by Tom Fort
To my sister, Elizabeth, and to Joe
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Growing Up
Twyford, Berkshire
2. Long Ago
Goltho, Lincolnshire
3. Countryside Enclosed
East Hendred, Oxfordshire
4. What Golden Age?
The Bournes, Surrey
5. Common Stream
Foxton, Cambridgeshire
6. The Curse of the Quaint
Bibury, Gloucestershire
7. Sea Shanty
Robin Hood’s Bay, North Yorkshire
8. Idyll
Chelsfield, Greater London
9. Parson Power
Eversley, Hampshire
10. This Sporting Life
North Moreton, Oxfordshire
11. Ancient Records
Myddle, Shropshire
12. Make-believe
Askrigg, North Yorkshire and Rippingale, Lincolnshire
13. Lark Rising
Juniper Hill, Oxfordshire
14. Poet’s Eye
Slad, Gloucestershire
15. Abandoned
Chopwell, Tyne and Wear
16. Village Observed
Luccombe, Somerset
17. High Ideals
New Earswick, North Yorkshire and Bar Hill, Cambridgeshire
18. Changing Face
Pitton, Wiltshire
19. Lakeland Statesmen
Troutbeck, Cumbria
20. Swallowed Up
Three Mile Cross, Berkshire
21. My Village
Sonning Common, Oxfordshire
22. Secrets of Survival
Sonning Common and Beyond
Postscript
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Picture Credits
Index
INTRODUCTION
The English village has been declared dead or dying so often that it seems almost heretical to declare that it is nothing of the sort. But I have to respect the evidence. And the evidence is that it remains very much alive – not necessarily kicking, but with a heartbeat that more often than not is regular and firm. Furthermore, barring some cataclysm that destroys society and all its structures, the village shows every sign of surviving into our foreseeable future.
I am not trying to be contrary. The village as a model for communal living is simply too strong to fail. It meets too many of our deep needs. It came into existence long before towns and cities so that people could live together but not necessarily under the same roof. It enabled them to work together and achieve results that would have been impossible had it been each man for himself. It provided a sense of security in the face of ever-present danger, and the reassurance of proximity without everyone having to eat and sleep side by side.
That fundamental, instinctive need – to be part of something larger and stronger – is as insistent as ever. So why have we been so ready to write the village off, to declare it redundant and therefore destined for a lingering passing from life? How did we lose sight of its indispensable nature?
I believe we allowed ourselves to be deceived about what the village was, and is, for. Because it developed in its familiar form so that those who worked the land would have somewhere close by to eat and rest and have occasional respite from their otherwise ceaseless round of toil, it became an article of faith that the bond with the land created the village. It seemed to follow that if and when that bond was broken, the village was doomed because its reason for being had been taken from it.
After two thousand years and more, the bond was ruptured beyond repair. For the sake of convenience let us date that breaking to 1945. In fact, of course, it had been weakening for a long time before that. But it is beyond dispute that since the end of the 1939–45 World War agriculture in this country has been transformed literally beyond recognition. Before 1914 it would have been unusual to find an able-bodied man in a country village who was not directly or indirectly employed on the land or in trades associated with it. Between the wars it would have been worthy of comment. Post 1945 the farm labourer has become a threatened species, and the associated traders – wheelwright, carter, blacksmith and the rest – have become virtually extinct.
The social consequences of the rupture were seismic. The agricultural labouring class, the bedrock of village life, disappeared, dispersed to towns and cities where there were factories and shops and jobs. The vacuum they left was filled by migrants from elsewhere: incomers, newcomers, newbies, call them what you will. The village dynamic was turned upside down. But the village did not die.
There had been times, long ago, when villages readily gave up the ghost. England is littered with the sites of deserted villages: prehistoric, Celtic, Roman, Saxon, Norman, medieval. In those far-off days people organised themselves for communal living in particular places because the circumstances – availability, good soil, favourable climate, absence of war and plague – supported the arrangement. But by its nature that arrangement was precarious, and there was nothing permanent about it. The notion of the settlement putting down roots to anchor it in its location would have struck those early peasants as highly fanciful. If the circumstances changed – a Saxon incursion, for instance, or the Norman invasion, or the Black Death, or simply the exhaustion of the soil by primitive farming methods – the village could easily become unviable. Its population diminished until those left decided to move and join another settlement, or try somewhere else altogether. Their village decayed and vanished, sometimes within a generation, sometimes over a more extended period.
It took centuries for a village to acquire history. In time, though, the churchyard took possession of succeeding generations, so that the current generation could look back and say: this is ours, we belong here. But that sense of belonging was shaken to its foundations by the earlier revolution that overtook rural England, the enclosure movement.
Between 1760 and 1815 a quarter of the entire farmed area of the country – seven million acres – became privately owned. In many places the old cooperative way of working the land was killed off. The open-field system that had evolved post-1066 had had a place for everyone, from the lowest serf to the ambitious, look-ahead yeoman farmer. The new system sealed the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Those best placed to exploit it took control and prospered. Those less well placed became the labouring class. Those at the bottom of the pile were dispossessed, sank into poverty and over time vanished from the scene altogether. The consequence in the village was that the divisions in the hierarchy – always there but blurred by the communality of effort – became more clearly defined and, inevitably, widened.
