Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 238

In this admirably-researched and crisply-written book Alun Howkins takes us on a brisk canter through a century of English rural life. Most of the general themes will be familiar to students of the recent history of agriculture, yet Howkins offers a comprehensive summary coupled with incisive judgements and what to some readers will prove to be controversial viewpoints. From an agricultural perspective it is a rather sad tale, being in essence a chronicle of the descent of a great industry from triumph into decline, and from public admiration to widespread vilification. While they may have been accused of ‘doing rather well’ out of two world wars, the farmers’ remarkable contribution to wartime food production engendered much public sympathy and a general belief in the principle of protection. But this was to evaporate due largely to indifference in the inter-war period and increasing resentment over environmental, public health and animal rights issues in the later twentieth century. Incidentally, Howkins writes brilliantly (if controversially) on the rise of the counter-culture of environmental protest and the growth of profound hostility towards the farming interest (whose doings were orchestrated by MAFF and its advisory wing) in the latter period. Farming, of course, has always been a broad church and throughout his book Howkins emphasizes the fundamental social, cultural and economic differences between the large (and highly-influential) arable producers predominantly of the central and eastern regions and their livestock-rearing brethren of the west. Not only did these groupings respond differentially to changing economic conditions, but their attitudes towards their workforces and their overall social aspirations varied enormously. As the eastern grain farmer of the 1980s pocketed his arable area payments, so the small dairyman of the west was forced to sell up as the Milk Marketing Board insisted that he abandon his churns and concrete his farm lane to accommodate their thirty-ton bulk tanker. With the growth of the political clout of the NFU from the 1930s onwards, the initiation of the post-war mechanism of the Annual Price Review, the compliance of the MAFF (more recently castigated as the farmers’ poodle) and the positive propaganda provided by the Farmers Weekly and kindred journals, there appeared to be no end to the growth of agricultural prosperity by the 1980s. The age-old rural-urban divide was still there, yet even this seemed to decline in significance as increasing numbers of townspeople moved into the countryside from the 1930s onwards. True, this increased village house prices to the discomfort of the indigenes, fuelled the craving for more access to the countryside and threw up the odd Linda Snell-like irritant to moan about the pesticides and the smell of pig slurry. But somehow, it hardly seemed to matter. ‘Silent Spring’ had come and gone, the environmentalists, and animal rights lobbyists could be dismissed as marginal cranks while the subsidies rolled in and the structural surpluses grew. My father, in many ways a far-sighted man, bought land at this time! The inevitable followed and Alun Howkins chronicles with considerable insight (and unconcealed relish) the subsequent disasters; the growth of the anti-factory farming lobby drawing support from all classes and age-groups, the dramatic rise of the environmental movement, the fiasco of BSE, the tragedy of foot- and-mouth disease, and the slumping of farm income from £6 billion in 1995–6 to £1.8 billion in 2000. The Countryside Alliance might fight back with some gusto, yet the world of agriculture had changed for ever as the farmer became an increasingly-marginalized figure and the MAFF a disgraced, derided and ultimately defunct body.

Howkins’ story, of course, is not merely about farming and the book is concerned throughout with the changing class and social structure of the countryside. As one might have anticipated, he relates in some detail the varying fortunes of the farm workforce and its evolving relationship with employers, discusses the tied cottage issue, and describes the effects of in-comers on core community values as urban folk drifted to the villages and farm workers became (almost) strangers in their own land. At the other end of the social scale were the landed gentry, whom Howkins sees as being increasingly divorced from the roots of their landed in-come as the rituals of deference – still common between the wars – began to evaporate. Perhaps, but not in the Northamptonshire of my youth in the 1960s where the squire was decidedly more than ‘increasingly symbolic’ and the parson, far from being ‘a marginalized minority’ remained a force to be reckoned with. Meanwhile, in the village hostelries of that same county (for all the effects of incomers, sales of council houses, declining farm work force and so on) public bar talk still tends to be of crops and livestock, the weather, hunting and shooting. Here, in the middle of England, animal rights activists and hunt saboteurs are thin on the ground. All of which leads me to my sole gripe with Alun Howkins’ admirable book; the title itself.

Having travelled a good deal in the tropics, being immune to the dubious allure of beaches, and having little taste for the company of the Chianti drinkers in Tuscany, I tend to go on holiday in England; frequently alone and more often than not, on foot. On my various wanderings over the past few years, I have seen little evidence of the ‘death’ of rural England which, to me at least, still seems a highly-dynamic place where crops flourish, woodland is planted, environmental schemes are elaborated, farms adapt to change by way of diversification and ‘added value’ and the rural economy adjusts to the demands of tourism and the imperatives of increased public access to the land. Of course there has been physical and structural change (as there has always been); of course farmers bemoan their lot (as they always have done) and of course the farmscape appears emptier as demand for labour declines. If ‘traditional’ rural society has changed, in some areas almost beyond recognition, the notion of a rural England close to ‘death’ appears to me a little extreme. Go to east Northamptonshire, central Dorset, the Yorkshire dales, the glorious country of the Welsh marches or the broad farmlands of Northumbria, and the ‘real’ rural England is still to be found, its social structures, traditions and rituals largely intact. And then, of course, there is Wales 240 the agricultural to which Alun Howkins nods from time-to-time. Wales may be ‘a country in the world’s backside’, but here the little grey Fergie is as common as the modern behemoth, every other field is a wildflower meadow, bracken, brambles and bush abound, and farms still co-operate at hay time and shearing time. Social patterns and social behaviours in the countryside remain constrained by traditional values, and the ancient language continues to flourish to the great benefit both of cultural diversity and the tourism industry. As Howkins rightly observes, tourism has long overtaken agriculture as a contributor to national income. Time and again, moreover, focus group studies of visitor perception reveal that in both England and Wales tourists identify the farmed landscape as a major priority. True, the ideal is a ‘traditional’ farmed landscape, but it is a farmed landscape nevertheless. The appalling disaster of the recent foot- and-mouth disease epidemic dramatically illustrated the intimate links between the fortunes of farming, tourism and rural society in general. Since people do not as a rule come to this country in pursuit of wilderness, we disregard the maintenance of farming England at our peril and while the demands of the environmentalist, the wetlands zealot and the lover of wasteland should be met, they should be accommodated within the framework of well-conducted farming.

In producing this highly-readable and challenging account, Alun Howkins offers a valuable counterpoint to John Martin’s recent work focusing essentially on agriculture. Howkins draws upon a wide range of sources in a book which, despite the odd typographical error, is notable for the charm of its illustrations, the common sense deployed in its arguments, and the reasonableness of its price. It is required reading for historians, economists, and social anthropologists for whom it will provide a valuable launching pad for further research into this most important period of rural history.