The Founder of our organisation, Captain Roger Pocock, was a philosopher, holding for one of his tenets that, no stone of value ever gathers moss: and early endeavours to fix him in some sedentary, moss growing occupation failed, he was a vagrant adventurer for close on seventy years. He had been a labourer, painter, missionary, mounted policeman, seaman, cowboy, arctic explorer, miner, pedlar, and the like, on the fringes of Civilisationor beyond them, mostly in the American continent,till the period ended at the end of the Boer War. We could keep company with him as a geologist who could read the relics of the stone age with an eye accustomed to peoples and regions where metal tools were scarce; a trained scientist who believed passionately in frequent interventions of the supernatural; a mystic who lived with many robbers, desperadoes and murderers; a great despiser of the city bred and the stay at home, yet almost fanatically in love with mother England and her Empire and their storied cities.
Obeying impulses, which he shared with others, the Frontiersmen, dwelling in the gap of danger by land and sea, sought to organise themselves in a Legion for the defence of the heart of the Empire before the Great War came, as he and they forsaw its coming; how the organisation was officially discouraged, how he himself was ousted from the control of it, how it was ignored as an organisation in wartime, till little more was left than a Brotherhood among men of the same mettle.
The National Park Memorial