When the medieval village was abandoned and died, there was no one around to pick up a pen and interpret this as a symptom of society’s sickness. But the upheaval resulting from the enclosure of the common land was documented in detail, and then assessed by a new breed of social commentator. The concept of the changing face of the countryside was born.
In 1751 Thomas Gray published his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. It celebrated the weary plodding ploughman and his way of life and the village and the land around in such a way as to suggest that they formed some sort of appointed harmonious whole, timeless and unchanging. The truth, for many a ploughman, was that their time was up. A decade later Oliver Goldsmith wrote in The Deserted Village:
Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all the green:
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain.
No more thy glassy
brook reflects the day,
But chok’d with sedges, works its weedy way.
John Clare witnessed the legalised seizure of common land in his quiet corner of Northamptonshire and cried out in protest: ‘Inclosure, thou art a curse upon the land.’
The new order swiftly became the established order. The economic inequalities cemented into increasingly rigid social distinctions. In 1873 the government produced a survey entitled Return of Owners of Land which revealed that one quarter of rural England was in the possession of 363 landowners, each with an estate of at least 10,000 acres. Half of them were peers of the realm. Three thousand members of the landed gentry, the squirearchy, had holdings of between 1000 and 10,000 acres. Below them came the 250,000 farmers, most of them tenants; and below them came the one million farm labourers, the vast majority living in tied cottages.
This was capitalism at work: the rich getting richer and more powerful, the middle class generally prospering and able to ride out economic lows, the labouring class anchored in poverty at the mercy of whatever squalls overtook the agricultural sector. The changing rural world acquired its standard types: the remote and infinitely arrogant landowner, the upwardly mobile and generally bullying farmer, and the poignantly pathetic archetypal landless farm labourer, known universally as Hodge.
The name, an elision of hedge and clod, was an expression of the man: slow in wits and movement, fathomlessly ignorant and credulous, dimly aware of his lowly situation but too gormless to do anything about it. The stereotype received its fullest treatment in Hodge and his Masters by Richard Jefferies, published in 1880, in which a life of toil on behalf of others reaches its lingering end in the degradation of the workhouse. As the critic Raymond Williams pointed out in his searching cultural analysis The Country and the City, Jefferies has himself been mythologised as a lifelong countryman and the descendant of generations of yeomen farmers, whereas he never worked on the land, lived mainly in suburbia and earned his living by journalism. Far from being a work of objective social reportage, Hodge and his Masters is a consciously political assault on a system which Jefferies saw – with considerable justification – as having relegated the most defenceless sector of the rural population to pauperism.
It took a true countryman, Thomas Hardy, to redress the balance. In an essay called ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’ he invited subscribers to the Hodge caricature to come to Dorset ‘where Hodge in his most unmitigated form is supposed to reside’. There, he said, they would discover for themselves that the typical Hodge ‘was somehow not typical of anyone but himself’; and that for those prepared to take the trouble to know him, the ‘dull, unvarying, joyless Hodge’ disintegrated into ‘men of many minds, infinite in difference’.
From the degradation of Hodge it was but a small step to conclude that the village – his locus operandi – was similarly on the slide. The crucial text in this strand of the story was George Sturt’s Change in the Village, which came out in 1912 and recorded the decay and unravelling of the community life in Lower Bourne, then a distinct village outside Farnham in Surrey, now absorbed into Farnham’s suburbs. Sturt’s tone and method appear rigorously unsentimental, but implicit in his account is his own belief that this transformation had eaten away and destroyed the soul of the village, and that what was left behind was a poor thing in comparison.
Sturt’s lament was taken up at intervals by other commentators in the course of the twentieth century – each recording their verdicts on the villages they had known. Almost inevitably, given our inclination to mourn what has gone, the tone of these judgments tended towards the elegiac. It was easier to conclude that the village was on its way out than to identify signs of hope and regeneration. But the last rites have proved to be premature. The village has remained obstinately alive even as, throughout its history, individual villages have decayed and become moribund.
What happened to it was that it changed so fundamentally, and moved so far from its familiar past, that the transformation could be, and frequently was, mistaken for a kind of death.
1
GROWING UP
Twyford, Berkshire
When I was a year old we moved to Twyford, a largish village in Berkshire, roughly midway between Maidenhead and Reading. My father was a Member of Parliament and needed to be in London much of the time. But with a growing family – I was the fourth son – he and my mother did not care to live there. Twyford’s great asset was its railway station, twelve minutes’ brisk walk from our house (my memory is of him always leaving late, always at a run, clutching bowler hat and briefcase).
