Robert Ashton - Where are the fellows who cut the hay?

George Ewart Evans' book Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay is one of the most remarkable works of rural oral history. Rightly it is considered an indispensible work for anyone trying to comprehend the enormous changes that British agriculture has gone through in the last two centuries. More importantly perhaps it is a book that doesn't patronise its subjects. It takes the lives, beliefs and labour of the Suffolk agricultural workers it records seriously. Any reader will be carried along by its honesty and insight.

So I was excited to learn that Robert Ashton was producing a new book that was to look at "How Traditions from the Past Can Shape Our Future" based on his own connections with George Ewart Evans and the places he lived and worked. I helped sponsor the book through Unbound. The book itself is a lovely production, well made, easy to read and the cover is lovely. But I was disappointed with the content. 

The book works as a two part autobiography. Firstly it is a look at Evans himself, exploring his life and the ideas and forces that shaped him. How did Evans, having grown up in South Wales in a mining community come to live in rural Suffolk, writing and recording the lives and work of the local population? This is fascinating, and I enjoyed Ashton's exploration of the places that Evans had lived, his encounters and the occasional coincidence that allowed him to meet people who knew Evans and loved his work. Ashton himself was taught by Evan's wife. This all allows Ashton to explore further the changes that Evans saw, and those that came after.

The second autobiographical aspect to the book is Ashton's own life and times. His life as a agricultural labourer, tractor driver and finally salesperson for agricultural companies. These events, Ashton tries to use as a tool to extract more details about what has changed and developed in the British countryside, drawing some parallels with the changes that Evans himself saw, and why Evans did the work he did.

The problem is it is quite superficial, and much of the book is Ashton retelling the stories and accounts that Evans recorded. None of this is dull or boring, but it isn't what I expected. Sadly the book doesn't really do what it promises on the cover. There is no real analysis of how the traditions of the past can shape the future. Ashton does make some attempts to do this, noting how there are a return to localised production, and a move away from industrial agriculture. But there's no deep analysis, only a few of Ashton's impressions. Indeed, Ashton's thoughts on the changes that have taken place in society in general are often quite superficial, limited, for instance to noting that clothes are cheap because they are mass produced abroad for workers' on low wages.

The big question, implicit in the title, about what has happened to rural labour could have been further developed. I would have liked to read more about migrants and casual labour in British fields. How these people are organising, and how their wages and conditions differ from previous generations. 

Overall this was a nice enough read, but it lacked the real depth I'd hoped for. The most interesting bits were those about Evans himself, and even then I'd have liked a little more. The passing reference to Evans' Communist Party membership sparked my interest, but that was all there was to it. The building of sustainable, healthy agriculture and socially just societies in the future will, no doubt, require us learning from traditional methods and insights. Unfortunately this book doesn't give enough of this. It will however be enjoyed by those who live, work and travel to and through Suffolk, and would be best read there in conjunction with Robert Ashton's own hero, George Ewart Evans' work.

Related Reviews

Evans - Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay

Landworkers' Alliance - With the Land
Clutterbuck - Bittersweet Brexit: The Future of Food, Farming, Land and Labour
Sutton - Food Worth Fighting For

Dan Saladino - Eating to Extinction

The food we eat has been shaped by many great social, economic and cultural forces. It is the result of thousands of years of agriculture, selective breeding, accidental crossing of genes and unique technological development, which has enabled humans in almost every ecological area to grow, hunt, catch and cook food unique to their lives and cultures. But it is under threat. Dan Saladino's excellent book explains why. 

Saladino's book documents the enormous historical diversity of our food. In the Svalbard seed valut there are an amazing 213,000 samples of different types of wheat, and 21,000 different potato types. There are dozens of further examples, but to quote from his introduction:

At Brogdale in Kent, home of the UK's National Fruit Collection ,there are 2,000 varieties of apple while at the University of California Riverside more than 1,000 different varieties of citrus are being conserved. Across the planet there are 8,000 livestock breeds (of cows, sheep, pigs and so on) being saved, mostly on small farms, many at risk of extinction. Much of our food supply has been narrowed down to a tiny fraction of this diverse array of plants and animals, and in some cases we are dependent on just on variety of a handful of breeds.

This narrowing of food diversity has accelerated in the last century, particularly in the post-war period. It brings with it several threats, not least that of missing tastes. As we loose types of fruit, vegetables or other crops, we lose the potential for different foods and tastes that were enjoyed by our ancestors, but will be lost forever. Perhaps more importantly, we risk loosing breeds of animals and plants that are more suitable for a warming world, a changing climate or are able to withstand disease. In those seed banks are sometimes the seeds that could feed future generations on a hotter planet. But the skills and knowledge needed to find them, or husband them is also threatened.

Why has this extraordinary change taken place? Take one of the world's most important crops - maize. There are literarily thousands of different types of maize. But a handful dominant today, following the introduction of new US strains that have displaced native maize from its centres of origin in South America. These new strains where designed to maximise yields and ensure that US agriculture dominanted the Cold War period. But

The mazine boom producd more calories but helped to make the global food system more uniform, less diverse and increasingly brittle. Evidence for this came in dramatic fashion in the early 1970s. At the time, 85 percent of the crop grown in the Corn Belt shared a single genetic trait susceptible to a fungal disease... The disease spread rapidly through corn fields, resulting hte loss of one billion bushels of maize at a cost of $6 billion to farmers.

In the context of wheat, Saladino explains why this has happened.:

The entire system, the wheat breeding programmes and the approved list, is also designed around one type of of product: white bread made with refined flour for which most of the nutrients in the grain are removed in the milling process. Again, by law, these nutrients are then put back in through the process of 'fortification;. This isn't the fault of the plant breeders; they are paid to create what the current food system demands: cheap grain and a commodity that can turn a profit on global markets. After 12,000 years of farming such a rich variety of wheat, what a strange state of affairs we find ourselves in.

It is, indeed, strange. Capitalism has concentrated food production into a few select types, that maximise profit at the expense of diversity, flavour, resiliance and sustainability. 

Saladino's book tells these, and other unique stories, extremely well. It is part travelogue, party foodie guide and part historical work that shows how food has been shaped by the development of capitalism. For instance the slave trade moved people and commodities between Europe, the Americas and Africa. Enslaved Africans brought with them their seeds and food culture, but were forced to work on plantations that furthered the concentration of food and other crops into a few select types. The industiralisation of fishing and agriculture have ensured that monocrops in animals and plants haved pushed out other types of food, at enormous rish to wider ecosystems. The example of fish, particularly salmon, epitomises this process.

Saladino's book celebrates those who rescue, protect and farm forgotten and minority crops. Because he is a "foodie" he enjoys tasting and eating these rarer foodstuffs, and its a testament to Saladino's ideas that these are never handled as exotic, rather a celebration and understanding of different food cultures. 

But repeatedly we return to the way that the food industry is distorted by profit, through massive multinationals that limit seeds, enforce pesticide and fertilisers and trap farmers in massive debts. Saladino says that "more of the world's seeds - the foundation of the food system - are becomign intellectual property and highly profitable commodities". The sense of food as a way to profit runs through the whole of the book.

