[Diggers350] Post-war countryside chroniclers: Robin Page, John Seymour, Jack Hargreaves
Tony Gosling
tony at cultureshop.org.uk
Sat Jun 17 15:29:12 BST 2023
Post-war countryside chroniclers: Robin Page, John Seymour, Jack Hargreaves
Bankrupting farmers and selling their land to private equity won't fix farming
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June 2023 <https://tlio.org.uk/author/tony/>Tony
Gosling
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As agricultural workers joined the fight against
Adolf Hitler. imported American tractors took
over from horse-power Post-war, the drive for
efficient fertilisers and pesticides ended
centuries of farming crafts and wisdom. Some of
these skills were only retained by gypsies who
have now themselves been almost persecuted out of existence.
Barely mentioned is the key role farming
subsidies have played in these changes, making
smallholdings, market-gardens and even the 100
acre farm barely viable. The industrial
agriculturists, like the Duke of Westminster,
private equity and Crown Estate, who never even
cast eyes on 99.9% of their land get a estimated eight-figure sum each.
The markets are moving in fast: near Oxford,
private equity is about to build an 11 mile long
solar farm, the biggest in Europe. Investors are
taking thousands of acres out of production on
the back of a rigged electricity market.
Emacs!
in George Monbiots 2022 declaration that
farming is the greatest threat to humanity it
is as if the environmental movement he claims to
be part of, and its sixty year fight against
industrial agriculture, never happened. Hoping
we've forgotten. King Charles too seems to have
abandoned his organic life, sacking Highrove
organic farm manager and signing GM into law.
Farmers, and the surpluses they produced, created
civilisation out of poverty, and without them, we
starve. The most simple and socially just
solution is to cap subsidies at 400 acres or to
subsidise the farmer rather than the acres
and to make all farming organic.
Time then to refresh all our memories about the
great post-war campaigning journalists who
chronicled these devastating changes which ended
time-worn farming practices. Noting too the
continuation of enclosure. depopulation that
meant many farm labourers never returned to the
land. Turning the countryside into a playground
for rich individuals and their corporations. [TG, ed.]
Robin Page
The Decline of the English Village, by Robin Page (1974)
Extract from Chapter 1, the home and farm
ISBN 0-7067-0132-1
Emacs!
Life on the land was hard, requiring patience,
resourcefulness and brute force. During a hot dry
summer the thick grey boulder clay, which seemed
to descend to unfathomable depths, would set as
solid as rock, its adamantine crust blunting
implements, wearing out horseshoes and causing
frustration and despair. If ploughed late it
would dry out, forming countless clods of varying
sizes from marbles to footballs, and elsewhere it
would crack, the heat from the sun drawing out
the moisture, leaving the crops struggling for
survival. In contrast, winter would show the full
fickleness of its nature and it would become a
squelching, glutinous mass, turning the farmyard
into a sea of mud and making land work
impossible; work was confined to ditching or
hedging with hands numb with cold, cutting kale
with clothing soaked by the chilling leaf-held
water, repairing buildings, or shovelling out
muck from the cowshed and the stable.
Dolly and Diamond were housed in the stable; two
fine carthorses, one the colour of burnt sienna,
the other a dark chestnut. They were said to be a
Clydesdale and a Shire, but time and hot blood
had allowed other strains to creep in. Their
confidence, bearing and strength, a living
tribute to their ancestry, made them not only
able and willing workers, but also valuable
companions in the never-ending struggle with the
elements. But, sadly, as they stood at their
manger, snorting and stamping, proud and content,
they were unaware of the significance of the blue
tractor standing silently in the shed nearby. It
needed no care when not working, its hunger was
for toil not sustenance, it was strong,
adaptable, and reliable. The adoption of the
Fordson Major marked the beginning, and the end, of an era.
Because of the tractor Dolly soon left, sold to a
dealer, who in turn sold her again, probably to a
factory in Melton Mowbray where she would
disappear inside tins of catfood, or to be
exported to Belgium, destined for a butchers
shop in Bruges. When I was eight, another lorry
arrived, this time for Diamond, and she too was loaded up and whisked away.
