by Tom Fort
The ruination accelerated. Hedges were grubbed up, the rabbit warren was destroyed, trees were felled. Grazing cows made way for arable monoculture. Machines ruled where mushrooms once grew. The brook was dredged and the willows along it were cut down. The village lost its bobby on his bike, and the rag-and-bone man called no more. Locals were priced out of housing, the pub acquired a jukebox and one-armed bandit, old people were given meals-on-wheels and ‘if they became too much trouble they were sent away by busy relatives.’
In the course of thirty years, Page reflected, ‘the heart of the village has died, with its soul hanging on, but only just . . . village life, country life, have taken second and third place to the superficial goals of progress, efficiency and development.’ With his country burr, whiskered ruddy face and heavy-limbed farmer’s way, Page was a natural media personality. Crook in hand, he presented One Man and His Dog on BBC television and was a regular panellist until his John Bull views came to be regarded as unpalatable by the high-ups. He also became a columnist for the Daily Telegraph.
For the best part of fifty years, Robin Page was given licence to pound his Telegraph lectern. Over that time, his themes and views changed little, nor his targets: agribusiness, the EU, planners, politicians, the BBC, the RSPB, lady vicars, immigration, the anti-hunting lobby, townies, global-warming alarmists, republicans. He must have been popular with readers to have kept going so long – his column was finally dropped in July 2016. The joke, of course, is that they – or the country-dwellers among them – are the very people responsible for the fall from grace Page so loudly bemoans: incomers, second-homers, out-commuters and the rest.
The single voice you hear from Robin Page is his own. In contrast, the whole purpose of Ronald Blythe’s famous work of oral history, Akenfield, was to permit a diverse range of voices to speak. Many of the same themes are covered – the passing of the old ways, the changing face of the village, the assault of intensive farming – but the tone both of Blythe himself and his villagers is notably unrancorous. His purpose was to record the experiences and articulate the feelings of a species of countrymen and women at a time – the book was first published in 1969 – when the world they knew was on the verge of disappearing for good. But he does not stand in judgment. He was acutely aware of the restrictive nature of the old village life – ‘it was very hard to get away, to do anything or be yourself, and people worked and worked until they died.’
Fraser Harrison, a writer not as well known as he should be, pursued this point in his book Strange Land: The Countryside – Myth and Reality. Harrison identified the qualities ascribed to traditional village life – close ties with family, neighbours and workmates, the habit of helping others, the shared understanding of a specific area of countryside, a particular culture – contrasting them with the perceived ‘dislocation, brutality and degeneration’ of urban life. He perceptively analysed the danger of taking these qualities out of their context and celebrating them in the abstract. ‘They should be recognised as products of poverty and repression,’ he wrote. ‘They were the positive aspects of a practice of survival which included such negative features as ignorance, superstition, suffocating parochialism and gross deprivation at every level, not only of physical needs but social, intellectual and political needs.’
The point is very well made. Yes, of course there has been loss. There must be when one way of life, long in the shaping and rich in texture, gives way to another. But it is perverse and absurd to harp on about the negatives and ignore the positives. And it is more absurd still to pretend that ‘something could have been done about it’, and to blame politicians or planners for ‘allowing it to happen’, as if there had ever been a choice in the matter.
But the temptation to romanticise the past is very powerful. In the case of the village, that sentimental idealisation brushes out the rudeness and cruelty, the discomfort and ill health, the financial, spiritual and intellectual poverty, the constricted horizons and absence of amusements. It ignores the conspicuous truth that country people lived that way not from choice but for the lack of it. They were forced into constant close proximity with others whether they liked it or not.
