The Village News

by Tom Fort

  For a long time the condition of the Brook continued to be the measure of how the village itself was doing. The records for 1500 show that Foxton was being run by a small, self-appointed committee. This organised the weekly market and imposed sanctions on those who stepped out of line. Ale-keepers, the butcher and the baker were regularly fined for overcharging and fiddling the weight of merchandise. The maintenance of the Brook, which provided all the village’s water and kept the mill-wheel turning, was the key communal duty. The butcher was fined for letting his dunghill drain into it. A fine of twelve pence was slapped on anyone who failed to help in the cleaning and scouring of the watercourse; and twenty pence on anyone caught washing clothes in it. A warning was issued that anyone releasing the contents of their gutters or cesspits before 8 p.m. would be fined. Even ducks and geese were banned from Foxton’s precious watercourse.

  But over time its useful life came to an end. The farmers who took advantage of enclosure to consolidate and augment their farms dug boreholes and ponds to provide their own supplies of water. Communal upkeep of the Brook gradually lapsed and its water became foul. In 1873 the Reverend William Selwyn, a Canon of Ely Cathedral who had taken up residence at Foxton House, paid for deep wells with pumps to be sunk on The Green and at the end of Mortimer’s Lane for general use. The water was good and reliable, and the Brook became no more than a convenient ditch for dumping rubbish, and gradually filled in. Today it has pretty much disappeared except in one or two places – most evidently in front of the houses on The Green – where it retains a ghostly afterlife as a waterless dip crossed by miniature footbridges.

  *

  In August 1885 a field of barley half a mile from Foxton railway station was being cut by men with scythes. There were twenty-four of them. At the end of a long day thirty acres of barley lay in swathes, ready at a later date to be turned, raked, heaped and taken by cart to the barn for threshing and eventual delivery to the maltster.

  In August 1970 Rowland Parker watched the same field being cut by the farmer and two men using a combine harvester and two tractors with trailers. At the end of their considerably shorter day only swathes of straw were left behind. Sixty tons of malting barley were in the barn ready for collection.

  Parker calculated that the first day’s harvest required 560 man hours of labour for a yield of fifteen tons of barley; the second thirty hours for four times the yield. He guessed the same exercise in the 1930s, when he was a boy, would have required 330 man hours and yielded thirty tons of barley.

  Parker also provided revealing figures for the composition of the village itself. In 1901 it had a population of 426 living in seventy-two houses. Eight were farmers and forty-five were farm workers. By 1941 the population had risen to 490 and the number of houses to 123; there were seven farmers and thirty farm workers. In 1974 1200 people lived in Foxton, in 380 houses. There were six farmers and six farm workers.

  The figures tell the story of England’s twentieth-century rural revolution. The detail differs from place to place, but the essentials are the same. Farming has not died. The same fields that were tilled at the time of the Norman invasion are still being tilled, but by machines, not men with horses. In 1945 a million people made their livings from working the land. In the 1990s the number was below 100,000.

  The link between the village and the land was broken for good. But the village evidently did not die. Foxton almost tripled in size, and it was not alone. Rowland Parker explained what happened with exemplary clarity: ‘By an ironic twist of circumstances the one-time supposed “superiority” of the town has been reversed and many people now prefer to live in the country. It is cheaper, healthier, quieter, cleaner and more pleasant. It is all that, but the real reason, of course, is that, thanks to the motor car, one can now live in the country and work in the town so having the best of both worlds.’

  The middle-class takeover of the village proceeded steadily in most parts of the country. Between 1951 and 1981 the rural population grew from 8.4 to 11.4 million, from less than a fifth of the nation’s total to a quarter, and the trend has continued. The village ceased to be a working community focussed on farming and became a place of residence and – increasingly – leisure.

  The agricultural workforce was not forcibly displaced. It just largely ceased to exist. Centuries ago a social upheaval on that scale would, as likely as not, have led to the village being abandoned and left to rot. But the reverse happened. The cottages of the peasants were bought up, repaired, modernised and given a new lease of life. Between 1946 and 1951 186,000 new council houses were built in rural areas. They generally lacked the charm of the old village houses and cottages, and their designers made minimal effort to achieve any kind of aesthetic harmony of past and present, but they were decent enough to live in. As the demand for country living grew so did the availability of new private housing – often banal and downright ugly, but nonetheless places where ordinary people could make good lives.

  Far from wasting away, the village expanded and prospered. According to Rowland Parker’s daughter Jane – who still lives in the Cottage on the Green – he welcomed the expansion of Foxton on the grounds that it needed to grow in order to renew and sustain itself. He loved the place deeply, but he was no sentimental pastoralist. He acknowledged that ‘community spirit’ was less evident in modern Foxton, while pointing out that it actually depended on a community of interest and an element of compulsion. He suspected that it was dormant, not dead; that if a real danger threatened the village – his example was a plan to put a motorway through it – it would burst back into life, with the incomers, the new villagers, leading the way.

