TRAVELLER’S REST
FROM WHOLESOME BUNKHOUSES TO BUDGET PLACES TO STAY IN THE CITY, YOUTH HOSTELS HAVE COME A LONG WAY
The teacher’s hope, surely, was that the five-day visit would see us 11-year-olds switched on to the joys of geology. Field trips to the Jurassic coast and its fossils by day, sitting around debating the finer points of evolution theory by evening. His dream was dashed by a more immediate fixation: using the copious front lawn of Beer Youth Hostel as a pitch on which to play football against a group of impossibly athletic German boys. The result need not detain us.
Instead, let us reflect on the fact that our teacher’s dejection would not have been shared by the Youth Hostel Association’s founders. The YHA was born on 10 April 1930 into a world of hands-across-the-water internationalism, fuelled by a ‘never again’ response to the horrors of the Great War. How they’d have thrilled to witness English and German kids in the communal kitchen, washing dishes and preparing meals, 50 years later. Especially if they didn’t have to sample the results.
The first hostel opened in December 1930 at Llanrwst in North Wales. And swiftly closed again, thanks to a farmer who saw no reason for ensuring drinking water didn’t mix with manure. Subsequently, growth was rapid, with 75 hostels established by the end of the next year. Accommodation was a shilling a night, with attendees required to be members, bring neither alcohol nor car, bed down in single sex dorms and undertake housekeeping ‘duties’.
Though internationalism was certainly in the air, the fundamental driving force behind the YHA lay close to home: the belief that shaping a ‘land fit for heroes’ shouldn’t end at the back gate of the new council house, but offer access to the rolling hills beyond the garden fence; a sense that our green and pleasant land was a common inheritance. Its stated charitable objective: “To help all, especially young people of limited means, to a greater knowledge, love and care of the countryside”.
A YHA pamphlet published in 1932 insisted that to best appreciate “this amazing England, a man must travel it slowly and keep his intimate touch with its age and loveliness. To know it thus, mile after mile, is to love it deeply; and to love it is to safe-guard its beauty, for ourselves and for those who come after us.”
By 1939, the YHA was faring somewhat better than the idea of nation speaking peace unto nation, with 83,000 members enjoying a choice of 297 hostels. By 1950 this had risen to more than 200,000 members and 303 hostels. This was the golden age of the YHA, when the organisation’s paternalistic concern for members’ health and moral fibre still held currency.
FIVE GO OFF TO A HOSTEL
Nothing better summed up its Blyton-esque ethos than the YHA Songbook, first published in 1952. “Many a common room sing-song has been marred because few of the hostelers know more than the first verses of the songs,” it lamented. “All too frequently the item that begins as a rousing chorus ends as a faltering solo.” Thus, the collection of YHA-endorsed lyrics. Not music, though – it was assumed that someone would know the tune. To all joining in the chorus it must have seemed that these innocent, unselfconscious days would go on
for ever. And then the following year Elvis entered Sun Records. Another year yet and Brando was starring in On the Waterfront. Cue the rise of the teenager and an end to the age of deference. Cheap package holidays drew nigh. By the end of the decade, what had been the norm had become an anachronism.
Acknowledgement of the age of the car belatedly arrived in 1970, with members allowed to park for a fee, but most of the ground rules remained. What, in another age, seemed like kindly concern now felt authoritarian.
In 1991 your correspondent took a friend from Louisiana to the youth hostel in Llanberis, the better to explore Snowdonia. A trip memorable for two reasons: glorious walking and American incredulity at being instructed by a gimlet-eyed warden to be back by curfew, or else. That, and having to bunk down with 17 snoring hikers in a room infused with the smell of damp woollen socks drying on a radiator.
Ten years later came the foot-and-mouth outbreak. Some rural hostels remained closed all year, visitor numbers fell by a third and the YHA lost more than £5m. In 2006 it announced plans to close 32 hostels. In its traditional rural guise, the organisation’s future looked bleak. Change was required. So if Mohammed, Mandy et al wouldn’t come to the mountain...
LIVING FOR THE CITY
Once upon a time, youth hostelling was all about getting away from it all. Today, it’s increasingly about getting right to the heart of it. In the 1930s, cities were chokingly smoky places from which workers fled to breathe deep in countryside or beach resort. Today, the YHA’s most popular hostels are in places such as London, Manchester, Bristol. While dormitories are still in place for the budgetconscious, private rooms abound, often en-suite. Since 2010, the majority of youth hostels have been licensed to sell alcohol, and wifi is pretty much ubiquitous. Cast your eye down the ‘Metro Menu’ at the Bristol hostel, promising bespoke pizzas and tapas, and the closest relation to the hands-on culinary days of yore is a build-your-own burger option. Adapting to an age where the customer is right, not ripe for a lecture, has seen the YHA thriving anew, with more than 200 properties located across England and Wales. Even the wheel of internationalism has turned full circle, with cheap city-centre accommodation and the promise of comradeship making hostels a magnet for young overseas travellers. Today’s YHA is online at yha.org.uk
“Seventeen snoring hikers in a room infused with the smell of damp woollen socks”