The forthcoming centenary of the start of the First World War prompted Cumbria-based journalist and writer Rosamund Ridley, whose husband Robert has an office in Little Germany, to recall the anniversary of a meeting in a Bradford Quaker meeting house in January 1912.

The annual meeting of the Co-operative Holidays Association was attended by delegates from all over Britain as well as Germany, relieved that the threat of war between the two big powers had been averted, or so they thought.

She writes: “On January 6, 1912, German delegates in Bradford certainly proposed invasion – of the British countryside by working people. The CHA voted in favour...”

The CHA was founded in Colne in Lancashire in 1894 – the year of the Independent Labour Party’s creation in Bradford – to enable groups of young millworkers to ramble and hike in the fresh air. As the the association’s founder, and former congegational minister Arthur Leonard, said: “In the long tramps over the hills and moors a young fellow learned for the first time the real wholesome pleasure of a mountain holiday, and found that such a holiday was not only healthier but less expensive that the usual ‘Blackpool bust’.”

In 1889, congregational minister and social reformer John Brown Paton founded the National Home Reading Union to improve the standard of working-class leisure reading.

A typical CHA hiking holiday was usually accompanied by a lecturer from the Reading Union who gave talks on natural history and local literary associations, says Robert Snape in a 2004 social studies paper for Bolton University called The Co-operative Holiday Association And The Cultural Formation Of Countryside Leisure Practice.

A bracing, spartan, ascetic outlook was encouraged. Plain dress, washing in streams and drinks of cold water were in; fashionable frills, hot baths, alcohol and hot tea on walks, were out. Somewhat equivalent to the Wandervogel, a healthy-mind-in-a-healthy body youth movement movement in Germany, which started in 1896, the CHA rapidly developed into more than a holiday company, says Rosamund Ridley: “The brightest and best of Britain’s universities began to lead walks.

“Serving on the first CHA committee was the vice-chancellor of Cambridge. Working at a Lake District centre was the founder of the National Trust. Peeling potatoes and cleaning boots at Keld was the high master of Bradford Grammar School.

“Before going to Oxford, one of Bradford Grammar School’s brightest maths students worked as a holiday volunteer. Originally a physics professor in Toronto, Bradford’s Dr Archie Duff became an expert in Middle Eastern languages and a pioneer of pre-First World War peace exchanges with Germany.

“From 1910 to the beginng of June 1914, peace exchanges by ordinary working people intensified. Outside Greater London, support for the peace campaigns was greatest in Yorkshire. Perhaps some families still have records of these visits. In Germany, photos of the British peace visits have turned up on eBay.

“The original CHA ethos challenged all barriers, gender, class, religion (including ethnicity) and politics.”

Rosamund is researching the CHA and the connection with the peace movement opposed to the war ethos of those pre-1914 years.