How we fell in love with nights camped out under the stars

But these rarely-excavated pictures from the archive help to trace the practice almost from when a travelling tailor named Thomas Hiram Holding invented it.

Holding, considered the father of British camping, had crossed the prairies of the United States with his parents in a wagon train and the spirit of adventure never left him. In July 1897, at the age of 52, he set off with his son on a three-day camping tour of south-west Ireland, carrying on his bike a lightweight tent he had made himself. Later, he wrote the first edition of the Camper’s Handbook and founded the Association of Cycle Campers, now the Camping and Caravanning Club.

The banks of the Thames were where camping was popularised in Britain, and by the turn of the last century many families were experiencing the pleasure of holidaying for next to nothing, sometimes commandeering pleasure boats to transport their canvas or even cow hide tents.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the publication by clergyman William Henry Harrison Murray of Camp-Life in the Adirondacks set in train a mass migration of holidaymakers to the mountains of north-eastern New York state.

The world’s first commercial camping site is believed to have been Cunningham’s, behind the prom at Douglas on the Isle of Man, but it was a business model that spread rapidly and by the beginning of the First World War a vast community of campers had been established, with the boy scouts founder Sir Robert Baden-Powell as its president.

Today, some 4.5m camping and caravanning holidays a year are taken by British travellers, with an average duration of three nights.

Editor’s note: first and foremost - and rarely have I written down these words with more sincerity - I hope this finds you well.

Almost certainly you are here because you value the quality and the integrity of the journalism produced by The Yorkshire Post’s journalists - almost all of which live alongside you in Yorkshire, spending the wages they earn with Yorkshire businesses - who last year took this title to the industry watchdog’s Most Trusted Newspaper in Britain accolade.

And that is why I must make an urgent request of you: as advertising revenue declines, your support becomes evermore crucial to the maintenance of the journalistic standards expected of The Yorkshire Post. If you can, safely, please buy a paper or take up a subscription. We want to continue to make you proud of Yorkshire’s National Newspaper but we are going to need your help.

Postal subscription copies can be ordered by calling 0330 4030066 or by emailing [email protected]. Vouchers, to be exchanged at retail sales outlets - our newsagents need you, too - can be subscribed to by contacting subscriptions on 0330 1235950 or by visiting www.localsubsplus.co.uk where you should select The Yorkshire Post from the list of titles available.

If you want to help right now, download our tablet app from the App / Play Stores. Every contribution you make helps to provide this county with the best regional journalism in the country.

Sincerely. Thank you.

James Mitchinson, Editor