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The social impact of state control of agriculture in Britain 1939-1955 CONFERENCE: RURAL CHANGE IN EUROPE BETWEEN 1935 AND 1955

The necessary wartime control of farming in Britain was through a devolved system of county committees (War Ags), appointed in part by the Government and in part through the social networks of those given the responsibility to produce more home-grown food. Official propaganda hailed the committees as a great success, and they certainly did achieve their main aim of producing more food very quickly. But there were muted hints from the early years of the war that the exacting changes in land use and farming systems required to fulfil these aims left many farming families scarred and indeed, in some extreme cases, homeless. This paper examines the interaction between the War Ags and the rural communities they were drawn from, and in turn effectively ruled over from 1939 through to the loss of their powers in the late 1950s. 1. A depressed countryside? The interwar British farming scene All was not well in the British countryside in the 1920s and 1930s, although retrospective views of the British countryside have recently been considerably modified.1 The accepted view of a depressed farming economy and dilapidated and melancholy British farmscape has recently been partly modified by the realisation that not all farmers suffered in the same way. Assets of capital, skill and location enabled pastoral farmers of the west and south-west, and those near towns, to thrive through liquid milk production. Meat, poultry, eggs, horticulture and fruit were now also emphasised, to embrace growing middle-class food tastes and to take advantage of cheaper transportation. By 1930 milk was even claimed by 1938 to be the cornerstone of British agriculture.2 Those who embraced modern farming techniques might also overcome poor returns and high input prices.3 It is also claimed that the worst years were from 1922 to 1925 and 1929-32, and moreover that farm productivity was higher in the 1930s than once believed.4 Nevertheless high-visibility arable farming struggled. And it seemed that few in the expanding urban areas cared, indeed that cheap food for urban consumers was prized by governments above any agricultural concerns. This was true. The repeal of the Corn Production Act in August 1921, ‘the great betrayal’, exposed many farmers to foreign competition once more and, with rising factor input costs – especially labour costs - home

1 P. Brassley, J. Burchardt and L.Thompson (eds), the English countryside between the wars: regeneration or decline? (Woodbridge 2006). An AHRC network seminar series in 2007-8 also had the theme ‘Landscape and environment in the interwar countryside’. 2 J. Thirsk, Alternative agriculture: a history from the Black Death to the present day ( Oxford 1997), 169, 187. 3 P.Brassley, ‘British farming between the wars’, in Brassley et al. (eds), English countryside between the wars , 187-199. 4 A. Howkins, ‘Death and rebirth? English rural society, 1920-1940’ in Brassley et al. (eds), English countryside between the wars, 13.

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production faltered. The removal of the ban on imports of Canadian cattle in 1922 was a further blow.5 The most common reaction to depressed arable prices was to revert to grassland, of varying quality, in ‘dog-and-stick’ pastoral landscapes that in many localities increasingly looked unkempt with fences, hedges and ditches ignored, bracken infestation increasing and buildings patched. In some areas land was effectively abandoned altogether. Smaller, all-grass farms stood a chance of weathering the uncertain times. In much of Wales the reliance on store cattle and sheep remained but profits were uncertain and innovations proceeded more slowly. But by 1939 the higher yielding Friesian breeds were becoming more popular, although older native black cattle and shorthorns remained most numerous until the postwar years.6 Two seemingly contrary attitudes emerged at this time, both of which were to become important in the Second World War. First, suspicions of government promises and of officials in general suffused through a generation of farmers after 1921. But on the other hand, a political consensus was growing among farmers’ leaders by the mid-1920s that heralded a preparedness for state intervention in certain sectors of farming. The farming lobby, bolstered by the prestige gained in the food campaign of the First World War, and led by the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), recognised that there was sufficient mutual interest for government and NFU, the National Union of Agricultural Workers (NUAW) and the Country Landowners’ Association (CLA) to work more collectively in the face of a deteriorating European political situation.7 Individual farmers might remain suspicious but their leaders looked for cooperation with government in return for present and future increased state protection. The policies emerging from this complex interaction produced an approach by the mid-1930s characterised as ‘quasi-corporatism’.8 By the beginning of the War, this relationship with the Ministry had become sufficiently important to the NFU that when its staff was evacuated from London the General Secretary remained behind to maintain contact with Whitehall.9 As European political tensions heightened, in July 1937 an Agriculture Act offered help for the purchase of lime and basic slag (a phosphatic fertiliser) to improve grassland; subsidy payments were extended from wheat to oats and barley; and there was Exchequer support for improvements to drainage basins. More than this the government seemed unwilling to contemplate in 1937. Many, Chamberlain included, feared favouring agriculture unduly at the expense of industry, and farming was not to be on a war footing

5 E.C. Penning-Rowsell, ‘Who “betrayed” whom? Power and politics in the 1920/21 agricultural crisis’, Agric. Hist. Rev. 45 (1997), 176-94; S. Moore, ‘The real “great betrayal”? Britain and the Canadian cattle crisis of 1922’ Agric. Hist. Review 41 (1993), 155-68. 6 E.S. Simpson, ‘The cattle population of England and Wales: its breed structure and distribution’, Geographical Studies 5 (1958), 45-60. 7 C. Griffiths, Labour and the Countryside: the Politics of Rural Britain 1918-1939 ( Oxford 2007); G. Cox, P. Lowe and M. Winter, ‘The origins and early development of the National Farmers’ Union’ Agric. Hist. Rev. 39 (1991), 30-47. 8 G. Cox, P. Lowe and M. Winter, ‘Changing directions in agricultural policy: corporatist arrangements in production and conservation policies’, Sociologia Ruralis 25 (1985), 132. 9 NFU, Yearbook (1940), 32.

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when Britain was not actually at war. Thus 65% of Britain’s food was still being imported, about 70% by calorie consumption.10 Although in March 1938 Wehrmacht troops marched into Austria to enforce the Anschluss, in July Chamberlain, in a speech at Kettering, continued to stress British reliance on imported food, to the consternation,‘bewilderment and astonishment’ of farmers.11 The problem was that although going onto a war footing too soon might be counter-productive ‘it takes as long, said one rural commentator, to rear a bullock as it does to build a battleship’.12 But everything changed in September 1938 with the annexation of the Sudetenland and in March 1939 the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia into the Reich. Preparations for agriculture and food production now had to be quickened. Graphically, in 1939 F. Le Gros Clark and R.M. Titmuss published Our food problem with the cover by-line its relation to our national defences aiming to ‘supply the average citizen with a few essential facts…’. War, it seemed now, was inescapable and ‘Famine is the traditional accompaniment of war’.13 At the end of January 1939 Reginald Dorman Smith was appointed Minister of Agriculture, a significant move, and one acclaimed by the farming community, for Dorman Smith had been president of the NFU from 1936 to 1938. He calmly prepared for war, pushing through the Agriculture Development Act 1939, offering a £2 per acre grant for grassland which had been down for at least seven years and which was converted to arable between May and the autumn of 1939, preparatory for cereals in 1940. Here now was the decisive shift away from the grassland emphases which had dominated farming for a generation. Deficiency payments for oats and barley were made more generous, and deficiency payments were also to be extended to fat sheep and lambs, together with more help for drainage and the purchase and storing of fertilisers and tractors.14 The effect of the Act was to spur ploughing-up. As A.G. Street put it, from May 1939 ‘some of my own grass fields began to feel iron, one of them for the first time since the Crimean War’.15 Rural society 1939-40 In 1963 Williams wrote ‘The present situation is… that we have a reasonable amount of information about farming and the rural landscape, but that we know very little about farmers’.16 This certainly remains the case for the years 1939-55.

10 M. Tracy, Government and agriculture in Western Europe, 1880-1988 (3rd edtn). New York 1989), 161. B. Burkitt and M. Baimbridge, ‘The performance of British agriculture and the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy: an historical view’, Rural History 1 (1990), 265-80. 11 A.F. Wilt, Food for war: agriculture and rearmament in Britain before the Second World War (Oxford 2001), 59, 101. 12 F. Le Gros Clark and R. Titmuss, Our food problem (Harmondsworth 1939), 50. 13 Clark and Titmuss, Our food problem, 11, 16. 14 2 & 3 Geo VI Agricultural Development Part V, s.34 (1-4). 15 A.G. Street, Wessex wins (1941), 326. 16 W.M. Williams, ‘The social study of family farming’ Geographical Journal 129 (1963), 63.

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Despite the increased attention paid by government to the economic problems of farming, the working families of rural Britain could reasonably consider themselves as second class, even residual, citizens by 1939. Only 17.6% of the population of England and Wales was rural, compared with 50% in 1851.17 For many years farm workers had been leaving the land in large numbers to seek higher wages and better living conditions in the towns and industrial and service employment. Many ex-servicemen were disillusioned on their return to civilian rurality after 1918:

‘There was a lot left after the war. Them what had been soldiers if they could get out they did so. Anything that they could get was better than a farm. A lot of them went into towns like Norwich and them sort of places and got jobs.’18

National employment in agriculture and forestry fell from an average of one million in 1920-22 (6.3% of total employment) 735,000 (3.9%) in 1937-38.19 And accompanying this there was the loss of rural trades and crafts, thanks to the advent of mass-produced goods. By 1931 agriculture was also employing more men over the age of 55 (25% of the workforce) than any other occupational group.20 As Moore-Colyer has noted of Wales:

‘As the closely-knit and cohesive fabric of rural society, with its reciprocal duties and obligations began to disappear, it carried away with it the quiet pride and satisfaction characteristic of localism. In so doing it may have helped to usher in the “make do and mend” and rather ramshackle approach so characteristic of the 1930s; the view that a relict bedstead would fix a gap in a hedge as effectively as an hour’s work with a billhook and hedge knife.’21

Wages and working conditions were poor, relations with employers could remain deferential, and the average household income only two-thirds that of non-agricultural working-class households, and with longer hours. By 1937 ordinary farm workers’ wages still only averaged 35s 3d, well below the wage of 41s estimated by Rowntree to be necessary for minimum nutritional standards for a family with three children. Furthermore, many faced inherent insecurity of work, especially during the winter months. In some areas it was said that ‘many girls hold the work and the men who do it in contempt’. In 1938 the Holidays with Pay Act was passed but for agricultural workers it was stipulated that they could not take more than three days consecutively, to prevent farms from being neglected, severely restricting the choice of where to spend the

17 D.C. Marsh, The changing social structure of England and Wales 1871-1961 (1965), 108. 18 Bill Curtis interviewed by Nick Mansfield (tape in Norfolk Rural Life Museum), cited in N. Mansfield, ‘Class conflict and village war memorials, 1914-24’, Rural History 6 (1995), 67-87. 19 A. Howkins, The death of rural England. A social history of the countryside since 1900. (2003), 45, 86; P. Scott, Triumph of the South: a regional economic history of early twentieth century Britain (Aldershot 2007), 229-33. 20 Marsh, Changing social structure, 150. 21 R.J. Moore-Colyer, ‘Farming in depression: Wales between the wars, 1919-1939’, Agric. Hist. Review 46 (1998), 180.

