Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 106

The Land Settlement Association was a unique experiment in the 1930s to give work on smallholdings to unemployed miners and dockworkers from Durham. In 1934 some miners had been out of work for fifteen years. Oldies among us still live with vivid memories of the hunger marches, so it is heart-warming to be reminded of this constructive effort to alleviate their misery. Moreover, we have reached almost the last moment when it is possible to capture relevant living memories. So Pamela Dearlove’s book is a historical treasure, giving a sober account of the scheme’s vicissitudes from the point of view of the smallholders and the local people who absorbed them, plus a rich store of photographs, posters from the early days, maps and plans. The background depicts what amounted in the end to a horticultural revolution rising out of a whirlpool of ever-changing commercial circumstances.

Yet the story is not well-known; a recent history of agriculture in Lincolnshire which had two Land Settlement estates ignored it entirely. It deserves wider publicity since the function of smallholdings must contribute to current debates on the global future of agriculture, while the story told here is instructive on the way tenants on these LSA estates devised significant labour- and time-saving innovations, and some of us can testify how traces of the whole venture survive in our local landscapes.

Pamela Dearlove’s book is focused on one estate, Fen Drayton in Cambridgeshire. When the scheme started in 1934 as the brainchild of Percy Malcolm Stewart, Chairman of the London Brick Company, government support was half-hearted and Stewart himself bought the first estate at Potton in Bedfordshire. Twenty estates emerged, and they are listed here, each no doubt having its own distinctive history. They occupied nearly 10,000 acres in 1,000 smallholdings, supporting 800 families.

To Fen Drayton came miners and dockworkers from Sunderland, Newcastle, and West Hartlepool, and later from Wales, from the Rhonda valley. Some returned home, unable to acclimatize; miners did not all like working outdoors in all weathers! The locals had to accustom themselves to speech they did not understand, a camaraderie and singing- and chapel-going tradition that were unfamiliar, and they had to watch houses built for LSA tenants that had far superior facilities to theirs: it is a fascinating account of the meeting of two cultures, most easily enjoyed perhaps by the northern children moving into the countryside, skating in the winter and picnicking by the river in summer. Economically, however, it was a hard, precarious life in the depression of the thirties. But it improved gradually with the wartime demand for home-produced food; the smallholders fed many airbase camps in East Anglia with salad foods. Incomes were positively buoyant in the 1970s. Vegetables, pigs and poultry as basic produce changed their relative importance in course of time, and bulbs and flowers added to the mix. The rules governing the LSA became irksome and constraining, though the government remained paternally supportive. But Margaret Thatcher’s policies spelt an abrupt, cruel end to the LSA in 1982, and now in 2007 only three people remain in Fen Drayton from the LSA era. Meanwhile, the South Cambridgeshire District Council plans for the future, looking for ‘new forms of sustainable living’.

This book is a thought-provoking survey spanning diverse experiences that agricultural historians need to ponder. In the 1960s and 1970s the LSA attracted visitors to England from countries stretching from Algiers to India, while one FAO report in 1959/60 described it as a lesson ‘in developing a prosperous peasant economy, without ... destroying incentives for production and profit’. This book, readably and pictorially, admirably blends the economic with the social ingredients in that challenge.