It was a miserable day on the farm. Two tractors
now stood in the shed and the stable was empty,
save for memories and the smell of the past. I
would have no more rides on that broad brown
back, clinging with trusting arms to her shaggy
greying mane, and she would pull no more cart
loads of water along the road for the cows as
they grazed languorously in a nearby meadow. The
harsh facts of farming life meant that she had to
go. She had worked willingly and well, but her
coat was losing its lustre, her muscles were
tiring and her reactions were slowing. The
faithful horse that had toiled for hours in the
fields, shifting tons of corn and earth, was
finished, and her large mournful eyes seemed to
know this. Father could not hide the sense of
betrayal he felt in sending his helper to the
knackers yard; a helpmeet who had aided him in
bad times and good, and whose crime was that of old age.
Apart from her age she had only one minor
failing; an almost uncanny sense of time.
Regardless of her task, whether she was hoeing,
ploughing or drilling, as soon as it was time to
stop, her time, not her masters, she would turn
at right angles and head for home. Now she would be returning home no more.
Father felt that same sense of betrayal and guilt
when he sent cows to market to be sold for
slaughter. For ten or twelve years he would feed
them and house them, in winter mixing their food
with a shovel on the floor of the barn, turning
over and stirring the multi-coloured mound of
different meals like a builder mixing cement, and
in return they would give him milk and every year
deliver him a new calf. Then, as soon as their
yield dropped or they became barren, they were
sold off and killed. The economic facts of life
did not allow for sentiment, and the saddest
sound on the farm was that of the cattle lorry as
it revved up and moved off to Cambridge.
He felt nothing for the pigs however, greedy,
screaming and often brutal animals that would
turn on the weakest of their number, sometimes
leaving it streaming with blood and literally
quaking with fear. He felt nothing, either, for
the bull, standing in its pen looking cunning and
malevolent. Its life alternated between periods
of lust for the cows, when it would breath
heavily and bellow out a message of virility, and
periods of distrust when it would snort with
anger and paw the ground at its human
adversaries. The bulls humour was worsened by
the fact that around the farm buildings and some
of the fields, the animals were kept in by an
electric fence; a thin strand of wire through
which an electric current passed every second. We
normally kept well away from it, hating every
time we accidentally received a shock, but
greatly enjoying the sight of an unsuspecting visitor taking hold of it.
The bull disliked it, after allowing the chain
from his nose to become entangled with it and
then retreating backwards, only for another
strand of wire to send a shock rushing up his tail.
The wire had hardly any effect on Father who
would casually take hold of it, to check that it
was not shorting, with no apparent discomfort.
When moving the wire one morning, to allow the
cows to get at some new grass, he was watched by
several children, including an innocent boy from
the High Street: Get hold of that end for me
will you, Paul? he asked. Paul picked it up with
both hands; his eyes blinked in amazement, his
mouth opened, and every time the current passed
through him his whole body jolted. He was so
surprised then to the roadside for collection,
the pigs and hens had to be fed, and in addition the land had to be cultivated.
All this could not be done by one man alone and
Father had two full time workers to help him, and
sometimes three. Jim and Percy were the regulars,
one a countryman born and bred, the other a
townsman who would have been more at home
delivering milk or repairing pavements. It was
Percy who was out of place on the land, for he
was unacquainted with the laws of nature and
could not understand the animals. Land work had
been for him a stop-gap, taken up when jobs were
difficult to come by, but he worked happily, if
fitfully, and used such words as shite, the
meanings of which we were supposed not to know.
Jim was completely different, a small, one-eyed,
well-meaning countryman, who could read the
condition of the land or the seasons of the year
like others read a book. His father, grand-mother
and great-grandfather had all been tenants of the
same farm and were from that ancient yeoman stock
which had formed the stable backbone of English
society for generations. Men of resolution and
reliance who had farmed and fought with a
resilience and a determination that had made them
an asset to any cause, and who, when Oliver
Cromwell had represented Cambridge in Parliament,
flocked to his banner to overthrow what they saw
as injustice and tyranny. Jim had maintained that
tradition, and in 1914 he, too, had responded to
the call of duty and went to do battle in northern France.