This book begins as a cry against the loss of food diversity. But as it proceeds the reader increasingly realises that the problem is the whole economic system. There is, of course, hope. Much of the book celebrates small producers who are rescuing, resurrecting and saving unique foods - from alcoholic drinks to rare wheats. All of these individuals are rightly heroes. But Saladino also recognises that this is really taking place in the context of an overwhelmingly powerful and dangerous system. It needs to be got rid of. As Saladino writes:

Our future food is going to depend on multiple systems of agricutlure. Some will be highly industrialised and mechanised, others smaller in scale and richer in their variety of crops and animals. Diversity can help each of these systems become as successful and resilient as they can possibly be. As we've seen, efforts are already under way to make this happen, from the reappearance of landrace fields of wheat to the work banana breeders are doing, using wild genetics and rethinking the monoculture model. Saving diversity gives us options.

But this will only ever be a breathing space. Unless we scrap capitalism, the profit orientated food system will continue to spread it's ugly tentacles, destroying and driving to extinction, rare and unique foods. This is a threat to us all. Eating to Extinction is a reminder that we must right to change things.

Related Reviews

Landworkers' Alliance - With the Land
Anderson - Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America
Wise - Eating Tomorrow
Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass
Carlisle - Lentil Underground
Holt-Giménez - A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism
Bivar - Organic Resistance
Zabinski - Amber Waves

 

Landworkers' Alliance - With the Land

The Landworkers' Alliance (LWA) is a British based union that links small producers, farmers, landworkers and others to fight for a more sustainable, equitable and healthy food and land system. With the Land is a fascinating book that marks the first decade of the LWA's work, It is first and foremost a celebration of the ideas behind the LWA, the work of its members as well as a discussion about the struggles we need for a food system fit for the future.

It is an eclectic mix of poetry, prose, commentary, interview, photographs and art. Its a book to be enjoyed in short bursts, but one that gives a real sense of the varied work that takes place - from forestry to land-management, bee keeping to urban farming. What shines through though is a sense of the deep connection between those who work the land (however that might be) and the ecological systems they are part of.

In the most overtly political section, authors Alex Heffron and Kai Heron describe the current state of British agriculture. 

Although seventy percent of the land in Britain is used for agricultural purposes, the country produces just 55 percent of what it consumes. Of that 55% much is grown and harvested, cared for, and slaughtered by seasonal, casualised, gendered and racialised immigrant labour; under brutally exploitative conditions. The rest of Britain's food is either grown under similarly exploitative systems in the EU's industralised and polluting agribusiness sites, or in tropical climates where super-profits can be secured through the super-exploitation of the Global South's lands and labour.

The LWA arose out of many different influences, including the massive climate movement of the late 2010s and the early anti-capitalist movement, which I was part of around the millenium. It is also, and importantly, highly influenced by the politics of the global Peasant movement La Via Campesina. These influences come through in many of the articles, both in response to the appalling picture painted by Heffron and Heron, but also in the ethos of many of the projects.

One of these, very close to where I live, is the Gaskell Garden Project in Hulme, Manchester. Writing about it, Robyn Ellis talks about how the project offers much to the local community beyond just locally produced food. "We are trying to find new ways to re-learn the relationships between ourselves and our land after generations of separation, transforming wasted land into a possibility of abiodiverse green comunnity space and edible forest". Ellis points out that many projects like these are "separate" from local communities, and fail to be inclusive.

The different chapters demonstrate a real commitment to producing food and fibres in sustainable ways that utilise knowledge and expertise. But also approaches. Morgan Ody of La Via Campesina makes the point that there are two prongs to the process outlined by the LWA and their own organisation. The first is the fight for food sovereignty, the second is the building and networking of social movements that can fight for this common goal. Ody concludes "Showing solidarity is key. It might start with climate justice or with organising for workers rights, with inflation and challenges to economic isssues. We should be open and take part in other actions that we didn't create. At the same time we should be very cautious about who we build alliances with". Earlier Ody says, "What we defend is much bigger than our own interests: we defend a vision of society, and of nature, that enables us to live in peace without domination."

This vision is inspiring, and it is very much the alternative to that bleak picture described by Heffron and Heron. The problem is getting there. Writing about a fascinating local workers' cooperative in Edinburgh, Mim Black makes a very important point. Their cooperative is producing huge quantities of mushrooms. As she explains its an ideal crop for urban environments. But despite the success of the project in networking local people, producing high quality food and using old brownfield sites, Mim points out that it is not enough on its own, "There are no silver bullets or panaceas - we know that we need a systematic overhaul of food growing practices and the power relations that uphold our current unjust system." That's not to decry the work of Mim's cooperative, or many others, but rightly to recognise that there are limits to building "agroecological food systems" within capitalism.

There are other struggles too, and some of these take place within the movement itself. I was very pleased to see a powerful statement in defence of transrights by the LWA, tackling the bigotry that is coming from the top of society, but recognising that such ideas also exist within out own movements. There is also an important piece by Josina Calliste on "racial justice in farming" that talks about the racial injustice within agriculture and attempts to address it. They write:

What would a land movement in Britain look like if Afro-indigenous ancestral farming practices were at its heart? If people writing food policies were from the communities most affected by food inequalities? For fighting industrial agriculture, black communities need land power. To acieve climate justice, people of colour need to be able to grow their own food. For environmental justice, the spiritual ecologies of indigenous communities should be at the front and centre.

With the Land makes it very clear that there has been an enormous shift within society about attitidues to farming, land work and sustainable food systems. There is a deep yearning for things to change. The many authors within the book are each offering their perspectives on how that might happen. But as several of the authors make clear, we must be cautious. Small scale agroecological practices are not enough in and of themselves. They are a response to the capitalist crises we face, but the social movements they represent must also be part of a much wider struggle for equality and justice. This will need to be fought for. As Donald Mackinnon writes in the context of Scottish crofting, "We are missing the radical edge to politics that we need to deliver the change we want to see." Its a point that is, however, valid much more generally.

As such I would have liked more on some of the political fights that are needed. Important questions such as housing, wages, working conditions and so on are touched on, but not really explored. It would have been good to get a sense of what has been done and what could be done to tackle wider social justice questions that are very much part of all the communities described.

However each of these highly personal accounts demonstrates a very human yearning for justice and good food! It helps us imagine how we can live in the future, once capitalism has been destroyed. The 19th century poem Three Acres and a Cow, is reproduced in the book. We should well remember the words:

There's a certain class in England that is holding fortune great
Yet they give us all a starving wage to work on their estate
The land's been stolen from the poor and those that hold it now
They do not want to give us all three acres and a cow

it continues:

If all the land in England was divided up quite fair
There would be work for everyone to earn an honest share

You can buy With the Land via the Landworkers' Alliance here.

Related Reviews

GRAIN - The Great Climate Robbery
Sutton - Food Worth Fighting For
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Holt-Giménez - A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism
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Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass

Braiding Sweetgrass is one of those books that defies easy categorisation. I picked it up expecting a book that distilled indigineous knowledge about plants, perhaps imaginging a discussion about what plants made for good food, medicine or had other benefits. The book definitely has this within it. But it has much more. It is also part autobiography, part reportage, part biological discussion. All of this often infused with anger and sadness. Robin Wall Kimmerer draws on her many varied experiences - as a mother, scientist and university tutor - as well as an indigenous person in North America - to draw out how Native American people understand the world and nature. It makes for a remarkable book.

One of the things about Braiding Sweetgrass is Kimmerer's mixing of scientific and indigenous insights. Towards the end of the book, she writes:

The very facts of the world are a poem. Light is turned to sugar. Salamanders find their way to ancestral ponds following magnetic lines radiating from the earth. The saliva of grazing buffalo causes the grass to grow taller. Tobacco seeds germinate when they smell smoke. Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury. Aren't these stories we should all know?