One consequence of what Raymond Williams identified as ‘the mutuality of the oppressed’ was the high level of feuding, fighting and bitter litigation between villagers. It is often claimed by the nostalgists that villages today are riven by divisions between cliques, and resentment from ‘old’ villagers towards incomers. Of course there are bones of contention – overbearing leylandii hedges, encroaching fences, shared accesses, dogs barking, late-night partying and the like. But open disputes are unusual and violence between neighbours rare enough to warrant national media attention. Contrast this to the busy work of the scribes to the medieval manorial courts and the clerks to the vestry committees laboriously recording the flowing stream of conflict between members of the village community.
Some of the hostility to the post-1945 village stemmed from misplaced sentimental pastoralism, some from political dislike of the property-owning middle class, some from an elitist disdain for the new housing. A report entitled The Future of the Village produced in the 1970s by the Council of the Protection of Rural England bemoaned the indisputable truth that ‘the vast majority of new buildings in villages are not designed by architects and often represent the cheapest form of building available.’ The Architects’ Journal devoted an issue in 1978 to ‘The Village: A Matter of Life or Death’, lashing the failure of the powers that be. Village planning, the journal said, was a shambles, and the problem of unbalanced communities should no longer be tolerated. The proposed solution turned out to be the usual mixture of waffle, wishful thinking and pious intention: better coordination in allocating public resources, better public transport, more power to parish councils, less deprivation, a review of local government, more research, etc., etc.
The sense of something precious having been lost or accidentally destroyed is often focussed on that elusive quality ‘community spirit’ and its good friend ‘village life’. The lazy assumption is that these were tied to the link between village and land, and that when that died so did they. In his book The Lost Village – published in 2008 – Richard Askwith set off around the country with the apparent intention of stitching together an extended obituary on the village of old – ‘that miniature self-contained ecosystem in which past and present were all tangled up and people, buildings and vegetation shared one reasonably coherent collective story.’ In Gilbert White’s Selborne Askwith finds it ‘hard to feel any sense of the old rural England’. East Coker, in Somerset, is ‘all about money’. In Tollard Royal, hidden within Cranborne Chase, he is scowled at by blonde women on horseback. On the Cornish coast he listens to the fishermen’s choir in Polperro, but there is not a fisherman among them.
Then, quite suddenly, Askwith executes a crunching gear change. It occurs to him that ‘there is something deeply complacent about the premise that the passing of the old rural ways was something to be mourned.’ For a corrective view he drops in on Ronald Blythe, who tells him that life is better now but that somehow people were more content when it was worse. He finds that some villagers are having success in fostering ‘community spirit’ and that these tend to be the very incomers whose arrival was construed as the death blow. In the end, back in his own village in Northamptonshire, he muses: ‘It hadn’t vanished – not yet. It wasn’t perfect but there was life in the old creation yet, and I could, if I chose, have a share in it.’
*
Up to the great watershed of the 1914–18 war, the squire, parson, administrative elite, craftsmen, shopkeepers and labour force were the animate foundation stones of village life. The inanimate were the houses and cottages, the shops and workshops, the church, the pub, the school. Around the village were the fields that sustained it. Within were the other familiar physical features: the green, the pond, the well and so forth. This was the village world: self-sufficient to a considerable degree, self-contained to a consid
erable degree, tied together by bonds that had lasted so long they may have seemed eternal, distinct.
Towards the end of this period another force, which filtered down from the development of a national enthusiasm for organised sport, began to make itself felt at village level. The village sports club – usually cricket or football or both – has received little attention from the earnest academics of the sociology and human geography departments. But it has played, and continues to play, a potent, if fluctuating, role in the assertion of village identity.
10
THIS SPORTING LIFE
North Moreton, Oxfordshire
North Moreton sits low in the fields across from the great squat towers of Didcot Power Station. It is separated from South Moreton by a railway line and half a mile of open ground. It is untidily arranged around the junction between the lane from South Moreton and two forks of a minor road which join the main road between Didcot and Wallingford a little way to the north. It has an old and very beautiful stone-and-flint church and a number of old, beamy thatched cottages mixed up with the usual nondescript assortment of early, middle and late twentieth-century red-brick housing. Unlike South Moreton it has no shop or school. But it does have a pub, with the eccentric name The Bear At Home. And behind the pub is a cricket ground.
