In Arnside junkshop, the battered album had drifted to the top of a pile. Six Nomads in Normandy? The map was instantly recognisable. The south coast of England, the north coast of France, every mile and kilometre marked, by sea and on foot. A D-day memoir? As a student, I spent one summer working near Arromanches, knew the Normandy war graves. Flicking through the album, I found photos, young men in straw boaters, waspwaisted girls in long skirts. In the Forest of Cerisy? The D-Day battlegrounds, yes, but this was an older story, spelled out on the title page…

“SIX NOMADS IN NORMANDY”

MCMXII

1912… This book was important. Studying photos, I’d barely noticed the interleaved typescript. Six young people had a story to tell, adventures to remember, couldn’t know their world was about to end. Beyond the Edwardian fashions, the faces were young, twenty-somethings, enjoying the holiday of a lifetime. Enterprising to make a book, organise the maps, the photos, the binding, desktop publishing, vintage MCMXII. The year Titanic sank, Britain was beleaguered by industrial unrest. Miners, rail and dockworkers went on strike. As usual, there was trouble in the Balkans, and, far nearer home, in Ireland too. One line cried out from the faded page:

‘Poppies made the fields of corn and barley very gay.’

At the end of the last chapter, one of the girls proposed a toast, in sparkling cidre de Normandie:

‘To friendship, long life and happy, happy days’

At the record office in Kendal, the archivist asked if I realised what I’d found. Then she told me. This was, of course, ‘a letter from the lost generation’. Intrigued by the backpackers’ adventures, I contacted history societies in Brittany and Normandy. Dr Jacques Gury of Rennes rejected the familiar cliché, suggesting instead that the Nomads’ story offers ‘a glimpse of the twentieth century as it might have been.’

The backpackers’ search for an international hostel in Dinan led to the social reformer, internationalist, pioneer of outdoor education and pre WWI peace campaigner Arthur Leonard. In 1891, the twenty-six year old brought despised Lancashire millworkers to the Lake District. Accused of Socialism (sic) by church leaders, Leonard left formal ministry to focus on education and social reform. Founded in 1897, the Cooperative Holidays Association sought to reject all barriers between people.

Despite the appalling weather, the Nomads’ DIY entente was a triumph. Young internationalists, backpacking across what would become the 1944 battlegrounds, the friends weren’t lost. They had local maps. When they took the wrong path, they could ask the way and - always the tricky part - understand the reply too. Using French public transport, arranging all their accommodation, backpacking with partners, laughing at fears of German spies, making friends with local people, they could be in the wrong century. Two years later, did the four young men return to France? Die there, on the Western Front? In 1912, how could they hope for happy days?

In 1912, why not? A year earlier, the Morocco Crisis or ‘Panther’s Leap’ of July 1911, had passed. Diplomacy succeeded. Dismissed as a ‘squabble over African sand’, Agadir didn’t lead to Armaggeddon. Britain and the U.S. agreed that in future, all disputes between them would be settled by peaceful arbitration. For these young people and all their generation, 1912 could be their 1963, the year after the Cuba crisis didn’t lead to a nuclear holocaust. Captain Josceline Bagot, the MP for Kendal expressed his hopes for the future:

‘The twentieth century might go down in history as the period when the heavy yoke of great armaments was taken from the shoulders of the world.’

Crossing the D-day battlegrounds in July 1912, six friends lived, still, in that very different twentieth century. In spite of former mistakes, all might still have been put right.

In the twenty-first century, every word of their book is stained with sadness. Calculating the direct military death-toll of the twentieth century wars is an exercise for statisticians. The human cost lives on in the history of every family. Internet searches end generations of silence, as families learn how their ancestors died. International conflicts and disputes inherit the debts of war, a legacy which includes the steadfast and often bitter opposition to Britain’s membership of the European Union. Twenty-first century defence chiefs plead as always that they need more and better equipment, more troops, not fewer, more specialized weapons, more ships and more aircraft carriers. In April, 1911, the Westmorland MP dared to imagine a world at peace, in which disputes would be resolved through arbitration. Now almost forgotten, its origins little more than a footnote in history, Britain’s proposed 1911 peace treaty with the USA had been welcomed with enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic. The so-called ‘special relationship’ with the U.S. would take a very different course. Still, allegedly, hoping for peace, Europe continued to prepare for war.

