Синклер Маккей – Ramble On: The story of our love for walking Britain (страница 4)

Kinder Scout – and indeed almost every other site of natural beauty in Britain at that time – was fiercely guarded by private landowners. And so, this was a quite deliberate, premeditated act of mass trespass. Although the day would end extremely unhappily for some participants, this moment – which had been in the offing for the last 100 years – finally galvanised the group’s aims into a campaign with mass appeal.

George Orwell, writing The Road to Wigan Pier in 1936, sarcastically parroted southern middle-class views about how the labouring classes had very little taste for the natural beauties of the countryside:

The [industrial towns] go on being ugly largely because the Northerners have got used to that kind of thing and do not notice it … Many of the people in Sheffield or Manchester, if they smelled the air along the Cornish cliffs, would probably declare that it had no taste in it.

It was an extraordinary assertion for anyone to make, and one that those marching up Kinder Scout on that Sunday in 1932 would have had words about. Indeed, in a sense, one of the trespassers did.

‘The only chance that a young person had of getting away from mucky Manchester and Salford,’ said trespasser Dave Nesbitt, ‘away from those slums full of smoke and grime, for about a shilling or one and six, was to come out here in the fresh air, and there used to be a mass exodus every Sunday morning.’²

By the early 1930s, Manchester had a population of around 750,000. Even though the vast cotton mills, which had powered the city’s wealth in the nineteenth century, were now in decline, the city’s industry had branched out into modern engineering works, chemical factories, and electrical plants. The nature of the work may have changed slightly, but it was no less intense. The concomitant need to escape from the remorseless production line, and the tightly packed streets and homes, was as strong as it ever had been. By the late 1920s, tension about access to the moors being denied to thousands of walkers had grown to the point where, in 1928, there was a large rally in nearby Winnat’s Pass, to the south of Kinder Scout. Attended by various members of established walking groups, these rallies became an annual fixture. But the Kinder Scout trespass of 1932 was a rather more direct and more shrewd form of action.

Today, I am following in some of these footsteps (though perhaps foolishly without the aid of a map). By the time I have clumped up an almost perpendicular hill of grass and muddy footholds – a gradient like a climbing wall which leaves me puffing like a fairground steam novelty – I can see exactly why this area attracted the trespassers. The immediate vista across this plateau is that of dusty brown heather and deep black peat; shivering tarns and vast boulders like enigmatic modernist sculptures. I know I have somehow taken a wrong turning because I have this part of the moor to myself; where are all the other hundreds of walkers I know are around here somewhere?

Thanks to the collective sense given by authors ranging from Bram Stoker to the Gawain poet, I was somehow expecting the area to be a little bleaker than this. But when the sun suddenly flashes out from behind fast moving clouds, all sorts of new colours bleed through the land – the peat becomes richer, more chocolatey, and there is a dash of citrus lime in the grass. Doubtless like all those walkers who came before me, I feel a surging sense of reward.

This high moorland was, in 1932, owned by the Duke of Devonshire. Its primary purpose was as a tract where his guests could enjoy shooting game. The moors were strictly patrolled by the Duke’s gamekeepers and in the recent past, there had been a number of skirmishes between young urban walkers and the keepers. There were natural rebels who would make evasion of the gamekeepers part of the fun of the walk. There were also many unemployed young men, for whom walks in this empty landscape were a simple and essential escape from an otherwise overwhelming sense of powerlessness and frustration. But for these men, it was also about the assertion of an ancient right. For had these not once been common lands, before the Enclosure Acts? Tony Gillet said of the 1932 trespass: ‘This was serious political action I was taking.’

A chief figure behind this ‘serious political action’ was Communist Benny Rothman, of a group called the British Walkers Sports Federation. Such were this group’s far-left politics that the well-established and rather more moderate Manchester and Sheffield Ramblers’ groups of the time kept a cautious distance from it. It could be that some people sensed that this proposed Kinder Scout action was less about asserting the simple right of walkers, and more about making a rather more aggressive point about property and land ownership. Nevertheless, Rothman was a charismatic and thoroughly committed enthusiast – he remains a folk hero to a great many today – and he was adept at recruiting followers to the cause. The Kinder Scout protest had been sparked directly by the failure of another British Walkers Sports Federation venture. According to Rothman, the BWSF had arranged a weekend camp for young people just outside the village of Raworth. These young people went for a hike across the moorland, and were met with furious gamekeepers, who forced them off the land. ‘It was decided then and there,’ said Rothman, ‘that we would do something about it, and we decided to organise a mass trespass over Kinder Scout.’ They went about this by distributing leaflets at railway stations to those who looked as though they might be ramblers and hikers. There were also notices written on pavements in chalk, all proclaiming that there would be a meeting at Hayfield Recreation Ground on 24th April. Rothman didn’t stop there, though. He also succeeded in getting an interview with the Manchester Evening News, which dutifully went to press, advertising, in big headlines, ‘Claims to Free Access’ and ‘Sunday’s Attack on Kinder.’ The reporter wrote that ‘working-class rambling clubs in Lancashire have decided upon direct action to enforce their claims for access to beauty spots.’³

This was only true to a certain degree, though. There were also a great many rambling clubs in Lancashire – some established since the 1820s – that felt deeply disinclined to take part; groups that might also perhaps have felt that their walking movement was being hijacked by a small number of agitprop figures. By 1932, there was already a Ramblers’ Federation, and having observed this pre-publicity for the Kinder Scout trespass, the Federation felt moved to disassociate itself from this particular cause; although a few of its members were none the less among those who turned up on Sunday 24 April.

These advance notices were also acted on by the authorities, and even before the prospective walkers had had a chance to set foot on private property, the police were out in force to make it clear that a Hayfield council by-law forbad meetings on the recreation ground. Such were the numbers of people who assembled that morning that there was little the officers could do. The walkers, discouraged from assembling in the park, gathered instead in a disused quarry nearby. From this point, they were urged to start the march upwards. Faced with such a multitude, the police could hardly hold them back; all they could do instead was follow them.

There was, according to Rothman, a cheerful atmosphere that day. Bear in mind that all the young men and women who joined him habitually worked six-day weeks, and very long hours; this was their precious day off, and they were clearly determined to enjoy it. Rothman said that they ‘all looked picturesque in rambling gear, khaki jackets and shirts, abbreviated shorts, colourful jerseys. Away we went in jubilant mood, determined to carry out the assault on Kinder Scout, which was planned, and determined that no authority would stop it. Some of our youngsters [previously] wanted to go up on to one of the tops here,’ Rothman added, ‘and they were turned back. And they came back very annoyed, and they talked it over, and we decided that they couldn’t turn all of us back. We didn’t want any violence, we didn’t want any clashes – but we were going up.’

The marchers that day were joined by a journalist from the Manchester Guardian. The reporter wrote his account of how, on those slopes, the trespassers caught their first glimpse of the Duke of Devonshire’s gamekeepers. They, like the police and the press, had clearly been informed in advance of what was going to happen that morning. ‘In a few moments,’ the journalist wrote,

the advance guard – men only, the women were kept behind – dropped down to the stream and started to climb the other side. I followed. As soon as we came to the top of the first steep bit, we met the keepers. There followed a very brief parley, after which a fight started – nobody quite knew how. It was not even a struggle. There were only eight keepers, while from first to last, forty or more ramblers took part in the scuffle.