The Village News

by Tom Fort

  So it is perhaps slightly surprising that the village should have agreed to be invaded over the summer of 1987 by a film crew from the independent network HTV. It may well be that the impetus to welcome the TV people came from the National Trust in return for a promise of favourable publicity for its humane and far-sighted stewardship of the Holnicote Estate. It was also the case that quite a number of those involved in the book had died or moved away by then, and that certain financial inducements – to support the church and the village hall, for instance – were on offer. Whatever the factors, the result was four half-hour programmes with the same title as the 1947 book, which were shown on HTV in 1988 and later on Channel 4.

  They were fronted by a well-known presenter and journalist, Dan Farson (less well known as an alcoholic and predatory homosexual). At the start of each programme he is seen leaving the Groucho Club in London in a well-filled lightweight suit and heading by taxi, train and bus for the infinitely remote Somerset location, rather in the manner of an explorer of old setting off for darkest Africa. Much of the first episode is taken up by a curious dramatisation of the original Mass Observation material staged in Luccombe village hall and performed by two professional actors with a ruddy-faced Farson providing the narration. The atmosphere in the hall is one of somewhat forced hilarity, with gales of raucous laughter greeting such absurdities as ‘What do people listen to on the radio in Luccombe?’ and ‘Is anyone courting?’ and ‘Where is Lovers Lane?’ Other events – including the stealing of a knife and the unmasking of the culprit – are recounted to the perceptible discomfort of the white-haired old folk involved.

  Nina Masel, the MO observer who was latterly involved in the Luccombe project, was also in the audience, a small, curly haired, twinkly eyed woman then in her late sixties. In an interview with Farson she dismissed his suggestion that the book had idealised the village. She said that for her – recovering from the experience of recording the impact of the Blitz on east London – her stay in rural Somerset had indeed been idyllic. She had been aware, she said, of deep divisions in the village society, and she agreed that these were not explored in the book. She was also clearly troubled by the question of whether the intrusion she had participated in had been justified, and had no clear answer.

  Many of the other interviews were stilted and unrevealing, others overextended. Some Luccombites clearly did not really wish to talk, others had too much to say for themselves, and overall the programmes come over as an awkward mixture of social documentary and rustic sentimentality. Members of the Gande family – originally wartime evacuees from London – received a disproportionate amount of airtime; interestingly in the case of the mother, Louise; tediously in the case of her son Terry, playing up to his self-appointed role as long-haired, bearded, singlet-wearing village rebel.

  Dominant themes were the absence of anything happening in Luccombe and the loosening of the ties that had bound the village together. Apart from a tiny handful still working on the land, everyone went to work elsewhere. The school had gone, the weekly village dance had gone, the drama group had gone (though its surviving members were persuaded to reconvene in wigs and rouge for the benefit of the HTV cameras). Hardly anyone went to church any more and judging from the gloomy assessment of the couple running the village shop, it too was heading for the scrapheap.

  The final programme attempted rather half-heartedly to look ahead over the next forty years. Some Luccombites, including the rector, expressed the fear that it was doomed to be turned into a holiday centre. Shots of overflowing car parks and flourishing commercial enterprises in Horner were contrasted with Luccombe’s somnolence and lack of amenities. The best sense was talked by an elderly, bespectacled farmer, Bill Partridge. He pointed out that as long as the National Trust maintained its policy of not making cottages in Luccombe available for holiday lets, discouraging the opening of a pub and making it as difficult as possible to start up anything resembling a teashop or other moneymaking enterprise, it would be difficult for it to become a holiday village. But people would still want to live there. ‘They’ll be absorbed as they always have been,’ Mr Partridge observed sagely.

  *

  Thirty years after the HTV series Luccombe is as lovely and unspoiled as ever. There is still no pub, and the shop is but a memory. There is no rector either; services at St Mary the Virgin are conducted by the vicar from Porlock. The village hall is decently maintained but the noticeboard outside gave no indication that a lively programme of events was in the offing. The church fete, prominently featured on television, has fallen by the wayside, as has the flower show.

  Most contentious has been the forced erasing from the Exmoor scene of stag-hunting. In 1990 the National Trust banned it on the Holnicote Estate (and all its other properties) in direct contravention of Sir Richard Acland’s stated wishes and intentions. The hunt was Luccombe’s great day out, bringing together all classes from the toffs on horseback to the ordinary folk in cars or on foot. It had been gleefully seized upon in the TV series and depicted as a comical relic of the feudal past amid a welter of clichés about red coats and red faces and frequent emptyings of the stirrup cup. But the outlawing of a sport that had been woven into the fabric of Exmoor life for centuries was bitterly opposed by most local people and remains considerably resented to this day.

  My first encounter was with a woman living in one of the new Housing Association cottages in Stoney Street. She told me Luccombe was the most unfriendly place she’d ever lived in. Nothing ever happened, no one ever talked to her and after being a regular churchgoer for a while, she had lost her faith and was about to lose the cottage because she couldn’t afford the modest rent.

  There was something about her testimony that made me slightly dubious about her reliability as a witness. I went and introduced myself to a couple who had moved into the village from High Wycombe for no other reason than its beauty. They gave me tea and home-made cake and told me it was paradise, which I suppose it might well appear to be after High Wycombe.

