YHAgroup.org.uk

A frequent criticism of YHA in recent years, on these pages and elsewhere, is their failure to communicate with the membership. The blog and forum added to the website just over a year ago were a step in the right direction, but many members continue to miss the paper publications of years gone by.

How welcome, then, to find on my doormat a new incarnation of an old friend. The new YHA News is a twelve-page colour newsletter combining news from the network and features about hostelling at home and abroad. It’s still a piece of marketing of course, but it feels more like a magazine and less like a sales brochure than Discover ever did.

Of particular interest to readers of this site is a letter from Margaret Bray, now living in New Zealand, remembering her days in an (unnamed) YHA Local Group just after the war:

For Ken and me, with no secure home life, our local Youth Hostels association groups which sprang up after the war became family, and for many other teenagers feeling similarly displaced. Several members, like us, came from broken homes, a few were young men demobbed from the armed forces, most of us probably feeling a bit lost after six fractured years of war. We met socially every Thursday night in a nearby hall. Spare cash was non-existent, but Youth Hostels were cheap We democratically organized ourselves with a committee and a constitution. We organized our own programmes.

Thriving from the friendship, we hostelled by either biking or walking as a group almost every weekend and summer holiday, leaving bombed out London behind to explore the English countryside. We’d wander down to the village pub in the evening, making a glass of sweet-and-sour cider, or a glass of beer last all the evening before going back to our dormitories. We even spent our Christmasses together at a hostel despite them closing between ten and five. We went for walks round the villages to fill in those winter hours outdoors and made our own simple fun in the evenings with games, ghost stories, or playing cards. On Christmas Eve we went to the poorly attended midnight service in those old village churches, often doubling the congregation, to the vicar’s delight.

We looked out for each other, affirmed each other, knew the good and bad sides of us all. More like brothers and sisters really. After all not much glamour remains after hours of cycling, walking or climbing in pouring rain, or coping with punctures, tiredness, grumpiness, sunburn or getting lost. My father always thought, wrongly, that we were “up-to-no-good” but romance did of course eventually blossom, and thirteen couples married in our early twenties, almost all proving successful and rewarding.

An experience not entirely unrecognisable to YHA group members today, I think. It’s just a shame that they fail to point out that hostelling groups aren’t some vanished artefact of the 1940s and 50s, but alive and well and meeting in a town near you! Oh well, maybe next issue.

An accompanying questionnaire invites feedback on YHA’s communcations, and what you’d like to read about in the future. All-in-all, I think this marks a very promising development in YHA’s relationship with its members.

An article in the Shropshire Star marks hostelling’s one hundredth anniversary with stories of  hostels past and present. Various former hostellers get misty eyed about the days of “metal bunk beds, itchy blankets and wardens who enforce compulsory chores.” How idyllic it must have been:

There was absolutely no bad or suspect behaviour of any sort. Everyone was self-sufficient and individually motivated. The fee to stay was a couple of shillings only and the place was a clean and tidy home from home.

However, they also take a look at the hostels of today, and seem pleasantly surprised by a visit to Coalport YH:

Where is the 6am wake-up call and the bleary-eyed breakfast making? Why are there as many mature ramblers as there are exuberant youths?

These days it is run not by a warden but by a manageress by the name of Cath Young. Like many YHAs, the one at Coalport has undergone a transformation and after being closed for five months it now has en suite bathrooms, wi-fi internet access in the rooms, state-of-the-art kitchen facilities and even family rooms.

Despite this, the youth hostel ethos remains the same today as it was when the movement was established 100 years ago.

“In many ways it has not changed,” says Cath.

“The curtains are a bit snazzier and it’s got central heating but at the core its principles are the same.”

Amen to that, Cath.

The bunkhouse at All Stretton is also described in glowing terms, and a map shows all six hostels located in the county. After the pasting delivered by The Times last month it’s good to see a return to positive coverage of youth hostels. Who knows, it might even attract a few new members to Telford & Shropshire Group.

BBC News’ online Magazine has published a short slideshow in honour of the youth hostel movement’s “100 years of bunk beds and washing up”. There’s some interesting pictures of hostelling days gone by, as well as shots of Manchester (looking rather grim) and National Forest to show the hostels of today.

If you think you’ve had a hard time trudging through the snow in the last week or two, an article in The Sentinel recalls tougher times:

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.”

Of course you’d be able to thaw out once you reached the hostel, well, probably…

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.

That certainly puts today’s biggest YHA groups into perspective, I’m not aware of any that are bigger than a couple of hundred members. Wherever did Stoke group hold their Christmas social?

It’s nice to see some tales of hostelling past appearing in the papers, but a shame that it’s not tied in with how you can still go hostelling today. Still, their website accepts comments, so why not join me in writing in to rectify that fault.

On the YHA forum yesterday, the following announcement was made of an important development for those with an interest in the history of the Association:

The YHA has a developing Historical Archive. For the past three years this has been run by three volunteers who make occasional trips to Matlock to look after the growing number of materials in this very significant collection of English and Welsh social history. I am privileged to be a member of this team. The priorities are to care for what is already there, to catalogue it (well under way) and to search out new sources of YHA archival material.

While the Archive is being set up it is not really available for public viewing, though accessibility to some of the material in the future is a point under discussion. However, we do our utmost to help with historical queries.

In the last few months large new collections have been donated to the Archive, and an excellent roomy, atmospherically stable and secure store has been made available at YHA Head Office.

The Historical Archive consists of a very large collection of photographs, drawings, slides and postcards (in the course of sorting, cataloguing and some digitising of rare items), national and regional handbooks (missing some from the 1930s) and annual reports. Regional Annual Reports before 1965 are very well represented; after that there are gaps, especially after 1972. The individual 19 regions before 1965 have patchy representation in minute books, local YHA magazines, newspaper reports and ephemera; Northumberland and Tyneside, Birmingham and London Regions are very good, for instance, while other regions such as Devon, Cornwall, Gloucester, Somerset & Exmoor, West Riding, etc., are hardly represented at all in official records. The important London Region News publication has large gaps in the sequence, particularly for later years.

There is a growing collection in the Archive catalogue of hostellers’ memories, personal logs of holidays, photographic albums of YHA activities and hostels, etc. These items are especially prized, and new material would be very welcome. There are also significant amounts of publicity material, leaflets, film strips, magazine runs and so on. (Some Rucksack Magazines, 1930s-50s, and the associated Bulletins are in short supply). There is a small collection of YHA cast triangles, signs, badges, hostel closure items, membership cards and rubber stamps, and even a remarkable professional-standard scale model of Twyssenden Manor Youth Hostel (closed 25 years ago).

Any new material for the Archive would be much appreciated (and acknowledged), and can be sent to: YHA Historical Archive, Trevelyan House, Matlock, Derbyshire, DE4 3YH. We would also welcome any ‘leads’ helping in detective work to find some of the missing regional items. Loans for the purpose of digitising could also be very useful. You can contact me through my email link below for more information.

Additionally, I am always happy to try to help with historical queries; do get in touch via my email, in the first instance.

If you have a stack of YHA memorabilia gathering dust in a corner, I’m sure the archivist (so far identified only as “John”) and his two colleagues would be happy to hear from you.