In conversation
TV adventurer and chief scout Bear Grylls talks to Jackie Brown about being a good dad, turning 50 and updating Robert Baden-Powell’s famous book
Many years ago, a colleague arrived at the office raving about a man she’d heard giving a motivational talk the night before. He was young, he was handsome, he had recently climbed Mount Everest. He was Bear Grylls.
Action men have never appealed to me much (too exhausting), but the way she described how inspiring he was stayed in my mind. And, of course, it’s a very memorable name.
Reaching the summit of Everest when he was just 23 was only the start of an incredible career in the public eye. Since then, Bear has become world famous for extreme adventures on TV, doing everything from drinking liquid squeezed from elephant dung and eating a live snake to crawling into the carcass of a dead camel for shelter.
In his Running Wild series, meanwhile, he’s shared his love of adventure with the famous – trekking through the wild in Alaska with Barack Obama and abseiling down the side of a Welsh mountain with Kate Winslet, to name but two. Away from the high-octane glamour of TV, Bear has another role. Aged 34, he became the UK’s youngest ever chief scout in 2009, and now he is also chief ambassador of World Scouting.
With his dedication – not to mention his celebrity – he was the ideal person to update the famous book Scouting For Boys, which was written by the organisation’s founder Lord Baden-Powell in 1908. The result, Do Your Best: How To Be A Scout, covers many practical skills, from camping and survival to tying knots and Morse code. But it also celebrates other ‘softer’ parts of scouting, such as kindness and how to be a good friend.
‘It’s a really special one for me,’ says Bear. ‘Scouting For Boys has been such a wonderful, powerful, positive influence for literally millions of young people worldwide for more than 100 years. So many of the values are needed now more than ever – as well as the skills – but it was ready to be written for a new generation of young people. I am really proud of it.’
So how is it different from Baden-Powell’s original book? ‘There are very few new topics – we are just updating them. I love things in the book such as how to be fit, how to be strong and how to build teams. When you look at the original, they were there, but they were just touched on.
‘We wanted to go deeper because school doesn’t teach this sort of stuff, does it? There’s such a huge gap, not just in the sense of practical skills and the adventures and outdoor skills, but almost more importantly in the life skills.’
He continues: ‘It’s hard to be effective in life if you have no idea about how to be a friend, no idea how to live free, ho
