by Tom Fort
The two chums spoke with one voice, on this matter anyway, chipping in to complete sentences in the same way they sorted out the mowing and rolling. ‘They’re not much good now, those that do play. We both went to the grammar school at Northend – not there now, is it? – and the history master taught us names and dates and battles and that, and how to stay in line against a quick bowler by keeping a bat handle against your arse.’ Bibury used to drink in the Swan, the fine old coaching inn facing the old stone bridge that takes the road over the River Coln into the village’s other half, Arlington. ‘Wo, what evenings we had there, eh! Cor, do you remember old . . .?’ And the memories came crowding in.
The Swan is now part of the Cotswold Inns and Hotels group, marketing the Cotswold brand to the rest of the world. The snug bar where great deeds with bat and ball were celebrated and relived season after season has long gone, and what was the village pub has become a processing centre for the coachloads of tourists who are decanted into Bibury each day. Terry and Brian haven’t been into either of the licensed premises – the Catherine Wheel is up the hill on the Arlington side – for five years and more. There are some locals like them left – old so-and-so who ran the football club for all those years, old so-and-so who’s still doing his garden most days looking pretty chipper – but now they only get together for funerals in Bibury’s extraordinarily lovely church.
The village’s great house, Bibury Court, is behind the church, separated from the graveyard by a high stone wall. It was built in the 1630s by Sir Thomas Sackville, a younger son of the immensely wealthy Earl of Dorset. The Sackvilles lived there on and off for a few generations, but thereafter ownership changed hands several times, and Bibury never enjoyed a close and constant relationship with a squire. In 1926 the house – which is Grade I listed and very fine – together with a much-reduced land holding was bought by a rich and distinguished lawyer, Sir Orme Clarke, whose family also had estates in Norfolk. He was married to a Roosevelt, so there was no shortage of funds for restoring the place to its former glory. Sir Orme died in 1949 but Lady Clarke lived on well into the 1960s; Terry recalls that at Christmas her chauffeur would drive her around the village in the big car filled with presents for the children, which he handed out while she remained in the back seat, hatted and gloved.
That’s how it used to be. The quality did not have to do anything much, except know their place, which was above everyone else’s, and show their faces every now and then. They did, however, have to hang on to the big house and live in a certain style. The failure of so many of these families to manage their money prudently – and in particular to provide for death duties – was the usual cause of their downfall. So it was with the Clarkes. Sir Orme’s heir, Sir Humphrey Clarke, died in 1973, and death duties forced the sale of the house, which became a hotel. The sixth baronet. Sir Toby, continued to live in Bibury in the somewhat reduced setting of Church House until a brace of expensive divorces elbowed him out altogether.
Even as a hotel Bibury Court remained one of the cornerstones of village life. The bar was well used, people had Sunday lunch there, the annual fete was held in the grounds each August bank holiday. But when I visited Bibury in May 2015 the relationship had gone off like sour milk. The hotel had been bought in 2008 by the founder of the Shipton Mill flour business, John Lister. He poured money into upgrading it, seeking to make it more than just smart. But the guests failed to materialise, the refurbishment stalled and the village was made to feel unwelcome there – or came to feel that way, which amounts to the same thing.
A small change sealed the disenchantment. The gate between the churchyard and Bibury Court, through which generations of the gentry and parsons had freely passed one way or the other, had a coded security lock fixed to it. Since then bad feeling has festered. Efforts to rebrand Bibury Court as a wedding and special events venue misfired, and permission has been sought to turn it back into a country house, apparently with the aim of selling it.
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Sometime in the 1890s a wealthy young man in pursuit of an ideal of country living became the tenant of Ablington Manor, a grand late Elizabethan house in a hamlet a mile or so upstream from Bibury. Joseph Arthur Gibbs was not a countryman by birth, but once installed at Ablington Manor he embraced country life and the duties of a country squire with great enthusiasm. He hunted, he shot, he fished the glass-clear waters of the Coln for its brown trout, he tramped the wolds, he quaffed ale in country inns and engaged the good folk in conversation, he took voluminous notes about the churches and stately and less stately homes.
