The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (9 page)

‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ is a phrase embedded in our national DNA, for it is a perfectly British blend of archaic pomposity and empty threat. Like most people, I grew up all too aware of the menacing signs that frowned across gateways and fences, and could recite the words long before understanding what they actually meant. After all, the only other time I ever heard the word ‘trespass’ was when mumbling the Lord’s Prayer in church or school assembly – ‘forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ Even that changed when they brought in the trendy new Lord’s Prayer in the 1970s, the one that made older relatives tut with bewildered disapproval. In that, ‘trespasses’ became ‘sins’, and we knew all too well what those were. Stealing, lying, swearing, eating too many sweets, cheeking your parents, hitting your sister, rummaging around in your classmates’ pants – they were all sins, and so, apparently, was going into a forbidden field or wood. Everything that was fun seemed to be a trespass.

Yet the signs are a nonsense; ‘wooden liars’ as they became widely known. Unless you have caused actual damage, you cannot be prosecuted for trespassing; it is a civil matter, not a criminal one. The Limitation Act of 1623 made this very clear: ‘if the defendant disclaims any title to the land and proves that the trespass was negligent or involuntary and that he has tendered sufficient amends before the action was brought, the plaintiff will be non-suited.’ This gave rise to the long-held belief that, if you were challenged by a farmer or landowner, you should offer a couple of pennies in recompense of any damage, declare that you make no claim upon the land and no trouble would ensue. It didn’t always work out quite that simply.

Even with no basis in law, ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ signs usually achieved their aim simply by scaring people off. This was a point frequently pondered upon in the many access debates in Parliament. In 1908, the Edinburgh Liberal MP Arthur Dewar said that the phrase was a ‘terminological inexactitude if ever there was one’, but that ‘it was quite enough to frighten away perfectly innocent people, because they did not know the law.’ In the 1938 debate, Labour and Liberal MPs, and even the odd Tory, confessed that they had knowingly trespassed on their walks, and would happily do so again. The soggy legal position was perhaps best illustrated by James Chuter-Ede, the Labour MP for South Shields and future Home Secretary in the Attlee government. He described a personal experience: ‘I recall walking along a footpath and being stopped by a gamekeeper who asked me if I knew that I was on private land, and I said “Yes, what about it?” He said, “My only instructions are to ask you if you know that you are on private land.” I said, “Does it not occur to you that we should not call it a public footpath unless it was on private land?” and he replied, “I know nothing about that, Sir. My job is to ask the people who come here, do they know that they are on private land.” I said, “I suppose that every one of them has turned back,” and he replied, “Yes, every one except you, Sir.” That kind of spirit is not the way to secure good feeling between the general public and the landowner. It is an abuse of the ignorance of the person who is legitimately using the footpath, and I am quite sure it would not be defended in public by any landowner.’ Not defended perhaps, but extensively employed nonetheless.

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 would never have given them in the eighteenth century.’ He continued: ‘Surely so fundamental an alteration in the law of England as this ought not to be slipped in as a final Amendment into a Private Member’s Bill as a result of some compromise arrived at, not upstairs, but mainly between the various landowners’ associations and the Commons and Footpaths Preservation Society (CFPS). This is an Amendment which we ought not to pass.’ Here was a nod to the internecine battle that was also raging within the rambling movement at the time. It was widely held by many, particularly in the Ramblers’ Association, that the CFPS, as the main negotiating organisation with the government, had sold them all out with their acceptance of the reworked bill. The CFPS is now the Open Spaces Society, and there are many diehard ramblers who have still not forgiven them.

The amendment to nullify the trespass clause was narrowly defeated, and the Access to Mountains Act – the title was pretty much the only thing that had survived intact – became law on New Year’s Day 1940, by which time the country was at war and not much thinking about a Sunday stroll. Amongst those on the losing side were many who, five and a half years later, would find themselves as Cabinet ministers following Labour’s post-war landslide election victory. They too would neither forgive, nor forget.

To my generation, it’s all too tempting to imagine that the country marched in solidarity into a bright new dawn with the 1945–51 Labour government. In truth, following Attlee’s thumping victory, public enthusiasm for their new masters ebbed away with alarming rapidity. Rations became ever tighter, the economy was in tatters and life failed to improve at all for the vast majority of people. Even landmark legislation such as the creation of the National Health Service and the nationalisation of the mines and the railways was beset with unforeseen difficulty. Britain was broke, knackered, cold, hungry and deeply gloomy (quite literally; power supplies were restricted and countless overseas visitors remarked on how ill-lit and smoggy were the streets of our major cities). The worst winter of the twentieth century crippled the country even further in early 1947, leading to death threats aimed at Mannie Shinwell, the Minister of Power. The Labour government was desperately in need of some feelgood headlines, and these they hoped to get from the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Bill, outlined in the King’s Speech of 26 October 1948. The thrust of it was to create 12 National Parks, an unspecified number of Areas of Natural Beauty (AONBs) and Britain’s first official Long Distance Paths (LDPs). It also aimed to tidy up the chaos around footpath law, by making every local authority draw up a definitive map of its rights of way network. Included within it too was the repeal of the much-hated 1939 Act.