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holiday.22 Furthermore by 1937 one inspection found that one-third of farms were contravening minimum wage regulations, and in north Devon this rose to nearly 57%. 23 For some in rural Britain the advent of war was even something of a blessing. Depressing conditions might be exchanged for something more secure and rural areas were certainly recruiting grounds for the armed forces. Albert Gillett, born in 1923 in the Cambridgeshire Fens, saw his father peremptorily sacked on a farm, endured a childhood in a dingy cottage without electric light from which the family were evicted and:

‘When war came along I volunteered for the Air Force at seventeen… I did it to get away from the hard graft and the cold, wet, dirty conditions of farming… After having been through what I’d been through on a farm, I found the RAF a real cushy life. Warmth, good clothing, companionship. It was real heaven, to me.’24

Housing conditions could be appalling By 1941 there were about 200,000 farm cottages in England and Wales, of which two-thirds were ‘tied’ and with living conditions closer to the mid-19th than to the mid-20th century. In rural Wales some two-thirds of cottages were considered unfit for human habitation, with vermin infestation and overcrowding rife. One Medical Officer of Health in Retford (Notts) reported that 80% of agricultural cottages in the area should be condemned.25 As late as 1951 in rural Rutland 53% of private houses were without piped water, 28% without a kitchen sink, 59% lacked a WC and 60% lacked a fixed bath. In the 1930s the only house with a bathroom on the 557-acre Binbrook Hall estate in Lincolnshire was at the Hall itself. Otherwise it was a question of outside taps and tin baths.26 A White Paper of 1944 estimated 30% of the rural population to be lacking mains water, and in the absence of a nearby well there were underground rainwater tanks, with the water charcoal filtered and drawn from hand pumps in the scullery.27 Sewerage schemes in scattered settlements were expensive in relation to available rate income, but piped water and decent sanitation were urgently required by this time: only 5% of the farmhouses on Anglesey, for example, had piped water by 1939, with long journeys with buckets to the wells almost medieval.28 Little progress was made here until in 1940 the arrival of thousands of urban evacuees, troops and munition workers, quite unused to water shortages, led to the preparation of a reservoir in the centre of the island, functioning by 1944. Lanterns and paraffin lamps remained the norm for winter and night work.

22 S. Hussey, ‘Low pay, underemployment and multiple occupations: men’s work in the interwar countryside’, Rural History 8 (1997), 217-35. 23 H. Pedley, Labour on the land: a study of the developments between the two great wars (1942), 23-4, 50-52. 24 S. Humphries and B. Hopwood, Green and pleasant land (1999), 32-5. 25 Lord Addison, [no title] in B. Vesey-FitzGerald (ed), Programme for agriculture (1941), 59. 26 C. Rawding, ‘Stagnation and progress: contradictions in the inter-war English villages. Binbrook, Lincolnshire 1918-1939’ Lincolnshire History and Archaeology 40 (2005), 48. 27 R. Pailthorpe and J. Holt (eds), Why did they call me Archibald? Memories of a West Sussex countryman (Weald and Downland Museum 1993), 30. 28 P. Dudgeon (ed), Village voices: a portrait of change in England’s green and pleasant land 1915-1990 (1989), 103.

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Educational standards in small village schools could be poor, given the wide age range of pupils and limited numbers of teachers, many of whom were unqualified. Farmers were suspicious of educating children beyond the requirements of farm work: sons followed fathers onto the farms, and many children were expected to begin work to contribute to household income rather than pursue secondary education. Seasonal work in the fields could keep truancy rates as high as 20% during harvesting periods and many left school immediately on attaining the minimum school-leaving age of 14. Joe Risby, born in 1911, grew up in Suffolk:

When I left school I’d love to have been an engine driver… If my father had been an engine driver there was a very good chance I would have been, but he was a farm worker and I finished up on the farm the same. I got my first job at the age of fourteen. I’d been wandering the streets of Lavenham for about a fortnight. It was crowded with unemployed man. Jobs were gold dust. I met a farmer I knew and he says to me in his booming voice, “Hello bor’, what you doing on?” “I finished school” “Ain’t you got no work?” “No Mr Dewar.” “Go up to the farm, they will give you a job.” My first pay packet was ten bob. I had a four-mile walk from work … I couldn’t wait to give some money to my mum to help pay the rent. I was proud to help the household…’29

And yet there was change. The growth of motorised transport, on improved country roads, was breaking down isolation and opening horizons beyond those reached by horse, foot or bicycle. While older people, farmers, and farm workers offered ‘the dead weight of resistance’, youngsters became ‘infatuated by mobility’.30 As S.L. Bensusan, writing of interwar small farmers on the Essex-Suffolk borders noted:

‘We are living at the parting of the ways; one must travel far in this county of Essex, once so beautiful, to find a district that has not been urbanised. The younger generation has welcomed the change, it thinks in terms of “moty bikes”, “grammyphones”, and the wireless; it hails charabanc and bus as deliverers from the tedium of a quiet life. The only plough that interests the boys is the one they can draw with a tractor, the only service to appeal to the girls is out of sight of the village.’31

The telephone had arrived in many wealthier homes, together with the wireless, and some village halls (often dedicated to village youth who did not return from Flanders in 1918) staged peripatetic film shows or glee-parties, clubs and whist drives. And striving to improve rural social conditions were organisations such as the Rural Community

29 Humphries and Hopwood, Green and pleasant land, 21-4. 30 F.G. Thomas, The changing village: an essay on rural reconstruction (1939), 19-20. 31 S.L. Bensusan, Back of beyond: a countryman’s pre-war commonplace book (1945), 22.

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Councils and the National Council of Social Service. There were also communal and grass-roots bodies such as the Women’s Institutes, founded in 1915 and with the objective precisely to break down some of the rural isolation felt by women and to improve their quality of life.32 And new employment could arrive as suburbia pushed into the countryside with its accompanying building trade and service demands. Modern industries too, provided employment, such as the furniture factories at High Wycombe, the Morris car factory at Oxford, together with the growth of village tea-gardens and petrol stations. Added to this in the Midlands from the mid-1930s, were the jobs with Austin, Rover or Wolseley to produce aircraft, or with the expansion of the dockyards, as Britain geared itself for war. The fewest alternatives to farm work were to be found in eastern and north-eastern counties from the East Riding of Yorkshire down to Hertfordshire and Essex where industrialisation had not impacted.33 Politically too, there were changes. The creation of county councils in 1888, followed by rural district and parish councils in 1894, had brought some new voices to mix with the older elite. The middle classes were now arriving in many rural areas by 1918, and with the expansion of the franchise as well to 98.5% of the population by 1939, it is no surprise to see the formation of new institutions to defend landed interests, the Country Landowners Association, in 1907 and NFU in 1908. Both had considerable memberships by 1939.34 On many issues the two groups’ policies were close and this was especially the case as war loomed. Of the agricultural workers’ trade unions, the National Union of Agricultural Workers (NUAW) was affiliated to the TUC from 1919, and there were smaller numbers in the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU). These two unions had a combined membership of about 50,000 by 1939, but with a heavy turnover of members as farm workers left the land rather faster than new recruits joined. Despite these changes, by 1939 in the English lowland shire counties many of the traditionally powerful families still provided chairmen and councillors for multiple committees, relying on their manipulation of social capital. These were the ‘natural’ leaders, clinging to a dented hegemony through the drafting of committees, the setting of discourses, and the identification of (their) family with place. Through this, the qualities of leadership were displayed, and accepted. The mixture ‘of intimacy and distance’ to maintain correct social stratification whilst indulging in the required amount of social contact with working families remained a feature of village life.35 Landowners (or their agents) might locally be elected unopposed, although by the 1930s real power was actually and increasingly being assumed by a growing body of professional bureaucrats. But rural leaders might influence voting, and offer petty local tyranny or ‘reactionary leadership and petty corruption’, there might be stagnation, poverty, ignorance. Farmers

32 See M. Andrews, The acceptable face of feminism: the Women's Institute as a social movement (1997); J. Burchardt, ‘reconstructing the rural community: village halls and the National Council of Social Service, 1919 to 1939’, Rural History 10 (1999), 193-216. 33 Pedley, Labour on the land, 1-27. 34 NFU Year Book (1940), 151-98. 35 ‘Authority doesn't work without prestige, or prestige without distance.’ Charles De Gaulle.

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blocked improvements which would increase their rates, and as school managers they resisted improvements.36 Rural District council meetings were generally held in the afternoons, ruling out those who could not afford time off, and leaving the field open for the retired, the wealthy, and for farmers and others with more flexible hours of work. It was little wonder that rates were kept down, that housing remained poor and water and sewerage schemes were so long in coming. And county council meetings would require a whole day off, often needing travel by car, and therefore once more attended primarily by the wealthy who were often unopposed since there was a general apathy from electors. The Conservative party still saw itself as the rightful guardian of the countryside.37 The increased numbers of owner-occupying farmers, following the sale of land from many large estates to sitting tenants after the Great War, the many local business interests and the growing numbers of middle-class residents all provided staunch support, encouraged by Baldwin’s ruralism. To give a longer term perspective, in 1959 the Conservatives won 43 of the 48 most rural constituencies in England, although less strong in Wales and Scotland where the nationalist vote was stronger.38 This is not to say that leadership always went unchallenged. Old landed families within ‘county society’ might assert a lingering authority. There were still hunt balls, country house parties and ‘the season’, as featured in the novels of P.G. Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh, but they might now be challenged by powerful farmers, businessmen, politicians or bankers. Country houses might be leased out for weekend parties and estates become as interested in game as in farming. Struggles within the elite rendered the identification of rural power relations more complex. Woods has identified three dominant 20th-century discourses of rural power in Somerset: firstly a ‘traditional’ discourse of the ‘country gentleman’ celebrating stability, landed estates and stewardship of the countryside; secondly a strengthening ‘agrarian’ discourse, symbolised by the 1934 arrival of Farmers Weekly, prioritising agriculture; and thirdly an ‘environmentalist’ discourse which saw countrysides as spaces of consumption (i.e. for residence, leisure, enjoyment of nature).39 The one group that certainly seemed to be losing influence was the church, although incumbents still sat on many committees. Not all would agree with Thomas’ assertion that ‘In each parish the Church can maintain a university graduate in comfort – and yet how little he contributes to the life of the village in so many instances’. But when the East Clandon (Surrey) parish council suggested a collection to mark King George VI’s coronation, the vicar wrote ‘it’s no use your suggesting a collection inside the church as most of the people in the parish never pass through the front door.’40 The social and political influence of the farmers was especially strong in areas of large farms, such as East Anglia. Social relations were maintained which legitimated 36 FThomas, The changing village, 30. 37 C. Griffiths, Labour and the countryside: the politics of rural Britain 1918-1939 (Oxford 2007), 3-8. 38 A. Flynn, P. Lowe and M. Winter, ‘The political power of farmers: an English perspective’, Rural History 7 (1996), 15-32. 39 M. Woods, ‘Discourses of power and rurality: local politics in Somerset in the 20th century’, Political Geography 16 (1997), 453-78; and Contesting rurality: politics in the British countryside (Aldershot 2005), 23-46. 40 J. Connell, The end of tradition: country life in central Surrey (1978), 51.

