Major Kenneth McLaren, the boy who was lost…

Major Kenneth McLaren (1860-1924)

The ‘Boy McLaren’

Historic images courtesy of the Scout Association

Kenneth McLaren was a key figure in the life of Robert Baden Powell and the early development of the Scout movement in its early years. A close friend for over twenty years – ‘my best friend in all the world’, he attended the first Scout camp on Brownsea Island in 1907 and was the first manager of the Boy Scouts.

McLaren has quietly slipped into obscurity aside for some discussion about the nature of his relationship with Baden Powell by author Tim Jeal in the 1990’s.

McLaren and BP met around 1881 in Afghanistan as members of the 13th Hussars where struck by McLaren’s youthful appearance thereafter called him ‘the boy McLaren’. The moved onto postings in India together and struck up a close friendship. They hunted wild boar together, described by BP as ‘pigsticking’.

McLaren had been educated at Harrow, thereafter passing through Sandhurst before his posting with the 13th Hussars. He was a very good polo player and represented the Hussars in numerous competitions. When the Hussars returned to Britain in 1886 BP travelled with McLaren to Scotland on leave. BP made numerous important trips to Scotland during the early development of Scouting but also in later years – it is valid to consider whether some of that warmth was initiated by his friend.

 McLaren married Leila Evelyn Landon, daughter of an army officer in 1898 but left his heavily pregnant wife in 1899 to campaign in Africa on the request of his friend. With BP a Mafeking, he was seriously wounded and in the Boer hospital for the last six weeks of the seige. His daughter Eilean was born in October 1899 and BP became her godfather. He worked for BP again in 1901 as his London based recruitment officer for the South African Constabulary. His wife died aged 29 in 1904 and BP supported his friend as he adjusted to life.

When he planned his great experimental camp on Brownsea Island it was McLaren he called upon to help. In December that year he became the first secretary of the Boy Scouts but only for a short three months, unable to get along with Pearsons management, BP’s publisher and backer at this stage. BP did not intervene, possibly as McLaren had announced his intention to re-marry.

BP was concerned at the developing relationship between McLaren and his wife’s former nurse Ethel Mary Wilson soon after the death of Leila. BP thought Ethel beneath McLaren and did not approve. Eventually married in 1910, BP did not attend the wedding and the pair started to drift apart. BP married Olave Soames in 1912, McLaren was not invited and his new wife was prone to be highly jealous of BP’s former friendships.

In 1914 McLaren volunteered to be in France in an administrative role and in 1910 was diagnosed with a ‘softening of the brain’ translating to chronic depression which he had suffered from throughout his life. Before dying in 1924, McLaren spent six years between Camberwel House Asylum or a private mental hospital in Herefordshire. BP did not attend the funeral.

Ethel kept on McLaren’s house in Argyll  and later bought a smaller house in the same village. McLaren’s papers and the hundreds of letters exchanged by the two friends were seemingly destroyed by wives after their deaths. In 1965 a tea chest at a Glasgow Auction was found to contain letters from BP to McLaren whilst he was wounded at Mafeking. These letters are now with the Scottish Scout archive. Ethel died in 1967, surviving their daughter Eilean by ten years dying from cancer in Creaton a decade earlier.

McLaren had been distraught on the death of his mother and it was this grief that originally brought him and BP together. He was laid to rest beside his mother Elizabeth McLaren on a hillside in Argyll in a magnificent location looking out to sea.

In a walled enclosure topped with a cast and wrought iron railing and gate, he rests beneath a granite celtic cross. The enclosure has not been managed (The McLaren family seem to disappear entirely from the area) and the yew trees have taken over the site, destroying the boundary walls and most worryingly threatening and damaging the headstone of Kenneth McLaren. It is a sorry legacy for the man so important in creating a global Scouting movement of 38 million.

 

At present I am talking to various parties to explore the restoration of the site and the headstone to preserve this important site for future generations.

Dr David Mitchell

With many thanks to Scouting historian Colin Walker for lighting the way.