Wood Badge

The Wood Badge is the pinnacle of adult training in scouting world wide. And yet, 1st Claremont has not had a Wood Badge holder since the 1960s.

It was with great trepidation that I registered for the Wood Badge in 2018. I had tried three times before but, due to a lack of numbers, the course had not been run. As it turned out, three scouters from 1st Claremont registered for the course in 2018.

There are three Wood Badge courses but the first weekend runs concurrently. The first weekend is largely discussions about various aspects of scouting and is fairly relaxed. This is somewhat misleading for the next two weekends that follow.

The second weekend for the Wood Badge took place at Hawequas and involved more detailed discussions and other more strenuous activities such as building major pioneering projects.

The third weekend (in mid winter) for the Wood badge was an expedition and the culmination of the the Wood Badge course. It took the form of various tasks that each patrol undertook involving things such as a photo of the patrol at the Cape Town fire station, Mostert’s Mill and other locations around Cape Town. Unfortunately, the weekend co-incided with some incredibly heavy rain. The night was spent at Appleton campsite and ended at about 2am in the morning. It was a requirement that the patrols take a photo of themselves at the top of Lion’s Head before day break. The options were to climb up at night in the pouring rain or wait until 4am in the morning and hope the rain had stopped. After some discussion the latter option was selected. This left us with about 2 or 3 hours sleep and an early ascent of Lion’s Head. It was an experience to stand on Lion’s Head at 6am on a winters morning after a major storm and watch the day break – elemental, raw, untamed – and pretty tired.

The rest of the day was a mad rush of moving from one place to another with more tasks to achieve until we ended at lunch at the Heritage Centre in Goodwood.

The course however, is merely a part of Wood Badge – a scouter must still “earn your ticket” with a project. For some scouters they run competitions (such as Rayner and Gordon Shield) and others contribute to scouting with legacy projects to “leave a legacy” and improve scouting in some way. It is this part of the Wood Badge that many scouters fail to achieve and it took a year of work to complete my project – with some long lapses in between and then many weekends and nights of work.

Having eventually completed the project, given the historical importance of the three scouters at 1st Claremont getting their Wood Badge, we organised an award ceremony, drawing on international traditions to craft a ceremony that we would remember.

Now, there is this possibility of doing the Scout Group Leaders Wood Badge as well…

Ian’s father awarding him the Wood Badge