Playing the Game Empire

The British Empire lasted over 300 years.

'It made Britain the most powerful nation in history,

'it also shaped a fundamental part of the British character.'

The Empire offered the inhabitants of a grey,

damp island in the North Atlantic

the prospect of limitless adventure.

You might discover a diamond field and become unimaginably rich

or you might perish in a malarial swamp.

Either way the thing to do was to play up, play up and play the game.

Wherever the flag was planted went a passion for sport

and the spirit of fair play.

Yes, yes, yes!

But sport was about more than just good, clean fun.

It was an entire way of looking at the world

and it was one of the foundations of the empire.

In its wide open spaces,

a particular kind of British hero was born.

Exploring the unknown places of the earth,

hungry for glory and adventure,

courageous,

intrepid

and ruthless.

For the builders of empire, it was how you played the game

that mattered more than victory,

mattered more than life itself.

To Britons in the mid 19th century,

the heart of Africa was as mysterious and unexplored

as the dark side of the moon.

BIRDS SQUAWK

It proved a magnet for Victorian adventurers.

They were drawn by an obsession to get there first

and to put new names to new places.

On the 17th of June 1857,

two Englishmen arrived in East Africa.

Their names were Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke.

They dreamed of finding what had eluded explorers for millennia.

Where did the most famous river in civilisation begin?

What was the source of the Nile?

The two men could hardly have been more different.

Burton was 36 and already famous as a charismatic adventurer,

a man who'd smuggled himself into Mecca disguised as an Arab,

a man known for liking to charm snakes and wrestling alligators,

a man who would eventually learn to speak 29 languages.

He had a slightly sinister expression to his face,

which wasn't helped by a scar on each cheek

where a javelin had pierced right through his face.

But it was the eyes that everyone remembered.

One poet described them as having, "a look of unspeakable horror."

His companion was his complete opposite.

John Hanning Speke was clean living with a taste for tweed suits.

But he shared with Burton the cast of mind

that made the early pioneers of empire,

an obsessive, often fool-hardy, determination.

BIRDS TWEET

The pair came to loathe each other and would become bitter rivals.

Together they travelled over 1500 miles

through swamp, desert and jungle.

For two years they journeyed into the interior

battling dysentery, fever and wild animals,

scorched by the tropical sun.

You get a sense of how heroic this expedition was

when you look at this 19th century map of Africa.

They'd landed on the east coast and various places around here,

Madagascar, Zanzibar, so on, they are known.

But inside Africa, the whole heart of Africa

is just marked "unknown parts",

thousands upon thousands of square miles,

but somewhere in there was the source of the Nile.

When Burton went down with malaria, Speke pressed on alone.

And on the morning of August 3rd, 1858,

a year after they had set out,

John Hanning Speke looked out on a vast expanse of water

which he immediately, of course, named Lake Victoria,

and which he believed to be the source of the Nile.

'"I no longer felt any doubt", he wrote,'

'"that the lake at my feet gave birth to that river

'"whose source has been the object of so many explorers."'

It was no more than a hunch,

though as it later turned out, he was right.

Despite the fact his evidence was really pretty thin,

Speke hastened back to camp

and six weeks later was reunited with Burton.

"I found the source of the Nile", he told him,

to which Burton replied, "Oh no, you haven't."

The two men agreed it would just be safest

not to talk about it anymore

and for the remainder of their time in the jungle,

they maintained a frosty English silence on the subject.

Victorian explorers like Speke and Burton

were the pathfinders of empire.

Fanatical not for power, but for knowledge and excitement

and they helped to create the image of the classic British hero.

Their accounts of their travels inspired tales of adventure

for a British public hungry for excitement.

King Solomon's Mines was published in 1885 and was a huge bestseller.

Filmed many times since,

it tells the story of three British adventurers

who play the game to the hilt.

Together they cross Africa in search of the lost diamond mines

of an ancient civilisation.

King Solomon's mines!

Its author, Henry Rider-Haggard was an old colonial.

He'd spent seven years in Southern Africa.

The British public devoured his thrilling tale

of danger and exploration.

It came complete with a map of his hero's journey into the unknown.

It's written in blood, a very good start,

on a strip of fabric torn from a dying man's shirt.

And it shows the route you have to take across the Calacarway river,

avoiding the bad water,

between a couple of mountains called Sheba's Breasts,

to the idols guarding the cave where the treasure is.

In this quiet country house in Norfolk,

Rider-Haggard produced rip-roaring yarns

for generations of school boys to read under the bed clothes,

as well they might.

