Hitchhikers

Navigating a roundabout near Bovey Tracey, I spotted an unusual sight. On the bend leading to the slip road, an unkempt figure, backpack at his feet, was waving his thumb. I pulled up around the corner, half-hoping he hadn’t noticed I’d stopped.

When I was offered a place at St Andrews University, I assumed I would travel there from London by train. But in the period between attending the interview (yes, in those days, universities admissions tutors interviewed candidates face to face) and starting the course, Dr Beeching had closed the branch line from Leuchars Junction to St Andrews. Buses were no more reliable in those days than they are today and driving was not an option. I had not passed my test and even if I had, car ownership in the days before Japanese competition forced British manufacturers to improve their quality control sentenced proud owners to weekends spent under the bonnet or scraping rust. On the one occasion I flew, the plane was diverted to Glasgow, landing well after midnight to the annoyance of the friend in Edinburgh with whom I was spending the night and who drove there to collect. It didn’t take long to realise that the cheapest and least inconvenient mode of transport was hitching, in those days an entirely acceptable and widely used option.

Most of my trips between London and Scotland entailed multiple lifts, often no more than twenty or thirty miles apiece, so that accomplishing the journey in one day was ambitious. My most successful hitch was a single lift from Edinburgh to the outskirts of north London. Embarrassingly, I broke the first unwritten rule of the hitchhikers’ code by falling asleep ten minutes after being picked up, thus depriving the driver of the quid pro quo of company during an otherwise tedious journey at the time when fewer cars had radios and CDs had not yet been invented.

A hazard of hitchhiking was exposure to drivers whose primary incentive was to impress with their skill. Having escaped from a maniacal mini driver who gave my girlfriend and I a lift from St Andrews to Edinburgh on a Friday afternoon, we tried to invent a plausible reason to decline his offer when he saw us by the roadside two days later waiting for a return ride.

By the time I qualified for a company car in the 1990s, hitchhiking in the UK had all but vanished. On the rare occasions when I spotted a lonely figure by the roadside, I always offered a ride (probably in contravention of the firm’s insurance policy) and on one occasion bought the traveller dinner, a favour which had several times been extended to me in my hitching days. 

My most recent experience of hitchhiking was three years ago in Norfolk. My companion and I had planned a walk which relied on the local bus service to return us to our starting point. Having miscalculated the timing, she suggested we try hitching. The idea would not have occurred to me and I doubted we would have any luck, but within a few minutes a car pulled up in the adjacent layby. We ran towards it just as a second vehicle stopped. We stated our destination and dumped our bags on the back seat. It quickly became apparent that the driver had not stopped with the intention of offering a lift but merely to consult with the following driver about the route! But by this time we were comfortably ensconced so they had no choice but to accept us.

The decline in hitchhiking can be explained by several factors. Wider car ownership; restrictions on parking near motorways; a general fear of strangers. In an increasingly atomised world, David Cameron’s Big Society initiative of 2010, allegedly designed to ‘help people to come together in their neighbourhoods to do good things’ made no reference to hitchhiking.

My Bovey Tracey hitchhiker placed a rucksack attached to a two wheeled trolley on the back seat and got in the front. I leaned across to offer my hand. 

‘Hi, I’m David.’

‘David’s my birth name,’ he said, ‘but I’m known as Bryn now.’

He explained he was going to Leicester to buy a van. He was well into his sixties and I was surprised to hear he had just passed his driving test. He explained that he enjoyed the life of a tramp and that the van he was buying would be suitable for sleeping in and also accommodate a wheelchair in case he needed to transport either of his parents, both in their nineties. I thought of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London in which he describes the ‘spikes’ used by itinerants. Rather a different concept of tramping from travelling about in a van. I dropped him at Exeter St David’s from where he would get a train. I wished him well and he seemed pleased that I remembered to call him by his assumed name.

Afterwards I reflected that Bryn’s acquisition of his own vehicle, late in life, marked the demise of one of the few remaining hitchhikers and the decline of a mode of transport which had been a familiar feature of British life until the late twentieth century.