Backpacking across Normandy and Brittany, the young Nomads were celebrating Britain’s new relationship with France. Germany is only mentioned in passing, in a light-hearted reference to spies and a warship patrolling the Channel. Photos taken during the holiday are no less eloquent than the text. Many record working lives and the people they meet on their travels. This is was no fictional evocation of a golden Edwardian summer. Even for the gilded few, those years were over. Tranquil as it may seem at first glance, the backpackers’ idyll in France is steeped in politics. The Nomads knew a world in turmoil, torn by riots, strikes, extreme weather and real fear of hunger. Six young people with the intelligence and initiative to plan this adventure couldn’t fail to be aware of the international situation. Making a weekend detour to Jersey, they bought the Daily Mail, discussed Lloyd George’s latest budget, knew that warships patrolled the seas, but took a relaxed attitude to fears of German spies. (Which backpacker chose the Mail? They don’t say. Drenched by a 1912 downpour, they used the paper for mopping-up operations.) Financially astute, they complained when offered what they considered a poor exchange rate. One writer expressed his opinion of the Chancellor. Landing at Le Havre, ready for breakfast, had they even considered food shortages? Would France be able to feed them?

Twenty-first century shoppers panic buy, drain petrol pumps, clear supermarket shelves. In the urban West, few of these frantic stockpilers have known hunger or thirst or any kind of rationing. In 1911, the blockades of the Franco-Prussian war were still within living memory. Across Western Europe, fear of hunger and shortages was entirely rational. Alarming press reports were all too accurate. Across much of the northern hemisphere the sun had shone too fiercely. Throughout Europe, the harvest of 1911 was poor. September storms damaged crops stunted by weeks of drought and intense heat. Meat was expensive and in short supply. Serious outbreaks of foot and mouth spread across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Hungary, forcing the closure of cattle markets as far east as Berlin. Grazing parched pastures, cattle across Europe went hungry. Drought and FMD affected British farms too, but there were no food riots. In Britain, only rural and country town newspapers expressed much concern for the harvest. Sourcing most of her meat from the Empire, Britain surely had nothing to fear. The Empire would always exist and would always provide. In the first seven months of 1911, Britain imported over three and a half million hundredweights of frozen meat, much of it from Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Reporting the European riots and shortages, Australia and New Zealand could envisage very different trading relationships and, perhaps, a more lucrative market for their products. In one New Zealand report of the European food crisis, the word ‘Dominion’ is apostrophized.

In press reports of the September 1911 riots, familiar names resonate. The list signals waiting tragedy, a catalogue of death and destruction; Arras, Bethune, Charleroi, St Quentin. Reuters relayed news of 20,000 rioters in Charleroi. In Lille, the mob overturned and burnt market stalls. In France and in Germany, cavalry charged on the crowds. Martial law was imposed on rioters in Vienna, where one man died and over eighty were injured in food riots. Britain expressed different fears. Real or imagined, German spies were everywhere. Very few were real enough to be arrested by counter espionage. Spies starred as the popular and dastardly villains of political thrillers by John Buchan, Erskine Childers, William Le Queaux and their many imitators. The spies were wasting their time. Britain, with her fleet of invincible Dreadnoughts, (and her vast empire) had won the arms race. Now that little matter was settled, a reforming government could at last turn its attention to the home front and a very different war. Rejected as unfit for military service, the stunted and sickly Boer volunteers had made poverty news. The wretched physical condition of so many industrial workers had been known for decades, recorded not just in campaigning journalism and heart-rending fiction but in government ‘Blue Book’ reports. No matter how patriotic, the unemployed and malnourished poor weren’t even decent cannon-fodder. Examined more closely, many young men weren’t even well enough to attempt remedial exercises. Addressing the House of Lords, the Earl of Meath reported on the steps already being taken to improve the wretched condition of so many working class men.

