Labour and the Countryside: The Politics of Rural Britain 1918-1939 (Oxford Historical Monographs)

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Author: Clare V. J. Griffiths

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L ABOUR AND THE COUNTRYSIDE

OXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS Editors . . .  .  .   .  .  . .   . -

Labour and the Countryside The Politics of Rural Britain 1918 –1939 CL ARE V. J. GRIFFITHS

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 2 6 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Clare V. J. Griffiths 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978-0-19-928743-7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For my parents, Raymond and Josephine Griffiths

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Acknowledgements I have many people and institutions to thank for their support while I was writing this book and the doctoral thesis on which it is based. The British Academy and the Scouloudi Foundation funded my postgraduate research. Ross McKibbin supervised my D.Phil., and has further confirmed his patience by acting as subeditor for this monograph; I have benefited greatly from his valuable criticism and advice, not to mention his encyclopaedic knowledge of British election results. My thesis examiners, John Stevenson and Alun Howkins, were also generous with encouragement and useful suggestions, and I am especially grateful to Alun Howkins for sharing his unparalleled knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, Labour and the countryside. Merton College, Oxford, provided a wonderful environment in which to learn about history and I was fortunate in the inspirational teaching I experienced there. Philip Waller holds a large measure of responsibility for converting a would-be early modernist to the delights of working on modern British history. As a graduate student, the Warden and Fellows of Merton made me the generous award of a Senior Scholarship. I regret that I was never able to give a copy of this book to John Roberts: it would have been a very small thank you for his kindness and friendship. The Warden and Fellows of Wadham College, Oxford, welcomed me into their company as the first Thompson Junior Research Fellow, gave me a room in one of the most beautiful settings in England, and even let me traipse around the College farms. Cliff Davies and Jane Garnett were excellent colleagues, and stimulating intellectual company. Colleagues in the departments of History at the University of Reading and the University of Sheffield have also helped in various ways. I am particularly grateful to Michael Biddiss for his support as I started out on an academic career. Sarah Foot and Mary Vincent have been sources of much-valued advice and encouragement in the later stages of completing the manuscript. I am grateful to the staff of the record offices and libraries listed in the Bibliography, to the organizations and institutions which granted me access to unpublished material, and to all those who responded to queries or offered information. Thanks in particular to the staff of Nuffield College Library, Oxford; ‘Room 132’ in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Library of Political and Economic Science at LSE; the Marx

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Acknowledgements

Memorial Library; the National Museum of Labour History; the National Farmers’ Union; the TUC library at Congress House; the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick; and the Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading. I am very grateful to Selina Hastings for permission to reproduce an image from one of her father’s paintings. Permission to quote from the diary of Ramsay MacDonald in the National Archives is subject to the following reservation: ‘The contents of these diaries were in Ramsay MacDonald’s words, “Meant as notes to guide and revive memory as regards happenings and must on no account be published as they are.” ’ Participants at the modern British history seminars at the Institute of Historical Research and colleagues in the Interwar Rural History Research Group deserve particular mention for many stimulating discussions. For providing information, asking good questions, and helping more generally with the writing of this book, I also want to thank: Jonathan Bates; Jonathan Brown; Alan Burton, of the Co-operative Film Archive; Matthew Cragoe; Peter Drinkwater; Robert Gildea; Anthony Howe; Nick Mansfield; David Martin; Gilbert Millat; David Morgan; Hazel Nicholson; Nottingham Trent University; Patrick O’Brien; Roland Quinault; Patrick Renshaw; Emmanuel Roudaut; Richard Temple; Andrew Thorpe; Darren Treadwell; and Richard Virr, of McGill University, Montreal. Postgraduate research was made the more enjoyable by the company of good friends: Jane Beverley, Edmund Cannon, Philip Carter, Scott Mandelbrote, Jane Rosenzweig, Andrew Thompson, and Brian Young. Thanks especially to Suzanne Fagence Cooper and Susan Skedd, for many great conversations on history and much else besides. Finally, to my family. My brother Edwin offers glimpses of life in a world beyond the library, and his kitchen in Fulham was a welcome refuge after long days at the PRO. My sister Isobel has shared many enthusiasms and jokes over the years, as well as some memorable walks in the countryside. She came to the very first seminar paper I gave on this material and, all this time later, still manages to appear interested in my research: I hope she enjoys reading about it all over again, between the covers of a book. I grew up in a household full of enthusiasm for books and history, and my parents taught me to love both. First and best of teachers, they have been unfailingly supportive of my studies and my career, and have helped and inspired this project in so many ways. It gives me tremendous pleasure to be able—at last—to dedicate this book to them, with much love. C. V. J. G. Ranmoor, Sheffield

Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations

xii xiv

Introduction: An Electoral Problem Ludlow, April 1923 ‘A Thing of the Town’ ‘The Key to Power’: Electoral Arithmetic Defining ‘Rural’ Constituencies

1 1 3 8 15

I. POLITICAL L ANDSCAPES 1. Dispossession: Rural Histories on the Left Merrie England Who stole the Land? Golden Ages The Uses of History Radical Chronologies

25 25 29 33 40 44

2. Voters in a Landscape ‘Another world’ Images of Rural Life Rural Society and Political Culture Political Opponents Prospects for the Future Interpretations

51 51 52 57 67 70 74

3. Rural Idylls Ramsay MacDonald Goes Rambling Folk Tradition and the British Left Anti-urbanism Hiking, Camping, and Cycling for Socialism Access Woodcraft Images of the Countryside

79 80 82 84 88 95 97 100

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Contents II. THE RURAL L ABOUR MOVEMENT

4. Campaigning in the Countryside Pioneers Election Campaigns National Campaigns The Labour Party’s Rural Drives The Campaigns at Local Level Propaganda and Pleasure How to Campaign in the Countryside

109 109 110 114 117 125 129 133

5. The Rural Labour Parties Organization Party Formation Membership The Role of Trade Unionism The Candidate Funding The Agent Grumbles and Grievances

142 142 145 147 156 160 166 169 174

6. Trade Unionism in Rural Areas Heritage Unionization and Employment in Rural Areas Agricultural Trade Unions in England and Wales The Scottish Farm Servants The Challenges of Organization Workers and Labourers

178 178 182 187 198 202 207

III. PL ANNING THE FUTURE 7. Policies for Agriculture ‘Two voices’: Town and Country Policy Making Land Nationalization The ‘Prosperous Countryside’ Labour in Government Producers vs Consumers Food and Farming A ‘National’ Policy

217 217 221 230 232 237 243 249 253

Contents

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8. Labour and the Farmers Farming and the Labour Movement ‘Better Farming’ Large-Scale Cultivation Smallholding ‘A Public Service’ Farmers and Their Politics The Farmer’s Friend A New Constituency?

258 258 262 265 270 274 277 281 285

9. A Land for the People The New Model Village New Landscapes The Land Question Revisited Planning A Landscape for Leisure

291 292 298 301 305 309

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Ground? Brecon and Radnor, August 1939 Socialism in the Villages? The Electoral Record The Country Road to 1945 An Epilogue: Ludlow, June 2001

316 316 320 323 331 341

Appendix A. Appendix B. Appendix C. Appendix D.

342 348 352 356

Bibliography Index

Labour’s ‘rural’ constituencies The rural campaigns Labour victories in rural seats, 1918 –1945 Biographies

362 383

List of Illustrations 1. Reassuring rural voters. The 1929 general election issue of The Land Worker.

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(Museum of English Rural Life)

2. Cycling for socialism. Members of the League of Youth set out on a tour in Hertfordshire, 1938.

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(Daily Herald photographic archive, National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, through Science and Society picture library)

3. Traditional images of the rural landscape, used to promote Labour’s agricultural programme in A Prosperous Countryside (1927).

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(People’s History Museum)

4. An open air meeting in the countryside. Mural by John Hastings at Buscot Park (1930s).

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(Author’s photograph, by permission of the Faringdon Collection Trust)

5. Start of the Clarion rural campaign, July 1934. The van sets off from Hoddesdon, with Herbert Morrison amongst those in attendance.

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6. Loudspeaker van for use in rural Scotland, April 1939.

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7. Rural society, as pictured on the cover of The Country Standard.

