It was 115 years ago on Monday that Benny Rothman was born and to celebrate a blog piece on his Anti-Fascist work was published at:-
https://writemark.blogspot.com/2026/06/born-115-years-ago-today-kinder-scout.html
This was taken from the booklet BENNY ROTHMAN –a fighter for the right to roam, workers’ rights and socialism.
Read at:- https://markwrite.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/6328-benny-rothman.pdf
Today it is a chance to recall the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass and for which Benny is best known,
The Kinder Scout Mass Trespass
The Kinder Scout Mass Trespass of 1932 is for what Benny Rothman
is internationally known and which he covered in his The 1932 Kinder Scout Mass
Trespass book first published in 1982.
The protest played a significant part in the ultimately
successful campaign for public access to moors and mountains. To celebrate the
70th anniversary of the trespass, writer Roly Smith, who is the current Vice
President of the Outdoor Writers' and Photographers' Guild, wrote the following
piece in 2002 and which Unite is grateful for allowing to be republished here.
William Clough, the site of the conflict between ramblers, police and land owners on 24th April 1932 - Photograph is copyright Mark Harvey
Forgive us our trespasses
Sunday, April 24, 1932 dawned fine and clear: a perfect day
for enjoying that away-from-it-all, top-of-the-world feeling uniquely and so
easily available to ramblers on the high moorland of Kinder Scout. But 70 years
ago, the highest and wildest moorland of the Peak remained frustratingly out of
bounds to the growing army of walkers who had joined the huge rambling craze in
the surrounding cities.
Only a dozen footpaths of two miles or more crossed the open
moorland of the Peak District, and not one crossed the 15 square miles of the
ramblers’ Holy Grail, the 2,000-foot summit of the Kinder Scout plateau.
Britain was then “bumping along the bottom” of the depths of an abysmal
depression, and nothing that Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Government could do
seemed to help. Dole queues stretched in the streets of Manchester and
Sheffield, and the newspapers were full of reports of demonstrations by the
unemployed, as the jobless total topped three million. The Great Escape offered
by the misty, inviting moors of the Peak, just a sixpenny (2.5p) bus ride away
from the grimy, back-to-back terraces, was a magnetic temptation; a chance to
recreate in the true sense of the word.
Many were prepared to risk an encounter with the burly
gamekeepers who jealously guarded the moors for their grouse-shooting masters.
Trespassing had become a popular sport, adding an extra frisson of excitement
to a moorland ramble. G.H.B.Ward, the King of the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers,
had dubbed the pastime, “the gentle art of trespass,” and gained the dubious
distinction in 1923 of having a writ served on him making him apologise for
past trespasses on Kinder, and promise not to trespass again. “But the
gamekeepers are not always there,” he gleefully reported in the 1952-53 Clarion
Handbook, “and after a while, the amount of general trespassing did not
decrease.” He regarded the writ as “a greater honour than any OBE,” and added:
“May Kinder be ‘free’ in 1953, and may those who never knew this fight for
Liberty deserve the Victory by their use of, and behaviour on, Kinder Scout.”
It was against this kind of background that the famous Mass
Trespass on Kinder Scout took place. There can be no doubt now that the
trespass was politically motivated. But it was born out of a mounting sense of
frustration felt by many young outdoor people at the apparent lack of progress
made by the rambling establishment towards the long standing goal of obtaining
free access to Britain’s mountains and moorland – a goal now within sight after
the recent passing of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act. Intellectuals like
Prof. C.E.M. Joad and Prof. G.M.Trevelyan appeared to support the idea of
trespass. Joad, addressing a ramblers’ rally in The Winnats, Castleton, had
told his audience: “If you want the moors to be free, you must free them for
yourselves.” Most interpreted that as an invitation to trespass, although Joad
later denied this.
The rambling federations of Manchester and Sheffield were
opposed to the use of direct action. Both Harold Wild of the Manchester
federation and Stephen Morton of the Sheffield group went on record as saying
that they believed the trespass had put back the access campaign by 20 years.
It came at a time when they genuinely believed they were at last beginning to
break the power of the landowners by getting them to agree to meet around the
conference table.
