Youth hostels show the way to a practical education in country life with rain, bulls and stink.
Fascinating ways
The British countryside was a foreign land to city dwellers in 1936. They missed amenities like electricity in the countryside and people there spoke differently, as if they really were foreign.
Beyond the fringes of Portsmouth, only a few miles from home, small boys “with queer accents in their tones” helped Hilary Hughes and her friend Margaret on their way. [1]
Jane Ash on a walking tour of Derbyshire heard the north country brogue in everyone’s accents and found it “mighty fascinating.” They met odd people and “strange specimens” inhabited queer forsaken stretches of countryside. [2]
Country people found them and their strange habits as amusing. Workmen shouted at Jane and her friends, asking were they going to stay at the Ramblers’ Hall.
No directions
On their travels they learned things about the countryside they might have wished they hadn't. They lost their way, even with maps and often could find no one to give them directions.
When they got directions, those sometimes took them astray and others had to put them right again.
A gamekeeper near Kinder Scout, who looked “rugged, self sufficient and careless of anyone’s interest”, told Jane and her friends they could climb Kinder Scout in pouring rain and mist. They would be fine, if they followed the path and hopped a few rivers, advice they did not take. [3]
Our lucky stars
Shops were few and unreliable. Near Lyndhurst “a horrid old lady in a bun shop charged [Hilary] a fortune for some rolls.” [4] One night they went without supper because they couldn't find a shop. But they did not die, Hilary noted in her diary.
Rural life could be uncomfortable. They washed in cold water in every place they stayed, with one exception, and endured a day without shelter “when the rain settled down to a real hard steady pour. It ran in streams off my beret and my nose. It trickled into my shoes and down my collar.”
But they did not curse the weather. “We only thanked our lucky stars it had not rained all the time.” They learned a stoical tolerance of hardship. [5]
Memories
Jane Ash and her friends touring in Derbyshire similarly endured terrible weather. Walking over the Snake Pass they wore bathing costumes under their coats because it was so wet. When they stopped for lunch at the Inn they sat down to eat inside in their bathing costumes.
Beautiful countryside was their reward. The scenery amongst which they walked was splendid. In rain the immensity of the high plateau among grey mountain sides and rolling mists had a frightening grandeur.
Jane would always remember the great hills and heavy grey skies of Derbyshire.
Terrors
Animals held a particular terror. Cows they met on the road terrified Margaret so much, that she rode her bike off the road and into the verges.
She was not alone in her fear of cattle. “A Somerset farmhouse ... was the roughest of all the places we stayed in,” Cicely Cole wrote in her diary. [6]. As she left the kitchen a bull blocked her way.
His back was enormous, "his powerful shoulders and neck, his stubby horns and his ringed nose. All we could do was sit down and ... wait for him to go." [7] He finally went but was back again that night, "just outside our windows, munching and whoofing, and every so often rubbing and bumping against our wall." [8]
Stink and smell
Farmers offered old barns, haylofts and disused dairies for youth hostel accommodation. In return they earned a shilling a night from each guest. In 1938, at least 15 youth hostels were in identifiably agricultural buildings.
Farms offered a rough education in country living. FJ Catley from Bristol kept closely written pocket diaries through the 1930s and later. His diaries are now in the Bristol Archives. In their pages he described youth hostels where he stayed.
At West Yarde Farm in Devon the common room and men’s dorm were in outbuildings around the farmyard and its dung-heap. “Neither smell nor outlook were very pleasing." At another "they killed a pig and carried its carcass ... under the window." [9]
Packing
Old fashioned farms also offered hungry youth hostellers unforgettable opportunities for eating which would be coloured by the following wartime years of shortages and rationing.
At Westway farm near Tiverton in Devon, Catley and most of those staying "bought our breakfasts from the warden, and a very good breakfast we had, a happy party round the big table in the pleasant room next to the big dark kitchen." [10]
Food was popular at Kennack Sands, a working farm in Cornwall which "offered supper and breakfast at 1/- each (5p) and typically about thirty people would take advantage of this each day. Breakfast was two eggs accompanied by two rashers of bacon or two sausages, with plenty of home-made jam and marmalade and toast..." [11]
A farm, at Lelant also in Cornwall, grew and packed flowers which went by train to London. Guests at the hostel were always keen to help in the packing sheds, especially men when they discovered how many girls worked there.
Last of an era
Youth hostels brought cash to farmers and their families, when widespread change was cutting through farming incomes. For their shilling a night, guests plunged into an alien experience rich as butter, cream and flowers for any urban dweller.
But by 1950 hostels on farms were disappearing. Farm incomes were rising. Farms were becoming more professional, mechanised and dangerous to casual visitors. Old fashioned mixed use farming gave way to modern agriculture.
In 1984 the last youth hostel on a working farm closed at Black Farm, at the foot of the Hard Knot pass in Cumbria. First and foremost a farm, it had been a peaceful and serene setting for a youth hostel away from the traffic of central Lakeland since 1964.
Love and understanding
For a brief time, youth hostels had thrown guests into rural life. They had learned what rural life entailed. They had slept amidst noise and stink in some of the roughest places any of them would encounter.
They had eaten well, made friends and came back to city lives with “a greater knowledge, care and love of the countryside.” [12] Theirs had been the education at which YHA had aimed. For them the countryside was no longer foreign or strange.
"When we returned to the farm after our swim, in the last field we had to cross, there [the bull] was again. There was no other route for us to take so we had to cross that field, feeling terribly vulnerable in the open, halfway across. He looked up at us, then went back to champing the grass." [The YHA in the Thirties by Cicely Cole, Hostelling News Winter 1979-80]
Notes
Image of the farm at Leland courtesy YHA Archive at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham
Hilary Hughes, Collection of holiday hostelling log albums Y691019
Lilian Ash, Holiday Log: account of early hostelling adventures in the Peak District, August 1934 Y600038-3
Ibid
Hilary Hughes, Collection of holiday hostelling log albums Y691019
Ibid
Cicely Cole, The YHA in the Thirties, Hostelling News Winter 1979-80
Ibid
Ibid
Diaries of FJ Catley 1935, Bristol Archive
Ibid
Rowe, Courtney, account found at Coverack Hostel in October 2013 Y050001-Kennack 701
YHA Handbook of hostels (England, Wales & Ireland) 1936, p10.