a huge rise in entertainments such as the music hall and the public house. Walking groups were being founded to stand deliberately apart from the noise and vulgarity of such pursuits.
Many of these walking clubs had a distinctly Methodist or Non-Conformist flavour; some were organised directly by churches. For instance, in the Lancashire mill towns, a Saturday half-day holiday was established in the mid-nineteenth century so that workers now had that afternoon for leisure. A great number of churches – many of them congregationalist – leapt in to try and ensure that this time would not be ‘wasted’ on drink or other such ‘worthless’ recreations. Rambling expeditions were proposed instead. A number of temperance associations also encouraged group walks out into the country.
There were other associations such as the Ancoats Brotherhood, based in Lancashire and formed by Charles Rowley, the founder of the Sunday Recreation Movement. In part, the group was about ‘rambling with a bevy of chums’ in places as far away as Wales. The group would also attract impressive guest speakers, such as William Morris and Ford Madox Brown.1 The act of walking in such organised groups was a very different thing to the solitary, dreamy rambles of the Romantic movement. This was about urban dwellers roaming about the crags and the moors and the coniferous woodlands as a deliberate means of breaking out of the work–recreation patterns that were being laid down for them.
There was a strong element of self-improvement; the working man who took a lively interest in the world around him, in the paths beneath his feet, had a greater claim towards shaping that world. Such walking groups were keenly interested in ideas to do with the spread of democracy. Early industrialisation, with its remorseless demands of time and energy of its workers, could also have the side effect of infantilising them. Walking out on to the Cheshire Plains, or into the vales of North Wales, on the other hand, gave those workers the sense of a certain independence of movement and of thought.
One of the most inspirational and pivotal figures in the walking movement, G. H. B. Ward, formed the Sheffield Clarion Rambling Club at the turn of the twentieth century. He was an engineer at the Hecla works, and an active Labour Party man. Indeed, as the years went on, he would rise to become a senior Labour figure. But it is his passion for walking that is remembered today. The explicit aim of the Clarion Club was the mental and physical improvement of the working man. Interestingly, the Club also posed an explicit challenge to the church; and that was over the use of the Sabbath. According to G. H. B. Ward, Sundays would be more satisfyingly spent out in the refreshing air. On this point, the Sheffield ramblers, and a small club of middle-class intellectuals down south, intriguingly mirrored one another. For as the walking movement grew – and despite the best efforts of the churches to get involved – it was also clear that it had a certain cerebral and secular appeal to many. There were also those who went out rambling on Sunday mornings precisely in order to get away from the church and its influence.
This corner of Jane Austen-land – that is, the countryside clustered around Box Hill and Leith Hill – was also deeply favoured by key members of the Victorian rambling group the Sunday Tramps. The ‘Tramps’ were a small and perhaps rather self-conscious assembly of intellectuals, scientists, writers and naturalists. They started meeting in 1879, led by Sir Leslie Stephen, a formidable Cambridge intellectual, editor of The Dictionary of National Biography, and enthusiastic mountaineer, among other things.
In this club, the men – there were no women – got out of London on Sunday to go for rather austere, brisk 25-mile walks. The fact that they missed church was all part of it. These men wanted to escape the ‘dreary Sabbath’ in London. Sir Leslie Stephen revelled in his ‘flock of cranium tramps’ and wrote that ‘tramping with them, one has the world under review, as well as pretty scenery.’2
The Sunday Tramps were by no means unique in finding the Sabbath dreary. Though our image of Victorians is that of respectable, upright families, occupying the church pews without fail, the truth was more complex, especially towards the end of that century. In rural parishes, and certain parts of Scotland, there was practically no escape from the Sunday service, simply because in a small community, any absence from the rituals of any particular day would be extremely noticeable. By contrast, in the vast sprawling towns, parish priests had a far more difficult job. In the poorer districts, the community was transient – families moving in or moving out according to the fluctuations in their economic circumstances. Among a number of the intellectual middle-classes – mostly educated men, who had read Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology – the church no longer had any real grip.
According to historian A. N. Wilson, had the Victorian middle classes thought to seek out the opinions of the urban working classes on the subject of the church and its teachings, ‘they would have found religious practice (except among Irish immigrants) all but unknown, and indifference to religious ideas all but total.’ One contemporary observer noted that in ‘the alleys of London … the Gospel is as unknown as in Tibet.’3
It is not quite as if the Sunday Tramps were dedicated atheists; they simply looked at the dull city, which was sullen and silent apart from church bells. The shops were all shut, the factories were still, and the Tramps took that opportunity to worship the beauty of Home Counties countryside instead. They charged across those small green fields, pointed themselves towards the startlingly abrupt hills of the South Downs, and took in the neatly proportioned prospects of downland and meadow. In In Praise of Walking, Leslie Stephen is especially clear on the pleasure of temporarily shaking off the capital, escaping its ‘vast octopus arms’ and mapping a course ‘between the great lines of railway’. The benefits were almost instantaneous; in counties such as Surrey and Kent, the old rural ways still held hard, and there was great hospitality to be found in even the most humble cottages. In many ways, Stephen was as great a romantic as Wordsworth, though he laid claims to being rather less sentimental. When once writing about the Lake District, he declared: ‘Much as I respect Wordsworth, I don’t care to see the cottage in which he lived.’
Another of the prominent Sunday Tramps, the novelist George Meredith, lived in a house on the side of Box Hill, and his enthusiasm for exploring the surrounding countryside was undinted. His 1885 novel Diana of the Crossways contained evocative hymns of praise to the downland: ‘Yews, junipers, radiant beeches, and gleams of service-tree or the white-beam, spotted the semi-circle of swelling green down, black and silver.’
Stephen and his assorted followers were not dreamers; this was walking as a highly masculine – and, in some curious way, acutely Victorian – activity; they marched across the land as though they claimed it for their own, in the true Imperial manner. In his obituary of Stephen, George Meredith paid this tribute, recalling the boisterous energy and enthusiasm of these Sunday Home Counties hikes:
A pause … came at the examination of the leader’s watch and Ordnance map under the western sun, and void was given for the strike across country to catch the tail of a train offering dinner in London, at the cost of a run through hedges, over ditches and fellows, past proclamation against trespassers, under suspicion of being taken for more serious depredators in flight.
The chief of the Tramps had a wonderful calculating eye in the observation of distances and the nature of the land as he proved by his discovery of untried passes in the higher Alps, and he had no mercy for pursy followers. I have often said of this life-long student and philosophical head that he had in him the making of a great military captain.
The mere fact of a ‘no trespassing’ sign had always been enough to pique Stephen, and goad him into doing that very thing. He wrote:
I looked out for signs saying trespassers will be prosecuted … That gave a strong presumption that the trespass must have some attraction. Cyclists could only reflect that trespassing for them is not only forbidden but impossible. To me it was a reminder