His massively popular tale, She, comes with a powerful dash

of Victorian male fantasy.

She, or She Who Must Be Obeyed, is an African goddess,

white as it happens, made immortal by killing her lovers.

The narrator is at last allowed a peep at her extravagant charms.

"For a moment she stood still,

"her hands raised high above her head.

"And as she did so,

"the white robe slipped from her, down to her golden girdle,

"bearing the blinding loveliness of her form".

This is enough to burst the buttons on your Victorian waistcoat.

But what it does point up, is the way in which the empire

opened up the possibility of all sorts of intoxications

that were quite unknown in respectable old England.

For Rider-Haggard's heroes, the empire was a vast playground

for a particular kind of British male.

He's a fellow with a stiff upper lip, athletic and unpretentious.

He is fair, he is honest and he's steady.

He's an amateur, and you can find him all over the empire,

from Khartoum to Calcutta to Cape Town.

If you needed three words to sum him up - a decent chap.

The decent chap was a contradiction.

Sturdy and self-reliant,

yet ready to obey orders without hesitation.

He was nurtured in a place far removed from the heat

and dust of the colonies - the English public school.

The public schools heyday was the height of the Victorian era.

Schools like this took boys

and turned them into the governing class of empire.

The future prefects of the colonial world.

They couldn't expect an easy ride.

Life in a Victorian public school was specifically designed

to work against the comforts of family life.

The chief thing to be desired, said one headmaster,

is to remove the child from the noxious influence of home.

There was a good reason for this strict regime.

It was to make the boys Christian gentlemen.

"Manly and enlightened, finer specimens of human nature

"than any other country could furnish".

The words of Rugby's celebrated headmaster, Thomas Arnold.

This is the room known as upper bench, where Dr Arnold

taught some of the sons of the wealthier Victorian middle class.

But from what they were taught, you would never guess

that Victorian scientists, engineers, architects and explorers

were about to forge the modern world.

It was rather the ancient Romans who provided the model.

Victorian headmasters and politicians

didn't look forward, but back to the classical world,

in which civilisation was spread at the point of the sword.

This is a timetable from 1899,

and it shows that if you were a 16-year-old

in the upper middle part of the school,

this would be what you'd study.

Divinity, classics, classics, classics, classics, classics,

maths, natural science, classics, maths, classics, classics,

classics, classics, classics, French, history, French, maths,

classics, classics, classics, maths, classics.

Small wonder that as one visitor to another public school remarked,

"Not one boy in 10 could tell him where Birmingham was."

But a public school education

wasn't really about learning where Birmingham was.

# Who would true valour see

# Let him come hither

# One here will constant be

# Come wind, come weather. #

A particular idea of Christian values, discipline,

respect for rules and ritual,

these made up the public schools' true mission -

the moulding of character.

# His first avowed intent

# To be a pilgrim. #

But there was something else fostered here

that would prove an even more powerful builder of empire.

The British public school practiced two religions -

Christianity and sport.

According to one Victorian headmaster,

sport was the rock on which Britain's greatness was built.

Great stuff, great stuff!

Englishmen, he said, are not superior to Frenchmen or Germans,

in brains or industry or the science or applications of war.

In the history of the British Empire

it is written that England owes her sovereignty to her sports.

The values of organised games

were said to express the values of empire.

Physical courage.

Team spirit.

And, er, having a go.

And it was the game of cricket

which gave rise to one of the most famous of all famous empire poems.

There's a breathless hush in the close tonight,

10 to make and the match to win,

a bumping pitch and a blinding light,

an hour to play and the last man in.

And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,

or the selfish hope of a season's fame,

but his captain's hand on his shoulder smoked,

play up, play up and play the game.

Ah, beautiful, Harry!

In the poem, the scene shifts from the cricket field

to a bloody battle in the African desert.

The schoolboy is now a soldier,

his comrades in arms dead or dying all around him.

But then his spirits soar as he hears his captain's voice calling,

"Play up, play up and play the game."

It's majestic and it's idiotic at the same time,

to our eyes at least, because war isn't a game.

And yet the fact that the poem could be written in that way

tells us something rather profound

about the way that the British viewed their empire.

The battle which had inspired the poem

was fought by British troops

in the biggest country in Africa, Sudan.

In such remote outposts,

the heroes of empire achieved sometimes mythical status.

In 1884, the empire found a hero

who played the game with a passion that bordered on madness.

He was a soldier who showed that heroic failure

could be even more inspiring than victory.

