four million acres of mountain and moorland in England and Wales were owned by a few inattentive individuals who didn’t – and couldn’t possibly – make anywhere near full use of it. Paths existed for ramblers to use, but such was the uprise in popularity in the pursuit amongst the working classes (it’s estimated that in 1932 some 15,000 ramblers took leave of Manchester on a Sunday to go walking) that these were often becoming as crowded as the suburbs, and potentially problematic frustrations were starting to mount. Worse, so-called ‘respectable’ walking organisations such as the Manchester and Stockport wings of the Holiday Fellowship – via deep-running relationships with dukes, earls and other influential citizens – were enjoying the freedom to wander on land forbidden to unemployed working-class ramblers. Enjoying the countryside – whether in the form of shooting, hunting or rock climbing – was, inexorably, a perk of the privileged.
By default, the wilder places of Britain became the scene of a strange class war. Landowning aristocrats were irritated by unkempt, Catweazle-type characters drifting illegally onto their land, and ramblers were increasingly frustrated at being barred from harmlessly entering what was effectively unused wilderness a bus ride from the inner city – and all over what they saw as little more than historic, ceremonial ownership by a few Hooray Henrys. It was a dangerously unstable stand-off: the ramblers had numbers and spirit, but the landowners and gamekeepers had the written law and cash – as well as employees with guns.
One of these landowners was the Duke of Devonshire. His particular 148,000-acre patch occupied an area of northern England known as the Peak District, which – despite a name that conjures pointy drama – is largely peaty moorland and vast, open plateau, reaching its elevational zenith atop Kinder Scout at 636 metres. It’s an agreeable if bleak place to wander, and its proximity to the northern industrial cities of Sheffield, Manchester and Huddersfield made it a natural choice for ramblers seeking to escape the depressing, economically stricken cities. But in April 1932 fewer than 1,200 acres of the Peak District were open for them to enjoy. Based on our estimate that 15,000 Mancunians left the streets and took to the upland paths each Sunday, this gave each person an area of considerably less than one tenth of an acre in which to find space and tranquillity. Something had to give – and on Sunday 24 April 1932, it did.
In the weeks prior to this a scrawled leaflet found its way into the hands of interested parties on both sides of the fence. One handed out in Eccles read:
B.W.S.F. RAMBLERS RALLY
This rally will take place on Sunday 24th April at 8 o’clock. At Hayfield Recreation Ground. From the rec, we proceed on a MASS TRESPASS onto Kinder Scout. This is being organized by the British Workers’ Sports Federation, who fight:
Against the finest stretches of moorland being closed to us.
For cheap fares, for cheap catering facilities.
Against any war preparations in rambling organisations.
Against petty restrictions, such as singing etc.
Now: young workers of [Eccles] to all, whether you’ve been rambling before or not, we extend a hearty welcome. If you’ve not been rambling before, start now; you don’t know what you’ve missed. Roll up on Sunday morning and once with us, for the best day out you’ve ever had.
Scenes photographed in Bowden Quarry near Hayfield – the hastily rearranged meeting place in an attempt to shake off gathering police attention – on the day of what history would remember as the Kinder Mass Trespass are extraordinarily vivid, despite their age. One shows a crowd numbering in their hundreds gathering amidst an amphitheatre of fractured rock looking up towards a figure standing on a gritstone plinth and purposefully addressing the crowd. Were he holding a medieval sword aloft it would resemble a scene from an Arthurian saga. According to contemporary accounts, the man on the rock launched into a passionate sermon against trespass laws and access restrictions, and after warning the crowd against using violence against whatever they encountered, presumably signed off with something stirring like, ‘Right lads, let’s go for a bloody walk.’ And off they went.
Five hundred people left Hayfield that morning, aiming for William Clough, a comely valley that ascends onto the Kinder plateau – the moorland for which the Mass Trespass was destined. It was here that the group met their opponents, a group of gamekeepers who had been specially drafted in for the day by the Duke of Devonshire, who had caught wind of the ramblers’ plans. Violence ensued. We’re not talking wanton bloodshed and rambling-crazed savagery (the most serious injury reported by the Manchester Guardian that afternoon was a keeper named ‘Mr E. Beaver, who was knocked unconscious and damaged his ankle’), but by the time the ramblers reached the plateau – there greeted enthusiastically by another group who had set off from the south – and retraced their steps back to Hayfield, the authorities had decided the landowners’ strife warranted some official fuss.
Assisted by several gamekeepers, the police arrested six ramblers, all aged between 19 and 23: John Anderson, Jud Clyne, Tona Gillett, Harry Mendel, David Nussbaum and the man on the quarry plinth – a 20-year-old, five-foot Manchester communist named Bernard Rothman.
‘Benny’ Rothman was actually not intended to be the rallying speaker at Hayfield Quarry – the original nominee grew meek when the crowd swelled beyond 200 – but the articulate sermon he delivered castigating official rambling organisations for their malaise stirred the crowd into a strident buzz, and Rothman soon became a figurehead for the respect (and the flak) the Trespass would later attract.
Something of a part-time political agitator, the event had been Rothman’s idea. He was a regular visitor to the Clarion Café on Manchester’s Market Street – a kind of informal parliament for the working class and frequently the scene of stylised political debates between socialists, Trotskyists, communists and supporters of other ideologies. Rothman became a member of the BWSF and took part in many of the weekend camps the group organised in Derbyshire, which would invariably draw unemployed young men, many wearing old First World War surplus kit. Following a scuffle with some gamekeepers on the nearby hill of Bleaklow some weeks earlier, Rothman observed that whilst it was not unusual for small groups of ramblers to be beaten ‘very, very badly’ by the gamekeepers with no rebuke, if there were 40 or 50 ramblers the balance would be tipped. Discussing what they viewed as the historical ‘theft’ of the moorland, the plan was hatched for the Trespass.
The main headline on the following morning’s Daily Dispatch read ‘Mass Trespass Arrests on Kinder Scout: Free Fight with Gamekeepers on Mountain’.
Rothman and his five companions were brought to trial at Derby Assizes on the charge of riotous assembly, assault and incitement. Tellingly, as regards the motives of the prosecutors, ‘trespass’ – seemingly the most obvious offence – was absent from the charge sheet, as it was a civil matter. By most accounts the trial was a farce; gamekeepers, members of the police and representatives of the Stockport Corporation Water Works, which owned and leased some of the Kinder Plateau for shooting, delivered overwrought testimonies to a jury comprised largely of the rural Establishment. Whiffs of political perversion in the communist leanings of many of the key figures,* as well as a bit of tokenistic anti-Semitism (the judge made the useful closing observation that several of the defendants were ‘obviously Jewish’), seemed to pervade the proceedings.
Rothman delivered another impassioned speech. ‘We ramblers, after a hard week’s work, and life in smoky towns and cities, go out rambling on weekends for relaxation, for a breath of fresh air, and for a little sunshine. And we find when we go out that the finest rambling country is closed to us,’ he said, before emphasising that ‘our request, or demand, for access to all peaks and uncultivated moorland is nothing unreasonable.’ The six men all pleaded not guilty; all but one were found guilty, and sent to prison for between two and four months, with the harshest
