The Village News

by Tom Fort

  Unlike Askrigg/Darrowby, Ambridge is entirely fictional yet feels rooted in a recognisable version of reality. Over the years the makers of The Archers have cunningly engineered spurious connections with the real world – for instance, by persuading public figures from Princess Margaret to Sir Bradley Wiggins to make guest appearances. Another insidious ploy has been to provide a back story for the village itself. This achieved a high point of absurdity with the publication in 1982 of Ambridge: An English Village Through the Ages purportedly written by two of the characters – Jennifer Aldridge and John Tregorran. Published in the name of the Borchester Press (proprietor Jack Woolley) it contained sections about prehistoric Ambridge, Roman Ambridge, Domesday Ambridge and even the deserted village of Ambridge. There were Ambridge recipes supplied by Shula Archer and Caroline Bone – who also did the sketches – and a collection of artfully aged photographs said to have come originally from Doris Archer, one of them of her mother, Lisa Forrest, captioned ‘A Borsetshire Beauty’.

  This farrago was actually cobbled together by the programme’s editor at the time, William Smethurst. But its true origin was too mundane to be advertised, so instead it became a storyline in the soap opera. The research undertaken by the two authors – each married to someone else – became a bond between them. As surely as night follows day in Ambridge, shared interest in Roman pot shards begets troubling intimacy. Before long, tongues were wagging and marital relations were under strain. In this case it took the abrupt departure of the Tregorrans to begin a new life in Bristol for peace to be restored.

  *

  The makers of The Archers have never sought to deny that fictional Ambridge has a real-life twin in the Worcestershire village of Inkberrow, and that the focal point of Ambridge life, the Bull, bears more than a passing resemblance to Inkberrow’s pub, the Old Bull. How much business has come the Old Bull’s way as a result of the connection is anyone’s guess, but it has long been a place of pilgrimage for Archers fans.

  It could all, however, have been very different. The seed of the idea that would be realised in The Archers was sown, not in Worcestershire but on the other side of the country, in the flat, fertile land of Lincolnshire. In 1946 Godfrey Baseley, a BBC producer based in Birmingham and specialising in farming programmes, attended an agricultural show in Nottingham where he met a Lincolnshire farmer, Henry Burtt. Burtt lived at Dowsby Hall, a fine Georgian house near the village of Rippingale, just off the A15. He farmed the land around Rippingale, specialising in growing seed crops, particularly seed potatoes. He was one of very few producers of mustard and cress, and supplied the blackcurrants that went into Ribena.

  Burtt was a good contact for Baseley, who had been charged with getting more farmers and country people listening to the radio and presenting agriculture in a sympathetic light. He invited the producer for an extended stay at Dowsby Hall, and he and his son Stephen were interviewed for a programme called Farm Visit which was broadcast in 1946. Two years later the BBC organised a conference in the Council Chamber in Birmingham to discuss farming and radio. Baseley and Burtt were both there, and at the end of a session of routine exchanges the Lincolnshire farmer stood up and said: ‘I’ve listened very carefully to all that has been said and discussed but it seems to me that what is really wanted is a farming Dick Barton.’

  Dick Barton was the radio hit of the time, a daily dose of suspense and derring-do in which the end of each episode was contrived to leave listeners on the edge of their seats gasping for the next improbable denouement. Burtt’s suggestion was greeted with laughter in Birmingham, but when Baseley returned to Dowsby Hall to explore it further, the possibilities began to dawn on him. He was conducted around the farm, listening intently as Burtt and his son explained the complexity and cost of the operation and how fine were the margins between success and failure. At some point they lunched at the local pub – the Bull at Rippingale.

  Baseley went away to chew on the idea. Eventually he commissioned the writers of Dick Barton, Ted Mason and Geoffrey Webb, to produce some trial scripts on the theme of working life in the country. In 1951 the BBC bosses, never at ease with the breathless sensationalism of Dick Barton, decided that it should be replaced as the daily serial by Godfrey Baseley’s creation. The Archers rapidly built up a huge following, and Baseley served as its editor for the next twenty-two years.

