Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 171

This book, aimed at non-specialists, enriches our understanding of rural society in twentieth-century Ulster, illuminating not only its agricultural economy, but also such themes as rural industry and gender relations. Bell presents oral history as a rich source for the reconstruction of rural life in Ulster between the 1930s and the 1960s. In an introduction and useful prologue, he considers how to navigate oral sources, and argues for the essential value of this material. The text is complemented by a good range of photographs, including many of the volume’s subjects. Bell often allows them to speak for themselves, and, as is often the case in such exercises, silence is as meaningful as the spoken word. Surprisingly, given the tumultuous events encompassed by both the period under consideration and the later timeframe in which the oral narratives were recorded, there are only oblique references to rural sectarianism (a curiosity that Bell notes in his introductory remarks). For insight into that feature of Irish rural society, readers will have to consult the work of other scholars, including Rosemary Harris, whose classic Prejudice and tolerance in Ulster is complemented by this book. Equally striking, the border is suppressed in this survey of a province that straddles two states – a curious matter, as one might expect divergent experiences in the Free State/Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, especially during wartime, to be foregrounded in memories of rural life, or in Bell’s accompanying commentary. The salience of this silence demands exposition.

As the latest in a number of publications by smaller presses highlighting sources for the study of rural Irish history, this book will find a place on shelves besides such works as James Morrissey (ed.), On the verge of want. It should invite its audience to contemplate the value of oral history, and perhaps spur new research. Bell sketches a range of themes ripe for further investigation – the uneven extent of mechanization on farms, divergent systems of farm labour, changing features of rural sociability, and intertwined relations of gender and authority on the farm. The transcribed oral narratives that he interweaves with his analysis of rural change are highly engaging. There is a strong emphasis on the variety of the subjects’ experiences, influenced among other things by gender and the size and location of farmholdings. They resist even tentative generalization about rural Ulster’s encounters with what Bell characterizes as the forces of ‘modernization’ (in particular farm technology and state intervention). The narratives suggest, with great colour, another powerful influence at work in the shaping of such experiences – individual personalities. The personal interactions detailed here – between family members, farmers, neighbours, workers and agents of the state – are rich in detail and nuance.

The concluding section offers a lucid discussion of oral history (largely culled from Gaynor Kavanagh’s Dream spaces: memory and the museum), but this study is largely a selection of narratives assembled to highlight experiences as they are recounted in later life. Some scholars may find the archive from which these cases were selected fertile terrain for the theorizing of memory, but Bell asserts its value for the archaeology of a near-past which, he asserts optimistically, is indeed ‘knowable’. Regardless of the purposes to which these voices are marshalled, their vividness (when describing, for instance, how rural families in Northern Ireland circumvented wartime rationing), is indisputable. This book may have benefited from a short bibliography, as it contains only a limited number of footnotes. Some readers may also fault Bell for being unreflective about the nature of his own project, seeing it as a window onto the every-day life of diverse rural people, rather than a complex series of layered narratives, including his own, giving voice to a heavily structured interpretation of the past. But by including the reflections of such people as the peripatetic farm labourer James Ennis and the farming sisters Isabel Lyons and Dolly McRoberts (whose experiences belie notions of immutable sexual divisions in farm labour), Jonathan Bell draws attention to narratives that have much to contribute to ongoing scholarly fieldwork in rural Ireland.