After just six months of active service he had
returned home with honour, but also with a
shrapnel wound in his right eye. He lost his eye,
but gained a view of the French that time never
changed and which, to him, the Second World War
endorsed. The French were, he said, incapable of
fighting, they were dirty and stupid, and France
itself was not worth fighting for. If I had been
a bloody Froggie, he asserted, T d have given
the bugger to Jerry. But he was proud of his
sacrifice and even had a begrudging respect for
the bloody squareheads , who were, he admitted, good soldiers and workers.
His father had been turned out of the rented farm
when the land had changed hands, and as there had
been no security of tenure Jim had not been able to become his own master.
But this did not worry him unduly, and with a
cigarette hang-ing from the corner of his mouth,
and his one eye guiding him almost as well as
two, he returned to the land as a worker, where
he progressed with ease from horse to tractor,
from harness to sparking plug, and became master of both.
Not surprisingly, after generations of
independence and struggle, he was a Tory, who
looked upon Socialism as a malignant cancer that
ate into stability, freedom and self-respect. At
the mention of certain politicians he would take
off his cap, scratch his greying head in
exasperation and recommend that the offending
wretch be placed head first in a barrel of runny
cow muck, or that a hedgehog skin should be
wrapped around a pitchfork handle and stuffed up his bloody arse.
Apart from his love of the land and his hatred of
Social-ism, his one abiding passion was cricket
and he could talk for hours on the game, sounding
like an encyclopaedia of all the great names of
the past. He spoke of Hobbs and Sutcliffe, at
Lords and Parkers Piece, and recalled many
memorable occasions on local village greens where
amazing feats of batting had taken place, and
where, on other occasions, teams had been skittled out for less than ten.
Charlie would occasionally arrive on his bicycle
to work part-time. He was a signalman on the
railway who rested while at work, and worked
while he should have been resting at home. In his
signalbox he could doze until roused by the
warning bell, and at home he kept pigs,
cultivated a large garden, as well as a plot of
ground, and still had time to help out local
farmers. At hay cart and harvest, others too
would come for casual work or would be borrowed
from neighbouring farms, so that the work could be speedily finished.
It was harvest time that we children liked the
best, the sun always seemed to shine and there
would be picnic teas down the harvest field.
There, Jim would drive the tractor, father roped
on, the loads would lurch and sway as the
trailers were pulled along the rough cart tracks,
and we children would conceal our fear with laughter as we rode on top.
The men worked long hours to get the harvest home
and would finish each day tired and hungry. But
the smell of corn being cut, the creak of horse
and harness, the feel of stubble on bare legs,
the sun, rabbits being shot as they ran for
cover, and mother, forgetting briefly the evils
of alcohol, buying quart bottles of cider, made
it the best season of the year for us. The
insects in the sandwiches, the horseflies droning
menacingly in hungry search, and the fatigue of
those working, were of little consequence.
John Seymour
High farming: no fertiliser no diesel
Extract from Chapter 7 crops of arable land
The Countryside Explained, by John Seymour (1977)
ISBN 0-571-11092-4
Emacs!
Late eighteenth-century and early
nineteenth-century writers such as Arthur Young
and Cobbett were constantly noting
two-ton-an-acre in their travels. They took this
as something good but not unusual in those days of High Farming.
No chemicals were used (there werent any) but
enormous applications of farmyard manure kept up
the high fertility of the land, plus the
ploughed-in residues of nitrogen-fixing clovers,
the bulk of humus-forming grasses, and the
dunging and treading of sheep which were kept folded on turnips.
I worked on a farm in Essex as a pupil when a boy
where two tons of wheat to the acre was the
almost invariable rule and where hardly any
chemical fertilizer and no other chemicals were
used. There were, though, a hundred bullocks
fattened every year in yards on this hundred-acre
farm, a herd of six breeding sows, the dung of
five horses and a couple of hundred free-range hens.
This was one of the last farms in Essex run on
traditional High Farming lines. No fuel-oil
[diesel ed.] was imported on to the farm for
there were no tractors or other engines. The only
thing that did come over our borders was a ton or
two of linseed cake for what Mr Catt the farmer
called its kindling effect on the bullocks to
give them a finish for the butcher in the last weeks of the fattening period.
