The Village News

by Tom Fort

  4

  WHAT GOLDEN AGE?

  The Bournes, Surrey

  On the Ordnance Survey map a cluster of settlements is shown just south of Farnham in Surrey. The names are Upper Bourne, Middle Bourne and Lower Bourne; and for good measure the map also displays a collective, The Bournes.

  But they are names only. The distinct places they were, with their distinct identities, disappeared a long time ago, swallowed up by the southerly creep of the town. This happened steadily and inexorably, but quite discreetly. What had been woodland and heathland was annexed, not by housing estates, but by large and sometimes rather splendid residences replete with external beaming, extravagant gables, high eaves and big chimneys and dormers, each standing in large gardens secluded among tall trees. They were well spread out, quiet, leafy, exclusive, now fabulously pricey.

  Lower Bourne was a modest, haphazard village scattered along the brook known as the Bourne, which flowed only after sustained rainfall. It had no long history, having been wasteland until some itinerant squatters built shacks there in the middle of the eighteenth century. It had no nucleus, no green, no squire – not even a parson until the church was built in the early 1860s. Its identity was precarious even 150 years ago, except for those who lived there, for whom it was their village.

  Lower Bourne in 1924

  One of those was George Sturt, an unmarried man who lived with his spinster sisters in a plain red-brick cottage standing above Old Church Lane. He was a rung or two above most of the villagers on the social ladder. His father had been a wheelwright in Farnham, and he went to the grammar school in the town, working there for a while afterwards as an assistant. In time he and his brother inherited the wheelwright business, but George Sturt was a reluctant craftsman. He found someone else to run the business while he devoted himself to studying and recording the rural life around him, just as it was being obliterated for good.

  In a series of books – published under the name George Bourne, presumably a nod at the brook that lent its name to the village – he chronicled the lives of the smallholders and artisans he knew. The first, The Bettesworth Book, was subtitled Talks with a Surrey Peasant, and focussed on Fred Bettesworth – real name Fred Grover – who was the Sturts’ gardener. Sturt later produced a sequel about Fred’s wife Lucy. But the book for which he was best known was Change in the Village, which came out in 1912. In it he tried to set down dispassionately and objectively how the village functioned, how its people worked, spoke, thought, took their leisure; what it was about the place that mattered to them and enabled them to be what they were; what was valuable and irreplaceable about it.

  Enclosure had come late to Lower Bourne, because there was little worth enclosing. But come it did, and Sturt – looking back half a century later – saw it as a hammer blow to the old way of life. ‘It was’, he wrote, ‘like knocking the keystone out of an arch . . . it left the people helpless against the influences that had sapped away their interests.’ Being a fair-minded observer, he accepted that at the time no one objected; and that it was actually welcomed because the money the villagers got for selling their shares of the common land enabled them to buy plots and build proper cottages in place of the hovels they had lived in before.

  But the charge sheet listing the evil consequences of enclosure is long. The peasant was ‘shut out from his land and cut off from his resources’. For the first time he was dependent on money and had to wait for others to give him work instead of ‘going for a livelihood to the impartial heath’. Competition had replaced cooperation. The villagers had become servile, their wisdom and particular skills no longer valuable or useful. The village temper had acquired ‘a sort of reserve . . . a want of gaiety . . . a subdued air’. The children were furtive and suspicious, no longer free to play in the woods, fearful of authority. ‘Today,’ Sturt declared, ‘we have a great mental and spiritual destitution . . . we have here, not a distinct group of people, but numerous impoverished people living provisionally from hand to mouth.’

  For all his sympathy and understanding, Sturt displayed a deep and arrogant condescension towards the class below him. His assumption was that he – the literate, educated one – was better able to judge what was happening to them than they were. He was determined to enlist them in his version of what Raymond Williams identified as the myth of modern England: that the transition from a rural to an industrial society represented a kind of Fall, and was the true cause of our sense of dislocation.

  George Sturt loathed the modern world. He hated what had happened to Farnham. He hated the gentrification, the spread of villadom, the disappearance of the countryside under bricks and mortar, the march of technological advance. He convinced himself that the villagers of Lower Bourne had possessed a set of ancient virtues rooted in the soil they worked. They had ‘the country touch . . . the village character was genial, steadfast, self-respecting . . . they had a great fund of strength, a great stability.’ They made the best of it and ‘met their troubles calmly’. They were not resentful of their poverty because ‘they have never learned to look upon the distribution of property that has left them so impoverished as anything other than an inevitable dispensation of Providence.’

  This was not all. The peasant’s relationship with the countryside was instinctive and intimate – ‘he was part of it and it was part of him’. There was an unwritten code, ‘and where it flourished it ultimately led to gracefulness of living and love of what is kindly and comely.’

  No awareness of individualism is permitted to colour Sturt’s obituary on his village. No one speaks for himself or herself. There is no voice to say: I was glad to build my house, I was glad to escape the poverty and isolation, I was glad to work for a wage, I was glad for the chance to better myself, I was glad not to have to toil all day on my plot in the wind and the rain and come back and sit in the dark in my comfortless, damp habitation and contemplate the prospect that this would be my lot until the end of my days.