She continues, "The stories of buffao and salamanders belong to the land, but scientists are one of their translators and carry a large responsiblity for conveying their stories to the world". But she bemoans that "scientists mostly convey these stories in a language that excludes readers."

I think the point she is making is that Western thought teachers people to understand the world in a particular way. Nature is a commidity that has been tied into a global market. Capitalism teaches us to see the world in a particular way. We relate to nature, not as nature, but as a thing, separate from us.

Kimmerer shows this often in her descriptions of time spent with student. On field trips she finds students who are incredulous at her suggestions that they listen to nature, or think of a tree, plant or stone as a person that they should communicate with. I'll admit that it seems strange to me. But the point that Kimmerer is making is that we consider the world differently when we have to think about the consequences of our actions - when we have to ask the animal if it is ok to hunt them, or the crop to cut it. The action of making gifts to nature is in part about making a recognition that nature cannot be taken for grants.

There's an excellent chapter that looks at this through a PHd students work on crop yields. This student is studying the impact of different ways of harvesting crops. The university professors are incredulous that she thinks that the act of farming the crops would increase yields. "Anyone knows that harvesting a plant will damage the population. You're wasting your time" said the Dean. Yet the opposite was proved to be true. Indigenous knowledge trumped the academy.

Kimmerer is not suggesting that indigenous knowledge should replace Western science. What she is arguing is that the approach of indigenous people to the world offers ways of understanding the world that can supplement science. Her different chapters all, in various ways, make this case - often in convincing and interesting ways.

But I think there's something missing of her analysis. The problem is not science. The problem is a social and economic system that frames science in a particular way. Rightly Kimmerer talks about the appalling genocidal treatment of indigenous people. This saw the deliberate and violent destruction of a way of life - and a way of thinking. But the rise of capitalism did this to people everywhere - including in Europe. James D. Fisher's recent book The Enclosure of Knowledge makes this point well about the experience in England. This is not to downplay the violence inflicted on Native Americans, but to argue that the rise of the bourgeois way of thinking about nature is the problem. We cannot simply graft better and more helpful ways of thinking on existing science. We need to transform the system itself.

This is why I think Kimmerer's book is sometimes misunderstood by reviewers. Because it seems hard to imagine what she is suggesting taking place - because it can seem so alien. Interestinginly at the same time as writing this review I've been reading Kent Nerburn's book Neither Wolf Nor Dog, which features similar increduality between Nerburn and his Native American companions.

Of course, it is possible to shift how people think and view the world. Kimmerer's students often make that leap - and she writes touchingly about this. Her book will also contribute to this process. But making that change is only a first step. As she writes at the very end, we need "courage" to "refuse to participate in an economy that destroys the beloverd earth to line the pockets of the greedy, to demand an economy that is aligned with life, not stacked against it. It's easy to write that, harder to do."

Unless we shatter the Settler Colonial system that alienates us from nature, and shapes our way of thinking, we will remain trapped in its framework. Kimmerer's book is thus a powerful argument for a new way of thinking, but we need to go much further.

Related Reviews

Fisher - The Enclosure of Knowledge
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McMillan & Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada
Hunter - Glencoe and the Indians
Cozzens - The Earth is Weeping

Liz Carlisle - Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America

Ahead of a trip to Montana I was intrigued to find Liz Carlisle's book Lentil Underground. Montana is known for it's agriculture, with thousands of farms farming almost 60 million acres of land. That farming is dominated by highly industrial agriculture, high in inputs likes fertiliser and pesticide, vulnerable to drought, and highly carbon intensive - while producing a huge percentage of grain for the United States. It is a model of farming driven from the very top - encouraged by successive US governments, and linking food production to the massive corporations that buy the wheat, and sell the tractors, combines, chemicals and fuel needed by the farmer. But as Liz Carlisle's book shows, the consequences were not good for farmers, food or the land. In the early 1980s:

Their fields looked good, at least early in the season, but the "For Sale" signs popping up amid Conrad's garin were proving a more serious menance than any weed. Behind every bankruptcy was the heatbreaking story of a good farmer undercut by dought or rising fertilier costs or poor commodity prices... Conrad's farmers tried even harder to control what they could-spraying more herbicides, cultivating more acres. But instead of solvign their provlems, these efforts just sunk the despeartae farmers further into debt.... Farmers were paying so much for the sophisticated machinery and chemicals that made their extraordinary sixty-bushel grain possible that they couldn't afford a dry year or a depressed commodity market-the margins were too tight. Meanwhile, the American heartland wasn't just losing people; it was also losing topsoil, at the rate of 3 billion tons a year. 

Intensive, industrial agriculture was undermining the basis of agriculture and the viability of farming. Carlisle points out that this favoured (and highly subsidised) farming was driving pollution, climate change and cancer. 

Lentil Underground tells the story of how a small group of farmers recognised the problems and began to adapt their agriculture. These farmers were sometimes progressive thinkers, on the left of the US political spectrum. But not always. One of the things I was reminded of while reading Lentil Underground is that the farmers, often with deep family roots in their farming communities, have a close knowledge of their land, love farming and hate the way they have become trapped by the logic of the industrial system. Even those with less progressive ideas were seeking ways out.

The way out turned out to be two-fold. A return to an older form of farming, that broke with the high-intensive, chemical driven agriculture and a change to new crops. The new crops included the lentils of the book's title but also more traditional or heritage grains like spelt, or oats were also added. These, the farmers found could be grown with less inputs, mixing crops together and crucially breaking from the favoured no-till system.

The wide open prairies of Montana are very vulberable to soil loss. To prevent this, US agriculture encouraged (and subsidised) forms of farming that did not use ploughing to turn over soil. This meant the extra application of chemicals to kill weeds. But it saved topsoil. But the Lentil Underground farmers discovered that ploughing, if combined with mixed crops that protected and fertilised the soils, had the same effect - while reducing costs and pollution.

The small network of farmers that began to develop into a group of farmers essentially were returning to a more traditional approach to farming. It was less costly, was less vulnerable to external shocks, and produced better food - not least because it could be certified as organic. Quickly the farmers were able to tap into a growing market for organic foods.

It is important to point out though that this was not an automatic win for the farmers who made the switch. They still had to cope with the vicissitudes of the free market. A massive contract with a health food chain proved disastourous when the company suddenly pulled out. They also found that other farmers treated their efforts with disdain, which is why the Underground of the title became so important - the network of self help and support that developed among the farmers and families that chose to make the leap. Interestingly this network goes far beyond Montana:

Another hallmark of the lentil underground is their openness to new people and ideas. They aren't bound by an unquestioning loyalty to the way that Granddaddy did it, or by a suspicious wariness of outsiders. The heritage and heirlook crops they grow manifest deep relational ties and long experience, tbut these carefully chosen plants are certainly not xenophobes. Black medic [a type of legume that is a green fertiliser, adding nitrogen to the soil as it grows] made its way to Monatana from the American Southeast. Ley cropping came from Australia. Lentils were domesticated 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, and breeders like Al Slinkard borrowed liberally from international collections.

Lentil Underground is a remarkably interesting book. It tells the story of how US farming turned into an ecologically and socially destructive method of producing food precisely because it was transformed by industrial capitalism - profits before people and planet. A similar process took place in the British Isles. At the same time it shows that it is possible to rapidly change things in a positive direction using the inherent skills and knowledge of existing farmers and labourers. The farmers who've made the transition are still trapped by a capitalist logic, at the whims of a much larger system. But they give us an indication that things can change - and that the people who will build a future sustainable farming system are the ones who work in the existing unsustainable one.

