youth hostels, the history, people and ideas behind them
A letter from Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Party prime minister, turned up in old papers this week. The pages on which it was written are stiff, thick and yellow with age. An old fashioned treasury tag holds the typewritten pages together, and the paper smells faintly of decay. It slipped from a bundle of... Continue Reading →
A sunny Saturday afternoon in April and the FA cup is into semi finals. When I get off the bus, football supporters are making a racket outside Liverpool Street station. They're either Spurs or Chelsea supporters, I have no idea which, and either way passers by are scurrying, trying not to be intimidated. I haven't... Continue Reading →
John Martin is YHA's honorary archivist and in this post he writes about an exciting new gift to the YHA archive. Every so often we receive for the Archive a really special account of hostelling in the old days, in the form of a holiday log. David Bayes has just passed to us his account... Continue Reading →
Youth hostels were always international. In the years either side of the second world war young people went to France, to the Netherlands, to Belgium, Ireland, Norway and Germany. They went for leisure. They went for fun. Some went in the hope that their actions could create peace. They went to restore or reopen youth... Continue Reading →
Discoveries come by chance, information falls in our laps like Newton's apple. The story of Frederick James Catley was one of those chance discoveries.Catley lived in Bristol. He was born about 1910 and worked in a bookshop in the city. At weekends he went with friends walking in the surrounding countryside. When war came in... Continue Reading →