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(Marx Memorial Library, London)

8. Cows, rather than tractors. Images of agriculture on the NUAW ’s award of merit.

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(Norfolk Record Office)

9. Model housing. Cottages built by the TUC at Tolpuddle, 1934. (Trades Union Congress)

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List of Illustrations 10. Campaigning on the farm in 1945: the Labour candidate talking to potato pickers in the Grantham constituency. (Daily Herald photographic archive, National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, through Science and Society picture library)

xiii 334

List of Abbreviations Place of publication is London, unless otherwise stated. BLPES CAB CLA Conference CPGB CPRE CWS DLP EC GC HCDeb HLDeb ILF ILP JAE LP LRD MERL MLG MRC NALRWU NCCC NEC NFU NLS NLW NMLH NUAW

British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics Cabinet papers Country Landowners Association Reports of Proceedings of the Annual Labour Party Conference Communist Party of Great Britain Council for the Preservation of Rural England Co-operative Wholesale Society Divisional Labour Party Executive Committee General Council of the TUC House of Commons Debates, 5th series House of Lords Debates, 5th series International Landworkers’ Federation Independent Labour Party Journal of Proceedings of the Agricultural Economics Society Labour Party Labour Research Department Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading Mitchell Library, Glasgow Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick National Agricultural Labourers’ and Rural Workers’ Union National Clarion Cycling Club Labour Party National Executive Committee (in footnote references: minutes and papers of the NEC in the Labour Party archive) National Farmers’ Union National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth National Museum of Labour History, Manchester National Union of Agricultural Workers

List of Abbreviations Org. Sub-Comm. PRO Record RO SDF SFSU TGWU TUC WEA WI WTA WU YHA

Organisation Sub-Committee The National Archives: Public Record Office Transport and General Workers’ Union Record Record Office Social Democratic Federation Scottish Farm Servants’ Union Transport and General Workers’ Union Trades Union Congress Workers’ Educational Association Women’s Institute Workers’ Travel Association Workers’ Union Youth Hostels Association

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Introduction: An Electoral Problem If of Rural wins forsaken Labour can’t bring home the Bacon. Labour Organiser, December 1935

LUDLOW, APRIL 1923 In the spring of 1923, Ivor Windsor-Clive, MP, succeeded to the peerage as Earl of Plymouth, and relinquished his parliamentary seat in the Shropshire constituency of Ludlow. A by-election was called for 19 April. Ludlow was solid Tory country. No Labour candidate had ever stood for election there, and even the Liberal Party tended to leave the Conservatives unopposed. There were a few trade unionists in the town of Ludlow itself, but across most of the division Labour had virtually no local organization. There were no funds to run a campaign, and potential Labour candidates declined the invitation to stand. After a survey of conditions in the constituency, the Labour Party’s district organizer for the Midlands, Herbert Drinkwater, advised against contesting the seat—as he had done when a previous by-election had arisen there only a year before.1 A handful of Labour activists within the constituency were not so easily deterred. Moreover, however dismal the prospect, the Labour Party was under some pressure to fight the Ludlow by-election, on point of principle. Following the 1922 general election, the party at a national level had become the official opposition, and it took its new status seriously, with a commitment to contest all parliamentary seats wherever possible. The Independent Labour Party (ILP), having a taste for ‘pioneer’ campaigns, forced the issue in Ludlow, finding a candidate at the last minute and scraping together the funds to cover the returning officer’s fee. The Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) agreed to endorse the candidate, and drafted in speakers and election staff. Drinkwater, having argued against fielding a candidate, now found himself in the unenviable position of acting as election agent. 1

NEC, 4 January 1922, and 27 March 1923; Labour Organiser, April–May 1923.

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Introduction: An Electoral Problem

