The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (8 page)

It had taken James Bryce eight years to get his bill even debated in the House of Commons, though in the meanwhile, another attempt, this time to open up land in Wales, had briefly flickered into life in 1888. The protagonist was another brilliant and highly individual Liberal MP, Tom Ellis, the member for his native Merionethshire in north Wales. In moving the Mountains Rivers and Pathways (Wales) Bill, he said that ‘the object of it was to secure public right of access to the mountains and waste lands in Wales, and also to the rivers, lakes, and streams. It provided that any pathway that had been used for any five successive years during the last 49 years should be again used by the public.’ Ellis conjured up ancient Welsh custom and law in support of his proposal, but this was denounced as ‘simple fancy’ by the veteran Tory MP for Caernarvon Boroughs, Edmund Swetenham. Swetenham fulminated at length against Ellis’s proposal, eventually talking the bill out under the 12 o’clock rule, whereby debate is automatically adjourned as midnight strikes. It never returned.

James Bryce, and then his younger brother John Annan Bryce, the Liberal MP for Inverness Burghs, continued to present the Scottish Bill to Parliament, but to no avail. It was also presented, covering the whole of Britain, in 1908 by another renegade Liberal firebrand, Charles Trevelyan, the young member for Elland, West Yorkshire. His rhetorical introduction to the debate has become something of a poster slogan and rallying
cri de coeur
for British ramblers: ‘Who has ever been forbidden to wander over an Alp? Who has ever been threatened with an interdict in the Apennines? Who has ever been warned off the rocks of the Tyrol? Who has ever been prosecuted for trespassing among Norwegian mountains?’

A little prone to earnest high-mindedness they may be, but the Trevelyan family are a fine example of the kind of dippy Liberal gentry who have forged and steered our national relationship with the land. True to his upstanding words, Charles was an enthusiastic vice-president of the Ramblers’ Association and, when he inherited the family pile of Wallington Hall near Newcastle, set up Northumberland’s first youth hostel in a stable block. He then donated the entire estate to the National Trust, thus disinheriting his son George, who nonetheless went on to become one of the leading New Age gurus of the twentieth century. Charles’s daughter Katherine was also a notable free spirit, walking solo across Canada in 1930, aged just 20 and equipped only with a tent and a revolver. On writing of her experiences in a book,
Unharboured Heaths
, she became something of a transatlantic celebrity and a potent symbol of emancipated young womanhood.

Charles’s younger brother, another George (usually known as G. M. Trevelyan), was an equally committed pedestrian who wrote one of the finest essays ever published on walking. Its opening words – ‘I have two doctors, my left leg and my right’ – are another motto often found pinned to a rambler’s kitchen cupboard. He continued in deft explanation: ‘When body and mind are out of gear (and those twin parts of me live at such close quarters that the one always catches melancholy from the other), I know that I have only to call in my doctors and I shall be well again.’ His essay is especially good on the mental benefits of a good walk, when ‘my thoughts start out with me like bloodstained mutineers debauching themselves on board the ship they have captured, but I bring them home at nightfall, larking and tumbling over each other like happy little boy-scouts at play, yet obedient to every order to concentrate for any purpose . . . I may wish.’ His book –
Clio, a Muse and Other Essays
– was published almost a century ago, but the condition, and the cure, are timeless.

It is after this George, not his hippy nephew of the same name, that Trevelyan House, the St Albans headquarters of the Youth Hostel Association, is named, for he was their first president, in post for 18 years from the organisation’s launch in 1930. He’s left a rather less sober mark too, in one of the country’s oldest and oddest extant outdoor events, the Trevelyan Man Hunt. A boisterous hurrah for the upper classes, the idea was dreamed up in 1898 by Trevelyan and two Cambridge friends, having been inspired by the flight from the authorities of the two young heroes in Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of derring-do,
Kidnapped
. Since then, the format has changed little: it is an exhilarating three-day scramble that still sees posh boys and their paters (the ‘hounds’) galloping over the fells of the Lake District in hot pursuit of a handful of young stablehands and jockeys in red sashes (the ‘hares’). The Trevelyan Man Hunt, or Lake Hunt as it’s sometimes known (naked swimming is an integral ingredient of the chase, for in common with many other aristocratic pursuits, it’s a thin excuse for a chap to get his kit off with his chums), sounds terrific.