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inequalities between the wealthy farmer and the workforce by encouraging workers to identify fully with the existing social structure.41 The identification was strongly felt because farmers and farmworkers lived in somewhat atomised situations, where unionisation was weak but the influence of the farmhouse strong. Tied cottages on the farm premises meant that workers identified with employers. Farmers were flexing local political muscle, developing a ‘farmer-politician class’, on parish and rural district councils. In Somerset the tenant farmer, Robert Bruford Jr, former chairman of the Taunton NFU branch, stock breeder and cider-maker, was elected MP for Wells in 1922.42 Between 1912 and 1930 the proportion of farmers on Somerset county council had risen from 15% to 25%. Other members of the NFU followed Bruford’s lead, all, like Bruford, standing as Conservatives.43 The Cheshire branch even formed its own Independent Party on the county council to push farming interests there.44 As Bracey noted somewhat acidly, by 1959:

On so many occasions the farmers as a body seem to be against everybody else, for instance with regard to prices, wages, town and country planning, school education etc. On these subjects the farmers usually claim that they speak for the countryside. They do – the farming countryside as seen through the eyes of an agricultural employer.

Furthermore:

A rural district council may consider itself fortunate if it has one councillor from the upper class who by his upbringing and experience can assure a reasonably high standard of conduct at meetings. 45

A contrasting political situation occurred where, as in south-west England, higher numbers of small family-run farms might entail different attitudes where there was no established landed elite, and local councils might be dominated not by large farmers but by tenants of smaller holdings. There were possibly 110,000 such farms by 1939. Wealth and economic status counted for less here, and hired men might in turn become farmers in their own right. Local identity and kinship networks might prevail, rather than the paternalism of East Anglia. Traditional farming persisted in much of upland Britain, with two-thirds of the farms of Wales less than 50 acres. Mutual cooperation had long been significant here, and continued to be so in the interwar years. In fact the greater adoption of more expensive machinery on smaller Welsh farms frequently meant more cooperation to defray the expense, and voluntary help might be repaid by allowing workers to plant

41 H. Newby, C. Bell, D. Rose and P. Saunders, Property, paternalism and power: class and control in rural England (1978). 42 Robert Bruford was later also a member of the Taunton and Wellington district sub-committee working with the Somerset War Ag (TNA, MAF 39/298). 43 J. Brown, ‘Agricultural policy and the National Farmers’ Union, 1908-1939’ in J.R. Wordie (ed), Agriculture and politics in England, 1815-1939 (2000), 179; Viscount Astor and B. Seebohm Rowntree, British agriculture: the principles of future policy (1938), 359-60. 44 Woods , ‘Discourses of power and rurality’, 464; and Contesting rurality, 34; G. D. Mitchell, ‘The parish and the rural community’, Public Administration 29 (1951), 397. 45 H.E. Bracey, English rural life: village activities, organizations and institutions (1959), 45, 75.

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some potatoes for their own use.46 Thus the milieu mattered, and we must avoid too many all-encompassing generalisations about power relations at the outbreak of war. To some extent all three of Woods’ discourses can be seen to be operating during the late 1930s, but with different emphases in different localities. As rural Britain entered the first year of war traditional rural landscapes coexisted with the elements of modernity, such as council housing, improved roads, electricity pylons, asbestos buildings, and state-controlled forestry, as in the Breckland of East Anglia. Writers and artists still vied to produce versions of rural nostalgia, as they sought a quaint, backward and distant past among living landscapes, and in so doing Adrian Bell or Henry Williamson might exaggerate notions of a depressed countryside. In general, the early months of the war saw rural communities unchanged, except for those receiving middle-class and child evacuees, but summer 1940 brought the fall of France, rumours of invasion, the building of anti-invasion defence lines and structures, the arrival of many poorer evacuee children, often fearfully mismatched in wealthy rural homes, and the onward removal of many to Cornwall and Wales, together with air raids in the eastern and south-eastern countrysides. Villagers living near urban or other strategic bombing targets were affected, as were the inhabitants of areas such as ‘Hellfire Corner’ (Kent). The evacuees, particularly children from inner urban areas, provoked some overcrowding and even hostility in some villages, undermining the myth of a united ‘peoples’ war’.47 Networks of power in the wartime British countryside The County War Agricultural Executive Committees (War Ags) Upon the social, economic and cultural differences and problems outlined above, were superimposed the War Ags, as the deteriorating international situation forced Whitehall to intervene. While intellectuals continued to see countrysides as landscape, or even as fundamental spiritual essence, the social inequalities were real and pressing. Even the zeal of voluntary agencies, the provision of some council housing and the enforcement of social services could do little at this stage to reverse the psychological damage to the rural community.48 The imagery of depressed rural landscapes and depressed village communities had been powerful but now the imagery had to be turned around quickly.49 The aesthetics of rural life and landscape had now to be utilised as wartime propaganda – an ancient and peaceful rural landscape and way of life to protect – and the practicalities had to await more peaceful times. The various quasi-fascist groups and admirers of

46 J. Geraint Jenkins, ‘Technological improvement and social change in south Cardiganshire’ Agric. Hist. Review 13 (1965), 103. 47 A. Howkins, ‘A country at war: Mass-observation and rural England, 1939-45’, Rural History 9 (1998), 82-3; S. Rose, Which people’s war? National identity and citizenship in Britain 1939-1945 (Oxford 2003); D. Sheridan (ed). Wartime Women: a Mass Observation Anthology (1990), 55-68. 48 Thomas, The changing village, 11-41. 49 For further illustration of this retrospection within literature see R. Williams, The country and the city. London: Paladin 1973. This seminal work is curiously overlooked in the otherwise excellent treatment of the interwar countryside in Brassley et al., the English countryside between the wars.

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Germany were also forced to shift their ground to accommodate the hostility of their neighbours. From 1939 we enter what Adrian Bell had earlier referred to as ‘Dora’s England’ – one of correction and surveillance to face the crisis of war.50 The impact of war on rural communities clearly varied with location, farming type and the activities of the War Ags. Class was certainly a factor. For the very wealthiest there was the distinct possibility of losing their mansions to the military, since country houses were ideal for military HQs, but were rarely treated sympathetically by working-class soldiers and even looted by local people. ‘Wonderful old place in its way’ said the Quartering Commandant: ‘pity to knock it about too much’. 51 For other wealthier families, life might go on much as before, with the possibility of supplementing rationing from game or paying for black market goods. Farmers also had access to their own produce, and it was the poorer villagers and country town residents who bore the austerity of rationing.

‘All sorts of persons were on the scrounge, calling for eggs, butter, a chicken or whatever was on offer. Father and I killed pigs, calves and sheep, and a local butcher at Exmouth came overnight and took it back for the customers in the shop the next day. Only family did this as it was done after staff went home to keep it all undercover. Even the local policeman had his piece of pork and used to load up his saddle-bag on his bike. Tea, sugar, and dried fruit for instance, were all exchanged for whatever around friends etc. A lot of money was also made this way - sad but true.’52

Labour supplies remained problematic at just the time when they would be most needed. In December 1936 the Ministry had turned its attention to the manpower situation, should war occur. Whilst it saw the military draft age being between 18 and 41, shepherds, stockmen and other essential workers were to be ‘reserved’ occupations, at least until substitute labour could be found. But by 1939 many farm workers were joining the forces despite being in reserved occupations, and it was clear that alternative sources were required. As it was said of Devon at the end of the war ‘To lose 10,000 men and then be asked to double the arable acreage of the county is rather a tall order’53 The greatest publicity was given to the Women’s Land Army (WLA). Administrative arrangements had begun in May 1938, and a recruiting campaign in early 1939 ensured that by September more than 1,000 volunteers had joined. Joining them from September onwards were Conscientious Objectors, pacifists, schoolchildren and local volunteers, off-duty military personnel and those too old or unfit for service. Later these were joined by women in the Timber Corps and by Prisoners of War. 50 Adrian Bell, ‘The village’, in Edmund Blunden (ed), The legacy of England (1935), 87. 51 The National Archives (hereafter TNA), WO 199/803; E. Waugh, Brideshead revisited (Harmondsworth 2000), 321; J.M. Robinson, The country house at war (1989). 52 Hilda May Eastley (b. 1929) BBC World War Two People’s Archive. WW2 People's War is an online archive of wartime memories contributed by members of the public and gathered by the BBC. The archive can be found at bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar'. 53 G.C. Hayter Hames, ‘War-time food production: the work of War Agricultural Executive Committees: Devon’, J. Royal Agric. Soc. England 108 (1947), 88.

