Introduction: 'Suitcases piled on the sidewalk'
A brief history of hitchhiking in Britain and the US
Hitchhiking is a wonderful thing. Nothing beats the feeling of apprehension and anxiety giving way to elation as you clamber into a stranger’s car and speed off. Where you’ll end up is anyone’s guess. It is the best and easiest way to experience the fleeting hospitality that has enriched travellers’ accounts since time immemorial and it allows the exchange of ideas, stories and experiences in an intimate and private environment - the cab of a car. What makes it all the more intimate is the knowledge that the meeting is perfectly transient.
Such interactions have always been the backbone of any journey long before the days of cars. The bible is full of chance encounters on the road and it is the entire subject of The Odyssey. What is The Canterbury Tales but not a group of strangers on the road telling each other stories? The very act of a pilgrimage, pervasive in all cultures, is about an inward journey on an onward path and most pilgrims will tell you the old cliche that the journey was made by “the people met along the way”. It’s a cliche for a reason.
Before the days of cars, long and arduous journeys were the source of spiritual cleansing, indeed they still are. Walking was and is a tried and tested antidote to depression but it also offers an opportunity for self-reflection that little else can. The comforting plod serves to massage out the knots in our brains. In groups, the rhythm of steps facilitates conversation like nothing else.
In the early 20th century the American poet Vachel Lindsay decided to walk across America. He chose to go by foot for these very reasons. In comparison, he said, the newly emerging cars were a ‘carnal institution, to be shunned by the truly spiritual’. But the long days of walking were tiring, his feet and legs ached and his pack was heavy. Lindsay soon found that motorists began to stop and offer him rides. Despite his prejudice he began accepting, noting, ‘There are times when I, for one, get tired of being spiritual.’ And so hitchhiking was born.
To credit Lindsay as the father of hitchhiking is probably a little rash. There are several contenders for the title. The ‘super-tramp’ Welsh poet, W.H. Davies certainly has a claim as he flitted between American jails, or perhaps Toad of Toad Hall deserves the title for successfully flagging down a fellow motorist (given that he then stole the car, I think he should forfeit his claim though).
Perhaps one could even claim its invention was in fact an instruction from Almighty God Himself. The Acts of the Apostles recounts Philip the Evangelist’s journey down the road to Gaza when an Ethiopian eunuch passed him in a chariot. The Holy Spirit whispered in Philip’s ear, ‘Go near that chariot and stay there.’ Philip did so and in no time was on board, rattling along to Gaza, deep in conversation with the Ethiopian as hitchhiker and driver have been ever since.
No doubt between Philip, Toad and Lindsay there were countless hitchhikers flagging down chariots, carriages or caravans that history doesn’t relate. The modern form though is synonymous with one crucial thing… the automobile.
Whatever its divine licence, hitchhiking’s history is an interesting one. John T. Schlebecker’s short history, written in 1958, is an illuminating chapter about the American side of the story. According to Schlebecker, hitchhiking mostly began as a modest means of transport for soldiers escaping the boredom of camp during the First World War. After the war, it was taken up by children who’d hitch their way to the playground or the beach and by young girls who didn’t have cars. Soon college boys saw its merits and in the 20s the country was dotted with roadside hikers. It was here that the term ‘hitchhiking’ first emerged and the outstretched thumb became its universal symbol. Many people were unsure what to make of the new phenomenon. Hitchhikers were definitely different to tramps and vagabonds but exactly how was hard to determine. Some thought it was an attack on the self-reliance that so symbolised America. The New York Times meanwhile offered another insight: ‘Most of these people are not dangerous,’ an article stated, ‘But they are immeasurably impudent.’
Schlebecker doesn’t mention the simultaneous rise in Britain however. The War had been the genesis over here too. Soldiers would flag vehicles down on their way to and from the frontlines in France, weary and shellshocked, and Robert Graves in Goodbye To All That is one of many early accounts.
As with much of hitchhiking’s history, crisis facilitated a boom, and the Great Depression changed its fortunes greatly in the States. The roadsides became littered with people of all ages hoping to catch a ride to a better life.
In Britain, it was a crisis of a different nature that brought the practice into the mainstream: a public transport strike. The aim of the strike to was to be so disruptive that all demands would be met but the sudden craze for hitchhiking slightly defeated the point. The car-owning upper classes were overjoyed to undermine the dastardly strikers so put signs in their car windows offering lifts to all that could fit. After the strike, much to the car owners’ dismay, the trend remained. Punch enjoyed the joke, making a mock advert for an inflatable passenger ‘to provide an excellent foil to the importunate lift cadger.’
The Second World War offered another shot in the hitchhiking arm. The national emergency drew people together and it became a patriotic duty to give hitchers a ride if you could. An American advert encouraged generosity from motorists, stating boldly, “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler!” By 1945 there were more hitchers on the road than ever before.
Whenever hitching rates rose, so too did tales of crime. Reports grew and steadily so too did motorists’ fears. A writer from The Nation wrote, "A lonely pedestrian on a country road is no longer a weary ploughman who on being invited to ride will pay his way in homely country epigrams. He is, instead, a gangster from Chicago…” A monument to Ray Evans in Oklahoma reads simply ‘1835-1935. Martyr to hitchhiking.’
These days people often say that only men can hitchhike but that neglects the central role women have played in its history. In Europe nurses were some of the earliest hitchhikers having made great use of ‘lorryhopping’, as it was then called in Britain, during the First World War. Reports all throughout the interwar years tell of women of all ages hitching on both sides of the Atlantic. A 17 year old hitched from Florida to New York, a distance of over 1000 miles, with her two month old baby and in 1946 Linda Folkard was crowned ‘Miss Hitchhiker’ by the local mayor after hitching 15,000 miles. She was only 19.
