Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  Baldwin was not of course quite the simple countryman he presented himself as. He was very attached to his Scottish mother, who came from a highly literary and artistic family: her parents moved in Pre-Raphaelite circles, and one of her sisters married Burne-Jones, another E.J. Poynter, while the third was the mother of Kipling. Louisa Baldwin wrote novels, poetry and children’s books, and brought up her only son with a keen appreciation of English language and literature. Baldwin would famously champion the works of that other author closely connected with Shropshire, Mary Webb, turning her from what he regarded as a neglected genius into a best-selling writer – he even wrote the preface to Precious Bane in the collected edition of her works. All that said, the persona Baldwin adopted was not created for him by political advisors but was an intrinsic part of his character. One would expect a prime minister to be patriotic, but Baldwin’s love of his country was entirely bound up in his love of the English countryside. As he said in a speech delivered at the annual dinner of the Royal Society of St George in May 1924:

  To me, England is the country and the country is England. And when I ask myself what I mean by England, when I think of England when I am abroad, England comes to me through my various senses – through the ear, through the eye, and through certain imperishable scents. I will tell you what they are, and there may be those among you who feel as I do.

  The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to function, for centuries the one eternal sight of England. The wild anemones in the woods in April, the last load at night of hay being drawn down a lane as the twilight comes on, when you can scarcely distinguish the figures of the horses as they take it home to the farm, and above all, most subtle, most penetrating and most moving, the smell of wood smoke coming up in an autumn evening, or the smell of the scutch fires […] These things strike down into the very depths of our nature, and touch chords that go back to the very beginning of time and the human race, but they are chords that with every year of our life sound a deeper note in our innermost being.

  Some have dismissed such speeches as both sentimental and irrelevant in a country that was still in the grip of an agricultural depression and in any case highly industrialised. To some extent Baldwin was aware that he was open to such criticisms, but while acknowledging that ‘we have become largely an urban folk’, he persisted in believing that the true spirit of England continued to reside in fields, woods and villages, and that this was something that everyone recognised. As he put it in one speech: ‘there lies, deep down in the hearts even of those who have toiled in our cities for two or three generations, an ineradicable love of country things and country beauty, as it may exist in them traditionally and subconsciously; and to them, as much as and even more to ourselves, the country represents the eternal values and the eternal traditions from which we must never allow ourselves to be separated’. He may well have been right. It is hard to imagine a British politician today managing to reach out to a wide public in the way Baldwin did – or indeed to have his speeches not only put between hard covers but becoming best sellers. Published in April 1926, On England was in its fifth edition by October of that year. Such was the demand for the book that a ‘Cheap edition’ was published in April 1927 and a ‘Popular’ one in March 1933, by which time it had sold over 26,000 copies. The Manchester Guardian felt that the book ‘reveals and expresses a love of England that goes […] far to explain the hold [its author] has so quickly won over his fellow-countrymen. It is no political theory, but a healthy concrete attachment to the soil and fields, the hedges and buildings of the countryside and to the men and women who draw their life from it.’ J.C. Squire in the Observer identified the book’s particular appeal: ‘This is the work of a thoroughly representative Englishman; not the common man, but one expressing … what the common man feels and cannot say for himself.’ There were all manner of practical things people wanted in the 1920s and 1930s in a country still reeling from a devastating war and beset by unemployment, industrial unrest and the rise of fascism in Europe; but equally they needed reassurance and a sense that the essential nature of England persisted in spite of such upheavals and threats.

  Publishers were keen to tap into this renewed sense of what England stood for and how it should be appreciated. J.C. Squire and Viscount Lee of Fareham were joint editors of the ‘English Heritage Series’ published between 1929 and 1936. Individual volumes were dedicated to such national pastimes as Cricket (1930), Fox-Hunting (1935) and English Folk-Song and Dance (1935), such national institutions as The English Public School (1929), The English Inn (1930), The English Parish Church (1930), and The English Country House (1935), and such cultural phenomena as English Humour (written by J.B. Priestley, with an introduction by Baldwin, 1929) and English Music (1931), while Edmund Blunden contributed to the series a more general, topographical volume on The Face of England (1932). In an article titled ‘On Pilgrimage in England: Voyages of Discovery’, Blunden cited Katharine A. Esdaile’s survey of Monuments in English Churches (1937) and Colonel M.H. Grant’s Chronological History of the Old English Landscape Painters, which appeared in three lavishly illustrated folio volumes from 1926, as instances of the way in which England was being catalogued and appreciated. ‘At no time have some of our national treasures been reconsidered with half the gusto or half the living scholarship that has been witnessed during the past quarter of a century,’ he wrote.