The input-output ratio of such a farm was simply
marvellous-practically nothing came on but a
great deal went off. But such farming is prodigal
of human labour. There were seven of us working
these hundred acres and we had to work in a way
which no modern farm worker would tolerate.
Today this farm is probably part of a
thousand-acre agribusiness with possibly two
tractor drivers working the whole lot. But apart
from the stunt members of the three-ton-and-over
club (who are certainly costing the country far
more in foreign exchange than they are saving by
producing wheat) the average production of wheat
per acre in Britain is still well below two tons an acre.
Jack Hargreaves
The Old Country, by Jack Hargreaves (1988)
extract from Chapter 6, a shining night
ISBN 0-946159-59-9
Emacs!
You may still find, in a country pub somewhere,
an ancient who will talk with relish about the
days of sparrow-pie. This really means little
bird pie. When protein was short large numbers
of little birds were eaten and they were not
particular about the species. Dozens of them
would be boiled until their flesh could be picked off and made into a pie.
Long ago when we moved to our first farm there
stood in the corner of the barn an old clap-net.
Two very long poles were tied together at their
thin tips so that, if you held the butts under
your arms, they formed them-selves into an arch.
This arch was covered with a thin soft net of
cotton. In the dusk of evening this was lightly
beaten against the ivy of the house, the high
hedges and the sides of the hay and corn-ricks.
As soon as there came a flutter the net was
closed by clapping the two poles together.
When Pointers first came up from Spain their job
was to find and put up birds for the falcon that
was hovering above, but the Setter was the
servant of the fowler. He developed his peculiar
crouching habit for the purpose of netting partridges.
The partridge, when it senses danger, will always
take refuge in concealment before flight. The
whole covey that is the partridge family will
crouch close together in the long grass silent
and unmovable. It is known as jukking and
nothing will make them juk tighter than the sight
of a hawk in the sky. In the earliest writings on
the fowlers art there are instructions for
making a kite in the shape of a falcon. When
setting out to net the birds the kite was flown
overhead to stop the birds from moving.
The setting dog would quarter the ground with the
wind in his face, moving to and fro until he
caught the scent of the hidden covey. Once he had
it he would move stealthily forward. The fowler
and his mate followed with a twenty foot square
net, carefully folded. When the dog knew he was
within four or five feet of the birds he would
sink down to the ground and crouch with his nose
pointing to them. The net would be delicately
spread and the two men, one on each front corner,
would slip it right over the dogs back and drop
it over the whole partridge family.
People who keep Setters today and even win with
them at Crufts can scarcely imagine the thrill
of working with them. Once set to a close scent
a good dog would not move a muscle until the job
was done. There is an old story about fowlers who
were working in the late evening when a mist
rolled down the hill. They lost sight of the dog
who was well ahead of them. After searching and
calling in vain they went home. At daybreak the
mist had cleared and they found the dog, still
setting a scent that he had found the night
before. They caught a covey of birds which had
squatted while the dog held them for eight or
nine hours! A likely tale! But you dont have to
believe it to understand that admiration for the dog caused it to be told.
Im sure there is not a setter alive today that
has a net pulled over his back. In any case it is
unthinkable that the many arts of the fowler
should be performed today. Still, to understand
the problems of modern conservation, it is well
to remember that seventy years ago when I was
little birds of all kinds existed abundantly
around us after centuries of fowling. Despite
the twirler, the skylarks sang in the sky all day
over fields where they are now unknown.
Every evening we heard the Grey Partridge cocks
calling the coveys to rest on land from which
herbicides have removed the weed seeds on which
they relied; and insecticides have robbed them of
the insects on which their chicks were reared. In
winter the small birds flew in clouds around the
rickyard; but yesterday I read in our Country
Bird Report that the sparrow must now be regarded as uncommon.
The art of fowling faded after the Battle of
Waterloo as the percussion shotgun spread across
the country, a weapon that would detonate a cloud
of shot fast enough for feathered game to be shot
on the wing. Instead of hawks and nets it was now
the shooting men who went out with pointers and
setters including Mr Pickwick. And soon the
privileged among them found a way of shooting in
which somebody else did the walking.
As so often in English history a new set of
people assumed the role of country gentlemen.