He wrote a book about it all, which he called A Cotswold Village. It was published in 1898 and was a considerable success. The fourth edition came out in 1901, by which time its author had died of heart failure at the pathetically early age of thirty-one. His mother, a member of the Hallam family which included Tennyson’s poet friend Arthur Hallam, referred in her foreword to the book to her son’s ‘taste for literary work and deep poetical feeling’, which probably accounted for the abundance of quotations from the poets – Gray, Horace, Burns, Chaucer and many others – with which the pages of A Cotswold Village are peppered.
It has remained in print, off and on, ever since it first appeared, invariably referred to as ‘a classic’ and praised for the truthful and realistic picture it paints of rural life in Gloucestershire at the turn of the nineteenth century. This reputation is not deserved, and will not – I guarantee – survive a close reading of the text by any sensible person.
In fairness to Gibbs, he was very young when he wrote it, and it is burdened with the faults of youth: self-consciously literary, overwritten, sentimental, prone to archaisms (‘list’ for ‘listen’, ‘I would fain’, etc.), superficial, gushing, arch, disorganised. It is worth looking at, not for what it records of the Cotswold village – which is actually very little – but for what it reveals about the attitudes of the class Gibbs represented, as well as of those who would bestow the status of classic on it.
He was warmly praised for his portraits of the village people – particularly the local gamekeeper and fount of local lore, whom he dubs ‘Tom Peregrine’. ‘He was,’ Gibbs wrote, ‘so delightfully mysterious . . . he became part and parcel with the trees and the fields and all living things . . . he would talk all day about any subject under the sun: politics, art, Roman antiquities, literature . . .’ Tom Peregrine heads a parade of rustic stereotypes: the farmers, ‘on the whole an excellent type of what John Bull ought to be’; the parson, ‘quite a character . . . an excellent man in every way . . . ruling his parish with a rod of iron he is loved and respected’; the miller, ‘a man worthy to sit among kings’; the village politician, ‘many a pleasant chat have we enjoyed in his snug cottage’; and so on.
As for the people in general, Gibbs finds them ‘healthy, bright, clean and old-fashioned . . . simple, honest, God-fearing folk who mind their own business.’ The farm labourers are, predictably, ‘somewhat lacking in acuteness and sensibility’, with ‘a marked characteristic of inertia’, but they have ‘a sense of humour and love of merriment that is quite astonishing’. After a short time at Ablington Manor, the new squire – the role Gibbs consciously assumed – was ‘glad to find so much good feeling existing among all classes . . . this was a contented and happy village.’
They were, however, difficult times for agriculture: ‘Time was when the uplands of Gloucestershire were almost entirely under the plough . . . now, alas, farms are to be had for the asking rent-free but nobody will take them.’ But then again, ‘the labourer is better off than he has ever been’ and ‘the farmers seem to be more liberal in bad times than good.’ After this searching social analysis, off the young squire gallops on another ride after the fox, or a spot of woodcock shooting, or an evening casting a fly for a trout, or a comical game of cricket for the neighbouring Winsom Eleven, ‘delightful old-fashioned people . . . quaint and simple folk.’
‘The whole country,’ Gibbs exclaims at one point, ‘reminds me of the day
s of Merrie England, so quaint and rural are the scenes.’ The words reminded me, irresistibly, of the glorious climax of Kingsley Amis’s comic masterpiece Lucky Jim, in which the inebriated Jim Dixon delivers his lecture on the subject of Merrie England and the immortal words ‘the point about Merrie England is that it was about the most unMerrie period in our history.’
A Cotswold Village is interesting as a prime specimen of rustic myth-making. The fate of the Cotswolds has been to fulfil in the public perception a shared image of the ideal rural life. As a result it has evolved from the working agricultural landscape of Arthur Gibbs’s day into a kind of pastoral dreamworld. The descriptive vocabulary applied to it has, in the process, been distilled into a residue of clichés endlessly recycled by the tourist guides and marketers of heritage – and, of course, the estate agents who offer those honey-coloured stone treasures as second-home boltholes at prices the few remaining Cotswold farm labourers could not hope to earn in a lifetime.
