Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  As farm boundaries were renewed, and tracks made up with rubble from London bomb sites, people suggested that disused hangars could be used for keeping pigs or large-scale poultry farming. Prison camps were handed over to the War Ags, who ran them as hostels for farm workers, many of them former inmates who had opted to stay in Britain rather than go home.

  One species which had positively benefited from Hitler’s madness was the grey squirrel. The six-year shortage of manpower and cartridges precipitated a population explosion. Breeding freely during the war, the squirrels began to inflict serious damage on young hardwoods, beech and sycamore especially. Their habit of chewing off patches of bark in early summer maimed or killed so many thousands of trees that in 1944 the Ministry of Agriculture responded by issuing free cartridges to grey squirrel shooting clubs.

  By the end of 1947 members of the clubs had killed 100,000 greys; but stronger incentives were needed, and in March 1953 the Ministry launched the shilling-a-tail campaign, paying 1s (5p, but £2.50 in today’s values), later increased to 2s, for every tail handed in. This spurred immense culls – 361,636 in 1953–4, 391,891 in 1954–5 – achieved mainly by poking out dreys with specially designed telescopic aluminium poles and shooting the squirrels as they emerged. But it was too late. After five years, and a million tails, the campaign proved ineffective, for whenever a wood was cleared it was quickly recolonized by immigrants from other stands of timber.

  This was particularly galling for landowners who were trying to replace trees felled during the war. Foresters favoured the creation of mixed plantations, with three rows of conifers to one of beech, oak or sycamore. Their hope was that fast-growing larch or spruce would nurse the beech in its early years, and when the softwood was harvested, the beech would grow on to maturity. Squirrels soon put paid to that plan: as soon as the hardwoods reached the age of ten or twelve, with a trunk diameter of about three inches, they ruined them by chewing off the bark, usually just above the ground.

  The greys’ grip on British woodlands also accelerated the decline of native red squirrels, which are smaller and less aggressive, partly because greys compete for food and sometimes kill reds, and partly because reds are susceptible to the squirrel pox virus, which greys carry, but which does not affect them.

  Rabbits continued to plague farmers until 1953, when the viral disease myxomatosis, which had already run riot in Australia and France, was illegally imported into Sussex. It was then deliberately spread by people translocating sick animals, and in two years, to the immense relief of most farmers, but also to the disgust of some, it killed 95 per cent of the rabbits in Britain. Survivors gained some immunity, but fresh outbreaks of the disease kept occurring, generally in late summer, and the population has never returned to anything like its pre-war level.

  As for the big country houses, although some went under during the war, many survived more or less intact. But when peace returned a stealthy and poisonous agent, as deadly as dry rot or lack of money, was brewing: the class-hatred simmering among Socialist politicians. Less than a year after Labour came to power, Emanuel Shinwell, Minister of Fuel and Power, sent heavy mining machinery into the garden of Wentworth Woodhouse, the largest country house in England (larger even than Knole), to dig for coal in the Barnsley seam only 100 feet beneath the ground.

  In due course almost 100 acres of formal gardens and woodland were destroyed by open-cast mining, and numerous specimen trees were lost. Coal was certainly needed, particularly for the railways, and Shinwell insisted that the seam was of exceptional quality; but this claim was refuted in a survey carried out by Sheffield University, which said in effect that the coal was rubbish – and many people saw Shinwell’s manoeuvres as a spiteful attack on the aristocratic owners of the property, the Fitzwilliam family. Although crippled by the nationalization of coal mines in July 1946, and by two sets of death duties, they managed to keep the house and eventually to restore its surroundings.

  It was Britain’s farmland that the war changed most. As early as 1940 Vita Sackville-West had sensed the shape of things to come. Although renowned as a denizen of the Bloomsbury literary jungle, she was brought up and lived in Kent, always at heart a countrywoman – as evidenced by her sprawling, prize-winning epic poem The Land, published in 1926, which celebrated the seasons and activities of the countryside. Soon after the start of the war, in one of her weekly essays for the New Statesman and Nation, she had written of her love of the traditional landscape and of the yeoman farmer, but she had also looked ahead with apprehension:

  It would break my heart to see the familiar aspect of England altered from our toy-like fields into wide stretches of undivided land where the gyro-tiller could churn the soil for two or three miles on end without coming to a turn. I should hate to see the yeomen swept away and replaced by so inhuman a thing as the communal overseer and the mechanised farm. Even so, I have always had a distressing suspicion that this is what we ought to do, if the agricultural possibilities of our land were to be properly exploited.