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There were many other farming issues to be faced. Murray criticised the preparation for war for lack of sufficient attention to labour supplies, but also the absence of an animal feed plan, and a workable system of price controls.54 One inherent difficulty was the huge variation in farming across the country. Legislation favouring one group of products also favoured one type of farm, and often one size of farm rather than another. By 1938 the highest farm incomes were to be found in the intensively farmed areas of west Cornwall, north-west Lancashire and the Fens, together with the crop growing and milk producing farms on the chalklands of southern England. But in these places, despite variability in management skills and capital levels, the larger units achieved incomes far in excess of the thousands of small farms run by families without capital or formal education, whose income was barely equivalent to that of a skilled worker.55 Nevertheless, in comparative terms it must be said that Britain entered the Second World War in a far better state of preparedness than in 1914. But there were something like 2.4 million fewer acres of arable crops than in 1914, much land was out of heart and farming standards had often deteriorated since 1918, there was less capital and credit available and fewer workers.56 And there was cynicism and a residue of mistrust of Whitehall, partly because of the ‘Great Betrayal’ of 1921 but also because of a perceived lack of information about preparations for war. In fact the discussions, negotiations, parliamentary decisions, Ministerial appointments and activities had come together as a network of interest groups within a discourse in which the countryside was above all to be devoted to the urgent production of food supplies. Perhaps what most favoured 1939 vis-à-vis 1914 was the great difference in the extent of mechanised farming, with over 46,000 tractors operating in England and Wales by 1937, together with increased fertiliser use and other technical advances. Indeed, by 1939 agriculture had become, in Orwin’s words ‘the nation’s spoilt child instead of its Cinderella’.57 Because the War Ags were generally regarded as a success in increasing home food production during the First World War, their re-imposition in the event of another war had been strongly advocated in the 1930s. Structures and actors were in place early. In 1936 a chairman, executive officer and secretary for each proposed county committee were provisionally selected, often turning to members already serving on county council agricultural committees. These members were placed on standby in the autumn of 1938 at the time of the Munich crisis.58 Land Commissioners were to guide, supervise and interact with the committees, and Liaison Officers, prominent agriculturalists, were also put in place later in 1940 to assist in the transfer of knowledge both ways between localities and Ministry.59 The outbreak of war saw the rapid implementation of these structures and policies. The 62 War Ags for England and Wales, each with between 8 and 12 volunteer members, 54 K.A.H. Murray, Agriculture (1955), 62-4. 55 E. H. Whetham, The agrarian history of England and Wales VIII 1914-39 (Cambridge 1978), 316-7. 56 Sir George Stapledon, The way of the land (1943), 245-56. 57 C.S. Orwin, Speed the plough (1942), 14. 58 Murray, Agriculture, 59. 59 Sir Donald E Vandepeer, ‘County War Agricultural Executive Committees’, Public Administration 24 (1946), 14-22. Sir Donald was the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.

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involved an overall total of 829 members during the war. The situation in Scotland was somewhat different with certain counties being subdivided because of the difficulties of access in the Highlands, but with other committees serving more than one county. There were altogether 40 War Ags for the 33 Scottish counties. Thus there were 102 War Ags in all for Great Britain. In Northern Ireland the existing County Agricultural Committees were reorganized for war production, with newly-established posts of County War Agricultural Executive Officer established by the Ministry. The staff of the former county committees were reassigned as District Tillage Officers to supervise the ploughing-up campaign.60 Despite farming’s problems in 1939 there was no time to lose.61

‘Whatever may be the status of British agriculture in peacetime, in war there is no hesitancy of verdict – the industry is vital to the national well-being. The impact of war, therefore, on a failing agriculture was revolutionary and immediate; the wartime agricultural policy had to be vigorous, penetrating and innovatory. The consequences were an avalanche of emergency legislation, expanded governmental administration, purgative interference, necessary adjustments and generous assistance and advice, the conflux of which tended to maze the agriculturalist and the practicing land agent who were confronted with the policy along the levels of practical application.’62

Many War Ags had already met informally before September 1939. The Hampshire committee, for example, had met on 30 June, and again at the end of August to arrange the sub-committees. By the beginning of November the War Ag was already issuing over 200 plough-up orders a week.63 However, much of the necessary background work such as the arrangements for accommodation for staff, finding office equipment, collation of the required Ordnance Survey maps, even the recruitment of staff themselves, did not begin until the actual outbreak of war. Somehow this was accomplished. In translating national strategy into local planning the War Ags had to assume power over farmers who had always cherished their own independence. They were helped, however, by three elemental issues: the first was the mobilisation of patriotism, of ‘doing your bit’ for the country. The Ministries in Whitehall exercised centralised control of this discourse, which was further disseminated by the surrounding media. Allied to this was the fact that many agricultural jobs were reserved occupations, and a consequent element of additional moral pressure could be brought to bear, even more so when British cities such as London and Coventry began to come under heavy bombing during 1940. The second was the instrumentalist point that on 3 September 1939 DORA ushered in swingeing powers which could be utilised by the War Ags, if and when required, to 60 Murray, Agriculture, 60; see, for example, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland AG/16/18/12 War Plans: tillage 1939 (file no. 1143). 61 A.W. Menzies-Kitchen, ‘Local administration of agricultural policy’ in D.N. Chester (ed), Lessons of the British war economy (Cambridge 1951), 240-41. 62 D.R. Denman, ‘The practical application of wartime agricultural policy: with special reference to highland regions’ Unpub. PhD (Estate Management) thesis, University of London 1945, vi. 63 TNA, MAF 80/894

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compel farmers to comply with their wishes, overriding any thoughts of independent action. They could take enter upon, inspect or take possession of land; control its use and farming methods.Thirdly, the committees could employ a knowledge base of modern science and technologies which could be offered to farmers in the form of information, advice or actual leased equipment, which in the circumstances of having to adjust farming practices rapidly, many farmers would welcome. And with that knowledge at their disposal, of course, went more power. Much of the day-to-day work of the War Ags was actually involved with encouraging good agricultural practice and monitoring performance, and the observation and recording carried out as part of the National Farm Survey 1941-1943 was an integral part of this scrutiny. Other tasks included the allocation of county ploughing quotas; the payment of the £2 an acre ploughing subsidy; the distribution of tractors and other equipment; liaison with the armed services; encouragement of drainage; and the provision of mobile gangs of labour. One of the strengths of devolving locally-effective power to the War Ags was the blending of the committees’ powers with the pre-existing social networks and interconnectedness, noted above, within which committee members lived. The opportunity was taken, in effect, to build upon a rural leadership that was already legitimated within the community, often by virtue of lengthy residence, property ownership, the holding of other offices, or recognised farming ability. It was, as Mitchell wrote in 1951 ‘always desirable to adapt old forms to new processes wherever they can be fitted into the dominant cultural background’.64 The new committees built on prevailing class relations. In fact, serving in a senior capacity on the War Ags was constitutive of class position in that it reinforced or highlighted a self-awareness and class solidarity as social power relations were exerted, relations that had been established within the farming workplace, the cultural and also the political sphere. In so doing, the greater or lesser patterns of deference and social capital enjoyed by the elites before 1939 were reinforced, and indeed mobilised with overtones of patriotic duty. The same was not necessarily the case, of course, for the many paid officials who administered the complex bureaucracy which rapidly evolved. For them, respect was scarce, for these were the pen-pushers and ‘townies’. Enforcement would ideally come through personal pressure by neighbour upon neighbour, disapprobation for non-compliance would suffuse through local society which, it was hoped, would support the War Ags in their efforts. Indeed, the latter were constituted from that local society and local knowledge, built from and contributing to, surveys of farms and farmers, was garnered and used as the basis for development wherever possible. In rural Wales class distinctions were weaker, most farming families having similar cultural and educational backgrounds, but esteem was instead gained from perceived all-round farming competence and longevity of family connections. Rees noted that in 1950 in the secluded, traditional and Welsh-speaking Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa 64 G. D. Mitchell, ‘The parish council and the rural community’ Public Administration 29 (1951), 393-401. Quotation from p.396.

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(Montgomeryshire) farmers made good use of the War Ag tractors whilst being forced to keep accounts by the committee. But the onset of agricultural modernity in such areas might be delayed, since some traditional cultures were resilient. Despite the war, for example, no farmer in the parish would carry hay on a Sunday for fear of losing face.65 A Mass-Observation diarist from North Wales wrote for Sunday 14 September 1941 ‘No-one in this district was working on the corn in spite of the Minister of Agriculture’s appeal. One old man told father that in the old days they managed to do the harvesting without Sunday work and had no tractors or binders to help them but cut every bit with the scythe’ A neighbour was helped in carrying his corn, and a cart was loaned in return. Wartime contractors cutting oats with tractor and binder in this area around Pwllheli were given meals by the farmers, as was the custom for all callers.66 Hence, perhaps unsurprisingly, we find wartime arrangements suffused with traditional courtesy. This strong familistic and chapel-based society stood accused of nepotism by urban dwellers but loyalty to kinsmen and known background remained important. So councillors appointed one another’s friends and relatives – rooted in rural reciprocity – and it would be difficult to imagine that such procedures left the War Ags untouched. There is some evidence of manipulation of the system, as for example, with one Welsh War Ag official (also a local NFU secretary) inspecting bracken cutting and drainage work, who spent some time with a farmer ‘manipulating the number of hours’ booked for bracken clearance grants, leaving the farmer to reflect that ‘this WAEC business seems a bit of a racket’.67 But across Britain how was the required degree of social control to be exerted? What structures were most appropriate? How could the available expertise be conveyed to the farmers? And how would the modern knowledge, conceived in university and colleges, fare when faced with traditional knowledge and concerns with an individuality embedded in generations of family/land intimacies? In the 1930s the future of farming had been the subject of many competing ideas about its future, but now differences had to be set aside, and it became clear that the wartime years would impel farmers, like it or not, into the modernities of science, technology, state support and its associated form-filling.68 In writing of this ‘greatest triumph’ Murray describes the key figures drawn from the ‘progressive leading tenant farmers and farming landowners’ on the War Ags, with their ‘almost crusading enthusiasm to bring about a renaissance in British farming’.69 The war gave an opportunity for those who had for a generation been proselytising the cause of a modern agriculture to transform farming on the ground. The relationships between social power, knowledge and actual practice were indeed thorny issues to be resolved immediately. Time could not be wasted with structures 65 A.D. Rees Life in a Welsh Countryside (Cardiff 1968 (1st pub 1950)), 23-30, 144; P.J. Madgwick with N. Griffiths and V. Walker, The Politics of Rural Wales: a Study of Cardiganshire (1973), 41-44. 66 Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex. Diarist no. 5056 (born 1911, single man, farmer). 67 Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex. Diarist no. 5056, entry for 17 September 1940. 68 J. Martin, ‘The structural transformation of British agriculture: the resurgence of progressive high-input arable farming’ in B. Short, C. Watkins and J. Martin (eds), ‘The front line of freedom’: British farming in the Second World War (Exeter 2007), 16- 35. 69 Murray, Agriculture, 339

