherited the peerage, and in 1945 he left the Southern Rhodesia Government and returned to England for eighteen months, and then permanently in 1949. He became a company director and a special constable with the City of London Police, and took his seat in the House of Lords
He died on 9 December 1962, aged 49, in St Thomas' Hospital, London. Already suffering leukaemia, he spent a night in his parents' 1929 caravan in wet and cold conditions at a Gilwell re-union in September 1962 and caught a cold, which subsequently turned to pneumonia, then pleurisy, which led to a fatal heart attack.

Later career

He was named Arthur after his mother's brother, Robert after his father, and Peter after the eponymous character of the play Peter Pan by James Barrie, of whom his father was a fan.
He was:
In May 1952 he visited Poole, Dorset and opened the new hall of the 1st Hamworthy Scouts' who had been started by some boys from his father's 1907 Brownsea Island experimental camp. He played his father in a pageant on the history of Scouting at the 50th Anniversary World Scout Jamboree at Sutton Coldfield in 1957. He was awarded: