by David Murray
Later, as well as BP’s fame, his family would become accustomed to controversy too. Critics and biographers have condemned Baden-Powell for many things over the years. He’s been labelled a mass murderer for starving Africans in Mafeking, and a brute for executing an African prisoner promised mercy. He was a plagiarist and a charlatan in the eyes of others, for copying central ideas for the Scouting movement from British author Ernest Thompson Seton. Some suggest he had an ulterior motive for his movement, citing comments he made about photo graphs and artwork involving nude boys. Some suspect he was a repressed homosexual, pointing to an unusually close relationship with a male friend. His works are also often inherently contradictory. On the one hand he instructed Scouts not to follow the herd; on the other he told them to obey orders without question.
Perhaps the most dangerous challenge to his legacy, though, has been the revelation that some Scoutmasters have abused their trusted positions to prey on boys in their charge.
Still, Scouting has stood the test of time. According to the biography Baden-Powell, by author Tim Jeal, more than a decade ago 550 million people had been Scouts or Guides. Today there are 40 million Scouts in one million local Scout groups worldwide. There are 10 million Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. It is a huge legacy for his descendants to live up to.
Scouts – Gerard was among them – pledge to follow a Promise and Law based on Baden-Powell’s original wording:
On my honour I promise that I will do my best: To do my duty to God and the King; to help other people at all times; to obey the Scout Law.
A Scout’s honour is to be trusted; a Scout is loyal; a Scout’s duty is to be useful and to help others; a Scout is a friend to animals; a Scout obeys orders of his parents, patrol leader or Scoutmaster without question; a Scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties; a Scout is thrifty; and a Scout is clean in thought, word and deed.
Scouts pledged to do a good deed every day, and adopted the motto ‘be prepared’.
Meet the Clays
More than 100 years after Robert Baden-Powell defended the township of Mafeking from Boer invaders, his family was once again under siege. This time a nation’s media surrounded them. The wife of Baden-Powell’s great-grandson Gerard Baden-Clay was missing.
Under the glare of the media spotlight, Gerard retreated to the home of his parents, Nigel and Elaine Baden-Clay, in suburban Kenmore, a few kilometres from the home he shared with Allison. By then, more than a week had passed since his wife had vanished without trace. A command post had been set up to coordinate the search for Allison, but Gerard was keeping away from there. Allison’s parents, Geoff and Priscilla Dickie, were permanent fixtures.
The public was becoming curious about the elusive Baden-Clays, who had circled their wagons around Gerard. Nigel and Elaine had chased journalists from their door and were aware news cameras were on their street around the clock to catch their son’s comings and goings. Perhaps in an attempt to project an image of family unity, the couple engineered a display of affection for the cameras so baffling it was referred to by many simply as The Granny Pash. Uploaded to YouTube under the heading ‘Baden-Clay parents pash for cameras’, it would be watched thousands of times.
The footage was captured when Gerard arrived at his parents’ home. After helping their son remove some things from the boot of the car, the couple leant in for a kiss in the carport. Nigel appeared to have expected a peck but his wife, Elaine, drew him in for a long and toe-curlingly awkward smooch. Channel Nine reporter Andrew Kos highlighted the scene in his report for that night’s 6 pm news bulletin, telling viewers, ‘As his parents, Nigel and Elaine, unpacked the car, a bizarre moment for a very public display of affection.’
The number plates on Nigel’s car, BWANA, added to the family’s air of oddity. From the African language Swahili, the word translated to master, boss or sir. Then there were the hunting trophies. Several sets of impressive antlers were mounted on the front wall of Nigel and Elaine’s home; visitors had to pass them to get to the front door. The ostentatious display, visible from the street, included a majestic pair of spiral horns from a kudu antelope, commonly hunted in Zimbabwe.
An old profile of Nigel from when he was a Century 21 Westside salesman could still be found online. It described him, intriguingly, as an avid big game hunter, conservationist and marriage enhancement facilitator; he and Elaine helped organise retreats for couples wishing to reconnect. ‘Nigel Baden-Clay’s personal history reads like a list of people you’d like to invite to your next dinner party, but incredibly it is simply the compilation of one incredible life so far,’ the website trumpeted.