  It is true that he did not portray village life as being in the least idyllic. He dutifully catalogued the drunkenness, cruelty, incidents of ‘infamous vice’, degrading poverty, ill health, dirt, primitive living conditions, the lack of refinement and mental stimulation and the rest of it. So why do we not hear from those – and they must have existed among Lower Bourne’s 500 or so inhabitants – who wished to exchange that life for another? The reason is that to do so would have been to risk compromising the message. And the message was that they were better off as they were, even if they were too ignorant to realise it.

  *

  Soon after the publication of Change in the Village came the conflict that would turn rural life upside down. In the year of its outbreak, 1914, a reforming and socially progressive politician called Ernest Bennett produced a little book called Problems of Village Life. Bennett examined the living conditions in the village of Potterne, near Devizes in Wiltshire. It comprised one- and two-bedroom tied cottages in a ‘vile and deplorable state’. Forty-four dwellings shared the use of three WCs. Rheumatism, pleurisy, bronchitis and pneumonia were rife. Two-thirds of the children suffered from malnutrition.

  Where George Sturt saw a community ‘taking pride in their skill and hardihood’, Bennett found an ‘absolute mechanical existence . . . the villagers go to bed at eight o’clock to save on oil and candles . . . the careworn faces of the women, the sullen endurance of their husbands, the dreary respectability of the farmer . . . there is so little to refine the mind or cheer the soul in rural England.’ To Ernest Bennett, Sturt’s noble peasant was ‘the poorly paid English labourer, the social product of centuries of repression and neglect’.

  There was no shortage of evidence to support Bennett’s version. Much of it was gathered by H. Rider Haggard – of King Solomon’s Mines fame – who spent most of the years 1901 and 1902 visiting farms and rural settlements across southern England and recorded his findings in two massive volumes entitled Rural England. Rider Haggard found the agricultural depression which had tak
en hold in the 1870s – blamed on rising imports of cheap food from abroad – maintaining its grip. The young men and women, he reported, were leaving the villages for the towns, leaving ‘the dullards, the vicious and the wastrels behind’. Parts of rural England were becoming ‘almost as lonesome as the veld of Africa’. The farm labourer was at the very bottom of the social scale. ‘Feeling this, and having no hope for the future . . . he does not even take the trouble to master his business. He will not learn the old finer arts of husbandry; too often he does as little as he can, and does that little ill.’

  An estimated quarter of a million farm labouring jobs were lost, and for those who stayed on the land, wages were severely depressed. It is hardly surprising that when the Great War began there was a great collective movement to join up and get away from the land. The names of those who did not return are recorded on memorial crosses and plaques on village greens and in churches throughout the country. Those who survived came back to a rural England that would soon be in the throes of convulsive change.

  Overall, one in eight fighting men was killed in the 1914–18 war. But the death rate among the sons of the rural elite, the class of major landowners, was much higher – one in five. Many a proud estate owner, with family roots deep in the soil, no longer had a male heir to shoulder the responsibilities. Steep rises in land and inheritance taxes compounded the problems. Finding and retaining servants in the old way became impossible. Mansions fell into disrepair and were sold off or demolished. Between 1918 and 1922, 7 million acres of agricultural land – a quarter of England’s total – changed hands.

  In the village the established order was tottering. The two figures that had traditionally dominated proceedings – the squire and the parson – were receding into the background. Many villages had never had a squire anyway, but almost all had a priest – albeit often a poor, harassed curate. But the official religion had been in decline for a long time, its authority eroded by widespread indifference and the assaults of non-conformism; it is estimated that as early as 1870 no more than 30 per cent of the rural working population were regularly attending church.

  Forelock-tugging, cap-doffing and deference in general were in retreat post-1918. The extension of the franchise and the growth of trade unionism and radical politics had long since constrained the political power of the ruling class. Elected councils – parish, district and county – had brought a degree of democratisation, even if in practice these bodies were, more often than not, dominated by the established interests. Perhaps more important, the experience of war – men fighting and dying together, sharing the terror and the suffering – had nibbled away at rigid and apparently immutable class divisions. Officers and the ranks had, to a degree, learned to look at each other in a different way, which made a return to the old servility difficult to swallow.

  Furthermore the physical and spiritual isolation of many rural communities was eroding fast. Men who had shed blood and lost comrades on foreign battlefields were not content to shut themselves away back in the village of their birth just because their fathers and grandfathers had done so. Motor cars and buses and the humble bicycle introduced intoxicating visions of freedom and opportunities for amusement and excitement. The cinema and the wireless opened windows into undreamed-of worlds.

  The fabric of the village was also changing. The ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’ campaign and the 1919 Housing Act led to the birth of council housing. To eyes accustomed to old stone and cob and thatch, these stark blocks of brick tacked on to the edge of the village or carelessly deposited on an empty space were unsettling. But they offered comforts – hot running water, for one thing – unheard of in the traditional tied cottage. Although the old cottage-based craft industries like weaving and bootmaking had long since vanished in the face of factory competition, new retail outlets – the cycle repair shop, the tea room, the machine workshop, even the petrol station – joined the village shop to give a commercial heartbeat.