  At the same time, Parker observed, ‘village life’ – in the sense of everyone knowing everyone, of making entertainment, of housewives being tied to the home all day, of speaking the local dialect and distrusting anyone who didn’t, of using an outdoors privy and going to bed to save on coal and lamp oil, of washing in cold water and eating cold fat bacon for breakfast, of finding your own way across the fields and along deserted lanes and enjoying it, particularly when courting – that was dead, for good. ‘There is no point in talking about “village life” and “town life” ’, Parker wrote. ‘There is just life.’

  *

  To me, an outsider passing through, the old village of Foxton – of thatched, rendered cottages and mellow brick houses – seemed to have been almost overwhelmed by the housing developments of the 1960s and later. I wandered around some of these new accretions of architecturally commonplace and charmless estate homes, chatting to anyone who was prepared to chat to me. And I learned again an important lesson: that aesthetic distinction – the look of a place, its prettiness or picturesqueness or heritage status, call it what you will – matters very much less to the people who live in a village than whether it works for them, whether it is alive and kicking.

  Foxton people like Foxton. They like it for having an old church which they can go to if they feel like it, and a scattering of old houses and a long history that someone has taken the trouble to write up. They like it because it has pleasant countryside around. They like it because they can get into Cambridge easily enough. They like it because they have been able to afford to live there, generally in one of those mundane, mass-built brick boxes that connoisseurs of pretty villages stick their noses up at.

  They like it for having a smart new primary school for their kids to go to, and a smart new village hall – both funded from the proceeds of planning permission for a new development of thoroughly insipid early twenty-first-century detached homes just west of the splendid recreation ground. They like it for having a pub, the White Horse, and a decent village shop. They like it because it is friendly, peaceful and unpretentious.

  In September 2015 Foxton Cricket Club achieved something remarkable, reaching the final of the national Village Cup at Lords. A fleet of coaches brought 500 supporters to the Home of Cricket in London to cheer on their team against three-time winners of the trophy, Woodhouse
Grange from Yorkshire. In the end the Cambridgeshire side were beaten by nineteen runs, but it was still a day of enormous pride for the village and its cricket club which – due to the passion and dedication of a small band of volunteers – had lifted itself from mediocrity to being the best in the county.

  Generally speaking, Foxton is doing well, and not just at cricket. But on occasions dark clouds still threaten. Over the years it has grown step by step to a size at which it functions nicely: roughly five hundred homes, a population of 1200. Its village plan allows for small-scale additional developments of up to fifteen homes within the current form – the so-called ‘village envelope’. It is the view of the great majority of the people of Foxton, of its parish council, of its district and county councillors, and of the South Cambridgeshire District Council as a whole that any significant expansion into the surrounding countryside would threaten the village’s integrity as well as opening the way to further unrestrained building. It is also my view, for what that’s worth.

  But the pressure for more homes is as intense in Cambridgeshire as anywhere in the country. A year ago Gladman, the best-known speculative land developer in the country, lodged an appeal against the refusal of South Cambridgeshire District Council to permit the building of ninety-five homes on what used to be a turf farm beside the Shepreth Road, beyond the western fringe of Foxton. Companies like Gladman do not have a view about the viability of villages or any interest in what happens to them. Their job is simply to secure planning permission by whatever means are available and to sell the land to a housebuilder for the highest price they can get.

  In the event they lost the appeal, and for the time being Foxton can breathe more easily. But the hunger of land for housing will not go away. There will be more battles to come, which the village will have to fight and win if it is to retain the integrity and character that have made it what it is over the past two thousand years.

  Rowland Parker ended the last full chapter of The Common Stream by observing the children of the village walking home from school: ‘These children are healthier, better fed, better clothed, better educated, better behaved, prettier and – did they but know it – happier than any generation of children that ever before walked the village street. For us of the older generation, the past is past and we do not regret it. For them – the future.’ Those words were written forty years ago, fifteen years before the death of this wise and humane man. They still hold true, and should be studied by anyone tempted to wring their hands over the state of the English village.

  6

  THE CURSE OF THE QUAINT

  Bibury, Gloucestershire

  On the inside cover of a recent version of the UK passport, the guff about Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requesting and requiring free passage for the bearer is framed by the Queen’s coat of arms and three curious emblems. Two are of oak leaves, one with a blue butterfly on it. The third, eccentrically coloured in royal blue, is of Arlington Row, a terrace of ancient cottages in the Cotswold village of Bibury.

  Whoever chose it offered a telling insight into their image of the country we live in. It could have been Windsor Castle, St Paul’s, the White Cliffs, even Stonehenge. But the committee – one assumes it was a committee – selected an irregular line of modest cottages built from Cotswold stone standing back from a millstream with a marshy river meadow beyond.