Women also played their part in the anti-hitching backlash after reports of female criminals circulated. Women hitchhikers certainly committed their fair share of hitchhiking crimes, including murder. In 1939 Bergan Evans’ article, though it seems somewhat mired in prejudice, is certainly good evidence for the pervasiveness of female hitchers:
“Then there is the fragile old lady from beneath whose petticoat peeped the cuffs of a man's trousers or from whose knitting bag protruded the muzzle of a machine gun—I forget which…She flits in the dusk on the outskirts of Chicago and appears in the dawn southwest of Denver. Late revellers have passed her on the Boston Post Road and the winter visitor sees her in Florida, where her artillery is sometimes hidden under Spanish Moss and sometimes wreathed in orange blossoms.”
By the time Schlebecker was writing in the 50s, it seemed hitchhiking was on the decline. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had gone on the offensive, spreading a scare campaign that seemed to put many off, publishing adverts that said things like, “Don’t pick up trouble! Is he a pleasant companion…or a sex maniac? A friendly traveller… or a vicious murderer? Don’t take the risk!” In Britain, although there were no state-led anti-hitching campaigns, the patriotic urge to pick people up was slowly waning, and numbers were declining. Some lorry drivers began to resent well-off youngsters abusing their generosity. What’s more, cars became more widespread, travel cheaper and people richer. “Relative prosperity seems to have hardened the hearts of many”, Schlebecker lamented.
But in the 60s things changed again. Hitchhiking came to be a countercultural political statement. It was a protest, anarchic in nature. It was a means of subverting the authorities, their timetables and their ticket collectors. Hitching became the true expression of the cooperation and kindness of strangers, a microcosm of a model society. Most of all it became synonymous with freedom. Students thumbed their way to university and the newly empowered youth hitched to festivals and concerts, across countries and continents, revelling in the chance of it, picked up by the war generation for whom it was as natural as buses.
It is hard to measure the impact hitchhiking has had on English-speaking culture. Schlebecker makes a tentative claim that it was crucial to the ‘intellectual ferment’ of the times: the random, intense, interactions allowed the free exchange of new ideas. He concedes it is hard to measure but there are numerous references in many great books, poems and songs throughout the century. The notion of a freedom embodied by hitchhiking is a widespread one. Lou Reed urged us to ‘take a walk on the wild side’ and tells of Holly, from Miami F.L.A. hitchhiking her way across the USA. On the road, she could be whoever she wanted. John Steinbeck opens The Grapes of Wrath with a hitched ride and the chance encounter sets off the whole tale. In Robert Johnson’s Crossroad Blues, the great vagabond bluesman describes the pain of not getting a ride and in his anguish, he meets the devil himself (a feeling many hitchhikers will be able to relate to!) Johnson became a posthumous legend of the blues scene in the 1960s and his vagrancy represented the antithesis of the consumerist, capitalist world the counterculture was rejecting. Hitchhiking (as well as blues) stood for that rejection.
But most seismic of all was the novel, written around the time Schlebecker was writing, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. It became the holy scripture of the counterculture and remains an iconic coming-of-age book. Kerouac and his fellow beat poets worshipped the open road and the strangers that rode down it. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life,” Sal Paradise extols. Its impact on the late 20th century was vast. Bob Dylan praised it as highly as any, “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s,” he famously said.
Hitchhiking has become common practice in much of the world nowadays. The history of its role in Russia and Eastern Europe is fascinating but its reach is wider still. I myself have hitched rides comfortably in several countries around the world. But somewhere down the line, hitchhiking in Britain fell by the wayside. It is still practised by some but the hordes of hitchers, once lining the roadsides, are no longer. During my life, I’ve seen only two hitchers and I’m embarrassed to say I picked up neither of them.
There are several theories why it is no longer really practised. Some put it down to the explosion in the number of cars and cheap buses and trains: there’s simply no longer a need for it.
To others, it shows the decline of trust in our fellow humans and is evidence of the crumbling of our values and trust. “Nowadays people are far more selfish,” explains one Reddit user, “Years of media indoctrination about scroungers and fear of others. We've become an insular, inward island, afraid of strangers and systematically more terrified of being robbed or murdered as crime falls. I haven't seen a hitcher this century.”
Certain films have no doubt had an impact too. Hitchhikers are often portrayed as bad omens. We’ve all sat there shouting at the screen as the driver slows down, urging them not to pick up the lonesome hitcher. Perhaps Liam1250’s slightly less academic response captures it: “We're all too scared of being bummed to death at the wheel to pick up strangers.”
Nevertheless, hitchhiking is not dead. Either people haven’t considered that they could be bummed to death at the wheel or, to many, it still has something to offer. For some it should be noted, necessity demands it. I once gave a group of refugees a ride in Northern France. They were from Syria and the lorry they’d stowed onto had dropped them not in England as they’d hoped but in a tiny French village. I drove them back into Calais to try their luck again. There was a girl with them who was much younger than 1946’s Miss Hitchhiker and may well have hitched just as far. It was a reminder that for many hitchhiking is not just a fun pastime. I hope they made it across the channel and I very much hope if they did they haven’t been sent to Rwanda.
For many though hitchhiking is not a necessity. They could get a bus or a train, or even drive themselves but the reasons to hitchhike are the same as they’ve always been: the unpredictability, the chance encounters, and the constant risk that makes it all the more vivid.
As early as 1937 Samuel Zeidman spotted the virtues it teaches: “If you are impatient, it teaches you to wait. If you have a temper, it gives you a placid nature. If you are selfish, it teaches you to be generous. If you are impetuous, it forces you to think.” It requires humility which helps one be kinder, less judgemental and more accepting.
Again though, perhaps Reddit is the best source. “Why would someone hitchhike if they can afford a car?” one user asked. “For the adventure” was the reply.
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