THE ORIGINS AND EARLY DAYS OF THE RAMBLERS' ASSOCIATION
BY
ANN HOLT
This is an essay presented to delegates attending the sixtieth anniversary National Council of the Ramblers' Association at Warwick University 8-9 April 1995.
1. Background
2. Reactions
3. Ancestry
4. Ramblers
5. Ramblers
and the Outside World
The Ramblers' Association (RA) was founded in 1935, in the middle of a decade with economic slump at one end and war at the other. By that time walking in the countryside for recreation already had a long history, with its own attitudes and organizations. But after the Great War it burst out of its pattern of steady growth to become a social phenomenon attracting unprecedented media attention, a 'craze'. A new word — hiking — came into use to describe it, much to the annoyance of those in the established movement, who much preferred 'rambling' or 'tramping'. Even now, the idea that rambling was something which began in the thirties, a matter of groups of young people with wide khaki shorts and wider rucksacks, still lingers in the public mind.
The 'hiking' craze therefore formed the background to the foundation of the RA and its predecessor, the National Council of Ramblers' Federations (NCRF), created as a result of a resolution passed at a conference near Sheffield in 1931. Both were landmarks in a process by which individuals joined walking clubs and clubs grouped together to form regional federations, which in turn created a body which would give rambling a national voice. That the final step to national organization should have been taken when walking in the countryside reached a peak of popularity was not, of course, a coincidence. It provided publicity for ramblers' claims and opportunities for recruitment and fundraising. But the hiking craze was also something the fledgling national organization had to cope with, as well as capitalize on.
This paper sets out to sketch the background to the formation of the RA in the thirties and to discern something of the character of the new organization by looking into some of its early activities. Its development will be set within the context of the history of rambling in Britain.
1. BACKGROUND
The hiking craze of the late twenties and early thirties
There are many strands in the explanation as to why rambling should have become so fashionable at this particular juncture. Some are practical. Transport became easier and cheaper. Railways were already much used by walkers but the inter war period added buses. In addition, despite the image of the 'hungry thirties' and massive unemployment in some areas, many people who did have jobs were relatively well off, with time and money to devote to leisure. The unemployed, then as now, had only time, but the ethos of thirties' rambling valued the simple life and frugality.
For example, the accommodation offered by the newly formed Youth Hostels Association, founded in 1930, was Spartan — one hostel was created out of old chicken huts. Reminiscences in a pamphlet published to celebrate the Association's fiftieth anniversary show that this was part of the adventure, not just an unfortunate necessity. '1-low we loved our hostelling in the 30s' wrote one veteran 'from Lephams Bridge, with its oasthouse where the rain dripped dismally on to our beds from the leaky roof, to Rildenborough where we were robbed of sleep by a watch of nightingales.
There were less tangible threads too. The hikers and those who remained to become committed ramblers after the fashion faded were mostly young, the generation which had escaped the carnage of the Great War but received the full force of the shake up in values and attitudes which seems invariably to follow wars.
Walking in the countryside was (and is) an activity which, for all its simplicity, offers a rich variety of experiences to those who take it up — among them healthy exercise and companionship. But for many young urban office and factory workers in the thirties rambling also offered an alternative to the banality of their weekday lives. Living in a period in which traditional verities had crumbled, they were better educated and less deferential than the generation which had been cut down in Flanders. Their horizons were correspondingly wider.
The physical condition of the nation
It was also a period during which outdoor exercise was encouraged by official and semiofficial circles. Conscription had brought to the attention of the authorities just how unhealthy much of the population was. In 1936, with the international scene darkening, the government even felt compelled to do something. A committee was sent to Germany to report on the 'strength through joy' campaign there. The king's speech of 1936 contained a promise of a bill 'to improve the physical condition of the nation' and this struck an immediate chord. There were eleven interventions on the subject in the debate on the address.
The thirties had a love affair with the outdoors. The newly built, usually in an uncompromisingly modern architectural style, lidos attracted crowds and suntans became something to be sought after rather than avoided. At a time when Britain had become largely urban in its settlement and employment patterns, and rural life as a distinct culture was dying, the countryside became desirable as a place for leisure activities.
The countryside
The indefatigable writer S P B Mais and many others turned out an extraordinary number of books about the countryside. Such writers purveyed reassurance that in a rather frightening world there was something stable and dependable — nature, and that there was something special about the British Isles' part in it. The writer of a book titled The Changing Face of England, first published in 1926, conveys both ideas in his introduction: 'thanks to long peace on our own soil, the development of English landscape has been rich and continuous ... Nowhere else have man and Nature cooperated so intimately'. This sort of sentiment precisely answered a mood of somewhat fragile nationalism current in the inter war period.
But even though the countryside was the object of so much interest, all was not well there. Agriculture was in the doldrums and regarded as economically backward. A book published in 1945 by C S Orwin, a well known agronomist, asserted that if Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep 'about the year 1880, somewhere in rural England ... and had slept for sixty years before waking', he would find the landscape and farmhouses just as he remembered, if a little shabbier. The village also would be unchanged, with a 'woman walking, bucket in hand, to the parish pump' or 'emerging from her back door to fling a pail of slops on the garden'. The local town, however, would have been changed out of his recognition. He would find the main street apparently rebuilt, 'he would lose his way amongst new factories, new shopping districts'.
One thing which would have astonished him 'would be the motor vehicles of all kinds on the road and the tractors on the land'. This highlights another aspect of the thirties' relationship with the countryside; not only was it seen as backward, but its attractions, its beauty and peace, were under threat. Previously walkers, whether on business or pleasure, had walked on roads as a matter of course. The advent of motorized traffic, though it took ramblers and others into the country, also rendered the roads dangerous and unpleasant once they got there. The RA's journal complained in 1935 that they had been called 'lovers of the broad highway' — 'an appalling oversight in these days of arterial roads
At the same time the edges of towns and cities were spreading outwards to an unprecedented extent as a building boom created miles of new houses which were attractive to their buyers not because they were suburban but because they were sub rural. The effect was to destroy what they had moved out of the cities to enjoy. A ramblers' handbook of 1929 comments sadly 'rambling between London and Edgware and in parts of Surrey, for instance, is now practically impossible, miles of delightful meadows having been converted into building estates, which give no pleasure to the rambler'.