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which failed to get crops and animals converted to human food. Advice and help of many kinds was now available but equally discipline had to be instilled and delinquent farmers had to be exposed and – if necessary – punished. DORA gave the necessary legal authority but it was important that best practice was rapidly established and suffused – what Foucault termed ‘the microphysics of power’.70 And since the day-to-day practice of the War Ags could not be separated from the cultural norms and beliefs of the countryside, that practice was imbued with class division, was gendered, and indeed was imbued with all the non-egalitarian cultural baggage of the British prewar countryside. The very constructions within which the members of the War Ags tacitly thought and talked and made sense of the world around them reflected their places within rural and county society. These networks of power were interlocking and multiple. Individuals might belong to extended families with marriage connections, to communities, to village clubs and associations. Many were parish or county councillors, aldermen, or more locally were village hall trustees, school managers, church wardens, or members of the Conservative Association. Although this would not preclude the formation of internal caucuses and splits within the elite groups themselves, the elites formed a powerful ‘inner circle’. Within the rural interwar countryside, they might move between CLA/NFU meetings and market day socialising, between the local hunt and the county council, between school and university Old Boy gatherings, or ‘learning by dining’. Their personalities and charisma mattered in the degree to which they were prepared to share expertise, to communicate effectively, to work together effectively. Such linkages facilitated transfers of knowledge, influenced commercial behaviour and substantiated social capital. The committees and their sub-committees wove a net of contacts with farmers and land-related individuals and groups – constituting what have been referred to as ‘power geometries’ among the wider agricultural community.71 The boundaries of each county were also porous, and ideas could flow ‘vertically’ down from Whitehall, from farm research institutes, or back and forth ‘horizontally’ across county borders. These linkages were extremely important, given the rapidity with which change was required. New or revived skills were needed, especially related to ploughing, seeding grassland, and the use of machinery and artificial fertilisers. Knowledge was therefore embedded within certain dimensions, referred to by Hess as ‘societal embeddedness’, ‘network embeddedness’ and ‘territorial embeddedness’. The first refers to the social, cultural and political backgrounds of groups or individuals which shape actions and attitudes; the second refers to the structure of formal and informal relationships, the ‘architecture’ of these relationships; and the third refers to the degree to which people are linked to particular places, with the economic and social interactions and ‘institutional thickness’ prevailing there.72 The link between the War Ags’ knowledge and its actual deployment did depend upon the three dimensions above.

70 M. Foucault, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (1977). 71 M. Brayshay, M. Cleary and J. Selwood, ‘Social networks and the transnational reach of the corporate class in the early-twentieth century’, J. Historical Geography 33 (2007), 144-67. 72 Brayshay et al,’Social networks’, 148-9; M. Hess, ‘”Spatial” relationships? Towards a reconceptualisation of embeddedness’, Progress in Human Geography 28 (2004), 165-86.

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Many actually saw the war as heralding a return to better times: the editor of the Farmers Weekly wrote in December 1939 that it was now ‘back to good farming … to the methods our grandfathers knew and to the crops they grew [but now with] all the advances of science at our disposal’. 73 In September 1941 a North Wales farmer wrote in his diary: ‘The countryside is showing signs of the revival of agriculture. It is beginning to look more trim and workmanlike as fences are repaired and banks restored and trimmed. But it will be a long time before it regains its reputed glory of the past. The ravages of the rabbits alone will take some making good’.74 And Lord Cornwallis, chairman of the Kent War Ag wrote in 1944 ‘Anyone who knew his Kent five years ago will now see a very different picture. Once more does the land begin to look as if it was cared for and once more really worthy of being regarded as “The Garden of England.”’75 Sizes of the committees varied throughout the war, and turnover could be greater in some counties than others. The small Scillies War Ag managed with just eight members 1939-45, whilst Buckinghamshire, Leicestershire and Kesteven (Lincolnshire) each included 20 members in total in the war years. There were some common structural requirements. Above all was the Executive Committee, and then District and Specialist sub-committees. The District Committees were formed from four to seven ‘residents with a good knowledge of local farming, able and willing to give a certain amount of voluntary work, and also carrying the confidence of their fellow-farmers’.76 They ‘not only had a thorough knowledge of the science and practice of farming, but also understood the psychology of the farmers’.77 Their territorial basis was usually that of the pre-existing Rural Districts, and they effectively translated and brought the power of the Executive into close geographical proximity. Their members could bang on neighbours’ doors, speak over the hedge or in the pub, and whose own performance could be judged in turn. Theirs also was the task of monitoring every farmer in their district, in part by the carrying out of surveys such as the National Farm Survey for England and Wales 1941-43, using those who knew local conditions of soil, climate and productivity very well.78 Altogether there were 453 of these committees operating in the first half of the war, increasing to 478 in the later war years, and the number of people serving on them rose from about 3,400 in the early war years to over 5,200 later, an average of 55 people per county in the early years and 91 later. Each county also had a variable number of specialist sub-committees, ranging from Anglesey and North Riding of Yorkshire with 5 each, up to Oxfordshire’s 22 and Surrey’s 27. The precise numbers of such committees also varied from year to year throughout the war. They committees undertook such vital functions as the allocation of county plough-up quotas, which were set at approximately half the area lost to the plough 73Farmers Weekly 22 December 1939, 8. 74 Mass observation Archive, University of Sussex. Diarist no. 5056, diary entry 20 September 1941. 75 P.W. Cox, ‘Front-line farming: Kent’s war effort’ Agriculture 51 (1944), 123. 76 Murray, Agriculture, 59-60. 77 A. W. Menzies Kitchen, ‘Local administration’, 249. 78 B. Short, C. Watkins, W. Foot and P. Kinsman P, The National Farm Survey 1941-43, State Surveillance and the Countryside in England and Wales in the Second World War (Wallingford 2000). For an abridged report for Scotland see TNA: MAF 38/217.

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since 1918, and the payment of the ploughing subsidy. A plethora of tasks included also the distribution of tractors and other equipment; liaison with the armed services, WLA and Timber Corps and other temporary sources of labour; the encouragement of drainage, pest and disease control; the provision of cottages and, where appropriate, horticultural advice. The range and quantity of work increased as the war progressed, with what John Moore called ‘a fat beribboned bundle of documents’ frequently changing hands from one committee to another.79 Altogether between 1939 and 1945 there were 771 specialist sub-committees recorded in the Ministry of Agriculture’s archive, but this almost certainly underestimates the true number since not all the war years’ activities are preserved and committees were fluid, some being ephemeral, some merging or changing into a similarly-named one. Local circumstances dictated varying committee structures – thus Cheshire’s dairying, or Cornwall’s horticulture demanded specialist committees. Northumberland had to look after farms within the 20,000-acre Redesdale artillery range; Lancashire had a specialist Marginal Land Committee; Durham had a Stints Committee to control the amount of grazing on commons; Hampshire a New Forest pastoral development committee; Lindsey a water supplies committee; Norfolk a Feltwell Fen Drainage Committee, and so on. 80 The supporting bureaucracy and space requirements could be vast: rooms had to be allocated not only for meetings of the various committees but also for the large substructure of officials carrying out the multitude of tasks. Departmental heads and assistants administered the various tasks required, and each district had its district officer and sometimes an assistant, helped by clerical and typing staff. A general office serviced the various specialist sub-committees and comprised supervisors, assistant supervisors, telephonists, filing clerks, cleaners, firewatchers and ‘office boys’. By 1943 the Cumberland War Ag employed no fewer than 61 officers, including a farm supervisor and machinery instructor, supported by 114 clerks and typists and four mechanics, a part-time labour organizer and a poultry instructress. One calculation of overall national numbers involved gave the figure of 30,000 employed by 1943, with Essex alone employing 2,000 workers.81 The changing nature of the international conflict provoked necessary adjustments to policy. The sudden shifts were difficult for farmers to accommodate, given the necessary seasonal rhythms of farming. But in order to more effectively communicate the changing governmental requirements it was decided that Liaison Officers be appointed who could move between Whitehall and the War Ags to explain and assist wherever possible. 82 79 J. Moore, The blue field (1948), 159-63. 80 TNA, MAF 39/241 (Cumberland); 39/249 (Durham); 39/255 (Hampshire); 39/276 (Lindsey); 39/282 (Norfolk). 81 Denman, ‘The practical application of wartime agricultural policy’, 511-34. Menzies Kitchen, ‘Local administration’, 243. The latter’s figure for Essex includes farmworkers on land taken over by the War Ags. 82 A. Hurd, A Farmer in Whitehall (1951). Murray, Agriculture., 327-8.

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Membership of the War Ags Although the Minister's independence in selecting War Ag members was emphasized to deflect criticism of undue local favouritism (or the antagonism), it is obvious that there was a limited supply of people with the time, experience and ability suitable for membership. Their unelected nature was also later to be the cause of considerable adverse criticism. But given their new-found powers it mattered greatly to the local farming community who would be wielding that power. Aggrieved farmers may have been deterred from complaining overtly because War Ag personnel may also have dominated local housing, land and job markets, or be magistrates, or otherwise dispense welfare and patronage. Hegemonic authority relations could remain strong, and dominance within small communities could still be total. War Ag membership was a coalition which might include politicians, capitalist industrialists, landed aristocracy, Fabians, academics, even members of the far-right landed class. But members were not representatives of any specific grouping, other than those individuals drawn from the farm workers’ unions and those with liaison duties with the Women’s Land Army. The appointments were made by the Ministers concerned, and members were personally responsible to Whitehall alone. Nevertheless, the individual roles on the committees were strongly differentiated, with members allocated specific tasks, and sitting on particular sub-committees. In this last respect, of course, there was also a marked sexual division of labour, since there were conspicuously few women serving on the main executive committees, other than those responsible for liaison with the WLA. Cannadine has argued that the War Ags were part of an ‘aristocratic resurgence’ which allowed landed ‘patricians’ to regain a degree of authority which had been lost over the previous decades. Indeed, he suggested that the war offered ‘the last reassertion of upper class leadership’.83 Some idea of this can be tested by examining some obvious and accessible ‘prestige indicators’.84 Members of the peerage included, for example, Lord Cornwallis, chair of the Kent War Ag; William Cecil, 5th Marquess of Exeter, chaired the Soke of Peterborough War Ag until June 1942; and others included the Duke of Grafton (West Suffolk), Baron Cromwell ( Leicestershire) and the Duke of Beaufort from Badminton (Gloucestershire). Many titled women fulfilled roles as WLA representatives: the Duchess of Devonshire sat on the Derbyshire War Ag.85 Other indicators included numbers of baronets, knights or other landed property owners (as suggested by their addresses), of JPs, military ranking officers and alderman. Of a total of 829 members of Executive Committees 1939-45, there were 31 peers and 32 otherwise titled individuals, giving 7.6% of the total membership. This was hardly an overwhelming proportion.

83 D. Cannadine, The decline and fall of the British aristocracy (New Haven 1990), 606-36. 84 The following discussion of committee members’ titles and occupations are taken from an analysis of the War Ag constitution lists in TNA, MAF 39. 85 TNA, MAF 39/267; 39/295; 39/303; 39/252; 39/242.

