16 December 1858 – 2 June 1945
Agnes Baden-Powell
Organiser, first President and main author of the first Guide handbook, and a founder whom later memory largely forgot.
Who shaped Guiding
People
Founders, organisers, members and critics. We are deliberately not writing a "great women only" history. Our first four biographies are of founders and national leaders; we aim for at least half of those that follow to be of people who were not.
The first four authority records are below. Next to be commissioned are Rose Kerr, Agatha Blyth, Dame Katharine Furse, Josefina Llanes Escoda, Olga Drahonowska-Małkowska, and local members and volunteers whose lives survive in diaries, logbooks and oral histories.
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22 February 1889 – 25 June 1977
Olave Baden-Powell
Chief Guide from 1918 and World Chief Guide from 1930, a much-travelled leader who held Guiding's international network together through visits, letters and ceremony.
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22 February 1857 – 8 January 1941
Robert Baden-Powell
Army officer and founder of Scouting, who set out the girls' scheme with his sister Agnes, wrote Guiding's handbooks from 1918 and signed them as "Founder".
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31 October 1860 – 17 January 1927
Juliette Gordon Low
Founder of Girl Scouting in the United States in 1912, who adapted the British model for American girls and paid for much of its early growth.