review on the shelf
THE FIGHT TO ROAM
Fight for It Now, by David Wilkinson, published by Signal Books (RRP £25)
National parks are the jewels in the countryside’s crown. They didn’t just happen; they had to be fought for. One man who did was trade unionist Benny Rothman, whose leadership of the 1932 Kinder Scout Trespass led to his and four fellow ramblers’ imprisonment. This sparked such public outrage that it brought to the fore the issue of countryside access.
No one did more to ensure we have National parks than Ilkley-born John Dower, whose lifelong battle for their creation, only finally won two years after he lost his life to tuberculosis (TB) in October 1947.
The story is powerfully captured by David Wilkinson in his biography that charts the long journey between conception and realisation of a dream that many others were happy to make a reality.
Civil servant and architect Dower had a blue plaque unveiled in his honour
at Malham YHA late last year on the 75th anniversary of the December 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act.
Building on the (Dr Christopher) Addison Committee report of 1931 that proposed Britain designated National Parks, but which was overlooked during a period of great economic crisis, Dower, already involved in discussions about national planning, conducted extensive surveys of SW England on behalf of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and Somerset County Council.
Forty thousand copies of his The case for National Parks in Great Britain,1938 pamphlet was well received and was a significant boost to the standing committee on national parks, established in 1935 by numerous open-air groups.
When war was declared, Dower volunteered but a year later he was declared permanently unfit for active
service with what was eventually diagnosed as TB. It meant that in March 1941 he joined what later became the Ministry of Works and Planning.
With the coalition government containing trade unionists, all determined amid the horrors of war to offer a vision of the future better than in 1920s and 1930s, he was charged with writing a White Paper. This established the key National Park principles of agricultural and recreational development, retention of characteristic landscapes and protection of wildlife and buildings in extensive areas of beautiful and relatively wild country.
Over the following years these aims and how to implement them had to be negotiated with government and various interest groups such as the NFU. Although the final legislation would not have been exactly what Dower wanted, the 1949 Countryside Act was a massive improvement on what had gone before. Much later the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 strengthened the right to roam across some of the most beautiful countryside in England and Wales.
FIND OUT MORE
Download the free Unite booklet:
https://bit.ly/4k7sCnn
Watch Mass Trespass:
https://bit.ly/4mcH4N0
46 uniteLANDWORKER Summer 2025
n By Mark Metcalf
Alamy
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