Partnership or Co-operation? Family, Politics and Strenuousness in the pre-First World War Co-operative Holidays Association

Abstract

The Co-operative Holidays Association (CHA), established by the Nonconformist social reformers T. Arthur Leonard and John Brown Paton in 1893, is well known as playing an important role in the development of mountain leisure in the early twentieth century. Unlike many other organizations with an emphasis on ‘strenuous’ physical activity in the outdoors, the CHA attracted many women, and offered mixed-gender sociability to its members. This article utilizes this organization to interrogate the role of domestic cultures in outdoors leisure. Domesticity is highlighted as a central set of performances, structuring participants' practices in the ‘guesthouse’ and mountain landscapes alike. Practices of ‘mutual help’ derived from contemporary notions of companionate marriage ‘partnership’, along with a more general atmosphere of informal domestic sociability, encouraged participants to engage in practices which could be integrated into the co-operative, Christian Socialist politics of the organization. At the same time, the encouragement of domestic ‘comradeship’ helped to legitimize the holiday as an acceptable social space in which to meet future (hetero-)sexual and marital partners. The integration of domesticity into the practices of the CHA highlights ‘mountains, moors and the quiet countryside’ as sites for the emergence of muscular and domestic masculinities and femininities in the early twentieth century.

Acknowledgements

This paper has emerged from my AHRC-funded doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Manchester in 2011, under the supervision of Dr Maxwell Jones and Dr Leif Jerram. In addition, I would like to thank the staff at the Greater Manchester County Record Office, the participants in the conference panels from which this special issue has arisen, and Sport in History's insightful and important comments on the article. Needless to say, any errors remain my own.

Notes

1. J.S. Marsden, ‘Anticipations and Impressions’, in ‘Memories of Hebden: A Wet Week in Wharfedale, September 14–21 1918’, ed. J.H. Forster, Greater Manchester County Record Office: Countrywide Holidays Association, B/CHA/PHT/3/113, 5–7. This archive will shortly be relocated to Manchester Central Library as part of Archives+.

2. J.S. Marsden, ‘Anticipations and Impressions’, in ‘Memories of Hebden: A Wet Week in Wharfedale, September 14–21 1918’, ed. J.H. Forster, Greater Manchester County Record Office: Countrywide Holidays Association, B/CHA/PHT/3/113, 5–7. This archive will shortly be relocated to Manchester Central Library as part of Archives+, 7.

3. Elsie Acomb, ‘Excursion to Barden Towers’, 11–13; H.I. Dallas, ‘The Gentlemen's Evening’, 14–15; J.S. Marsden, ‘The Ladies’ Evening’, 19–20; George W. Gaythorpe, ‘Some Tramp’, 21–4; H.I. Dallas, ‘The “Tale” of a Lost Coat’, 24; Anon., ‘Do you Remember?’, 32, all in Forster, ‘Memories of Hebden’.

4. A. James Hammerton, ‘Pooterism or Partnership? Marriage and Masculine Identity in the Lower Middle Class, 1870-1920’, The Journal of British Studies 3 (1999): 291–321.

5. Kathleen E. McCrone, Playing the Game: Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 1988); Rebecca Brown, Women on High: Pioneers of Mountaineering (Boston, MA: Appalachian Mountain Club Books, 2002); Ingrid Runggaldier, Frauen im Aufstieg: Auf Spurensuche in der Alpingeschichte (Bozen: Edition Raetia, 2011); Tanja Wirz, Gipfelstürmerinnen: Eine Geschlechtergeschichte des Alpinismus in der Schweiz 1840–1940 (Baden: Hier + Jetzt, 2007).

6. Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 117–34.

7. Jennifer Hargreaves, Sporting Females: Critical Issues in the History and Sociology of Women's Sports (London: Routledge, 1994); Allen Guttmann, ‘Sport, Politics and the Engaged Historian’, Journal of Contemporary History 38, no. 3 (2003), 370; Jill Marie Maclachlan, ‘Peak Performances: Cultural and Autobiographical Constructions of the Victorian Female Mountaineer’ (Ph.D. diss, University of British Colombia, 2004); Patricia Vertinsky, ‘Women, Sport and Exercise in the 19th Century’, in Women and Sport: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds D. Margaret Costa and Sharon R. Guthrie (Leeds: Human Kinetics, 1994), 66.

