This is the UK's new chief Scout who succeeds Bear Grylls

The UK’s new chief scout survived a stabbing and attempted shooting while growing up in London, and credited the Scouts with teaching him the skills to avoid falling “on the wrong side of the tracks”.

Dwayne Fields was the first black Briton to reach the North Pole and will succeed TV star Bear Grylls in the post.

In a radio interview, he said he had moved to north London from rural Jamaica and later lived in east London, where there was “a lot of street violence” including robberies and knife crime.

Mr Fields said: “I walked through the doors of a Scout hut in north London when I was seven years old – scared, new to the country, anxious, really shy, and it gave me a place to belong, scouting gave me someone to believe in me and allowed me to believe in myself.

Jonathan Brady/PA Wire

“I think scouting instilled in me a level of self-belief that I carried through all of that and it supported me making the right choices at the right times, I think it played a huge part in me being where I am today.

He added: “I was stabbed, I was a victim of street violence, I’d never carried a knife with malice, I’ve never carried any instruments with malice, and I suffered a stabbing incident just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“It would have been so easy for me to slip and fall on the wrong side of the tracks, but in terms of my self-confidence, my self-belief … sometimes we look at it and call them soft skills – empathy and patience, and understanding, and communications skills – all these things played a part in me making the right decisions at the right time, and arguably I learned those and developed those in scouting.”

His predecessor, Mr Grylls, was appointed the youngest every chief scout, aged 34, in 2009. His departure from the role, announced in June, came after photographs emerged of him baptising Russell Brand in the River Thames.