April 24: Benny Rothman and the “Mass Trespass”

Bernard (Benny) Rothman, a Romanian-born political activist in the United Kingdom, led a “mass trespass” of some five hundred “ramblers” (countryside walkers, mostly unemployed workers) on this date in 1932, to protest the lack of public access to broad swaths of public land in England and Wales. The protesters, mostly from Manchester, sang “The Internationale” and clashed violently with gameskeepers on Kinder Scout, a large plateau, resulting in six arrests. Rothman, who was among those arrested (he served four months in prison), was head of the British Workers Sports Federation in the North, which organized bike rides, camping trips, and rambles. The protest led to the passage, in 1949, of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, which ended upper-class monopoly over access to Great Britain’s public land. Three decades later, Rothman helped to mobilize renewed protests against Margaret Thatcher’s environmental and property-use policies. He died in 2002. For a video featuring Ewan MacColl’s song about the Mass Trespass, click here.

“Jewish by descent, tiny in stature and fiery in rhetoric . . . Benny Rothman, who has died aged 90, is now revered as the patron saint of the British outdoor community.” —Jim Perrin, The Guardian