The Village News

by Tom Fort

  So, if the stream can be brought back to life, why not Chopwell itself?

  16

  VILLAGE OBSERVED

  Luccombe, Somerset

  My bicycle chain snapped on the first hill out of Porlock, so I had little choice but to proceed on foot. It was a nice, soft summer’s day with no rain threatening, so I didn’t mind. I walked down through the ancient oaks of Horner, over the stream and on to the lane which led me to the signpost for Luccombe.

  You would have to have a heart of stone not to be stirred by the situation and appearance of Luccombe. Whichever way you approach, it is the realisation of the dream of the classic English country village. It rests at the bottom of a vale below the bare, brown hump of Dunkery Hill, fitting into it in the same comfortable way that an old dog sleeps in its familiar bed. Bands of woodland stretch across the lower slopes beneath Dunkery Beacon, giving way close to the village to irregular meadows defined by thick, old hedges where sheep graze amid drifts of buttercups and clover.

  It consists of two streets of houses and cottages roughly at right angles to each other, meeting in the centre in a quavery T. The stem, Stoney Street, leads south-west in the direction of Dunkery but shrinks to a bridle path as it reaches the woods. The cross of the T heads north-west then west towards Horner and Porlock, and east towards Wootton Courtenay. But such is Luccombe’s seclusion that all these destinations – not to mention Minehead, which is only four or five miles away to the north as the crow flies – seem remote to the point of being almost theoretical.

  Times past in Luccombe

  The forty or so dwellings of Luccombe are arranged in no systematic way. The majority are seventeenth or eighteenth century in origin, cottages with thick walls of stone rubble and low thatched roofs, although some of the thatch has made way for tiles over time. The only significant nineteenth-century buildings are the school – now doing duty as the village hall – the Rectory, spuriously renamed the Manor House, and a pair of delightful red sandstone cottages at the road junction, which were built in 1897. There are three dull but unobtrusive modern houses on what used to be the Rectory gardens, and other gaps have also been filled. The most noteworthy recent additions to Luccombe were three small Housing Association cottages in Stoney Street, built in the early 1990s in appropriate vernacular style let down – in the stern judgment of the Luccombe Conservation Area Appraisal drawn up by officers of the Exmoor National Park – by their PVC windows.

  But we can forgive the PVC windows and other uninteresting twentieth-century elements, because as a composition Luccombe is well-nigh perfect. Any minor blemishes are more than compensated for just by the glory of its Grade I listed church with its square, embattled towers, its 700-year-old chancel, its 600-year-old nave, its 500-year-old aisle, its ancient stone glowing with a slightly pink flush in summer sunshine, standing majestically in its grassy graveyard in the company of Luccombe’s departed. The Church of St Mary the Virgin stands tall and dominant, as it was meant to, but the rest of the village is modestly and comfortably embedded in its setting among big, sheltering trees – oak, ash, copper beech, sweet chestnut; the dwellings looking modestly out from behind grassy banks, low walls, hedges and shrubs.

  The composition is enhanced by a tiny brook that runs down beside Stoney Street and then turns left along the road to Horner. The brook is contained within steep, stony embankments thick with ferns, and is crossed at intervals by miniature stone bridges. An iron railing keeps it company, set at a convenient height for leaning on and worn smooth by generations of Luccombites lingering to contemplate the cheerful progress of their watercourse.

  There is very little that is regular or repetitive in Luccombe. The dwellings stand where someone chose to put them long ago, at angles to each other and the road. The roof line goes up and down and up and down, thatch then tile then thatch again. There are square chimneys, rectangular chimneys and some round chimneys. The walls are rough, bulging and crooked. No vision of how a village should be arranged has been applied here, perhaps because Luccombe has no big house and never had a resident squire. It is a medley of expressions in brick and stone of different tastes, different means and different needs, which over time has grown together to fit pretty exactly the conventional notion of what a West Country village should look like.