  Owing to its convenient proximity to the BBC’s studios in Birmingham and even more convenient proximity to Baseley’s home, Inkberrow – then still an old-fashioned farming village – became Ambridge by proxy. Coaches would bring parties out from Birmingham hoping to meet Dan and Doris and Phil and Grace (before her tragic incineration); and the BBC’s publicity department would arrange photo opportunities at the Old Bull in which members of the cast – who never looked in the least like farming people – brandished their pints of Shires.

  No one spared a second thought for poor old Rippingale’s crucial part in inspiring the nation’s best-loved radio soap opera until a retired journalist living in the village, Jim Latham, dug up the story. He did his best to promote the Archers link for the benefit of the village. In November 2013 the Bull (the Rippingale Bull) put on an Archers Day, with a talk from Mr Latham and a themed lunch. The menu included the Lincolnshire bangers, mash and peas that Godfrey Baseley allegedly had when he lunched with Henry Burtt, Clarrie Grundy’s Harvester Rabbit, Freda Fry’s Rhubarb and Ginger Crumble, and – as a starter – Stilton, Celery and Pear Soup ‘as served in Nelson’s Wine Bar’.

  Alas, Rippingale’s attempt to supplant Inkberrow as the true home of the Archers, Grundys, Woolleys, Aldridges and the rest of them came to nothing. When I visited the village in September 2015 the Bull was closed and had evidently been that way for some time. It was dark and silent and the sign outside had lost its ‘u’. But there is evidently more to Rippingale than its Archers connection, and I’m delighted to say that by Christmas the pub had reopened under new management.

  13

  LARK RISING

  Juniper Hill, Oxfordshire

  As self-appointed keeper of the nation’s apprehension of itself, the BBC has played a major part in shaping perceptions – or misconceptions – of rural life. All Creatures Great and Small presented one version, The Archers an alternative. And there have been others.

  A prime specimen, a generation ago, was Miss Marple, in which the bird-like Joan Hickson poked her genteel beak into assorted improbable crimes in the village of St Mary Mead, a confection of thatch, beam, mellow brick and flower-filled cottage gardens located in an entirely mythical, time-detached rural England (it was actually filmed in Nether Wallop, Hampshire). A little earlier came the vastly popular To The Manor Born, the manor in question being on the edge of another picture-book village, the fictional Grantleigh (both To The Manor and ITV’s recent snob soap opera, Downton Abbey, observed a similar dramatic distancing of the grand house from the supporting, indistinctly realised village community).

  A more recent BBC foray into an imagined rural setting was The Vicar of Dibley, a gentle farce or medley of farcical incidents revolving around the new woman priest and members of her congregation in an Oxfordshire parish. Filmed in Turville in Buckinghamshire – which has done long service as ‘the quintessential English village’ in the absurdist Chilterns crime caper Midsomer Murders and innumerable period fictions – Dibley owed its enormous popularity to the casting of Britain’s best-loved farceuse, Dawn French, as the eponymous cleric. Although not even the BBC’s publicity department would have dared to claim it as an authentic portrait of village life, the spinning out of its central comic premise – a big, jolly woman with a big smile and a big voice being in charge of a village’s spiritual welfare – did depend on exploring her relationship with the villagers. That Dibley should have lasted thirteen years and been regularly voted among the nation’s favourite sitcoms is testament to the ingenuity of its writers and the appeal of its irrepressibly mirthful protagonist.

  Before Dibley’s run was over, the BBC
commissioned a period drama based on Flora Thompson’s classic account of rural life in north Oxfordshire at the end of the nineteenth century, Lark Rise to Candleford. The decision was taken early on that the title should be used as a flag of convenience, and that the contents of what had been a trilogy of books were to be regarded as a self-service store of characters and incidents from which the writers were to help themselves as and when they pleased. Faithfulness to the original was not a prime concern.

