Rapscallion Magazine Book Review: John Hillaby’s ‘lyrical, revealing and candid account’ of his Journey Through Britain – in a country much changed since 1968 when it was published

Book Review: Journey Through Britain. By John Hillaby

Britain was different in the late 1960s. Most chaps wore jackets and women wore hats to church, children would be sent out to play in the street and told to not come back until tea time, there were only two television channels and you could buy a lot of chocolate, sweets and comics with a ten shilling note. In many ways the country was a better place that it is today – but in others it was much worse. Racism was rife, especially after Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood Speech, full child benefit was yet to be introduced, women were legally paid less than men and tower blocks and brutalism dominated much of the redevelopment of city centres. To paraphrase the opening lines of L P Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, ‘the past is a foreign country: they did things differently there.’ Certainly, re-reading John Hillaby’s account of his walk from Land’s End to John O’Groats in his travelogue Journey Through Britain published in 1968 it was a different country.

I had read it in the mid 1970s and in part it inspired me to cycle first to Wales and later to Scotland from Somerset – experiencing the countryside before bypasses, motorways and giant roundabouts proliferated. A time when most main roads still went through the middle of town and city centres and a time before chain stores made every high street the same.

As it describes in the fly leaf Journey Through Britain is John Hillaby’s one man Odyssey on foot across Britain using mostly footpaths and bridal paths but also the country’s highways at times covering 1,100 miles in 55 days. A seasoned travel writer he notes not only his route relating to whether the paths are overgrown or bereft of anyway to eat but also descriptions of the landscape and his views on everything from history to politics. Take these thoughts on Cornwall’s neolithic stone circles and ancient burial chambers: “Cornwall is badly served by those who ought to be looking after this treasure. In the three-mile walk from Lanyon quoit to the coast you move in an d out of hut circles, settlements, burial mounds, Iron Age forts and Celtic stones, but apart from advertisements for ice-cream and Pepsi-Cola, there isn’t a notice board or signpost in this layer cake of prehistory.” He notes that the monuments are often defaces of overgrown and blames it on the Ministry of Public Building and Works.

In my experience the equivalent of the Ministry of Public Building and Works in the 21^st century (mainly local authorities, Friends of, the National Trust and the Department of Environment etc) have at least put up interpretation boards like the one I read at Dawns Meyn near Penzance – although many are defaced by a spray of paint by idiots.

He gives good advice on what to wear – to be neither hot nor cold – and wear as little as possible and just be comfortable. To pack only the essentials and to take that essential of the 1960s – a tin opener. No SATNAV then, just maps and above all sign posts to guide the journey – and to take the advice of locals when tackling footpaths and shortcuts. Spending so much time outside walking day after day means you become acutely aware of the weather. Crossing Dartmoor he is shrouded in mist leading to him ending up a bog wile crossing into Westmorland (one of England’s lost counties) it’s the rain that left him soaked and miserable. However he met so many people, enjoyed many little pubs of England where he usually had three pints in the evening before finding somewhere to bivouac and pondered on the ‘inexpressibly beautiful’ landscape.

His shoes wear out he is weather beaten and tired but ‘the walk came to an end at a craggy-looking place called Dunscansby Head, a mile or two beyond John O’Groats.’ He had slept under the stars, stayed in pubs, crossed the River Severn on the ferry and made enough notes on the journey to be able to write one of the classic travelogues of this country about this country.

Douglas Matthews writing Hillaby’s obituary in The Independent in 1996 summed it up: “Pedestrian was the last word to apply to John Hillaby, though he has been called the most celebrated pedestrian in England. Yet like his contemporaries, Clive Wainwright and Wilfred Thesiger, he was admired as much by armchair idlers as by the serious walking fraternity.”

Harry Mottram

Published in 1968 Journey Through Britain. By John Hillaby

Born in 1917, John Hillaby was a writer and journalist working for the New York Times, and the Manchester Guardian and found fame initially with hit account of a walk across Africa charted in his book Journey to the Jade Sea published in 1964.