The protection of the environment, the beauty of the landscape and the rural character of the countryside had long been the concern of relatively small groups. The National Trust was founded in 1895, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877 and the Commons (now Open Spaces) Society in 1865. But these environmental concerns now became a matter of general public interest. The Council for the preservation (now protection) of Rural England arrived in 1925, the Standing Committee on National Parks (now the Council for National Parks) in 1936. The RA was a true child of the thirties — from the beginning it was interested, not just in rambling, but in protecting the landscape in which its members walked. The third of the nine objects listed in its first constitution connits it to assisting the preservation of the beauty of the countryside. The need for town and country planning and whether Britain could or should have national parks were recurring themes in newspapers, books and at public meetings.
2. REACTIONS
Countryfolk and townees
The sheer increase in numbers of people going into the countryside for their leisure, including many intent on getting as far away from recognised tourist spots as possible, meant that they suddenly became a matter of concern for people who were already there. According to C E M Joad, a popular writer and radio personality, rambler and propagandist for rambling, they were not much welcomed. He wrote in his 1946 The Untutored Townsman's Invasion of the Country. "The attitude of the countryside to the invaders from the towns has varied between rapacity — the townsman is rich and one can make money out of hUn - and resentment, one does not want a lot of 'townees' trampling over one s fields and breaking down one's hedges — but has in the main been suspicious and hostile."
There were accusations of violence from gamekeepers, particularly in the north. In 1932 a group of northern ramblers' organizations put out a pamphlet which claimed some shooting landlords employ undesirable types of keeper who do not hesitate to assault walkers and use foul language". A veteran of the Sheffield rambling scene recalled 'a genuine hatred of ramblers by countryfolk who sometimes "beat up" those they found walking alone' and commented 'the more we could blend into the background and avoid detection by keepers, farmers, landowners, the better for us'. There were more official forms of discouragement. In 1930 a young rambler found himself the subject of a police hunt after he was accused of assaulting two keepers. Then the case came to court it was revealed, in best courtroom drama style, that he could not have fought with anyone. He had fractured his arm a few months previously and was still considerably disabled as a result.
Superior people
The wealthy, who largely owned the countryside, regarded it as a setting for their own leisure, particularly hunting and shooting. For the owners of moorland used for shooting and for those who shot, ramblers were perceived as a threat to their sport and/or livelihood. In a debate in the House of Commons in 1938 an NP claimed that grouse moors provided 'employment to the amount of £3,500,000 a year'. He went on 'There is no end to the list of people who might be affected if a serious attack were made upon the shooting industry'. But because the conventional wisdom of the time held that healthy outdoor exercise was good for people, especially young urban workers, there was a limit on what could be said 'on the record' in criticising their activities.
Speaking in Nay 1933, the Duke of York, the future King George VI, included in a speech 'a word in defense of the hiker'. Compared with the motorist who 'rarely enjoys the loveliness of England', 'those who stride away though woods and over hills, who sleep under the stars in meadows, and who hear the nightingale in its own home ... really know England'. In the climate of the time love of the countryside was a very close neighbor of love of country and the thirties was no time to do anything which might inhibit the growth of patriotism. In the debate on the King's speech in 1936 an NP expressed the hope that 'physical training will make every child in this country a better citizen whether for service in ordinary work or for service for the country in time of necessity'.
This support in high places explains some of the relatively sympathetic public reaction to ramblers' conflicts with owners of moors preserved for shooting. An example is the The Field's report of the Ki.nderscout mass trespass of April 1932, the most famous single incident in the history of inter war rambling. The tone was more querulous than belligerent. The writer asked 'when an "army" of some 400 young men and women decide to invade privately owned moorland at the height of the grouse nesting season, what is likely to be the reaction of the owners of the moors and their gamekeepers?'. Collisions between trespassers and the law, the article claimed, were 'regretted not least, we may be very sure, by the moor owners whose hospitality these "ramblers" challenge'.
A vivid snapshot of the way middle England perceived the hiking craze is to be found in the pages of a novel published in 1940, by Francis Brett Young, called Mr Lucton's Freedom. It is a work which probably has the distinction of containing the first appearance of a card— carrying member of the RA in fiction. The portrayal is not flattering; the first sight of Bert, a clerk from a Black Country office on his annual holiday, is of 'a little bareheaded man in a khaki shirt and shorts whose skimpy cut emphasized the shape of a pair of bow legs which should have deterred their owner from wearing any such garment'. He is a comic figure, redeemed only by his 'disarming enthusiasm and complete unself consciousness', carrying a huge rucksack packed full of gear, who objects strongly to being called a hiker. He's a rambler, a meter of the Ramblers' Association and ready to show his card to prove it.
With Bert is contrasted a young couple who are also rambling. The woman is a typical example of the idealised vision of youth, health and beauty so important in the decorative arts of the thirties. She has 'a lovely ease of movement, lithe and fluent, which, together with the line of her forehead and wind swept hair, gave to her progress an impression of swiftness: not an Amazon swiftness, but that of a Dryad, soft and fleet and virginal'. Her companion is dark, fine featured and thin lipped — 'the face of an intellectual' — 'compressed and a trifle sombre'. Given the conventions of the time, it is not surprising that the young woman turns out to be from an aristocratic family, whereas her intellectual boyfriend is a Communist and up to no good.
Complaints about how far short of the physically ideal real hikers fell are not uncommon. October 1934 saw the beginning of a correspondence in The Times sparked off by W Russell Flint, who had recently become a member of the Royal Academy. 'Why do our lean-limbed young men and shapely damsels make themselves so ugly in potato colour and khaki while merely taking a walk?' Others responded complaining of hikers 'clad to resemble pirates, with coloured handkerchiefs tied round their heads'. The impression given is that in Times reading households hikers were regarded as if they were a comic variety of extra terrestrial being. Their amusement was reproved, in equally patronising tones, by the Bishop of Exeter. 'Surely the thought that the darkness of their lives is irradiated for a short interval by fancied adventure and amusing experiences should stifle in us any tendency to criticism.'
Criticism
Criticism, however, there certainly was. Not only did the established rambling movement have the irritation of being portrayed as ludicrous, they were held responsible for the activities of the newcomers to their cherished leisure pursuit. These could go all the way from actual damage caused by thoughtlessness and ignorance to annoyance at the sort of high-spirited jollification so antipathetic to those not taking part in it. Because rambling was in vogue complaints about bad behavior in the countryside were likely to appear in the newspapers, reinforcing existing prejudices against the young, people from the working and lower middle classes from which most of the hikers came, and 'townees
For example, the Manchester Evening News ran a weekly rambling column during the sinner and in May 1933 carried a story which hinged on the writer meeting an irate farmer complaining about the depredations of such townees. The complaints are accepted at face value with the comment 'I suppose it is no good reminding those hikers who cover the ground with litter and disturb the peaceful folk of Hayfield and Hathersage that farmers have to make a living.' Such stories were not uncommon, no doubt reflecting some level of genuine grievance, and they presented the established rambling movement with a problem. To understand how it reacted to the new circumstances, it is necessary to look at its roots and character.