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Craig Taylor - Return to Akenfield

Forty years after Ronald Blythe published his seminal account of a Suffolk village, Akenfield, Craig Taylor returned to the villages that Blythe disguised as the fictional eponymous location, to look again at the lives of villagers. Four decades later the people that Blythe interviewed have mostly gone, as have the specialised trades that were on the cusp of vanishing in the first book. The village however, retains much of its identity, though there are more incomers, far fewer agricultural labourers and very different attitiudes. Work now is done by a handful of workers, and farmers tend to employ seasonal labour in ways that were inconceivable decades before.

In fact its to Taylor's credit that three of his interviews are with immigrant farm workers, two from Eastern Europe and one from Portugal. They recount the difficulties, the hard work and the costs of working in England for a few years, but all retain a belief they will return home with money to get their own farm. 

There are also deep connections to the past. The first three interviews are with former orchard workers, a staple of the local economy, and now a shadow of its former self. These retired workers are wistful about the old economy, but mostly about the old varieties of fruits. The endnotes include copies of the handwritten lists of pear and apple varieties that one worker could remember. Dozens and dozens of varieties, some perhaps no longer in existence. These former workers recount the impact of technology and the way it changed production and labour. 

In the original Akenfield we got a sense of agriculture in transition to a new intensified industry. In Return to Akenfield we see what that is. Chris Green, a dairy farmer explains

the likes of Wla-Mart and Tesco are not worried at all about us. They want the supply and that's all they care about. We see to a Footsie 250 company, quite large, and even they can't go to Tesco and Wal-Mart and drive a bargain. They still have to take the price and as as conseqyence the guy at the bottom of the chain, which is us, eventually takes the hit. And because we take the hit we have to take the subsidy, which comes off the taxpayer.

Return to Akenfield has little about class struggle. In Blythe's original the question of trade unionism ran through the book. Here there is little open struggle, though class difference remains. There is also much less poverty, though the lack of a mass agricultural workplace means that the poorest workers have moved away. Indeed the only real open differences are those between the retirees and commuters who've bought up expensive housing and feel excluded. The migrant workers refer to racism, but not in as great amounts as you might expect. One Polish worker says:

The work is difficult and the money is not so good. People here would rather get others to do the work. I think it is more easy for a person in this country to find the work he wants to do. And the work they wants to do is in an office or in a bank.

A farmer refers to paying gang-masters who pay the immigrant labourers. It smacks of a return to a very dodgy and poor past, when workers were highly exploited. That, however, did eventually lead to strikes and protests. Modern farming remains much more difficult to organise - though its clear that some farmers use the opportunity.

The book opens and closes with two interviews with Ronald Blythe himself. At the end he cautions about a rose-tinted view of the past and discusses how he put that into the original book deliberately:

I wasn't interested in quaintness or crafts, picturesque things necessarily. It's a slightly hard book, not sentimental. People always say 'the good old days'. People were extremely poor! Their houses were uncomfortable and damp. Children left school very early. In that village in that time it was very hard to get away, to do anything or to be yourself, and people worked and worked and worked until they died.  Between the wars they were getting twenty-seven and six a week, they could be given the sack any minute, and they worked sixty to seventy hours a week on the land and often got one days holiday a year, Christmas Day.

Things, in many respects are better. Return to Akenfield then is a snapshot of a village that has been transformed, through change and struggle. It retains a link to the past - the young workers rennovating tractors are pleased that the older retirees get so much pleasure from sitting in their old tractors. But it is a village that has fundamentally changed. If Return to Akenfield lacks some of the intensity of the book it is trying to emulate, that is because it is about a period where great changes feel very distant. Forty years ago Blythe wrote in the shadow of two World Wars and the end of Empire. Craig Taylor wrote in the aftermath of the victory of neoliberal agriculture. Let's hope that by the time a third book is written, we have transformed things in a very different, less corporate way.

Related Reviews

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Ronald Blythe - Akenfield

Ronald Blythe's Akenfield is perhaps the greatest work of British agricultural oral history. Akenfield however, is not a real place, it is an amalgamation of two Suffolk villages near where Blythe lived in the late 1960s. The stories are mainly those of farm workers or industries closely related to them, and their authenticity comes from the oral accounts - you cannot help but feel that you are in their living rooms listening to their talk. In a later book, Return to Akenfield, Blythe (then 83) tells the author of that work that people talk about the "good old days", but that was not the Akenfield he wrote about. Then "People ere extremely poor! Their houses were uncomfortable and damp... people worked and worked and worked until they died".

But Akenfield's brilliance isn't just that it captures the voices of the people, but that it came to be produced in an era of enormous change. British agriculture had gone through enormous changes in World War Two. The war had begun an era of mechanisation, a process that contined into peacetime. By the 1960s British food production was heading well into a time of industrial and factory farming. Akenfield captures this moment, when the old traditional, local production was ending and new farming was exploding. Capital was becoming king. Roger, a thirty-one year old "factory farming" tells the reader:

The idea on these modern farms is that no breeding goes on. It is not a new idea, farming is simply splitting up into specialist groups and getting away from the concept of the old mixed farm. The old mixed farmer had a few hens, a few sows, a few bullocks, a little sugar-beet, a few greens, a little orchard... It was all so cosy. What ever you do now you've got to do it big. I mean - twelve sows! We've got sixty and we're still not nearly as large a unit as I would want.

This farming though is not without concerns. He mentions an "awful lot of petitions" about animal cruelty, and notes that "dreams of the past... have got to be abandoned. Farming is not this lackadaisical business of yesterday. Yet I think of my grandfather and his father, and I thik that although they had small profits for so much hard work, they had a carefree life".

But Akenfield also tells the opposite story. I remain haunted, and inspired, by the account by Leonard Thompson, seventy-one and a farm worker. Leonard's story opens the book and tells the grim story of a childhood effaced by poverty. But in 1896 he remembers his brother (one of ten children) dying in the Boer War. Food and money were scarse, "our food was apples, potatoes, swedes and bread, ad we drank our tea without milk or sugar. Skim milk could be bought from the farm but it was thought a luxury. Nobody could get enough to eat no matter how they tried. Two of my brothers were out to work. One was eight years old and he got 3s. a week, the other got about 7s."

After surviving the horrors of trench warfare in World War One Leonard returns, liberated by the German Revoution and concluded, "We felt there must be no slipping back to the bad old ways and about 1920 we formed a branch of the Agricultural Labourers' Union". The rest of his life, though economic slump and renewed war, he fought for better conditions. Now old he finishes "I have these deep lines on my face because I worked under fierce suns". 

It's a beautiful passage and deeply moving. Despite an atmosphere of insularity, the village is not ignorant or unaffected by outside events. I noticed that several of the younger interviewees mention the Russian Revolution, seemingly because there has been a showing of Eisenstein's film October recently, and many of them refer to books they are reading and things they would like to see. The young blacksmith, a skilled worker, has travelled to Europe to enter competitions and dreams of another big project like the cathedral lights he worked on, "I would like to work like that again" he says. You get a sense though, that the young people feel trapped. One 19 year old worker says,

One of the drawbacks to working on a farm when you are young is that yo are kept away from people and when, as I am, you spend day after day with middle-aged men who never read, who never go anywhere outside the village itself and who cannot understand what makes any modern gadget work, you being to lose touch yourself. I went to the pub to meet the young men. They never talk ideas, it is always people with them... they seem, well, hemmed-in by the village itself. 

