His busy month

Y050001-Malham 01 300-8 phoY — Image from a previous celebration at YHA Malham in 1948. (l to r) Arthur Raistrick, Professor GM Trevelyan, Arthur Dower, Michael Dower, Pauline Dower and H Warwick. (YHA Archive)

History’s a living thing. YHA archivist John Martin gets out and about a lot, researching the history of hostels, looking for old hostel sites and finding people with memories of hostels as they were.

He gets to celebrate all that is rich in YHA’s history. As well as spending hours searching and cataloguing papers and items from the past, he deals with constant queries about the whereabouts of old hostels, facts and people searching family history. It’s all about the history of hostels and without John’s work a lot of the history of youth hostels would have been lost.

Some of his work is available on this site in the rich hostel profiles he produces. He tells us when hostels have birthdays and goes along to hostels when they celebrate special anniversaries as he did last month at YHA London St Pauls and YHA Malham.

You can read all about his busy month here YHA Archive News July 2018

And here’s his profile of the history of the youth hostel at Malham Y950001-Malham YH Profile 2018-01-01 2 copy 1