  It looks perfect. But it is worth considering what it does and does not have. It has its church and its village hall. It has no pub and never had one. It once had a school, but not for a long time. It once had a village shop, but not for a long time. It was once lived in by people who also worked there, and they all knew each other, but no more.

  *

  Towards the end of the Second World War Luccombe came under the microscope in a way no village before or since has experienced. It was chosen for treatment by Mass Observation, the organisation set up in the late 1930s to document everyday life among ordinary working-class people. The ambition of MO was high-minded. Its founders – the anthropologist and ornithologist Tom Harrisson, the Communist poet Charles Madge and the film-maker Humphrey Jennings – believed that one of the chief reasons for conflict and rivalry between nations was that the voice of the people had been drowned out by governments and power groups and newspapers pursuing their own agendas. Their mission was to counterbalance the propaganda and misinformation by raising awareness of how working families lived, what mattered to them, what their opinions were. They called it ‘the science of ourselves’, ‘an anthropology of our own people’.

  A small army of volunteers was recruited to do the observing. They were not trained – several were poets like Charles Madge, including William Empson, Stephen Spender and Madge’s wife, Kathleen Raine. Others – Tom Driberg, Woodrow Wyatt and Richard Crossman – later became Labour MPs. The method was to send one or two observers to a specific location for an extended period with instructions to watch people as discreetly as possible and eavesdrop on their conversations, and then to inquire about their views.

  The main effort was concentrated on industrial towns and cities, and Luccombe was the only village to receive the MO treatment. It was to have been the first in a projected series under the generic title British Ways of Life, intended to have a wider public appeal than the earlier compilations of data. The idea was to gather material in the usual MO way, but then to have it edited and written up by an established author and published with attractive illustrations with a view to making money. Exmoor Village was published in 1947; probably because it failed commercially it was not followed up and the series did not materialise.

  The established author originally commissioned to produce the text was Compton Mackenzie, who had achieved critical success with his novel Sinister Street and would hit the jackpot with Whisky Galore. But for some reason the task was switched to an Australian poet and music critic, W. J. Turner. Turner – remembered now, if at all, for his mystical poem ‘Romance’ with its refrain of ‘Chimborazo, Cotopaxi’ – was an established figure in London interwar literary life, much admired by Yeats and Sassoon among others. But he was a strange choice for a book about rural life in Somerset – as James Hinton says in his history of MO, The Mass Observers, it is ‘an odd mixture of pedestrian detail and nostalgia’.

  Turner had no part in collecting the material, and is believed to have visited Luccombe only once, which may explain the hit-and-miss nature of his judgments on it. Most of the groundwork was undertaken by a young woman called Desiree Ivey, who had not previously been involved in MO and seems, from her communications with her handler in London, to have had a very sketchy idea of what was expected of her. She spent the best part of two months in the village, but naturally enough everyone knew from the start who she was and what she was doing, and considered it most peculiar. ‘Some of the detail you ask for is very personal,’ she protested to London at one point, ‘and the people resent it.’

  Towards the end of her stay in Luccombe she was joined by an experienced MO volunteer, Nina Masel (later Nina Hibbin), who helped knock the material De
siree Ivey had gathered into shape. Nina Masel was a dedicated Communist who had previously worked on an MO project in the East End of London during the Blitz. But there is no obvious sign of the story of Luccombe being overtly touched or coloured by a Marxist perspective – although the absence of the rector or any gentry from the action could perhaps be seen as a subtler form of manipulation.

  But overall the picture presented of the village belongs to an earlier school of thinking about country life, in which it is invested with a noble innocence, as if it represented some kind of eternal truth about Man’s relationship with the land. One of the several oddities is the almost complete absence of any awareness of the war, which at the time the material for Exmoor Village was being drawn up was approaching its final crisis. It is as if there was no war, or not one that had an impact on village life. None of the men are mentioned as being away on war duty, yet there must have been some, even though the great majority of farm labourers were designated as ‘reserved occupation’ and continued to work on the land.

