Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 1 (2019), p. 142

Edward Bujak’s previous books have focused on landholdings in England and the agricultural revolution, and on the ‘gentlemen’ of the Royal Flying Corps. This latest work both builds on and combines these interests, looking at the relationship between English landed society and the First World War, both in terms of landed estates’ contribution to the war effort, and the impact of the war on landed society. It is a compact book of just 122 pages plus 41 pages of notes and a 16-page bibliography, and Bujak has chosen to examine his subject matter through the lens of the bible of landed society, Country Life magazine, referencing or quoting at length no less than 85 times from issues published between 1901 and December 1918, the vast majority published during wartime.

The book clearly charts how the role of landed estates and the socio-economic class that owned them changed over the course of the war. This was initially as a recruitment vehicle until conscription was introduced in 1916, both with regard to landed society’s ‘fearless and perfect gentle knights’ providing officer-class material, and also the volunteering or offering of irresistible cash inducements by squires to landed estates workforces if they enlisted. The book is most chilling when recounting the instance of the Earl of Wemyss who issued a decree to his estate workforce to either ‘enlist or be dismissed’ – before his wife intervened to soften her husband’s stark ultimatum to his workforce. Over the course of the war some estate lands were used for training camps and aerodromes, and as casualties mounted, some country estate houses were converted to military hospitals, where the wounded could experience being treated more as guests than patients by some particularly compassionate and generous aristocratic hosts.

Bujak’s unwavering focus on ‘landed society’ does lead to some unfortunate insensitivity. He attests that ‘the weight of the war fell disproportionately on English landed society’, with ‘few landed families … unaffected’, but recognizes that the death toll only amounted to 800 titled men in the first 16 months of the war. Yet at the same time Bujak notes that across the whole of the war between 243,000 and 300,000 agricultural workers in England and Wales joined the armed services, but omits to say how many did not return. The accepted mortality figures are that some 12 per cent of the British army’s ordinary soldiers were killed during the war, compared, admittedly, with 17 per cent of its officers, but that 12 per cent represented a higher number in absolute terms as the ‘lower ranks’ naturally comprised the larger number of soldiers; this would mean that perhaps 30,000 agricultural worker/ soldiers died in the war – but this is a book on landed society, and the workforce that served it plainly does not count as part of it.

The chapters on fox hunting and game keeping are excellent illustrations of landed society culture at the time and the conflicting needs of wartime Britain, although readers of a sensitive disposition may flinch at the numbers of so-called game birds that were shot by the landed gentry for their amusement. War became an extension of game shooting and fox hunting, with – at least in one instance, incredibly, English beagles being transported to France to hunt French hares behind the Allied lines. This certainly provides a stark counterpoint to the world of John Lewis-Stempel’s Where poppies blow: the British soldier, nature, the Great War where soldiers embraced nature rather than making a leisure pursuit out of destroying it. Further, fox hunting was seen within landed society as having provided a ‘national service’, with the country owing a ‘debt’ to fox hunting due to its consequent supply of horses and men already capable of riding and commanding horses – resources valued by the cavalry. That is, until fox hunting was increasingly curtailed over the course of the war, as a more efficient means of containing the fox population was sought in order to protect the growing poultry farms, which were being increased in order to help meet food needs.

The book will be of greater relevance to readers of the Review whose interests lie in rural life rather than agriculture. As the book highlights, pre-war many estates made more money from rural lifestyle pursuits for the gentry than they did out of farming. Bujak quotes a Country Life article from 1916 criticizing the neglect of agriculture by landowners because they valued the land chiefly as a generator of income through the provision of shooting, hunting and other sporting facilities, with the country house providing a pleasant focal point for social life. Agriculture was only mobilized in support of the war effort from 1917, and this helps to explain why there is only one ‘agriculture’ chapter – ‘Landlords and Food Security’ – in the book, and this is just 11 pages long, compared to 27 for gamekeeping and fox hunting combined.

In looking at how war impacts countries which are not themselves battlegrounds, the book signifies a welcome broadening of subject matter into ‘Home Front’ history by Bloomsbury Academic’s Studies in military history, which has previously focused mainly on more conventional battlefield histories. However, the publisher’s back cover promotional text asserts that the author ‘explores the … corrosive effects that the progressive and systematic militarization of the countryside had on the authority of the squire’. In this respect the book does not deliver an examination of the militarization of the landscape of landed estates, nor proves that such a militarization was either progressive or systematic. The book shows that landed estates were subject to change during the war as a result of demands placed on them by the War Office, whether for increased agricultural production or for sites for training camps, aerodromes and hospitals, but the evidence is sporadic and there is no analysis of how temporary or permanent these changes were.

The book is also very tightly bookended contextually. Bujak’s introduction sets the historical scene with Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, accurately highlighting that the world was changing under the feet of the landed aristocracy before the war, but since the 1890s consecutive Liberal Governments had turned against the aristocracy and their landed estates as the epitome of offensive levels of inequality. Similarly, the post-war end of the book does not look forward to the impact on estates of the interwar economic depression, and with the advent of the Second World War just 21 years after the Great War ended, there was also scope for a comparison with how landed society was affected across the two wars, yet this is not acknowledged, not even as a pointer to further study. Whilst fully respecting the author’s decision to adopt a narrow focus, a few additional pages to put English landed society in the Great War in a broader historical context would have made this interesting book more rounded.