Scouting leaders question--help!

[Spartan Tartan]

Gents,

Thanks for the advice. We did end up doing a couple and they were pretty simple and based upon the promise, etc...like some suggested. My favorite one for the night was as follows:

Start: "Honesty is the best policy."

End: "Bugs are good for Cub Scouts."

I thought for a moment Bear Grylls was in the den! We had a pretty good laugh with that one.

As a side note for the other cub leaders (and the Troop guys if you can remember all the way back ), as of tonite, the boys that were there have earned their Bobcat Rank. They were pretty excited. They will be awarded their patches at the next pack meeting.

Thanks again for the advice!

Jeremy

[O'Callaghan]

In the UK we call that game something different but it's so long since I had to play it with Scouts I can't remember what the name was

Anyway, it's based on a supposed military incident in, I think, the Boer War. The message "we are going to advance, please send reinforcements" was sent down the line and arrived as "we are going to a dance, please send three and fourpence" (three and fourpence meaning three shillings and four pence, which was the British currency at the time)

You could try using the original message and see what your Tiger Cubs make of it

That's one of those stories that sounds apocryphal. In the version I remember the amount of money was only two and fourpence, so it may be that yours had experienced inflation, LOL! Also, I don't remember what war it was supposed to be, but either amount would have been quite a lot of money going as far back as the Boer War, I would have thought.

Exchange rates were a lot different back then, too, so a US dollar was only worth two and sixpence I think (from my recollection of what my grandad told me when he was alive). IOW, three and fourpence would have been worth something like a dollar and a quarter back then, and we're talking nineteenth century. OTOH, maybe that would be the right amount to pay for the whole regiment to attend a dance ... ? Not a historian, so I don't really know what things used to cost.

Of course, at present rates of exchange a whole pound is only worth about a dollar sixty. There used to be twenty shillings in a pound and twelve pence in a shilling before 1971, for those who don't know, so three and fourpence, if we still used shillings, or about 17p in the 'new' money, would now be worth about a quarter, instead of a dollar and a quarter.

[Laird_M]

Gents,

Thanks for the advice. We did end up doing a couple and they were pretty simple and based upon the promise, etc...like some suggested. My favorite one for the night was as follows:

Start: "Honesty is the best policy."

End: "Bugs are good for Cub Scouts."

I thought for a moment Bear Grylls was in the den! We had a pretty good laugh with that one.

Last time we did t we had a few 'wags' decide to change the message - thankfully the main culprit has left. Some of the messages sure as heck didn't fit with the 'a scout is clean of mind' by the time they got to the other end of the chain...