  Thus, even though the stretch of countryside depicted in the books was comparatively unchanged since the late nineteenth century, the location was shifted to Wiltshire, which could be relied upon to provide the sort of conventional rustic setting expected by audiences brought up on endless Jane Austen adaptations. The appearance of the original village was evidently not quaint or picturesque enough to satisfy expectations, so the necessary mellow old brick and thatch dwellings were knocked up out of fibreglass and tacked on to the ends of some existing farm buildings. Small liberties were taken with some of the original names – for example Timms, the surname of the main character, Laura, was for some reason upgraded to Timmins.

  The decision to import Dawn French from Dibley into Lark Rise sealed its fate. She exchanged clerical habit and pudding-basin haircut for tumbling locks, rustic hat, long skirts and a selection of blouses cut to display generous expanses of chest and cleavage. In the book her character, Caroline Arless, makes only one significant, albeit memorable appearance – ‘a tall, fine, upstanding woman with flashing dark eyes, hair like crinkled black wire, and cheeks the colour of a ripe apricot.’ She is attended by a multitude of her children – ‘she was so charged with sex vitality’, Thompson wrote, ‘that with her, all subjects of conversation led to it.’ On TV her output of offspring is reduced to four, her husband becomes an (absent) fisherman, her role is expanded to exploit Dawn French’s star quality (and availability) to the full, and the original character vanishes from sight.

  It is significant that in the original, Laura’s move from Lark Rise to work in the post office at Candleford Green occurs at the start of the third volume, whereas in the television version it is placed at the start of the first of what would become forty episodes. The events used by the scriptwriters come mostly from the second and third volumes of the trilogy. Invented extra characters and all manner of additional storylines – many in the form of love interests for all and sundry – are thrown in. Flora Thompson’s first volume, Lark Rise, figures little. Yet it was this, with its unsparing, unsentimental, loving and lyrical depiction of a place and the hard lives it sustained, that won the status of classic for the trilogy. Thompson herself was well aware that it stood above the other two, which she referred to disparagingly as the ‘light little gossipy books around it’.

  In spirit the BBC ‘adaptation’ has almost nothing in common with Flora Thompson’s masterpiece. It is a period soap opera, one more in a long line of good-looking contributions to what Richard Mabey, in his marvellously sympathetic and perceptive study of Flora Thompson’s life and work (Dreams of the Good Life), referred to as ‘the amorphous comforting mythology of Old England’. The TV show, Mabey observed, had ‘floated free from its physical moorings and its mortal creator’.

  But that distortion of her work had begun long before BBC scriptwriters got their hands on it. The three volumes – Lark Rise, Over to Candleford and Candleford Green – were published separately in 1939, 1941 and 1943 respectively. They were well received individually (Sir Humphrey Milford, head of Oxford University Press, who acted as midwife to the first volume, said he regarded it and Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History as the two most important books he published in his thirty-two years in charge). But it was not until they were brought together under the inspired collective title Lark Rise to Candleford that they were hailed as a modern classic. An important factor was the introduction commissioned by the OUP from the high priest of rustic fundamentalism, H. J. Massingham.

  Flora Thompson

  Massingham observed no scruple in claiming Thompson’s work for his own back-to-the-earth agenda. Instead of seeing it for what it was – a closely observed, clear-sighted account of the lives of very different individuals bound by their situation in a particular place at a particular time –Massingham presented it as a generalised account of ‘the irreparable calamity of the English fields . . . the utter ruin of a close-knit organic society with a richly interwoven and traditional culture.’ He asserted, without any foundation at all, that Thompson had described this ‘at the very moment when the rich, glowing life and glowing culture of an immemorial design for living was passing from them’.

  Massingham’s introduction continued to feature in the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Lark Rise for more than sixty years, until it was replaced by a very much more accurate and sensible one by Richard Mabey. By then, however, the appropriation of Flora Thompson’s masterpiece to the myth of the pre-Fall rural England of peace and innocence had been cemented by the publication in the 1980s of The Illustrated Lark Rise to Candleford, which sold not far short of a million copies. The text in this lavish production was severely pruned to make way for the illustrations, several of which were of paintings by the popular Victorian watercolourist, Helen Allingham.

