The third in a series of four posts looking at how war shaped holidays after 1939. The experience of people captured in records, diaries and journals confounds my perceptions of well known events, like the 1939-45 war.
For a brief year, the numbers staying at youth hostels had declined, but from 1941 numbers climbed, from 275,000 in 1940 to 331,877 in 1941, to 408,443 in 1943.
Big numbers
More and more people went to the Lakeland region. Youth hostels had an established reputation for touring holidays in fine scenery there. Increasing numbers went to hostels in other regions. Increasing numbers enjoyed the freedom of touring.
The Manchester and North Midlands regional groups with hostels in the Peak District attracted many.
Hostels in South Wales, and the West Riding saw increases, and numbers staying in the youth hostels of the Merseyside group in Wales were above pre-war levels by 1943.
Fourth rate
Increasing numbers didn’t go to all the regions. Youth hostels on the coast, like those in Devon and Cornwall, in areas taken over the by the military to prevent invasion and then to prepare for invading France, were hard for anyone to access. The numbers going to those would take longer to rise.
Conditions caused grumbles. One hostel crammed more beds into rooms to accomodate the rising demand. “It wasn’t like a hostel but like a fourth rate hotel…”.
Food could be terrible too. “…breakfast was a small helping of porridge followed by one half slice of thin bread toasted on one side and a spoonful of mixed boiled carrot and potato, no marmalade, bare ration of marg and sugar and nearly always dried milk made up…”
Some wardens thought they could get away with anything because there’s a war on, the complaint concluded.
Back in use
War changed the way people travelled. Petrol was for essential use only. Public transport became difficult and unreliable.
One youth hostel members took nine and a half hours to travel by train from Sheffield to Keswick, where she arrived, fed up with the British transport system.
Cycling and walking for touring or and holiday mking became even more established. Abandoned bicycles came back into use. Others took up hitch-hiking.
Men away
War brought changes which reflected wider changes in society. With men in the armed forces and many away from Britain, women made a greater proportion of those staying in youth hostels.
Figures from hostels in the Manchester regional group show that women as a percentage of members rose from 31% in 1938 to 41% in 1945.
Unsurprisingly, with so many men unavailable for the work, the number of women running hostels during war years rose even higher (66% in 1943) than it had been before the war.
Drains and concrete
Women did other work in hostels too, because so few men were there to do it. Volunteers, two thirds of them women, built a hostel from a ruined cottage in the middle of woods near Leatherhead in Surrey.
They dug and laid drains. They mixed and poured concrete. They cemented bricks and set flints. They carried water using an old timber yoke “… staggering half a mile uphill with two galvanised buckets, each with twenty pounds of water in, to feed teams of concrete mixers and plasterers and bricklayers…”
They tiled roofs, carpentered and plumbed. They showed that they could do without men.
Greater weath
War did more than increase the numbers staying in youth hostels. War boosted the income of hostels, and more income meant more money to spend on hostels.
Increasing income also went to purchasing property. YHA bought property during the war. YHA brough a lot of property during the war.
In 1941 the YHA trust bought “Y Bryn” at Stow on the Wold, and Bretton Farm in Derbyshire. It acquired Hill House, in Streatley overlooking the River Thames in 1942. It acquired Tun House in Hertfordshire and The Old Hall at Elton in Derbyshire in the same year. The next year it added six properties, two in Lakeland and one in Derbyshire.
On the way
In 1944 it added 13 more and in 1945 it added 19. In 1939 YHA owned the freehold on 33 properties. By the end of 1945, it had more than doubled its portfolio of properties to 78.
By the end of the war, youth hostels had become a large organised institution. YHA was no longer the ramshackle collection of regions and buildings it had been. It was on the way to becoming a property owning, professionally run organisation.
If you’re interested in the history of youth hostels, there’s more in Open To All, how youth hostels changed the world. Available in paperback and digital editions.
This is one of a series examining holidays in wartime. Coffee and dried milk follows…
Note on sources
Diaries and collections consulted:
Hilary Hughes logbooks Cadbury Research Libary
Olg Mowarth letters Cadbury Research Libary
Isobel and Mary Brown journals, National Records of Scotland
Image, Esthwaite Lodge, Hawkshead, opened 1942, purchased 1943. (Y050001-Hawkshead 606 300-8 pcY), one of those youth hostels purchased and opened during the 1939-45 war. Courtesy YHA Archive at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.
SIMPLY HOSTELS 
Leave a comment