by Peter Parker
Mais thus places himself in a high literary tradition of writing about the English countryside, but he also wanted to encourage ordinary people to set off on foot and find the kind of spiritual tranquillity he did before an office job curtailed his ramblings: ‘If any of these descriptions rouse a single reader to explore for himself an unknown plot of rural England where he finds this peace I shall be happy […] I long to start a new religion … “This England of yours, have you seen it? Leave your books and your games, your work and your worries, escape by yourself to the lonely places and there you shall find unutterable joy and profound peace.”’ Mais insists that he is not averse to foreign travel, but this can wait: as the title of a later book instructed, See England First – an appeal that would have seemed particularly inviting to those who had been obliged to spend time abroad during the recent war in places where joy and peace were in very short supply. This had not been Mais’s lot, since a near-fatal appendectomy had kept him from active service, but at one point he had ‘stood under the shadow of the Jungfrau and longed for the hop-fields of Kent’, a civilian version of the kind of yearning for home felt by many soldiers at the front.
The frontispiece of See England First, published by Grant Richards in 1927, was a photograph of the Shropshire landscape by Edgar Ward; at Richards’s suggestion Ward had sent this to Housman, who declared it ‘very magnificent’. What Housman thought about Mais captioning the photograph with lines from ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ is unrecorded. Housman Country would also feature in Mais’s This Unknown Island (1932), based on ‘seventeen haphazard excursions made at high speed at the request of the B.B.C. for the purpose of stimulating in listeners a desire to explore and rediscover their own island’. High speed obliged Mais to make use of a hired car, ‘an expensive and (to me) more or less distasteful way of exploring new ground’, but it allowed him to cover an astonishing 15,000 miles during the four months he made his weekly broadcasts. The broadcasts proved hugely popular, Mais claiming that: ‘I had more letters after my first talk than I have had in twenty years after writing forty books.’ He began his talk on ‘The Welsh Marches’ by quoting a traditional poem:
Happy is the eye
Between Severn and Wye,
But thrice happy he
Between Severn and Clee.
‘Happiness is not the first word one associates with the novels of Mary Webb or the poems of A.E. Housman,’ Mais commented, ‘though both were inspired by this part of Shropshire.’ For Mais, Housman is the more significant of the two writers. Staying overnight at the Feathers Hotel in Ludlow, he encounters at breakfast a young married woman who is reading A Shropshire Lad. Mais asks her what she thinks of Mary Webb and receives the succinct answer ‘Not much.’ ‘I have a feeling that the future will endorse her judgment in preferring Housman,’ he says. In the village church at Minsterley he finds a collection of ‘maiden’s garlands’, which were traditionally placed on the coffins of young unmarried girls and afterwards hung on the pews in which they had sat. ‘This seemed to me an outward and visible sign of the whole content of Mr Housman’s poetic vision,’ Mais remarks. If not encompassing the whole poetic vision, these garlands certainly bring to mind the high proportion of young women who die before their time in A Shropshire Lad and may even have suggested to Housman, had he read about them somewhere, ‘The garland briefer than a girl’s’ in the final line of ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’. Mais inevitably quotes the traditional rhyme with which Housman prefaced ‘In valleys of springs of rivers’ and suggests that the war memorial at Clun is ‘another very vivid reminder of A Shropshire Lad’ before going on to quote the fifth verse of ‘1887’ about the ‘Shropshire names’ incised on tombstones from an earlier war.
This Unknown Island was published two years after the formation of the Youth Hostels Association and three years before the foundation of the Ramblers’ Association. Both organisations encouraged the discovery of the English countryside, the first by providing accommodation for young walkers, the second by campaigning for the right to roam over land that had hitherto been regarded as private and was often fiercely guarded by landowners’ employees. Such rights were promoted by the popular philosopher C.E.M. Joad in A Charter for Ramblers (1934), in which he described the by now widespread enthusiasm for walking. ‘The Central Station at Manchester early on a Sunday morning is an unforgettable sight,’ he wrote, ‘with its crowd of ramblers, complete with rucksacks, shorts, and hob-nailed boots.’ When he observed that ‘this generation has replaced beer by “hiking” as the shortest cut out of Manchester’, he evoked the spirit of A Shropshire Lad, with its invitation ‘come out to ramble’ and its suggestion that beer had often been used as an escape from life’s problems. While the Ramblers’ Association had a political dimension, and had grown out of an organised ‘mass trespass’ on Kinder Scout in the Peak District in 1932, the YHA was rather more traditional and conservative in its outlook, formed to ‘help all, especially young people of limited means, to a greater knowledge, love and care of the countryside’. Walking had become a national and highly popular pastime and well-equipped individuals or groups, with their rucksacks and sticks, were now a common sight in the landscape.