8. Richard Holt, ‘The Amateur Body and the Middle-Class Man: Work, Health and Style in Victorian Britain’, Sport in History 26, no. 3 (2006): 352–69.

9. John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 187–9; Martin Francis, ‘The Domestication of the Male? Recent Research on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Masculinity’, The Historical Journal 45, no. 3 (2002): 637–52.

10. Melanie Tebbutt, ‘Rambling and Manly Identity in Derbyshire's Dark Peak, 1880s–1920s’, The Historical Journal 49, no. 4 (2006): 1125–53; Peter Hansen, ‘Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain’, The Journal of British Studies 34, no. 3 (1995): 300–24; James Anthony Mangan and James Walvin, introduction to Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 4.

11. Holt, Sport and the British, 126–128; Jeffrey Hill, Sport in History: An Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 80.

12. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 39–40.

13. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 62–148.

14. Tosh, A Man's Place, 170–94.

15. Obtaining male participants was a constant concern among the CHA leadership, and men tended to form a 40% minority. See Wendy Joy Darby, Landscape and Identity: Geographies of Nation and Class in England (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 160–1.

16. For the early history of the CHA see Robert Snape, ‘The Co-operative Holidays Association and the Cultural Formation of Countryside Leisure Practice’, Leisure Studies 23, no. 2 (2004): 143–58: 145–7; Harvey Taylor, A Claim on the Countryside: A History of the British Outdoor Movement (Keele: Keele University Press, 1997), 191–225; Darby, Landscape and Identity, 158–163; David Prynn, ‘The Clarion Clubs, Rambling and the Holiday Associations in Britain since the 1890s’, Journal of Contemporary History 11, nos. 2/3 (1976): 65–77: 71–75.

17. See Emily H. Smith, ‘The C.H.A. Notes of Emily H. Smith’, B/CHA/HIS/10, 1.

18. ‘C.H.A. Centres and Membership’, Comradeship 5, no. 5 (1912), 80.

19. B/CHA/ADM/12/1; T.A. Leonard, ‘Outgrowths’, Comradeship: The Magazine of the Co-operative Holidays Association, in Connection with the National Home Reading Union 1, no. 1 (1907), 2.

20. David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion, 1998), 62–72; Gavin Parker, ‘The Negotiation of Leisure Citizenship: Leisure Constraints, Moral Regulation and the Mediation of Rural Place’, Leisure Studies 26, no. 1 (2007): 1–22.

21. Snape, ‘Co-operative Holidays Association’, 149–52. Compare with Anon., St Michaels’ Parish Journal, May 1898, B/CHA/HIS/16/1, 2; Anon., Scarborough Mercury 1898, B/CHA/HIS/16/1, 3; Anon., ‘Co-operation in Holidays: A Summer Experiment’, Echoes, 1902, 131–3, B/CHA/HIS/16/1, 8a–8c; Anon., ‘New Wharfedale Holiday Home: An Interesting Movement’, Craven News, June 18, 1909, B/CHA/HIS/16/1, 23; Franz Grämer, ‘Ein Studienaufenthalt in England’, 192, B/CHA/HIS/16/1, 26a.

22. ‘Minutes of the Directors Meetings of ‘Co-operative Holidays’ Guest Houses Limited’, B/CHA/ADM/2, 11–82, cross-referenced to 1901 census records. Although £1 may have excluded some, it was about two-thirds the price of a holiday with the CHA. Leonard explicitly asked previous CHA holidaymakers to contribute, and many of those in white-collar operations would have earned little more than a skilled labourer. Gregory Anderson, Victorian Clerks (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), 20–1.

23. Taylor, A Claim on the Countryside, 3; Tebbutt, ‘Rambling’, 1137–8; Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, ‘Civic Cultures and Civic Colleges in Victorian England’, in The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain, ed. Martin Daunton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 345; Peter Bailey, ‘White Collars, Gray Lives? The Lower Middle Class Revisited’, Journal of British Studies 38, no. 3 (1999), 284–5.

24. Darby, Landscape and Identity, 160–2; Snape, ‘Co-operative Holidays Association’, 151–3. However, see Jill Liddington, The Life and Times of a Respectable Rebel: Selina Cooper, 1864–1946 (London: Virago, 1984), 80–8.

25. See notes 14 and 21; for instance, T.A. Leonard, ‘From the General Secretary’, Comradeship 2, no. 5 (1909), 65.

26. Snape, ‘Co-operative Holidays Association’, 153.

27. Sarah Wintle, ‘Horses, Bikes and Automobiles: New Woman on the Move’, in The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin de Siècle Feminisms, eds Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 66–78.