3. ANCESTRY
Walking for recreation
From the late eighteenth century there is plenty of evidence, much of it literary, of walking as a source of quiet pleasure for people drawn from a wide social range.
Walking was, for instance, considered 'the most salutary and natural exercise' by Dr A F N Willich, a fashionable physician and author of a book on 'the most rational means of preserving health and prolonging life' published in 1799. Britain was still mostly rural but Willich, who practiced in London, already had the needs of urban people in mind. Regular and daily walking, he wrote, 'cannot be too much recommended to the citizen, who in the present age is so much harassed with nervous and hypochondriacal complaints'. However, he did not think of walking only as a form of cure; 'we should contrive to procure as much pleasure and recreation after serious occupation as is possible and consistent with our situation in life'.
References to walking for 'pleasure and recreation' crop up frequently in nineteenth century memoirs. Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus records many walks, whether in her highland home or around fashionable watering places like Cheltenham, where in 1810 she and her sister 'were so happy wandering about the outskirts of what was then only a pretty village'. At the other end of the century, in 1879, the young Beatrice Webb was staying near Lake Windermere enjoying her 'quiet reading and long rambling walks in this lovely country'. In fiction there are plenty of examples from the literary canon of people walking. In Jane Austen's Persuasion of 1818 Anne Elliott overhears an embarrassing conversation in the course of a 'long walk'. Elizabeth Gaskell, in Mary Barton, published in 1848, provides a rare glimpse of working class families walking in the countryside around Manchester.
However, rambling and tramping as the words were used from the later nineteenth century usually referred to the more arduous forms of walking, more so than is generally the case today. But if the literary record is a useful source of information about the gentler forms of walking, writers and writing are also important in its more strenuous forms. In the first place writers have often been walkers; secondly what they wrote about walking influenced others.
The literary tradition and the search for experience
Walking is a form of travel, and travel, whether or not it broadens the mind, certainly provides material for writers. This is not to say (necessarily) that much literary walking was driven by the need for copy, only that people who want to write are likely to feel the need to experience something other than the common round. For many authors a journey on foot has provided it. Some memoirs of walking tours are surprisingly early. Those of Thomas Coryate and William Lithgow date from the early seventeenth century. Others have become classics of travel writing, like R L Stevenson's Travels with a donkey in the Cevennes, first published in 1879, or Hilaire Belloc's The Path to Rome of 1902. Others have dropped out of memory, like the books of A N Cooper, a Yorkshire clergyman who did many walking tours in Britain and continental Europe, including one to Rome fourteen years before Belloc. Or those of Stephen Graham, whose much more self consciously literary works tell of tramping practically all over the world.
Also central to the literary tradition in walking is the contribution of the romantic poets. William Wordsworth was one of the first practitioners of the undergraduate walking tour on the continent, setting off with a friend in 1790. He wrote two works drawing on the experience, one almost immediately, and later as part of The Prelude. His heroic rambling in the Lake District in later life, and his role and that of his circle in popularising the search for romantic sensations in wild country is well known. John Keats undertook a strenuous tour of Scotland in 1818, too strenuous for his fragile health, miring the course of it he climbed Ben Nevis with a guide; 'I am heartily glad it is done — it is almost like a fly crawling up a wainscot'. But he also found the heightened romantic experiences he was looking for, writing to a friend with a touch of self— mockery foreign to Wordsworth 'I have been merry romantic indeed, among these Mountains and Lakes.'
The readers
The writing, of varying quality, which resulted from sensibilities excited by long walks and fine scenery inevitably influenced to some extent those who read it, particularly those already drawn to the outdoors and walking. Many were affected by the romanticism fostered by popular writing in which rejection of urbanism, admiration of heroic sensitivity and travel provided a powerful means of escape from everyday life. E M Forster's Howards End was published in 1910, but his portrait of the city clerk Leonard Bast stands as a tragic forerunner of the cheerful hikers of the thirties. He had read George Meredith, R L Stevenson, E V Lucas, Richard Jeffries and George Borrow. Wanting to experience what he had read about he walked all night from Wimbledon to 'get back to the earth'.
Forster's purpose dictates that this could not be a successful experience, but plenty of Leonard Bast's contemporaries were walking in the countryside with happier results, just as his successors would do. G H B Ward, one of the prime movers in the creation of the RA, had founded the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers, which had overnight walks in its progranne, in 1900. In August 1914 the participants were advised 'Bring spirit lamp, kettle or flask, towel, soap and a heart good for the equivalent of 35 miles. The route does not concern you. We shall get home again'. This somewhat daunting advice appears in the club's annual Handbook, in which Ward regularly included extracts from authors he thought suitable for ramblers.
Endurance
Part of Leonard Bast's problem was that he was not very fit and early ramblers, whether writers or followers of more mundane professions, walked long distances. Indeed, for many of them the boundary between rambling and athletics seems to have been a little blurred at times.
At first sight it is difficult to see the competitive walking which was in vogue in the later eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century as an ancestor of the hikers, still less present day ramblers. These
'pedestrians', as they were known at the time, usually undertook to walk a particular distance along a road in a given time for a wager. One, Foster Powell, walked from London to York and back in 1773, averaging 72 miles per day. Yet if we look at one of the key figures in rambling in the later nineteenth century the elements of physical endurance, distance, speed and competitiveness come together.
Intellectuals
Leslie Stephen was described as having been, as an academic in Cambridge in the 1850s, 'the personification of a "muscular Christian" of that date'. He sometimes engaged in walking races similar to those of the earlier 'pedestrians', in 1862 covering just under 6.3/4 miles in an hour. Even when walking from place to place, Stephen and his circle paid close attention to times and distances. A colleague remembered walking with Stephen and two others from Bedford to Cambridge: 'we left a post marked "Cambridge 30 miles" at 11.30 and reached the back gates of St John's College at 6 pin. We were dressed in our ordinary clothes and stopped at St Neots for 43 minutes. At the end of his life Stephen recalled 'with complacency' the hot day when he walked fifty miles from Cambridge to London in twelve hours to attend a dinner of the Alpine Club.
