On what would have been his 125th birthday, let’s celebrate the legacy of ‘Green Bar Bill’

William Hillcourt, also known as “Green Bar Bill” and the “Scoutmaster to the World,” was born on this date in 1900. In honor of one of the most significant figures in the history of the Scouting movement, here are five things you need to know about the professional writer and volunteer leader who devoted so much of his life to Scouting.

He fell in love with the outdoors at a young age

Nelson Block is the chairman and president of the “Green Bar Bill” Hillcourt Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting Scouting programming and history.

In 1993, Block wrote an extensive biography of Hillcourt that appeared in Hillcourt’s book Baden-Powell: The Two Lives of a Hero and included this nugget about his youth:

He had friends at school, but spent much of his time alone, roaming the woods outside town. His mother worried about him being alone, but none of his friends shared his enthusiasm for the wild spaces Bill enjoyed so, and Bill had no program to attract his playmates there.

Growing up in Denmark, Bill had a much older brother named Harald. When Bill was 10, Harald, already a professional bookseller, sent his younger brother a copy of Scouting for Boys, and a fire was lit in the younger Hillcourt that would never be extinguished.

Coming to America

After earning the rank of Knight-Scout, the highest rank in Danish Scouting, Hillcourt came to the United States. He spent the summer of 1926 working at a Scout camp in New York state and eventually got a job at the Boy Scouts of America national office, located at the time in New York City.

While waiting for the elevator, he struck up a conversation with Chief Scout Executive James E. West and was inspired to write West a letter full of his ideas of what Scouting could be. West was so impressed that he invited Hillcourt to stay on as a permanent employee of the organization.

A talented writer and editor

Hillcourt’s early assignments included writing and editing for Scouting magazine and writing the Handbook for Patrol Leaders. Then he got perhaps his most important assignment: writing for Boys’ Life.

Hillcourt launched a monthly column for patrol leaders under the pen name “Green Bar Bill,” which comes from the patrol leader emblem, a design that is still in use today.

“No rocking-chair adventuring for us,” Hillcourt wrote, “but the real kind, out on the trail under the open sky, following the by-paths through the woods.”

In the years that followed, Hillcourt’s role expanded from the organization’s chief journalist on Scoutcraft and troop leadership to one of its primary program researchers and developers.

In 1948, he served as the organization’s first Wood Badge Scoutmaster.

Returning to the unit level

In his biography of Hillcourt, Block wrote:

Bill was never satisfied to dream up a project or menu, he wanted to try it out, play with it, and perfect it before telling Scouts to do it. He decided the best way to accomplish this would be to again take the leadership of a Scout troop. And he quickly found the perfect location, the village of Mendham, New Jersey.

Hillcourt helped lead Troop 1 in Mendham for almost 20 years.

A prolific author

Over the next 30 years, Hillcourt wrote the first Scout Field Book, two editions of the Handbook for Scoutmasters and three editions of the Boy Scout Handbook, all while continuing to produce columns for Boys’ Life and Scouting magazines.

It took him four years to conduct the research necessary to write Baden-Powell: The Two Lives of a Hero, still considered one of the definitive works on Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting.

On November 9, 1992, while on the last leg of a world Scouting tour, Hillcourt died in Sweden, a day away from what would have been a visit to his boyhood home in Denmark.

Click here to read Block’s complete story on Hillcourt.

The “Green Bar Bill” Hillcourt Foundation continues to support independent scholarly work on the history of Scouting and is a frequent contributor to the National Scouting Museum and various volunteer efforts on researching Scouting history, as well as a supporter of some activities at national and international Scouting events.

The Hillcourt Silver and Bronze medals recognize those who help preserve the history of Scouting. For more information on those awards, please reach out to the Hillcourt Foundation.