The 1932 mass trespass of Kinder Scout eventually led to the opening of the outdoors to everyone. Daniel Neilson travels to Manchester and on to Kinder Scout in the footsteps of Benny Rothman, the leader of the famous trespass.
Through the headphones comes a crackly voice, full of the accent that you’d expect from a man from Cheetham Hill, Manchester. “The only grass we saw was that growing through cobbles,” the late Benny Rothman is telling the interviewer, Alec Greenhalgh, recalling his younger years. He goes on to describe his childhood. Born in 1911 to a Jewish family from Romania, he later made a bike from spare parts and cycled to explore the Peak District and Snowdonia. Benny died in 2002, aged 90, but his legacy and that of his friends have had a profound effect on our lives today as outdoor enthusiasts.
I’m listening to this evocative interview in one of the Sound + Vision pods in the Manchester Central Library. A simple search for ‘Kinder Trespass’ has presented me with various audio files to appear, including this two-and-a-half-hour interview with Benny Rothman, one of the leaders of the trespass. In the conversation, conducted in 1989, Benny tells the story of what Lord Roy Hattersley later described as: “The most successful direct action in British history”
The mass trespass of Kinder Scout, a largely peaceful march, ultimately led to the establishment of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. This act allowed public rights of way and access to the countryside in England and Wales for the first time. Should you have hiked in the Peak District before this time, you would have been trespassing, just like Benny Rothman and his band.
In the library, I flick forward through the interview. “We had a bit of a pow-wow at a camp,” Benny says, “and the thing that came out of it was that if there’d have been about 20 of us, they wouldn’t have turned us back. We decided that we’d have a big group, a mass trespass, and onto the hills in Derbyshire.”
This was a time when there weren’t any public rights of passage, public footpaths, or national parks — but workers from Manchester, Sheffield, Stockport, Liverpool, Huddersfield would walk or cycle to the Derbyshire Hills to explore the countryside. Among the organisations of the day was the British Workers' Sports Federation, which the National Clarion Cycling Club established with Labour Party activists and trade unionists (although, as it became more aligned with the Communist Party, Labour and the trade unions split). Benny Rothman was the federation’s secretary.
A date for the mass trespass was set: 24 April, 1932, and they met in Hayfield, a town below Kinder Scout. Some got the train. Benny, aged 20, cycled because he couldn’t afford the train fare. “We decided we’d slip out before the meeting started, a bunch of ramblers. And we just went out. ‘Follow us, lads and girls’. We led the way, and the rest just came along and off we went. Singing, very, very cheerful. And the police just fell in behind us.”
The walkers numbered around 400 in total. As they approached Kinder, the police and others —sometimes described as ‘gamekeepers’ — stopped the group.Scuffles broke out, and several people were arrested, Benny among them. “We didn’t offer any resistance, because it was more or less futile. It was just daft; we weren’t out to battle with the police.”
Back in Manchester, pondering all this, I walk into the Science and Industry Museum and Industry to learn about life at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. An interpretation board reads: “Thousands flocked here to work in the city’s new factories and workshops. Nobody had planned for such rapid urban growth. Sprawling and swarming, Manchester became known as one of the filthiest, most overcrowded and unhealthy places in the country. The world’s first industrial city faced a human crisis.”
Then something remarkable happens. I fall into conversation with a volunteer at the museum, an exuberant man, perhaps in his 60s. We chat about the museum, about walking on Kinder — he’s a keen walker, it transpires — and then Benny Rothman. “I met him in 1982,” he says to my astonishment. “I was there when he unveiled the commemorative plaque at Bowden Bridge Quarry.” The plaque is still there. We chat about the political effects of the trespass,, how Benny and the others imprisoned became almost a cause célèbre, garnering huge public interest, partly for their lengthy sentences (two to six months) and the realisation for many that you mostly couldn’t just ‘go for a walk’.
From the dock at Derby Assizes following his arrest, Benny gave the following speech: “We ramblers, after a hard week’s work, in smoky towns and cities, go out rambling for relaxation and fresh air. And we find the finest rambling country is closed to us... Our request, or demand, for access to all peaks and uncultivated moorland is nothing unreasonable."
This eventually led to the National Parks legislation in 1949 and the establishment of the Pennine Way, an idea first mooted by journalist and rambler Tom Stephenson, and much later, as the new millennium arrived, the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 which gives people in England and Wales the ‘right to roam’.
On the Pennine Way
The next day, we jump on the Hope Valley Line to Edale, for a ramble of our own. The Manchester walkers of the mass trespass started from Hayfield, but as we’re staying at YHA Edale, we drop our stuff and start our ascent. Kinder Scout is always an adventure.
For my money, this great moorland plateau provides one of the best days out in Britain: the sense of adventure comes from the sense of remoteness, the glorious panoramas of northern England and across to Wales, and the fact that plunging across in bad weather can also pose one of the most challenging navigations in the country.
Today, the weather is clear and bright. We walk up Grindsbrook Clough, a fun, scrambly way to the top. Kinder Scout has a nomenclature all of its own: cloughs, groughs and grikes all feature. We follow the clough as water tumbles down it.
There’s plenty of stepping-stone action as the path crosses the stream (be aware that after heavy rainfall it can be tricky in places, and know too that it’s a long, rocky path, so boots are recommended — there are still a few places where you need to put a hand down). The final push is along a rock staircase to the top.
Kinder Scout is a vast hulking mass of Millstone Grit covered in heather and peat. Its highest point is 636m — Kinder is a moorland plateau, but it seems anything but flat once you’re on it. At the top of Crowden Brook, we cut across the plateau. The main problem with navigation is that the groughs, as the deep channels that cross the peak are called, are deeper than a human is tall. A map and compass are essential.
It’s all too easy to follow the random swerving of a grough and become completely disorientated and lost, as people very frequently do (on one occasion I met with Kinder Mountain Rescue on an exercise, who on that day alone had found two groups of people utterly lost on top!). Fortunately, a new path with slabs to protect the land makes it almost impossible to get lost for at least half the crossing.
At Kinder Downfall, we meet the Pennine Way along part of its 267-mile (431-kilometre) journey between Edale and Kirk Yetholm on the Scottish Borders. The Pennine Way section follows the edge of the plateau; it’s a well-worn path, and reassuringly busy when we visit.
From here, you can see Manchester. No longer billowing smoke, but my day in Manchester compared with a day walking in the Peak District couldn’t have been farther apart. I mentally thank those of the Kinder Trespass and all those who came before and after to fight for my right to be up here and experience these views. I think about YHA and its mission to get young people out here, an organisation that was a year old at the time of the Kinder Trespass. Indeed, YHA were a fundamental part of the conversation that led to the formation of the National Parks, along with the Ramblers and other organisations.
We keep moving south again along the edge, heading for the trig pillar, now very nearly at the highest point of Kinder. There are expansive views of the Vale of Edale and across the southern fringe of Kinder Scout, including the distinctive Woolpacks stone formation, and soon we’re clambering down Jacob’s Ladder back towards Edale.
Had we been descending Jacob’s Ladder on 24 April, 1932, we would have passed a group of cheerful young ramblers from Sheffield who had set off to meet their Manchester compatriots on Kinder Scout. The two groups never did meet. The police stopped one group — and you know that story.
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