The Story of White Hall Centre: Outdoor Education across the Decades.
By Pete McDonald.​

Synopsis –

White Hall Centre for Open Country Pursuits, near Buxton, was set up in 1950 by Jack Longland, Derbyshire’s director of education. It welcomed its first visitors in December that year. The Story of White Hall Centre describes White Hall’s origins and its first sixtyseven years. Since 1950, writers on outdoor education have often mentioned the pioneering roles of Longland and White Hall in the history of the sector. But the brevity of most of these mentions has rendered them unavoidably superficial and reductive. At the same time, many revealing written sources – some fragmentary and others more substantial – have remained untapped. The research behind this book has completely filled this factual vacuum. By examining written references to the setting-up of White Hall, unearthed from the late 1940s and early 1950s, this book shows that one of the main purposes of the centre, at a local level, was straightforward and was openly and repeatedly stated: to introduce young people of Derbyshire to what Peter Mosedale, the centre’s first warden, called the ‘hill and water sports’. The primary sources also reveal a more ambitious intention, in the mind of Jack Longland, which was to demonstrate and promote a widening of physical education nationally. They show that he frequently spoke of the need to extend physical education beyond the playing fields and that he set out to do exactly that….. for more see  http://homepages.vodafone.co.nz/~pete.mcd/wh/WHallSynopsis.pdf

For more information on ordering please see – http://homepages.vodafone.co.nz/~pete.mcd/wh/WHallBook2018.pdf