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B-P's footprint

B-P's Footprint
B-P's Footprint @ Gilwell Park (1110933073).jpg
Location multiple
 

B-P's footprint is a casting, usually in bronze or brass, of the right foot of Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scout and Guide Movements, who is known as "B-P." The idea is that people may put their foot into this casting, so that they can say that they have "walked in the footsteps of B-P."

The 1928 Scouting World Conference was officially opened on May 4 in Budapest. The next day, the delegates went on an excursion to Lake Balaton and other places returning to Budapest in the afternoon. That evening, Baden-Powell, his wife Olave and Lord Hampton arrived.

On May 6, there was a rally at the Training Park attended by 9,647 out of the 25,000 Scouts then in Hungary and up to 20,000 of the public. In the June 1928 issue of The Scouter B-P wrote, about the Rally at Hárshegy:

This took place in pouring rain... An unusual incident marked the occasion of my visit when they invited me to make my footprint in the soil. A cast of this was taken and imprinted permanently on the spot in concrete.

From this cast two bronze copies were made, one was for the Hárshegy Training Park and the other was a gift to Baden-Powell, which he passed to the British Scout Headquarters.

When the communists took over and banned Scouting in 1948, the training ground was confiscated and houses were built on the land; neither the original concrete footprint, nor the "Hungarian original bronze" has been seen since.

Some years later a copy of the "British original bronze" was cast and placed at Gilwell Park, the original remained at Scout Headquarters in London. In 1991 four Members of the Hungarian Scout Headquarters team visited England, and saw the Baden-Powell footprint at Gilwell. At their request, a plastic mould was taken of the first "British original bronze", by this time at Baden-Powell House, and from this the Hungarians cast a new footprint, which was installed in their new Scout Training Park, given them in 1991 by the Hungarian Government.

The Norwegian Boy Scout Association received a copy of the B-P Footprint as a gift from Gilwell Park by Camp Chief John Thurman in the summer of 1959. A Kudu horn was presented at the same time. The footprint then was mounted in front of the house at the Norwegian Gilwell Training Ground on the farm "Sverveli" in Telemark, Norway.


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