28. Smith, ‘C.H.A. Notes’, 1; T. Arthur Leonard, Adventures in Holiday Making: Being the Story of the Rise and Development of a People's Holiday Movement (London: Holiday Fellowship, 1934), 135; Fanny N. Pringle, ‘A Week Among the Lakes: The National Home Reading Union Summer Holiday’ in The Independent and Nonconformist, August 31, 1893, B/CHA/HIS/17, 164.

29. Many thanks to Douglas Hope for this information. See also Robert Snape, ‘The National Home Reading Union’, Journal of Victorian Culture 7, no. 1 (2002), 102–3.

30. Eliza M. Champness, ‘Associated Holidays’, Joyful News, B/CHA/HIS/16/1, 1.

31. Domestic Committee Minutes 1897–1911, B/CHA/ADM/3/1; Emily H. Smith, ‘In Memoriam: Miss Beveridge: Nov. 20, 1861 – July 22nd, 1902’, N.H.R.U. Magazine, Oct. 1902, B/CHA/16/1, 16.

32. J., ‘Holiday Co-operation’, High Peak Advertiser, April 29, 1904, B/CHA/HIS/16/1, 29.

33. Domestic Committee Minutes 1897–1911, 59.

34. For the role of performance in identity construction in gender, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 10th edn (London: Routledge, 1999), xiv–xv, 33. For the role of performance in (gendered) tourist mobilities, see Wirz, Gipfelstürmerinnen, 17–20; Tim Edensor, ‘Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism: (Re)producing Tourist Space and Practice’, Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 59–81; for the role of performance in the spaces of the early-twentieth century home, see Grace Lees-Maffei, ‘Accommodating “Mrs Three-in-one”: Homemaking, Home Entertaining and Domestic Advice Literature in Post-War Britain’, Women's History Review 16, no. 5 (2007), 726–8.

35. Julie E. Fromer, ‘”Deeply Indebted to the Tea-Plant”: Representations of English National Identity in Victorian Histories of Tea’, Victorian Literature and Culture 36 (2008), 531.

36. Julie E. Fromer, ‘”Deeply Indebted to the Tea-Plant”: Representations of English National Identity in Victorian Histories of Tea’, Victorian Literature and Culture 36 (2008), 532; Tamara Ketabgian, ‘“Foreign Tastes and “Manchester Tea Parties”: Eating and Drinking with the Victorian Lower Orders’, in Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives of Consumption, 1700–1900, eds Tamara S. Wagner and Narin Hassan (Plymouth: Lexington, 2007), 126–128.

37. Harry Lowerison, ‘A Reminiscence’, in A Souvenir of a Holiday Spent in the Guest Houses of the Co-operative Holidays Association at The Abbey House, Whitby, Yorkshire, and “Ardenconnel”, Row, Scotland (n.d.), B/CHA/PUB/13/2, 3. Kevin Manton, ‘Establishing the Fellowship: Harry Lowerison and Ruskin School Home, a Turn-of-the-Century Socialist and His Educational Experiment’, History of Education 1 (1997): 53–70. See also Redfern, ‘A Social Holiday’, B/CHA/PUB/13/2, 1–4; Anon., ‘An Ideal Holiday: A Week of Co-operative Holiday-Making’, Young Oxford, 423–5, B/CHA/HIS/16/1, 10b.

38. L.T., ‘At Whitby’, Comradeship 7, no. 2 (1913), 29. The gender of L.T. is given in the text. See also D.R., ‘With the C.H.A. in the Peak’, Comradeship 3, no. 5 (1910), 69; D.T., ‘Co-operative Holidays’ (n. d., early First World War), B/CHA/PUB/13/2, 3–4.

39. ‘The Co-operative Holidays Association: A New House at Hayfield’, Manchester Guardian, January 4, 1902, 5; Hardwick Drummond Rawnsley, ‘Address to the Annual Conference of the Association at Liverpool, January 3rd 1903’, B/CHA/HIS/16/1, 15–16; Redfern, ‘A Social Holiday’, 2; ‘The New Fellowship’, quoted in Summer Holidays Organized by the Co-operative Holidays Association, in Connection with the National Home Reading Union, Buxton, 1897, B/CHA/PUB/5/1, 1.