Stephen went on from Cambridge to become editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and an influential figure in literary and intellectual circles. Ills place in the history of rambling results from his founding in 1879 of the Sunday Tramps, a walking club made up of friends who met on Sundays to walk in the countryside around London. Stephen's regime continued to be muscular and spartan. The novelist George Meredith, whose Ordeal of Richard Feverel was probably responsible for Leonard East 's wanderings from Wimbledon, recalled 'the strike across country to catch the tail of a train offering dinner in London, at the cost of a run through hedges, over ditches and fellows, past proclamations against trespassers, under suspicion of being taken for more serious deprecators in flight'. As a walking club the Sunday Tramps was small and atypical, but it was an early one and the eminence of its members gave it an influence out of proportion to its size.
It did much, for instance, to reinforce the image of rambling as a pastime of intellectuals, one which surfaces in Mr Lucton's freedom in the person of the male companion of the 'Dryad'. The literary influence was already there, but the Sunday Tramps, both in Stephen's day and later, was also strong in academics and lawyers, such as Sir Frederick Pollock and F W Maitland, who collaborated on a two volume History of English Law, and academics. The tradition continued, including the historian C M Trevelyan, and, nearer our own day, A J P Taylor. The idea of the rambler as a species of part time Scholar Gypsy is an attractive picture to many. Morris Marble, whose history of walking Thanks Pony was published in 1960, seems to have felt let down by a less romantic reality; 'they probably appreciate few of the finer points of the art of walking as understood by such a connoisseur as Trevelyan' and 'their pleasures are mainly physical, perhaps (without offense) one might say animal'.
Politics
The Sunday Tramps and their friends were also linked to political circles. Stephen was a mountaineer as well as a rambler, and one of his fellow members of the Alpine Club was James Brace, who in 1884 first brought before parliament an Access to Mountains bill which would have made walking on privately owned uncultivated land for recreation legal. A Cambridge colleague was Henry Faucet, who became an NP and campaigner against the enclosure of commons. Stephen's biographer and fellow tramp F W Maitland remarked that he would not list 'all those who on occasion walked with Stephen on Sunday' as he had 'no desire that a respectable and Liberal ministry should go down to posterity as "All the Tramps"'. A radical political image certainly became attached to the rambling movement about this time. Bryce's Access to Mountains bill was brought before parliament many times — always by Liberal and later Labour MPs — and was widely seen in conservative circles as an attack on the rights of property.
This was reinforced by the readiness of many ramblers to trespass. Leslie Stephen, as Meredith's obituary indicates, was free of what Stephen himself once called 'superstitious reverence' for landowners' legal rights. Brett Young's Bert relishes a confrontation with a gaxnekeeper: Iltve read up the law of trespass, and they can't catch me out. I know what my rights and theirs are, and I reckon its my duty, as a citizen like, to stand up for them'. It is doubtful that most ramblers were as confident in reality as they were in fiction and rambling legend, though it is clear many did habitually trespass, particularly in the north. Many more certainly agreed with Bert in theory, and drew on a strand of radical political thought, prominent in Britain through the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, which saw the private ownership of land as a social evil. They certainly disputed the landownerst right to exclude most of the population from land used for a few days' shooting a year~
Natural History
A different aspect of Victorian life which had a profound influence on the development of the rambling movement was the popularity of natural history and specimen collection. In a strongly class—divided and class—conscious society, it was a favourite avocation across a surprisingly wide range of people. The aspect which most astonished — and aroused the approval of — wealthy Victorians was the attraction of natural science to working people, by definition poor and overworked at the time. They were sufficiently numerous to provide a market for cheap illustrated textbooks, like those written by F 0 Morris, a Yorkshire clergyman (and great walker). These were issued in shilling numbers which could be collected gradually. His son wrote in a memoir of his father 'I remember hearing of a working man writing to the author saying that he had denied himself his pipe and beer in order to take in the parts month by month'.
This man would have been one of many. Two who became sufficiently well—known to win the attention of Samuel Smiles, the apostle of Victorian self help, were Thomas Edwards, a shoemaker from Banff and Robert Dick, a baker from Thurso. The study of natural science at the time relied heavily on field trips to make observations; this required lengthy walks, especially for people without means to pay for transport.
One such who left a record of his life was Richard Buxton, born in 1786. In it he remarked that, at the age of sixty—two, 'I can yet make a ramble of thirty miles a day and enjoy the beauties of nature with as much zest as I ever did'. In an article published in 1870, Henry Fawcett quoted the rector of Bethnal Green on an entomological society in his neighbourhood 'consisting of fifty members, all working men, who pay a penny a week. They have thousands of specimens'. There was another society almost as large in Mile End and other smaller ones. The members could often be seen in Epping Forest 'under the trees, sometimes singly sometimes in pairs, generally on Sundays, often on week-day holidays, with their nets, catching butterflies and other insects'.
Many of these local societies organised field trips. W H Shercliff's Nature's joys are free for all, which deals with north—east Cheshire, records that the Stockport Society of Naturalists went out 'fully equipped after rambler fashion' from its foundation in 1884. They seem also to have had in common with ramblers a liking for healthy teas. After one walk they stopped 'for sumptuous tea of chicken, rabbit pie or mutton chops at the Anglers' Rest where later three members identified the plants collected during the ramble'. Similarly, early walking guides often include information in some detail on natural history. William Dobson's g~p~]e~jy the Ribble of 1864 includes plants to be found in parti ar localities, giving the latin nants. He is sceptical of a report 'many years since' of a lady's slipper orchid exhibited 'at a meeting of botanists, near Preston' as having been found on Pendle Hill.
Significantly, natural history societies saw themselves as having something in common with those trying to protect access to the countryside. Early affiliations to the Peak and Northern Footpaths Society, founded in 1894, included the Manchester Field Naturalists' and Archaeologists' Society, the Stockport Field Club, East Derbyshire Field Club and the Glossop Field Naturalists' Society.
Tom Stephenson, the RA' s long—serving secretary, studied as a young man with Ernest Evans, who had begun work in a mill at the age of thirteen in 1868, but eventually took charge of natural science teaching at Burnley mechanics' institute. Field excursions were his favoured teaching method and Stephenson later recalled that many of his fellow—students 'maintained a life—long interest in natural history, and a habit of rambling in the adjacent countryside and farther afield in their brief holidays'.
