The Midland Area of the Ramblers' Association 1930-1987
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Midland Area of The Ramblers’ Association 1930-1987 By Michael Bird Published in celebration of the Ramblers 75th Birthday in 2010 2 CONTENTS ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE TEXT 3 FORWORD 4 INTRODUCTION 5 CHAPTER ONE THE EARLY YEARS – BEFORE THE FEDERATION 7 CHAPTER TWO THE MIDLAND FEDERATION – 1930 to 1948 11 CHAPTER THREE MIDLAND AREA PRESIDENTS 27 CHAPTER FOUR BUILDING THE AREA – 1948 TO 1968 37 CHAPTER FIVE DEVOLUTION OF THE AREA – 1969 to 1987 49 CHAPTER SIX A BRIEF LOOK AT THE LEGACY AREA 61 APPENDIX 1 CLUBS AND ORGANISATIONS AFFILIATED TO THE MIDLAND FEDERATION IN 1948 63 APPENDIX 2 MIDLAND AREA LOCAL GROUPS & YEAR OF FOUNDATION 64 ILLUSTRATIONS 65 ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE TEXT 1949 Act National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 AGM Annual General Meeting AONB Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty CHA Countrywide Holidays Association CRoW Act Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2001 CTC Cyclists Touring Club EC Executive Committee GWR Great Western Railway HF Holiday Fellowship LMS London, Midland and Scotland Railway NEC National Executive Committee OS Ordinance Survey RA The Ramblers‘ Association RoW Rights of Way (Committee) YHA Youth Hostels‘ Association 3 FOREWORD The story of the Ramblers is scattered across countless local archives, spare bedrooms and people‘s heads. Michael Bird has done a valuable job in pulling together the history of Midland Area. The Area‘s wartime President, writer Francis Brett Young, as Michael recalls, wrote a charming novel with a rambler at its heart. In Mr Lucton‘s Freedom Bert Hopkins, the humble black-country clerk, inks all his summer walks onto his Ordnance Survey maps and relives them in the winter evenings. Michael Bird‘s account gives us the freedom to relive Midland Area‘s 57 years. We forget just what an extensive territory the Area covered. That is particularly significant when we read of how its members claimed paths for the first definitive map of rights of way and then checked the draft maps for omissions. This was in the early fifties, when fewer people had cars—yet they had to cover an area from Montgomeryshire to Northamptonshire, from Staffordshire to Herefordshire, largely from the stronghold of Birmingham. It is hard to conceive now how they achieved this. This is not a history written with rose-coloured spectacles: while some members were absolute Trojans, the majority were apathetic, despite exhortations at meetings and in newsletters. Midland Area was no doubt a microcosm of the Ramblers as a whole, with the tension between campaigners and social walkers which still exists today. What this history does show is that we owe a huge debt of gratitude to those campaigners of Midland Area who fought to get paths recorded and to stop damaging developments in the lovely countryside of their territory. They didn‘t claim all the paths or stop all the developments, but this chunk of England and Wales would be a poorer place for walkers were it not for their efforts. This history is written with the understanding of one who has trodden the Ramblers‘ path for the greater part of his life. Thank you, Michael, for your contribution to the Ramblers, and for this fascinating history. Kate Ashbrook Ramblers‘ trustee and former chairman 4 INTRODUCTION When the papers of the long-serving President of Midland Area, Jane Timmins, were passed to me on her death in 1993, I discovered that a fascinating record of social activity and endeavour had fallen into my hands. As I read through these minutes, annual reports, handbooks and newsletters from the pioneering days of the Ramblers‘ Association, all so replete with the names of our founding members who deserve to be far better known to today‘s ramblers than they are, I knew then that, one day, I would have to attempt to assemble this wealth of information into a history of Midland Area. Reading the achievements of these pioneers of the Association, I found that I had been privileged to have met quite a few of them during my early years with the Ramblers. Francis Ritchie in particular, a pre-war secretary of the Area who went on to become President of the Ramblers‘ Association and a National Parks Commissioner, and Arthur Roberts, my mentor on Welsh Council when I, as Secretary of an English Area with a toehold in Wales, represented Midland Area on the Association‘s Welsh Council. If anything more was needed to inspire me in this task, it was a letter I discovered in the Archives to Jane from Francis Ritchie, dated April 1984, enclosing a linen backed footpath map of Warwickshire, published by Midland Area in 1939: I have come across a second copy of the Foot•paths Map, Section 2, which