Charles Gordon was a maverick,

a general who disobeyed orders and wrote his own.

He became an imperial martyr

in one of the strangest episodes in the history of empire,

the Siege of Khartoum.

The capital was surrounded by thousands of Islamic warriors,

followers of a religious leader sworn to end British rule.

He called himself the Mahdi, the expected one.

The man sent from Britain to stop the Mahdi, roared on by the London

newspapers, was already a legendary soldier and a fervent Christian.

General Charles George Gordon was an extraordinary man.

He was thin, he was 51, he was unmarried

and he had blue eyes with a far away look in them.

Other places they'd have just called him a crank.

But as it was, the British public whipped up by the press,

came to share his unshakeable self belief.

General Gordon could save Khartoum.

Gordon's orders weren't to fight,

but to evacuate the British force there.

But Gordon himself had something rather more heroic in mind.

From the governor's palace he announced he'd hold out

against the Mahdi until reinforcements were sent.

The siege of the city began.

The British government, furious with Gordon's disobedience,

refused to act.

The press were outraged at this treatment of their hero.

Gordon had been deserted they cried, he must be rescued.

General Gordon was a hero, not just because he was a remarkable

human being, but because he seemed to express Britain's moral purpose.

The newspapers twigged that

in a way that the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, didn't.

Gladstone didn't want a war,

but the press and public opinion forced his hand.

The army hastily assembled a relief force but by now it was too late.

After ten months under siege,

every scrap of food in Khartoum had been eaten.

The dead lay in the streets, the Mahdi's men were at the gates,

the water level of the Nile protecting the city

dropped further every day.

Holed up in the governor's palace, Gordon was relishing the part

he'd given himself in this imperial tragedy.

He lit candles in his rooms,

almost offering himself as a target to the Mahdi's snipers.

A companion begged him to stop.

When God was portioning out fear to the people of the world, he told

him, at last it came to my turn and there was no fear left to give me.

Go tell all the people of Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing,

because God has created him without fear.

When the attack came, it was unbelievably savage.

The siege had lasted 317 days.

It ended in a blood bath.

Gordon was killed in the battle.

The Mahdi's followers bought him

Gordon's head as a trophy and the general's body was never found.

Khartoum and the Sudan belonged to the Mahdi.

The Mahdi's great grandson still lives in the city.

Ah, good morning, good morning, good morning.

Good morning, Imam. Good morning.

-Welcome to Sudan.

-Thank you for having us.

What sort of a man was your great grandfather?

The Mahdi was a world-denying figure.

Although he wanted to change the world,

he really wanted to change it in favour of the next world.

So actually he was world-denying,

almost with aspirations of a mystic.

Whatever kingdom he had in mind was the kingdom in heaven not here.

When you think about it,

they're pretty similar individuals, aren't they?

They're both religious, they were both ascetic men.

Gordon too was a man who mortified the flesh and denied the world.

Indeed, indeed.

And he was a great hero in Britain in the way that the Mahdi

was a popular hero here.

Indeed, that's why there is this tragedy

that there was this conflict between people

who in a world differently organised, could have been very close friends.

What do you feel about General Gordon?

He had no business combating people who were asserting themselves.

The whole basis is that power corrupts and if you have power,

it's very difficult for you to accept other human beings as your equal

because you feel that very powerful situation makes you some kind of god.

Then you make the rules, then you make everything.

You decide everything. And this, of course, is a great human failure.

If General Gordon had only done as he was told and evacuated Khartoum,

he'd never have become the imperial hero he immediately turned into.

Even though he'd have saved thousands of lives, his own included

The people of Britain didn't much care whether or not Sudan was in

the British Empire, but this wasn't about a place it was about an idea.

That idea was summed up in the famous painting,

Gordon's Last Stand, by George W Joy.

Gordon waits at the top of the steps careless in the face of death,

he makes no attempt to defend himself,

his pistol hangs loosely in his hand his sword remains sheathed.

He looks his killers in the eye - "Do what you have to do".

This wasn't the death of an imperial conqueror.

This was a martyrdom,

sanctifying the empire with heroism and personal sacrifice.

The memory of Gordon's solitary end refused to fade.

Even after the death of the Mahdi, the British public

and the British press continued to thirst for revenge.

The task fell to a man of a very different kind from Charles Gordon.

Even by his own men, Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener

was often described as a man with no soul.

The Daily Mail dubbed him "The Machine of The Sudan".

On 1st January 1897, a meticulously organised force

left Egypt for Khartoum, over 600 miles to the south.