4. RAMBLERS
The culture of rambling
The attitudes current in rambling circles during the thirties drew on these various traditions. Ramblers distinguished themselves from 'ordinary walkers' by the distances they walked and the speed at which they did it. There tended to be a disregard for mere comfort. They were people who wanted experiences more unusual and more intense than those provided by their homes and working lives. In these respects they were similar to the 'hikers' who flooded into the countryside between the wars. But there was also a somewhat serious cast of mind among people who regarded themselves as part of a rambling movement rather than as hikers. The intellectual walkers, the romantic sensibility of poets and writers and the earnest self—improving working men and women who joined botanical societies and studied at mechanics' institutes all left traces. Ramblers prided themselves on understanding the countryside, treating it with respect and working to preserve it from the damage inflicted by the modern world. They also had a degree of political awareness which marked their early activities. These were the attitudes which marked the people and organizations which came together in the mid—thirties to form the RA. A brief excursion into the past is necessary to describe the early development of rambling movement and where the RA stood in this process.
Organization
In order to walk in the countryside — or anywhere else — other than by invitation of the owner of the land, people need to have the right to do so; in the British context this means rights of way, ie roads, bridleways and footpaths, or a more generalised right to walk at will in an area of country, often a feature of common land. However, as the numbers of those seeking to walk in the countryside increased throughout the nineteenth century, so their right to do so came to be more and more restricted. The enclosure of the commons, new patterns of agriculture, the aristocratic craze for shooting intensively—reared game birds and stalking deer, plus landowners' changing conceptions of privacy, all conspired to reduce the opportunities for most people to have access to the countryside.
As a result, the rambling movement initially developed in response to attempts by landowners to prevent people from walking on their land. The closure of paths was the first issue around which protest crystallised into formal groupings, followed by the protection of access to connon land.
Path protection
Landowners were much aided in their efforts to exclude the public by the passing of an Act in 1815 by which, if two justices of the peace agreed 'that any Public Highway, Bridleway, or Footway is unnecessary, it shall and may be lawful by Order of such Justices, or any Two of them, to stop up and to sell and dispose of such unnecessary Highway, Bridleway or Footway'. Given the social composition of the rural magistrature, and the obsession with poaching which characterised rural life at the time, it is unlikely that much attention was paid to those wishing to walk for recreation and only slightly more to the needs of villagers.
The earliest currently known organization concerned with the protection of public paths is the Association for the Protection of Ancient Footpaths in the Vicinity of York, founded in 1824. In 1827 its annual meeting heard complaints that farmers were putting up 'great bars ... miscalled stiles' which 'prevent our fair townswomen from enjoying the same privileges as ourselves'. It had also given advice when the Manchester Association for the Preservation of Ancient Footpaths was formed in 1826. By 1833 Richard Potter, MP for Wigan, could state during a debate on public health in the House of Ccxnmons that 'such was the constant desire to stop up footpaths, that had it not been for the exertions of the Manchester Society, he believed there would at this time have been very few footpaths left within ten miles of Manchester'.
However, by 1896 the Manchester society's work had been in abeyance since 1863 and the trustees decided to hand over its remaining funds to assist the work of the Peak District and Northern Counties Footpaths Preservation Society, now known as the Peak and Northern Footpaths Society (PNFS), which had been founded 1894. The PNFS, which still flourishes, can thereby make a good claim to be our oldest surviving outdoor amenity society.
There were many other local footpath societies extant in the later part of the nineteenth century. There was even a National Footpath Preservation Society established in 1884 with an impressive list of aristocratic supporters. In 1895 it published a manual dealing with the law of footpaths 'written by one in the "thick of the fight', who has had the subject always before him for a period of nearly eleven years
Commons
The Commons Society (now the Open Spaces Society) grew out the concern of a number of eminent people, drawn largely from political and legal circles, about the effect of enclosures of common land on the rural poor and the opportunities for recreation of people such as the members of the Mile End entomological society, as well as articulate and influential walkers like Leslie Stephen. Under an Act of 1845 such matters were supposed to be taken into account, but between 1845 and 1864 over 614,000 acres of connon were enclosed with only 4,000 acres kept back for recreation or the use of the poor. The Society began defending the existence of cannons around London, notably Hampstead Heath and Epping Forest, and soon established itself as a national amenity body, widening its concerns to include footpaths and other open spaces.
Because it was the first society concerning itself with protecting opportunities for walking in the countryside for recreation, and following from its elite origins, the Commons Society was well endowed with contacts in parliamentary circles and accustomed to dealing with the civil service. By the time bodies representing ramblers in more humble circumstances arrived on the scene, the Cannons Society already occupied the role of senior outdoor amenity society and Whitehall confidant. This was to have important implications for the early history of the PA.
Rambling Clubs
Early ramblers shared with natural history enthusiasts a propensity for forming clubs, often initially as offshoots of other organizations. The nature of these says a good deal about the type of people involved in the early days of the rambling movement. Among the earliest were the Manchester
YMCA Rambling Club, formed in 1880 and in London the Polytechnic Club of 1888. C H B Ward's Sheffield Clarion Ramblers was initially one of the multifarious off—shoots of Robert Blatchford's socialist journal The Clarion. Others were attached to churches. I A Leonard, founder of both the Co—operative Holiday Association (GEM and the Holiday Fellowship (HF), first chairman and first president of the RA, was in 1891 a Congregational minister in Come. His 'adventures in ida-makin' began when he took some members of a rambling club connected with his chapel on a four—day walking holiday in the Lake District.
Regional Federations
The process of grouping individual clubs into geographically—based federations began in London in 1905, at a meeting called by Lawrence Chubb, secretary of the Commons Society from 1896 to 1948. In spite of being based in london it attracted affiliations from clubs over a wide area, extending from Bristol and Cardiff in the west and Darlington and Newcastle in the north. After the Great War more ramblers' federations fanned in other centres. In Manchester a federation combined thirty—eight clubs and thirty—seven individuals in 1922, followed later the same year by Liverpool. Sheffield federation began work in 1926. These were swiftly joined by others. By the time the National Parks Connittee appointed by James Ramsay MacDonald in 1929 came to take evidence, it could hear from ramblers' federations from Glasgow, Huddersfield, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Sheffield.
National Body
The Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield federations, with some hesitations, were the key movers in the formation of the national body to represent ramblers. These three quickly began to hold joint meetings. Initially the ambition was to bring together all the outdoor amenity bodies, including the CPRE, Connons Society and National Trust. Conferences were held in 1928 and 1929 which served to demonstrate to ramblers that they needed their own national organization to represent their specific interests. The National Council of Ramblers' Federations was set up at a meeting of eleven federations in 1931. It was a somewhat loose grouping, with a council meeting once a year, but it did appoint an executive connittee and from June 1933 published a journal, thus providing a continuing framework. The council meeting of 1934 decided that from 1 January 1935 the title should be changed to the Ramblers' Association.