Some walkers took their copies of A Shropshire Lad with them. The Rt Rev. Mervyn Charles-Edwards, a retired Bishop of Worcester who had been brought up in Shrewsbury, recalled that in the 1920s, ‘long before I owned a car, a copy of A Shropshire Lad was always in my pocket or haversack, for the advantage of a home where money was scarce was that as expensive holidays were out of the question I early learnt the joy of walking, and in company with four friends climbed every hill in Shropshire. On the Stiperstones, Long Mynd, Caradoc and the Clees, during the lunch interval we used to take turns in reading the poems to each other.’ These friends felt that Housman had ‘caught the atmosphere of the country-side which we knew and loved. “Far in a western brookland”, for us this was the little stream that ran by the Bridge Inn near Ratlinghope where we drank beer and ate ham and eggs on our way from Church Stretton to Minsterley. In a mystical sense Housman’s poems bound us to the past, we became involved in the very soil of Shropshire and were united with other lads before us who, “in their hundreds to Ludlow came in for the fair”.’
After Charles-Edwards moved away from Shrewsbury, his pocket edition of A Shropshire Lad remained his ‘constant companion’. He bought his first car, a second-hand Morris Cowley costing twenty-five pounds, in 1929, and the book became ‘part of its essential equipment (and the same applied to all the cars I have owned)’. Even ‘fifty-two years later, amid maps, the Highway Code and the car handbook, a copy of the poems has its place.’
Although many people, like the Manchester hikers, reached their rural destinations by rail, others increasingly got there by road. ‘The remarkable system of motor-coach services which now penetrates every part of the country has thrown open to ordinary people regions which even after the coming of the railway were remote and inaccessible,’ H.V. Morton observed in 1927. ‘The popularity of the cheap motor-car is also greatly responsible for this long-overdue interest in English history, antiquities and topography.’ While this is undoubtedly true, it is also the case that such interests were kindled in the trenches, where soldiers had spent time thinking about what it was they were fighting for. When they got home, they wanted to look at the things they had come to value when it occurred to them that they might lose them, and Edmund Blunden noticed ‘a strong desire’ among returning soldiers ‘to see something of our own country, considered in many aspects, external and spiritual, personal and geographical, artistic and institutional’. The number of privately owned cars did indeed rise sharply after the First World War, from some 109,000 in 1919 to around a million by 1931 and two million by the outbreak of the Second World War. It was in 1919 that the Ordnance Survey produced its first set of one-inch-to-one-mile ‘Tourist Maps’. The OS’s hitherto austere and utilitarian maps were repackaged for the general public, with colourful pictorial co
vers by Ellis Martin, designed to entice people not only to well-known areas of outstanding natural beauty but also to Burns’ Country and Scott’s Country, as two of the Scottish maps were romantically renamed. In 1921 the OS recorded its highest ever sales, with profits up by 56 percent.
Guidebooks were now carried as often as not in glove compartments rather than in the bulging pockets of Norfolk jackets. Morton’s In Search of England started out as a series of articles in the Daily Express that were announced on the paper’s front page on St George’s Day in 1926. Morton would set out from London in a two-seater ‘Bullnose’ Morris Cowley. ‘I suppose many a man has stood at his window above a London square in April hearing a message from the lanes of England,’ he wrote. ‘The Georgians [of the eighteenth century] no doubt fancied that Aegipans and Centaurs kicked their hoofs in Berkeley Square, and I, above my humbler square, dreamt a no less classic eclogue of hedges lit with hawthorn, of orchards ready for their brief wave of pink spray, of fields in which smoky-faced lambs pressed against their dams, of new furrows over which moved slowly the eternal figure bent above a plough […] Now I will go, with spring before me and the road calling me out into England. It does not matter where I go, for it is all England.’ This excursion would fulfil the pledge he made to himself while standing on the hill above Jerusalem. ‘It was the only religious moment I experienced in Jerusalem,’ he recalled, rather as Mais described his urging of people out into the English countryside as ‘a new religion’.
