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I came here in 1932. Most of us who came here after the First War came from Lanarkshire and Stirlingshire. We came because we were land-starved back home and needed—what did the Germans used to call it?—Lebensraum. We were all young men in our early twenties, strong and adaptable, and mostly farmers’ sons. There was no official scheme. One came down and then another. The first people to come down were the Alstons, the Lawsons, the Wilsons and the MacMasters. News about East Anglia got around fast. It was the land of Goshen compared with Scotland. A better climate, easier working soil with no damn great lumps of granite pushing out of it. It was, “Come on, Wully! Come doon here!” It was, “Send home for brother Angus and for sister Mary and her man!”
There were all these fine farms standing idle and no great rush by anybody to work them. We got our jackets off and got stuck into it. A neighbour came south first and did so well that his Suffolk landlord wrote back to the Scotch landlord who had previously employed him, did he know of another Lanark man who would come down and take a farm? That is how I came. We were always tenant farmers. It is our tradition. The Scotch don’t try and buy their farms. Scotland is all estates—even in these days of change and economic chaos, there are still great estates. And there are still more tenant farms in Scotland than ever there were in England. Tenantry suits us. I think it was because the agricultural revolution was late in hitting Scotland and when it did hit the country, the changes were made fast. We jumped a period. Everybody had learned a lesson quick. We adapt easily, that is the truth of the matter. When there was no room for us on our fathers’ rocky little farms in the Lowlands, we came South. It made sense. The circumstances were attractive and the climate, after what we had been used to, was wonderful. We were always exporting our population anyway.
What a scene we found when we arrived! I don’t know how to begin to describe it. Dereliction. The fields were wet, the hedges like forests. The East Anglian farmer had lived with his decline so long that he couldn’t move, he couldn’t think. There he was, bogged down in the best corn area of England with ruin right up to his farmhouse door. The thought of having to restore it seemed impossible, so he didn’t think about it. It was a God-sent opportunity for us Scots. Apart from its being heavier land than we had ever seen before, it was the Garden of Eden!
There was something else about the Suffolk farmers we Scots couldn’t understand—their snobbery. In Scotland there is no distinction between a farmer’s son and a farm-worker’s son, for instance, but it was quite another tale in Suffolk. We couldn’t understand this. Labourers’ sons as well as farmers’ sons came down to restore the southern farms, if the southerners did but know it. But I supposed they couldn’t tell us apart. The Suffolk farmers’ snobbery was quite unjustified—they were just ordinary working farmers who weren’t working! That was what was happening. They were all copying the Big House, Colonel This and Sir That. Their wives were sitting in the best room with village girls as maids. A village woman would scrub a farmhouse through for her dinner and her insurance stamp—that is what times were like. But the farmers hadn’t twopence to rub together and owed money everywhere. Yet it didn’t stop them looking surprised when they saw our women working out on the land. As for the labourers, what a bad deal they had. Some of them didn’t get paid for weeks on end. We were more punctilious about this. I’m not boasting, it is a fact. Anybody will tell you that the Scots paid. The corn merchants and the blacksmiths came to rely on the payments made by the Scotch during the Depression. Ask any of them and they will tell you. Well, that is how it was. Fancy feudalism in 1929. The ordinary village folk were being pushed about all over the place by the classy farmers. Classy! They thought they were classy—that was about it. I tell you, we had never seen such airs and graces. The cottage man here was also subservient by nature. He’d be touching his forelock whereas a Scot would be saying, “I’m as good as you, Jock, any bloody day!”
The village men came to work for us and we saw how different they were. They were slow, their horses were slow. A Suffolk man would plough to the end of the field, stop there, then gradually turn his horses round and plough back again. Whereas a Scotch ploughboy would thrust up the field, kick his horses round and be back in no time! A Scotch farmer is used to this quickness, so the first thing we noticed in Suffolk, after the ruination, was the unhurrying pace. The lack of competition between the labourers. It worried us at first but gradually we came to a meeting point where both sides improved. I think that the man-master relationship on a Scots-run Suffolk farm in the thirties was very, very good. Much better than it was between an English farmer and his men.
We found the Suffolk men much more tolerant than ourselves—not nearly so critical of each other. The Scots are hyper-critical of their neighbours and the village people in Akenfield seemed strangely un-malicious. The men lacked aggression. One of the things we noticed most was the childish way the village men boasted about being first. They liked to go to the pub in the evenings and boast that their particular farm was taking thirty sacks an acre off a field, or that they had started their harvest before anybody else in the neighbourhood. They would pick peas as thin as paper just to say that they were first to eat the new crop. Their wives were as bad. They would get up at four in the morning to get a line of washing out before anybody else.
We were, generally speaking, more able, more industrious, more enterprising, less fearful. When a new machine was introduced, it was always a Scot who had brought it in. A Suffolk farmer would wait for ten years to see whether a new method was foolproof—and then he would adopt it.