Mistaken at first for a for D-Day memoir, Six Nomads in Normandy ends with that carefree pledge to the future. Friendship, long life and happy days? On the eve of WWI? But the dog-days crisis over Morocco had passed. There would be no ‘Armageddon’. The war to end all wars need not happen. Diplomacy and behind the scenes pourparlers had succeeded, not high summer media frenzy. Europe wasn’t at war. For these young people and all their generation, 1912 could be their 1963, the year after the Cuba crisis didn’t lead to a nuclear holocaust. Young people could travel around a world at peace with itself. Like the backpacking Nomads, their friendships would be international. In 1912, the backpackers faced one major problem. The weather was appalling. Far too often, rain stopped play, and not just at Lords or Headingley. Extreme monsoon conditions cut short an international cricket tournament. Throughout the wet and alarmingly cold summer of 1912, international tension mounted then waned again. Trekking across Normandy and Brittany, the Nomads sheltered from regular downpours as they celebrated the still unfamiliar entente cordiale, defined by the irreverent John Foster Fraser, for those who hadn’t caught up with this novel arrangement: ‘The French are our friends. They drink our whisky and we drink their cheap wine. This is called the entente cordial.’ Adventurer, traveller, journalist and a candidate in the 1910 elections, Fraser was making a serious point. Business partners expect mutual support. Campaigning for tariff reform, Fraser had his own interests in trading relationships with Britain’s neighbours.

Old habits die hard. The entente was by no means universally popular. Driving through the Lake District in July 1911, Prinz Heinrich of Hesse was greeted by a banner proclaiming ‘Herzlich Wilkommen in Windermere… Blood is thicker than water.’ The prince was a competitor in the friendly post-Coronation Anglo-German car rally. In Windermere, he was staying at the country house of the British managing director of Daimler. Visiting the Lakes, Kaiser Wilhelm could use the summer house in Martindale, built for him in 1910 by the Earl of Lonsdale. Blood is thicker than water needs no translation and wine lists of the period can be startling. In the Edwardian era, a case of Liebfraumilch often cost more than Mouton Rothschild, sparkling hock more than Veuve Clicquot, and a cruise on the Rhine was naturally far superior to a budget journey along the Rance in Brittany. Burying the hatchet with France broke with centuries of tradition, but in 1911, at the height of the Morocco Crisis, the entente was already militaire. Britain and France had been on the brink of war with Britain’s old friend, her ‘cousin nation’, Germany. Earlier that year, France and Spain had vied for possession of the same territory.

Timelines of the early twentieth century record the rapidly shifting allegiances of the two Morocco crises. The 1911 Punch cartoon of the Kaiser and the French president perched on Morocco is one of my earliest memories. France and Germany had squabbled over ‘a piece of North African sand’, all because, most unreasonably, Germany wanted a place in the sun. Specifically, she wanted a port on the Mediterranean. Clearly, this couldn’t be allowed. Why not is never discussed. It’s self-evident. Britannia ruled the waves and a quarter of the globe. British military experts knew they could claim the moral high ground, preparing for war only because they wished for peace. The historian of the Officer Training Corps makes the distinction clear. Unlike Prussians and other greedy imperialists, Britain only colonized other countries for their own good, taking up the white man’s burden, no matter how heavy. She would, of course, support her new friend in any dispute over African sand. Why Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy or any other country should claim to own African sand or an African port is another question not worth asking. The flashpoint came, naturally, in the dog-days,

‘… when most of us were lying on our backs in the shade, and watching the ripple of the soft sea waves. There was going to be a terrible conflict in the North Sea, our great statesmen were much perturbed, and warships were being equipped. This was all over Morocco (where the bedroom slippers come from) with which we had little concern.’

