Leonard, Thomas Arthur (1864-1948), founder of the Co-operative Holidays Association and Holiday Fellowship, son of Thomas Leonard, clock and watchmaker, was born on 12 March 1864 at 50 Tabernacle Walk, Finsbury, London. Leonard’s father died when he was only five years old and he was brought up by his mother, Agnes, the daughter of John Campbell, Congregational minister at the nearby Whitefield Tabernacle. He thus inherited a non-conformist tradition. Following the death of his father, the family moved to Hackney, during which time Leonard spent some of his schooldays in Heidelberg in south-west Germany. This gave rise to his interest in International relations. By 1881, he was living in Eastbourne where his mother ran a lodging house, and where he drifted into employment as a builder’s clerk. It was in Eastbourne that he became interested in Sunday school work and met his future wife, Mary Arletta Coupe, whom he married on 5 January 1888. They had a son, Arthur, and a daughter, Jessie. Arthur, born June 1889, died in 1902 at the age of 12 years. Jessie, born December 1891, survived him and also played a prominent part in the Holiday Fellowship until her premature death in November 1948, just 4 months after Leonard’s death in July 1948. His wife, Mary, died the following year, in June 1949.
His leaning towards the Congregational church led him to enrol in the mid-1880s at the Congregational Institute in Nottingham, run by Dr. John Brown Paton, an educational and social crusader. Paton had a great influence on the direction of Leonard’s future work and this was a turning point in his life. His training in Nottingham was followed by pastorates in Barrow (1887-1890) and Colne (1890-1894) in Lancashire. It was in ‘the bleak upland township’ of Colne, as he describes it in his memoirs Adventures in Holiday Making, that Leonard first sought to enhance the lives of artisan and textile industrial workers though the provision of ‘recreative and educational’ holidays as an alternative to the more common annual exodus during Wakes week to Blackpool and Morecambe.
In June 1891, Leonard took 32 members of his church’s social guild for a three-night holiday to Ambleside in the Lake District. Its success led to a trip to North Wales in the succeeding year, and the strong support of his mentor, John Brown Paton and the National Home Reading Union (NHRU), founded by Paton in 1889, encouraged Leonard to expand his holiday programme in 1893. ‘Why not do this for thousands’ Paton is quoted as saying.
Holidays “Under the auspices of the NHRU” followed whilst Leonard continued with his pastorate at Colne. The Co-operative Holidays Association was established as a legal entity in 1897 with J B Paton as President and Leonard as General Secretary. Its objects were “to provide recreative and educational holidays by purchasing or renting and furnishing houses and rooms in selected centres, by catering in such houses for parties of members and guests and by securing helpers who will promote the intellectual and social interests of the party with which they are associated”.
Leonard’s approach to holiday making was influenced by contemporary social and political thought. He has been described as a Christian Socialist and disciple of Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin. He also gained inspiration from William Morris, Edward Carpenter and Charles Kingsley. The term ‘guest-house’ for the accommodation used by the CHA came from Morris’s News from Nowhere. Lecturers and guides at CHA centres included leading academics and distinguished professionals, such as Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, who introduced the first parties to the Lake District to the poetry of Wordsworth and the teachings of Ruskin.
Leonard was an enthusiastic member of the fledgling Independent Labour Party and knew many of its leading figures. He advertised holidays in Labour Prophet, founded by John Trevor, who joined one of the first NHRU groups to Barmouth in 1894. Philip Snowden and Ramsay MacDonald visited Leonard’s home in Conwy during the First World War. However, Leonard was by no means uncritical of the ILP. His main objective was always to further his ideas for the social improvement of working people, particularly young workers, and he was outspoken on such subjects as socialism, betting and liquor reform. He was also a convinced pacifist who actively supported efforts to maintain International harmony prior to the First World War.
Under Leonard’s management and guidance, the CHA expanded and by 1913 had thirteen British centres catering for over 20,000 guests. Although foreign travel was not one of its original objectives, once having experimented with a trip to St. Luc in the Valaisian Alps in 1902, the CHA extended its operations across the Channel, with centres in Switzerland, France, Germany, Norway and Denmark. Together with J B Paton’s son, John Lewis Paton, High Master of Manchester Grammar School, Leonard organised school exchanges between British and German schools, students and young workers in the years leading up to the First World War to encourage International friendship. German parties were accommodated at CHA centres, members acting as hosts.
It came as a shock to many members when, in November 1912, Leonard announced his intention to resign from his post with the CHA in order to form a new organisation, the Holiday Fellowship (HF). Publicly, his reasons were his desire to extend the work begun twenty years before and to make more progress in his International work. However, personal records in the CHA archive reveal Leonard’s growing dissatisfaction with the General Committee’s desire to improve the quality of centres and its increasing lack of idealism. Nevertheless, the split was an amicable one, with the HF taking over the CHA’s centre at Newlands in the Lake District and a centre at Kelkheim in Germany. The objects of the new organisation were similar to those of the CHA, but with a greater emphasis on International relations, and there was no thought of competition between the two organisations.
Leonard established the HF’s first headquarters at Conwy in North Wales in 1914. He was its General Secretary until 1925 and a member of the General Committee thereafter until 1947. He was International Secretary from 1925 to 1930, President in 1938/39 and a Vice-President from 1939 until 1947, by which time the HF operated some 30 centres with over 45,000 guests. Meanwhile, the CHA had also expanded and operated some 25 centres with 30,000 guests.
Leonard joined the Society of Friends shortly after the First World War, the absence of a rigid creed and the freedom for intellectual religious thought which it afforded appealed strongly to him, and he was a member of Colwyn Bay Meeting for almost 30 years, attending Peace meetings on Conwy Quay and in Conwy Town Hall between the wars.
Leonard played a prominent part in the establishment of the Youth Hostels Association, Ramblers’ Association, International Tramping Tours and the Grey Court Fellowship. He was a Vice-President of the YHA from its inception in 1930. He was Chairman of the newly-formed National Council of Ramblers’ Federations in 1931 and continued as President of the Ramblers’ Association from its formation in 1938 until 1946. He was for many years Chairman, and later President, of the Grey Court Fellowship, founded in 1935 to provide holidays for unemployed workers and their families from North East Lancashire. In his eighties he founded yet another organisation, the Family Holidays Association, formed to convert derelict Government training camps into family holiday homes.
Leonard was awarded the O.B.E. in the Coronation Honours of May 1937. He has justly been described as the ‘Father of the modern open-air movement’. The extent of his influence on the development of countryside leisure is illustrated by the range of organisations represented at his eightieth birthday celebrations on 18 March 1944, attended by almost 100 guests, which included the Co-operative Holidays Association and Holiday Fellowship, the Youth Hostels Association, Ramblers’ Association, Workers Travel Association, Pennine Way Association, National Trust and the Council for the Preservation of Rural England.
He died at his home ‘Wayside’, Conwy on 19 July 1948, aged 84 years, survived by his wife and daughter, Jessie, and was cremated at a simple Friend’s service at Anfield Crematorium, Liverpool on 22 July 1948. Memorial plaques were erected in North Wales and the Lake District to commemorate his contribution to the outdoor movement, inscribed with the following epitaph: Believing that “The best things any mortal hath are those which every mortal shares”, he endeavoured to promote “Joy in widest commonalty spread”. As one obituary states: ‘His fertile imagination, his great powers of persuasion, his friendship and warm heartedness were responsible for the initiation and success of many enterprises which have brought joy, happiness, fellowship and comfort to tens of thousands both in this country and abroad. He sought no personal gain for himself.’
Douglas G Hope 