7th World Scout Jamboree - Prologue

Prologue

At the 1949 International Scout Conference in Norway, invitations for the 1951 Conference and quadrennial World Jamboree were presented by Austria and Denmark. The vote was overwhelmingly in favor of Austria as it was a small country, a World Jamboree had never been staged there, Austrian Scouts had been forbidden in 1938 and had made their own comeback in 1946. The majority of the countries represented at the Conference had been at war with the then Austrian State only five years before, and there was a great desire to show the brotherhood of Scouting was a reality.

In voicing the invitation, the Austrian International Commissioner, Adolf Klarer, said that the Seventh Jamboree "would have to put up with great simplicity." This itself appealed to the Conference as suiting the primary purpose of World Jamborees, to bring Scouts together from all over the world and so strengthen the feeling of unity and fellowship, so the "Jamboree of Simplicity" was born.