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Download Thesis This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The fashioning of a new world youth culture and the origins of the mass outdoor movement in Interwar Britain Thompson, Simon Robert Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 07. Oct. 2021 The Fashioning of a New World Youth Culture and the Origins of the Mass Outdoor Movement in Interwar Britain Simon Robert Thompson Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy King’s College London Simon Thompson The Fashioning of a New World ‘The Wayfarers’ Fellowship’ This shall be a bond between us, That we are of one blood, you and I; That we have cried peace to all men, And claimed kinship with every living thing; That we hate war and sloth and greed and love fellowship And that we shall go singing to the fashioning of a new world.1 Illustration 1 (Front Cover): ‘Hiking’ (1936) by James Walker Tucker (Laing Art Gallery). 1 L. Paul, The Folk Trail: An Outline of the Philosophy and Activities of Woodcraft Fellowships (1929), 11. (Note that in all footnotes place of publication is London, unless otherwise stated.) ii Simon Thompson The Fashioning of a New World Abstract In the early 1930s, the ‘hiking craze’ transformed strenuous walking in the country from a minority leisure activity into a mass outdoor movement. This thesis examines the social and cultural origins of the movement. Many commentators at the time portrayed hiking as a youth movement, representing a radical break with the past. Subsequent academic studies have emphasised continuity with one of two pre-war traditions: an upper-middle-class, intellectual, neo-romantic walking tradition; and an upper-working- and lower-middle-class, mainly nonconformist, tradition of self-improvement and ‘rational recreation’. Some historians have highlighted ideological aspects of the mass outdoor movement, often conflating it with the campaign for access to open country and in some cases portraying ‘the battle for the countryside’ as a conflict between urban socialist workers and Tory landowners. This has led to the widely held conception that the mass outdoor movement was above all a phenomenon associated with the industrial towns flanking the southern Pennines, where the highest profile access protests took place. Drawing upon newspaper reports, social surveys, autobiographies, oral histories, club records and the archives of the main associations linked to the outdoor, access and preservation movements, this thesis argues that past studies have placed undue reliance upon sources documenting the fears and aspirations of a relatively small number of vocal middle-aged, middle-class leaders of the outdoor movement, or equally exceptional working-class activists, while neglecting the motivations of the vast majority of walkers. An over-emphasis on the neo-romantic and campaigning aspects of the movement has obscured its role in creating a social space within which youths and young adults of both sexes could interact, beyond the supervision of adult authority figures. The thesis argues that the mass outdoor movement was more geographically widespread and socially diverse than previous studies have suggested, and that it was essentially apolitical and escapist. Young hikers nevertheless believed themselves to be part of a new social movement, and a defining characteristic of that movement was youth. Some two decades before the appearance of the ‘Teddy Boys’ and ‘Mods’ – the first widely acknowledged expressions of mass youth culture in Britain – hikers had many of the characteristics now associated with a youth movement, including their own distinctive dress and behavioural conventions. While the two pre-War traditions remained influential in the interwar years, particularly in relation to the preservation and access movements, neither of them can explain the sudden emergence of the ‘hiking craze’ and the mass outdoor movement that evolved iii Simon Thompson The Fashioning of a New World from it. Reinterpreting the movement as an early manifestation of mass youth culture sheds new light on evolving social relations between generations, classes and genders, and provides fresh insights into changing attitudes to, and usage of, the countryside in the two decades following the First World War. iv Simon Thompson The Fashioning of a New World Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................ iii Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. vi Abbreviations .......................................................................................................................vii 1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 2. THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT .................................................................... 29 Age ............................................................................................................................ 30 Class .......................................................................................................................... 42 Gender ....................................................................................................................... 52 Region ....................................................................................................................... 57 3. TRAMPERS AND PRESERVATIONISTS ...................................................................... 61 The Tramping and Mountaineering Tradition .............................................................. 63 The Preservation Movement ...................................................................................... 87 4. RAMBLERS AND ACCESS CAMPAIGNERS .............................................................. 112 The Pre-War Rambling Movement ........................................................................... 113 The Post-War Rambling Movement.......................................................................... 127 The Campaign for Access to Open Country ............................................................. 136 5. HIKERS ........................................................................................................................ 152 The Origins of the ‘Hiking Craze’ .............................................................................. 154 The Demography of the Mass Outdoor Movement ................................................... 158 The Development of the Mass Outdoor Movement .................................................. 174 Privileging the Exceptional: The Historiography of the Kinder Trespass ................... 187 The Woodcraft Movement ........................................................................................ 200 Reinterpreting the Hiking Craze as a Youth Movement ............................................ 206 6. THE YOUTH HOSTELS ASSOCIATION ...................................................................... 216 7. THE LEGACY OF THE MASS OUTDOOR MOVEMENT ............................................. 238 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 254 v Simon Thompson The Fashioning of a New World Acknowledgements I would like to thank John Bowers, Robin Campbell, Jim Cunningham, Mike Dent, Peter Hansen, Tadeusz Hudowski, John Martin, David Matless, David Medcalf, Jon Parry, Paul Readman, Chris Sherwin, Graeme Siddall, Simon Sleight, Gillian Swan, Fiona Thompson, Ken Thomson, David Turner, Janet Vaux and particularly Arthur Burns, for their help, encouragement, questions and insights, without which this thesis would not have been written. I would also like to thank the institutions listed in the Bibliography for allowing me to quote from their archives, and the AC, the FRCC, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, Punch, the SMC and the YHA for kind permission to use their images. vi Simon Thompson The Fashioning of a New World Abbreviations AC Alpine Club AJ Alpine Journal APRS Association for the Preservation of Rural Scotland AR Annual Report B&MLRF Bolton & Mid-Lancs Ramblers’ Federation BL British Library BMC British Mountaineering
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