The British force advanced steadily across the desert

laying a railway line behind it

at the amazing rate of a mile and a half a day.

On the train which followed, came guns and troops and supplies

and three gunboats which had been built on the Thames, disassembled

and shipped up here to be put back together on the banks of the Nile.

It was a relentless progress.

This was a new kind of warfare,

the moment the empire entered the machine age.

Waiting in Khartoum were the Sudanese warriors, the Dervishes,

sometimes known as whirling Dervishes

after their ecstatic religious dance.

CHANTING

Dervishes still gather on holy days in Khartoum

to pray, celebrate and dance.

The great poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling,

wrote about them in the imagined words of an ordinary British soldier

who recognised that, in some strange foreign way,

the Dervishes too played up, played up and played the game.

Kipling's soldier raises an imaginary glass to his fearless foe.

"So here's to you, Fuzzy Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Sudan,

you're a poor benighted 'eathen but a first-class fighting man."

The Dervishes might play the game in the old fashioned way,

but the empire had moved on.

Kitchener would rely on

rather more than fighting spirit to win in battle.

The British like to think of their military history in events

like the Spanish Armada or the Battle of Britain, when, outnumbered

and outgunned, Britain survived by virtue of guts and ingenuity.

But the truth is, in most of Britain's empire wars,

Britain's inventiveness in science

and industry had simply given it much better ways of killing people.

On Kitchener's desert train had come machine guns

and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

At Omdurman, near Khartoum, the stage was set

for one of the bloodiest battles in the history of empire.

The British forces were drawn up down by the Nile over there,

and the Mahdi's men held the high ground.

Winston Churchill was a young officer with Kitchener

and he described coming out one morning

and seeing the entire hillside moving.

Thousands upon thousands of Dervishes advancing on a front

he reckoned was four miles wide, under innumerable banners,

and with the sun glinting on the tips of their spears.

Spears against machine guns, the result was never in doubt.

Kitchener was watching the battle from horseback.

At about 11:30, so five hours after the fighting began,

he put his binoculars away

and remarked that the enemies seem to have been given "a good dusting".

They then broke for lunch.

The casualties were about 10,000 Sudanese dead to 48 British.

The body of General Gordon's foe, the Mahdi,

was dug up and thrown into the Nile.

Kitchener was presented with the Mahdi's skull as a trophy of war.

The story went that he planned to use it as an ink stand.

Queen Victoria was not amused.

Ornamental skulls weren't her idea of fair play,

even if Kitchener had added one million square miles to her empire.

Where Gordon had failed, Kitchener had succeeded spectacularly.

But it wasn't Kitchener, the Machine of the Sudan,

who became the empire's romantic hero.

That role belonged to Charles George Gordon -

idealistic, reckless and slightly deranged, and now very dead.

That was how the empire really liked their heroes.

Heroic disaster always seemed to stir British hearts

quite as much as victory.

Whether it was the explorer Captain Cook,

killed by Hawaiian islanders in 1779.

Or Sir John Franklin, frozen to death trying to find

the northwest passage through the Arctic.

Or the Charge of the Light Brigade riding fearlessly and pointlessly

into enemy cannon fire in the Crimea.

They all played up, played up and played the game.

Tales of heroism provided spectacular stories for the citizens

of what was soon calling itself, "The Mother Country".

Publishers were churning them out well into the 20th century.

One of the main outlets for this kind of material would have been

the market of Sunday school prizes.

Giving things as gifts to good spellers in class.

The Romance of Colonization.

Wouldn't be a title of a book you'd see today.

I don't think you would see that very often, no.

Woah, there are loads of them!

I think it very much reflects the way that people saw the world

and one of the major elements was, of course,

Britishness, patriotism, excitement in the empire.

I think that the striking thing is certainly the message of the text

which is all about bringing civilisation to the nighted parts

of the world, but then just the glorious and alluring images.

Society was awash with this kind of comic

or cigarette card collection, annuals.

A lot of people would find this stuff unspeakable now,

wouldn't they? Ghastly racist propaganda.

I think it tells us a lot about the world view at the time.

It's also interesting in magazines like Chums,

there were so many of these.

"Chums". What a great name. At the mercy of the witch doctors!

This one, of course, is full of the militaristic heroism

of the British armed forces, and, of course, the standard themes

about English history and the wider world and the empire.

"A fight with the Zulus".

Here for example there are copies of the wider world, which are,

to all intents and purposes, the same stuff yet again.