They moved in with East Indian spoils, Admiralty
prize-money, the profits of coal, sugar and iron,
and the fruits of banking. Land was no longer to
have the monopoly of riches and power and with
but a modest estate you could by following the
new fashion of driven-game shooting put up a show of being a shooting host.
It meant rearing game birds by the thousand, and
crowding them into the coverts in numbers for
which Nature could never provide. It meant
keeping the locals off your land and closing the
footpaths which their ancestors had walked. It
brought an obsession with trespass that developed
over the years into a malady which the Old Man
used to call Landowners Disease. Kipling is
said to have been most seriously afflicted. On
his small Sussex estate he sat at a top window
with field-glasses, scanning his boundaries in
fear of invasion, yet hoping that someone might
cross the border who could be prosecuted.
But it also meant that a man need no longer walk
hard all day in company with a yokel and two dogs
in order to bring home three or four brace of
birds. He could invite a dozen of the elite and
influential to stand fifteen yards apart while
the birds were driven over their heads. And he
could have them all roistering at his lunch table
while the Head Keeper sat outside, growling at
his pocket watch and cancelling one after another of the afternoon drives.
His work was to be judged by the hundreds of
birds shot and also by the scores of wild
creatures, said to be competitive in the game
environment, that he himself killed and hung on
gibbets for his employer to see.
This time of new riches in the country houses
brought hardship to the rural poor. And since the
yokels were needed on shooting days to beat the
woods and put the birds over the line, they
became aware of the vast numbers of quarry, and
more familiar with their habits than those who
stood to receive them. It was quite natural that
the fashion for driven game gave birth to the
great age of poaching. Within fifty years two
generations of country lads had grown up knowing
every trick of the game, and taking a pleasure in
it that amounted to ecstasy. Its my delight on
a shining night in the season of the year.
The cleverest dog was now the poachers dog
though he usually looked just a little
ragamuffin. The pointers and setters died
gradually away, to be replaced by the fetch-
and-carry retrievers that Stonehenge writing
in The Field in the eighteen-fifties called
Servants Hall Dogs. While the poacher worked
his dog would crouch on watch and if he noticed
the sound or smell of anyone else he would creep
up to his master and, in the dark, touch his hand
with a cold nose. When the man with the needle-
pole wanted a hare for his own pot he would go
out with a gate-net inside his trousers a soft,
wide-meshed net about the size of a single
bedspread. This he hung loosely in a gateway or a
hedge-gap on anyone of the hares habitual routes
that he knew by heart. Then he lit his pipe and
walked on. His dog would slip through the hedge
and quarter the field until the hare was put up
and then drive it sheep-dog fashion into the
net. Having killed it there he would return to
walk respectably at heel. The hare could be fetched when the coast was clear.
One of the satisfactory things about poaching was
that it did not involve guilt. No poacher ever
thought of himself as a criminal. Of course, if
you were caught you would be in trouble. But it
wasnt fair to the village Bobby to get caught.
It was embarrassing for him. Even the keepers
would turn a blind eye. They were, on the whole,
contemptuous of their masters. But you shouldnt
put your trust in that. The Old Man used to say
If the keeper lets you take a hare youll never finish paying for it.
Poachers were hard to catch up with except for
the gangs that came from the towns and openly
challenged the keepers to violent encounters. The
standard of skill of the country poachers was
very high indeed. Why, then, did the night when
Great-Grandfather went out with his needle-pole turn out so fatefully?
The outcome of it was decided on the other side
of the world. Australia had been used as a place
to send the criminal classes and, now the time
had come to open up and develop the country, the
Governor General said it could not be done with
his work-gangs of thieves and pickpockets. Now he
needed good men who could move out into the country.
So the word went from Westminster to the Lords-
Lieutenant and from them to the squires who were
magistrates. The search was on for good men who could be caught poaching.
Great-Grandfather could milk and plough and
thatch and like most farm-hands had a dozen different rural skills.
The day he was taken on information extracted
from the drover was his last free day in his
native land. On the ship he joined hundreds of
others swept up in the same cynical operation. It
was a bad day for the man but perhaps a very good
one for his descendants. I hope that their
sheep-station may be called Needlepole.
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