Access campaigner Tom Stephenson, while opposing the tactic
of mass trespass, thought this was nonsense. The cynical emasculation in
Parliament of the 1939 Creech Jones Access to Mountains Bill showed how little
reasonable hope there was for access legislation at the time. Stephenson
acknowledged that the 1932 Mass Trespass was the most dramatic incident in the
long access campaign. “Yet it contributed little, if anything, to it,” he
claimed. Edward Royce, access secretary of the Manchester federation and a
leading champion of the access cause, was equally dismissive. “The year 1932
will not be remembered as a red letter year for the rambler,” he wrote soon
afterwards. “It has been a period of more than the usual froth and bubble.”
Royce’s successor as access secretary was Philip Daley,
later to become national chairman of the Ramblers’ Association and chairman of
the Access and Footpaths Committee of the Peak District National Park authority
for 19 years. As such, he was closely involved in the negotiations for the
first access agreements with the landowners in the Peak, and said he found the
mass trespass was invariably used as an argument against public access. “Such
access as we have gained,” he wrote, “owes nothing whatever to the mass
trespass….and I can say quite categorically without fear of contradiction that
the mass trespass was a positive hinderance and deterrent to the discussion and
negotiations to secure the freedom of the hills.”
The idea of a mass trespass originated during the Easter
1932 weekend camp of the Communist-inspired British Workers’ Sports Federation
held at Rowarth, on the western edge of Kinder Scout. A visiting group of
London based BWSF walkers had been turned back by abusive and threatening
gamekeepers at Yellowslacks, on the western approach to Bleaklow from Glossop.
Back at the campsite, it was agreed that if enough ramblers had been there, no
number of keepers could have turned them back. “We decided then and there to
prove the point,” recalled Benny Rothman, then secretary of the Lancashire
district of the BWSF.
Which was why that sunny Sunday morning found Rothman, then
a 20-year-old unemployed motor mechanic, and his best friend Woolfie Winnick,
cycling out of Manchester to the friendly village of Hayfield, which shelters
under the western ramparts of Kinder Scout. They were already wanted men,
having used their bikes to avoid police waiting at Manchester’s London Road
station with a restraining injunction against the event, which had been
deliberately well-publicised by Rothman in the Manchester newspapers. The bells
of St. Matthews Georgian parish church were ringing out as Benny and Woolfie planned
the event which was to change the course of rambling history over a cup of tea
in the village tearoom.
What happened next is now firmly established as part of
rambling folklore. The march of about 400 ramblers from Hayfield Recreation
Ground to Bowden Bridge quarry, (where a plaque unveiled on the 50th
anniversary now commemorates the event); the impromptu speech by Rothman when
the main speaker failed to arrive; the joyful, arm-in-arm, singing procession
up the Kinder Road by Nab Brow above the reservoir and into Wiliam Clough; and
the sudden break-out onto the forbidden ground of Sandy Heys at the prearranged
signal of three blasts on Woolfie’s whistle.
Tom Stephenson always
insisted that the trespassers never reached the summit of Kinder Scout, which
is two miles away and about 400 feet higher, and the available evidence seems
to bear him out. Rothman himself said that the body of ramblers was about
halfway up William Clough on the Hayfield to Snake Inn public footpath, which
had been negotiated by the Hayfield and Kinder Scout Ancient Footpaths
Association as long ago as 1897, when the trespass actually began.
At Woolfie’s signal, they started to scramble up the steep
slopes of Sandy Heys in open formation. A line of between 20 and 30 keepers was
waiting for them on the brow of the hil. The few, undistinguished scuffles
which fo lowed resulted in one temporary keeper, Edward Beevers, being knocked
to the ground, injuring an ankle. Press photographs taken at the time actua ly
show concerned ramblers coming to his assistance. John Watson, one of the group
of stick-wielding keepers waiting on Sandy Heys said afterwards: “We could hear
them cheering and yeling as if they had achieved something, when they had
achieved nothing at al. They had only trespassed about 100 yards – they never
got halfway up the clough.”
Rothman later agreed with Stephenson that the so-called
“victory meeting,” when the Hayfield group met up with others from Sheffield,
who had come by the much more difficult route across Kinder’s peaty plateau
from Edale, was held near Ashop Head, at least two miles north west of Kinder’s
hard-to-find summit. But in the end, what was more important was that they had
trespassed in such a public and positive way, rather than how far they had
trespassed.
