Women, history and hostels #5 During the first years after the founding of YHA, Edith Bulmer was the most prominent of YHA’s pioneering women. As editor of The Rucksack magazine, the association’s magazine for all its members, she guided and shaped YHA’s new public voice until a scandal shifted her from the scene. A claim... Continue Reading →

Women, history and hostels #4 We’ve many reasons to be grateful to Berta Gough (above left). She was one of the small band on Merseyside who opened the first youth hostels in Wales, and some of the first in Britain. She took part in early important meetings that set the tone for youth hostels to... Continue Reading →

Women, history and hostels #3 Connie Alexander epitomised the best of those who ran youth hostels, a woman with a lively sense of adventure, full of genuine care for others. Wardens, as hostel managers were then known, were hard to find at the beginning. YHA paid them them “a pittance”, about £50 a year, and... Continue Reading →

Women, history, hostels #2 When it came to opening youth hostels, women often did the work like architecture student, Dorothy Tomkins, who led the work at Winchester. She was unemployed, available and, with a good knowledge of buildings, was ideal to furnish and prepare an old mill to be one of Britain’s first youth hostels.... Continue Reading →

Women, hostels, history #1 Gwen Moffat wrote that “No one but a desperate woman”* would have gone to work at the remote Ro Wen youth hostel in Snowdonia in 1952. Each morning, after the hostellers left, she washed sheet sleeping bags used the night before. She repaired Primus stoves, storm lanterns and Tilley lamps, almost... Continue Reading →