Building (1965)
By The District Commissioner.
I find it quite exciting going round Chester these days. All sorts of development is going on. Tall blocks of flats and what a view from the top ones too. Tall blocks of offices. New shopping centres, multi-storied with badly needed car parks to attract the motorist shoppers to Chester. All these features, together with the ring road, are Chester's contribution of the twentieth century, to its already rich heritage of building through the ages. I wonder how posterity will judge us.
Were it not for the fact that architecture has already a period named the Perpendicular, that is what I would dub our modern developments, for certainly the tendency nowadays, because of the lack of land of course, is to build upwards. Mind you, that's not new either, for you have only to look at man's most noble edifices, the churches, to see that trend. Walk round the countryside of East Anglia and count the spires reaching to the sky to see what I mean.
And always, when talking about building, one automatically associates the word upwards with it - one always builds up - never sidewards - or down.
In Scouting we go in for quite a bit of building too. No, I don't mean headquarters, although we do our share of that. What I mean is our building of the boy himself. We start with the boy of cub age somewhere round the 4 foot mark. Physically we do quite a bit to help nature make him taller by our activities. Spiritually we start him off fairly small with the Cub Promise, I promise to do my best, to do my duty to God, and the Queen, to obey the Law of the Wolf Cub Pack and to do a Good Turn to somebody every day. Mentally, we set him moderately easy tests, but all calculated to build him up into a physically, spiritually and mentally "taller" person.
Then he goes on into the Scouts at 11 years old and about five foot tall. Then he takes the more advanced Promise, still to "do his duty to God and the Queen," but then "to help other people at all times" (not just once a day) and '' to obey the Scout Law.'' That Promise stays good for the rest of his scouting days. Scouters make the same Promise, whether they are eighteen or eighty.
But that building up process goes on and on. Perhaps that's why they call Scouting a Movement ! The tests are harder and more technical. The spiritual demands lift him up further towards God. The mental demands make him a more complete person. And so he goes on to Senior Scouting at 15 and Rovering at 18, or maybe he takes out a Warrant as a Scouter then. But all the time there is that sense of building up of body soul and spirit until, please God, we turn out another good citizen through that planned progress of building up in Scouting.
How does the old hymn run?
These things shall be, a loftier race
Than e'er the world hath known shall rise,
With flame of freedom in their souls
And light of knowledge in their eyes.
Nation with nation, land with land
Inarmed shall live as comrades free,
In every heart and brain shall throb
The pulse of one fraternity.
Scouting, spread all over the world as it is, aims at something like that.
V. E. Stonebridge.
