The less favoured

Youth hostels get their beginning and bring benefits we shouldn’t overlook in our desire for sustainable tourism.

In early 1930 a series of meetings established a Youth Hostels Association of Great Britain. It aimed to create chains of accommodation so that people could tour.

The hall marks of an organisation dedicated to sustainable principals were there, in low prices, protections for the natural environment and a demand that guests travel by sustainable means.

It banned touring by private car. It also brought increased freedom, tourism and holiday making to a new generation.

Essentially global

British youth hostels would be based on the German idea. Youth hostels were international, intent on widening access to tourism beyond national borders. Hilary and Margaret’s encounters on their first night in a youth hostel, with Frans and the two Dutch girls, were not chance events.

Youth hostels intended to foster tolerance, peace and non-violence, a goal of sustainable tourism today. They encouraged a global exchange of ideas and learning, and desired to bring about an international citizenship, despite the approaching war.

Determinedly local

But they would be essentially British, essentially local, adapted to local conditions. Slavish adherence to a single idea would not yield the result anyone wanted. Recognition of local variation was essential. Local effort would determine its success.

Low prices increased access to tourism and holidays. Youth hostels would charge low prices for everyone, a shilling a night – about £2.50 today.

Anyone wishing to stay had to become a member, funding the organisation’s initial investments. Five shillings bought membership for an adult aged 25 or over. Membership for a juvenile, aged 18-25, was half that, whilst one shilling bought membership for a 14-18 year old.

Within six years, 59,768 had joined YHA, a virtuous triumph. Touring by walking dropped within reach of many, especially young people. 63% of the total membership was under 26.

Less favoured

The role of youth hostels in empowering young people is well known, obvious, and undisputed, from their name, their statements of intent towards young people, and from the predominance of those under 26 in their numbers.

The ways in which youth hostels benefited young women is less obvious. No one mentioned girls or young woman as a special group in the founding documents of YHA.

No one said youth hotels were needed so that young women could go on holiday. They were always referred to alongside boys and young men, and not in their own right. That reticence seems surprising today.

Immoral and dangerous

Perhaps those who wrote about youth hostels worried about offending the parents of girls. YHA’s first president, historian GM Treveylan, doubted the wisdom of mixing the sexes in youth hostels.

Bringing young men and women together, unchaperoned, to sleep in the same building seemed to him dangerous and immoral.

He was told that young men and women would tramp together, whether he wanted them to or not. If suitable accommodation wasn’t available, they would sleep in haystacks, leaving him no choice but to acquiesce.

Watchful eyes

One woman doubted that youth hostels would be popular with young women in Britain as they were in Germany. Parents kept a watchful eye on their sons and daughters in Britain, limiting their freedom.

Connie Alexander’s mother and father had very reluctantly allowed her to go walking in a mixed sex group. She couldn’t imagine parents allowing young people to roam the countryside on their own, as they did in Germany. Girls didn’t have the confidence of their peers in Germany.

Six years later Hilary and Margaret, two sixteen year olds, set out from home alone and unaided. They proved the doubters wrong. In Hilary’s diary there’s no indication of any fight to achieve her right to a holiday on her own. No one seems to have stood in her way.

A mystery

Youth hostels gave girls and young women like Hilary the ability and confidence to travel alone. Despite sexism, cat calls and whistles during their travels, youth hostels were safe and welcoming.

Youth hostels show how tourism is a tool for women to unlock their potential. Despite this, YHA didn’t record the number of young women who joined as members or who stayed in youth hostels. The gender breakdown in national figures remains a mystery.

These benefits of tourism can be overlooked today when we’re ever ready to highlight the horrors of tourism. But they should not be overlooked. They are benefits not to be lost in our drive to create sustainable tourism.

Fashioned and fashionable

Youth hostels found their moment in a fashion, as part of a zeitgeist, a social movement. If it had not been the output of its times, youth hostels would not have happened.

They came into being because a fashion for touring was already in place, as written, extolled and promoted by Morton, Mais, and others. Youth hostels could not have existed without that wider background.

Big social factors were behind it. More people than ever were living in towns and cities. Rural areas became havens for fresh air and relaxation, for many town and city dwellers.

Travel was easier than ever. Trains linked urban and rural areas as did bus services. Social change was under way and youth hostels were part of a drive to modernism. People were discovering the importance of personal health, exercise and sunshine.

Deep and wide

All men and women over the age of 21 could now vote, a change that had only arrived in 1929.

Working people were gaining rights, especially to paid time off work and holidays. The pool of those who could benefit from youth hostels on their holidays was growing deeper and wider.

Despite the ravages of the depression many were better off in the early years of the 1930s, especially if they were in work, and many working in new industries were increasingly prosperous. They had the financial ability to fill youth hostels as soon as they could be opened.

Green fuel won’t do it

Youth hostels offer an essential lesson for anyone trying to change the way we take our holidays. Wide social, economic and political changes are fundamental to success.

It’s easy to think of youth hostels as moving the world on their own, as single handedly changing the way we holiday. But the mirror image is the truth. The world was moving youth hostels into being.

That lesson can be applied to our own times. Sustainable or good tourism can only come about as part of wider changes. Sustainable tourism must be part of its times, rooted in the demands and support of their times.

Tourism that is simply providing low energy light bulbs and green fuel won’t do it. Neither will one only available to a privileged few.

Notes.

Image shows a group of three friends on a youth hostel holiday in 1934, courtesy YHA archive, at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham. Y600038-07 1934 300-10.