Hardy souls undeterred by hostelling hardships

By jabberley

The winter weather might cause chaos these days, but it was fun for a generation of young adventurers.

E VEN the heaviest snowfall didn't stop hardy youth hostellers reaching their goal in the days when a YHA membership card was a passport to adventure.

Potteries YHA veteran Ron Scholes recalls trudging through snow to the old Oakenclough hostel, near Macclesfield, after leaving a bus at Flash – the highest village in England.

At Oakenclough, Ron was astonished to meet a cyclist in shorts. His legs were frozen blue after riding to the hostel from Bolton in Lancashire.

Gladys Maitland, another YHA enthusiast of a previous generation, also remembers how they were undeterred by snowstorms more than 50 years ago.

"We never worried about a bit of snow," she says. "We got through to Hartington hostel on our bikes when snowdrifts were up to the roofs of cottages."

Gladys, now 89, was a YHA member with her late husband Fred from the 1940s, when the movement was still in its early years and many hostels were classed as basic – though spartan might have been more accurate.

I myself visited Dimmingsdale youth hostel, near Cheadle, in the 1950s when we slept in old hen houses lit by oil lamps. We washed in cold water from a tub and cooked our own meals.

Among my 35 companions that weekend were Tony and Margaret Garibaldi, stalwarts of the flourishing Stoke-on-Trent YHA group, which then boasted 1,500 members.

"At that time most of the girls who went to Dimmingsdale took their hot water bottles," she recalls. "I used the water from mine to have a wash in the morning.

"It was a primitive place to keep warm, although when we were in our teens and twenties we didn't feel the cold much at all."

Retired teacher Pam Lunt has similar memories of nights spent at Dimmingsdale in the 1950s, although for her the coldest experience was at a hostel in North Wales.

"There was only one paraffin heater to keep our dormitory warm," she says. "During the night it kept moving round from one bed to another.

"Wherever we went the girls had to rough it like the boys and do the same sort of jobs like cleaning and painting. But it was a cheap way to enjoy yourself and get out into the country."

Both Pam and Margaret joined working parties at another local hostel at Sharpcliffe Hall, a large 17th century mansion near Ipstones, where visitors sat round a log fire in the common room.

However, the 100-bed hostel had a longstanding problem with water supplies, which the city group tried to solve by digging a mile-long channel to pipe water up from the Coombes brook.

They dammed the stream to provide a head of water to power a hydraulic ram, but this was twice swept away in storms. The project was dropped and the hostel eventually closed in 1954.

A pivotal figure in the growth of the YHA in Staffordshire was Laurie Landon, a Longton teacher who championed the cause in his home county and travelled the world as an ambassador for the movement. In 1977 his international work for the YHA was recognised when presented with Germany's highest award, the Richard Schirrmann Medal, named after the founder of youth hostelling.

Laurie's widow Dorothy says when he joined the YHA in 1930, at the age of 12, he was given the membership number 1,012. At that time the charge of an overnight bed was 1s (5p).

After getting married, Laurie and Dorothy stayed in 54 different countries, although the couple preferred small and simple hostels wherever they went.

"One remote hostel in the Lake District stands out in my mind," says Dorothy. "In the morning we had to wash in an ice-cold stream which ran down the hillside in Ennerdale."

Ron Scholes remembers filling a bucket with water from a stream while staying at a hostel in Northumberland where there was no heating, a stone-flagged floor and a primus stove for cooking.

"We sat and talked to complete strangers under oil lamps and had a sing-song round a stove pot.

"I remember going off into Shropshire with about £4 in my pocket, a tin of sardines and a packet of instant mashed potatoes. I did a week's hostelling on that."

Ron took a prominent role in a dramatic episode in 1958 when a party from the Stoke-on-Trent group climbed Carnedd Llewellyn, the second highest mountain in Snowdonia. Near the summit they spotted a climber who was stuck on an area of smooth ice. With the helper of others, Ron reached him in a few minutes and got the man to safety.

"He'd been there for several hours and was in a precarious position," Ron recalls. "He might have gone down the mountainside if he'd moved, so it was fortunate we turned up."