In the summer of 1911, when Germany’s Panther gunboat challenged the French-owned port of Agadir, Morocco was still a far away country of which we knew almost nothing. On her way home for a refit, the Panther gunboat certainly wasn’t a Dreadnought. The much larger Berlin reached Agadir four days later. Books, papers, timelines, exam notes and theses attempt to make sense of the summer crisis. Reading Pepys’ Diary might be just as useful. Then the moment of madness passed. This time, they didn’t blow each other sky-high with long distance guns, despite the bellicosity of Lloyd George’s Mansion House ‘warning to Germany.’ An exercise in oratorical histrionics, the speech was a notorious own goal. Reports suggest that it annoyed Asquith, alarmed British diplomats and infuriated Germany in one dramatic performance. Three years earlier and with quite as much passion, Lloyd George presented Germany’s case, urged that there should be an Anglo-German entente, denounced Britain’s building of Dreadnoughts and declared his commitment to peace:

‘We buy tens of millions worth of goods from Germany. Why should the Germans kill us? They buy thirty million pounds worth of goods from us. Why should we want to kill them? I want to put two considerations to you from the German point of view. Every misunderstanding and quarrel is largely a matter of lack of imagination. Men have not got the imagination to project themselves into the position of the other party. Now, just consider for a moment. You say, “Why should Germany be frightened of us, why should she build because of us?” Let me put two considerations to you. We started; it is not they who have started. We had an overwhelming preponderance at sea, which would have secured us against any conceivable enemy. We were not satisfied. We said, “Let there be Dreadnoughts.” What for? We did not require them. Nobody was building them; and if anybody had built them, we could have easily out-built them. We have more shipbuilding resources than any country in the world, and more than every country in the world put together; so really there was no need for it.’

Portrayed in a 1911 Punch cartoon as sleeping through the crisis behind their newspapers, Kiderlen-Waechter and Cambon played their parts in achieving peace, or rather, in avoiding war. Lying on one’s back in the shade might be exactly the right response to media driven summer frenzy. France and Spain claimed their respective shares of Morocco. Germany agreed to settle for part of the Congo, a move which would not contravene the Monroe doctrine, which defended only the Americas from further colonization by Europe. Peace reigned, even in the Balkans. George V and his cousins Nicholas and Wilhelm were all Emperors, and, like Trident, Dreadnoughts really were, as the statesmen of Britain and Germany insisted, merely a deterrent. Like all weapons of mass destruction, they were designed to keep the peace. Lloyd George’s contentious tax reforms would benefit the poor, a little, if they managed to become aged enough, but they also raised vast sums for the armed services Vast sums were essential. Even the first Dreadnought cost close to two million pounds - £1,783,883. At Westminster and in the Reichstag, the need for massive expenditure on armaments was perfectly clear. The Crown Prince was sometimes disgracefully rude about his English cousins, but the Kaiser could surely be trusted to keep his son in order. On December 11th, 1911, it was announced that the Crown Prince would not attend any further debates. At the year’s end, the last editorials of 1911 bear an uncanny family likeness to those written fifty years later, in December 1962. Most writers rejoice over peace in their time. The Manchester Guardian found the narrow escape from war alarming:

‘a little more misunderstanding might have set England at war with Germany, without anyone outside the Government knowing why.’

In the Halifax Courier, James Parker lamented as if from the pulpit that:

‘the conflicting ambitions of the nations brought us perilously close to war…’

Dismissing peace societies as ‘voices crying in the wilderness’ Parker deplored the failures of the ‘Christian powers of Europe’, apparently powerless to prevent war or mitigate its horrors. After this passionate denunciation, Parker became the most prominent of the Independent Labour Party’s pro-war contingent.

Fortunately, all was well. On the shores of Derwentwater, speakers at the 1912 Keswick Convention spoke enthusiastically of peace and of the many Germans they’d met as friends, who were nothing like the monsters of fiction. Spotting that warship off the coast of Jersey, the Nomads could laugh about German spies.

Visitors in another country, the Nomads recognised the different but very real poverty of rural France. In 1912, middle-class holidaymakers from southern England came to Brittany’s casinos to gamble. The rich headed for the Riviera. The Nomads were far from rich and definitely not gamblers. Some of the party were wary of alcohol too (or at least, inexperienced in tracking down the nearest bar). Their idea of a holiday was radically different. Independent travellers, making all their own arrangements, they’d come to discover France, meet her people, enjoy the French countryside, observe the abundant wildlife, explore ruins, reflect on a shared history and centuries of conflict. Above all, they were determined to speak French and get to know the people they met. How had they learned so many skills, including good-enough French? Eager observers, nothing escapes their attention, from meal time etiquette and the wearing - or not - of hats, to the discovery that standing passengers on French trams qualified for a reduced fare. (a concession which met with strong approval) Evidently city-bred, they didn’t realise why, in a summer of all too-frequent rain, a harvest-time funeral was held at five in the morning. Apart from one forgivable youthful lapse (singing popular songs, late at night, in the street, plus ca change) they behave as considerate guests.