The trespassers agreed that they would march back to
Hayfield “with their heads held high” and not disperse like a band of
criminals. “It was a demonstration for the rights of ordinary people to walk on
land stolen from them in earlier times,” Rothman was to write later. “We were
proud of our effort and proudly marched back the way we had come.”
The police, who had declined to take part in the scramble up
Kinder’s steep flanks, were waiting in a line across Kinder Road when the
trespassers returned. Five people were arrested, in addition to John Anderson,
a rambler actually opposed to the trespass who had just come along to see what
would happen, but was apparently arrested when he went to assist the injured
Beevers. They were variously charged with public order offences such as riotous
assembly, but significantly, not with trespass.
The story of the
trial of the trespassers at Derby Assizes is as riddled with the same kind of
class prejudice as the rest of the event. The judge, Sir Edward Acton, was true
to the best traditions of English justice. When it was revealed that a copy of
a book by Lenin had been found in the possession of one of the accused (Tona
Gilett) when arrested, he innocently enquired, to the merriment of the court:
“Isn’t that the Russian gentleman?”
Rothman’s self-conducted defence, prepared in the darkness
of a Leicester prison cell, was a masterpiece of open-air, working-class
rhetoric. “We ramblers, after a hard week’s work in smoky towns and cities, go
out rambling for relaxation, a breath of fresh air, a little sun shine,” he
told the court. “But we find when we go out that the finest rambling country is
closed to us, just because certain individuals wish to shoot for about ten days
a year.”
Ironically, it was the severity of the sentences handed down
by the judge on the five young defendants – ranging between two and six (*)
months’ imprisonment – which was to unite the ramblers’ cause. Even those
implacably opposed to the trespass were appalled by the “savage” sentences, and
the Manchester federation were among many who appealed to the Home Secretary
for a remission. A writer in the Manchester Guardian compared the affair to a
university student rag, pointing out that people arrested during rags were not
usually sent to prison. The Clarion Handbook of 1933-34, reported that the
stiff sentences handed out “did not bring laurels to the other side” and
thousands of ramblers were reported to have gone to view the scene of the
trespass immediately after the event.
The annual ramblers access demonstration in The Winnats a
few weeks later drew a record 10,000 people, and further mass trespasses
followed at Abbey Brook in the Upper Derwent, and on Stanage Edge, but
significantly, no arrests were made. Indisputably, the mass trespass on Kinder
in 1932 bought the access issue to a head, and acted as an important catalyst
to the whole National Parks and access to the countryside campaign which
eventually led to legislation in 1949. When the Peak District National Park authority
came into being in April, 1951, it lost no time in addressing the access
problem, and it was no accident that the first-ever access agreement allowing
walkers the freedom to roam was signed just a year later, covering 5,780 acres
of Kinder Scout and Broadlee Bank Tor. Today, more than 80 square miles of
moorland are covered by such agreements.
The “Right to Roam” Countryside and Rights of Way Act of
2000 can be seen as the crowning culmination of the efforts of those brave
pioneering trespassers, though few will live to see its enactment. There can be
little doubt either, that the Kinder trespass has entered the realms of the
mythology of the outdoor movement, giving its few survivors a totally unsought
aura of martyrdom.
Roly Smith
* John Anderson received the longest sentence for assaulting
the gamekeeper, a charge he disputed to the end of his life and one which
Derbyshire’s Chief Constable publicly stated in 1994 he was innocent of.
Who else attended the Trespass?
Jimmie Miller was there. He is better known as Ewan MacColl,
the singer who wrote and recorded The Manchester Rambler. MacColl later married
Peggy Seeger.
AJP Taylor, who in 1932 was a Manchester University
lecturer, later became a distinguished historian.
Clem Beckett Clem ‘Dare Devil’ Beckett, the man who rode the
Wall of Death on his motorbike.
Benny Rothman is, of course best, and widely known, for the
mass trespass. Yet according to Harry Rothman “my Dad barely mentioned it as he
always had too much on. He knew it was important but he was engaged in things
that were immediately important such as trade union and Communist Party work.”
Although Benny had not chosen to go to prison he did utilise his time there productively by learning shorthand. This was to prove a very useful skill when he became a workplace union representative, allowing him to constantly challenge management when they changed their attitudes during negotiations and sought to dispute they had previously concluded an agreement.
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