Olave St Clair Baden-Powell, Baroness Baden-Powell (née Soames; 22 February 1889 – 25 June 1977) was the first Chief Guide for Britain and the wife of Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting and co-founder of Girl Guides. She outlived her husband, who was 32 years her senior, by over 35 years.
Lady Baden-Powell became Chief Guide for Britain in 1918. Later the same year, at the Swanwick conference for Commissioners in October, she was presented with a gold Silver Fish, one of only two ever made. She was elected World Chief Guide in 1930. As well as making a major contribution to the development of the Guide/Girl Scout movements, she visited 111 countries during her life, attending Jamborees and national Guide and Scout associations. In 1932, she was created a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire by King George V.
Family and early life
Born in Chesterfield, England, Olave Soames was the third child and youngest daughter of brewery owner and artist Harold Soames (1855–1918), of Gray Rigg, Lilliput, Dorset (descended from the landed gentry Soames family of Sheffield Park) and his wife Katherine Mary, daughter of George Hill. She was educated by her parents and by a number of governesses at home. She lived in seventeen homes in the first 23 years of her life. Olave became keen on outdoor sports including tennis, swimming, football, skating and canoeing, and also played the violin.
Olave was the sister of Arthur Granville Soames and thus aunt to his children, including Christopher Soames, Conservative politician and diplomat, who in 1947 wed Mary Churchill, youngest child of Sir Winston Churchill.
Adult life
Marriage and children
In January 1912, Olave met Second Boer War hero and founder of the Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell, on an ocean liner (RMSP Arcadian) on the way via the Caribbean to New York to start a lecture tour. She was 23, he was 55, and they shared the same birthday. They became engaged in September of the same year, causing a media sensation. They married on 30 October 1912 in a very private ceremony, in St. Peter's Church, Parkstone, her parish church. She was given away by her father. Apart from clergy, the only other people present were his brother and sister and Robert Kekewich, a close friend of his, her mother and brother, her brother-in-law and Miss Sie Bower, a close friend of hers.
The Scouts and Guides of England each donated a penny to buy the Baden-Powells a wedding gift of a car (not the Rolls-Royce called "Jam-Roll" that was presented to them in 1929). Olave's father helped financially with the purchase of Pax Hill near Bentley, Hampshire, as a family home where she lived with her husband from 29 January 1919 until 25 October 1938.
The Baden-Powells had three children – a son and two daughters (who took the courtesy titles of Honourable in 1929; the son later succeeding his father as the 2nd Lord Baden-Powell upon his father's death in 1941): Arthur Robert Peter Baden-Powell, later 2nd Baron Baden-Powell (1913–1962), who married Carine Boardman (1913–1993), and they had two sons and a daughter; at Peter's death, the elder son Robert succeeded him as 3rd Baron Baden-Powell; the younger son, Michael, and the daughter live in Australia; The Hon. Heather Grace Baden-Powell (1915–1986), who married John Hall King (1913–2004), and they had two sons; and The Hon. Betty St. Clair Baden-Powell, CBE (1917–2004) who, like her mother, met her future husband on board ship, an older man (by a decade) who shared her birthday. She married, on 24 September 1936, Gervas Charles Robert Clay (1907–2009). They had a daughter and three sons. Betty Clay was also prominent in the Guide Movement in Northern Rhodesia until they retired to England in 1964, when she became involved with the Girl Guides in England until her death.
In addition, when Olave's sister, Auriol Davidson, née Soames, died in 1919, Olave took her three nieces, Christian (1912–1975), Clare (1913–1980), and Yvonne, (1918–2000), into her family and brought them up as her own children.
War work
During 1915 and 1916, with World War I in progress, Olave assisted directly with the war effort in France. Robert had seen the usefulness of the YMCA's recreational huts for the soldiers and persuaded the Mercers' Company (of which he had been Master in 1912) to pay for such a hut at Val-de-Lievres, Calais. It was to be staffed by adults connected with Scouting. Olave was one of the team of five men and three women that staffed the hut at the start. She persuaded her mother to look after the children for the time she would be away.