Two Hiking 78s

I gather hiking became very popular about 1933. The Reverend A.A. Evans wrote his book On Foot in Sussex then, and I would wager that's when these two songs were recorded:

I'm Happy When I'm Hiking - Bert Layton
(You can look at the sheet music cover here.)

We're All Going In For Hiking - Malcolm Desmond

Both have a satiric air just short of mocking, which usually indicates the British attitude to a new trend.

Eclipse records were sold in the now-defunct Woolworths, and they were these sweet little eight-inch records which to me all have a particular acoustic, a timbre that satisfies my inner ear.

I was trying to find something out about the Eclipse label that put out these records, when I found this site.

The author calls the entries for hitch-hiking in the Guinness Book of Records "dubious", and then goes on to list them. This immediately intrigued me.

But then I started to peek around the rest of his "brown paper bag" site, and fell into the man's mind.