Morton’s journey through England was not comprehensive, missing out several richly bucolic counties such as Kent, Sussex and Suffolk. More tellingly he tends to bypass the industrial heartlands of England. Crossing the Cheshire–Lancashire border, he steers a careful passage ‘between Liverpool on the left and Manchester on the right, and about sixteen miles from both cities’. From this distance Liverpool is safely reduced to ‘red smoke-stacks rising above the flat lands by the sandy shore’ of the Mersey estuary, while Manchester is merely ‘an ominous grey haze in the skies’. ‘For months I have motored through a green England which might never have known the Industrial Revolution. Round Bristol, it is true, I saw factories. I left Birmingham on my right, and saw no trace of that monster as I went on into Old England. Here was new England: an England of crowded towns, of tall chimneys, of great mill walls, of canals of slow, black water; an England of grey, hard-looking little houses in interminable rows; the England of coal and chemicals; of cotton, glass, and iron.’
This, it is clear, is not the England Morton has come in search of, even though it is an England in which many of his readers were living, particularly those who read his account in the Express rather than between hard covers. He acknowledges that industrial architecture has its own ‘grim power’ when seen from a distance, but takes consolation from the fact that ‘these monster towns and cities of the north of England are a mere speck in the amazing greenness of England; their inhabitants can be lost in green fields and woodlands within a few minutes.’
The book ends not with Morton back in London, but in a small, unnamed and presumably emblematic country church at Harvest Festival:
A Sunday hush lay over field and wood: a silence broken only by the song of birds and the drone of insects. The church bell rang.
The little church was full of corn sheaves. Apples, picked for their size and colour, washed and polished, stood in a line against the altar rails. Above the empty pew of the absent squire, barley nodded its golden head. The church smelt of ripe corn and fruit. Some one, I wonder if consciously or just by chance, had placed a posy of flowers in the stiff, stone hands of Sir Gervais. He lay there with his thin, mailed toes to the vaulting, his sword at his side and in his hands this offering from his own land to warm his heart in a Norman heaven.
When the service ends, Morton walks out into the churchyard and performs the same gesture as Edward Thomas did after he had enlisted: ‘I took up a handful of earth and felt it crumble and run through my fingers, thinking that as long as one English field lies against another there is something left in the world for a man to love.’ The book ends with an exchange between Morton and a clergyman:
‘Well,’ smiled the vicar, as he walked towards me between the yew trees, ‘that, I am afraid, is all we have.’
‘You have England,’ I said.
Morton’s England is recognisably the England of Stanley Baldwin, who served three terms as Britain’s Prime Minister between the wars (1923–4, 1924–9, 1935–7). Like Housman, Baldwin was born in Worcestershire, at Bewdley, the original destination of the Severn in ‘The Welsh Marches’ before Housman changed it to Buildwas in Shropshire. Until Baldwin’s great-grandfather moved to Stourport-on-Severn to set up a foundry in 1788, the family had been yeoman and tenant farmers in Shropshire for almost two centuries, and when Baldwin retired he acknowledged both Shropshire and Worcestershire in the titles he took, becoming Viscount Corvedale as well as Earl Baldwin of Bewdley. ‘There could have been no more typical English surroundings in which to cherish the earliest memories,’ he said of Bewdley.
I remember as a child looking up the river from the bridge into that mysterious and romantic land of Shropshire, so close to us, from which my people came only three generations before, and watching the smoke of the train running along the little railway through places bearing names like Wyre Forest, Cleobury Mortimer, Neen Sollars and Tenbury – names steeped in romance and redolent of the springtime in an England long ago passed, but whose heritage is ours. Those names must have been familiar to Langland as he lay on the slopes of the Malvern Hills while the great poem of Piers Plowman shaped itself in his brain.