Analysing their text, word by word, I failed at first to recognise the most important clue. According to the writers, their adventures in France began in a railway carriage early on July 20th, 1912. Travelling as ‘Mr Pulford’s party’, they were heading for London. For some of them, probably the young women, this was their first visit to the capital. After a hectic afternoon of galleries and sightseeing, including the Tate, the Abbey and Trafalgar Square, they caught the London and South Western Railways train from Waterloo to Southampton to board Hantonia, the overnight ferry for Le Havre. But the inspiration for their French idyll had its origins more than twenty years earlier, at the Independent (Congregational) Church in the Lancashire mill town of Colne, then a hotbed of radical politics and equally radical faith. In the final chapter of their story the Nomads are in Dinan, searching for somewhere called ‘the CHA centre’. Dusty and dishevelled after their twenty mile walk from Dol, they welcome a rare chance of speaking English, but the imposing villa, with its ‘babble of many tongues’ isn’t for them. They find somewhere else to stay. Invited to join CHA guests for an evening of music, they politely decline. After a fortnight living out of rucksacks, their ‘trampish’ clothes aren’t fit for company. The initials suggested some kind of hostel. Country Hostels Association? This was over two decades before the first YHA hostels opened in Britain. In French, surely Association would come first… When at last they track the place down, the host and hostess are clearly English, a Mr and Mrs Hinchcliffe. Further research identified the Countrywide Holidays Association, later absorbed by the better known Ramblers.

Eventually, the original title, Cooperative Holidays Association led to business records and many other documents in the Greater Manchester Record Office. The Villa Ste Charles in Dinan was one of the earliest overseas houses leased by the CHA. During WWI it would become a Red Cross hospital. The Association proved to be a walking club and a great deal more, founded in 1894 by Arthur Leonard, described in the CHA archives as a ‘former Congregationalist minister’. As members of the CHA, the adventurous Nomads had learned many of the skills which would enable them to explore another country and another culture. Traditionally, the young men and plenty of women in the Lancashire mill towns would spend their ‘wakes’ holidays get wasted in Blackpool. In an exasperated sermon, Leonard’s word is ‘vitiated’, but he’d understand the current colloquialism only too well. Blackpool in the 1890’s was a match for any 21st century drunken antics in Prague or Phuket. In the legendarily ‘Naughty Nineties’, illegitimacy rates in Britain soared to levels not reached again until WWII. But why was Leonard a ‘former minister’? Had he been unfrocked? Had he quarrelled with God? Young men who’ve studied and prepared hard for a life of ministry don’t usually set up holiday companies, let alone one targeting the eighteen to thirty set. Arthur Leonard’s remarkable career move was inspired by faith, politics and the tragedy of stunted lives. In his first period of ministry, based in the raw new town of Barrow in Furness, he found the disaffected young, physically and spiritually wasted, both by wretched working conditions and, in his forthright opinion, the tragic misuse of leisure.

For the twenty-three year old Leonard, Barrow in 1887 would be the ultimate culture-shock. Londoners, if they’d read the right books, knew it was grim up North. In German or any other language, the condition of the working class in England was unspeakable. But Mrs Gaskell’s Drumble (Manchester), had a solid bourgeoisie. A ten minute walk separates Ancoats from the Athenaeum. The original Chetham’s Hospital is almost as close. Engels used both libraries. The university college was strong, the collegiate church handsome, the city’s music superb. Manchester claims over two thousand years of history. Dicken’s relentlessly grim Coketown (Preston), had been a prosperous community long before the Conquest. For centuries, Preston and not Liverpool was Lancashire’s major port. The ‘priest’s town’ was a centre of learning too. Barrow was an industrial orphan, stranded on the distant Furness coast. Intermittently, steel and shipbuilding prospered. As the industrial boom town exploded into unplanned existence, young workers made their own amusements, usually involving too much alcohol. In stark contrast to the working conditions and housing developed by other companies, including the Cadburys at Bournville, Lever Brothers at Port Sunlight and Rowntrees at Easwick. Barrow’s industrialists and wealthy landowners had evidently given little thought to the wellbeing of their workers. Leonard had arrived in Barrow just as the impressive Town Hall opened. The town’s police pose carefully on a narrow strip of paving stones. Very carefully… In the foreground, just beyond their toes of their boots, there’s only mud and bare earth.