  Allingham was something of a phenomenon in her heyday, famed for her innumerable depictions of English country cottages characterised by an intensely sugary fin-de-siècle sentimentality. Her cottages were old, low and crooked, with fat chimneys and small windows; often thatched, sometimes tiled, usually beamed, some of mellow brick, some of stone, some of rough cob; almost always enclosed in bloom-bursting gardens and shaded by spreading oaks or elms, often with blossoming or fruit-laden apple and pear trees close by and geese and chickens pecking outside the white wicket gate. The scene would be bathed in a misty, golden haze bestowed by a hidden but fruitful sun. The inhabitants of this Arcadia are outside: happy children at play, maids in bonnets and long skirts, matrons with baskets containing home-made cheese and honey over their arms. There are no interiors for Mrs Allingham, no studies of old men broken by toil sitting by meagre fires, no drunks, no paupers, no hint of disease or want or unkindness; above all, no hint of individuality.

  *

  Flora Thompson’s triumph was to capture in words everything that Mrs Allingham with her brushes left out. She has been criticised by earnest academics for averting her eyes from the ugly side of working-class rural life: death, disease, cruelty, intolerance and so on. But as Richard Mabey pointed out, this is to misread her intent. She was not interested in writing a social history of rural conditions in north Oxfordshire in the 1890s. Her purpose was to produce literature: an imaginative realisation of a place and its people to achieve a deeper, more powerful truth.

  She succeeded because she could write, and because she had the true creative impulse. She is much more novelist than historian or memoirist; hence her inspired use of the literary device of casting an imagined version of her eleven-year-old self as observer and chief player in the action. She calls this girl Laura; as Flora Thompson she is left free to comment and elucidate, to be the authorial presence. The result is a wonderfully rich and multilayered texture of storytelling.

  It is interesting to compare her with Miss Read: both female, both bookish girls, both evidently reserved emotionally, neither displaying much sign of strong attachment to their parents, both making conscious decisions at an early age to leave the place of their childhood behind, both infrequent visitors in later life, both mining the experiences of childhood much later to create partially imagined worlds.

  The big difference – apart from in terms of talent – was social class. Miss Read, from a modest but unmistakably middle-class background, wrapped the past in the soft tissue paper of nostalgia, distilling the elements that suited her ideal of rural life and discarding the rest. Flora Thompson belonged fully in the life she observed so minutely – as her first biographer, Margaret Lane, wrote, ‘she was able to write the annals of the poor because
she was one of them.’ It is true that there was a small but significant social distinction between her and others in that her father, as a stonemason, was the only able-bodied man in the village who did not work on the land. But in the day-to-day existence, the lives of the Timms family were intertwined with those of their neighbours. For better or for worse, they were all in it together.

  ‘The hamlet was in a state of siege,’ Thompson wrote, ‘and its chief assailant was Want.’ But although they were all poor, they were not paupers. There was work for all the men on the farm, and for the boys who would join them as soon as they passed school age. At that same age the girls went away into domestic service, so as not to be burdens on the family. All the men earned the same, and all the wives were engaged in the same struggle to make ends meet. ‘Their favourite virtue,’ Thompson recorded, ‘was endurance. Not to flinch from pain or hardship was their ideal.’

  But this uniformity of circumstance did not make them all the same. ‘In themselves they differed,’ she wrote, ‘as other men of their day differed in country and town. Some were intelligent, some were slow on the uptake; some were kind and helpful, others selfish; some vivacious, some taciturn. If a stranger had gone there looking for the conventional Hodge he would not have found him.’

  She was equally insistent on the particularity of the place – Lark Rise as she called it, Juniper Hill in reality. It was unusual in having no extended history; indeed had not existed at all until the middle of the eighteenth century when the Poor Law overseers in neighbouring Cottisford raised a rate to build two cottages for the poor one-and-a-half miles away on what was open heathland. Two more cottages appeared soon after, and those four acted as a magnet for others, so that over the next hundred years Juniper Hill grew into a haphazard but coherent settlement of about thirty dwellings.