Policy Issues
Neither landmark was reached without controversy and the strains in the new organization affected most acutely the Manchester federation. During negotiations on the setting up of the NCRF, its representatives had doubts about an organization centred on London and suggested that it should be in the north. This was not simply a matter of north/south rivalry but of one of policy. There were three main issues which concerned the rambling movement at the time. These were national parks, rights of way and access to mountains. The BA was in favour of national parks, one of its earliest acts being to join with others in publishing a campaign pamphlet — National Parks: An appeal to ramblers, cyclists, campers, hostellers and all who love the beauty of Britain. It goes without saying that all ramblers were in favour of the maintenance of public footpaths, bridleways and tracks, the more so as the growth of motor traffic on roads made them ever more important to those seeking quiet recreation.
The controversial area was access to mountains, a shorthand tern which by the thirties had come mean uncultivated land such as moors, heaths and downs, often including foreshore. This was the subject of the bill brought before the House of Commons by James Bryce in 1884. Restricted to Scotland, it would have provided that 'no owner or occupier of uncultivated mountain or moorlands' should be 'entitled to exclude any person from walking on such lands for the purposes of recreation or scientific or artistic study, or to molest him in so walking'. Similar bills were subsequently presented, not all restricted to Scotland, none of which got anywhere.
Access to mountain and moorland was the great cause of the northern federations, representing as they did populations from industrial towns near vast areas of moorland from which walkers were excluded on grounds of game preservation. It was lack of support on this subject at the 1928 and 1929 outdoor amenity societies' conferences which had decided ramblers' representatives that they needed their own national body. Manchester federation feared that others, representing people for whom access to mountain and moorland was not an important problem, would downgrade the issue in favour of national parks and footpaths, which were less contentious. In the event the Manchester federation went along with the NCRF, but continued to have doubts and decided not to continue their membership when the &CRF became the BA. They stayed outside the fold until December 1939. However, their fears proved groundless and access to open country has been one of the RA's most consistent causes.
5. RAMBLERS AND THE OUTSIDE WORLD
Protecting the image of rambling
While individual walking clubs were coalescing into regional federations and the work of the national organization was begun, the hiking craze reached and passed its peak. If the attitude of the rambling movement to hikers was often, to say the least, ambiguous, towards some of the other people then flooding into the countryside it could be positively venonnus. The usual tern for such people at the time was 'trippers', and the reigning stereotype was of noisy urbanites who played radios, trampled flowers and spread litter over beauty spots. A parody of FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of (bar Khayyam in a London federation !j 22k of 1929 ends
'But when at dusk, 0 Tripper! you shall pass
Among the Peel and Paper on the grass
Then may you trip indeed on battered tins
And cut yourself upon your Broken Glass'.
The trippers concerned ramblers partly because they were in the countryside, taking away the quiet enjoyment of rural peace and beauty. The editorial in the first number of the &CRF's journal, published in June 1933, states succinctly what the Council saw itself as standing for. This included 'a tidy land and a seemly landscape; for a decent taste, which knows a good and simple building when it sees one'. For, it went on, 'what use is "rambling" if the whole land is to be like a North Wales watering place, full of sham gentilities of style, or has the fevered setting of a bargain sale?'.
But ramblers also feared being lumped together with trippers and hikers as townees — people who knew nothing about the countryside and wreaked havoc when they got there. Within the rambling movement there were many anxious to distance themselves from modern enjoyments of the kind so dear to the trippers, like 'Bywayman' in the London federation Handbook of 1929: 'True, I know nothing of foxtrots or loud speakers or motor cars or cinemas, but I have gained more than an inkling of the charms of Nature.' Patrick Monkhouse, a reporter with the Manchester Guardian wrote in a walking guide to the Peak District published in 1932, 'it must be frankly admitted that the weekend swarm includes some who have not yet learned to harmonise their manners with rural scenery. They sing tunelessly, and argue in loud voices, strum on stringed instruments, complains the old timer, and hints that those who sing the loudest and dress the most strangely have not ventured more than a few miles from a railway station'. Monkhouse was less condemnatory, content to wait for the civilising influence of the countryside to improve the behaviour of those who walked in it.
Negotiations
Such a philosophical approach was not always possible for those actively working within the ramblers' federations. They sometimes met landowners for discussions aimed at improving access to the countryside not only for their own members but also for the general public. One of the reasons why the Kinderscout mass trespass of April 1932 met with such an arms—length response from the Manchester and Sheffield federations was that they were at that time involved in negotiations for better access to some of the moorland in the area. The federations and the NCRF were not wholly opposed to militancy. The minutes of the latter's executive conynittee meeting of October 1932 has a Sheffield representative cocmnenting that 'he wondered sometimes if the young fellows who had been demonstrating were not doing more than the Federations ... A new spirit was abroad in the rambling movement, and the problem was how to utilise it to the best advantage'. From the point of view of those involved in arguing the ramblers' case in public and in private negotiations, insensitive trippers and hikers were more of a danger, strengthening the case of those who claimed that there could be no question of improving access to the countryside.
As a result, the federations were drawn into acting to head off such claims. For instance, the complaints of the good folk of Hathersage and Hayfield seem in the spring of 1933 to have become so frequent that the Manchester federation became persuaded that direct repudiation was called for. The Manchester Guardian reported that a letter from the federation had been read to the rural district council, stating that its representatives had visited Hayfield on Sunday to view the disorders said to have been caused by ramblers. They had found that a small proportion of visitors were responsible, of the type which 'rarely travels farther than the recreation ground'. They suggested that the council should close the ground from Saturday night to Monday morning and apply the by—laws against unsatisfactory camp sites. The letter concluded 'we are of the opinion that if such steps were taken the disorders and nuisances will be greatly diminished'.
A potentially more far—reaching problem was tackled by a conference on trespass in Scotland held in the autumn of the same year. Societies representing landowners in Scotland had prepared a memorandum urging the Secretary of State to consider strengthening the law of trespass. Any such proposal was bound to touch a raw nerve in the rambling community, where so many held that trespass was justifiable while access was so unjustifiably restricted. The Scottish ramblers' federation therefore proposed a conference between themselves and the landowners' organizations, which was duly held, as reported in the NCRF's journal, Rambling, 'in a most friendly atmosphere'. The spokesman for the landowners was reported by the Manchester Guardian as saying that in fact there was 'not so much cause for complaint against the organized bodies'; it was the activities of 'ordinary trippers' which had brought matters to a head. An agreement which satisfied both sides was reached, but only because, as Rambling's editorial put it 'organized ramblers of all kinds in Scotland have gone bail for the better public manners of their fellowinen'.