The Town Hall was barely complete. The unmade road in the foreground might be unfinished business, but could Barrow afford so much civic pride? Its streets were notoriously unpaved and dirty. In a narrowly focused economy, the latest recession had forced many out of work. During Victoria’s Golden Jubilee year, soup kitchens opened on Barrow island and free dinners were provided for hungry school children. Prosperous Victorian Britain wanted the things Barrow made. The residents themselves were expendable, paid well enough when business was good, but badly hit during recessions. The closest modern parallel might be the new industrial centres of the far east, vulnerable to the fluctuating demands of the West. By 1887, almost eighty thousand people inhabited this strange and often disturbing wasteland. Very few were local. Like economic migrants now, Barrow’s immigrant workers, many of them young and single, were sending over £1,000 a week to their families all over Britain and beyond.

Hostility between different migrant communities and faith groups was rife. Stripping out the political and sociological jargon of town planners, Barrow, ‘rough, tough and insanitary’ had been allowed to happen. It existed for steel, shipping and the railways. In 1845, Barrow had been a remote Furness village with barely two hundred residents. By the 1870’s, Barrow had become, on a simple head-count, a major Northern town. Size isn’t everything. Barrow was a town with no heart or history. Contemporary accounts suggest an urban wilderness of unfinished streets, crowded rooms, unlicensed ‘hush’ alcohol sold from terraced houses, obscene graffiti everywhere, scrawled by all ages and both sexes, and, according to the Registrar General, ‘a startling increase in zygotic disease’. Efficient sewers and clean water were very much an afterthought. Until the cemetery opened in 1873, Barrow couldn’t even bury her dead. Bodies had to be taken to Dalton in Furness, four miles away.

Faith and philanthropy faced an enormous task. As a young man in his first ministry, Leonard discovered squalor, savagery, intellectual and spiritual poverty. The ‘Reverend’ title is distracting. It could suggest a sanctimonious Victorian patriarch. Still in his early twenties, Leonard was offering young people excitement, beauty and a sense of achievement, instead of drunken oblivion. Congregational church records reveal an impassioned novice, struggling to reconcile his faith and ideals with the reality of life in the unpaved and disease ridden streets of Barrow. The impact on his faith, and very soon, the direction of his whole career was dramatic. A young man questioning the tenets of Christianity made dangerous enemies. Leonard, far too often for his own good, suggested that many churchgoers ignored all the inconvenient details of Christ’s teaching. Young people welcomed his imaginative approach to ministry, enjoying, for the first time in their lives, rambles on the nearby Furness fells. Older members of the community distrusted his politics, and, as they saw it, his increasingly unorthodox faith. Some said he wasn’t really Christian but a Unitarian.

Insulting the old gods and corrupting the young was a serious charge. It was agreed that a move to the already notoriously radical town of Colne might be appropriate for all concerned. In Colne, Leonard discovered once again that, in his outspoken opinion, the young workers didn’t understand how to use their leisure time. The aftermath of traditional holidays for young people was all too predictable. In one impassioned speech, Leonard spelled out the cost of unlimited alcohol and equally unlimited freedeom. The young minister was no prude. Many of his initiatives outraged the older generation. Almost immediately, young women were invited to join the moorland rambles. Trailing skirts and muddy windswept moorland don’t mix. Early CHA guidelines suggest that ladies should wear ‘woollen knickers’ for hillwalking. Leonard meant, of course, knickerbockers or walking breeches, but the advice that skirts, if worn, should be six inches above the ankle, was almost as shocking.

