Scouting For Boys by Robert Baden-Powell

A reissue of the iconic handbook on scouting underscores how its famed author, and the Empire, were fuelled by repressed sexuality, argues Jake Arnott

When it was first published in 1908, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship became an immediate bestseller. This was hardly surprising since its author had gained fame as the defender of Mafeking against the Boers in the South African War. Robert Baden-Powell was a good prospect for a celebrity book deal: an Empire Hero. That the book continued to sell and instigated an international institution could hardly have been foreseen, but the success of the Boy Scout Movement was intrinsically dependent on the character and circumstances of Baden-Powell himself.

The Relief of Mafeking marked a brief respite amid intense anxiety in the British Empire. A sense of decline coincided with reports on the physical deterioration of its subjects. Fear was felt that the Empire, like Rome, would collapse into decadence from within. The idea that the next generation should "be prepared", mobilised into a juvenile moral militia, captivated the nation. And who better than Baden-Powell to provide the imperial pedagogy? "Don't be disgraced like the young Romans," he implores in a section titled "How the Empire Must be Held", "who lost the Empire by being wishy-washy slackers without any go or patriotism in them."

Baden-Powell was born in 1857 to a very domineering mother whose control over him reached beyond the grave. "There is only one pain greater than losing your mother," he wrote in his eulogy for her in the Boy Scouts' newspaper, "and that is for your mother to lose you - I do not mean by death but by your own misdeeds. Has it struck you what it means to your mother if you turn out a wrong 'un or a waster?"

He was educated at Charterhouse, where one of his favourite older boys, whom he fagged for, nicknamed him - suggestively - "Bathing-Towel". In the 13th Hussars, stationed at Kandahar he met a handsome fellow officer, named McClaren but always referred to by Baden-Powell as the "Boy". They shared quarters for a while and an intense friendship that lasted nearly 30 years. He had a keen interest in performing in regimental theatricals, his speciality being what he termed "skirt-dancing" (essentially a drag-act). All through his life he expressed a strong admiration for the male physique. "A clean young man in his prime of health and strength is the finest creature God had made in the world," he wrote in Rovering to Success in 1922. In short, he had all the elements to make the perfect Empire Man.

The Victorians knew that sexual repression was not an end in itself, but a means to power national ambitions. Just as the steam that had made industrialisation possible depended on its pressure being restrained, so the British male sexual psyche had to be so harshly subjugated that men of adventure would be propelled into the world with the energy of sublimated passion. This was the fuel of expansionism. Gordon of Khartoum, Kitchener, Rhodes, Lawrence of Arabia, Baden-Powell, come on, spot the happy heterosexual among the Empire Heroes. That we cannot say for certain that any of them was homosexual in practice is a testament to the fierceness of their repression and the real danger of being found out. General Sir Hector MacDonald, the hero of Omdurman, when caught in flagrante delicto with a group of Sinhalese boys in a railway carriage in Ceylon in 1903, simply did the decent thing and loyally shot himself in the head.

"The use of your parts is not to play with when you are a boy," writes Baden-Powell in a section headed Continence, "but to enable you to get children when you are grown up and married. But if you misuse them while young you will not be able to use them when you are a man: they will not work then." Perhaps he grimly foresaw his own difficulties in achieving procreation. Shortly after his wedding in 1912, he began to suffer from agonising headaches that lasted until the birth of his third and last child when, duty having been done, he left the marriage bed for good and slept on a field bunk on the balcony. But it was this stoicism, self-sacrifice and his absolute commitment to the notion of "ruling one's self" that made Baden-Powell such an ideal candidate for imperial youth worker.

The trick was to stay busy. In Scouting for Boys anxiety is transformed into a neurotic euphoria. "Play up!" is the cry, taken from Henry Newbolt's poem "Vitai Lampada", "Play the Game!" So many things to do and observe, that even on a tiny level could be used in defence of Empire. In a section on observing insects he remarks of the bee: "They are quite a model community, for they respect their Queen and kill their unemployed." Along with tracking, concealment and deception are also vital. The book is full of secret codes, camouflage and "dodges" that reflect Baden-Powell's skill at sublimation.

He was accused of trying to "foster among the boys of Britain a bloodthirsty and war-like spirit", a criticism he answers in the section Militarism. But his genius was that, rather than set out a harsh tract of indoctrination, Scouting is an assemblage of the touching elements of lost boyhood. Racial superiority is not asserted by vilifying indigenous people, but co-opting them into the "Game". The colonised are seen as noble savages happily contributing to their own subjugation. The narrative of imperialism is rendered into a camp-fire yarn. "Boys are full of romance," he writes, "and they love 'make believe' to a greater extent than they like to show." The success of the Scout Movement was the victory of his own hard-fought dream of youth. He tracked the precarious frontiers of his own imagination and infantilised the Empire into a dominion of innocence.

Jake Arnott's latest novel, 'Truecrime', is published by Sceptre (£10.99). A four-part adaptation of his debut, 'The Long Firm', is scheduled for the summer (BBC2).