George Skett and I produced just before the war. I am very happy for you to keep this on the basis that ultimately it will form part of the Midland Area archives; thus this becomes valuable with the passage of time and of great interest to those who come after us. This makes me wonder whether the Area has retained its early records, Minute Books, the annual note books which were produced up to 1940, etc.? Well, yes Francis, we did, and I am honored that it should fall to me to be the one to attempt to knock this unique collection into shape for publication. And, with the 75th birthday of the Ramblers‘ Association falling due this year, in 2010, this seems as good a time as any to do so. If this story savours too much of the committee room and conference hall, well, that was where the battles were won—but it was not always like that, there were glorious days in the open air as well! In its heyday, Midland Area extended from the North Staffordshire Moors to the Cotswold Edge, from the Welsh Borderlands to the Northampton Uplands, all within comfortable reach of a Coach Ramble from Birmingham, and full advantage was taken of this fortunate fact. For our last major anniversary, twenty-five years ago in 1985, the Ramblers‘ published a book called Making Tracks, a short collection of essays to celebrate fifty years of the Association. I have long considered one of these essays, ―The Lot of an Area Secretary‖, written by Colin Speakman (Hon Secretary of West Riding Area), to be the definitive Handbook for RA Area Secretaries. In his essay Colin suggested that once you become an Area Secretary: You now find yourself at the centre of things, with a house full of files and the awful realisation that, for your RA Area, ‗the buck stops here‘. In all truth, it‘s no mean achievement for any Area Secretary merely to keep the show on the road! I have been treading this road for the last thirty-five years, from 1974 until 1987 as Midland Area Secretary, and from 1992 as Warwickshire Area Secretary, before I retired from the post earlier this year. 5 In his essay, Colin helpfully suggested that: Anyone foolish enough to help run a voluntary organisation, particularly those foolish enough to allow the words ‗hon. secretary‘ to follow their name, faces the best and worst of human behaviour. If you‘re trying to make any voluntary body work, you‘ve only two weapons at your disposal that really matter, enthusiasm and goodwill. Once these are destroyed, you‘ve had it. I could not agree more! Without the enthusiasm and goodwill so unstintingly extended to me by all my friends and colleagues both in the Area and the Ramblers‘ Association during my last thirty-five years as an RA ―hon. sec‖, I too would have “had it‖—long ago! To you all, my grateful thanks. In order to let the founders of Midland Area speak for themselves (and also to save myself a great deal of work in précising their words), I have quoted from original documents at some length. These quotes are shown in italics in the text, complete with the original punctuation, noticeably the (nearly always) correct use of the apostrophe in the possessive noun Ramblers‘! What are now known as Ramblers Central Office and General Council, were originally known as National Office and National Council, before Ramblers Scotland and Ramblers Wales raised objections to the use of the word ‗National‘ in this context. As the original term was used during the lifetime of Midland Area, it has been retained throughout this account. My two proof readers, David Sutton and John Garrett—Ramblers Group and Area Newsletter Editors respectively—both suggested many improvements to the presentation and text and I cannot thank them enough. Michael Bird Chairman Warwickshire Area The Ramblers‘ Association Solihull January 2010 6 CHAPTER ONE THE EARLY YEARS – BEFORE THE FEDERATION Where to begin? IF I were writing a history of the Ramblers‘ Association, as good a place to begin with as any would be with Ralph Wright, a landowner in Flixton near Manchester, who in 1826 invited a brother magistrate to dinner with the infamous request to “come and dine with me, and I shall expect you an hour earlier as I want to stop up a footpath‖! From local resentment against this blatant abuse of an Act of 1815 (which allowed any two magistrates to close any path they considered unnecessary) ultimately evolved the Manchester Association for the Preservation of Ancient Footways, forerunner to the Peak and Northern Footpath Society who can claim to be the oldest amenity organisation in the country and whose footpath signs you can still find around the Peak District. IF I were writing a history of the Ramblers‘ Association, I might well begin with the foundation of the Sunday Tramps or the Forest Ramblers, two of the earliest rambling clubs in the Country, founded in 1879 and 1884 respectively.