  ‘In this Exmoor village,’ the preamble to the book states, ‘we may see country life very much as it was hundreds of years ago.’ It is a life dictated by the demands of the land. Apart from the agricultural workforce of four farmers and four farm labourers, Luccombe has three carters, a carpenter, a mason, a house-painter, a haulier, a timber-cutter, two gardeners and two men employed by the council to mend the roads. There is a total of thirty-one cottages housing a population of ninety-four. The equine element is almost as important as the human – every man and boy (no mention of women and girls in this context) can handle a horse.

  Mrs Baker, aged seventy-eight, runs the village shop, opening and closing it when she feels like it. There is a post box but no post office. There are five homes with private telephone lines; all but three have a wireless set, but very few a flushing lavatory and almost none a bath.

  And so the detail is piled up, relentlessly and impersonally. All but four households take a daily newspaper, but none has the Times, Telegraph or Daily Graphic. Few people go regularly to church. The parish hall – described as a cold ex-Army hut – is rarely used. Social life, such as it is, takes place in the street or on the doorstep. The teacher at the school, Miss Sims, keeps out of village life. A policeman comes once a week. No one discusses politics. The principal entertainment is the local stag hunt, which the villagers follow on foot.

  The overall impression is close to unreal – of a place magically detached and isolated from its neighbours, its region, from the country as a whole, and from the world outside. That impression is enhanced by the photographs used to break up the spare, sober text. These were taken by John Hinde, a painter as well as a well-known photographer (and, for several years, a circus performer) and are far from being casual, spontaneous snaps. They are carefully composed studies of village scenes or villagers engaged in mundane tasks or activities – children dancing, a mother tending to an infant by the fire, the interior of the village shop – but reproduced in rich, almost gorgeous, colour, as if intended as backdrops for a theatrical, cinematic or operatic production. The front cover displays a vista of Luccombe set in its rolling landscape of woods and fields, with a glimpse of the sea in the far distance. It is like the vision of a promised land; you would not guess that this was a country at war, emerging from a struggle for its very existence, soon to have a Labour government, on the verge of social and technological transformation.

  Instead we are invited to accept the implausible proposition that Luccombe is representative of the working country village all over England; and that this life exists as a kind of eternal, timeless counterweight to the frenzy of change going on elsewhere. ‘In a world where so much changes so rapidly as almost to obliterate memory,’ the concluding valediction goes, ‘it is good to think that Time has a foothold in Luccombe; where the continuity of the life of individual men and their families imparts a sense of permanence and duration to all things.’

  This amazing piece of make-believe could surely have been written only by someone who was drunk, or who had no care about what they wrote, or – most likely – knew nothing at first-hand about Luccombe in particular, and next to nothing in general about agriculture and rural conditions in England. In fact, of course, it was not ‘typical’ of anywhere else. Its location and its history – in which W. J. Turner took no more than a cursory interest – had determined both its physical reality and, to a great extent, the way it functioned.

  In Domesday the Manor of Luccombe is recorded as having a population of ‘18 villeins, 6 bordiers, 2 serfs, 1 horse, 6 swine, 100 sheep, 50 goats.’ It passed through the hands of various owners over the next few centuries until it came into the possession of Sir Thomas Acland in the middle of the eighteenth century. He was the 7th baronet and was already the owner of estates at Killerton near Exeter and Petherton Park, on the edge of the Quantocks, when he married Elizabeth Dyke, who had inherited the 12,000-acre Holnicote Estate, including Luccombe. But Luccombe was well away from the heart of the estate, Holnicote House; and anyway Sir Thomas Acland’s principal residence continued to be Killerton (with its modest 6000 acres). His use of, and affection for, Holnicote arose from the exceptional opportunities it afforded for indulging his passion, which was hunting the red deer of Exmoor. He maintained packs of hounds at Holnicote itself, and at two of his wife’s other properties on Exmoor, making use of one or other of them according to where that day’s chase would take place. It was said of the 7th baronet that he ‘hunted the country in almost princely style . . . respected and beloved by all the countryside’.

