Speaker Roy Tate - A Trip to Austria as a Boy Scout

He went to Austria with the Scouts of Great Britain on an expedition called the Explorer Belt. Four scouts from his pack went on the trip and they had to choose a subject to speak on when they got to their destination. Roy and his friend Dave Shaw decided to do Architecture, and they swotted up on it before setting off. They went to London by bus which took all day stopping at all sorts of places on route. Then they caught the tube to Eaton Square which was the headquarters of the scout movement in Britain. There they met around 60 other scouts. From there it was the train to Dover, the boat train to Belgium and then onto Cologne eventually arriving in Vienna.

It was a very long journey in a carriage with 4 Welsh scouts who they couldn’t understand when they were talking among themselves. The night train from Cologne to Vienna was a sleeper where the seats folded down to form a bed and your suitcase went underneath the seat.

Austria had only been a separate country from 1955, before that it had been partitioned by the allies. Roy had been to the country in 1955 and was amazed by how much had been rebuilt in the intervening 5 years. They were told that they mustn't go out in uniform or they would aggravate the locals, particularly in the eastern section which had been controlled by the Russians. This section was still quite poor. They were in western part which had been substantially rebuilt.

Whilst in Vienna they went to a Bierkeller and a Schnitzelhaus. After 3 days of visiting the tourist sites they given instructions to a location and had to find own way there, but had to stay away from Czechoslovakia or Hungary as these were communist and could cause problems. Despite this, 4 scouts did stray over the line, and it took quite a large diplomatic effort to get them back.

They were given a task to find some refugees and find out about Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and then write a report about them. Most people went back to Vienna, but as it was so expensive there, Roy and his friend headed to Linz and spoke to some refugees there. One place they pitched their tent got flooded and they ended up having to spend part of their limited money on a hotel. After this they went to a ski resort.

They then met up with the other 2 scouts from their pack at Salzburg and camped in the Castle grounds. Finally, they went to find Strobl on the outskirts of Salzburg to the Scout camp site, where they met up with the other Scout troops. The food here was being prepared by the Austrian army so it was mainly goulash and green bell peppers. The scouts had never seen bell peppers before and were surprised to find that they were hollow.

The culmination of the trip was when each scout was interviewed about their experiences and prizes were handed out, but Roy didn’t get one.

The return journey home was the reverse of the outbound except that they got 7 hours leisure time in Cologne which enabled them to see how dramatically it had been rebuilt following the war.