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Just under one-third of members were practising farmers – Not comprising over half of members as stated by some sources, anxious to emphasise the neighbourly spirit of farmer helping fellow farmers.86 But the second highest number was that for landowners, many of whom would, of course, have been farmers as well, so the numbers of the farming community were certainly solidly represented.87 The number of English farmers on the executives can also be further disaggregated. Of the 756 members there were 33 ‘large farmers’, 193 ‘farmers’, 11 retired farmers, an additional eight living at a farm address and 14 market gardeners, giving altogether 34.3% of the total executive membership. In some cases farming activities or status might be referred to as ‘farmers and landowners’ (49 or 24.5%); ‘large farmers’ (40 or 20%) or those prominent in the NFU (22, 11%). Well over half the farmers were therefore described as landowner-farmers, large farmers or otherwise prominent. Only nine (4.5%) were referred to as tenant farmers, and this bias, together with just 4 per cent described as small farmers does underline the potential for exclusion and tension. The larger farmers were seen as the more progressive members of their communities, those most able to spare the time this committee work would require, and probably those most networked amongst themselves at the county level. The committees were also predominantly male. Apart from the WLA representative, there were few women. One exception was the distinguished Hon. Mrs Mildred Assheton, land agent on her family’s estate at Downham Hall, Clithero, on the Lancashire committee and specifically named as ‘the only woman member of the LAS’ (Land Agents Society).88 Of the 92 who served on the English and Welsh Executive Committees during the war (out of 829, ie 11.1% of the membership) 40 were titled women and a further 18 from wealthy homes. Twelve of the 92 were in some way related to another member of the committee, sometimes the wife of the chairman. But in her own right was Lady Mary Langman, on the Somerset executive, champion of alternative farming and a founder member with Lady Eve Balfour of the Soil Association after the war.89 Otherwise female participation was restricted to serving on sub committees and district committees, although there were women officials dealing with such matters as horticulture, poultry, dairying, accommodation or as secretaries. The committees were therefore gender and class biased, amply reflecting the prewar rural societies from which they were drawn. A hereditary principle might even apply, with sons or family members taking on former roles. W. Hugh Kemsley and his cousin Gilbert both chaired the Essex War Ag after illness forced the former to resign in 1942.90 There were certainly relatives on the War Ags, mostly husband and wife, and such links were also to be found on the sub-committees and district committees.

86 See, for example, Ministry of Information, Land at War (1946), 11. 87 Unfortunately the Welsh documents do not list occupations. 88 L. Thompson, ‘The promotion of agricultural education for adults: the Lancashire Federation of women’s Institutes, 1919-45’, Rural History 10 (1999), 218-9. 89 TNA, MAF 39/316. 90 TNA, MAF 39/292; 70/184; 70/183; 39/250. And see P. Wormell, Essex farming 1900-2000 (Colchester 1999), 82.

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The chairmen of the War Ags were all male, with landowners, sometimes referred to as farmers as well, supplying 47.2 per cent; those with no listed occupation another 23.6 per cent; farmers (including one retired) 18.7 per cent; land agents 4.2 per cent; and those with other commercial/professional interests the remaining 6.3 per cent. Here then were those with privileged access to material resources and both economic and cultural capital, members perhaps of ancient families with notions of the duties and responsibilities required of ‘country gentlemen’, and the communication skills and charisma required to influence others. Many chairmen were recognized as leading agriculturalists who would thereby command respect. H.R.Overman, chair of the Northamptonshire War Ag, was from a family of farming innovators in Norfolk whose antecedents farmed on the Holkham estates in the late eighteenth century. By 1952 he was chair of the Farmers’ Club of London.91 Sir Henry Upcher, chair of the Norfolk committee, president of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists Society, had farmed at Hall Farm, Sheringham since 1894.92 Such experience was commonplace and indeed essential if the chairmen were to inspire the confidence of their committees and the farmers at large in their counties. Echoes of older upper-class elitism could be heard. As an example, A.T. Loyd, ‘uncrowned king of Berkshire’, owner of the Lockinge estate, and chair of the Berkshire War Ag until his death in November 1944, had also been Lord Lieutenant, chair of the county council, High Sheriff, Warden of Bradfield College, the public school, an ecclesiastical commissioner, Conservative MP for Abingdon and a trustee of the Wallace Collection. He had served during World War One and in the immediate postwar years in the Egyptian public service before taking up residence at Lockinge in 1920.93 At the time of his death he was farming about 10,000 acres. He was succeeded as chair of the War Ag by another long-term member of the county gentry, H.A. Benyon (later Sir Hugh Benyon) but was not before the names of Sir William Mount and Lord Faringdon were discussed – illustrative of the echelons of society normally sought for the post. In fact Mount was serving in the army and was not released, and Lord Faringdon could not be countenanced for the following reason, given in correspondence with William Gavin, the Liaison Officer for Berkshire:

‘With regard to the suggestion about Lord Faringdon, I agree that his politics should not enter into the matter, but it must be remembered that he was prosecuted by the ministry in the early days of the war for refusing to comply with a direction of the Committee to plough up. He was convicted and fined £40, £10 costs [in July 1940]. I am afraid this is a serious bar to his appointment to the Committee.’94

91 Susanna Wade Martins, ‘Overman family (per. c.1800–1933)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004; [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/50161, accessed 27 Sept 2006]. 92 President’s address (Sir Henry Upcher) ‘Norfolk farming’, Norfolk and Norwich Naturalist Society Journal 16 (1946), 97-105. 93 TNA, MAF 39/230; The Times, Obituary 10 November 1944; Reading Mercury 11 November 1944; M. Havinden, Estate villages: a study of the Berkshire villages of Ardington and Lockinge (University of Reading 1966), 120-29. 94 TNA, MAF 39/230-31. Memo note 8 December 1944.

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Another, unspoken, reason was hinted at by Hugh Dalton who called him ‘a pansy pacifist of whose private tendencies it might be slander to speak freely’.95 The links between the War Ags and the wider national sphere are perhaps best exemplified in Buckinghamshire, where the chair was Christopher Addison, Viscount Addison of Stallingborough (1869-1951). Born into a Lincolnshire tenant farming family, he moved from the Liberals to the Independent Labour Party, becoming MP for Swindon and Minister of Agriculture in Ramsay McDonald’s second administration. He resigned his War Ag chairmanship in 1945 to become Secretary to the Dominions, Leader of the House of Lords (and a Viscount) in the Attlee administration, at the age of 76. Atlee was an old colleague and near-neighbour in Buckinghamshire.96 Clubs and societies facilitated networks of acquaintance and perhaps most prestigious for farming at the national level was that of the Royal Agricultural Society of England. Some War Ag chairmen became council members, such as Sir Merrick Burrell (West Sussex), Hubert Alexander (Glamorgan), Major Barclay (Hertfordshire), Henry Benyon (Berkshire), Lord Cornwallis (Kent), or Capt Duberley (Huntingdonshire). Lord Cranworth (East Suffolk) served on the RASE council, becoming a vice-president by 1947.97 Care was certainly required in these appointments. Committee members who defaulted themselves paid the penalty: one farmer from Husbands Bosworth (Leicestershire) resigned from Lutterworth District Committee because he himself was indicted for ‘bad farming’- presumably he would not have been in any position within the farming community to enforce War Ag directions.98 Even more serious was the immediate ejection from the Cumberland War Ag of its vice-chairman, following an adverse report on his farming from a local district committee in Solway, and at the angry insistence of the Minister, Robert Hudson, who had been staying nearby.99

Nor were all appointees well received within the committees themselves. Knowledge of Welsh was clearly important as a cultural marker among Welsh rural communities, and when the Welsh Office proposed to appoint Lady Kathleen Stanley to the Anglesey War Ag a unanimous ‘strong exception’ was expressed at their first meeting on 31 August 1939, namely that the meetings would be conducted in Welsh but that ‘her ladyship is not conversant with the Welsh language’. The same objection was raised again at their next meeting, but nevertheless, Lady Stanley was appointed and remained on the executive throughout the war.100 The Montgomery district committee of Llanfair Caereinion had a 95 Gaynor Johnson, ‘Henderson, (Alexander) Gavin, second Baron Faringdon (1902–1977)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31218, accessed 19 Sept 2006], citing B. Pimlott (ed), The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1940–1945 (1986), 509 96 TNA, MAF 39/232; Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Addison, Christopher, first Viscount Addison (1869–1951)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30342, accessed 28 Sept 2006]. 97 Lists of members of council and standing committees, Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England 103 (1942), 191-4; 107 (1946), 210-13; 108 (1947), 204-7. 98 TNA, MAF 39/272. 99 D.R. Denman, A half and half affair: chronicles of a hybrid don (1993), 74. From the Cumberland War Ag documents this would appear to have taken place in August 1942 (TNA, MAF 39/240-41). 100 TNA, MAF 80/3638.

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non-Welsh speaking District Officer appointed in September 1939 and a memo noted that because of his poor knowledge of Welsh they were to ‘ask for a substitute if he is unable to carry out his duties satisfactorily’. It would appear that he too coped with the situation, since he was still in post by 1944.101 Although much has been made of the social leveling through the mass participation caused by the exigencies of total war, this may have been an urban rather than rural feature, since the War Ags do not appear to have offered avenues by which aspiring members might enter county power structures. George Orwell in 1941 could write, ‘Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred.’ He then continued ‘England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege largely ruled by the old and the silly. But in any calculation one has to take into account its emotional unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel alike and act alike and act together in moments of extreme crisis’.102 One supposedly fictional account, but clearly based on real experience, related how the War Ag Labour Officer with the ‘Wilton North Labour Pool, Deepshire’ evidently relished being in charge of men of much higher social standing than himself.103 The Essex landowner and far-right commentator J. Wentworth Day lamented the ‘pretentious ignorance on the part of officials’, while Hugh James, a Welsh pioneer of agricultural cooperation, made similarly wished for greater involvement from those of higher standing.104 Despite opportunistic and short-lived attempts to subvert rural hierarchies, there was no rural melting pot, but rather there were many situations demonstrating a consolidation of positions and attitudes and a shared, reinforced image of a hierarchical ‘English’ community. Indeed, such hierarchies would not be challenged fundamentally until the arrival of substantial numbers of middle class ex-urban families during the post-war counterurbanisation decades. Although there was no formal political affiliation on the War Ags, the unminuted ‘small behaviours’ of demeanour, clothing, language and tone, signs and body language would probably have followed informal political grouping or contingent networks of interests within (or against) the hegemony of ‘agrarian Conservatism’.105 The documentation for Monmouth Executive Committee exceptionally did give the political affiliation of the Executive Committee as at June 1940. Five of the seven members were Conservatives, one Labour and one was non-political, a structure which was probably not at all unusual.106 The surroundings of the meetings also mattered: E.J. Rudsdale was secretary

101 TNA, MAF 70/184 102 G. Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941), 22, 27. But for the ongoing class divisions in rural Britain see A. Howkins, ‘A country at war: Mass-Observation and rural England, 1939-45’, Rural History 9 (1998), 92. and for doubts on social solidarity in either town or country see S. Fielding, P. Thompson and N. Tiratsoo, “England arise!”: the Labour party and popular politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester 1995), 21-6; and Rose, Which people’s war?, 151-96. 103 C. M. Baldwin, Digging for Victory (undated typescript, Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading D73/22), 12. 104 J. Wentworth Day, Farming adventure: a thousand miles through England on a horse, (1943), 6; R. J. Moore-Colyer, ‘The County War Agricultural Executive Committees: the Welsh Experience, 1939-1945’, The Welsh History Review 22 (2005), 578. 105 E. Goffman, Interaction ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face behaviour (1967), 1. 106 TNA, MAF 70/183.

