The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [128]
It shows. The new logo, a stylised lower-case letter ‘r’, will, according to the report, make people say, ‘Who’s that? The Ramblers? Wow!’ as it is ‘a radical step . . . desirable to make people completely reassess what the Ramblers is about’. If you think that’s exciting, just wait for the strapline that accompanies the logo: ‘at the heart of walking’ (still no nasty, spiky, unfriendly capital letters). This, apparently, is ‘relevant and motivating’, ‘gives the sense of a charity’, has ‘emotional warmth’ and is ‘effective in compensating for, or opening reappraisal, of preconceptions’.
It’s possible that the membership would have just about swallowed this guff had the rebrand not precisely coincided with something of a financial and organisational meltdown, as well as a catastrophically malfunctioning new computer membership database. Discontent rumbled like a summer storm, and broke out in a group calling itself the Concerned Ramblers. Brows were furrowed, meetings held, a website set up, the press alerted, and at the RA’s General Council in April 2010, two of the ringleaders got themselves elected to the Board of Trustees.
Their launch document, ‘The Ramblers in Crisis’, spelled out their complaints: the group, they said, ‘is composed of truly concerned members of the Ramblers who want to see a restoration of traditional values, coupled with a forward look which will attract new members to the Ramblers’. By traditional values, they may have meant national service and birching, but narrowed it down more specifically to a return to more active campaigning on clearing blocked paths and re-opening lost ones; they claim that ‘clear moves to downgrade the importance of these policies have been made in the last few years.’ The priorities of Tom Franklin – attracting more younger people, folk from disadvantaged backgrounds and ethnic minorities, running many more urban walks and groups, even joining up with gay walkers’ societies – are just not the priorities of folk who live and ramble in the leafy lanes of suburban Britain. It’s pretty certain that not many of the Concerned Ramblers were to be found on the recent RA walk around Banksy’s graffiti sites in Shoreditch.
Inevitably, the Concerned Ramblers became slightly drunk on their own invective. Stepping up a gear, they let rip in the authentic language of fully capitalised Ramblerhood: ‘A nambypamby tendency led by the CEO to talk about “the walking environment” rather than rights of way, footpaths and freedom to roam has developed.’ It ‘is clear is that the CEO has no business running an organisation which purports to be democratic’ and that ‘management . . . is contemptuous of our democracy and unwilling to share problems with the membership.’ The minutes of a meeting between the rebel group and the RA’s trustees include this even more arch complaint: ‘And then there was Tom’s presentation at General Council 2009 – the last slide with a supposed Darwin quotation from On the Origin of Species – about change in evolution – whereas in fact the quotation did not come from On the Origin of Species, was not written by Darwin, did not represent a correct principle of evolutionary theory and anyway the same principles don’t apply to organisational change.’ I can imagine that would have made Tom Franklin absolutely furious. Not so much the opposition, but the fact that they thought his sleek PowerPoint presentation was a slide show.
The unedifying spectacle rolls on, each side hunkering a little further into its own fortress of intransigence. Savage staff cuts, particularly in the Welsh and Scottish