  Among the many books on the countryside that appeared between the wars, the best known were Arthur Mee’s The King’s England series, the Shell County Guides and the series of volumes published by B.T. Batsford. Mee was a journalist who had become well known for his phenomenally popular Children’s Encyclopaedia, originally published in fifty fortnightly parts between 1908 and 1910. The King’s England, which began publishing in 1936, was advertised as ‘A New Domesday Book of 10,000 Towns and Villages’. It would eventually run to forty volumes, each dedicated to an individual county, with the addition of an introductory one, Enchanted Land (1936), which in its revised edition was subtitled ‘The Very Essence of England and the English Character’. Mee claimed of the series that ‘There has been nothing like it before: it is the first census of the ancient and beautiful and curious historic possessions of England since the motor car came to make it possible.’ He and a team of researchers travelled the land recording not only cities, towns, villages, notable buildings, monuments, natural features and ‘enchanting vistas’, but also local history, legends and anecdotes. The books were illustrated with sepia photographs, included a fold-out map, and were written in a relaxed conversational style aimed at ‘ordinary’ people. The Shropshire volume, subtitled ‘County of the Western Hills’, first appeared in 1939, and refers to ‘Mr Housman’ or quotes his poetry in its descriptions of Clun, Hughley, Ludlow, Shrewsbury and Wenlock Edge.

  The Shell County Guides were intended to appeal to a rather different market. The idea for them came from John Betjeman, at that time an assistant editor at the Architectural Review, and it was he who approached Jack Beddington, the publicity director of the petroleum company Shell-Mex & BP Ltd. Beddington had been working for Shell for a decade, having apparently got the job after he had criticised the company’s advertisements, which were striking but concentrated entirely on its products. He was determined instead to promote the company itself, inventing slogans and commissioning painters and graphic artists to create posters for hoardings. As motor cars became more affordable, they were increasingly used for leisure activities, notably following H.V. Morton’s lead in exploring the countryside, and among Beddington’s most successful campaigns were those depicting landscape, buildings or other notable structures and urging motorists to ‘See Britain Firs
t on Shell’ or assuring them that ‘To Visit British Landmarks You Can Be Sure of Shell’ and even ‘Everywhere You Go You Can Be Sure of Shell’.

  The images were commissioned from both established artists and those starting out in their careers, and Beddington was inclined to give his designers a free hand. This resulted in a wide range of styles: John Piper’s dark image of Stonehenge beneath the stars, Graham Sutherland’s airy, almost surreal rendering of the Great Globe at Swanage, Paul Nash’s Cubist-inspired vision of the Rye Marshes, and Rex Whistler’s lush green view across Aylesbury Vale. The series both encouraged tourism and provided a genuinely public art gallery which promoted the works of, among others, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Leonard Rosoman, Frank Dobson, Edward Bawden, E. McKnight Kauffer, Barnett Freedman, Edward Bawden and Denton Welch. Betjeman felt that Beddington’s innovative approach to design, and his policy of letting those he commissioned get on with it without undue interference, would make Shell the perfect commercial sponsors for a series that would be quite unlike any guidebook previously published.

  Betjeman himself wrote the first volume, on Cornwall, in 1934. Its idiosyncratic text, drawing attention to unfashionable periods of architecture, its inclusion of local recipes, its use of old and new photographs, collage and both modern and Victorian typefaces, and its overall impression of enthusiastic amateurism rather than dry scholarship, set the tone for the entire series. Another feature that set the guides apart was that they were spiral-bound, which meant that they could be opened flat – far more convenient for motorists than traditionally bound guidebooks. During the 1930s a further twelve guides would be published, often written by Betjeman’s friends and fellow enthusiasts: John Piper on Oxfordshire, Lord Clonmore on Kent, Robert Byron on Wiltshire, Peter Quennell on Somerset. Few of the books were the work of professional historians, and in commissioning instead artists such as Piper, Paul Nash (Dorset), John Nash (Buckinghamshire) and Stephen Bone (the West Coast of Scotland), Betjeman was continuing the policy Beddington had already established with the Shell posters. The series has been described as ‘the largest essay on the relationship between our physical environment and British identity in the twentieth century’.

  The books published by Batsford during this period also encouraged readers to explore their own country, but were intended to be read at home rather than on the road. They were distinguished by their stylised and brightly coloured dust-jackets, designed by ‘Brian Cook’, otherwise Brian Batsford, nephew of, and eventually successor as chairman to, the firm’s founder. His first jacket design was for A.K. Wickham’s The Villages of England in 1932, and overall the books gave a contemporary graphic look to timeless English landscapes. As the books multiplied, Batsford marshalled them into ‘libraries’ with such titles as ‘The Face of Britain’, ‘The Pilgrim’s Library’ and the ‘Home-Front Handbooks’, which appeared during the Second World War. The books were written by a wide variety of authors and were illustrated with photographs. Volumes in ‘The Face of Britain’ series were regionally specific (English Lakeland, English Downland, Welsh Border Country, Shakespeare’s Country) and written by individual authors, but those in ‘The Pilgrim’s Library’ were collections of essays by individual hands, attracting such well-known writers as J.B. Priestley, Edmund Blunden, Henry Williamson, H.E. Bates, Adrian Bell and G.M. Young (who would go on to become Stanley Baldwin’s official biographer). The Pilgrim’s Library was launched in April 1935 with The Beauty of Britain (1935), followed by The Legacy of England (‘An Illustrated Survey of the Works of Man in the English Country’), Nature in Britain and The English Countryside.