  Five years after she had written that, the scenario she dreaded was already taking shape. Accelerated by the necessities of war, drastic change had set in. Horses were fast giving way to tractors. The steam engines which had dominated threshing yards for half a century were hissing into retirement. Machines even more powerful than gyrotillers were tearing out hedges, copses and awkward bits of woodland to make room for six-furrow ploughs and giant combines – the process which eventually devastated much of East Anglia and turned it into prairies. Ancient barns, too small to be useful any longer, were being demolished or left to rot. Outlying wells were neglected and beginning to silt up. Age-old facilities no longer sufficed for workers on the land: new houses, piped water and electrification were on their way.

  All this signified the start of a new era in British agriculture. Hitler’s attempt to starve Britain had forced farmers to become more skilled and more competitive; although many grumbled, most realized how beneficial the changes had been, and would be, and there was no looking back. The land of my boyhood was disappearing: the old ways of the countryside were dying, and could never return.

  Acknowledgements

  I should particularly like to thank the following for allowing me to consult their archives:

  The Duke of Beaufort (Badminton)

  Donald Cameron of Lochiel (Achnacarry)

  The Duke of Devonshire (Chatsworth)

  The Hon. Simon Howard (Castle Howard)

  I am most grateful to Lord Dulverton for the loan of his father’s rare wartime sniping manual, and to Iain Thornber, for sharing his wide knowledge of Highland history; also for permission to quote from his privately printed memoir The Cameron Collection.

  I am indebted to Xandra Bingley for permission to include a passage from Bertie, May and Mrs Fish; to Lord Egremont, for permission to publish a passage from Wyndham and Children First; to John Reymond for permission to quote passages from Fortitude South; to Professor David Reynolds for permission to include short extracts from Rich Relations, and in particular the passage in Chapter 15; to Nova Robinson for permission to publish extracts from James Lees-Milne’s diaries; to Paul Varney, for welcoming a researcher to the Flyfishers’ Club; and to Jo Warin, for permission to quote her mother Anne Hollis’s account of the fire at Castle Howard.

  The BBC People’s War series of interviews has been a most useful source. Because the reminiscences are already in the public domain on the Internet, the Corporation cannot give permission to quote from them; but because it would now be exceedingly difficult to trace individual contributors, I hope those who are still alive will forgive me for including parts of their stories without their leave.

  Others who have given generous help include:

  Elizabeth Allen (RSPB), Lord Allendale, David Barber (Royal Swans), Janet Barber, Lord Barber, Sir Benjamin Bathurst, Cynthia Batten (Queen Margaret’s School), David Beazley, Robert Benson (Moorland Association), John Berkeley, Bob Browning, Richard Bullen, David Burnett,
Reg Chambers-Jones, Jane Cheape, Rollo Clifford, Mark Cunliffe-Lister, Susannah Davis, Peter du Feu, Brigadier Christopher Dunphie, the Earl of Eglinton and Winton, Francis Evans, Jane Fawcett, Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall, Elizabeth Fleming, Robin Fleming, Simon Foster (Egton estate), Gillian Gooderham, Roger Griffith, Stephen J. G. Hall, Ben Heyes (Bolton Abbey estate), Jane Higgs (the Eden Valley Museum Trust), Henry Hoare, Susie Keown, Jean Lindsay, John Luke (Wycombe Abbey), David Lyon, Barbara Mackintosh, Sarah-Joy Maddeaux (Bristol Zoo), Louise Martin (Grosvenor estate), Elaine Milsom (Badminton estate), the Hon. Lady Morrison, Mark Norris, Chris Perrins, Michael Palmer, Sandra Pallister, Lorna Parker (Archivist, Royal Agricultural College), Roger Patterson, Christopher Perrins (swans), the Hon. Michael Pery, James Pilkington, Christopher Ridgway (Castle Howard), Sir Christopher Royden, Richard Sidgwick, Dr Cathryn Spence, Michael Stone, the Hon. Mrs Peter Thorne, Erika Tobiassen, James Towe (Chatsworth archive), Hilary Wainwright, Sir Humphry Wakefield, George Winn-Darley, Jeff Woods.

  The staff of the Library at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading have been exceptionally helpful, none more so than Caroline Benson.

  As always, the London Library has been a godsend to a country author.

  Finally, I should like to thank my editor, Arabella Pike, for shaping the book most skilfully, and my copy editor, Richard Collins, for eliminating errors with lethal precision.