  The passion for pursuing and killing stags burned with almost equal brightness in the breasts of the next two Sir Thomas Aclands, but died down somewhat with succeeding generations. They retained the estates, though, and encouraged others to keep up the old hunting tradition, and the semi-feudal life went on much as before. In politics, in contrast, the Aclands inclined increasingly to the radical. The 11th baronet, also Sir Thomas, succeeded his father in 1871 and served initially as a Tory MP and later – for twenty years – as a Liberal MP, in which capacity he campaigned energetically for agricultural and educational reform. He was succeeded in 1898 by his eldest son, another Thomas, who also became a Liberal MP.

  In 1917, two years before his death, this Sir Thomas Acland took the momentous step of handing over the Holnicote Estate on a 500-year lease to the National Trust. According to the chairman of the Trust’s executive committee at the time, the Earl of Plymouth, he did so ‘to safeguard this beautiful country from such dangers as might arise in future from disfigurements or injury through building development or otherwise.’ His decision was taken in conjunction with his brother Arthur – who succeeded him to become the 13th baronet – and his nephew Francis, who became the 14th baronet. But it was Sir Francis’s eldest son, Richard – who succeeded to the baronetcy in 1939 – who proved to be the most radical Acland of them all.

  Richard Acland was elected as Liberal MP for Barnstaple in 1935. But he drifted left, and in 1942 left the Liberals to form a new party, known as Common Wealth, with J. B. Priestley. Common Wealth was an overtly Socialist grouping, which proclaimed its core principles as Common Ownership, Morality in Politics, and Vital Democracy. In keeping with the first of these Acland – by now Sir Richard – transferred complete ownership of both Holnicote and Killerton to the National Trust in 1943.

  His subsequent career was varied, to put it mildly. He stood as a Common Wealth candidate in the 1945 election at Putney and was defeated; defected to Labour for whom he fought and won a by-election at Gravesend in 1947; defected from Labour in 1955 in protest at the decision to support nuclear defence; fought Gravesend as an independent and lost. He subsequently became a teacher of mathematics at Wandsworth Grammar School, was a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and spent fifteen years as a lecturer at St Luke’s College of Education in Exeter, which his great-grandfather had helped establish.

  As no Acland had ever lived
in or near Luccombe or had anything much to do with it, the fortunes and activities of the various baronets were regarded with indifference there, and the transfer of ownership made no difference to their daily lives. The National Trust ran the village in much the same way as the Acland bureaucracy: dutifully with regard to the maintenance of the buildings and the land, but with no lively concern as to how it might adapt to a fast-changing world.

  Horner, the hamlet just to the west, developed a commercial dimension in the form of teashops, a caravan site and an open farm where visitors could pat the sheep and watch cows being milked. Luccombe, by contrast, remained stuck in its time warp. The school closed in 1946 having taught a grand total of 303 pupils in its 54-year history. It became the village hall in succession to the previous parish hall which had rotted away and eventually blew down. The Acland ban on a village pub was upheld by the National Trust, so that thirsty villagers had to tramp two miles to Wootton Courtenay for a pint.

  Some visitors did come to Luccombe because it was so quaint and pretty; but they did not linger because there was nowhere to linger, and they did not spend money because there was nowhere to spend money apart from at a couple of B&Bs and the sparsely stocked village shop. Meanwhile the agricultural revolution so conspicuously ignored in Exmoor Village spread its reach even to this distant corner of Somerset.

  *

  Forty years after being exposed to the attentions of Mass Observation, Luccombe found itself in the public eye again – this time through the wrong end of a TV camera. The publication of Exmoor Village had been a bruising experience for some of those featured in the book, who felt that they had been tricked into cooperating and objected strongly to what they saw as the violation of their privacy (‘all the other people in the other villages got to know about our private affairs and that’s not right,’ one complained). They even consulted a solicitor about taking legal action against the publishers, although this came to nothing.