  For a broader view I dropped in on Eric Rowlands, the historian of Luccombe. I had already obtained and closely studied his admirable guide to the village’s history and buildings. One of the most characteristic of these is his own cottage along the road to Wootton Courtenay, where he was born and still lives. I found him gently saddened by the way the life of the community he had known had slowly drained away. It was still very much a working village when he was a lad. The men had work in and around the village, there were young families, everyone knew each other and got together to do things. But now everyone had aged or moved away, and the young families had not been replaced by new young families. It was never a paradise, Mr Rowlands said, but it had something and that something was gone.

  What has not gone is the farming – in the sense that the farms that were in operation when Exmoor Village was published are still farms today. East Luccombe Farm, on the edge of the village towards Porlock, was at that time let to a Fred Partridge, who had taken it over from his father-in-law. It then passed to the Bill Partridge featured several times in the HTV programmes; he continued to live there until his death in 2013 at the age of ninety-six, by which time one of his daughters had assumed the tenancy. I found her at home at the farmhouse, which sits back from the yard and its glorious set of thatched outbuildings. She was hard-pressed by calls on her time. She said she could spare me ten minutes, and ten minutes is what I got.

  I wanted to know if the National Trust were good landlords. She didn’t say that they were and she didn’t say that they weren’t, but I had the firm impression that dealing with them was one of the more taxing trials in her life. The viability of the farm depended to a significant degree on an animal feed business that her father had established many years before in one of the barns; but the Trust, I was told, had persisted in restricting the terms of the lease so that it could not be defined as a retail enterprise and therefore could not sell directly to the public. In the old days there was a local Trust agent whose
ear could be bent with local gripes, but now she had to deal with the central bureaucracy which liked to remind her that the Trust had to operate as a business and not a charity. ‘That’s not why the Aclands handed it over,’ she said bluntly.

  I asked her if this was the life she would have chosen. She had left home early and spent years away, and then come back to help her father after her mother was overtaken by dementia. She looked thoughtful. Maybe I would anyway, she said. Her son, who had trained as a vet, had already committed to taking the farm over from her. So at least it’ll stay in the family, she said. Then she said: your ten minutes is up.

  I called on another Luccombite, born and bred like Eric Rowlands. She was in her early eighties and had featured in both exposures of village life. In the book she appeared twice in John Hinde’s photographic compositions – in the village shop, a little girl with neat flaxen hair accompanied by a boy, and with her grandfather holding up a flower from his garden. There was also a reference to her going outside the cottage where she lived with her grandparents at night, in her nightdress. Even now, seventy years later, she was indignant: ‘That was not true, they would never have allowed it. That book should not have been written.’

  Her indignation over the intrusion probably explains her reaction in one of the TV programmes to being accosted by Dan Farson and asked what she thought of the book. She ducks away, saying in a palpably uncomfortable way that she doesn’t want to talk to him (it does not explain, however, why the makers of the series saw fit to include the brief encounter).

  But she seemed happy enough to chat to me in the little sitting room in her snug, thick-walled cottage. It was true that there were no more than a handful of the old village people left that she knew. But she had wonderful neighbours who did so much for her, and her son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren were just down the road, and she had more family over in Minehead and Taunton. What about her landlords, the Trust? I asked. ‘Oh they’re very good,’ she said. ‘They put in a new wood burner and fixed the Rayburn for me. I just have to ask and they come round.’

  I asked her if she had been happy in Luccombe. Oh yes, she said, smiling brightly. It wasn’t any good being sad about the way things used to be. ‘It’s the way things are now that matters,’ she said. ‘This is my home, the only one I’ve ever known. Why would I ever have wanted a different one?’

  Then her face darkened. ‘But I did not like that book.’

  17

  HIGH IDEALS

  New Earswick, North Yorkshire and Bar Hill, Cambridgeshire

  Luccombe is a perfect specimen of a village that was not planned nor needed to be. It just came into existence in response to its setting and landscape, as if it had grown from the Somerset soil and rock. That way of growing – little by little over a long period, adding something here, losing it there, replacing, rebuilding, a multitude of small decisions and actions taken by a host of individuals – is how the great majority of English villages achieved the form they have now, although not often with such happy results as at Luccombe.

  There is another type, the planned village – purpose-built to fulfil a specific function and usually built in a comparatively short period to achieve a near-finished form. The earliest of these were commissioned by a handful of outstandingly rich members of a new breed of landowner that emerged in the period after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. These plutocrats – some of them aristocratic, some made-good merchants – accumulated vast estates to go with their vast wealth, and naturally enough wanted to let the world know how well they had done. One obvious way was to have an enormous mansion built and to surround it with many acres of rolling parkland. What these men did not want was a squalid huddle of hovels and tumbledown cottages visible from the drawing-room window.