  The ‘Handbooks’ first appeared in the autumn of 1939 and were ‘designed to meet the needs of those who, through wartime circumstances, must seek their own entertainment instead of finding it readymade to hand’. The series, according to the publisher’s blurb, was ‘intended particularly for people now living in the country for the first time’, by which it was presumably meant those who had moved there to escape threatened air raids, ‘that they might use their leisure constructively for their own benefit and for the benefit of the nation in general’. While it was easy to see how a book on How to Grow Food might benefit both individuals and the nation, other titles seemed rather less practical: How to See Nature, How to Look at Old Buildings and How to See the Countryside. Presumably these titles were intended to boost morale and remind people what the country was fighting to protect.

  In this they resembled ‘There’ll Always Be an England’, a song composed in the summer of 1939 by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles and first performed by a boy soprano in a midshipman’s uniform in the film Discoveries. It became one of the most popular songs of the Second World War, particularly when sung by the ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’, Vera Lynn, and its chorus proclaimed, in words that echoed the sentiments of Stanley Baldwin:

  There’ll always be an England

  While there’s a country lane,

  Wherever there’s a cottage small

  Beside a field of grain.

  Within two months of the declaration of war some 200,000 copies of the sheet music had been sold, and S.P.B. Mais appropriated the song’s title for a morale-boosting volume about the English landscape published in 1940.

  Mais’s earlier suggestion that people should ‘Leave your books and your games, your work and your worries, escape by yourself to the lonely places and there you shall find unutterable joy and profound peace’ was taken up by the protagonist of Francis Brett Young’s Mr Lucton’s Freedom. The novel was written and published in 1940 but is set in a timeless England during the last summer of peace, and is saturated in Housman. The book’s American publisher acknowledged this when retitling it The Happy Highway, a phrase borrowed from ‘Into my heart an air that kills’. Brett Young draws together those enduring notions of the countryside as a repository of true English values into which urban people can escape. In particular, the English landscape that lies between the River Severn and the Welsh Marches is portrayed as a place where spiritual peace and happiness can be found and briefly grasped before the onset of another world war.

  Brett Young is one of those prolific English novelists of the interwar years whose work was widely read at the time but has since been largely forgotten. Born in 1884 in the Worcestershire town of Halesowen, he had looked longingly to the westward hills as a child. His own ‘Pisgah’ was the nearby Walton Hill, as he wrote in some notes for an uncompleted autobiography: ‘Even today, I doubt if I could ever wholly overcome the awe of that prospect, for it is one of the widest and fairest in all England: the dreamy, green expanse of the Severn Plain; the level line of the Cotswolds – pale blue as the chalk hill butterfly; Bredon (beloved hill!), a half-strung bow; Malvern, peaked and fantastic like scenery on a stage; Abberley, with its tower; two waves of Clee; and, beyond it all, a tangle of unnamed hills.’

  While studying medicine at Birmingham University he met his future wife, the daughter of a local gentleman-farmer, but they were temporarily separated after a couple of months when she took a job in Somerset. Having paid her a visit on the eve of her departure, Brett Young walked the eleven miles back to his home: ‘I don’t believe I saw two inches of the road – I just trudged along with my head full of love and hope and anxieties, reviewing, as a drowning man sees his whole life in the flash of a moment, our wonderful experience of the last two months – till the steady swing of my walk resolved itself into the metre of a poem by A.E. Housman, and I mentally repeated it a hundred times.’ That poem was ‘White in the moon the long road lies’, but the pair would be reunited and would marry after Brett Young had gained a first-class medical degree and begun practising as a GP in Devon. In his spare time he wrote music, setting the words of English poets, including Housman, and embarked on his career as a novelist.

  He served with the RAMC in South Africa during the First World War, but was invalided out and gave up medicine to become a full-time writer, embarking on a series of novels set in the West Midlands and the Wels
h Marches and known, after Hardy’s model, as the Mercian Novels. They would eventually be published in a uniform ‘Severn Edition’. The first of them were written on Capri, where he had gone in 1919 to recover his health and where he remained until 1928. As with the Shropshire Lad, exile from the landscape of his youth increased his longing for it. ‘Ever since my childhood, my soul has wandered over these beloved hills, and brooded over them, tenderly,’ he wrote, and this yearning fed into the Mercian novels, which made his reputation and sold in large numbers. In almost all of them the western horizon, seen from somewhere approximating Birmingham, represents contentment and freedom.

  At the time he wrote Mr Lucton’s Freedom, Brett Young had returned to Worcestershire and was living in Craycombe House in the ancient village of Fladbury, midway between Evesham and Pershore. During the war the BBC had moved their headquarters to Wood Norton, a couple of miles away, and Brett Young played host to many of those who broadcast from there, including Stanley Baldwin. He had sent Baldwin a copy of Portrait of Clare, the novel that made his reputation in 1927, and a cordial friendship based on a shared love of literature, cricket and Worcestershire had eventually resulted. It is perhaps no coincidence that Baldwin stayed at Craycombe while Brett Young was writing Mr Lucton’s Escape, since the two men’s vision of England is essentially the same.