It was strange when we arrived. I shall never forget it. I was in my twenties and just wed. My farm was falling down, my fields ran with water and my hedges were like jungles. You never saw anything like it. Nothing had been fertilized or cared for for a generation. It was the Garden of Eden gone back. It was the hedges which amazed us most. Just when we thought we’d seen the tallest one you could get, we’d discover another twice the height! “Come and see this one, Alasdair!” we’d shout. We’d laugh but we felt like crying. We found weeds which we’d never seen before and clay which sucked your boots off. The Suffolk farmers had what they called their “best fields”—the ones near the road or which could be seen from the house. But out of sight, at the back, lay the wilderness. We had come to a system that was passing away.
We all started with a small farm—150 acres at most. Those who went to West Suffolk, Sudbury way, could manage bigger farms because of the light lands there. They went for the 200-acres-plus touch. We each employed about five men, two horsemen, a stockman, a labourer and a boy. There was always a boy. We brought cows from the North and produced a race of cowmen which had never existed in Suffolk before. Before we came, the average Suffolk farm had about five cows but we introduced herds of thirty or more. Then came another problem—there were no creameries to cope with all the milk. So we introduced a milk-collection system which was being used in and around the Clyde Valley, and which was the first system ever to take milk in bulk from the farms to the big cities. We brought very fast Irish horses into Suffolk, fast-stepping jennets which would pull the milk floats from the farms to the railhead. Then it went to London. The supply was far ahead of demand locally. A little place for retaining the milk was built at Wickham Market and all the farmers for miles around rushed their milk to this centre.
This was what Suffolk was like when I, a young man from Lanark owning nothing more than a plough, came here a little more than thirty years ago. Some were better off than me and came with full equipment, stock, furniture and everything packed on a special train, but I came with a plough.
The old threads are still present here. Suffolk’s slowness is saving it from destruction by the commuters. But you are getting more and more of the retired type of person moving in. Most of the good ideas for the village come from these people and they do nearly all the voluntary work in the neighbourhood. The ex-colonials circulate in their own tight little circle and the
y seem to resent the business side—the farming side—of village life. They are all out of place. So they hide in their gardens and feel safe. Gardens are the only energetic hobby they can pursue. They haven’t got enough money to keep a horse. There is something else about them, too. They always walk on a tarred road. They never dare to strike across country. You rarely meet them in the fields, even where there’s a known footpath. They’re scared to leave the tarmac. It is their suburban upbringing. They’re living in the country and they know nothing of it. They couldn’t tell a red-fellow from a rook. They buy all their garden plants straight from the Woodbridge and Ipswich nurserymen and spend hundreds of pounds on hybrid roses. They can tell you all the names of the roses but they couldn’t walk up my lane and pick out the wild flowers and grasses. It is not they—or the Scotch and English farmers—in this village who will provide the continuity.
It is the cottage man who is the continuous factor. There are three main families in this village and they are all working class, and they are the ones whose names cover the churchyard right to way-back. I call myself middle class and I will go from here unremembered. So will all your Major Blanks, your commanders and your colonial Sirs. We’ll have left no record. But the village men are the descendants of the old farmers who lived here when this house was built, centuries past. They have come down while others were going up. They are tied in here by history but they don’t know it. I know it. I can scrape up scraps of the old pattern everywhere. The villagers don’t resent the newcomers, they ignore them.
We Scots stick together here to a certain extent. We keep our distinction wherever we are. We need to talk to each other. If you have English friends you will talk gossip but when Scotch friends get together they will work their way into a philosophical argument. The Scots are more concerned with life than with politics. They have to find a meaning in things. We are still religious, I suppose. We find Christianity in England is a very superficial thing.
The big skies leave the East Anglians empty. The skies are nothing. The horizons are too wide. There is nothing for a man to measure himself by here. In Scotland you have the hills, the mountains. They diminish a man. They make him think. They are there for all time. Every man who has lived in Scotland since the world began has looked at these same mountains. He knows they last and that he doesn’t. There is nothing like this in East Anglia. The water moves in Scotland but in Suffolk it stands still—or as good as. Because they are a flat-land creature there is a lack of imagination and excitement in the Suffolk character. You get very few real characters here. You don’t meet many men who are outstanding. At home we make a point of being very individual. Every day you will meet men who will not conform. The Suffolk people conform easily, they are natural conservatives.
All England is changing, of course. Too fast. My son is emigrating to Australia and if he makes a go of it, we may follow. These are poor days in Britain. Too much sex. I like reading. My wife goes to the library and grabs three novels for me. I look at them and I say, “How on earth did the authors get them published?” That Iris Murdoch—she must have some funny friends. Did you see Muggeridge interviewing Lord Reith? What a great man. He made Muggeridge look small, didn’t he? Lord Reith is a leader. He is what we want today. We need to be told where we are.