Coming from Barrow to Colne, Leonard understood only too well why factory workers headed straight for the pub. The Factories Acts and the Coal Mines Regulation Act had achieved some improvements, but for many, working conditions remained deadly. Briefly and within the strict limits of Health and Safety law, visitors to cotton mills reborn as heritage centres can experience the literally deafening conditions. When museum staff switch on one loom in a room built for fifty, the noise is earshattering to the point of pain. Thick and white as falling snow, the choking cotton-waste, can’t be replicated, nor can the suffocating heat and humidity. Cotton fibres benefited from that humidity. Their lungs clogged with cotton fibres, workers suffered from constant respiratory illness.

Choosing the passionate young Arthur Leonard as their new minister, the deacons of Colne knew the appointment might be controversial. Born in Finsbury Park, Leonard’s childhood world was intriguingly international. At the time of the 1871 census, the seven year old was living in Hackney with his widowed mother, four year old sister and the six members of a Dutch-Belgian family, of whom only the baby was British born. Hackney in the 1870’s was hardly a privileged area, but the very low illegitimacy rate indicates social stability. After schooldays in Heidelberg and studying for the Congregational Ministry at Nottingham with Dr John Brown Paton, Leonard was now twenty-six, married, and the father of a baby son. Reports from Barrow had hinted at unorthodox beliefs, including the suspicion of Unitarianism. Colne expressed further misgivings. Did Leonard believe in the fundamental Christian doctrine of Atonement, the idea that Christ died for our sins? In the intensely political Colne of the 1890’s, all kinds of unorthodox beliefs flourished. Too many of the clergy and eager young politicians insisted that the teachings of Christ should be taken literally. Leonard was accused of wanting to create a Labour Church in the town. Church elders wrote to him sternly, complaining that he was using his position to promote Socialism (sic) a doctrine they entirely rejected. Founded in Manchester only three years earlier by John Trevor, a former Unitarian minister, the Labour Church movement was spreading like wildfire through the industrial towns and cities of Britain. Like the churches they rivalled, Victorian trades unions carried elaborate embroidered banners. The faithful walked in processions, singing rousing hymns. Leonard’s response to his accusers was surely unanswerable. He had never sought to make Colne a Labour Church, and if everyone followed the teachings of Christ, there’d be no Labour churches and no need for them.

By the early 1890’s, the Independent Labour Party was entrenched in many of the manufacturing areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire. In Colne, many would probably welcome a Labour Church. But, as Leonard had already learned to his cost in Barrow, a powerful elite opposed any suggestion of socialism, Christian, ethical, international or any other brand. Critics complained that God was rarely mentioned. From Plymouth to Dundee, the Labour Churches were attracting leading socialists, including Keir Hardie, Ben Tillett, and, in nearby Keighley, Leonard’s friend and exact contemporary, Philip Snowden. Ordained minister and journalist/editor, both young men were determined campaigners for a new moral order. Snowden’s wife destroyed all his personal papers after his death, but their long friendship is documented in Leonard’s records, including his only book, and in Snowden’s library. Snowden’s famous address on ‘The Christ that is to be’ was delivered in Peckover Street in nearby Bradford. Leonard saw his work for the ‘holiday movement’ as a development in faith and ministry, not an indulgence for the rich, but an absolute necessity for everyone:

‘the clerk, chained to his desk all day, the mother, out of sorts with the fretting worries of home, the father and son, weakened by the impure air of the mill, all these require recreation of the body God has given them.’

Considering the needs of women at home was one of Leonard’s most outrageous moves.

