My absolute favourite life and outdoors manual is my 1992 Guide Handbook. Not even joking. There’s a lot that’s Guide-specific but it’s got entire chapters on Skills for Living, The Great Outdoors, Camp, All About You, Express Yourself and One World and I still like to sit and read it as a book, even now I’ve been an adult leader for more than sixteen years. If I need ideas for camp food or activities, this is the book I consult. If I need to check how to do square lashing, this is the book I consult. And then I saw that Bear Grylls had written a new book, Do Your Best: How To Be A Scout. It looked like it might follow similar lines, only more with boys than girls in mind, and thirty years more up to date.
(This is an odd book. Its title is Do Your Best: How To Be A Scout but if you look at the cover, Do Your Best is treated as a subtitle, despite coming first. I’m going to persist with just calling it How To Be A Scout because that’s what’s in big curly letters on the front.)
I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it is exactly what I expected. It’s a book that’s half Scout-specific and half a handbook for life and the outdoors. But the Guide Handbook is packed with pictures and diagrams, without large blocks of text whereas How To Be A Scout is primarily large blocks of text. Now, that may be because I have a Kindle version – not willing to pay £19 for the hardback, I’m afraid – but that’s probably just how the book is. It does have a few diagrams and pictures, accompanied by very detailed captions and image descriptions, most of which I assume don’t appear in the hardback version.
The introduction says to treat this book as something that you dip in and out of, that you read this chapter or that chapter when you need it, that you take with you on adventures and if it gets dirty and battered, that’s part of the point of it. It wasn’t really written to be read cover-to-cover like a novel and that’s why it felt a bit long and tedious at times. I’d feel the same if I sat down and read my Guide Handbook like that.
It has three parts. Part one is How To Be A Scout and it’s about Scouting history, transcripts of entire speeches Grylls has given on big Scouting occasions, the whole Scouting ethos – teamwork, leadership, volunteering, the environment. Parts of it are tedious and parts of it I found myself nodding along to – and throwing it onto Threads. I lost enthusiasm for doing that very quickly. But I did appreciate sub-section “How to be part of our worldwide family” because if you swap the uniform, that section could just as easily be about Guides.
Part two is How To Be An Adventurer. It covers survival, first aid, camp, tracking, observing nature and tying knots. This is the section I’d dip in and out of if I didn’t have my Guide Handbook. While I’m sure Bear Grylls is qualified to do all of this and a lot more, I am dubious about his first aid advice – not because my inexpert eye sees anything obviously wrong about it but because a knowledge of first aid is not the same as being qualified to teach it or give advice on it. From his adventures, I’d assume he’s got an excellent working knowledge of expedition first aid. I attended a virtual expedition first aid talk at RebelFest in June and rapidly realised that the gentleman presenting was essentially a one-man field hospital – but there are qualifications needed to pass this kind of thing on and I just don’t necessarily believe Bear Grylls holds those.
Anyway, that’s kind of a nitpick. There’s a lot of good stuff in this section and I do appreciate that the tent diagram in this book is something that strongly resembles my little yellow one-man tent rather than the obsolete dark green heavy canvas Icelandic ridge tent used in my Guide Handbook. But again, I think the Guide Handbook’s diagrams make the camp chapters more accessible than the blocks of text with a sketch at the top of every sub-sub-section in How To Be A Scout. I think it probably covers more than my book, because people have higher expectations of Scouts than they do of Guides but the Handbook covers probably 85% of what’s in here and I think it does it better.
I’m well aware that I’m biased towards my old favourite book. I’m also trying to be aware that if I didn’t have it, How To Be A Scout would be an absolutely invaluable resource and I’d probably at least get the paperback version so I can consult it more easily. Flicking through the Kindle version as I write this is strongly reminding me that Kindle is meant for reading cover-to-cover, not for jumping backwards and forwards, one section to another.
Part three is How To Be You. This is an entire guide to life wedged into 73 pages – achieving goals, being a friend, living more freely, communication, organisation, fitness & health. Well, it’s only what’s squished into the rest of my Handbook, really, only brought up to date. I absolutely expected to see an endorsement of Notion appearing in the organisation subsection. In fact, it’s really an update of Baden-Powell’s “clean in thought, word and deed”, including the virtues of getting up early and “eating the frog”. Some of this is very up to date, the kind of thing I expect to see on a beige Instagram, and some of it is pure 1907.
Last, there’s a section of useful stuff – things that Grylls clearly wanted to include but couldn’t shoehorn into Scout, Adventure or You – things like Morse code, semaphore, distance conversion tables, tree growth factor (this is a reference to an earlier section), highest mountains and World Scout Jamborees.
That’s the contents. As for style… well, my Guide Handbook is written as a handbook for people aged 10-teens. How To Be A Scout somehow never lets you forget the image of Bear Grylls hand-writing it, at a wooden desk, wearing a neckerchief over a beige shirt, possibly with a quill. I admit, as a non-Scout, I’d rather pictured him as a figurehead for the movement, a big adventurer who’ll take a paycheque to represent adventure for younger people and so I was vaguely surprised that he appeared to care enough to write a book about and for them – I mean, whether he actually wrote it, I don’t know. I gather that celebrities often use ghostwriters. Not accusing him of that, it’s just something that occurred to me. But as I worked my way through the book, I realised he’d been a Scout himself at that age, he knows plenty about Scouting – it’s very easy for an outsider to see only the surface, like the uniform and the knots and the dib-dob-dob and the hahahaha woggle but he clearly sees the thoughts, the ethos, the attitude, that there’s more to being a Scout than just wearing the uniform for an hour and a half a week and going on camp – that, in fact, being a Scout is in many ways more a state of mind. All the same, the book does often feel like “Celebrity Scout writes self-conscious essay about some aspect of Scouting” than a book really meant as a guide to life and the outdoors. Ah! Got it! It’s too dry! That’s what it is. It’s the equivalent of trying to teach all this stuff by lectures instead of by getting out and actually doing it. I know there’s going to be a certain amount of that in trying to put all this into a book but I think the Guide Handbook does a far better job of balancing book with practicality.
I also don’t think How To Be A Scout is going to convert non-Scouts. I don’t think anyone who’s not already a keen member is going to see and wonder if there’s anything in Scouting that can become applicable to their lives. I can picture a lot of grandmothers buying this for their grandsons in Cubs for Christmas and a lot of Scout leaders buying it and flicking through it. I know in Guiding we’re currently missing a good handbook. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the current Guide one but I have a Brownie one to hand. It’s a stapled book 24 pages long which basically just explains in a series of double-page spreads what Brownies is, how it works and what you’ll get to do. In the previous programme, I think the G-File was better but I honestly think the 1992 Handbook is possibly the best guide to life and the outdoors that we’ve ever had. As for the Scouts, the Scout Shop shows nothing under Resources except promise cards, a handful of certificates and a record sheet that you could probably make yourself in Excel. No wonder they’re pushing this book (with free badge!) – they don’t actually have any kind of book of their own.
In conclusion. Yes, this is a good guide to life and the outdoors and the whole Scouting ethos, although you can skip that part if you’re only interested in the first two there. It’s a brilliant book to dip into for ideas, inspiration and “I need to know how to do this thing, aha, I know where I have a guide to doing it!”. If you already have a 1992 Guide Handbook, don’t bother with How To Be A Scout. If you don’t already have one, see if you can find one on eBay. There’s one here – or at least, there was. And if you think you might use How To Be A Scout as a dip-in book to take with you on adventures, maybe wait and see if it comes out in paperback – it’ll take up a lot less space in your backpack.