When you start looking in the magazine, and you get adverts

for Canadian Club Whiskey, or Burlington Belt Trusses

or Briar Pipes that you realise the target audience.

Chap who needs a truss is going to be damn all use

in some of these situations.

Such tales might satisfy the armchair imperialist at home,

but out in the colonies

playing the game was something to be done more energetically.

For the British, sport was part of the civilising mission of empire.

The gift of the mother country to her colonies.

Whether it involved chasing a ball,

smashing it with a racket or whacking it with a club.

The sporting gospel was carried

to the farthest-flung corners of the empire.

Hong Kong's life as a British Colony

began in the 1840s as a trading post for nearby China.

Even here there was always a place

for one of the empire's great obsessions, horse racing.

They used to say that when the French took a colony,

they built a restaurant,

when the Germans took one, they built a road,

and when the British pitched up, they built a racecourse.

Happy Valley Racecourse in the heart of Hong Kong

is a legacy of the days of empire.

Over 20,000 people come here every Wednesday night.

It was the British who developed the razzmatazz of the modern turf.

Today's inhabitants are such enthusiastic gamblers

that bookies here take as much money in one night

as in the whole of Ascot week.

I'm going with number seven, Something Special, in the next one.

Let's find out what the minimum bet is.

Can I have ten dollars, about a pound,

ten dollars on Something Special, number seven, in the 8.10.

-Thank you.

-Number seven, right?

Number seven, Something Special.

BELL RINGS

Whoo!

I can't believe it, that's amazing!

I won, I won, it's amazing!

I won! First time.

36 dollars, which is about just over three quid.

We're not even going to get a round of drinks out of it!

Wherever in the empire sport was played,

it was supposed to bind subject peoples to their colonial masters.

But the spirit of fair play

and the interests of empire would eventually clash head on.

The West Indian island of Jamaica

had been a British colony since 1655.

The British introduced cricket to Jamaica in the 1830s.

It soon seemed to enter the bloodstream of the island.

He's got a good eye, that boy in the yellow shirt, hasn't he?

-How old are you?

-Ten.

Ten? Do you play much cricket?

Who's the best cricketer here? You are?

-No, him.

-Who's the best? You're the best cricketer, are you?

-Me.

-You're the best one?

-Him!

-And him.

-And me.

-You're the two champs.

But there was a problem here.

How could a game, which prided itself on fairness,

work in an empire divided between rulers and ruled,

and therefore very obviously unfair?

Cricket in the West Indies would become not a unifying force

but a symbol of oppression.

In 19th century Jamaica, whites owned the land, blacks worked on it.

While cricket was supposed to be good for subject races,

at that time, black and white rarely played together.

It's a practise day at Sabina Park,

the home of Jamaica's Kingston Cricket Club.

When it was formed in 1863,

it was a place for white men to play the game.

Even when black and white began to play on the same side,

racial tensions in the game remained.

No black player was ever selected to captain the national team.

Whites were chosen to bat,

while blacks were relegated to bowling or fielding.

It wasn't quite the done thing

for white men to do a lot of running around in the tropics,

besides which there was a distinction between brawn,

bowling, and brains, batting.

Batting was for white men.

Change had to come.

It arrived in the person of Frank Worrall, who, in 1960,

became the first black player

to captain the West Indies team for an entire series.

When Worrall brought his team to England,

they showed they could play the game rather better than their hosts.

The Oval can never have heard of a scene like this.

Victory in the series by three matches to one

confirmed the West Indies as the most powerful side in the world.

It was generally said, that here is the right person at last

to lead a West Indies team because I think, before, there wasn't unity

based on who was appointed captain or who was appointed vice captain.

Now it was felt that the players have a captain they can fight for.

So it was greeted with cheers throughout the entire Caribbean

and I think many people were saying,

"At last, we have the right man to lead."

-Like a Mandela moment!

-It certainly was, that's why I said that.

-Free at last, free at last.

-Free at last, at last, at last!

Students now become the teachers.

England taught the West Indies cricket,

and had a grand opportunity for the students now to reverse that process

and in the mind of many of the West Indian players,

this was, you know, the turning point I think for everyone.

Sort of like sweet revenge.

CROWD CHEERING

In the end, the British idea of fair play

undermined the very notion of empire itself.

If a black cricket captain, why not a black prime minister?

In 1962, Jamaica became the first

Caribbean island to gain independence,

and through the 1960s, all over the empire,

from the West Indies to Fiji, the Union Jack came down.

As the empire crumbled,

so did reverence for the things and attitudes it held dear.

