Why the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club?

The puzzling choice of “Ramblers” for a Mountaineering and Caving Club has generated plenty of discussion over the years and will no doubt continue to do so. Here is some of the background …

Formation

The circumstances surrounding the formation of the club is recorded by H.H. Bellfield in the first issue of the YRC Journal^[1] and the subject of choosing the club name is described in more detail by George T. Lowe, the first YRC President, in his article celebrating the first forty years of the Club.^[2]

Lowe himself records scrambling on Almscliff and cave exploration in the 1870s and 1880s. He was a keen hillwalker and had walked the Roman Wall and the Northumberland Coast. He wrote the Cheviot chapter in Bogg’s Border Country and another in Edenvale to the Plains of York, which was for a long time the only accurate information on the Nidderdale caves. He had been to Norway, Finland, and even Canada, and had several seasons in the Alps.

He reached out to “… all the men I knew to be interested in rambling over our Yorkshire moors and fells”. Such an individual will in the words of H.H. Bellfield who was a great hillwalker “… betake himself to the fields and woods and solitary places, to the ‘cloud-piercing peak, the trackless heath’, where there is no way of getting over the ground but by walking and climbing”. It is clear that the nine people attending the inaugural meeting in 1892 were interested in “rambles, walking tours, and other expeditions”. The name Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club was chosen after careful thought “the majority decided upon our present title which delineates roughly the principal area of our work”. 

This was clearly wider than mere low-level walking and the objectives of the new Club were clearly set out in the Rules as “The objects of the Club are to organise walking and mountaineering excursions, and to gather and promote knowledge concerning Natural History, Archaeology, Folk-lore, and kindred subjects.” Lowe, Bellhouse and the Committee clearly believed that being a “Yorkshire Rambler” suitably encompassed these activities and the intellectual thirst for knowledge about the outdoors. It therefore seems fairly clear why the other proposed names (probably suggested by the hillwalkers in attendance rather than mountaineers, climbers or cavers), including The Yorkshire Pedestrian Club, The Leeds Pedestrian Club, The Leeds Walking Club and The Three Peak Club were rejected. The first three did not go beyond mere walking and the latter, although attractive to some, was clearly self-limiting. The name had to bridge several outdoor disciplines.

The first year

It is recorded by Bellhouse that the papers presented in the Club’s first year resulted in the members’ greater desire for travel and knowledge, and they “went to Switzerland, for instance, and greater attention was paid to climbing in the Lake District, North Wales, and other mountainous parts of the British Isles”. In the second year, it was the mountaineering talks that attracted the greatest interest. Wm Cecil Slingsby, who came from Carleton just outside Skipton, was an eminent mountaineer and was rightly known as ‘the father of Norwegian mountaineering’. By 1892, he had a string of first ascents across the breadth of Norway made in the previous twenty years and would not have accepted the second Presidency of the Yorkshire Club if it had not had mountaineering right at its heart.

According to Melanie Tebbut^[3] who researched rambling and late-Victorian manly identity in the Dark Peak, “The punishing physical values of such wild upland areas offered challenges of stoicism, hardiness and endurance which were central to late-nineteenth century ideals of manliness, as masculinity was increasingly defined by forms of sporting activity which encouraged character-building battles against nature.” One can get a sense of this in Bellfield’s discussion about the Club’s admission requirements – the spirit of the YRC demanded more than just pure physical performance and looked for applicants with experience in depth, having a good record on the hill.

We’re not all from Yorkshire

Ten years on, the Club had over sixty members but was still looking to grow. New mountaineers, climbers, cavers and hill-walkers were being attracted to the YRC from outside Yorkshire.

“… new members. They need not necessarily be Yorkshiremen or even residents of the county. Though on this point the name of the Club is perhaps a little misleading, the list of members shows that the Club is ready to embrace men of like tastes from any part of the country.”

Proceedings of the Club. Thomas Gray (Editor). YRCJ 1902; 1(4): 329

Rambler

It is also worth looking at how the meaning of ramble, rambling and rambler have changed with time. In Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary, the meaning of these were given as:^[4]

• Rambler: rover, a wanderer
• Ramble: an irregular excursion; to rove loosely, to wander
• Rambling: The act of wandering

In 1750, The Rambler had clearly taken on its literary guise as it was a “twopenny sheet” to which Samuel Johnson contributed essays on practical morality. In Rambler No.5, Johnson picked up a famous “seeming paradox”: “that very few men know how to take a walk.” Really knowing how to take a walk, Johnson says, entails keeping your mind open so as “to be able to accommodate itself to emergent occasions, and remark every thing that offers itself to present examination.”^[5] This was understood by the early members of the YRC who included an intellectual dimension “to gather and promote knowledge concerning Natural History, Archaeology, Folk-lore, and kindred subjects” in the Club’s objectives – they are still there today.

In 1822, an article was published describing a four-day ramble in North Wales in which the gaining of Snowdon’s summit defined the experience of a mountain excursion.^[6] By 1914, the meaning had moved on to cover wandering journeys on foot including over mountains for recreation and pleasure, thus closer to its present day meaning.^[7]

So, what did it mean in 1892? The short answer is pretty well what it does now, but without the present day connotation of pedestrian country walks in rather large organised groups.

So our best guess is that it was selected to convey the sense of gentlemen whose aim was to explore the mountains and caves of the world not for glory or with a great purpose, but purely for pleasure; or to paraphrase Mallory “because they are there“. We rather like that.