  At Chippenham in Cambridgeshire half the village was removed to make way for the park and lake that Edward Russell, Lord Orford, required to complement his very splendid residence, Chippenham Park. Fifty new cottages were built in pairs along the approach to the gates; very neat and pretty they looked, and still look today. Other magnates followed suit. Sir Robert Walpole had the village at Houghton in Norfolk demolished and rebuilt outside the gates to his Palladian pile, Houghton Hall. In Nuneham Courtenay, near Oxford, the existing village was razed to enhance the view from Lord Harcourt’s mansion across the park created for him by Capability Brown. It was replaced by the two rows of regular-as-clockwork little cottages still facing each other across the main road today.

  The most notorious of these acts of relocation was the erasing from the landscape of the village of Milton near Dorchester on the orders of the vainglorious and pathologically touchy Earl of Dorchester, Joseph Damer. He had a lake dug in its place and had most of its people rehoused in two rows of thatched whitewashed cottages arranged at intervals along a sloping street some distance away in what became known as Milton Abbas.

  Even at the time, these exercises aroused unease and were seen by some as nothing more than displays of arrogance. Goldsmith based his poem The Deserted Village on the fate of Nuneham Courtenay, and Fanny Burney was one of several who complained about the artificiality of Milton Abbas. But there were few audible complaints from those who were housed in this first generation of model villages. The new cottages were in every way better built, more comfortable, more spacious and more salubrious than their old ones, and they were not bothered by a change in the view.

  As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace and force, a different kind of purpose-built village appeared, combining utility with elements of paternalistic philanthropy. There was a clear and obvious need to provide the workforce in the great factories with somewhere to live. In the cities that generally meant putting up rows of basic cottages as fast and as cheaply as possible wherever there was space for them – the first slum settlements. But in some cases the location of the manufacturing centre opened another possibility – one that appealed to that characteristic Victorian impulse felt more strongly by some of the new breed of industrialists than others: to combine the pursuit of profit with doing good and being seen to be doing good.

  Well-known examples included New Lanark on the Clyde, Elsecar near Barnsley and Sir Titus Salt’s Saltaire near Bradford. All these went much further than merely providing somewhere for the worker to eat, rest and be with his family in the brief periods between shifts. Their owners saw improving the lot of the lower orders as part of their civic duty: to nurture their minds, to tend to their welfare and even to provide them with amusements (as long as these did not involve alcohol or gambling). These model villages boasted a range of amenities – reading room, library, allotments, sports room and so forth – as well as living accommodation vastly superior to the city slums. Such villages were, of course, the exception. Settlements like Chopwell in County Durham – regimented rows of tiny, basic dwellings put up as fast and as cheaply as possible, offering the barest minimum of comfort – remained the norm.

  The nature of the synergy between the making of sweets and chocolate and the Quaker conscience may not be immediately obvious. But it is a fact that the three great sweet-making dynasties – Fry of Bristol, Cadbury of Birmingham and Rowntree of York – were all closely involved in the Society of Friends, and all took the duty of promoting a better life for their workers and for humanity at large as seriously as they took the business of making and selling tooth-rotting temptation.

  In 1902 Joseph Rowntree – following the example of George Cadbury at Bournville – acquired 150 acres of land a couple of miles north of his factory in York with a view to building a decent place for working people to live. To achieve his vision he secured the services of two brothers-in-law, Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, who would later mastermind the first Garden City, Letchworth. The site was flat and without notable features except for a stretch of the River Foss down the eastern side. Unwin’s plan for what became known as New Earswick shows a sort of perimeter road following the bends in the river, then running across the northern edge to intersect with the
existing through route, the Haxby Road, and feeding into the western section and curving around the southern perimeter.

  Thus enclosed, the estate was divided into sectors by traversing streets. Each sector covered five or six acres, and they were built on successively over the years. The approach to the layout of homes was original and dictated by Parker and Unwin’s determination to get away from the regimented terraces typical of the industrial slums. They placed small terraces and groupings at all kinds of angles to each other: some fronting the street, some sideways to it, some accessible by footpath only. The cul-de-sac became the favoured method to fill in the gaps; the guiding principle was liberation from the street pattern.

  The inspiration for the early house designs came from the Arts and Crafts movement. The first homes were built along Western Terrace, in the south-east sector, country cottage in style with low eaves and thick, whitewashed pebble-dashed walls. Others were built of the distinctive wine-dark bricks fired at the local brickworks. A prime concern was light – living rooms were placed to be open to the sunlight even if that meant facing the street rather than the garden. Each dwelling had an internal WC and bathroom – distinct novelties at that time – as well as a coal store. Each had a garden with fruit trees and space to grow vegetables. Open green spaces were provided on a liberal scale and planted with English broad-leaved trees.

  Although Joseph Rowntree and his sons were impelled by their sense of obligation to better the lives of working people, New Earswick was not intended as an act of charity. The rents were fixed at a level calculated as affordable, but sufficient to fund the provision of amenities and services. Between 1902 and 1918 a total of 250 houses were built without any subsidy from the Joseph Rowntree Trust. Subsequently the need to fit the homes with improved facilities combined with higher building costs meant that the 259 houses built between 1919 and 1936 were subsidised by the Trust. This was despite significant modifications in Barry Parker’s designs (he and Raymond Unwin had gone their separate ways in 1914 after Unwin accepted a post with the Local Government Board and devoted himself to public-sector housing).