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

eternal hills, and are at once an insult and a challenge to the youth of these great industrial centres.’
    To most of their Conservative opponents, these arguments were nigh-on irrelevant, for they detected something far worse lurking within them. ‘The Bill really aims at the nationalisation of property,’ boomed Captain Frank Heilgers, the MP for Bury St Edmunds and the government’s chief spokesman in the debate. ‘There is more behind it than one imagines,’ he continued in the tones of a gumshoe sleuth, ‘because I notice that the names of three Front Bench Members of the Socialist party are on this Private Members Bill.’ Oh, well spotted, sir. Other Tory Knights of the Shires smelled the same rat. Brigadier General Douglas Clifton Brown (Hexham) ‘began to feel that the principles underlying the Bill were to down private property and to nationalise the land’. Robin Turton (Thirsk & Malton) thought that if the bill was successful ‘we shall be going very far towards Marxian Socialism.’
    Sir Patrick Donner (Basingstoke) apocalyptically warned that ‘unless the Bill receives the drastic amendment which, in my opinion, it will require, it will have unjust and lamentable results. I do not want to base my objections on any ludicrous argument,’ he stated, before going on to do just that: ‘it might be said that, while Scott, the explorer, crowned the South Pole with the Union Jack, we may witness every mountain top in the United Kingdom crowned with a bin placed there under the auspices of the anti-litter league.’ He also demanded financial compensation for landowners, should the bill become law.
    Not all of the Tories were quite so lacking in any appreciation of the way the world was changing. Within the party, there was – the likes of Clifton-Brown and Turton excepted – a pretty stark north–south split, as there was in practically every interest group concerned with the bill, the ramblers’ movement included. The Conservative MP for Leeds West, Vyvyan Adams, stated firmly ‘that the broad principle of the Bill is incontestable’, before going on to slyly chide his colleague Captain Heilgers for the ‘extraordinary intellectual agility’ he had displayed in the debate. ‘He made a speech,’ Adams continued, ‘which, with great respect, I would say would have been substantially out of date when this question was last discussed in the year of our Lord 1908 [it had in fact been discussed since]. He said, for example, that there is no public demand for the principle of this Bill. There may not be any public demand from Bury St Edmunds, that hive of industry. My honourable and gallant Friend represents a part of East Anglia in which, incidentally, I was born; but let him go north and then he may be able more accurately to assess the need for fresh air in those densely populated areas . . . My honourable and gallant Friend sets up the shooting interests against the need of millions of industrial workers to escape from drabness, monotony and gloom and to realise the natural treasures of our country. Never have I heard such an audacious, or witnessed so unblushing, an opposition of sectional interest to the general good.’
    With only 154 MPs in the parliamentary Labour party, the bill’s sponsors knew that they would have to rely on Liberal and Conservative votes to get the legislation enacted. For all the harrumphing, most Tories seemed to realise that some change was inevitable, and best therefore to manage it as smoothly as possible – and by smoothly, I mean most in their own interest. The bill passed its second reading and was sent off to committee, where it was torn apart by the Conservatives, and reassembled in a way that bore practically no resemblance to the original. Limited access would be granted, but only after a tortuous, and potentially expensive, process of permission was applied for. The most controversial addition, however, was to make trespass a criminal offence for the first