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to the Lexden and Winstree District Committee in Essex. His journal entry for the day of his first committee meeting, on 6 January 1941, runs:

… met Captain Folkard [the District Officer] at half past 9, and went out to Birch Hall. We met in the main hall before a roaring log fire, the mantel above which was carved with the Borough Arms, and sat on uncomfortable chairs having the Round crest of lion couchant in high relief on their backs. Capt. Round [later made a Colonel of the Home Guard] came in, looking every inch the country squire, and was very nice to me. I sat at the table with Capt Folkard, and took notice of how the meeting was run…107

The committees were regulatory and coercive, restrictive and normative. Utilitarian, they controlled the mobilization of material resources, and the allocating of benefits and services. They might also lead by example: Capt. Charles Fitzroy, 10th Duke of Grafton, vice-chairman of the West Suffolk War Ag, turned over the bulk of his Euston Park near Thetford, covered pre-war in tough heath grasses and bracken, to his own War Ag to produce arable crops by 1943, an operation continuing successfully throughout the rest of the war.108 Their power was exercised in different ways: here dominating, there exhorting with moral persuasion, elsewhere manipulating. As A.G. Street had it, the question was whether to ‘coax, cajole, or curse’.109 But where there was power there might be either compliance or resistance. Responses might be inconsistent, complying with some demands whilst resisting others. And challenges to authority found expression in many ways even within the all-encompassing wartime discourse. Resistance might be mounted on a question of principle, such as A.G. Street’s refusal to fill in one question when the National Farm Survey was administered on his Wiltshire farm, or more extremely in the case of opposition to dispossession from the farmhouse, as happened in the case of Ray Walden in Hampshire in July 1940, when he was killed after a gun battle with police.110 At least one farmer committed suicide as a result of being dispossessed, some left the land never to return, and others had relatives who sought, and still seek, to publicise what they see as wartime injustices. By far the most controversial action was in dispossessing farmers, mostly ‘C’ graded in the National Farm Survey 1941-3, who failed to comply with War Ag instructions. Over 2500 farmers were affected either by complete eviction from land and house, having tenancies terminated, or by having land taken over. Although engendering considerable discussion at the time, there has been little mention of the impact of dispossession on the farmers within their communities, where such an outcome might be seen as a disgrace. As Sir John Mellor told the Commons in 1941 ‘His character as an agriculturalist is, indeed, wrecked. ’111 The Minister’s response was that, if anything, the committees were too 107 E.J.Rudsdale, ‘Colchester Journal’, Essex Record Office D/DU 888/Box 3:1941, p.11. 108 Duke of Grafton, ‘Experiences in land reclamation: Euston, Thetford’, J. Royal Agricultural Society England 104 (1943), 85-7. and ‘Land reclamation on the Euston Estate’, J. Royal Agricultural Society England 108 (1947), 127-9. 109 A.G. Street, Wessex Wins (1941), 335. 110 B. Short, ‘Death of a farmer: fortunes of war and the strange case of Ray Walden’, Agric. Hist. Review 56 (2008), 189-213. 111 House of Commons Parliamentary Debates 374, 9 October 1941,

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lenient, having known the farmers concerned for many years, and any hardship caused was inevitable in wartime. The impact fell unequally upon smaller farmers, who were more likely also to be graded ‘C’; or on all-grass or dairy farmers faced with producing arable crops; or by those requiring access to common land which had been ploughed.In turn the authority of the War Ags was bolstered by exhortatory visits by the Minister or by his officials, by written circulars, and by the upholding of difficult decisions by top Ministry personnel. Reactions from the farming community were certainly mixed, ranging from high praise to execration. Old friendships might be broken, community reciprocity threatened as neighbours formally judged neighbours; even family ties strained. The unpopularity of the War Ags, felt to be ‘un-English’, manifested itself in many ways. Older farmers, having suffered during years of depression, resented instructions from younger men often on flying visits, and many committee members might be over-zealous. Farmers were suspicious of the grading systems which left C farmers very vulnerable. Some felt that the committee members were failed farmers themselves, and, ‘essentially fascist’.112 Wentworth Day, a writer for The Field in the 1930s, reported cases of ‘bullying, petty feuds, jobbery and favouritism’, but his views were widely discredited because of his pro-fascist ideas and emotive writing style.113 John Blishen wrote of his farmworker: ‘Bert took a simple view of War Ag officials. They were all failed farmers or opportunists with dubiously relevant backgrounds who had wormed their way into indefensible jobs’.114 There was no route of appeal for farmers during the war other than to the executive committees themselves. Sir John Winnifreth later noted that the operations ‘threw the door wide open to jobbery, favouritism [and] nepotism’. The Wiltshire War Ag lost a high profile law suit involving preferential treatment and the purchase of a farm by R.S. Hudson, the Minister of Agriculture himself.115 And although membership of the committees came cheaply because they were volunteers, the overall cost in a year such as 1942 still amounted to £11.8 million, as against an income of £4.75 million.116 Murray cites the 5-year expenditure 1940-41 to 1944-5 as exceeding receipts by £27 million. But everything was mortgaged to the pressing requirement to ensure food supplies. Nor were the War Ags always successful in their dealings with the local farming community. One instance in Sussex is revealed by an interviewer, equipped with the relevant National Farm Survey documents for a farm, talking to an elderly interviewee:

Interviewer: It says here, for the management section [of the War agricultural Survey], that the reasons for the farm failing, is the “inability of the agent to gain the necessary power and ready cash to farm the home farm properly.”

112 F. Sykes, This farming business (1944), 119-20. 113 J. Wentworth-Day, Marshland adventure (1950), 40. 114 J. Blishen, A cack-handed war (1972), 38-9. 115 J. Martin, ‘George Odlum, The Ministry of Agriculture and “Farmer Hudson”’, Agric. Hist. Review 55 (2007), 229-50. 116 J. Winnifreth, The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (New Whitehall Series 1962); E.Whetham, ‘Agricultural policy and food production’ (typescript draft in TNA, CAB 102/325, with amendments by officials) ; R.H.Hudson in parliamentary reply, see H of C Debates 19 May 1944, 543-8.

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Farmer: Yes, that was true, he was always drunk… There were two big fields by the river, one was 27 acres and the other 21 acres, and the 21 acres the war agricultural committee made them plough up, but they made such a mess of it that it didn’t produce anything.117

Even more difficult for farmers and War Ags alike, were the many cases where agricultural expansion had to compete with other critically important uses. Thus, the government had to intervene in a dispute between The Ministry of Agriculture and the War Office over the militarization of much of the South Downs, in many ways an ideal environment for crop production. There was competition in East Anglia for flat terrain for airfields. In total by 1945 although the plough-up campaign had created about 6 million acres of arable land in Britain, farming had still lost some half million acres, much to military uses.118 One-third of the Yorkshire Wolds was taken over in June 1943 as a training ground, with sheep being removed, hedges flattened by tanks, and crop acreages falling by 40 per cent. American and Canadian soldiers were now ubiquitous in rural Britain. In Devon a well-known known example was the evacuation of 180 farms and 3,000 civilians in late 1943 from the Devon countryside behind Slapton Ley required for battle training for the D-Day landings. The cases of the now-deserted villages of Imber (Wiltshire) and Tyneham (Dorset) are also relatively well-known. By 1944 a remarkable 20 percent of the total land area of Great Britain was in military use, and the occupation by the military has left nearly 20,000 landscape features catalogued by the Defence of Britain Project.119 The countryside in ‘Victorious poverty’ The ending of the war in 1945 found Britain exhausted and economically drained. Rural communities, sheltered as many were from the most destructive impacts of war, now looked towards reconstruction. But several aspects of wartime rurality persisted for a while: the WLA continued to recruit until March 1950, before being disbanded in November of that year; and German Prisoners-of-War remained billeted on farms or in hostels throughout 1948, and were highly valued.120 Many lives had changed for ever and in so many different ways. It is difficult to separate nostalgia from reality, but it may truly 117 A. Holmes, ‘Integrating history and ecology to sustain a living landscape: applying oral history narratives in interdisciplinary research’ (Unpub. Paper for the University of Sussex ‘Integrating history and ecology to sustain a living landscape’ project). 118 TNA, MAF 38/574. 119 W. Foot, ‘The impact of the military on the agricultural landscape of Britain in the Second World War’ (Unpublished M.Phil thesis, Univ. of Sussex 1999), 8-10; and ‘The impact of the military on the agricultural landscape of Britain in the Second World War’ in Short et al. (eds), Front line of freedom’, 132-42; W. Foot, Beaches, fields, streets and hills: the anti-invasion landscapes of England, 1940 (Council for British archaeology 2006); P. Wright, The village that died for England: the strange case of Tyneham (1995). 120 G. Clarke, The Women’s Land Army: a portrait ( Bristol 2008), 144-5: R. Moore-Colyer, ‘Prisoners of War and the struggle for food production, 1939-49’ in Short et al. (eds), Front line of freedom, 117-31. Johann Custodis (LSE) is currently working on a PhD evaluating the contribution of German and Italian POWs to British agriculture.