The tone of the debate, starting on 31 March 1949, was a world away from that of a decade earlier. There was no doubting that real change was going to happen, and for a Commons more used to dealing with an apparently never-ending sequence of hardship and difficulty, much underscored by vicious class and political rivalry, the degree of consensus around the topic, and the feeling that it was good news all round, produced something of a carnival atmosphere in the chamber.

The bill was introduced by the Minister of Town & Country Planning, Lewis Silkin, who attempted to turn the bleak national mood to its advantage, in stating that ‘with the increasing nervous strain of life, it makes it all the more necessary that we should be able to enjoy the peace and spiritual refreshment which only contact with nature can give.’ There was none of the circumscribed language of earlier debates, when access campaigners had had to tiptoe deftly around the Sir Bufton Tuftons on the Tory benches. Silkin rose to unaccustomed powers of oratory in summing up what the bill meant: ‘Now at last we shall be able to see that the mountains of Snowdonia, the Lakes, and the waters of the Broads, the moors and dales of the Peak, the South Downs and the tors of the West Country belong to the people as a right and not as a concession. This is not just a Bill. It is a people’s charter – a people’s charter for the open air, for the hikers and the ramblers, for everyone who loves to get out into the open air and enjoy the countryside. Without it they are fettered, deprived of their powers of access and facilities needed to make holidays enjoyable. With it the countryside is theirs to preserve, to cherish, to enjoy and to make their own.’

Conservative opposition was muted, and where it came, it sounded by contrast like the mumblings of some bespittled old buffers in a dark corner of the Athenaeum. A few made reference to the fact that they dreaded rural areas of Britain becoming like ‘Mr Butlin’s holiday parks’, a name that they could barely say without a shudder. Sir Edward Keeling, MP for Twickenham, talked about England’s highest peak, Scafell Pike, and felt obliged to point out that ‘there is nothing in the Bill to prevent the local planning authority from acquiring that summit and erecting on the top a Tea Kiosk – with one capital K – or a Kozy Kafe – with two capital K’s and a z.’ Colonel Sir Ralph Clarke, MP for East Grinstead, worried that, with the trespass law gone, ramblers who were accidentally shot by grouse-hunting parties might now feel emboldened to take legal action. Major Tufton Beamish, who’d inherited his safe seat of Lewes from his father, Rear Admiral Tufton Beamish, snorted that great danger came from ‘townsmen who probably did not know the difference between a badger and a fox or, at any rate, not the difference between their smells’.

A small number of Tories stayed obstinately off-message, and could raise no enthusiasm for the measure at all. The Lonsdale MP, Sir Ian Fraser, declared that ‘it is unthinkable that a farmer should bring his horse into one’s back garden in the suburbs, but it is not unthinkable that one should take one’s clumsy ignorance into his farm yard and let his beasts stray. Indeed, the people in the towns demand the right to go and harm the countryside because they do not understand it.’ Osbert Peake, a Leeds MP, voiced his suspicion that Labour sympathisers were temperamentally unable to enjoy the places they were planning to free, telling the chamber how ‘I remember during the war giving a night’s hospitality to a war-time colleague, who now occupies an important position on the Government Front Bench, and taking him for what I thought would be a treat for him. It was a drive through one of the most beautiful parts of Yorkshire. I must say that he did not seem very interested, and spent the drive reading in
Lloyds Weekly News
and the
Sunday Dispatch
the accounts of a speech he had made the day before.’

Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, the greatest opposition to the measures being proposed by a Labour minister came from behind him on his own benches. To some of the new intake of Labour MPs, whose election had surprised everyone, themselves included, it gave them a chance to roar out a few of their most cherished radical tenets. One such came from the veteran Suffragette Barbara Ayrton Gould, who had snuck an unexpected election victory in Hendon North on her eighth attempt at getting into Parliament. The 1945
Times Guide to the General Election
had certainly been caught on the hop: her defeated Conservative opponent, Brigadier E. W. C. Flavell, was given a fulsome biography, including the fact that he ‘formed and commanded the first Paratroop Brigade, and on D-Day was the first brigadier to drop with his troops’, whereas all they could find to say about the new MP was that she was ‘a journalist’.