The rambling movement was radical in that it demanded access to the countryside as of right, in the face of landowners' manifest disinclination to allow any such thing. They, and most of the outdoor amenity movement at the time, also favoured curbs on the rights of ownership through planning controls and special conditions in defined areas of land, like national parks, to protect the beauty of the landscape. But they felt they had a great deal to lose and on occasion local federations found themselves having to take on the role of the respectable face of rambling, interposed between the landowners and the numerous urbanites flooding into the countryside for the first time.
Parliament and the use of public opinion
As outlined above, while discussions on setting up the NCRF were being held, the Manchester federation was dubious about the wisdom of a London—based organization. In the course of correspondence about this George Mitchell, secretary of the London federation, commented 'owing to circumstances over which present—day ramblers have no control the City happens to be the seat of Government for the present.' It is a remark which reveals how much those working to create a national body to represent ramblers' interests had influencing government as one of their main objectives.
It is not surprising that this should have been the case, for the law and how it could be used and improved in favour of better access to the countryside had been part of the organized movement's project from its earliest days. The Access to Mountains bill was by this time something of a hardy perennial among private members' bills. The Rights of Way Act 1932, which simplified the law relating to the proving of footpaths, had been presented as a bill eleven times since 1906. The passing of the Law of Property Act 1925, a section of which ensured the public legal right of access to all urban commons, was recent history when the NCRF began work. The last two were monuments to the efforts of the Connons Society, adding considerably to its prestige and that of its secretary Lawrence Chubb.
The great strength of the ramblers' federations and the RA was their skill in mobilising public opinion. The favourite method, both arising out of and making full use of their status as popular organizations, was the large outdoor rally. The most famous of these were the yearly series held to press for an Access to Mountains bill at Winnats Pass, in Derbyshire. At these rallies MPs and ramblers' leaders spoke, a resolution calling for the bill was ritually passed and despatched to the prime minister of the day. Such occasions had many advantages; they reinforced among those attending the sense of being part of a movement; they introduced the ordinary rambler to the movement 's leaders and 'stars'; the passing of a resolution gave them a sense of purpose. And, by no means least, reporters and photographers were attracted in considerable numbers to the colourful spectacle and obliged with a goodly number of column inches.
However, their great weakness was that they lacked what the Commons Society had — access to the corridors of power.
Access to Mountains Act 1939
The HA's aptitude for lobbying MPs and gaining publicity was amply demonstrated in the controversy over the passing of the Access to Mountains Act 1939. This was introduced in much the same terms as the original Bryce bill but was altered to an extent unacceptable to most of the HA's membership during negotiations between the Labour MP who moved it, Arthur Creech Jones, the government, and landowners' and ramblers' representatives. The management of these negotiations for the rambling side was left in the hands of Lawrence Chubb of the Commons Society.
This was an act of some naivety on the part of the RA leadership. Chubb's views were known to be, at the most optimistic estimate, lukewarm on the question of legislating to allow access to mountains and moorlands. He was a man of conservative disposition who looked rather to permissive agreements as a solution and appears, judging from correspondence with Home Office civil servants, to have claimed that he had kept the HA better informed than he in fact did. When HA representatives became aware of the proposals their objections were strenuous. In the first place the bill as revised did not provide access to land conforming to a particular definition, but rather a mechanism by which they could apply for access on a piecemeal basis. As Edwin Royce, a dedicated campaigner for access from Manchester federation, put it in the HA journal, 'a more fitting title for the measure would be "The Access to Access Bill"'. Secondly, the revised bill made certain forms of trespass a criminal offence. Around the much trespassed—over moorlands between Manchester and Sheffield this was a red rag to a bull.
Campaigning to stop the bill
The campaign against the revised bill brought into play all the HA's particular skills. Tom Stephenson has described how 'within two days, by letters and telegrams' an enthusiastic advocate of trespass from Sheffield, Philip Barnes, obtained the signatures of a dozen well—known access campaigners to a letter which, on the third day, he circulated to the press and more than 600 MPs. In the days before faxes and photocopying this was a considerable feat. The HA's Executive Conwnittee decided the bill was unacceptable and a deputation went to the Ministry of Agriculture, which may have had a hand in the weakening of the clause making trespass a criminal offence as the result of an amendment in the House of Lords. Public meetings were held, including one which drew more than 2,000 ramblers to Leith Hill. Philip Barnes wrote a lengthy memorandum which was, again, sent out to MPs and the press. It was all carried out with considerable flair, but its success at the time was limited to the amount of attention it generated. The effect on the Act which passed into law was minimal. In the event the war intervened, its provisions were never used and it was repealed by the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949.
Corridors of Power
The effort did, however, bear fruit ten years later when the bill which became the 1949 Act was being drawn up. The behind—the—scenes story of this process says much about the strengths and weakness of the postwar HA. It could work within the context of a favourable social climate, where both the countryside and popular access to it were seen, following a series of government reports, to be prime candidates for post—war reconstruction. The HA, however, was still a small organization with activity mostly focused in its constituent federations and whose first full—time officer was not appointed until 1948.
The bill was controversial and came close to not being presented. That it got that far was due in no small degree to the cainitment of the Minister of Town and Country Planning who oversaw it, Lewis Silkin. He was greatly helped by the pressure of public and parliamentary opinion in favour of such a bill, part of the legacy of the popularity of rambling, including the hiking craze, during the pre—war years. This favourable climate was available to be used by all those lobbying for legislation to improve access to the countryside, of which the HA was a significant part and in one respect crucial.
Inside influence
There was, however, one respect in which the RA began in a more favourable position than it had in the later stages of the bill's progress. This was within the ministry itself. They began well placed as Tom Stephenson, already well known as a writer and activist in PA circles, had in 1943 joined its staff. When Lewis Silkin arrived 'he was surprised to find than an Independent Labour Party colleague of some twenty years before was now his press officer'. Capitalizing on this and a connon interest in access to the countryside — both had spoken at the rally on Leith Hill denouncing the Access to Mountains Act of 1939 — Stephenson was able to spend 'an afternoon in an infonnal discussion on legislation the PA was seeking' with Silkin, who promised to receive a deputation. When he did Stephenson put out a press release making connitments which the ministry would later find something of an embarrassment. Also through us good offices, Stephenson became a member of a conwnittee meeting under the chairmanship of Sir Arthur Hobhouse, which in 1947 issued two reports, one on National Parks and one on Footpaths and Access to the Countryside.
