Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 1 (2022), p. 145

Water, mills and marshes presents the work of WISEArchive, a volunteer oral history group set up in 2005 to record accounts of working lives in Norfolk. The book forms part of the Heritage Lottery-funded ‘Water, Mills and Marshes Project’, managed by the Broads Landscape Partnership Scheme, with Broads Authority involvement. Oral history here takes its place within a wider engagement with the heritage of the Norfolk Broads region, and this well-produced book presents a range of voices recounting their working lives. Short introductory and concluding essays by Tim O’Riordan bookend individual testimonies grouped in sections on ‘Life and Childhood on the Marshes’, ‘Water’, ‘Mills’, ‘Marsh’ and ‘Conservation and Ecology’. A website at wisearchive.co.uk documents the wider work of the WISEArchive group.

For readers of the Agricultural History Review the book is notable in including accounts of agricultural working lives, although male voices predominate in the land-working sections of the book. The ‘Marsh’ section includes occupations commonly covered in accounts of the Norfolk Broads, such as reed-cutting, thatching and the maintenance of remote grazing marsh by ‘marshmen’, but also covers wider work in agriculture, animal health and knackering. In a region where grazing marsh is a valued landscape in terms of ecology and amenity, such accounts allow appreciation of the organization and management of the grazing which shapes the marsh. Broadland appears not only as a valued ecological region but as a working agricultural landscape, shaped by wider historical connections such as the cattle brought annually from Ireland via Birkenhead to graze on the marshes, and Scottish farmers moving to the region in the 1920s. A set of accounts cover the Cantley sugar beet factory in the Yare valley, recounting harvest, processing, engineering and managerial labour, the agricultural life of the region generating an industrial processing plant in a rural area (though only ten miles or so from the city of Norwich). The book also shows livings from the land made through seasonal work; thus Bernard Shepherd appears in both the reed-cutting and sugar beet sections, moving from one to the other through the year. Since the publication of this volume at least one of the marsh voices featured has died, in the process demonstrating how a private life, once recorded, can go public. Marshman Bill Lacey died on 5 July 2021 aged 94, his passing as one of the ‘last marshmen’ noted in the local and national press, and with an item on BBC Radio Four’s obituary show, ‘Last Word’, using recordings from WISEArchive.

The ‘working’ voices in this oral history are not only working-class voices. Water, mills and marshes includes testimony from those whose working connection to Broadland derives from professional expertise in science and conservation, whether around ecology or heritage. The campaign to rid the area of introduced coypu is thus covered by accounts from both trappers on the ground and scientists in the lab and field. O’Riordan’s framing essays give a valuable background to the region’s history, ecology and management, and its possible future under climate change, with a possible flooded return to the ‘Great Estuary’ of Roman times, a Broadland without broads. The book could also however be given a cultural framing with reflection on the history of the recording and expression of voices speaking of and for the place. This is not the only recent oral history project, for example the 2009 Marsh workers of the Broads project by Paul Mace for the Broads Reed and Sedge Cutters Association gave a parallel coverage of a specific form of marsh labour, with a book and accompanying DVDs, again with Heritage Lottery funding. A few individuals appear in both projects. There is also a history of voices styling themselves as local, notably through the performance of dialect, most famously in Broadland the mid-twentieth-century Potter Heigham garage owner, dialect performer and writer Sidney Grapes. Beyond attention to some local working terminology, however, dialect has a very minor presence in Water, mills and marshes, the local voices communicating in plain English.

Water, mills and marshes thus gives a regional portrait of great variety and value, although there is one notable group of people with significant connection to the region whose voices are absent. Tourism is a major element in the regional economy, and while boatbuilding, boatyards, river inspection and heritage sailing receive attention here, the voice of the holidaymaker is seldom heard. Occasional celebrity visitors are noted, as when Brundall boatbuilder Roy Forder recalls: ‘Our clerk came from Potter Heigham where Cliff Richard moored his boat, Pamanda. He persuaded Cliff to store Pamanda at our yard and I put in a new bilge pump for him’ (p. 82). For a project devoted to working lives within the region the lack of summer holiday voices is perfectly appropriate, but it would be interesting, if challenging, to move beyond the conventional oral history remit of exploring deep and intimate working connections to place to gather voices of those with more passing understanding, not least given that holiday encounters with the region have profoundly shaped its economy, and therefore the working lives of its residents. Holiday voices beyond those of the professional travel and guidebook writer are hard to trace, indeed in conducting my own research on the region’s cultural landscape these were in some ways the most elusive of voices, though Norwich library holds a series of inter-war holiday diaries and personal boating logs which give insight into the place connections shaped by leisure. An oral history of Broads holidaymaking, from the one-off weekend cruiser to the year-on-year repeat sailor, would be instructive in complementary fashion to Water, mills and marshes. The boatbuilding, wherry-restoring, beet-processing, coypu-killing, mill-wrighting, cattle-tending, dyke-cleaning lives recounted through WISEArchive have been lived alongside those taking a break from work, spending their money on the waterways. Water, mills and marshes itself records many pleasures, of childhood and work, sailing and craft, but in a regional portrait the pleasures (and anxieties) of Broadland holidays would also be telling.