Moreton Cricket Club – it caters for both the Moretons – was founded in 1858 by the then vicar, the Reverend William Barff. He was an Oxford man, sympathetic to the reforming Oxford Movement, who rightly regarded the game as having a moral value and the capacity to bring the village together. He also hoped that having a cricket team might wean the villagers away from their habitual heavy drinking and bad language. Although Barff did not play the game himself, his successor, William Young, did; and so did Young’s curate, Arthur Winter, who was a Cambridge Blue and played a few games for Middlesex. The fixture list in those early days was limited to a few local villages and schools and Oxford colleges, but the club put down strong roots.
North Moreton around 1950
In 1960 Gerald Howat – a schoolmaster by profession and historian by inclination – came to live in the Old Schoolhouse in North Moreton, which is opposite the church. The next year he made his debut for Moreton CC as wicketkeeper and middle-order bat. He retired forty-four years later at the age of seventy-seven after having a heart attack. He told a journalist from the Oxford Times that but for his illness he would have carried on – ‘I have to say that I was still worth my place keeping wicket,’ he said.
By then Howat had made his reputation as one of cricket’s most accomplished and distinguished writers. Biographies of the incomparable West Indian all-rounder Learie Constantine, and two of the greatest England batsmen, Walter Hammond and Len Hutton, set new standards for careful research and elegance of prose. In 1980 Howat produced Village Cricket, which celebrated the unique place of the game in the stories of so many villages and the lives of their people.
Howat knew at first-hand how a cricket club could contribute to a village’s sense of itself and pride in its individual character. A constant theme of village cricket is the rivalry between neighbouring clubs: memories and stories of close encounters going back over decades, ready at any moment to spark sharp words and even questionable actions. Sport – and cricket in particular, because of the close identification between village and club – has been able to define and sustain a village’s image of itself in a way few other social forces can.
But Gerald Howat was also acutely aware of the incurable tendency of cricket-lovers to relapse into sepia-tinted sentimentality when contemplating the village game. He himself was careful to steer clear of the minefield of associated clichés: sound of leather on willow, smell of cut grass, the creaking of the old roller, the assembly of ancient stalwarts on gnarled benches peering at the action and chewing over past heroics, the chime of church bells, the sinking of the sun behind the beech trees as the off-spinner twirls his tempting offers ever higher and slower. Other writers were less discriminating.
In 1930 the playwright R. C. Sherriff followed up his extraordinary success with his Great War drama Journey’s End with a very different – and very much less successful – rustic comedy revolving around village cricket. The plot was banality itself: Mr Butler, an entrepreneur of vulgar stamp, has managed to acquire the cricket ground in the Hampshire village of Badger’s Green and is proposing to cover it in an assortment of horrors, including bungalows, Japanese tea garden, a cinema, a dance hall and a ‘park for charabancs’. The village rises up in revolt. Through various twists and turns the plot reaches a denouement in which the fate of the ground will be decided by the outcome of the match between Badger’s End and their bitter local rivals, Hagholt. Mr Butler is somehow roped in to play and makes the two runs needed off the last ball to humble Hagholt. He wakes up to the understanding that cricket is an eternal and essential part of national life, and that an attack on it is an attack on Englishness itself. The green is saved and the cast rejoice that ‘the glorious “chock” of ball against bat’ will be heard for evermore.
As player, long-serving secretary and finally president of Moreton CC Gerald Howat was alert to the gulf between this nostalgia-misted version of village cricket and the reality. But he also rejoiced, in his dry and understated way, in the contribution made to village life by a thriving cricket club and a well-maintained and visibly cherished ground. ‘There is a pastoral charm about village cricket,’ he wrote in a rare rose-tinted passage, ‘which is timeless. It has a touch of Paradise. Men and women in the outposts of Empire have dreamt of less . . .’