Defecting from the Liberals to become a Labour MP and Cabinet minister under Ramsay MacDonald, Charles Trevelyan was always astute in seeing which way the wind was blowing, and by becoming one of the first stately home owners to present his pile to the National Trust, pre-empting it as best as possible. More importantly, his gift came from a profound belief that owning huge tracts of land brought responsibility to ensure some measure of public access to it. Other politicians were neither as prescient nor as philanthropic, and the sound of the landed and wealthy resisting inevitable change continued to echo through Parliament and the press right up to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Trevelyan’s 1908 access bill seemed at first to be successful; the Commons voted heavily in its favour. But for all the fine words in the chamber, as soon as it was shunted into committee, the bill was quietly sidelined and left to gather dust. In the press, only the
Manchester Guardian
, predictably enough, made enthusiastic noises;
The Times
seemed to forget its earlier support for Bryce and retreat into its Establishment lair, from where it shouted grumpily, in an editorial headed ‘Mountains and Molehills’, that the whole access issue was a ‘bogey’, and that every ‘man or woman or child who wishes to explore the waste places of this island can do so without let or hindrance from anyone’. Over the next 30 years, there were a further nine attempts to bring in new access legislation, all largely based on Bryce’s bill and all equally unsuccessful.

To see how far, and how fast, things then changed, it’s instructive to take a closer look at two pieces of legislation enacted just a decade apart: the Access to Mountains Act of 1939 and the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949. The 1939 Act was brought in as a bill the previous year by the Labour MP for Shipley, Arthur Creech-Jones. All through the 1930s, the public mood for greater access had been building up steam, galvanised by the Kinder protest of 1932 and its controversial aftermath. The idea of a first national long-distance path, the Pennine Way, had been floated by Tom Stephenson in a 1935
Daily Herald
article, entitled ‘Wanted – A Long Green Trail’; support for the idea was instantaneous and massive. The annual Winnats Pass access demonstrations grew every year. Rambling groups had mushroomed everywhere, and were confident that their time had finally come.

On the morning of 2 December 1938, Creech-Jones rose in the Commons to launch his bill, substantially the same measure that had been rejected or filibustered out well over a dozen times throughout the previous half century. He outlined the well-worn grievances, particularly in the north, and left it to the bill’s seconder, Nuneaton Labour MP Reginald Fletcher, to expound more philosophically, and humorously, upon the principles at stake. Fletcher talked of his own lifetime’s love of walking: ‘I myself in the Lake District have watched trousers giving way to knickerbockers, knickerbockers giving way to shorts, and shorts in their turn giving way to shorter shorts. Looking at some of those shorter shorts, I have smiled to remember that my father walked and scrambled over every fell in the Lakes wearing a bowler hat and clasping an umbrella as firmly as any British Prime Minister being taken for a walk up the Berchtesgaden path.’

The last reference is a reminder that this debate was taking place only two months after Neville Chamberlain had returned from Munich waving his little piece of paper and declaring that he had secured ‘peace for our time’. Fletcher’s dig was very well aimed, for it was rapidly becoming evident that Hitler’s assurances counted for nothing; the country was in a highly restive mood and could see a war fast approaching. To that end, supporters of the bill made much of the need to ensure that the nation’s youth were as fit as possible, and in what better way could that be achieved than by granting them access to the hills, mountains and moors of upland Britain? There were explicit appeals too about helping to foster a new sense of patriotism in the land by giving people the chance to experience its finest bits for themselves. ‘How can you expect some people to feel patriotic about the rookeries in which they have to live?’ demanded Fletcher.

The patriotic case was expounded with most passion by Fred Marshall, Labour MP for Sheffield Brightside and a longstanding supporter of ramblers. ‘Beautiful and lovely scenery has not only an aesthetic value,’ he insisted. ‘It has a definite spiritual and moral value. One who is in the habit of contemplating England’s natural beauty is a better man and citizen for doing it.’ Drawing in the spectre of rearmament for war, he brilliantly conjured up the image of his Sheffield constituents: ‘men who stand and toil before the vast furnaces in blinding heat, smelt and pour the steel, fashion, hammer, and roll it into all kinds of useful articles, from the tiny razor blades to the great blocks of armour which line the sides of the great Leviathans of war, are absolutely precious to this country. The service they have given to it is incalculable. These men stand behind this Bill. They are the men who will carry on that wonderful craftsmanship and they are not content to spend their week-ends in places where they can see nothing but the belching smoke of factory chimneys. They ask for the national right to see the lovely spots of our land.’