Stephenson was only able to do so as he was leaving the civil service. The PA's views were therefore given considerable prominence in the two reports on which the legislation was based, but lacked an influential voice in the ministry which was doing the drafting. John Dower, whom Stephenson described as 'my only kindred spirit' in the ministry, and whose report on national parks was published in 1945, died in 1947. An influence on the detail of the bill which reached parliament sympathetic to PA views was therefore much reduced. An examination of the internal papers of the ministry shows that others were much more adept at maintaining contact with Silkin and with civil servants than was the RA. This is not to say that those who did always got what they wanted, but the agricultural lobby's close relationship with the Ministry of Agriculture ~.'as certainly mainly responsible for ensuring that no general right of access to uncultivated land, along the lines recommended by Hobhouse, found its way into the 1949 4rt. The PA was once again very effective in making use of sn!ipathetic back—bench MPs and arranging events to attract utlicitv, but these techniques have limitations.
National parks
Controversy over the bill centred on two topics — national parks and access to mountains and moorland. The Hobhouse committee had thought that national parks should be run by boards of which half the members were nominated to represent the national, as against the local interest, by a powerful National Parks Cainission (parent of the Countryside Ccmmuission). It was a cardinal belief of the groups making up the outdoor amenity lobby that local authorities would not be sufficiently conmiitted to national parks and would need stiffening if the idea was not to be subverted by purely local considerations. However, as the bill was drafted, this national interest on park boards was weakened largely, though not entirely, through opposition within the ministry to creating any such independent locus of power.
Access to mountains and moorlands
With access to mountains and nnorlands it was touch and go whether any such section would be included at all. The PA was part of a spectrum of outdoor and amenity organizations pressing for a strong national element in the administration of national parks, as it was when it came to ensuring that the bill came before the house at all. On the question of access to mountains and moorlands the PA was the main body concerned. The recoomiendation of the Hobhouse report on footpaths and access to the countryside had been that local authorities should draw up maps of all land suitable for open access within their area. Subject to appeal, a statutory map would be drawn up indicating access land, on which access on the general basis of that suggested by James Bryce in 1884 would become a legal right.
What emerged from the negotiations within Whitehall fell short of what the committee had recommended. The drawing up of the map was to go ahead but the bill only enabled planning authorities to declare a right of access to defined areas. As Silkin himself admitted, though not publicly, these provisions did not go much beyond making the 1939 Actst provisions workable, by making local authorities responsible for putting them into effect, rather than leaving it to interested parties — ie ramblers' organizations which had little funding and only voluntary workers. This was a genuine improvement, but not what the pioneers had hoped for.
However, it is almost certain that without the work of those pioneers arid continuous lobbying by contemporary ramblers not even that much would have been achieved. A ministry paper of May 1948 indicated that it was 'still uncertain whether to include such a power in the Bill, but may not be able to avoid doing so in view of the pressure of public opinion'. The weight of the past shows up most clearly on the question of a trespass clause along the lines of that in the 1939 Act. Silkin informed a committee which organized the flow of legislation to parliament that he would not be re—enacting this clause, which 'was the one which gave the greatest offence in the Act of 1939'. So, when a deputation of farmers and landowners met Ministry of Agriculture officials in 1949 to press, among other things, for the inclusion of such a clause, the officials replied that they had tried to do so. But the Ministry of Town and Country Planning had resisted the suggestion firmly on the grounds that the bill was 'far from satisfying all the desires of those interested in public access and that they cannot contemplate further alienating these people by the imposition of special penalties'. Had those who wrote letters and demonstrated in 1939 known this, they might have felt a certain justifiable satisfaction.
Saving the bill
In 1949, however, the PA and its colleagues in the outdoor amenity movement were most successful in making sure that the bill was included in the government's legislative plans. As Tom Stephenson put it 'At the end of 1947 there were disquieting rumours that Silkin might yield to the pressure of his ministry against legislation.... These rumours led, in 1948, to the most intensive campaign in the history of the PA. MPs and ministers were bombarded with letters and resolutions. Many public meetings, large and small, were held... .1 planned a three—day walk for MPs on the Pennine Way ... which hit the headlines'. Ministerial documents show Whitehall was affected by this pressure. Silkin himself clearly found it useful sometimes. When a meeting of members of the parliamentary Labour Party sent hUn a letter, with 90 signatures on it, pressing for the bill to be introduced he passed it on to Herbert Morrison, who managed the legislative progranwne.
Once the bill had been published and presented in the House of Commons, the HA and the other organizations concerned lobbied intensively to try to get an act more to their liking. In doing this the PA was able to call on the goodwill of many MPs who had grown up in the atmosphere of pre—war rambling. However, by this stage there was little ì-liich could be done to change the bill in any major way. The 1939 bill had been totally rewritten between its first and third readings, but that was a private members' bill. A gDvenrrnt Dill, however many back—benchers are eager to put down anEndrrnts, is the outcome of a long process of negotiaticm and can only be unstitched in extremis. Silkin himself clearly had a good deal of sympathy with his critics in the outdoor anEnity organizations, but could stand squarely for the provisions of the 1949 Act in the knowledge that it was the best he had been able to get out of his own department and negotiations with the rest of Whitehall.
The lessons of history
The first lesson of the PA's history is that it has a lot of it. It is the legitimate heir of generations of people who, as Tom Stephenson once put it 'found beauty in the land and strove that others might enjoy that beauty'. This is not just a matter of antiquarian interest; institutions, like people, are more secure when they have roots, and the HA's roots go very deep into the culture and institutions of Britain. The HA is now in a much stronger position than it was in 1939 or 1949 — it can't be left out of any discussion about what happens to the countryside and the opportunities people have to walk in it for quiet enjoyment.
The other lesson of history is that you can't repeat it because you never start from exactly the same place again. The PA is now a very different from the HA of those pioneering days. Most spectacularly its size has changed. When Tom Stephenson became its paid secretary in 1950, membership stood at 8,600. Last year it passed 100,000. The first paid official was appointed in 1948; the HA now employs 35 people. Yet many of the issues remain the same — rights of way, protection of the countryside, access to open country and attracting more people to rambling remain the PA's agenda just as they were at the outset, 60 years ago, when they were picked up like a baton from all the ramblers who had gone before. Modern means have to be found to work towards them, but looking at the past may provide some pointers for present day action and can certainly be a source of inspiration.