The process of change that was taking place would transform Akenfield and was already transforming its inhabitants. The Reverand Gethyn Owen (63) who came to the area from Wales, describes it as a "revoution" and he was right. The needs of British capitalism and forced through industrial, mechanical and scientific changes which, in turn, were transforming the workers and social relations in the villages. 

It would be too easy to read Akenfield for nostalgia. The brilliance of Blythe's commentary and editing is that he makes it clear that this was no lost, green and pleasant land. But a place of customs and dreams, and class struggle. Class, and class division, runs through the book. But so does the sense of ordinary people making their own way and creating their own space. One of the lovelist chapters is that by the bell ringer who talks in detail about this singuarly British hobby, but also of the importance of the bells to community and indentify. 

Akenfield became a major sensation, spawned a feature film, and 30 years later a follow up by Craig Taylor. It captured, and continues to capture, reader's attention I think, because it is wonderful to hear ordinary people talk about themselves, their lives, their struggles and their hopes. It is a perfect response to those who think of buccolic English villages and forget the women and men who made them.

Related Reviews

Pryor - Making of the British Landscape
Groves - Sharpen the Sickle
Howkins - The Death of Rural England
Rebanks - The Shepherd's Life: A Tale of the Lake District
Clutterbuck - Bittersweet Brexit: The Future of Food, Farming, Land and Labour

Beverley McCombs - The Ascott Martyrs

The 1870s saw an explosion of trade unionism across rural England as workers', sick of low pay, appalling conditions and the cost of living, joined new trade unions in their thousands. Many of them quickly went on strike and often one excellent pay rises from the farmers. The epicentre of this trade unionism were the Midland counties of Warwickshire and Oxfordshire, partly because of their proximity to the Warwickshire village of Barford where one of the leading figures of the new unionism, Joseph Arch, lived.

At a recent event in Barford to celebrate the life and struggles of Arch, I was reminded of a often forgotten episode of this struggle that took place nearby in the village of Ascott, near Chipping Norton. I had written about this in my own account of rural struggles, Kill all the Gentlemen, highlighting its importance because it is one of the few occasions where the workers' strikes explicitly involved a group of women. Despite the agricultural unions limiting membership to men, women were actually often agricultural labourers, or workers' in allied trades and certainly were workers. The Ascott Martyrs, as they became known, were a group of sixteen women who were sent to prison for trying to prevent scab labour breaking a strike. Beverley McCombs book on their lives and struggle is a fitting and important tribute to events.

Today the area near Ascott is a relatively affluent part of the Cotswolds, near to the wealthy market town of Chipping Norton. In the early 1870s, while there were pockets of great wealth concentrated in the hands of the landowners and farmers, workers experienced a hard life. Seven of the women who were imprisoned were farm workers, eight gloveresses and one a servant. Assembling gloves was a hard, repetative task often done in the family home or by groups of women visiting each other. As McCombs explains, they "sewed the pieces together by hand, earning between fourpence and fivepence a pair. A good gloveress could make up to three pairs in a day".

This pay did not allow luxury. As one contemporary report quoted by McCombs describes, some of the housing conditiond were appalling:

Imagine a narrow place, like a coal cellar, down which you go two or three steps, no flooring except broken stones, no celiing, no grate, rough walls, a bare ladder leading to the one narrow bedroom about six feet wide, containing two double bedsteads for a man his wife and three young children.

It is no surprise that within a couple of months of forming a union, local workers went on strike. By May 1873, the men had been on strike for four months and the strike was causing significant problems for the landowner. This led to him trying to employ two scab workers. The women decided to act and a newspaper reported:

On Sunday 11th of May [the women] were informed that two strange boys were working on Hambridge's farm, from which the Union men had retired. They discussed the matter and consulted together (the greater part of them being related to a family named Moss), and determined to wait upon the boys to represent to them the manner in which they were injuring their own order.

What happened next depends on which side you were on. As McCombs explains:

The two youths... made statements under oath to prove that they were threatened, molested and obscrtucted from entering their work place. The women, also under aoth, denied these claims, though they did say they had spoken to the youths and asked them not to go to work.

Whatever actually took place, and it seems likely that the scabs were encouraged to exagerate events by the landowner, the women were tried and seven women considered leaders were give ten days with hard labour, the remainder seven days with hard labour. Considering that two of the women had babies in arms, this was vicious and cruel sentancing by the two clergy acting as magistrates. They were ignorant of the law and in fact the outrage at the sentences and the riot that took place afterwards caused a brief national scandal, and McCombs suggests, an eventual reform of the law.

The riot was significant and demonstrated the outrage, some 1000 people protested outside the Chipping Norton police station were the women were awaiting transfer to prison. As McCombs says, "The crowd shouted, 'Fetch the women!', 'Stick to the union!', 'Cheers for the women!' and 'Cheers for the union!', along with further threats that they would pull down the police station unless the women were freed." Sadly this latter did not take place and the women were hauled off to hard labour.

McCombs details conditions - which were awful - and the longer time impact of the sentences on the women. Their release, by contrast, was marked by two celebratory events, parades and rallies as the two groups of women came home. In his autobiography Joseph Arch says that the women were given a silk dress in union colours, and £5 each. He also notes that £80 was raised for their support, £5 of which came in pennies - indicating that many poor people gave. McCombs discusses a long standing belief that Queen Victoria herself gave a dress to the women, though it seems unlikely to be true.

McCombs book has its roots in her own investigations of family history, and the book finishes with detailed individual accounts of each women, their family relations (many were related to each other as the newspaper suggested) and what happened to them. Many of the women, like many other agricultural workers in the union movement, emigrated to North America or New Zealand. Some of them had lives cut short by the conditions they had experienced, including in prison. Others seemed to live long and happier lives. Some of them lived into relatively modern times being young when the strike took place. Reading McCombs summary of their subsequent lives, I was struck again by how the experience of struggle is often transformative and life changing. Fanny Honeybone, who was sixteen when she tried to stop the scabs breaking the strike, and was sent to prison for 10 days with hard labour, lived until 1939. She had fourteen children, five of whom died very young and lived her whole life in the local area. In 1928 she remembered the strike very fondly, and her quote stands testament to the struggle and the role of women in these strikes, which is all too often ignored and forgotten:

During the strike... the farmer, had sent for two men to finish his pea hoeing, and the women, including myself, went up the Ascott-under-Wychwood road to stop them. There was something of the idea of fun in what we did - certainly no intention to harm them. I got ten days, second division, in Oxford Gaol. I remember the coaches which met us and the demonstration afterwards in the Town Hall at Chipping Noron. Those were stirring times and it gives me a thrill of pleasure to remember them.

Beverley McCombs short book is a fitting and detailed tribute to these women. It also raises the question about whether there were other such events involving women workers, that have been neglected by the union movement. As she points out, Arch himself believed "Wives must be at home" and there ought to be a family wage paid to their husbands. His union thought that women workers' would drive down men's wages. Luckily this attitude is long gone from the British labour movement, but it was a significant issue in the 1870s and likely undermined the strength of the strikes. Did other women agricultural labourers come out with their men? 

The book will be an important source for family historians (I myself found at least one family connection!) and those interested in the history of women's struggle and radicalism in the countryside. You can order it from the Ascott Martyrs'  website.

