Why Roland Philipps?
 
 

Simple, because there's nothing about the captain on the World Wide Web. When we say nothing, we mean that there's nothing substantial. On our search we found some scout groups named after him and some sites with very brief information on his life, as well as his main book "The Patrol System". However, these do not reflect the significance of his service as a scout, nor the intense philanthropic work with the boys of East London and the poorest social strata of his time.
 

For the purpose of the www.GRUPOVII.com project and due to the great influence of Roland Philipps in our scout group, we considered that the Web was the best means to enrich our site, especially the place we were planning to devote to our scout troop, but ¡surprise! the Web lacks information in depth on this mainstay of world scouting.

Not satisfied we contacted the Scout Association based in Great Britain and we were surprised to find that many people ignored his contribution, that his books were out of print and that they even didn't know who he was. After a while we were sent to Mrs. Pat Styles, archives assistant to the headquarters who did the search for us and found some documents and images that were sent back to us by mail.

The information we received had us change our first objective. Roland Philipps was not just worth a place in our site but a full separate site dedicated to the man, the soldier and the leader.

The task of recreating his life is not an easy one, thus we hope this effort helps as a reference, especially, to patrol and troop leaders around the world to continue the great job initiated by this man, Roland Philipps, Captain of the British Empire Army and a truly believer of real scouting.