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After peering over the high wall in front of Arthur Gibbs’s Ablington Manor – now owned by a retired scrap dealer – I cycled in his tracks for a while along the quiet lanes to Winsom, Coln Rogers, Coln St Dennis and Fossebridge, following the river up towards its source. Gibbs found in all these villages ‘the good old honest labouring folk’, watched over by ‘the village parsons – good pious men’. But he was anxious for their future. Their populations were declining as work got scarcer, and he looked forward with foreboding to a century hence, when the Cotswold country would become ‘a huge open plain . . . and these old villages will contain scarcely a single inhabitant.’
He was not entirely wide of the mark. There is no open plain and the walls whose decay he predicted have never been in such a state of perfect repair. The lovely old houses stand behind their sculpted hedges, beside their swept gravel drives, with their close-mown emerald lawns framed by fantrained apple trees and vigorously espaliered plums. But on a midweek morning, there was scarcely an inhabitant to be seen – the only people around were the hired hands on sit-on mowers with earmuffs on and blokes from building firms in Cirencester working on barn conversions. There was not a school, not a shop, not a pub – just grave-silent old churches with Arthur Gibbs’s good, honest, toiling labouring folk at rest in the ground outside.
The favoured names of these houses toll like a funeral bell. There is not a Mill House where the mill-wheel turns, an Old Forge where the blacksmith’s hammer is heard, an Old Bakehouse where bread is made, an Old Schoolhouse with a desk or blackboard in it, a Glebe Cottage with any glebe left – not even an Old Rectory with a rector inside. But there is beauty, almost a surfeit of it. The fields, the woods, the streams, the rise and fall of the wolds, the hidden places suddenly revealed, the walls and houses and barns and gardens – all come together in a composition that is not merely ravishing in its own right, but overwhelmingly suggestive of that idea of the old, simple, pre-Fall rural England that clings on in our hearts. But it is a sham, a deathly silent sham, and after marvelling at the perfection of it as I pedalled past, I could not help wondering: what is it for?
Arthur Gibbs can probably be credited with initiating the canonisation of the Cotswolds as ‘the quintessence of England’. The seeds he sowed were then watered and nourished by that generation of topographical and countryside writers – including H. V. Morton and H. J. Massingham – which came to the fore between the World Wars. Unwittingly they promoted an unresolvable conflict between celebrating a region for its charms and retaining the old ways of life. They gave the impression of having stumbled across a survival of the pre-industrial Golden Age just as the Modern Age was poised to sweep it all away. In effect they extended an invitation to all and sundry to jump on a charabanc or motor car or bike to come and take a look. But they carefully concealed their own part in the process of destruction.
Massingham in particular could be venomously snobbish about the lower class of Cotswold tourist. One extraordinary passage refers to the ‘human sparrows from the Midlands towns’ digging up bluebells and stripping hazel trees, and congratulates the farmer for shooting out the tyres of ‘these cits while they were away grubbing and smashing’. Popular Cotswold destinations were viewed with contempt – particularly Broadway, described by Massingham as being ‘hateful . . . it reeks of “Ye Olde” ’. The countryside writer John Moore likened the village to a harlot ‘who not only charges you an exorbitant fee but seizes the opportunity to pick your pocket’.
Bibury has long been one of those favoured destinations. William Morris’s comment about it – ‘surely the prettiest village in England’ – is quoted in every brochure and leaflet and tourist puff, so that it comes to sound more like a curse than a compliment. Yet it is gorgeous. This is partly because of the building materials, the rough, weathered stone roof slates and stone walls, the mullioned windows and door surrounds, the gabled frontages and dormers and ashlar chimney stacks – that feeling of the houses and cottages having somehow been drawn from the earth; partly because it is full of surprises, unexpected corners leading to little lanes that open up new views and angles; partly because of its setting, the rolling fields and meadows and hanging woods above, the river through it.