  Duff Hart-Davis

  Uley

  Gloucestershire

  September 2014

  Sources

  Sources consulted include (those more frequently used are abbreviated in the notes as indicated):

  The National Archives, Kew – NA

  Mass Observation records

  Museum of English Rural Life

  BBC WW2 People’s War records – BBC PW

  The Cameron-Head Archive

  The Eden Valley Museum archive

  Magazines

  British Beekeepers’ Association Journal

  Country Life – CL

  The Country Gentleman’s Magazine

  The Farmer & Stockbreeder

  The Farmers’ Weekly – FW

  The Field

  The Flyfishers’ Gazette – FG

  Illustrated London News

  Books consulted include

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  Arnold, Ralph, A Very Quiet War. Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.

  Babington Smith, Constance, Evidence in Camera. Chatto & Windus, 1958.

  Baker, J., Chimps, Champ and Elephants. S. J. H. Publications, Paignton, 1988.

  Bates, H. E., In the Heart of the Country. Robinson Publishing, 1985.

  Bingley, Xandra, Bertie, May and Mrs Fish. Harper Perennial, 2006.

  Blishen, Edward, A Cackhanded War. Thames & Hudson, 1972.

  Blythe, Ronald, Akenfield. Penguin, 1969.

  Bond, Lilian, Tyneham: A Lost Heritage. The Dovecote Press, 1956.

  Botting, Douglas, Gavin Maxwell: A Life. HarperCollins, 1993.

  Brooks, Linda, Flights of Memory. Scottish Homing Union, 2007.

  Brown, Tim, Ashby, Alan and Schwitzer, Christoph, An Illustrated History of Bristol Zoo Gardens.

  Butler, Simon, Goodbye Old Friend. Halsgrove, 2012.

  Calvert, Michael, Fighting Mad. Airlife, 1996.

  Campbell, Clare, Bonzo’s War. Constable & Robinson, 2013.

  Chambers Jones, Reg, Anglesey and Gwynedd: The War Years. Bridge Books, Wrexham, 2008.

  Clark, Kenneth, The Other Half: A Self-Portrait. John Murray, 1977.

  Croall, Jonathan, Don’t You Know There’s a War On? Hutchinson, 1988.

  de la Billière, General Sir Peter, Looking for Trouble. HarperCollins, 1994.

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  Elliott, Geoff, Colyton at War. Colyton Parish History Society, 2007.

  Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jane, The Ministry of Food. Hodder & Stoughton, 2010.

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  Freeman, Roger A., The Mighty Eighth. Arms & Armour Press, 1989.

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  Priestley, J. B., All England Listened. Chilmark Press, New York, 1967.

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  Reynolds, David, Rich Relations. HarperCollins, 1995.

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Sheean, Vincent, Between the Thunder and the Sun. Macmillan, 1943.

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  Stoate, Chris, Exploring a Productive Landscape. Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, 2010.

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  Vickers, Hugo, Elizabeth: The Queen Mother. Hutchinson, 2005.

  Wainwright, Martin (ed.), A Gleaming Landscape. Aurum Press, 2006.

  Wainwright, Martin (ed.), All Hands to the Harvest. Guardian Books, 2009.

  Ward, Sadie, War in the Countryside, 1939–45. Cameron Books, 1988.

  Wheeler, Rob (ed.), German Invasion Plans for the British Isles, 1940. Bodleian Library, 2007.

  Wicks, Ben, No Time to Say Goodbye. Bloomsbury Paperback, 2009.

  Williams of Barnburgh, Lord, Digging for Britain. Hutchinson, 1965.

  Wills, Captain Anthony, Sniping. Small Arms Training, Vol. 1, Pamphlet No. 28. The War Office, 1946.

  Woolton, Lord, Memoirs. Cassell, 1959.

  Younger, Major-General Tony, Blowing Our Bridges. Pen & Sword Military, 2004.

  Notes

  One: The Old Ways

  11s a week: In order to gain an idea of wartime values, one has to multiply by at least forty: £1 in 1940 would have been the equivalent of over £40 today.

  when war broke out on August 4th: Akenfield, p. 41.

  you could see the horses listening: Ibid., pp. 61–2.

  leaving me to carry on: Private reminiscence.

  only means of stopping anyway!: Darling Ma, p. 154.

  is the ideal continuous: FW, 7 July 1944.

  eight hours a day: The Woods Belong to Me, pp. 45–6.

  fields of time: The Worm Forgives the Plough, p. 162.

  Two: All Hands to the Plough

  will be less efficient: FW, 15 September 1939.