Duncan Campbell · aged sixty-six · sheep-farmer
A lot of us Scots came to Suffolk between the wars. Things have changed mightily since then; they were tough times. My wife and I have been here for forty-two years. Before this I was a sheep-farmer on the borders of Scotland. My father had a lot of sheep in the Border country. The flocks are very big there. They roam at their own sweet will, as they do in Wales. The hills are where the great art of shepherding is practised, where a man has to work subtly to get the best out of his sheep. They have to “go over the ground,” you see. They like to lie on the driest part of the grazing, which is on the mountain top. So the shepherd has to incline them out all the afternoon and evening in such a way that they reach the top at night. Then, at daybreak, they will leave the tops and gradually drift low into the valleys until they reach the stream. And so they go over all the pasture all the time, over all the hill and valley in one day. And that is the art of good shepherding, to work them gently, to let them go nicely out and in daily. The shepherd will go to his flock in the afternoon, moving straight along the valley to set them out. If there are any slow sheep, he will put his dog round them and gradually they will all slowly walk the little paths they have made on the mountain, one after another, grazing higher and higher, until they reach the top—and sleep. It is a lonely life—my word, it is! A shepherd spends nearly all his life quite alone.
Very few Suffolk farmers keep big flocks now. There were many more sheep when I first arrived. There have been great reductions in East Suffolk, the numbers have gone down by many thousands. It isn’t because they are unprofitable but maybe because other animals are easier to farm and offer a better return. One of the reasons why I haven’t got so many sheep on my farm is that I am growing sprouts, peas, beans and other things for the frozen food factory. It is these new green crops which have made the wonderful change in the farming round this village. Before these came along, I used to go in for ley farming, taking my leys round the farm, ploughing up after they had been grazed by sheep and cattle every three-four years, and then catching the fertility. I can assure you that, compared with these deep-freeze crops, there isn’t a finer way of keeping a farm in a high state of fertility than taking the leys round. It seems right. You feel that you are doing things the way they should be done and it makes you glad and satisfied. It surprises me that some people who do not get good root crops don’t practise ley farming more. I know hundreds of farmers who would benefit from having a couple of hundred breeding ewes on their land. This present continual serial cropping won’t, in the long run, prove so beneficial as a flock of sheep going over the ground every little while. The artificial fertilizers can never give what a flock can give.
The farm was in poor condition when we came here. There was a lot of grass on it, so that was a help. But they had made hay off the same bits of pasture so often—continually hay, hay, hay, imagine that!—that at last they couldn’t have got more than a ton per acre. Well, that won’t pay, you know. I make very little hay and I’ll tell you why. Because you can buy nice hay at £8 10s. a ton. Now if the most you can grow is two tons—why waste the time or run the risk of losing it because of bad weather for £17? We only make hay when it has been a growing year. This was a growing year and we cut acres of beautiful hay.
I missed the mountains when I first came to Suffolk—I still do. My wife and I, we missed the hills and the weir-running streams. I shall always remember these four lines:
Says old Tom, “Give me a Border burn
That can’t run without a turn,
And with its bonny babbles
Fills the glens among our native hills . . .”
They were written by J.B. Selkirk. They make me homesick. I remember saying them for the first time when I was a young man and standing in a Suffolk field which was being ploughed with horses by an old man wearing a long black coat with tail buttons, a bowler hat and carrying an umbrella! I shall be homesick here, I thought—and I have been. That old ploughman, he was a grand old man. So good.
We have farm students now. Just one at a time, and just for a year’s practical work before they go to the agricultural college. We don’t mind what trouble we have to go to to teach them farming ways, so long as they make use of all we tell them later on. But some get tired of it and go into something else. It is disappointing when this happens. They are usually boys aged about sixteen. We don’t take them into our house; they have to find lodgings in the village. We give them a turn with cows, then tractors, reaping, sugar-beeting, everything as it comes along. The older men sometimes resent the student. If they do it is because he is putting on airs and being too clever. He has forgotten how much the older men know—such wonderful things. Student
s should watch their step, keep their eyes open and their mouths shut. I give them a reference when their year’s “practical” is up. And they have to make a statement of all that they have done during the year, what the acreage of the farm is and what happens on it, the date when they started the harvest and what machines were used. Many of these young men get depressed because they can never see any way of getting a farm of their own. They are so dear now. But it was hard for us, too. We young men from Scotland had to struggle along carrying an agricultural ruin on our backs. It is a wonder that any of us can stand upright! I tell the students that farming is three-quarters practical and a quarter theory. And that a farmer must be able to do every job himself before he orders another man to do it. I have the sons of quite well-to-do people as students. I tell them, “Irrespective of your position, you must be taught to work.”
I am really a shepherd. I could work a dog before I left school. My father would let me have the old ones which were finished for the hills and I would teach them and learn from them. Therefore I got into the art of handling dogs when I was a child, and I’ve never been without them all my life. And my dogs have always been the Border collie sheep dogs. They are with me in Suffolk and I have trained scores for all the East Anglian farmers, but they come from my homeland. The best of them were registered on both sides of the Border in the nineteenth century and eventually the National Sheep Dog Society, with its own studbook, was founded. They are the best sheep dogs in the world. They say that there are sheep dogs in Wales, but I’ve never seen a Welsh sheep dog.
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