  By 1900 almost all villages had a school, which were now controlled by the new county councils instead of being dependent on local benefactors. Post-1918 the school was increasingly joined by the village hall, which has remained the key pillar of village life ever since.

  The village hall was a very different animal from the reading room or institute of the late Victorian era, provided by some high-minded local philanthropist – often teetotal and with strong religious convictions – in an effort to counter the pernicious influence of the ale-house. In Lower Bourne George Sturt had been instrumental in establishing an Entertainment Club. With his characteristic honesty, he admitted that after a successful start it petered out. The songs the people knew were sung so often that everyone became bored with them. The night school foundered in the face of indifference and ignorance. In Sturt’s words, the club ‘began to depend on the few members with a smattering of middle-class attainments . . . they gave themselves airs of superiority to the crowd, and that was fatal.’ It could not compete with the pub, being unable – in his words – ‘to lend itself to the easy intercourse that tired men enjoy at the public-house’.

  The impulse behind the movement for village halls was the desire to leave a lasting memorial to those who – as Lawrence Weaver, one of its leaders, put it – ‘gave their lives so that the sanctity of their villages, no less than the safety of the nation, might be kept whole and undefiled’. This sometimes caused trouble with the rural elite who argued that the funds raised should be spent on traditional memorial crosses and plaques and stained-glass windows. At Northchapel in Sussex a bitter rift opened between campaigners for a village hall and a clique led by the rector and the well-known playwright Sir Arthur Pinero, which wanted a memorial in the church.

  A more forward-looking example was set at Balcombe, another village in Sussex, by the local bigwigs, Lord and Lady Denman. They funded the transformation of the existing working men’s club into the Victory Hall, able to seat 500 people. The upper walls of the hall were decorated with frescoes by another progressive aristocrat, Neville Lytton, the Earl of Lytton. One depicted the war in which he and 200 Balcombe men had fought. Another, entitled Peace and Hope for the Future, shows local craftsmen at work on the hall amid scenes of dancing and music-making; with Lady Denman herself discussing the plans for the hall with her clerk of the works.

  At that time this remarkable woman had served five years as the first president of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes. Trudie Denman, as she was known, devoted much of her life and energy to good works in war and peace, among which her devotion to the WI was just one. The WI movement, originally imported from Canada, assumed a critical importance in village life which it has never lost. It is impossible to conceive of the village hall – that focal point in the life of so many settlements – without the meetings and the contribution of the WI. In many cases the WI led the way in getting halls built – as in Wolvercote in Oxfordshire, where the ladies started fund-raising, then persuaded the Duke of Marlborough to donate a site, then secured a loan and grant from the National Council of Social Service to fund the building. By 1938 the NCSS had helped establish more than 400 village halls across the country.

  The get-up-and-get-something-done attitude of the WI was one response to the catastrophe of war. Another was an extended exercise in soul-searching by certain intellectuals, who wrestled with the burning question: what had gone wrong with humankind that such horrors could happen? A powerful strand of thought was that as a nation we had taken a spiritual wrong turn by embracing urbanisation and mechanisation, materialism and the consumer society. We had turned our backs on the ‘true’ England, the England of our forefathers.

  And where was that England to be found? The answer was obvious: in our fields and along our hedgerows, in our woods of oak and beech, in our villages – timeless communities where bonds stretching back centuries had been forged; bonds based not on notions of equality or the rivalries of competition, but on the ancient virtues of trust, respect and obligation. A way must be found
to restore that Old England of Alfred and Queen Bess before it was too late.

  The search had actually begun before the Great War. In 1911 Cecil Sharp founded the English Folk Dance Society, having spent several years on a self-appointed mission to rescue England’s great store of folk music and dance from oblivion. Sharp worked tirelessly tracking down, annotating and publishing the traditional music in the unswerving conviction that it represented ‘the faithful expression in musical idiom of the qualities and characteristics of the nation’. Exactly what these qualities were and how they manifested themselves were not precisely defined. It was enough that they belonged to some pre-industrial idyll of peace and harmony rooted in the English countryside.

  Like many visionaries, Sharp was distinctly odd and extremely intolerant of views that deviated from his own. Later commentators have accused him of appropriating and then gentrifying the musical traditions of the rural working class, and patronising the practitioners. This version ignored his close collaboration with a host of authentic musicians and dancers, his heroic rescue of a great body of music and dance that would otherwise have been lost, and his liberating influence on a generation of English composers including Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten.

  Nevertheless, the awkward truth was that, while the tunes and the jigs could be saved from destruction, no amount of high-minded endeavour could restore them to the position in rural life they had once filled. As one of Sharp’s followers in the Lake District noted, no more than a quarter of her dance group were born and bred locally – ‘the farming community always gave us a wide berth . . . the English Folk Dancing Society always appealed to an often rather mobile intelligentsia.’