And the surname? How could descendants of Baden-Powell have come to be called Baden-Clay? Truth is, they were plain old Clays until the 1980s, when the surname was changed by deed poll to the far more illustrious sounding Baden-Clay.
Even putting aside their famous ancestry, the Baden-Clays seemed determined not to behave like your average family. Now they were caught up in truly extraordinary circumstances.
Nigel Gerard Arden Clay married Elaine Isobel Nora Hughes in St Stephen’s Anglican church in Bournemouth, south-west England, on 23 August 1969. On their marriage certificate, 26-year-old Nigel listed his occupation as ‘tsetse fly control officer’. Elaine, then 25, was recorded as an advertising executive. Guest of honour was Nigel’s grandmother, Olave Baden-Powell, the adored 80-year-old World Chief Guide and widow of Robert Baden-Powell.
Lady Baden-Powell had flown into the UK especially for the wedding. A day earlier, she had been addressing 1000 people in a hall in Finland, on one of her many tours, and had slipped and hit her face against a wall. A wide-brimmed hat concealed her two black eyes as Nigel and Elaine exchanged their vows.1
Lady Baden-Powell’s famous husband had died in Nyeri, Kenya, in 1941, but she had continued his work. At London’s 16th-century Hampton Court Palace, where she had a residence at the grace and favour of the Queen, Olave sent out an extraordinary 2000 Christmas cards a year; she was known for her prodigious memory for faces, names and places. Her palace apartment, which she called ‘Hampers’, had an annexe with 13 rooms, each named after a different country.2
Olave practised what she preached when it came to following the strong moral code instilled in Guides. On one occasion, Nigel’s brother, Robin, spotted Lady Baden-Powell cleaning the back of her Guides badge ahead of a gathering at Wembley Stadium. He was puzzled. After all, no one would see the back once it was pinned to her jacket. She told him it was a reminder to always be clean, and not just in the visible ways.3
When Robin – Gerard’s uncle – documented the Baden-Powell pedigree online, he finished up with a family tree which fills almost 50 printed pages and goes all the way back to a William Powle born around 1460 in Mildenhall, Suffolk.4
Robert Baden-Powell is not the only highly accomplished family member. His father, Baden Powell, was a Savilian professor of geometry at the University of Oxford. An overseas guest at one of Professor Powell’s parties in 1857 recounted the privileged scene and extraordinary gathering of minds that greeted her. A servant welcomed her at the door, and another announced her arrival. Among other invitees were the likes of Peter Roget, of thesaurus fame, and mathematician Charles Babbage, known as the ‘father of computing’ for inventions that led to development of the modern computer.5
Robert Baden-Powell married late in life. He was 55 when he met Olave, then 23. It was 1912 and they were aboard the ocean liner SS Arcadian. The pair shared the same birthday, which they viewed as a sign they were meant to be together. They married later that year and had three children.
Their youngest child, Betty, met Oxford-educated Gervas Clay on a ship in 1936. When Betty discovered she and Gervas shared the same birthday,6 the events were so strikingly similar to her parents’ first meeting that it seemed fate had brought them together.
Gervas was a champion hurdler and member of the Achilles athletics club at Oxford. He was working in the British Colonial Service in Norther
n Rhodesia – now Zambia – and was expected back in Africa within months, so the couple hastily arranged to be married.7
Gervas Clay later told how his father asked him to check that Robert Baden-Powell owned long pants for the ceremony, because he was so frequently seen out in public wearing shorts. After the wedding, the couple headed immediately to Northern Rhodesia, where they lived for the next 30 years and raised their four children.8 One of these children was Nigel, Gerard’s father.
As Gervas rose up the career ranks, the family lived in 17 different houses.9 He was posted as District Commissioner to Kitwe, Ndola and Broken Hill in Africa.10
A visit from royalty in 1960 added another chapter to the family’s proud history. Gervas was then Her Majesty’s Resident Commissioner for Barotseland, and the Queen Mother came to stay at his official residence in Mongu during a tour of Africa. Gervas later described to his son Robin how, during a garden party on the residency’s lawns, he warned his royal guest about the presence of stinging ants.
The Queen Mother revealed that one was biting her at that very moment, so Gervas directed her to a private room, knelt down and removed her shoe. ‘And there was a great soldier ant gnawing at her poor toe and drawn blood – and she had never shown a sign of it to the people,’ Gervas told his son.11 Robin documented the story, and many others, on websites devoted to his parents.
Betty, like her parents, documented her life in a daily diary and scrapbooks, and in one entry wrote of the Queen Mother attending a dance during the Mongu visit. The royal, wearing a tiara to please the crowd at Gervas’s request, asked Betty if her husband danced.
‘I said, “Yes”,’ wrote Betty, ‘so she turned to him and asked him if he would dance with her – which he did very beautifully.’
A social disaster was narrowly averted when it was realised the record for the next dance was called ‘The Lady is a Tramp’, and it was replaced just in time, Betty wrote.12 The Queen Mother must have been impressed with the hospitality during her three days as a guest of Gervas and Betty, because when she left she personally wrote a four-page thankyou note.
In Livingstone, Gerard’s grandfather enjoyed a wonderfully civilised existence. Gervas would come home for lunch each day at 12.35 pm and enjoy a meal, game of cards and 30-minute nap before heading back to the office at 1.55 pm. He would be home again by 4.35 pm for a cup of tea, some cricket or a trip to the river with the dogs.13
Nigel, the third of Gervas and Betty Clay’s four children, was born in Tanganyika – now Tanzania – East Africa, in 1943. In his eulogy to his father, which was read out at Gervas’s funeral at the Parish Church of St John the Baptist in Somerset in 2009, Nigel described an idyllic childhood. His earliest memory, he recalled, involved hunting wildlife. He was three years old and Gervas had taken him shooting in Kitwe, Northern Rhodesia. His father shot a teal and couldn’t find the bird. Nigel found it and was rewarded with a tickey, or thruppence. ‘That was when the shooting bug infected him and Nigel has shared his father’s love of shooting all his life.’14
For his secondary school education, Nigel was sent to a newly established boarding school at Peterhouse, Rhodesia, which developed a reputation as one of the finest in southern Africa. Like his father, he lived a highly regimented existence. At 6 am the bell rang and it was time to get up for showers. From 6.15 am to 7 am the students did their homework in their room, which had a small study nook with a table, chair, locker and books. From 7 am to 7.45 am it was breakfast, followed by morning prayers in the chapel until 8 am and then class.
The students were streamed according to ability in maths, physics, chemistry, French and Latin. Afternoons were spent playing sport – cricket in the summer and rugby and hockey in winter – or working around the school grounds. At 6.30 pm it was dinner, 7 pm to 8 pm was more study, and 10 pm was lights out. Boys who misbehaved were subjected to brutal canings.
When I track down Nigel’s old Peterhouse classmates more than half a century later, they generally remember him fondly as one of the students in the top streams. A good friend from the school, Peter Pinder-Browne, tells me Nigel was ‘always a very wide-awake kid’. Despite his Coke-bottle glasses, he was a keen sportsman who played hockey and cricket. As would be expected, Nigel was also strongly involved in Scouting.
Pinder-Browne and his twin brother, David, were once invited to Nigel’s home in Livingstone for the Easter school holidays. It took two days by train to get there. The home was a regular government house, comfortable but not grand. The Clay family’s cocker spaniel, memorably, could open and close doors. Like other expatriates in Rhodesia, the Clays had domestic help: a cook, cleaner and a couple of gardeners. It was standard for staff quarters to be separate, made up of sleeping rooms, a communal kitchen and toilet. Staff received wages and rations such as beans and maize meal, sugar and salt.
The Clays were excellent hosts and took their two young visitors to the breathtaking Victoria Falls. At a viewing platform, a locked iron gate blocked the way to a perilous walkway leading behind the wall of water plummeting from more than 100 metres above. It was an area normally off limits to the public, but Gervas Clay, as district commissioner, had a key and took Nigel and his friends through. It was the end of the rains and water levels were soaring. Nigel and his young friends were soon standing amid the spray, wind and thunder of water, conscious that they were enjoying privileged access.
Afterwards, the young boys tried to climb the famous thousand-year-old baobab tree nearby, but didn’t make it far up the grand trunk. Another day, they went on a wildlife safari, spotting giraffe and zebra. It was a taste of paradise, an unforgettable holiday.
One day in 2013, Pinder-Browne was surfing the Internet and read that Nigel’s son Gerard was facing trial for murder. ‘It must be a catastrophe for the family. Even if he didn’t do it – the name. The family were impeccable people,’ he told me.15
Nigel would have other fond memories from childhood of his grandmother, Lady Baden-Powell. In particular, he held close a long walk with ‘Granny’ across a Swiss mountain, and a visit to a chalet where staff were shocked to see the World Chief Guide appear.16
While life was full of fun, there was always the family’s strict moral code in the background. Nigel recalled in his eulogy to his father how Gervas once strongly rebuked him for trying to reuse a stamp that had not been postmarked: ‘All of us, his children, are all in his debt for all that he taught us – about honesty, integrity, ethics, chivalry, respect for other people, love of animals (except for cats!), service to ‘God and Queen’, duty, and love of family.’
Some of the same words would be used to spruik a suburban real estate agency on the other side of the world.
Elaine Clay fell pregnant within months of marrying Nigel. The couple went to Johannesburg, South Africa, to share their big news with Olave Baden-Powell. Nigel’s grandmother was on her last world tour. Coincidentally, Lady Baden-Powell had been in the same city 27 years earlier when daughter, Betty Clay, told her she was pregnant with Nigel.17
In England ahead of the birth, Elaine joined Lady Baden-Powell at her Hampton Court Palace apartment. Just as Allison would struggle many years later, Elaine found pregnancy harder than she had imagined. The publication Guiding in Australia mentions Elaine’s time at ‘Hampers’: ‘Elaine went to spend a short time with “Granny”, the intention being to look after[Olave] as her servant was ill. However Elaine’s role became reversed and she found she could not match Lady B.P.’s energy.’18
On 9 September 1970, Elaine delivered a healthy son. Gerard Robert Baden Clay was born at The Firs maternity home on Trinity Road at Bournemouth. The family was yet to change their name. Gerard’s birth certificate, obtained through UK archives, shows the new parents were still named Nigel Gerard Arden Clay and Elaine Isobel Nora Clay. Nigel’s employment was again listed as tsetse fly control, though on this document he added that he was a Zambian government supervisor.
Robin Clay, Nigel’s brother, became Gerard’s godfather.
Nigel, Elaine and their young son, Gerard, migrated south across the Zambezi River to Rhodesia – now Zimbabwe – in 1972. They were going into a country in the midst of a brutal, intensifying civil war. The Rhodesian government of Ian Smith had unilaterally declared independence from Britain in 1965. A white minority of 250,000 ruled a country of five million. Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union, Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union and the Rhodesia government were in a three-way battle for power.
Nigel was working for the Rhodesian government, and the family moved between various cities. Daughter Olivia Isobel Clay was born in Umtali, Rhodesia, on 26 September 1973, and another son, Adam Clay, was born on 23 December 1975, also in Umtali.
A striking family photograph from their time in Rhodesia, taken within a year of Adam’s birth, can be found online. It shows Nigel dressed in camouflage fatigues, a rifle in one arm and his baby son, Adam, in the other. Gerard, who is about six years old, is standing slightly behind him, ramrod straight, with his shirt tucked neatly into his mustard-coloured shorts. Gerard, smiling broadly, is clinging to his dad’s leg. Olivia is to the front, with a big grin, also holding her dad’s leg. Nigel looks like a hero about to set off to battle. Presumably, Elaine Baden-Clay is behind the lens.
With Rhodesia at war, able-bodied young men were drafted into the army for mandatory service. There were some exceptions, such as civil servants who could not be spared from their day jobs. Nigel, 29 when he moved to Rhodesia, did his bit.
Many years later, when son Gerard came under suspicion for the murder of his wife, there was much talk about Nigel’s military links. Some whispered he was a member of the infamous special forces regiment, the Selous Scouts.
Nigel may have been a Scout but he wasn’t a Selous Scout. Published service rolls for the prominent regiment and the separate SAS do not include his name. When I consult Rhodesian military experts, at first they can find no record of Nigel. But eventually, one comes back with a match. On a 1978 roll, Nigel Clay – with a matching date of birth – is listed as a British South Africa Police reservist.