In Northern England, over a century before ‘right to roam’, much of the wild and beautiful countryside was already accessible by footpath and along traditional ‘corpse roads’. Bridleways used now by armies of hillwalkers and mountain bikers link scattered farmsteads to upland churches and market towns. Until Leonard arrived in Barrow, very few industrial workers explored the Lakeland or Furness fells. In Colne, Leonard took young people out of the hilly and narrow streets around the mills and up into a world few of them had seen, though it was all around them. He introduced them to the Pendle hills, the Ribble valley, and the high moorland around Keighley and Haworth. Dr John Paton of Nottingham, who had prepared Leonard for ministry, supported and guided this radical change of direction. Linking the hillwalking and music of Colne to the educational programme of the National Home Reading Union, it was Dr Paton who recognised the national and indeed international potential of the movement. Losing his own father in early childhood, Leonard acknowledged how much he owed to Dr Paton - ‘that great discoverer of men and ideas’ - the man to whom the whole movement owed its being. Soon, Dr Paton, Arthur Leonard, Lewis Paton and the other founding members of the CHA ‘dreamt of showing the earth to the company of youth’ - and not just the youth of Britain. In his foreword to Leonard’s only book, Lewis Paton, High Master of Manchester Grammar School, defines Leonard’s inspiration as ‘a great piece of social engineering.’ ‘Social engineering’ sounds ponderous and unappealing, suggests Soviet control. Delivered by government, it can be an insensitive and unwieldy process, often managing to alienate all the parties involved. Leonard’s own version of his vision is both more poetic and more immediately practical. He wanted to show young people ‘regions of loveliness to seek out and preserve, for the highest uses of the human spirit’. In the caste-ridden Britain of 1890, this was a dangerous ambition. Regions of loveliness were reserved for the elite. Many of the intelligentsia believed that working class people were incapable of recognising beauty. Never afraid of controversy, Leonard took a party of young millworkers to the Lake District. The date was June 1891. In literary Lakeland, millworkers from Lancashire or Yorkshire were about as welcome as a new outbreak of Foot and Mouth. They couldn’t possibly appreciate the scenery. Decades earlier, expressing vehement opposition to the Kendal to Windermere railway, Wordsworth had conceded that a long period of education might eventually correct this.

In 1891, the Kendal to Windermere line still coralled low-budget day trippers around Bowness and the burgeoning railway town of Windermere. No nook of English ground was completely secure from rash assault, but beyond Windermere, economics and expert nimbyism had ensured that the Lake District remained carriage-trade only. Blessed with many friends in high places, the residents of Ambleside had recently defeated the 1887 Railway Bill, which would have extended the existing line to Ambleside. Lakeland’s elite proclaimed their objection to ‘trippers’. Their presence would devalue property and drive away the better class of visitor. Ambleside would soon be no better than an inland Blackpool. In countless letters to the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Pall Mall Review and the Spectator, the factory workers of Lancashire and Yorkshire are singled out as grotesquely undesirable, in language which makes Wordsworth’s cautious attitude seem moderate. Class hatred becomes indistinguishable from racism. The ageing Ruskin was horrified. Ambleside must be reserved for the delectation of the whole country, as ‘a specimen of mountain village’. Allowed into the Lake District, factory workers would drink bottled beer. They might eat sandwiches. Leonard could have reassured his former idol on those points. Officially at least, the young men attending Colne’s Independent Church were teetotallers. As for sandwiches… It would be years before the millworkers achieved such middle-class refinement. They made do with dried fruit and ginger biscuits. Oatcakes and ‘pots of butter’ carried in jacket pockets, were rather less successful.

The first Lake District adventure was a triumph. Arranging cheap lodgings and walking heroic distances, just to reach the start of a climb, Leonard kept the price for a three day break within the 21/-s he’d promised, though this sum was for many well over a week’s wages. On the slopes of Wansfell Pike, Leonard held their Sunday afternoon service. Later that day, in the Langdales, Leonard’s address was based on the text ‘What is man that thou art mindful of him?’

Next day, the Colne party climbed Helvellyn. In the words of one millhand, ‘It were champion.’ Enough said, and preferable to some odes. This was no Sunday School outing, led by a whiskery old padre. Leonard wasn’t quite twenty-seven, a little younger than Prince William was when he led a group of homeless people up the same mountain.

The following summer, they travelled to Caernarfon and in 1893, the local paper informed its readers that Leonard was now the secretary ‘of a scheme which embodies a new idea of summer holidays.’ The project was, from the very beginning, intensely and deliberately educational. Together, Arthur Leonard, his former tutor Dr Paton, and Paton’s son Lewis presented the first National Home Reading Union holiday. Guides and teachers included local geologists. As Leonard himself acknowledged,

‘We did not conceal the fact that we were out for education. We believed in conferences and lectures’.