The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [19]
As I trudge through the peat at a pace so slow
There is time to remember the debt we owe
To the ‘Kinder Trespass’ and the rights they did seek
Allowing us freely to ramble the Dark Peak.
On that Saturday nearly 80 years ago, the protestors could not, in their wildest fantasies, have imagined that their little adventure would be so massively, passionately remembered. The idea had first germinated a few weeks earlier, when a youth camp organised by the British Workers’ Sports Federation (BWSF) had taken place at Rowarth, a couple of miles north-west of Hayfield. Some of the campers had gone for a walk up to Bleaklow and had got into an argument with a gamekeeper. Back at camp, discussing the event, the idea of a well-publicised mass trespass on Kinder Scout was floated, and enthusiastically adopted. The date was set, and Benny Rothman, a 20-year-old unemployed mechanic, used his considerable flair for publicity to ensure that knowledge of the event was spread to the winds. To that end, he wrote and distributed leaflets, organised posters, inscribed chalk advertisements on pavements and went to visit the offices of the Manchester Evening News, who duly obliged with a sensationalist spread about the bust-up to come.
After the rally in the old quarry, the trespassers marched up past Kinder Reservoir, which was being heavily patrolled by officials of the water corporation, and thence into open country, along a rising valley called the William Clough. This was the disputed territory: once open to all, but through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gradually closed off for grouse shooting. The grouse are still there today, and as you walk through, they squawk and fly off suddenly, but soon return unperturbed to their original spot. They are not, as gamekeepers and landowners have so stridently claimed over the years, much bothered by ramblers. In the William Clough, the first skirmishes took place with stick-wielding keepers, one of whom was slightly injured in a fall. The trespassers broke through and made it to the top of the Clough, on to the hallowed summit plateau of Kinder Scout. There they met a contingent from Sheffield who had walked unimpeded up the other side from Edale station, whereupon a short victory meeting was held, before the Manchester contingent returned to Hayfield. The police and keepers were waiting, and six ringleaders, Benny Rothman included, were picked off and arrested. At Derby Assizes three months later, five of them were imprisoned for a few months apiece, by a jury that comprised of two brigadier-generals, three colonels, two majors, three captains and two aldermen.
Had they not been arrested and imprisoned, the mass trespass would probably have been remembered only by Ramblers’ Association archivists and local historians. But Kinder proved to be the inevitable flashpoint in a smouldering fire of resentment and agitation that had been building up since the end of the First World War. As is hinted on the famous Ellis Martin covers of OS maps of the time, this was the first great age of the rambler. Walking clubs were everywhere, from groups of well-to-do middle managers tramping the lanes and hills of the Home Counties to the great working-class mass movements of the north, furiously campaigning for access to their nearest open spaces. Inevitably, there was more mutual suspicion dividing the two than any sense of comradeship uniting them. No surprise, perhaps, for this huge chasm was not just circumstantial, but deeply ideological as well, and gave the Establishment press plenty of ammunition against the trespassers. In the Derby court case, the prosecution claimed that demonstrators had sung ‘The Red Flag’ (probably true) and chanted ‘Down with the landowners and ruling classes!’ and ‘Up with the workers!’ (probably not) as they clambered on to the moor. Counsel noted that