People are beginning to appreciate and miss the beauty of being in the countryside. With Easter holidays upon us many people yearn to go outside and into the country or seaside. This is a good chance to look at the origin of the UK national parks and the leading role one gay man took in their creation.
Probably Yellowstone in the USA was the first proper national park. In the UK there are currently 15: 10 in England, 3 in Wales and 2 in Scotland. The first of these was the Peak District, the nearest to where I live in Nottingham. It was created in 1951 under the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949.
I won’t go into the long history of previous attempts to create parks because I want to concentrate on the person who chaired the committee which led directly to the 1949 National Parks Act.
The British government set up the committee in 1945. They appointed a former Liberal MP called Sir Arthur Hobhouse (1886-1965) as its Chair. Sir Arthur has some experience with countryside issues. He was an elected member and alderman of Somerset County Council, a rural county in the south of England, and was its chairman at the time he was appointed to the national parks committee. He was also chairman of the Rural Housing Committee and a member of the Open Spaces Society.
In 1929 Arthur began a brief career in parliament. His father had been a Liberal MP and a previous chairman of Somerset County Council. Arthur was first elected to parliament in 1923, representing the Somerset constituency of Wells. He lost his seat in the general election of 1924 less than a year later.
Before that Arthur was one of the peripheral figures in that queer community of artists and writers called the Bloomsbury Group, in particular several members of the Dreadnought Hoax I’ll write about on Wednesday. The association began when Arthur arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1904 to study natural sciences.
Arthur created quite a stir among two other students. The reasons were his good looks and his quiet intellect. At first the other two students, Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) and John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), were rivals for Arthur’s attentions. They were also members of a select band of students called the Cambridge Apostles. It was meant to be a secret society though many students knew it existed and yearned to become members.
The Apostle were formed in 1820. Members met in secret in the rooms of its secretary to discuss a paper prepared by one of the members, discuss it and generally just hang out together. Even outside these meetings they spent a lot of time in each others’ company, and by the time Lytton Strachey became secretary, often their bed. Membership was by invitation only and by the unanimous election from all members. For a history of the Cambridge Apostles read this article from the sadly defunct glbtq.com.
Lytton Strachey brought John Maynard Keynes into the Cambridge Apostles in 1903. Similarly, it was Lytton who introduced Arthur Hobhouse as a possible new Apostle the following year. His reason was more to do with erotic desire rather than for Arthur’s intellect. Lytton was smitten.
Lytton introduced Arthur to John, and it became apparent that Arthur preferred to be with John. In fact, John beat Lytton into sponsoring Arthur into the Apostles and this was the start of a brief rift between them. Lytton took it very personally and broke off all contact with John. To make matters worse, less than a month after being elected into the Apostles Arthur and John went off on a 3-week “working holiday” to Cornwall so that john could prepare for his final exams.
Arthur refrained from any sexual contact, which frustrated John immensely and made his fall even further in love with him. After the trip John and Lytton became reconciled in their joint rejection and it left a shadow over John’s remaining time at Cambridge.
In 1906 Arthur Hobhouse visited a former Cambridge Apostle, Lytton Strachey’s cousin, Duncan Grant (1885-1978), in Paris. The two fell hopelessly in love. Lytton and John spent a year writing to each other to console themselves on this further development. The affair only lasted 9 months. That united Duncan, Lytton and John in mutual antipathy towards Arthur Hobhouse.
This was to be the total sum of Arthur’s homosexual experience. Unlike Lytton and Duncan he didn’t continue gay relationship, but like John Maynard Keynes Arthur married and left his homosexual life in the past.
After Cambridge Arthur Hobhouse became a solicitor, and on the outbreak of World War I he enlisted in the British Expeditionary Force. Shortly after the war married Konradin Jackson and returned to his country estate in Somerset and took up life as a gentleman farmer.
Working his way up through local government and politics Arthur entered the House of Commons in 1923 for his brief role as an MP. He was knighted in 1942 while chairman of Somerset County Council. His involvement in rural affairs made him a perfect choice to chair the National Parks Committee (England and Wales) 1945.
It is a testament to Sir Arthur Hobhouse’s diligence in identifying areas to be designated national parks that parliament accepted the committee’s recommendations and passed the national Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. All except one of the committee’s proposed parks (central Hadrian’s Wall) were created over the following decades.
This Easter holiday weekend, and all of the other weekends and holidays during this time of social isolation, only makes us yearn to get back out into the open countryside. Even Pride marches are cancelled until further notice. Let’s hope we can all get out there soon, and thank Sir Arthur Hobhouse that there are areas of natural beauty for us to go out into.
 |
| Map of the current National Parks of England and Wales. Ones proposed by Sir Arthur Hobhouse are in red. |
No comments:
Post a Comment