The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths by Mike Parker

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’.
    Her beef was that Silkin proposed to give much of the power of administration of the new National Parks to members of the local county councils. ‘I ask myself,’ she posited imperiously, ‘what is the personnel of a great many of these county councils? Many of these councils are reactionary. Unfortunately, there are