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 sentence – predictably – given to Rothman himself.
It was a huge misjudgement. Far from putting down such actions, the convictions dished out to the Kinder trespassers further ignited the cause. The public response had repercussions still felt today; in many respects, the treatment of Rothman and his cohorts was really the best thing that could have happened to wild places. A rally in Castleton a few weeks after the trial was attended by 10,000 people. In 1935 the Ramblers Association was founded, and a year later the Standing Committee for National Parks was formed, publishing a paper titled The Case for National Parks in Great Britain in 1938.
A setback came in 1939 when the progressively intended Access to Mountains Act was passed by Parliament in such an aggressively edited form it actually sided with the landowners, and made some forms of trespassing a criminal as opposed to a civil offence. But opposition to draconian access restrictions continued, and in 1945 – just as soldiers were returning home from the war to a country undergoing profound social changes – architect and secretary of the Standing Committee on National Parks John Dower produced a report containing the definition of what a national park in England and Wales might be like. Given what went before – and what would follow – it’s worth quoting at length.
An extensive area of beautiful and relatively wild country in which … (a) the characteristic landscape beauty is strictly preserved, (b) access and facilities for public open-air enjoyment are amply provided, (c) wild-life and buildings and places of architectural and historical interest are suitably protected, whilst (d) established farming use is effectively maintained.
In 1947, Sir Arthur Hobhouse was appointed chair of the newly enshrined National Parks Committee, and proposed twelve areas of the UK that would be suitable locations for a national park. ‘The essential requirements of a National Park are that it should have great natural beauty, a high value for open-air recreation and substantial continuous extent,’ he decreed in his report of that year. ‘Further, the distribution of selected areas should as far as practicable be such that at least one of them is quickly accessible from each of the main centres of population in England and Wales.’
In 1949 the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act was passed, and on 17 April 1951 – with an irony not lost on many of the Trespass participants – the Peak District, including Kinder Scout, became the first national park in Britain.
The Lake District, home to the highest mountains in England, followed on 9 May; Snowdonia, thick with legend and shattered geological grandeur, on 18 October; the Brecon Beacons National Park – where I was now being battered – was opened on 17 April 1957, six years to the day since the first, and itself the tenth national park to be opened in England and Wales. Somewhat slower on the uptake, Scotland opened its first national park in 2002 (Loch Lomond and the Trossachs), with the Cairngorms National Park following suit the next year.
For the first time, access to our high and wild places was gilded by law. By 1957, with the opening of the Brecon Beacons National Park, 13,746 square kilometres of the most arrestingly beautiful countryside was officially enshrined as national park – just under 9 per cent of the total area of England and Wales.
The golden ticket in the eyes of access campaigners, however, was not stamped until the turn of the 21st century. The national parks were a giant leap forward, but much of what truly lay open to free access was only the very highest land, where agriculture was poor. Other than areas owned by bodies such as the National Trust, access agreements still had to be reached with landowners concerning the often restrictive rights of way through their land. But in 2000 the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (CRoW) was passed, coming into effect five years later, providing ‘a new right of public access on foot to areas of open land comprising mountain, moor, heath, down, and registered common land’. In other words, the balance had finally swung to the benefit of walkers, who could now roam freely in open country – the inverse to the Enclosure Acts of the 1800s that ramblers had fought so hard to repeal. In a stroke, the area of land upon which a walker could freely roam had expanded by a third.
Benny Rothman lived to see the CRoW Act passed. After a lifetime of lending his voice to access causes, the passing of the act was a vindication that came just two years shy of the 70th anniversary of the Kinder Scout Trespass. This he did not live to see; he died aged 90 just a few months before it, in January 2002.
Had he been at the anniversary celebrations he would have witnessed a fitting endstop,