Related Reviews

Horn - Life and Labour in Rural England 1760 - 1850
Horn - The Rural World - Social Change in the English Countryside 1780 - 1850
Ashby - Joseph Ashby of Tysoe: 1859-1919
Groves - Sharpen the Sickle!
Arch - From Ploughtail to Parliament: An Autobiography
Horn - Joseph Arch
Archer - A Distant Scene

J.P.D. Dunbabin - Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain

The nineteenth century was a time of great turmoil for rural communities in the British Isles. In Scotland the post enclosure era was being shaped by vicious struggles over land and Crofters' rights, in Wales battles of tithes and semi-rural protests such as the Rebecca Riots were causing a crisis for the rural authorities and in England the agricultural working class was making itself known - firstly in the wave of struggles around Captain Swing and then with the explosion of trade unionism in the 1870s and the strikes associated with that.

J.P.D. Dunbabin's Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain has long been a standard text for those trying to get their heads around the period and understand the dynamics of the struggles and their links to economic policies. I picked it up recently to read in preparation for a talk about Joseph Arch and I was impressed by several of the essays. The book is at its best in covering the struggles around trade unionism. While the book is authored by Dunbabin, two of the chapters are written by other authors, both giants in the field of rural history - Pamela Horn and A.J.Peacock. Peacock's essay on Vilage Radicalism in East Anglia is obviously focused, but there is a wealth of analysis of the Swing and other incenidary attacks localy. Pamela Horn's article on Oxfordshire and the agricultural trade union movement is superb. Her use of minute books from union branches and the details of the often angry fights between unions themselves, do not obscure a brilliant tale of deep rooted and brave trade union activism. She convincingly argues that the "Oxfordshire farm worker... was better off financially than he had been in the 1860s" as a result of trade unionism. It's an important, if contested argument, so Horn's conclusion:

it may be argued that the rise in wages which occurred in the 1870s would have come anyway as agriculture was prosperous and the demand for labour buoyant at a time when employment in urban industry was at a high level. But it must be remembered that such prosperity had existed before without the labourers deriving any great benefit from it. Union agitation pinpointed the need for some redistribution of agricultural income in favour of the farm worker.

It should also be noted that Horn's article includes a map of trade union branches in Oxfordshire which is remarkable in showing the scale of the movement.

The rest of the book belongs to Dunbabin and there is a real breadth here. Some of these are wider in their coverage, a general introduction to the nineteenth century and a chapter on tenant rights in general. Some of the other chapters are more niche - those on the tithe wars in Wales and the Crofters War in Scotland may appeal more to students of the topics rather than the general reader, though Dunbabin has a nack for putting interesting and illuminating anecdotes within the general analysis.

Dunbabin's conclusion though is interesting. Noting the disturbances in Wales and Scotland and the fact that local authorities there were unable to deal with the discontent, he makes the interesting point:

In ninetenth century Britain unrest sometimes passed beyond the control of the local establishments but never beyond that of central Government. So where concessions were made from weakness (as was the forced return of 10 per cent to Welsh tithe-payers), they wer emost likely to be the work of local men. Similarly the central Government did not frame its policies with a view to the avoidance of rural unrest. But such avoidance was one of the factors behing the southern English tendnency in the half-century after Waterloo, to spread work rather than to maximise productivity.

The authorities tended to react to events - dropping threshing machines after Captain Swing, or introducing farmers associations in response to strikes - rather than trying to prevent discontent - to their detriment. Dunbabin's general conclusions are also interesting. He notes the long drawn out struggle to get Parliament to agree a Land Act that would offer some form of justice. This was finally given a nail in the coffin by World War One, with Lloyd George failing to push it though. What might have happened had it "got under way" would "have provided an interesting bridge between the ideas and aspirations... [in the book] and the conditions of the new century."

That did not happen, but Dunbabin's book is a very useful, if a little dry in places, introduction to the swirl of struggle and ideology around rural communities and agriculture in this most fascinating of transitionary centuries.

Related Reviews

Horn - Labouring Life in the Victorian Countryside
Horn - Life and Labour in Rural England 1760-1850
Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class
Hobsbawm & Rudé - Captain Swing

Fred Archer - Under the Parish Lantern

Fred Archer was a Warwickshire farmer who discovered a penchant for writing, and whose accounts of English rural life in the Vale of Evesham between the wars became best sellers. Reading Archer today it is easy to dismiss his work as bucolic whimsy. His tales of usually funny, salacious and often deal with the changes that Archer himself saw - the transition from horse power to the internal combustion engine, the transition away from traditional crafts and practices and the decline of the rural village as a centre for agricultural workers. Archer bemoans what has been lost, though he is rarely dismissive of the new. Unfortunately his comments on wider politics tend to be irksome, and simplistic.

That said, if you read between the whimsical lines there are some fascinating nuggets here, that illuminate wider rural issues. Many of these are related to questions of poverty and unemployment. But two chapters in Under the Parish Lantern stood out for me. The first relates the construction of the war memorial, which can still be seen in Ashton-under-Hill. There were two rival projects, the official construction was to be on land donated by a local landowner, but a smaller group of villagers argued that this land wasn't his to give - it had been illegally enclosed by the previous owner and belonged to the village by rights. They proposed an alternative location for the memorial and even began constructing it, before being stopped. Archer's dismissal of one of the leaders of this opposition for his left politics demonstrates that radical ideas did exist in the countryside, exacerbated by the way the individuals son continued to suffer from the gas he'd been the victim of on the Western Front. The battle over the war memorial highlights wider struggles, and how workers' memories of the past shaped their fears and thoughts in contemporary times.

The second chapter is actually the best - Archer's thoughts on how modern industrial farming is destroying nature. It is fascinating because it has great parallels with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Archer, a farmer close to the land and nature, understands exactly how the destruction of specific species has a much wider knock on effect. He notes how pesticides might kill one weed or insect that is damaging crops, but lead to a wider increase in destructive creatures. There's a broad range of examples, and it reminded me that ecological thinking is not a new thing. Indeed the whole chapter emphasises how important it is to ensure agricultural workers and farmers are part of the struggle to protect the environment and biodiversity.

Under the Parish Lantern is by no means a great work, but Archer's thoughts on industrial farming, labour and the nature of community - as well as his funny stories continue to entertain, many years after the community he describes has completely disappeared.

Related Reviews

Archer - A Distant Scene
Thompson - Lark Rise to Candleford
Whitlock - Peasant's Heritage
Bell - Men and the Fields

Ian Angus - The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism

In his latest book, Ian Angus answers a question that apologists for the capitalist system would like to pretend does not exist. How is it that humans came to live in a world were a tiny minority own and control huge amounts of wealth, and the vast majority of us have to work for them? Angus writes that "even sharp critics of injustice and inequality rarely question the division between owners and workers, employers and employees". Yet almost every aspect of our world is defined by such inequality. About 50 percent of England is owned by one percent of the population. A staggering inequality for a country supposedly defined by its "green and pleasant land". Indeed it is England were Angus' history is mostly focused, for here it was that the process went "furthest" according to Marx. But the transformation of society that saw the total destruction of "the traditional economy" was neither automatic nor benign. Rather:

wage-labour has only become universal in the past few hundred years - and the change was forced on us by 'the most merciless barbarism, and under the stimulus of the most infamous, the most sordid, the most petty and the most odious of passions'.