40. Snape, ‘Co-operative Holidays’, 151–3.

41. F. Ackroyd, ‘My First C.H.A. Holiday’, Comradeship 4, no. 2 (1910), 23–5.

42. Janette, ‘Holidays for Teachers’, People's Friend, May 16, 1910, 416, B/CHA/HIS/16/1, 30.

43. T. Arthur Leonard, ‘From the General Secretary: “Local Secretary” v. “Host”’, Comradeship 5, no. 4 (1912), 51.

44. Anon., ‘Co-operative Holidays Association: Inauguration of Scottish Guest-House’, Glasgow Herald, October 6, 1899, 12.

45. The literature here is vast, but to name some relevant and classic studies: Eileen Green, Sandra Hebron and Diana Woodward, Women's Leisure: What Leisure? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990); Claire Langhamer, Women's Leisure in England, 1920–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 29.

46. Hammerton, ‘Pooterism’.

47. Redfern, ‘A Social Holiday’, 2–3;

48. D.T., ‘Co-operative Holidays’, 2.

49. Redfern, ‘A Social Holiday’, 3.

50. See Domestic Committee Minutes, B/CHA/ADM/3/1. For a ‘strenuous’ centre, see Liddington, The Life and Times of a Respectable Rebel, 83–85.

51. William Morris, News from Nowhere and Other Writings, ed. Clive Wilmer (London: Penguin, 2004), 51–3, 82; Redfern, ‘A Social Holiday’, 2.

52. Lees-Maffei, ‘Homemaking’.

53. Doubtless some married couples did attend, but CHA guest houses provided very few double beds, references to married couples were extremely rare, and children and families were actively discouraged. See Percy Redfern, ‘Family Holidaymaking’, Comradeship 6, no. 2 (1912), 19.

54. S.F., ‘The Cure of the Cynic’, Comradeship 6, no. 4 (1913), 63.

55. St. John G. Ervine, ‘The Peak’, Comradeship 8, no. 1 (1914), 6–7.

56. Lowerison, ‘A Reminiscence’, 3; S.E.W., ‘Holiday Papers I: With the C.H.A.’, Clifton Road Magazine, September 1905, 7, B/CHA/HIS/16/1, 40a–40b; An Outsider, ‘The Annual Conference’, Comradeship 2, no. 3 (1909), 38.

57. C.H.A., 1909 Summer Brochure, B/CHA/PUB/4/1, 3; Hammerton, ‘Pooterism’.

58. Tosh, A Man's Place, 170–94; Amy Milne-Smith, ‘A Flight to Domesticity? Making a Home in the Gentlemen's Clubs of London, 1880–1914’, Journal of British Studies 45, no. 4 (2006): 796–818.

59. See Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 62–71.

60. For example, although ‘ladies and gentlemen’ were invited to attend a ‘Summer School of Social Study’ at the CHA centre at Ardenconnel in 1906, just one of the lecturers was female. ‘Summer School of Social Study’, B/CHA/PUB/13/2. The lecturers and guides at normal centres were also largely male. See Summer Holidays Organized by the Co-operative Holidays Association, in Connection with the National Home Reading Union, Buxton, 1897, B/CHA/PUB/5/1, 1; Programmes for all the Centres, 1908 (1908), B/CHA/PUB/5/8.

61. Smith, ‘C.H.A. Notes’, 3.

62. Emily H. Smith, quoted in T.A. Leonard, ‘F.N.P.’, Comradeship 5, no. 5 (1912), 70.

63. Karen Hunt, ‘Strong Minds, Great Hearts, True Faith and Ready Hands? Exploring Socialist Masculinities before the First World War’, Labour History Review 6, no. 2 (2004), 211.

64. Snape, ‘Co-operative Holidays’, 144–5.

65. Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Thought in European and American Thought, 1820–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 152–88.

66. Anon., ‘An Ideal Holiday’, 424.

67. Graham Murphy, ‘Rawnsley, Hardwicke Drummond (1851–1920)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/37884, accessed February 12. 2011.

68. Rawnsley, ‘Address to the Annual Conference’, 15–16. See also Anon., ‘Co-operative Holidays 1: Ardenconnel, New Glasgow’, Manchester City News, June 3, 1905, B/CHA/PUB/13/1; T. Arthur Leonard, ‘Manxland’, Comradeship 6, no. 4 (1913), 54; D.T., ‘Co-operative Holidays’, 1. See Snape, ‘Co-operative Holidays Association’, 145.

