Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 139

Over recent years the received image of inter-war Britain, of dole queues, of undernourished workers, of bleak and depressing living conditions and of a countryside abandoned to scrub and bush, has been called into question. The extractive and heavy manufacturing industries of the Midlands and the North may have gone steeply into decline, yet, in some regions, economic growth spawned employment in both traditional and novel areas. The commercial world and the white collar sector prospered and standards of living in the south and elsewhere began to advance. As the ‘rural trippers’ descended on the countryside, they were enabled sniffily to observe their ‘primitive’ fellow countrymen and by their purblind incomprehension of rural matters to deepen the growing gulf between the urban and rural worlds so much in evidence today.

In this book eleven contributors from a variety of disciplines discuss the social, economic, political and cultural aspects of the rural world between the wars and assess whether the English countryside at this time might better be characterized by growth and innovation rather than stagnation and decline. And it is a totally anglocentric work, Wales receiving three cursory mentions and Scotland none at all. The volume comprises a series of papers delivered at the agreeable venue of Dartington Hall, itself originally conceived as a social experiment in reconstruction after the First World War. It is fitting then, that Leonard Elmhirst’s vision is described in detail as are John Spedan Lewis’s extraordinary ventures at Leckford, both of them exercises in rural regeneration. In like manner, village drama and various other attempts to foster local cultural cohesion were seen as regenerative activities. Yet so often there was a vapid artificiality about these efforts. What had Dartington Hall or Leckford to do with the rural community beyond their self-sufficient boundaries? What was the purpose of rural drama if it did not somehow connect to the daily round or common task? The holistic vision of a ‘rural university’ adumbrated by Rolf Gardiner and others wherein music, drama, ritual and masque were directly linked to routine work is not considered. A comparative study of the Gardnerian vision and that of the Elmhirsts would have been instructive. In fairness, the editors admit that they have not attempted to produce a comprehensive coverage of the period, yet one cannot help feeling that several opportunities have been lost, especially since there are elements of repetition throughout the book. Take for example, two rather lacklustre chapters on rural and agricultural education, which incidentally eschew any reference to my book on the subject written in the 1980s. These are replete with material on the WEA, the Rural Community Councils, the Village College Movement and other matters pedagogical, yet fail completely to address the issue of agricultural research. Given that there was a modest increase in agricultural output, especially of high-priced products, a nod in the direction of the world of research would have been appropriate. Plant breeding, herbicide and pesticide development, advances in reproductive physiology, artificial insemination and dairy hygiene, to say nothing of the evolution of extension systems, all were moving rapidly forward in the two decades under consideration and were to lay the foundation for the dramatic expansion of agricultural technology in the postwar period. And what about the great modernists who hammered away at the conservative bastions of the rural world? In discussing the advance of dairying, the salvation of many a farmer during the period, Paul Brassley mentions ‘Mr Boutflour, an educator and advisor’. This is, in fact, Professor Robert Boutflour CBE of the Royal Agricultural College whose crusade for the evolution of a high yielding dairy cow fed on a high level of concentrated feeds did more to promote the animal feed industry than anyone else at the time. He left behind a substantial archive and is deserving of more than a footnote in the rural history of the inter-war period.

Like C.S.Orwin, that fervent apostle of modernity and implacable enemy of traditionalists, Boutflour would have had little time for the Mary Webbs, Sylvia Townsend Warners, Winifred Holtbys and Constance Holmeses whose works are skilfully dissected in this volume by Marion Shaw. Their craving for an imagined past to set against the social wrongs and economic stagnation of the present would have cut little ice with Boutflour who would also have raised his ample eyebrows at Professor Shaw’s suggestion that England was ceasing to be an agricultural country ‘in the first third of the twentieth century’. The reality was that she had been an essentially urban country since around 1860. Boutflour might also have been surprised to learn elsewhere in this book of his acquaintance Rolf Gardiner’s ‘English Mistery’. Gardiner was, in fact, only loosely associated with this reactionary body (of which Minister of Agriculture and future Governor of Burma Reginald Dorman-Smith was a member), the ‘Mistery’ having been founded by his friend Viscount Lymington.

Another of Gardiner’s friends was that past master of myth-making and man-of-action, Henry Williamson. As Mark Rawlinson brilliantly demonstrates, Williamson saw the restoration of his derelict farm in Norfolk as a metaphor for the restoration of fertility in its broadest political sense, while his ruralist and neo-romantic fascist vision is manifest in his vast novel sequence Chronicles of ancient sunlight. Williamson was no stranger to the workings of bodies like the National Council for Social Service, the Rural Industries Bureau and the Rural Community Councils who struggled to bring life to the remote reaches of rural England, generating mountains of paperwork as they tried to reconcile the protectionist/modernist dichotomy. Together with most politicians, especially on the Left, these various rural bodies were united in the view that for the national interest to be properly served the land should be fully utilized in providing nutritious food for the people. Farmers held land in trust for the community, avowed Labour, and putting it to full use was the farmer’s most direct form of public service. Labour, of course, would have liked to nationalize the lot, and even more, to have persuaded the rural working classes as to the virtue of their cause. But in much of the country slick Conservative organization (and a little timely coercion) meant that trades unions notwithstanding, rural labourers remained overwhelmingly Tory voters.

Many inter-war commentators, in particular the likes of H.J.Massingham and Thomas Hennell, wrote of the decline of the rural crafts tradition. In Massingham’s elegiac writings this was viewed as nothing short of catastrophic as men were cut off from nature, natural materials and, by extension, from God. Paul Brassley, in his thoughtful way, takes a rather more sober view. The crafts had certainly gone into steep decline before the war, but thereafter there was a period of stability. Diversification and attention to quality ensured the survival of some crafts into the present day while others fell by the wayside.

This is a curate’s egg of a book wherein fresh in-sights jostle with rehashed and recycled views. While it presents the revisionist case and provides an abundance of material for debate, much work needs to be done before the realities of the inter-war countryside can be brought clearly into focus. I have no doubt that there were very wide regional and sectoral variations in response to the ‘depression’, to say nothing of differences between the constituent countries of Britain. The group meeting at Dartington have offered parts of a skeleton, which will need to be fleshed out by local studies and attention to complete new areas not addressed in this volume.