Tintin and Scout-Art

Over the years, Scouting has had a huge influence on children's books. Born as it was in the spirt of Kim, with his literary younger brother Mowgli going on to be the patron of the Wolf-Cubs (nowadays known as Cub Scouts), Scouting has affected boy fiction and boy art, and "boy culture" generally, directly and indirectly in both obvious and subtle ways. From Tintin, to The Lord of the Rings, to the children's books of John Christopher, to Indiana Jones (and perhaps even to Harry Potter - though admittedly whimsical wish-fulfilment doesn't lend itself easily to the gritty world of Scouting), the spirit of Scouting has formed the characters of boy-heroes in fiction for over a hundred years just as surely as it was meant to form the characters of real live boys in the so-called "real world".

The most famous fictional Scout is almost certainly Tintin, the artistic and literary creation of Belgian former Catholic Scout Georges Prosper Remi , better know by his nom de plume Hergé. Half Sherlock Holmes, half post-imperial explorer and adventurer, in fact Tintin is really half boy and half man: he doesn’t have a Christian name (or a surname, for that matter), let alone parents, and he smiles and whistles under all circumstances. (Actually I’m not so sure about that last part. We were always taught not to whistle when we were children because it was common – as Hardy puts it, such an accomplishment would be one that one should ‘not care to profess in genteel company’ – but since I never learnt to whistle anyway it hardly matters.)

Hergé himself had his centenary last year. Tintin, for his part, is now 77, and he’s looking pretty good on it. He first appeared in the children’s cartoon-supplement of a rightwing, traditionalist Catholic magazine in Belgium called Le Vingtieme Siecle (The Twentieth Century) in 1929. He wasn’t the first of Remi’s characters to feature in the pages of Le Petit Vingtieme, but he was far and away the most successful, and he pushed up the ’paper’s circulation several-fold. (Which, rather pleasingly, is what happened to Tintin in the Congo last year when the CRE decided to make a stink about it!)

Tintin’s immediate forerunner in Le Petit Vingtieme was not a journalist but a Catholic Boy Scout called Totor. Remi had been a Catholic Scout himself, Catholic Scouting having been started in Belgium in 1917 at Mouscron, thanks to the efforts of a Jesuit priest by the name of Père Jacques Sevin. The international Scout movement had been recognised by Pope Benedict XV two years before that, and Sevin himself had discovered the movement in Britain two years before that. He had been sent to England by his superiors to “investigate” after a couple of “unfavourable” articles had appeared in the Jesuit journal Etudes. Whilst he was here he attended a Scout rally and had tea with Lt Gen Robert Baden-Powell, who by then was a national hero from the Relief of Mafeking, and he liked what he discovered. And this was a mere six years after the birth not just of Georges Remi but also of Scouting itself with Baden-Powell’s first Scout camp on Brownsea Island the very same year.

From Belgium Catholic Scouting spread quickly to France, where in its traditional form it is still surprisingly strong. With a pleasing irony, after the changes of the 1960s (or rather after the changes that started in the 1960s – for in Scouting as in all things change is utterly addictive, and once the craving has beeen indulged it can never be assuaged!) traditional Catholic Scouting in France is a good deal closer to B-P’s original vision than most of what passes for Scouting in the UK today. The 9 Articles of the original Scout Law are still there (though the French prefer ‘sourit et chante’ to ‘smiles and whistles’), albeit with a tenth article – ‘Le Scout est pur dans ses pensées, ses paroles et ses actes. A Scout is pure in his thoughts, words and deeds.’

On the annual Chartres Pilgrimage of course the Scouts of Riaumont and Saint Louis and the Europa Scouts put on a pretty good show. The preference is still for shorts (or for that matter lederhosen) rather than baggy jeans, and the couple of times I've been on it they've all had haircuts that make them look like… well, like Tintin. The iconic tuft of hair indeed was to remain a part of Tintin through all his incarnations: in the 1930s Hergé’s black and white Tintin was reborn in colour as we know him today; in the 1940s he moved from the city to the country, to live with Captain Haddock, whereupon he stopped wearing a tie; and in the 1970s he even changed out of the plus fours he’d been wearing since the very beginning into a pair of groovy flares. It’s nice then to think that one little bit of Scoutisme did indeed survive right until the end.

By the time of his death, Georges Remi had attained a near legendary status as a popular artist of great talent and vision. Certainly he was not primarily a Scout artist, but arguably Scouting was a massively important part of his work in much the same way as it was for artists as diverse as the great French children's artist Pierre Joubert, the immortal American popular artist Norman Rockwell, and the controversial German artist Otto Lohmüller. Each certainly owes a debt to the Scout movement, and Scouting certainly owes each of them a debt of gratitude.