• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

For the well-to-do rambler, confident of his rights, the signs acted not as a deterrent, but as a magnet. Sir Leslie Stephen, Victorian writer and father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, founded the supremely well-heeled, all-male Sunday Tramps walking club (every member in Who’s Who and, as Stephen himself put it, ‘precisely the kind of person who writes articles for newspapers’. So cocksure of their own importance were they that one of their number, novelist George Meredith, suggested that the conversations on their walks ‘would have made the presence of a shorthand-writer a benefaction for the country’. On their fortnightly tramps in the green lanes and byways of the Home Counties, the appearance of a ‘wooden liar’ would be the perfect spur for exploration: ‘they gave a strong presumption that the trespass must have some attraction,’ Stephen explained. ‘To me it was a reminder of the many delicious bits of walking which, even in the neighbourhood of London, await the man who has no superstitious reverence for legal rights.’ They even devised a chant about their legal rights that they would perform in unison should they be challenged for trespass, and after blasting it at the startled keeper or farmer, would force a shilling on to him. They might just as well have sung in close part harmony, ‘Look here, my man, don’t you know who we a-aaare?’

To those lower down the social pecking order – in other words, practically everyone else – the signs, and the gamekeepers, ghillies and guns that backed them up, worked very effectively indeed. But by the time of the 1938 debate, knowledge of the fundamental loopholes in the law of trespass was no longer confined to those in the upper echelons. The staggering upsurge in working-class walking organisations, together with the thirst for knowledge that accompanied it, meant that the implicit threat was no longer enough. Arthur Creech-Jones’s bill returned from committee to the Commons bearing almost no resemblance to its former self. The advantages it now contained were almost all for the landowner, and chief amongst these was the criminalising of trespass.

Labour and Liberal MPs were horrified by the idea, and it is interesting to note how many impassioned contributions came from some of the most impressive of their number, the free-thinking men of cast-iron conviction whose reputations have only grown with time, rather than being utterly forgotten like so many colleagues, their own colourless yes-men and the baying public-school twits on the Tory benches alike. The Liberal MP for East Wolverhampton, enlightened industrialist Sir Geoffrey Mander, described it as ‘almost equivalent to a new Enclosure Act’. Joshua Ritson, a Durham miner turned Labour MP for the city, strode energetically up on to the moral high ground, saying: ‘I am anxious lest people whom I have known all my life should now be restricted and be fined for wandering about on the moor, and if that should happen, I say that it would be not only serious, but a very wicked thing.’

Philip Noel-Baker, the hugely impressive Labour MP for Derby, war hero, Olympic medallist, co-founder of both the League of Nations and the United Nations and winner of the 1959 Nobel Peace Prize (and who also found time to have a 20-year affair with Megan Lloyd George) stated that the bill was fatally poisoned, should be dropped and that he regarded ‘this incursion into the law of trespass as a restrictive evil’. Sidney Silverman, the pocket-sized Dennis Skinner of his day (he even sat in the same place in the chamber now occupied by the Beast of Bolsover), drew himself up to his full five feet nothing as he declared that criminalising ‘merely to be upon the land’ was ‘doing something so dangerous as to outweigh any of the other advantages that remain in the Bill’.

James Chuter-Ede put it into historical perspective with the observation that ‘by this so-called compromise, the landowning classes are getting with respect to their land a thing that the old landlords’ Parliaments