Agricultural History Review, Volume 61 Part 1 (2013), p. 176

Between 1933 and 1936 the now-defunct national broadsheet The Daily Sketch published 150 short articles by Dorothy Hartley under the heading ‘In England now’. Over 60 of these have now been reproduced in this volume, together with a number of Hartley’s own photographs. They have been selected and introduced by the journalist and photographer Adrian Bailey, who knew Dorothy from the late 1960s until her death in 1985. The book was accompanied by a TV documentary ‘The lost world of Dorothy Hartley’, which was made by the independent media company Available Light for BBC4 and first screened in November 2012. It was presented by the indomitable Lucy Worsley, who also provides a short foreword to the book.

Dorothy Hartley was born in 1893 and at the age of 10 moved to Nottinghamshire, where her father became rector of the village of Remstone. Later in life she moved back to her mother’s ancestral home in Fron, north Wales. Trained at Nottingham Art School, she earned her living as a teacher of art and it was in her spare time that she developed the writing skills for which she is best remembered. A singular figure, she never married, revelled in frugal and sometimes chaotic living, and cultivated a lifelong interest in food, travel, rural living and customs. She toured Britain between 1932 and 1936 by bicycle and car, writing her observations for the Daily Sketch, and gathering material that made up several book length publications including Here’s England (1934), The countryman’s England (1935) and Made in England (1939). She is perhaps best known today for the 1954 book, Food in England, which has remained in print ever since and has been cited as an influence by many modern-day celebrity cooks and food writers.

The content of the Daily Sketch articles reproduced here very much reflects her passion for regional foods, country recipes, disappearing crafts and rural lifestyles. There are eulogies to mutton, cheeses, bread, watercress, mushrooms, butter, berries, laver (sea weed), haver (oat cake), apples, cherries, clotted cream, shrimps, eels, winkles, wedding cakes, cider and tea, amongst others things. They are often described in a poetic and whimsical manner. Cheshire cheese is ‘large and red, like a harvest moon or carrots’ (p. 41); Stilton is ‘ancestral’ and ‘belongs to family portraits and gout’ (p. 44); mushrooms are ‘Nice, white, exciting things’ (p. 107); bilberry patches consist of ‘foamy long serpents riding against the land!’ (p. 120); a toffee apple ‘will wink its shining, varnished eye at me and waggle its little stick to diddle me – till I’ll be bound to eat it in self-defence!’ (p. 166). Her encounters with the landscape and with the workers and inhabitants of the countryside are similarly prosaic. She describes the tent-peg makers of Buckinghamshire beech woods as ‘some of the jolliest workers in England’ (p. 51) and encourages readers to seek out the coastal marramgrass workers to ‘see if you can persuade some friendly old eyes to twinkle and laugh, and some skilful old hands to twist you a hollow-bodied bird, with a waving grass tail’ (p. 97).

But, as this last quote shows, whilst the tone is often overtly nostalgic and wistful, Hartley’s writing does also recognize the skill and complexity that underpinned rural labour, the regional differences, the hard work and the pride attached to work. There are detailed descriptions of how a field is ‘spaced out’ for ploughing (p. 263), of the science of sheep grazing, of the detailed and careful work that made up the turnip and potato clamp, of the technical processes involved in the successful cultivation of a hay field. Moreover although Hartley’s writings are steeped in old traditions, she is also very aware of the changes taking place in rural life in the 1930s. She notes the disconnection that farm women now had from the work of the land, and although she recognizes that life for ‘womankind’ was easier and more pleasurable in many ways, she underlines the value of farmers’ wives having an interest and understanding in the family business. She outlines a new intolerance towards minority groups such as gypsies, and the inroads that farm machinery was making in the 1930s. The juxtaposition of the old and new is most clearly made in a sketch of a Kentish charcoal burner who lived in a traditional hut dwelling but drives a car, and sits in his hut of a night listening to the wireless. ‘There now, do you see why I keep puzzling’, she asks ‘whether this is the 12th century or the 20th century in England now’ (p. 281).

Hartley’s sketches of rural Britain were written in an era when interest in documenting the nation and its people was burgeoning. It took various forms: travel writing, documentary film, social and political commentary. Whilst Hartley avoids any engagement with the social and economic problems facing the countryside in the 1930s, and is certainly not attempting to replicate the work of contemporaries such as A. G. Street, J. B. Priestley and George Orwell, her writing is part of a tradition that attempted to record a world that was irrevocably changing. Some of her themes come across as a bit esoteric today, but many sections – the variety of English cheeses, regional foodstuffs, the value of country markets, and traditional recipes – resonate still and will find favour with a new audience with the publication of this attractive volume.