These names would have been familiar to Langland because he is thought to have been born in Shropshire, between the Wyre Forest and the Clee Hills.
A large part of Baldwin’s popular appeal was that he presented himself as a dependable, straightforward English countryman, setting himself apart from the sleekly metropolitan personae of other leading politicians. He was rarely seen without his pipe, and he favoured baggy suits, stout footwear and old hats. He had little time for the smart set in London and appeared to regard the capital rather as Housman’s Lad did, as a place of exile from the beloved countryside of his youth. He even had his own blue remembered hills, the ones he could see from the garden of his Worcestershire home. It was a view that often came to mind when he was in his Whitehall office, as he told members of the Worcestershire Association at one of their annual London dinners:
I see the hills known to you all, beginning in the north-east, the Clents; and beyond, in Warwickshire, Edgehill, where the English squire passed with horse and hounds between the two armies; Bredon, the beginning of the Cotswolds, like a cameo against the sky, and the wonderful straight blue line of the Malverns, little shapes of Ankerdine and Berrow Hill, and, perhaps most beautiful and graceful, his two neighbours, Woodbury and Abberley; and Clee Hill, opening up another beautiful and romantic world and presenting a circle of beauty which I defy any part of England to match.
Housman, too, often came to Baldwin’s mind. The two men had met on only three occasions. Appropriately enough, they had acted as pallbearers at the funeral of Thomas Hardy in Westminster Abbey on 16 January 1928. Some time later Baldwin was taken to visit Housman in his rooms, where he was ‘not made very welcome’, and in 1933 sat next to him at a Cambridge dining club, where he found him ‘most unclubbable’. If he did not know or much care for the man, Baldwin certainly knew the work and clearly expected his audience to do so when he quoted it in his speeches. It was a knowledge he shared with Churchill, with whom he also felt a certain kinship because ‘although not a Worcestershire man, he is sprung from the soil of Oxfordshire, which is not very far off, and has some of our happy characteristics. We country people have, by the mere fact of our birth and sojourn in the heart of England, learned something which stands us in good stead in the strange life of politics in which we are both immersed.’ The context for this was another speech Baldwin made to the Worcestersh
ire Association, this one delivered in February 1929 during his second term as Prime Minister, when Churchill was serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer:
It is, as the Chancellor said, the background – the constant, consistent, persistent background – of the old country life that is so strength-giving and so refreshing. Picture to yourselves the House of Commons on one of those rare occasions when things are not going well, when tempers are rising, and when observations which had better not be reported are flashing across from one side of the House of Commons to the other: when possibly those who dwell beside the Clyde seem so different from those one had known on the banks of the Severn. It is in those moments that the lines of the poet which I have quoted so often before in connection with our county come back to mind:
‘In valleys of springs of rivers
By Ony and Teme and Clun,
The country for easy livers,
The quietest under the sun.’
The contemplation of that takes one far away from the turmoil in which one is, and enables one to pass through the fire unscathed.
The banks of the Clyde had been anything but quiet during Baldwin’s political career, becoming a byword for industrial unrest among engineers and shipbuilders ever since the mass strike and subsequent establishment of the Clyde Workers’ Committee in 1915. Baldwin never names Housman in his speeches, merely referring to ‘the poet’ or ‘the beautiful lines which I am sure you all know’, and these same lines came to his mind when, for instance, he was delivering a speech at the annual dinner of the Fly Fishers’ Club in 1927. The theme of the speech was that fishing promoted social unity, that no matter what their station in life, ‘the mere fact that a man is a fisherman, whether it is on the Ony, the Teme or Severn, all these men are brothers’, and that these men were further bonded by ‘love of the open air and open spaces’ suggested by Housman’s poem: ‘That is all we want; it is such little things we want to make with pleasant livers and all around us peace and quiet, and it is just what so few of us can get.’ A famous 1937 cartoon by Bernard Partridge marking Baldwin’s departure from office depicts him as a ploughman being congratulated by John Bull on ‘a long day and a rare straight furrow’: it was captioned ‘The Worcestershire Lad’.