The quote here comes from Marx, and Angus skilfully uses Marx's theoretical framework to explore the development of capitalism's system of unrestrained accumulation based on exploitation. Marx was well aware that pre-capitalist society took a myriad of different forms, and Angus shows how England (and indeed the British Isles in general) saw a number of different ways of organising agricultural production. The peasantry, under the respective lords, farmed land in ways that were much more communal and depended, in significant part, on the use of communal land. These commons were used according to democratic and egalitarian principles, sharing fields and carefully managing access to essential resources.

The developing capitalist interests however saw the commons as a barrier to further profit. The destruction of the commons, the key theme of this book, took place not out of individual malice, but out of the logic of capital. The need, by the capitalists to expand into every available space and to transform the very world into their own image. Land, animals, wood, forests and space itself was converted into a commodity that could be bought and sold. Fields were engrossed, land was enclosed, commons were privatised. The peasants who lived from the land, were expelled or turned into wage labourers - their old traditions and histories erased. As Angus says, "The twin transformations of original expropriation - stolen land becoming capital and landless producers becoming wage workers - were well underway". These people became a new social group:

A new class of wage-labourers was born in England when 'great masses of men [were] suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour-market as free, unprotected and right-less proletarians.'

The quote is, again, from Marx, whose book Capital is filled with rage at what happened to the peasantry. Angus continues by highlighting the sweep of this process:

It was sudden for those who lost their land, but the social transformation took centuries. In the early 1700s, two hundred years after Thomas More condemned enclosures and depopulation in Utopia, about a third of England and almost all of Scotland was still unenclosed, and most people still lived and worked on the land. it took another great wave of assaults on commons and commoners, after 1750, to complete the transition to industrial capitalism... Looking back, that transition appears inevitable but it did not seem so to commoners at the time... some argued eloquently for a commons-based alternative to both feudalism and capitalism.

Contrary to what some followers of Marx tell us, he did not believe that this process was inevitable or indeed desirable. Marx took inspiration from contemporary movements to protect the commons in his own time, but he was also aware of historic struggles. A great strength of Angus' book is his celebration of these forgotten struggles. One key event is Kett's Rebellion of 1549, about which I have written elsewhere. But Angus also notes other struggles, such as the great battles between poachers and gamekeepers - representing resistance to the idea that game should be a commodity, private property for the sole use of the local landowner. A significant chapter also looks at the work of Gerrard Winstanley whose writings during the English Revolution raised the possibility of a new way of ordering society - though interestingly Angus frames' Winstanley's vision not as a future Utopia, but as a transitional society to it.

Angus' conclusions about the laws introduced to protect private property make an important point:

The very existence of the Bloody Code refutes the common claim that capitalism triumphed because it better reflected the dictates of human nature than previous social orders. The poor were not easily reconciled to a system that expelled them from the land. England's ruling class tried to terrorise them into submission.

This terror and the process of destruction of the commons was not limited to England. Angus demonstrates how the colonial project for English capitalism arose directly from the processes begun in the English countryside. The slave trade, the destruction of commons in the Americas, Africa and Asia were part of a process that subverted the world into the interests of English capital. These sections are among the book's most insightful and moving, dealing as they do with the destruction of entire peoples and their worlds. 

Angus also gives several important theoretical insights. He notes, for instance, how apologists for capitalism can argue that the process was painful and violent, but it was necessary. They suggest that enclosure was important because it was only in this way that crop yields could rise to the levels needed to support industrial capitalism. Angus shows the wealth of evidence that this is incorrect and that yields were not significantly improved. But he also makes an important point that peasants themselves were innovative and clever - far from the dumb backward looking yokels of legend. Common field farming was not "inherently conservative" it was actually dynamic and incredibly successful. But such propaganda was important to the landowning class who wanted theoretical justification for their actions. It is notable that similar points are frequently made today. We are told that large scale industrial farming is the only way to feed the world. But such farming invariably has lower yields, is more polluting and highly vulnerable to environmental disaster. Then, as now, the "claim that peasants resisted improved methods reflects anti-peasant prejudice, not the real activity of working farmers".

The skilful linking of historical processes to contemporary political and ecological struggles is a great strength of Angus' book. This is not specifically a work of history, but rather a framing of the current ecological crisis within the wider historic development of capitalism and the destruction of the commons. For Angus it is capitalism's transformation of the commons that is emblematic of the system's method of operation. But looking backward can only tell us so much, the alternative has to be a new way of organising society based on the creation of a new society with the idea of common, democratic ownership at its heart. As Angus writes, "Today's movements of the oppressed and dispossessed to steal back the commons offer real hope that capitalism's five-century war against the commons can be defeated and reversed in our time." It is an inspiring vision and Ian Angus' War Against the Commons is a brilliant account that ought to be read by every activist who wants to see an end to capitalism and "another world".

I am looking forward to speaking with Ian Angus via Zoom for the London launch of The War Against the Commons at Marxism 2023. More information on the whole event here.

Related Reviews

Angus - A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism
Angus - Facing the Anthropocene
Angus & Butler - Too Many People? Population, Immigration & the Environmental Crisis

Yerby - The English Revolution and the Roots of Environmental Change
Wood - The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England
Wood - Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England
Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class
Thompson - Customs in Common
Linebaugh - Stop Thief!
Sharpe - In Contempt of All Authority
Hill - Liberty Against the Law

James D. Fisher - The Enclosure of Knowledge: Books, Power & Agrarian Capitalism in Britain, 1660-1800

A really interesting study of how the development of capitalism saw the consolidation and enclosure of knowledge as well as land as a fundamental part of the process of transformation of power relations in the countryside. Fisher explores this by studying how knowledge became concentrated in the hands of the rising capitalist class in the form of books. Despite its price, this is a accessible book which sheds new light on the process whereby the English peasantry was destroyed in the name of agrarian capitalism.

I reviewed this book for the International Socialism Journal. You can read my review here.

Article on the book by the author.

Corinne Fowler - Green Unpleasant Land

In July 2021 a coincidence of time and space meant that I was able to join a Stand Up to Racism protest outside the massive estate of Richard Drax. The estate was built with a fortune made from slavery. As Corinne Fowler points out in Green Unpleasant Land, the Drax family made vast amounts of cash from sugar plantations in Barbados and used it to transform the very landscape of Dorset. They built "England's longest wall" around their estate, a wall that remains - keeping out anyone who might want to enjoy the land, or peer at the consequences of such wealth. 

For her unflinching portrayal of the reality of the English countryside, Fowler has received plenty of criticism. In a hostile article the Daily Mail quoted the former, right-wing, Tory cabinet minister Peter Lilley as saying, "Arguably, it is she who has insulted her country by her book whose very title — Green Unpleasant Land — tells us what she thinks of her fellow citizens." Typically the Daily Mail headline claims that "gardening has its roots in racial injustice". It is a click-bait title designed to trigger the sort of apoplectic rage that the Mail's core readership excel in. It is also grossly unfair for Fowler's book is nuanced and detailed about the reality of the English countryside, gardening and its portrayal in literature. In fact Green Unpleasant Land is a remarkably interesting study of the English countryside, its history and the forces that shaped (and continue to shape) the landscape many of us, including Fowler, continue to enjoy. 

The Drax wall is a useful entry point to Fowler's argument. She notes that it "provides a fitting metaphor for the link between empire overseas and enclosure at home". Far from being a idyllic place, the countryside, Fowler argues, was (is) a space of intense struggle over ownership and access. She notes the various class struggles against enclosure or for economic improvements and points out that this continues today. But despite this history, the image of a beautiful pastoral idyll continues. She says:

Industrialised farming and escalating environmental destruction ought to have made naïve visions of the countryside hard to sustain. Yet they have been sustained, and a succession of social histories, personal memoirs and political manifestos have criticised the continuing pastoral view.

