Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 1 (2022), p. 143

Simon Gooch’s biography of his grandfather, Edwin Gooch, the President of the National Union of Agricultural Workers (NUAW) and Labour MP for North Norfolk, is a touching and very personal account of the life of a man who worked tirelessly for improvements in the lives of agricultural workers in his county and nationally. The book is richly illustrated with numerous images from the author’s personal collection, and is punctuated with points of humour and personal recollections from family members which make it a very readable account. Many of the other characters who appear in the text have already been the subject of biographies, and the author ably demonstrates that Edwin Gooch’s work is worthy of similar attention.

The book’s key strengths lie in its personal approach, showing the development of the agricultural trade union movement through the lifetime and experiences of one man. This allows it to cover a lot of ground in terms of intriguing links to wider social and political histories, while retaining a sharp focus on the matter at hand. It also serves as an accessible introduction to the topic for a non-specialist reader. Over the course of 18 chapters, Gooch details the life of his grandfather, and his impact on the agricultural trade union movement in the mid-twentieth century. This period saw a great deal of change, politically, socially, and agriculturally, and more details in the referencing or direction to further reading would have been a welcome addition to a work which incorporates tantalizing glimpses of the wider history of inequity between landowners and labourers prior to the nineteenth century, wartime, journalism, the Great Depression, women’s suffrage and entry into political life, Communism in Britain and the history of the Labour party, to name but a few topics.

The first four chapters set the scene for Gooch’s involvement in the NUAW. Gooch’s world and work is immediately placed in the context of the writings of Adrian Bell and George Ewart Evans, and the work of Joseph Arch and George Edwards, in a county with a long history of protests from agricultural labourers stretching back to Kett’s Rebellion in 1549. Acknowledging this local history, the author establishes that the book’s focus is to be on ‘the attempted resolution of those ancient inequities in the mid-twentieth century’, and uses some of the tributes paid to Gooch after his death to demonstrate his place among these names.

The chapter ‘Mr Edwards with his Agent’ explores the relationship between Gooch and the veteran trade union pioneer George Edwards, which shaped much of his life and approach to politics. This leads well into a potted history of the agricultural trade union movement. Here this complex history is condensed into an easily digestible form by focusing on the personal experiences of Edwin Gooch. This gives a useful summary of the salient points of the wider story without becoming excessively bogged down in the politics and overwhelming the reader.

From here, the book follows Gooch through his rise to local prominence and the development of his conciliatory approach to relations between workers and landowners. The following chapter, ‘The Great Strike’, gives us the first substantial quotation from Gooch’s own pen, in which he links his own work and the legacies of Joseph Arch and Robert Kett, making the connections to local labour history explicit. In this chapter, the author recognizes the criticisms Gooch received in the period after the Great Strike regarding his conciliatory role in the negotiation. He uses these to demonstrate the impact of Gooch’s personal ‘Methodism-derived Socialist ethos’ on his approach to his role in the NUAW.

Matching Gooch’s move to prominence in the NUAW, the next chapter, ‘Our County Work’, opens with the first full page portrait. From this chapter onwards, the author discusses the conflicting requirements on Gooch’s time, forcing him to juggle his union and paid commitments with his family time, against a background of local, national and international events. These chapters are helpful in distilling the multiple challenges facing the government through the wartime and immediate post-war years down to their effects on one man. The book cleverly weaves national and international events into the events which loomed large in Gooch’s private life: wartime agricultural policy, the devastating 1953 East Coast floods, and Britain’s relationship with Russia contrast with the deeply personal in the loss of Gooch’s wife Ethel.

The penultimate chapter, ‘Champion of the farmworkers’, is largely dedicated to tributes to Edwin Gooch following his death in 1964. It concludes with the words of Bert Hazell, Gooch’s successor as NUAW president and MP for North Norfolk: ‘he was never aggressive enough from the farmworkers’ point of view. He was too kindly.’ ‘Maybe so,’ the author notes, ‘but he achieved much through his patient negotiations and could write and speak stirringly in public on the farmworkers’ behalf’.

The concluding chapter discusses the changes which took place in the decades after Edwin Gooch’s death in the world of the farmworkers which he had known so well. The author relates the development of the National Union of Agricultural Workers through various incarnations, into the Rural, Agricultural and Allied Workers’ Trade Group, within Unite, noting the irony that an amalgamation with the Workers’ Union had been one of the suggestions made by Edwin Gooch as early as 1924, demonstrating the prescience and deep level of understanding inherent in Gooch’s approach to his work and the community he served.

The personal and family history aspect of the book means that the author risks straying into ‘rose-tinted’ territory, and, indeed, he acknowledges in the early pages that the book has become something of a tribute to the land workers of the past. However, the text skilfully blends a personal story with wider industrial, social and political history, drawing the reader in and bringing Edwin Gooch to life, while using his career as a window to shed light on the competing forces at play during this period. The book largely relies for academic comment on Alun Howkins’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Edwin Gooch, while more critical pieces about him are dismissed rather than dismantled. Nevertheless, the book makes a compelling case for the inclusion of Edwin Gooch as one of the key players in the movement for agricultural labourers’ rights and fair treatment. It is to be hoped that in future his legacy receives greater attention in historical investigations of rural life in the mid-twentieth century, as well as in the developing historiography of the trade union movement itself.