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be the case that any prewar feelings of community or solidarity were never to return. Prewar master/servant relationships in farming were less likely now. Many younger people, as after the Great War, had experienced a wider world, new friendships and a society free of village restraints on behaviour, and would never return. Modernity seeped into the countryside just as much as the town. Many farmers had superficially made money, although soil nutrient depletion in many areas had already led to a lowering of yields in the last two years of the war. Leading up to the General Election of July 1945, just two months after the Nazi surrender, both main parties praised the efforts of the farmers in increasing home output, and there was a general political consensus that postwar food security would henceforth command greater state investment (and control). An ongoing role for the War Ags was generally agreed. As one civil servant from Preston wrote in 1942 ‘agriculture must never be allowed to fall into the condition into which it had descended prior to the war in this country’.121 However, many contemporaries disagreed that the War Ags should have a future. The postwar committees were not always popular. Some perceptive writers criticized the boost they had given to over-use of chemical fertilizers. Several county committees were roundly criticised and according to A G Street, ‘after the war the British farmers, by their meek acceptance of the Agriculture Act [1947], betrayed Britain's country life for material security’, and by sitting on the ‘fascist’ County Agricultural Executive Committees the ‘yeomen of Britain’ had become ‘the yes-men of Britain’.122 In 1945 many War Ags underwent a large turnover of personnel. Some members who were perceived not to have pulled their weight were excluded: the Bedfordshire executive lost three members who were deemed ‘not much use so quickly dropped on reorganisation’ in April 1945.123 The War Ags became County Agricultural Executive Committees (CAECs) under Part V of the Agriculture Act 1947, and their role in exhorting agricultural production to combat the fierce food shortages meant that they retained many of their wartime powers. Some food rationing continued until 1954. Thereafter their functions were absorbed into the Agricultural and Development Advisory Service (ADAS). One power retained postwar by the War Ags caused particular ill feeling among farmers, namely the right to supervise or dispossess farmers whose efforts were regarded as insufficient for whatever reason. This power, enshrined in the 1947 Agriculture Act, albeit now with the right of appeal to a Land Tribunal, persisted until 1957 when a subsequent Agriculture Act set it aside. But before 1957 evictions were still carried out on the grounds of poor farming: one high profile case concerned Lady Garbett who had purchased a 160-acre farm in Sussex in 1949 but who had failed to maintain farming standards. Her eviction in 1956 was widely reported, initially attracting sympathy until a

121 Mass-Observation Archive respondent, cited in A. Howkins, ‘Qualifying the evidence:perceptions of rural change in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century’ in D.Gilbert, D. Matless and B. Short (eds), Geographies of British modernity: space and society in the twentieth century (2003), 97-112. 122 A.G. Street, Feather-bedding (1954), 37 and 43. 123 TNA, MAF 39/228-9.

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statement issued by the CAEC set the record straight, pointing out that a supervision order had been issued as long ago as 1950.124 Nevertheless, Conservative governments remained unhappy about the degree of state intervention in the 1950s, compounded by the ‘Crichel Down Affair’ in Dorset whereby land compulsorily purchased in 1937 by the Air Ministry for military operations was passed in 1950 to the Ministry of Agriculture, who improved the land and leased it out at greatly inflated prices. The former owners triumphed after an enquiry in 1954, causing the resignation of the Minister of Agriculture, Thomas Dugdale from Churchill’s government.125 Finally, what of the impact upon those whose livelihoods were directly affected by War Ag activities, especially reclamations? We know almost nothing of them, they seem to have left little record of their feelings. Indeed, in social terms, little seems to have changed in some areas. The Ministry’s Agricultural Improvement Council considered a 1948 report on the wartime Fens, stating that:

‘The best and most progressive farmers will not live in these inaccessible areas and they tend to become populated by men of the squatter type…. It is not an uncommon thing to meet intelligent and keen young people, in their twenties, who are quite illiterate. [one cannot] expect a high standard of farming from illiterates’. The peat covered fens are not desirable places of habitation for they are in many parts difficult of access. Water supply and sanitation is lacking and the climate is damp and cold in winter. A great deal of subsidence takes place owing to the sinking of the peat, and brick built houses become displaced and damaged Their appearance is quite a bad as in the salt mining districts of Cheshire. There is a tendency to build dwellings of a more temporary and flimsy nature which can best be described as shacks. In some fens they present an appalling appearance and from the exteriors are hardly fit for human habitation.’126

Times were changing by 1945. Indeed the political power of the landed classes was now far less secure. Whereas Asquith’s 1908 cabinet had 10 landowners out of the 20 total, and Churchill’s had six out of 16, Atlee’s had just one out of 22.127 Throughout the 20th century landed interests had been battered, and now the maintenance of agro-political power had to rest in large measure on the efforts made in 1939-45, for which the nation duly and properly remained grateful. For the next 40 years, before European surpluses began to be tackled, farmers would enjoy rural dominance, political clout and protected incomes in the era of productivism, with such ‘agricultural fundamentalism… rooted in memories of wartime hardships’.128 124 See the reports in The Times (various dates 1956-7) and Time Magazine 11 June 1956. 125 House of Commons Debates vol 530, 1178-1297. (June 1954); R.D. Brown, The battle of Crichel Down (1955). I.F. Nicolson, The Mystery of Crichel Down (Oxford 1986). 126 TNA, MAF 105/288. 127 K. Cahill, Who owns Britain (2001), 25. 128 A.G. Wilson, 2001 ‘From productivism to post-productivism… and back again? Exploring the (un)changed natural and mental landscapes of European agriculture’ Trans Inst Br Geogr 26 (2001), 77-102.

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Conclusions By 1939 the key trajectories of the main rural political and economic changes can be summarised briefly as an increasing familiarity with state intervention within farming; scientific, technical and mechanised advance; increased educational and advice provision; the development of agricultural economics and the increase in the numbers and perceived utility of rural surveys; central and local agricultural committee preparedness for war from c. 1935; an increased differentiation between ‘progressive’ and traditional farming; a residual suspicion of government by many farmers; and regional inequalities in farming, society, modernity and legislative impact. Stepping into these trajectories, the War Ags intensified many of these themes. The wartime surveillance and control was enacted by people who were also embedded within their own rural social networks. As well as understanding that joining such committees would probably bring changes in self-perception and self-worth, these non-material contexts: the norms, the institutional frameworks and cultural values, are highly significant in reaching a greater understanding of the local reception accorded to the committees. It is also important to remember that the War Ags were concerned above all else with food production. People would inevitably suffer during war, and the War Ags were not directly concerned with the social relations of production, except insofar as labour supplies and workers’ housing had to be addressed. Indeed, the personal criticisms of individual farmers made by the War Ags could be vitriolic and certainly damaging, so much so that there were anxieties about postwar libel cases should the details become public.129 The war presented an opportunity for those ‘progressives’ who had, for a generation, been proselytising the need to modernize British farming. Their enthusiasm might be catching, but also alienating. And as D.R. Denman later wrote: ‘The near absolute power which this wartime authoritarianism put into tiny hands (including my own) was alarming. Its misuse was a formidable forge which has moulded my political outlook for life… against state domination over the affairs of free citizens…’ Denman worked as assistant to the Executive Officer for the Cumberland War Ag, resigning the morning after Atlee’s victory in 1945 because of the Labour promise to continue the wartime ‘dirigiste’ structures after the war.130 Britain entered the Second World War in a far better state of preparedness than in 1914. It is true that there were something like 2.4 million fewer acres of arable crops than in 1914, that much land was out of heart, that farming standards had deteriorated during the depression years, that there was less capital and credit available and fewer workers.131 And there was cynicism and a residue of mistrust of Whitehall from the 300,000 farmers, partly because of the ‘Great Betrayal’ of 1921 but also because of a perceived lack of information from the government about preparations for war. But in fact the discussions, negotiations, parliamentary decisions, Ministerial appointments and activities had come

129 TNA, MAF 38/471. 130 D.R. Denman, A half and half affair, 73-9. 131 Sir George Stapledon, The way of the land. (1943), 245-56.

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together as a network of interest groups within a discourse which promoted the defence of British interests, and which in the countryside meant above all the production of food supplies. This is not to claim that the government avoided mistakes: very basic, for example, was Tom Williams later claim that the Departmental Committee had estimated that in the event of war it would be necessary to plough up 1,285,000 acres of grassland. But between 1936 and 1939 the arable area actually shrank by more than 500,000 acres. Thus it was necessary to plough up 2 million acres, and this following the onset of war. The wartime years themselves are acknowledged as a watershed of some kind, and one with great personal meaning for those involved. Habbakuk has argued that whilst there were certainly not the far-reaching disposals of landed estates that had occurred between 1918 and 1925, it is nevertheless the case that of a sample of 500 large estates, in over 100 cases the core estate came onto the market between 1945 and 1955. However, the exact impact of the war itself is more problematic since the particular circumstances of individual families were so varied. Taxation and alternative investment opportunities were certainly factors, together with a considerably lessened strength of obligation and paternalism. A withdrawal from local and national politics by the same families also occurred.132 In Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa (Montgomeryshire) farmers did accumulate reserves since farming ‘paid’ in wartime, and many tenants were enabled to buy their holdings after the war. Indeed, the pre-war non-economic determinants of status were seen to be changing because of these profits. One cautionary note should however be made: Williams’ study of Gosforth showed similar trends of wealth accumulation in wartime, but during the early 1950s while tractors and mechanization had advanced during the war on lower lying dairying farms, those nearby in the uplands of Cumberland had equipment which was unchanged for the preceding 20 years or more. In other respects the wartime years in Gosforth continued trends initiated earlier in the century which opened up the locality to the outside world. But wartime mechanization, compulsory plough-up and control of labour appeared to hasten the process.133 Among the small Pennine farms of the industrial West Riding of Yorkshire prewar preferences for shorthorn breeds continued, whilst the milk cheque was a saviour economically.134 Clearly we must factor in such spatial and environmental differences when discussing the difference that war made to rural society and economy. Accounts might demonstrate how a pre-war/postwar transition was ‘the conversion of a way of life into a means of production’.135 If their role was a crucial one in the agricultural revolution that was the wartime years, then it was also crucial in establishing immediate postwar British agriculture as the well-known ‘featherbedded’ postwar success story with its increased yields, guaranteed prices and decent incomes. The postwar committees have been described as ‘the birch in the cupboard’, and with ‘only

132 J. Habbakuk, Marriage, debt, and the estates system: English landownership 1650-1950 ( Oxford 1994), 694-704. 133 W.M. Williams, The sociology of an English village: Gosforth (1956), 16, 21-4. 134 University of Leeds, The small farms of industrial Yorkshire (Univ. of Leeds 1958), 63. 135 Rees, Life in a Welsh countryside, 167.

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minor alterations of procedure and scarcely any change in basic approach’ from wartime.136 The onset of productivism in such areas might also be allied with the onset of modernity – fundamental social and cultural changes were on their way, of which agricultural change, generated in large measure by the War Ags and their peacetime successors, was a precursor. Brian Short University of Sussex October 2009

136 P. Self and H.J. Storing, The state and the farmer (1962), 140.