In contrast she points to a whole number of books and studies that have demonstrated the exact opposite (including, full disclosure, one of my own books). In particular she looks at the close links between colonialism, racism and the countryside - which manifest both through economic issues such as land ownership and exclusion, to more overt racism directed to Black visitors. She argues that there has been a "collective amnesia about the role of empire", highlighting, for example W.G.Hoskins' classic work The Making of the English Landscape, which "makes no mention of empire".

Fowler dismisses "common misapprehensions about rural England: firstly, that it has nothing to do with colonialism and, secondly, that Black British and Asian British authors are disconnected from English rurality." She systematically examines the way that writers who have written about the countryside, or set novels within it, consider questions of colonialism and racism. There are some fascinating examples. In Walter Scott's 1814 novel Waverley, the Highlands are seen as populated by people compared by Scott to "natives of Africa and America, India and the Orient". Charlotte Brontë repeatedly hints at the "colonial connotations of Wuthering Heights". Descriptions of the moors frequently link the dirty, poverty stricken people to black faced "savages". 

Yet the colonial linkage to the countryside is not just in fiction. Fowler shows how the nature of Empire shaped the countryside too. Drax's wall is one example. The profits from slavery allowed a new landowning bourgeoise to transform the landscape. The enclosures of land and the destruction of common rights, leading to the forcible destruction of the peasantry are part of a process where the primitive accumulation of wealth overseas helped kick start the evolution of capitalism back home. That's the economic context, but there were other examples. Slaves were brought back to England from overseas, sometimes to be black servants, a particularly appalling fashion. There were also black workers, traders, gardeners and escaped slaves in the countryside. The history opf the English countryside is far blacker than the Daily Mail would like.

The global transportation of plants as transformed gardens and farms in Europe. Fowler points out the role of slaves themselves in helping select and transport these plants for botanists, farmers and gardeners to enjoy. The knowledge and labour of enslaved black people and indigenous communities was essential to choosing the plants as well as providing the food to continue with slavery. Gardening may not have had its original roots in racial injustice as the Daily Mail claims Fowler says, but it was fundamentally shaped by slavery, colonialism and imperialism.

Fowler's book is subtitled Creative Responses to Rural England's Colonial Connections. These creative responses include the poetry, novels and essays of black writers whom Fowler examines in depth. The breadth of her coverage of these is remarkable and I found it impossible not to add to my list of books to read as a result. But Fowler also adds her own creativity to the discussion by responding to the themes and arguments in the book with a short story and some poetry of her own. I found these particularly insightful, and it the fact the book brings together the non-fiction and fictional form was both unusual and thought-provoking. I particularly enjoyed the poem about Kings Heath park in Birmingham which I know well. Her poem Green Unpleasant Land is about the response to Danny Boyle's London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. In the opening chapter of the book Fowler examines the knee-jerk response to Boyle's placing of black people in the countryside and in the poem she has a raging commentator declare:

If you're still listening, here's my message:
to all you pc hand-wringers out there:
Jerusalem will never get built
if you corrupt our heritage

The erroneous belief that the English countryside is untainted by corruption, violence, racism, colonialism or class struggle is a deep-seated one. As Fowler points out, "they" have to keep reinventing it. Why? I think it serves two purposes. By removing the real history of the countryside, it becomes a continuous reservoir that the ruling class can draw upon to challenge progressive ideas. But it also offers something to individuals - escapism, hope, a challenge to the alienation of work and urban areas. We're sold a dream of Jerusalem outside the city, because without that dream, the reality is overcrowded housing, lack of jobs, poverty and polluted streets. Corinne Fowler's Green Unpleasant Land is a challenge to that narrative. It is readable, entertaining and honest, and deserves a wide readership if we are to really build Jerusalem.

Related Reviews

Howkins - The Death of Rural England
Groves - Sharpen the Sickle
Rackham - The History of the Countryside
Poskett - Horizons: A Global History of Science
Horn - Joseph Arch

David Kerr Cameron - Willie Gavin, Crofter Man: Portrait of a Vanished Lifestyle

Willie Gavin, Crofter Man, is the second of David Kerr Cameron's trilogy about history and social life in the Scottish countryside. In this volume he looks at Croft farming, through the life of Willie Gavin, a anonymised croft owner from the early 20th century. Willie's life is recreated by Cameron through archival information, tombstones and the reminiscences of children and grandchildren.

Willie was an expert stonemason who became a crofter on his father's croft. Crofting was extremely hard and unrewarding, Cameron is at pains not to romanticise the lifestyle, or portray the life as some sort of rural idyll. Indeed he criticises those who see such farming as romantic in words that might be applied to those who retreat to the countryside imaging an easy rural life:

Of that rage for improvement, the birth of crofting was maybe the greatest betrayal of all; it deluded men, then trampled on their dreams. Folk took on crofts for the independence they thought they gave and doomed themselves to long disappointment. They believed they were perhaps putting a tentative first foot on the farming ladder and found instead that their position was untenably ambiguous in that new countryside and in a restructured society; they were neither masters nor hired men. Sometimes the croft's appeal lay in the deep-seated desire for a house that would be a home, settled and secure, in that new farming landscape of the tied house and the wandering cottar; the occupants found soon enough that the laird was sometimes as hard to please, and always to pay.

Gavin, perhaps, had less illusions, having seen his father's hard work. Though clearly Willie also believed things would be better. Each year the dreamed that the harvest would be his best, enough to break out of the cycle of poverty and debt. Each year it wasn't. In fact his wife was only able to break from the croft with her husband's death and the selling of his last harvest and all their possessions.

Mention of Willie's marriage brings up his wife, Jess MacKendrick. Her life is told by Cameron, alongside that of Willie. It is poignant - for Jess's life was hard - on her fell the twin burden of child rearing and home management, alongside agricultural work. She married Gavin after they met while she was working as a housemaid, and Cameron has dug out the shopping bill she had as, before their marriage, she purchased what would be needed for their home together. It's a moving list of the minutiae of daily life and the prices the merchant charged.

The twentieth century saw crofting life change - machinery for instance. Though Gavin was old fashioned and refused to use such equipment, relying on his own labour until the stroke that nearly killed him at 75 taking in the harvest in his fields. Cameron notes that this was likely Gavin's most successful harvest as he'd finally switched to a modern seed, though too late to make a real difference. 

As with Cameron's other books, he blends archival and oral history with music, poetry and song. He notes how the stories that Jess tells her children provided a continuity, and their telling "knit the generations" and passed down the "Lore of the Gavins and the MacKendricks... imprinting identity". There is a real sense of the crofting life being locked to the past, but challenged by the new. That said, the family were realtively mobile, visiting town, travelling to see relatives and so on. It would be wrong to see them as being so poor they were trapped at the croft, on the other hand the croft demanded attention constantly. 

The problems of this come out on the Sunday. As observant folk, the Gavins would not work on the Sabbath, despite the havoc this played at key moments in the agricultural calendar. Willie might, if Jess was not watching, make an adjustment to a rope - but little else.

As with all of Cameron's work, Willie Gavin, is an accomplished work of social history that will fill in gaps for those visiting Scotland, and perhaps staying in an old croft. There is no sanitisation here - we are constantly reminded that the modern Scottish landscape was made through hard work, poverty and endless labour by people like Willie Gavin and Jess MacKendrick. It is worth reading this book to remind ourselves of this.

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