‘What has this House said to them?’ Marshall continued, on something of a rhetorical roll. ‘With incredible ingratitude this House has said, “No, you will disturb the grouse.” The House has mumbled something about private property and the damage they will do to the gritstone rocks. And the owners have said “No”. They have said, in effect, “We are having a few gentlemen from London for a shooting party for a day or two for the glorious twelfth, and therefore we must close the moors for twelve months, and anyone found on them will be summoned for trespassing.” They have put up their miserable little boards “Trespassers will be prosecuted” which really deface the eternal hills, and are at once an insult and a challenge to the youth of these great industrial centres.’

To most of their Conservative opponents, these arguments were nigh-on irrelevant, for they detected something far worse lurking within them. ‘The Bill really aims at the nationalisation of property,’ boomed Captain Frank Heilgers, the MP for Bury St Edmunds and the government’s chief spokesman in the debate. ‘There is more behind it than one imagines,’ he continued in the tones of a gumshoe sleuth, ‘because I notice that the names of three Front Bench Members of the Socialist party are on this Private Members Bill.’ Oh, well spotted, sir. Other Tory Knights of the Shires smelled the same rat. Brigadier General Douglas Clifton Brown (Hexham) ‘began to feel that the principles underlying the Bill were to down private property and to nationalise the land’. Robin Turton (Thirsk & Malton) thought that if the bill was successful ‘we shall be going very far towards Marxian Socialism.’

Sir Patrick Donner (Basingstoke) apocalyptically warned that ‘unless the Bill receives the drastic amendment which, in my opinion, it will require, it will have unjust and lamentable results. I do not want to base my objections on any ludicrous argument,’ he stated, before going on to do just that: ‘it might be said that, while Scott, the explorer, crowned the South Pole with the Union Jack, we may witness every mountain top in the United Kingdom crowned with a bin placed there under the auspices of the anti-litter league.’ He also demanded financial compensation for landowners, should the bill become law.

Not all of the Tories were quite so lacking in any appreciation of the way the world was changing. Within the party, there was – the likes of Clifton-Brown and Turton excepted – a pretty stark north–south split, as there was in practically every interest group concerned with the bill, the ramblers’ movement included. The Conservative MP for Leeds West, Vyvyan Adams, stated firmly ‘that the broad principle of the Bill is incontestable’, before going on to slyly chide his colleague Captain Heilgers for the ‘extraordinary intellectual agility’ he had displayed in the debate. ‘He made a speech,’ Adams continued, ‘which, with great respect, I would say would have been substantially out of date when this question was last discussed in the year of our Lord 1908 [it had in fact been discussed since]. He said, for example, that there is no public demand for the principle of this Bill. There may not be any public demand from Bury St Edmunds, that hive of industry. My honourable and gallant Friend represents a part of East Anglia in which, incidentally, I was born; but let him go north and then he may be able more accurately to assess the need for fresh air in those densely populated areas . . . My honourable and gallant Friend sets up the shooting interests against the need of millions of industrial workers to escape from drabness, monotony and gloom and to realise the natural treasures of our country. Never have I heard such an audacious, or witnessed so unblushing, an opposition of sectional interest to the general good.’

With only 154 MPs in the parliamentary Labour party, the bill’s sponsors knew that they would have to rely on Liberal and Conservative votes to get the legislation enacted. For all the harrumphing, most Tories seemed to realise that some change was inevitable, and best therefore to manage it as smoothly as possible – and by smoothly, I mean most in their own interest. The bill passed its second reading and was sent off to committee, where it was torn apart by the Conservatives, and reassembled in a way that bore practically no resemblance to the original. Limited access would be granted, but only after a tortuous, and potentially expensive, process of permission was applied for. The most controversial addition, however, was to make trespass a criminal offence for the first time in British history, with a fixed fine attached to it of anything up to £2.