69. John Lewis Paton, John Brown Paton: A Biography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914), 203, 213.

70. Jose Harris, Private Lives and Public Spirit: Britain, 1870–1914 (London: Penguin, 1993), 80–1. This was particularly true of female philanthropists akin to those involved in the CHA. See Ellen Ross, ‘Good and Bad Mothers: Lady Philanthropists and London Housewives before World War I’, in Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women's History, eds Dorothy Heller and Susan Reverby (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 59–78, and Ruth Livesey, ‘Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of the Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London’, Journal of Victorian Culture 9, no. 1 (2004): 43–67.

71. Tosh, A Man's Place.

72. See Simon Gunn and Rachel Bell, Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl (London: Phoenix, 2003), 21–57.

73. See Bailey, ‘White Collars’, 275–6; Hammerton, ‘Pooterism’, 307–8.

74. Alison Oram, Women Teachers and Feminist Politics, 1900–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 45–88; Dina Copelman, London's Women Teachers: Gender, Class and Feminism, 1870–1930 (London: Routledge, 1996), 167–75.

75. See C.H.R., ‘The Unpardonable Sin’, Comradeship 6, no. 3 (1912), 46–7.

76. Graham Law, ‘Before Tillotsons: Novels in British Provincial Newspapers, 1855–1873’, Victorian Periodicals Review 1 (1999), 47.

77. Janette, ‘Wives and Daughters’, 30. See also Freda, ‘Co-operative Holidays: A Girl's Recollections’, Manchester City News, July 24, 1909, B/CHA/HIS/16/1, 44.

78. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 178–220.

79. Harris, Private Lives, 233–44; Bill Luckin, ‘Revisiting the Idea of Degeneration in Urban Britain, 1830–1900’, Urban History 33, no. 2 (2006): 234–252.

80. ‘Summer Holidays, June 1909’, B/CHA/PUB/4/1, 15; See also Lowerison, ‘A Reminiscence’, 3.

81. C.H.R., ‘The Unpardonable Sin’, 46; H.C., ‘Glissading on the Bel Oiseau’, Comradeship 4, no. 5 (1911): 76–8: 77. See also J.F.H., ‘The Annual Conference’, Comradeship 1, no. 3 (1908), 36; D.R., ‘With the C.H.A.’, 69–70. For male ramblers continental trips also provided a chance to meet continental women: E.J.B., ‘Jimmie in the Taunus’, Comradeship 5, no. 3 (1911), 45.

82. Mary Champness, ‘How We Opened Keld’, in Leonard, Adventures in Holiday Making, 167.

83. Leonard, Adventures in Holiday Making, 106.

84. T. Arthur Leonard, ‘To Our Members’, Comradeship 4, no. 3 (1910), 35. See also T. Arthur Leonard, ‘From the General Secretary’, Comradeship 5, no. 4 (1912), 50; T. Arthur Leonard, ‘From the General Secretary’, Comradeship 5, no. 5 (1912), 67.

85. R.T., ‘Barmouth Bottled; and a Recipe’, Comradeship 6, no. 4 (1913), 58; T. Arthur Leonard, ‘From the General Secretary: Personalia’, Comradeship 4, no. 1 (1910), 4. See also Ackroyd, ‘My First C.H.A. Holiday’, 25.

86. Darby, Landscape and Identity, 161–2.

87. Hammerton, ‘Pooterism’.

88. Langhamer, Women's Leisure, 114–121.

89. M. Mostyn Bird, Woman at Work: A Study of the Different Ways of Earning a Living Open to Women (London: Chapel and Hall, 1911), 153.

90. Snape, ‘Co-operative Holidays Association’, 153.

91. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 105–48.

92. W.G.H., ‘Cader’, Comradeship 6, no. 1 (1912), 9–11: 10; G.G. Desmond, ‘Eskdale: A Lost Valley Rediscovered’, B/CHA/PUB/13/2, 2.

93. T.A., ‘A New Sesame’, Comradeship 7, no. 1 (1913), 13–15.

94. G.G. Desmond, ‘Eskdale’, Comradeship 6, no. 5 (1913), 70–71.

95. Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 62–72.

96. Tebbutt, ‘Rambling’.

97. See Amanda Holt, ‘Hikers and Ramblers: Surviving a Thirties Fashion’, International Journal of the History of Sport 4 (1987), 59.