2016 will see the publication of a welcome new biography of a much-loved and once very influential Dales writer and campaigner – AJ Brown.

For almost 40 years, between his first book – Four Boon Fellows: a Yorkshire Tramping Odyssey, in 1928, and his death in 1969, “AJB” was one of the most popular, and most widely read authors about the Dales and indeed the whole of Yorkshire.

This was well before Alfred Wainwright was to monopolise walkers’ bookshelves. Indeed Brown probably helped to pave the way for that later author’s success, through his books and articles – especially in The Dalesman – by popularising many now famous walks or as he would call them hikes or “tramps” through the fells, moors and dales, often covering huge mileages in a day, in an area from Calderdale to Teesdale, from the high Pennine summits to the rugged Yorkshire coast, including that still neglected area the Yorkshire Wolds.

But AJB’S passion for the countryside came out of the horror and nightmare of the First World War. Alfred was born in Bradford in 1894 and was a pupil of St Bede’s Grammar School, leaving at 14 to become a wool industry trainee, continuing his education at night school – soon to be interrupted by the War when he served as a gunner in the Royal Field Artillery, before being invalided out in 1916 with post-diptheric paralysis, leaving him unable to walk.

During six years of recovery, he read widely in classical literature and poetry, setting himself a rehabilitation routine which included daily “rough walking” over nearby moorland.

This love of the open countryside stayed with him when in 1920 he was able to return to work, now as overseas sales manager for a Bradford wool company. He spent much of his spare time walking in the Dales and Moors, and in writing. He married in 1927 and after a honeymoon to the Yorkshire coast and Swaledale – including visits to favourite inns The Cat Hole at Keld in Swaledale and Tan Hill - he moved to Burley-in-Wharfedale. Four Boon Fellows was his first popular success, to be followed by Moorland Tramping in West Yorkshire (1931), Tramping in Yorkshire E&NR (1932) and his biggest single literary success Striding Through Yorkshire (1938) which was to sell over 20,000 copies during and immediate after the war.

As well as helping to establish a national awareness of the Dales and Moors as one of Britain’s finest areas for walking and outdoor activity in those vital post-war years, AJB was also a great campaigner for access to his beloved fells and for footpath rights. He became the first president of the West Riding Ramblers Federation, soon to become the West Riding Ramblers Association, and remained closely associated with rambling politics for the rest of his life, and was the first president of the Fellowship of Fell Walkers.

During World War Two, though too old to fly, he joined the RAF as an intelligence officer, using his considerable language skills to help advise the planning of bombing missions, finally rising, by the end of the War, to the rank of Acting Wing Commander.

After the war more successful books followed including Broad Acres (1948), an affectionate literary meander through the whole of Yorkshire, and the first official guide book to the then newly established North York Moors National Park in 1958. He also served on the North Riding Committee of the Yorkshire Dales National Park as a ministerially-appointed member. Sadly his attempt to become a full-time writer in 1952 with a series of novels was not really successful, and he returned to the wool export business establishing his own textile export agency in the 1960s. In 1966 the Browns moved to Sleights before his unexpected illness and death in 1969.

It is impossible to over-emphasise AJB’s influence on a whole generation of Dales lovers and walkers at a time where access to the Dales was mainly by steam train, foot and tram, and country lanes were not monopolised by cars. He writes in an energetic, masculine prose style, rich in anecdotes and personal reminiscence, a style no longer fashionable, but very much of its time and highly readable, rich in humour and zest for life – including a love of Yorkshire ale and inns - with what was rightly described as his encyclopaedic knowledge of England’s greatest county as it was in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

You can still pick up well-thumbed second hand copies of an AJ Brown classic at most second hand bookshops, and on the web, no longer as cheaply as once you could, but maybe it is time for an imaginative publisher to reprint one or more.

John White, a Bradford-born researcher and writer now living in Cheshire, has recently completed an excellent, detailed biography, due to be published very shortly which explores Brown’s complex personality as war veteran, entrepreneur, journalist, poet and above all champion of the Dales. For full details of publication and how to order an advance copy, contact John direct at whitejam@btopenworld.com.

How fitting, that at the recent funeral service in Skipton to that other great Dales writer, WR Mitchell, his old friend Bob Swallow should read an extract from AJB’s fine poem There must be Dales in Paradise:

There must be dales in Paradise

or what would a dalesman do?

There must be dales in Paradise

to wander through and through