Baden-Powell's first two names were Robert Stephenson, after the great engineer, who was his godfather. Baden-Powell visited the Armstrong works at Elswick twice in the 1880s to inspect the machine-guns. The first Boy Scout camp in England was held 22 August - 4 September 1908 on a site west of Parkshields farm, at the foot of the South Tyne valley (the much-publicised 1907 camp on Brownsea Island was a trial camp). A cairn is inscribed: This cairn marks the site of the first Boy Scout Camp held in 1908 by B.P., later Lord Baden-Powell. The Chief Scout relit the camp fire, 9th June 1957. The land belonged to the 'Great White Hunter' and naturalist Abel Chapman (q.v.).
Baden-Powell had many discussions with Viscount Haldane about the Territorial system and in 1908, Haldane asked him to take over the Northumberland Territorials. It was in May of this year that Baden-Powell visited the camp organised in Grindon by his friend Colonel Vaux, an old friend. In this year too Baden-Powell published his famous book Scouting for Boys in which he uses the murder of Margaret Crozier at Elsdon, and the resourcefulness of a Northumbrian shepherd-boy as an instructive tale for scouts. It is set near Winter's Gibbet (Winter was the murderer) standing at Steng Cross above Elsdon. The same story, with a different emphasis appears in G.M. Trevelyan's essay 'The Middle Marches'.
Saxton Noble, son of Sir Andrew Noble, head of the Armstrong Whitworth colossus in Newcastle, had sent his own two boys to the Brownsea Island camp in 1907, and had personally underwritten the financial loss of that camp. His brother George had served with Baden-Powell in the 13th Hussars in India and Afghanistan.
Baden-Powell wrote (actually sitting on Tourney's Fell):

'I am writing this letter in the camp on top of a great hill overlooking the Northumbria moors and dales with a view of the mighty Roman Wall, an old grey castle tower where the Moss Troopers used to fight. What a country for fighting and romance we are in [where men have been] scouting for their lives many times in the last 2000 years.
I wish every Boy Scout in Britain could be with us today.'