# Everybody's doing a brand new dance now

# C'mon, baby, do the locomotion! #

The uniforms...

..the flag...

..the moustaches!

This wasn't playing the game, this was having a laugh.

# So c'mon, c'mon, do the locomotion with me. #

A laugh at military valour,

at sporting prowess,

at the thrill of adventure and exploration.

The empire was gone.

The only way to cope with its loss was to see its absurdity.

So ladies, shall we retire?

We'll be in to spank you later, you firm buttock young amazons, you.

I'm terribly sorry. I don't know what came over me.

All right, Morrison, I think you know what to do.

THEY LAUGH

Yes. Yes, of course, sir.

I apologise to you all.

GUNSHOT

-Silly really, seemed a nice enough young chap.

-Yes.

Now, why is this...why is it funny?

Because I think it's such an absurd thing that they're doing

and yet they're all taking it absolutely seriously

and that's what the empire was all about, really.

Doing very, very strange things absolutely seriously.

-Clive, what ARE you doing?

-I say Cooper, what's going on?

Oh, er, it's nothing really, sir.

He was just explaining to me about...

I was passing the port from left to right.

This sort of thin veneer of control of which passing the port is one,

and being gallant about ladies is the other, you know.

If that starts to crack, the whole thing just collapses.

I think it's just because of the formality of it.

And the fact that they go and shoot themselves,

which is the ultimate logical end to letting down the empire.

GUNSHOT

Where did the idea of ripping yarns come from?

Well, really from all those books. It was a literary idea.

It was all those books that were written in the '20s and '30s

and maybe before the war even, which I vaguely knew about,

which were all stories of pluck, heroism, courage, duty.

So why did you find it funny?

Was it because you were young and truculent?

When I started to think about this

with the sort of clear light of the '60s upon us all

and suddenly we were free to talk about anything we wanted to

and I suddenly thought, "Yes it was, it was really absurd,"

and it was a rich vein, and a lot of people kind of obviously

shared that literary upbringing

and understood quite...understood what we were on about.

What's funny is being funny

in a place where you're not supposed to be funny.

GUNSHOT

So, is all that's left of empire just a bit of a joke? Not entirely.

Hello, you boy in the corner there, you ought to be a boy scout.

You're a fine looking fella and I know you'd make a jolly good

back woods man by the look of you. You're ugly enough anyway.

Robert Baden Powell founded the boy scouts in 1907.

This die-hard imperialist wanted

to enlist ordinary British boys to the service of the empire,

not just the officer class of the great public schools.

He gave them military style uniforms and funny rituals

so these boys, too, could play up, play up, and play the game.

Ah, good!

Today the scouts are going as strong as ever.

Here, at an annual camp in Norfolk,

boy scouts and girl scouts learn about living in the wild...

Oh good!

..staying healthy...

..and becoming more confident.

Baden Powell had toyed with the idea of calling his organisation

"Young Knights of the Empire".

But, by the time I joined it, it had nothing to do with empire.

What it fed on and continues to feed on,

is young people's appetite for adventure.

For sleeping out, for cooking under the stars,

for cleaning your teeth with a twig in a stream.

Can I join your breakfast?

-Yes, if you want, sit down.

-Good. What do you think you learn

in scouts that you wouldn't learn somewhere else?

It's like some things you learn in school, like English and Maths,

but, like, you don't learn that at scouts. It's like other things,

like adventure and other things that just might come in handy in life.

-Do you still do knots?

-Yeah, we do knots.

-Pioneering.

Who's got a bit of rope?

You can all demonstrate your knots.

-Put your hand in there.

-OK, go on.

That's it.

Very good.

Get me out!

And do they still have that, you know the...what's it called,

the scout oath or the scout promise?

-Promise, yeah.

-And how does it go?

ALL: I promise to do my best to God and the Queen,

to help other people and to keep the scout law.

-Do you have a good deed every day? No?

-Sometimes.

-Aren't you supposed

-to help little old ladies across the road?

-No, they can do it themselves!

LAUGHTER

The scout movement now numbers over 41 million boys and girls

from North America, to Europe, to Africa.

The scouts were set up to protect the empire

from the fleshy corruption, which Baden Powell saw threatening it,

but they've turned into something entirely different.

International and inclusive, while still fostering

the same spirits of self reliance and public spiritedness.

And here's to 'em, I say.

Next time:

The empire's roots.

Piracy in the Caribbean.

Empire's riches.

How it grew into a global money machine.

And empire's shame.

Profits from opium...

..and slavery.

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Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd