Much writing over the years has centered on Baden-Powell. The Boy Scout movement was a great success, but it owed this to the nationally honoured "Hero of Mafeking" at its head. The Legion of Frontiersmen had ideas for service to the State that were far wider ranging than those of the Boy Scouts, but they lacked a nationally admired hero at its head. Who was the founder? A minor author from a minor branch of a landed family. Invalided as a humble constable from the North-West Mounted Police, he had later served in a most irregular band of Scouts in South Africa, leaving as a corporal. Throughout his life, he was closest to his sister. She was far better known as an extremely good actress and an actor/manager. The "Oh divinely-gifted Lena Ashwell" as George Bernard Shaw described her had access to the royal set. Later, even as a divorcee, she married Sir Henry Simson, the Duke and Duchess of York's doctor, who saw the Queen and Princess Margaret into the world. In those strictly class-conscious days, however much support the Legion attracted and however hard Pocock worked at drumming up that support, society was suspicious of this ex-corporal, particularly when national papers re-ran the story of the mystery of the missing baronet with more than a hint that Pocock had murdered him. Pocock had persuaded Lord Lonsdale to be the first President, but, although respected, he was no national hero in fact he "was never happier than when he was playing at soldiers. Brass bands, waving flags and colourful uniforms could bring tears to his eyes. (Douglas Sutherland, The Yellow Earl). There could be no more exotic uniform worn by a volunteer that that of the Legion of Frontiersmen. In the popular view a "frontiersman" was a colourful and exotic figure.

These were clubbable men and indeed the Savage Club was often their meeting place where the affairs of the world were discussed, not with such power to influence those affairs as was held by those who met at, say, the Carlton Club. These were what you could almost describe as the second sons of the families of power: those who had been sent out to the far-flung outposts of Empire and world to strengthen Britain's grip on the world.

First of all, we need to know about the man whose enthusiasm and effort set the Legion into being. In November of 1941 we read in his obituary in The Times that "Roger Pocock was so modest that few except his closest friends could guess that life to him was, and always had been a splendid adventure." This starts to give us some idea of the man's character before we begin to chart his adventures. Of course, obituaries always speak no ill of the dead and concentrate on a man's good points. Roger Pocock was all the more likeable for having been so human in his failings. For a start he trusted too easily. Every Englishman was a gentleman to be taken at his word. Even in Victorian times that could not have been wise. Roger Pocock had little respect for authority and yet expected Authority, in the shape of Government and the War Office, to back his Legion of Frontiersmen, the majority of whose members in foreign parts shared his contempt for officialdom as it then existed.

Pocock knew many famous men who will come into our story. He even on one occasion met and interviewed Butch Cassidy. He had a multitude of friends and acquaintances, but it is difficult to point to many really close life-long friends. He never married; his was not the sort of life that would have brought happiness to any wife. Roger Pocock was known nationally and throughout the Empire before the First War as the founder of the Legion of Frontiersmen, an organisation of roguish patriots who did all they could to ensure that Britain was prepared to defend itself. They were the men who had called themselves 'the eyes and ears of the Empire'. During the War many had belonged to the 25th Fusiliers (Frontiersmen) who had served with great valour in East Africa. The Frontiersmen were also famous as the first British troops into action in 1914, when the Manchester Troop had sailed with their own horses and at their own expense to serve with distinction with the Belgian army. Where the Frontiersmen saw a need and a service to be fulfilled they seldom paused to ask permission from authority.

Why has this man been ignored and "forgotten as becomes a Frontiersman" ("The Rules of the Game", by Roger Pocock) by the country he loved with a fierce patriotism. He founded the Legion of Frontiersmen and nursed it through its earliest years with great love and care and yet it brutally expelled him once, and he resigned himself twice more before his death. He had an unusually active and adventurous life, during which he did a multitude of things from being a constable in the North-West Mounted Police to being accused of murder. He claimed experience of twenty-eight trades but certainly could not have been considered an expert at more than a few. To him "Civilization is a poor thing to one who has lived the spacious life of the West" (Rules of the Game). He was one of that band of Victorian gentlemen adventurers who helped secure the boundaries of the British Empire, but whose activities were little noted by others. Roger Pocock was different from the majority of other gentlemen adventurers because he was a thinker, a man who dreamed dreams, but whose dreams and whose attempts at their realization too often ruled his head and turned him into a Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.

He studied many subjects in depth and could discuss most things intelligently. He was a real expert on horses and wrote about them knowledeably if individually (Horses, 1917). A friend saw him as a knight, jousting through life, helping lost causes and saving damsels in distress, demanding entrance at the castle gate, but happy so long as he had a good horse under him. Geology was a great passion from an early age and he thought deeply on mysticism and the occult. If his meditations led him along independent and solitary paths to his conclusions, he was not one to shirk publicizing his arguments so that they could be debated.

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