SCOUT NOTES

Southland Times, Issue 23675, 25 November 1938, Page 7

SCOUT NOTES

By PATHFINDER The Invercargill Scouters have procured the use of a very central room for local Scout headquarters. This has been necessary for a considerable time and will be useful for Scouters meetings, badge examinations, conferences, and as a place to hold badge stocks ana district property, which is at present scattered round various Scouters homes. A few Scouters are making the room more like a Scout den than it was previously. The Southland Scout district has no provincial badge, by which it can be seen that a Scout in uniform belongs to this district, and to remedy this state of affairs, the competition for the best design of a badge has been extended till the next Scouters’ meeting on December 5, at the headquarters. Few entries have been received, and Scouts are asked to increase the ber to be judged. The badge should not be big, or appear Scouting as it will only be worn on the Scout uniform, but it should be distinctive of Southland. Simplicity will reduce the cost. “A Scbut’s duty is to be useful and to help others.” Everybody has heard of the Scout’s good turn; in fact the first thing which many people associate with Scouting is the doing of good turns. The best sort of good turn is the one which is done almost' surreptitiously, the one that nobody else knows about. Sometimes, however, many Scouts combine to do a big good turn, such as at Coronation time last year, when Rovers in London got up very early, or stayed up all night, to erect “crush barriers for the crowd, and act as ushers and messengers at Westminster Abbey. What is a good turn? Anything which helps someone else, and for which no reward is taken. As the Chief Scout says, “You Scouts cannot do better than follow the examples of your forefathers, the Knights, who made the tiny British nation into one of the best and greatest the world has ever known. One great point about them was that every day they had to do a good turn to somebody, and that is one of our rules. When you wake up in the morning remember that you have got to do a good turn for someone during the day, and before you go to sleep at night think to whom you did it. A good turn need only be a very small one; but one must be done every day, and it counts as a good turn only when you do not accept any reward in return.” Those who were Cubs before becoming Scouts, will remember that when they enrolled as Cubs they promised to “do a good turn to somebody every day,” and that when they became Scouts they promised “to help other people at all times.” In other words they had grown up, and though the idea was the same, they are not now to be content with doing one good turn a day, but must be ready and on the look-out to help other people always.