Howat died only two years after his retirement, but his name lives on attached to the low wooden pavilion where the men – and women, boys and girls – of Moreton gather and prepare for battle as he did for all those years. I visited on a Saturday afternoon, hoping to see a match in progress, but it turned out that at weekends Moreton CC play only Sunday friendlies and are not in a Saturday league. But cricket in the village is far from fading away: they play Wednesday and Thursday evening fixtures most weeks, and have teams in the Ladies Thames Valley league and the Oxfordshire Women’s Midweek League, as well as two teams of youngsters in the development leagues.
The pavilion has an authentic veranda along the front with benches commemorating stalwarts of old. That slight but insistent smell of sweaty socks and jockstraps – familiar to me from almost fifty years of playing village cricket – lingers inside, along with the odd pad and glove and batting helmet lying around. On the walls are faded photographs of Moreton Elevens of old, and pages from scorebooks recording extraordinary feats. These are the annals of Moreton men – whether actually from the village or not – bound together by ties of friendship and blood, and love for that square in the middle with the short boundary on the pavilion side.
In The Bear At Home I chatted for a while with Sam the barman, a strapping lad who bowls left-arm and biffs it around a bit in the late order. He’d been recruited by Gerald Howat as a boy and now played three times most weeks. The pub did the teas for the friendlies and provided baguettes and chips for the midweek matches at £5 a go. Much of the cricket was T20 bang-bang stuff in coloured kit – ‘Gerald hated all that,’ Sam said cheerfully. ‘He was a real traditionalist.’ Maybe he was, but he would have liked what Sam said next: ‘To be honest, without the cricket there wouldn’t be a lot going on around here.’
*
The past has gone, and with it the sustaining alliance between the working people of the village and the fields and woods around. The old structure of the village society, generations of the same families in the same houses performing the same functions in the same relationship to each other, has been demolished. The local yokels have gone, dispersed by the same economic forces that have shaped the wider society we have today. They will not return. A villager born and bred is a threatened species today; one living in the same dwelling as his grandparents an extreme rarity.
A village may still have a firm, regular heartbeat, but the source of th
at vitality is very different from what it once was. In the old days everyone was part of village life whether they liked it or not. They were bound by a web of interdependence. Today there is no such web, and many are excluded. They may live within the parish boundaries or ‘village envelope’ or ‘settlement area’ or whatever planning term is applicable. But they are newcomers, living on the edge because that is where the new housing tends to go, working somewhere else, driving one of their several cars wherever they wish to go.
It may be that they have no desire to integrate, to be ‘part of the community’. Not everyone does. Or it may be that they do, but are not sure how to go about it. This age of mobility is not congenial to the putting down of roots and the making of social ties. The new estate is organised so that no one need know their neighbour. The houses and gardens are arranged to protect ‘privacy’, and because everyone drives everywhere the shared space is mostly reserved for parking cars.
In times past the question of getting into village life did not really arise; but if it had, the main routes would have been the church and the public house. Both these institutions have tended to withdraw to the margins (although in many cases they do remain vitally important). The key pumps for forcing blood through the village’s arteries are generally the school and the village hall. So for the incomer the easiest way into village life is to have a child and send him or her to the school. By then the mother may well have encountered other mothers through National Childbirth Trust prenatal classes, and subsequently through the playgroup. The routine of drop-off and pick-up promotes chat, leading to coffee mornings devoted to the consuming subjects of infant sleeping and feeding patterns, speed of growth, symptoms of precocity and so forth.
Unless the mother is unwilling, or a complete social misfit, she finds herself drawn into the network. Can you help on the produce stall at the spring fair? Join the sponsored walk? Do assisted reading? The path reveals itself: Cubs, Brownies, health walks, choir, boys’ football, judo, cleaning the church, history society, WI, village magazine, the action group campaigning against greedy developers, dog walkers, nature walkers, anti-dogshit activists. The list is endless.