Two frogs fell into a pail of cream - You won't believe what happened next

At Boxmoor County Primary School we had only two pieces of music: Morning by Grieg and Vaughan Williams' Tallis Fantasia. And, as far as I recall, the headmaster, Mr Staten, had only two stories.

That was me writing in 2009, when I found one of those stories repeated in Roger Scruton's Gentle Regrets, where he reports hearing it from Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, who was the Catholic chaplain at Cambridge during his undergraduate days.

As Mr Staten told it, a great artist was painting scenes from the life of Christ. Having begun with the Nativity many years before, he was on the home stretch and tackling the Last Supper. He searched and searched for someone with the right looks to be his model for Judas. He eventually found a beggar who was perfect, only to learn that this beggar had been his model for the infant Christ years before.

These days this story is all over the net, but it's told about Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Summer, with the same man being the model for both Judas and Jesus, which seems less powerful to me. And it's not true, of course.

But what about the other story? This, as I wrote back in 2009:

One involved two frogs who fell into a pail of cream. One swam around for a bit, but then gave up the struggle and drowned. The second frog swam and swan until his strength was almost exhausted. Just when he thought he could swim no more, he found that the cream had turned to butter and he climbed out.

The reason for this post is that I have found the source of this second story. In his book Lost Worlds, Michael Bywater quotes from Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys:

Two frogs were out for a walk one day and they came to a big jug of cream in looking into it they both fell in.

One said: "This is a new kind of water to me. How can a fellow swim in stuff like this? It is no use trying." So he sank to the bottom and drowned through having no pluck.

As you're all sniggering now, let me end with Colin MacInnes's description of the ideology of Scouting, as found in Baden-Powell's works:

the weirdest blend of ritual, non-sectarian religiosity, nature and beast worship, and a passion for peoples (Red Indian, Australian aborigines, African tribesmen) whom Christian imperialism had tried for centuries to destroy.