The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [28]
To see how far, and how fast, things then changed, it’s instructive to take a closer look at two pieces of legislation enacted just a decade apart: the Access to Mountains Act of 1939 and the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949. The 1939 Act was brought in as a bill the previous year by the Labour MP for Shipley, Arthur Creech-Jones. All through the 1930s, the public mood for greater access had been building up steam, galvanised by the Kinder protest of 1932 and its controversial aftermath. The idea of a first national long-distance path, the Pennine Way, had been floated by Tom Stephenson in a 1935 Daily Herald article, entitled ‘Wanted – A Long Green Trail’; support for the idea was instantaneous and massive. The annual Winnats Pass access demonstrations grew every year. Rambling groups had mushroomed everywhere, and were confident that their time had finally come.
On the morning of 2 December 1938, Creech-Jones rose in the Commons to launch his bill, substantially the same measure that had been rejected or filibustered out well over a dozen times throughout the previous half century. He outlined the well-worn grievances, particularly in the north, and left it to the bill’s seconder, Nuneaton Labour MP Reginald Fletcher, to expound more philosophically, and humorously, upon the principles at stake. Fletcher talked of his own lifetime’s love of walking: ‘I myself in the Lake District have watched trousers giving way to knickerbockers, knickerbockers giving way to shorts, and shorts in their turn giving way to shorter shorts. Looking at some of those shorter shorts, I have smiled to remember that my father walked and scrambled over every fell in the Lakes wearing a bowler hat and clasping an umbrella as firmly as any British Prime Minister being taken for a walk up the Berchtesgaden path.’
The last reference is a reminder that this debate was taking place only two months after Neville Chamberlain had returned from Munich waving his little piece of paper and declaring that he had secured ‘peace for our time’. Fletcher’s dig was very well aimed, for it was rapidly becoming evident that Hitler’s assurances counted for nothing; the country was in a highly restive mood and could see a war fast approaching. To that end, supporters of the bill made much of the need to ensure that the nation’s youth were as fit as possible, and in what better way could that be achieved than by granting them access to the hills, mountains and moors of upland Britain? There were explicit appeals too about helping to foster a new sense of patriotism in the land by giving people the chance to experience its finest bits for themselves. ‘How can you expect some people to feel patriotic about the rookeries in which they have to live?’ demanded Fletcher.
The patriotic case was expounded with most passion by Fred Marshall, Labour MP for Sheffield Brightside and a longstanding supporter of ramblers. ‘Beautiful and lovely scenery has not only an aesthetic value,’ he insisted. ‘It has a definite spiritual and moral value. One who is in the habit of contemplating England’s natural beauty is a better man and citizen for doing it.’ Drawing in the spectre of rearmament for war, he brilliantly conjured up the image of his Sheffield constituents: ‘men who stand and toil before the vast furnaces in blinding heat, smelt and pour the steel, fashion, hammer, and roll it into all kinds of useful articles, from the tiny razor blades to the great blocks of armour which line the sides of the great Leviathans of war, are absolutely precious to this country. The service they have given to it is incalculable. These men stand behind this Bill. They are the men who will carry on that wonderful craftsmanship and they are not content to spend their week-ends in places where they can see nothing but the belching smoke of factory chimneys. They