  This, the image declares, is England. The cottages are small, therefore quaint and homely, therefore intended for ordinary people. They are evidently old, and England is very old. They are the work of craftsmen, and there was a time when we had craftsmen. They are irregular, therefore individual, and we pride ourselves on our individuality. They are conspicuously lacking in grandeur; and although we can do grandeur better than anyone when we must, we are generally not that impressed by it.

  Arlington Row, Bibury, in the 1950s

  There is more to it than that. The cottages clearly belong in a larger village scene. And England – the true England – is a country of villages. The sentimental image of the village and its place in the landscape chimes with Stanley Baldwin’s celebrated paean to rural life: ‘The tinkle of the hammer on the anvil of the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone and the sight of the plough-team coming over the brow of the hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land . . .’

  It is immaterial that by the time Baldwin delivered these stirring words (1924) the plough-team, blacksmith, scythe and whetstone were already in or on their way to the countryside museum, and that more intensive farming methods had already triggered a collapse in corncrake numbers that would see it vanish almost entirely from the English countryside. Rather like John Major and his much-derided celebration of the England of warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and the fillers-in of pools coupons, Baldwin was articulating a shared apprehension of common identity none the less potent for being divorced from reality. At its heart was the belief in – or a longing to believe in – continuity and permanence, a solid core of Englishness rooted in our past and the events that shaped us, in our landscape, in our communities.

  Putting Arlington Row in the passport sealed its fate. Once lived in by working people engaged in the struggles of daily life, Bibury has become a living museum and one of the unmissable tourist sights of England. Every day of the year coaches heave their way into the village to discharge shoals of visitors to gawp at the pale stone houses and richly bloomed cottage gardens, the trout-filled Coln running by the road, the little bridges and cobbled yards. All of them find their way sooner or later to Arlington Row where they grin into their cameras, with the ancient gables, eaves, dormers and fat, slightly crooked chimneys behind.

  Arlington Row has achieved – or been reduced to – global heritage status. When a retired dentist who lives opposite the cottages dared to park his yellow Vauxhall Corsa so that it intruded on the universal selfie, he found himself on the receiving end of a firestorm of online abuse for spoiling the view.

  *

  I would hazard a bet that very few of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who descend on Bibury each year ever stumble across the village cricket ground, known as the Bat Field. Yet it is a treasure beyond compare; I have seen many lovely cricket grounds in my time, and played on some of them, but none lovelier than this one.

  It is reached by a track off the road to Cirencester which winds between fields and along the edge of a wood to a gate. Beyond the gate and the fence is the ground, oval in shape, with a smart pavilion at one end built of dark wood, with a veranda for sitting out on a warm evening to watch the final overs as the sun sinks behind mid-wicket (or cover, depending on which end is bowling and whether the batsman is left- or right-handed).

  The Bat Field has many glories: its hidden-away situation, the rolling fields around, the hanging woods that plunge down behind the pavilion with the high chimneys of Bibury Court beyond and below. But the chief of them – certainly in the opinion of the club stalwarts who look after everything – is the square in the middle of the oval on which the wickets are cut. It is billiard-table flat, close cut, the grass tightly woven into one firm carpet, the whole glowing with the care and – yes – love lavished on it.

  But there is a sharp poignancy here. There is a fine pavilion and there are benches and nets and rollers and mowers and all the accoutrements of village cricket at its most idyllic. But Bibury cannot put out a proper team any more, and the ground is used on Saturdays by a league side from Lechlade. The Bibury team – such as it is – play short-format twenty-over matches on Sundays only, and not every Sunday at that. There are simply not enough able-bodied and willing cricketers left in the village to keep the old tradition going.

  That may not sound much of a tragedy to a non-cricketer. But to Terry and Brian, Bibury cricketers from boyhood, dropping out of the league and giving up on traditional Sunday friendlies because there are not enough blokes left who want to play is tantamount to t
he dawning of a new age of barbarism. They are now well past playing, but the care of the square remains a sacred duty to them and the collapse of cricket is a source of great sadness. And it is part of a wider picture, in which the village where they have spent their lives has been sucked of its lifeblood to a point where they hardly recognise what it is any more.

  Terry came to Bibury with his family more than seventy years ago, when he was four, and he played cricket for the club for more than fifty years. When I asked him how many wickets he had taken, he replied: ‘Thousands.’ Registering scepticism in my raised eyebrows, he said: ‘I had a hundred five seasons in a row, and a hundred-and-fifty in one of ’em’, and I stopped looking sceptical. He and Brian, who was more of a batsman, were there week in, week out, regular as the pavilion clock – ‘We had a helluva side in the Sixties, won just about everything going.’ Terry had to pack it in 2007 after a major operation, by which time Brian had already hung up his bat and pads and the club was on the slide. ‘Every week was the same – we’d be begging, borrowing and stealing players wherever we could find them.’ But the village had changed too much.