Thomas Arthur Leonard

Thomas Arthur Leonard (12 March 1864 – 19 July 1948) was a British social reformer. He was a pioneer in developing organised outdoor holidays for working people through the Co-operative Holidays Association and the Holiday Fellowship. He also helped to establish the Youth Hostels Association and the Ramblers' Association.

Early life and marriage He was born in Finsbury, London, the son of Agnes and Thomas Leonard, a clock- and watchmaker who died when his son was five. He was then raised in Hackney by his mother, the daughter of a Congregationalist minister, and spent some time in Heidelberg, Germany as a child, before moving with his mother to Eastbourne, Sussex, where she ran a boarding house. He started work in Eastbourne as a clerk in a builder's office, and also taught at a Sunday school. In 1884 he enrolled to study at the Congregational Institute in Nottingham, run by Dr. John Brown Paton. He married Mary Arletta Coupe in 1888; they had a son, who died as a child, and a daughter. Leonard later wrote that: "In those days we were content with very primitive arrangements, so long as they gave us the joy and freedom of the open fells."

The success of his church trips led him to start organising holidays under the auspices of Paton's organisation, the National Home Reading Union (NHRU), which he continued to run after he moved from Colne back to London in 1895. He continued his pastoral duties until 1897, when he and Paton set up the Co-operative Holidays Association (CHA), with the aim of providing "recreative and educational holidays by purchasing or renting and furnishing houses and rooms in selected centres, by catering in such houses for parties of members and guests and by securing helpers who will promote the intellectual and social interests of the party with which they are associated". describing him as "the 'Father' of the Open-Air Movement in this Country", and bearing the epitaph: "Believing that 'the best things any mortal hath are those which every mortal shares' he endeavoured to promote 'joy in widest commonality spread'." The quotes come from the Quaker poet Lucy Larcom, and William Wordsworth.