Like all villages, Twyford owed its existence and particular character to its location. It had been a coaching station on the old Bath Road, and was an obvious choice for a stop on Brunel’s Great Western Railway, being thirty minutes or so away from Paddington. It had no industry or speciality of its own to make it remarkable, although Waterer’s celebrated Floral Mile of nurseries ran along the A4 not far away. When we moved there in 1952 it was recognisably a village of a traditional, familiar kind.
Its centre was around the intersection between the Bath Road and the road between the neighbouring villages of Hurst and Wargrave. It was the usual mixture of shops, businesses and pubs, among which the pubs – or rather their names – are clearest in the memory. The Kings Arms stood on the crossroads, with the Bell facing it from the other side of the Wargrave Road. The Station Hotel, as you might expect, was opposite the station, with the Golden Cross no more than a couple of hundred yards away on the same road. The Bull and the Duke of Wellington were on the Bath Road, with the Waggon and Horses further along towards Reading. A little way from the village centre was the Grove Hall Hotel, a red-brick pile excitingly and mysteriously destroyed by fire when I was a few years old.
There were two butchers, a bread shop which sold cakes and cream buns, a greengrocer or possibly two greengrocers, Mrs Read’s sweetshop, Newberry’s the newsagents and Mr Gillett’s antiques shop. There was a saddler’s run by Mr Seymour amid a thick, beguiling aroma of leather and polish; he was also the secretary of the local angling club and sold fishing tackle and bait, of critical interest to myself and two of my elder brothers as we were mad for fishing. There was a cycle repair shop where our punctures were mended by a man steeped in oil whose hands were, for reasons never explained to me, short of the normal complement of fingers. And there were doubtless other retail premises, milliners and haberdashers and hairdressers and suchlike, which did not impinge upon my limited consciousness.
Although Twyford was ‘home’ and remained so until I was into my twenties, I realised much later that we played little part in village life. At that time the English class system still retained its rigid grip, defending the demarcation lines between sectors of society in a way that seems extraordinary now. We were of the upper middle class – my father went to Eton, my mother to Benenden – and there were very few of us in Twyford. Indeed there was only one other family like ours with parents and children of similar background, ages and outlook. Fortunately for us they owned a large house on the river that ran along the western boundary of the village, giving us unfettered access to a mile and more of good fishing water. But none of their children was in the least interested in the things that interested me – mainly fishing, cricket and football – and I did not forge strong bonds with any of them.
Twyford village centre – pre-1914 and 1960s
I had no playmate in the village apart from my brothers. A month short of my eighth birthday I was sent off to boarding school in Northamptonshire. Two of my brothers were already there; the eldest had by then graduated from prep to public school. Soon after I was eight my father was killed in a motor accident. Subsequently my mother became headmistress of Roedean School near Brighton, but the family base continued to be our house in Twyford. In my mother’s absence everything was organised by my grandmother, who lived next door.
Unlike the rest of us, she entered energetically into aspects of village life. She was, in the best s
ense, a busybody: pillar of the church, the Conservative Association and the WI; familiar in every shop, known to every trader and a good many villagers. She had friends there, many more than my mother, whose brief breaks from her duties on the Sussex coast were mostly spent on solitary exertions on her knees in the garden keeping weeds at bay and plants in order.
The village was growing. In the Fifties it retained its irregular but comparatively compact form, gathered around the crossroads and the approaches to it, and the station. It extended east and west along the Bath Road but remained cushioned by fields to the north and south. Inexorably these fields were swallowed up by new housing. What had been neglected, rabbit-infested meadows across the road from our back fence were annexed for a new school and an expanse of streets and closes and cul-de-sacs lined with new houses and bungalows built from that pale, bloodless brick favoured by the mass housebuilders of the Sixties. The grounds of the Grove Hall Hotel were annexed by an estate of detached and semi-detached houses and maisonettes in the same brick, relieved by cladding and panelling, with flat-roofed, swing-doored garages and neat rectangular gardens.
The new housing was occupied by newcomers who commuted to London or had jobs in Reading. As the village centre was enclosed by its swelling surround of housing, so it gradually surrendered the diversity and the distinctiveness that went with it. The Kings Arms migrated from the crossroads to anonymous red-brick premises behind. The handsome stuccoed nineteenth-century building was demolished to make way for a thoroughly nasty parade of shops. In its new home the pub faltered and failed, eventually becoming an Italian restaurant. The Bell closed as well. For a time both butchers kept going, until Franklin’s and the land behind it were sold to Waitrose. The opening of the supermarket in 2000 dealt a mortal blow to the retail heart of the village. Within a few years there were no food shops left, and the vacant premises were mostly eaten up by cheap restaurants and estate agents.
This process – the bleeding out of retail diversity in response to the tightening of the supermarket grip so familiar in so many similar settlements – took many years. By the time it was completed I had long since ceased to live in Twyford. I do not remember remarking upon it as it started and gathered pace, although later I noticed aspects of it, and I recall writing a piece for the Financial Times lamenting the end of Franklin’s and the disappearance of its incomparable sausages. But as a lad I saw very little, heard nothing and knew almost no one, until 1968, when I was seventeen.