There are a few imposing single buildings: the church, Bibury Court, Arlington Mill. But most of Bibury is modest and unpretentious. Wandering about, you glimpse cottages behind other cottages, embraced by steep irregular gardens where roses ramble and apple, pear and plum trees hang with fruit in season and raised beds keep compost heaps company; the dwellings jumbled about but at one with each other, expressions of the way the village grew and what it was for. Once it was just another working place in the country where they wove cloth, ground corn, worked the fields and helped themselves to the stone from the quarry at the top of the hill to build their homes.
It is now something else entirely. The locals are a shrinking, ageing rump. The old houses are taken by incomers and weekenders. The Swan, where the floor of the public bar was awash with spilled ale on cricket nights, is chintz and carpet and allegedly fine dining, its car park solid with coaches. Every day the coaches come, clogging roads intended for carts and horses, discharging flood tides of visitors to ebb and flow through the village’s arteries. They surge down the road by the river, pour over the footbridge, swill around the lane in front of Arlington Row, circle around the church, gaze through the gates of Bibury Court, fan up the hill through Arlington and around its green, then down again past Arlington Mill and the Bibury Trout Farm back to where the coaches wait, the air around them thick with diesel fumes.
Bibury does not offer much in the way of ‘olde-worlde’ shopping – not one antiques shop or proper heritage shop, for instance. But the photo opportunities more than compensate: Arlington Row, of course, the low wall along the river, the footbridge, a great selection of quaint old doors and stone gateposts and low walls enclosing cottage gardens to pose in front of. The resident population have had to learn to share their village with the daily invasion of curious, mainly foreign humanity, although the manoeuvrings of the coaches as they jockey for position and the occasional pressing of faces and camera lenses against kitchen windows do cause resentment. There are those who maintain that the village survives as a village despite the onslaught; and those, mainly old-timers, who shake their heads and tell you that Bibury sold its soul a long time ago.
It has its church and village hall and its CoE primary school. Apart from the Swan it has a pub on the Arlington side as well, the Catherine Wheel, although it is a little smart to qualify as a village boozer. It lost its shop some years ago but the Trout Farm – which was established more than a hundred years ago by the owner of Arlington Mill, Arthur Severn, to stock the local chalk streams – has a shop selling the basics of life as well as the fish. The Trout Farm also has a café, and there are one or two other teashops about the place.
Like other Cotswold villages, Bibury is perhaps too perfect for its own good. It was designated a Conservation Area in the
early 1970s, which means its buildings are watched over and protected as carefully as the treasures of the British Museum. Cotswold District Council permits no deviation from its core doctrine: ‘It is crucial that any new building follows its traditional architectural character using traditional building materials.’ So no wood, no glass, no brick, no – horror of horrors! – concrete, no sharp angles; nothing to suggest that architecture might still be a living art revealing new possibilities.
The effect is that there has been no significant building in the historic heart of the village for decades; and rigid restrictions are imposed on repairs, refurbishments and minor alterations which elsewhere are waved through without any requirement for planning permission. For instance, the paints permitted for outside doors and windows are limited to a small range of genteel pastels: Crushed Aloes, Moorland, Lizard, Hopsack, Buttermilk, Willow, Antelope, Orion, Chive. The names tell the story.
The only sizeable additions to the village in the past half century have been well up the hill on the Arlington side, where the Cotswold character was diluted long ago by nineteeth-century villas and the like. In the early 1970s a cluster of nine one-bedroom cottages for elderly people, known as The Quarry, was built out of something resembling the local stone in colour, but cut smooth and regular and distinctly non-authentic. The grip of conservation orthodoxy has tightened since then – witness Arlington Fields, a development of Housing Association homes at the extremity of the settlement, which were finished and handed over to local families in 2015.
These are prime examples of the ‘Cotswold style’ as appointed by the district council: regular frontages in stone or pale wash, steep pitched roofs with ridge tiles and coping, wooden windows and stone surrounds, plain front doors. The stone is bona fide, the colours appropriate, the overall effect perfectly pleasant if somewhat bland, and unavoidably compromised by the provision of car parking spaces as laid down by council standards (twenty-five for eleven houses), which means that the area of tarmac with white lines greatly exceeds that of the small rectangular gardens.