After this uncertain start, the Labour candidate, P. F. Pollard, had only ten days to campaign.2 The task was huge. On polling day alone, Pollard clocked up 200 miles motoring around the constituency. Around 2,500 voters lived in Ludlow itself, but the rest were difficult to reach, scattered across the countryside. Canvassers estimated that at least half of the electorate had no contact whatsoever with Labour’s campaign. Much of the constituency was covered only by an innovative campaigning technique of touring the division in a decorated car, dropping a paperchase of ‘tickets’ to advertise the Labour cause.3 The election was presented as an epic struggle against reaction. Some canvassers were pelted with eggs, and others with dung. They met electors who had never heard of the Labour Party, or who believed outrageous stories about socialist policies and morality. As one commentator put it, ‘It wants some courage to assail the venerable tranquillity of dreaming villages and gracious towns, which look to the stranger as if nothing had happened in them since Tudor days.’4 Pollard polled 1,420 votes, finishing well behind the Conservative and Liberal candidates. It was the first by-election since 1918 in which Labour lost its deposit—the forfeit paid by any candidate who failed to attract at least one-eighth of all the votes cast. The pessimistic forecasts from the party’s head office had proved all too accurate. Labour’s leader, Ramsay MacDonald, acknowledged that there had been good intentions behind the contest,5 but the national agent, Egerton Wake, was forthright in his condemnation: ‘There are many rural constituencies which require to be opened up by propaganda and organisation,’ he remarked, ‘but the escapade at Ludlow is a deplorable illustration of how not to do it.’6 The ILP saw Ludlow in a more romantic light: ‘true to its pioneering tradition, [the ILP] went into this old-world constituency at short notice, challenged feudalism for the first time, and carried its international message to workers who had never heard it before’.7 The by-election in Ludlow could have been treated simply as an embarrassing episode, best forgotten. Rural Shropshire was not natural Labour territory, and the NEC had reached a reasoned decision that a contest there would be a waste of time. Yet the ‘escapade at Ludlow’ was

2 For an account of the episode see Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party 1910 –1924 (Oxford, 1974), 153–4. 3 4 Labour Organiser, April–May 1923. New Leader, 6 April 1923. 5 6 Socialist Review, May 1923. NEC, 25 April 1923, crossed through in pencil. 7 New Leader, 27 April 1923.


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quickly identified as a symbol of the party’s shortcomings as a national political force. In drawing attention to Labour’s weakness in rural areas, it prompted discussion about ‘other Ludlows’, and how the party might best approach them.8 Ludlow, however inappropriately, was taken to stand for rural Britain as a whole, and the humiliation at the hands of its electorate seemed to carry a significance beyond the mere fact that Labour would not be representing this Marches constituency in the House of Commons for the foreseeable future. The New Leader could not look with complacency at that landscape in which there was no trace of Labour activity: ‘Through these dreaming Shropshire villages’, it wrote, ‘lies our road to power.’9 ‘A THING OF THE TOWN’ Throughout its history, the Labour Party in Britain has been firmly associated with the urban environment. Its roots, its development, its organizational and electoral achievements are all predominantly urban and industrial. This was not an ideological choice: Labour did not spurn the countryside under the influence of Marx’s famous contempt for the ‘idiocy of rural life’. The basis of its urban character arose rather from the particular origins of the party and the scope of its early activity. In the years immediately following the party’s foundation, its organization and the focus of its propaganda were highly localized, reflecting pre-existing strengths of trade union organization and the location of progressive political associations—usually in areas with a high concentration of the urban working class. Where Labour functioned outside the urban environment, its activities tended to be restricted to specific, isolated communities of industrial workers, notably in mining. The year 1918 was a watershed in Labour’s history. The strength of trade unionism within the high-wage economy of the war years boosted affiliations and revenues for the political organization, and the party entered a new era in its institutional history, with the adoption of a new constitution and the establishment of the category of individual membership. Labour began to expand its horizons to appeal on a broader political programme to more heterogeneous communities: to the middle class, to rural and suburban Britain. By then, the legacy of its early pattern of development had become associated with the character and image of 8

Labour Organiser, April–May 1923.

9

New Leader, 27 April 1923.

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the party in a more fundamental sense. Labour was, it seemed, ‘a thing of the town’, the ‘great town party’.10 This identity was treated by political opponents as indicative of Labour’s outlook and priorities, rather than of its experience: a town party was judged to be in some way not only ill-suited to represent rural Britain, but even opposed to its interests. A polarity had been created in which a history of near-exclusive involvement with urban working-class interests seemed to disqualify Labour from having any present or future interest in the countryside. That identification has proved enduring. Labour has had a reputation as a party unsympathetic to rural, and particularly to agricultural issues, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.11 Tom Williams, Minister of Agriculture in the 1945 Labour government, became one of the most popular individuals ever to hold that office, but this did not prompt farmers to revise their opinion of the party he represented. Meanwhile, one of the Conservative Party’s achievements in the twentieth century was to appoint itself as the rightful representative of the countryside—an appropriation which reached an apogee under Stanley Baldwin, with his styling of England as the country, and the Conservative party as its friend.12 The importance of rural Britain in modern British politics has often seemed to lie as much in the realms of political rhetoric and statements about identity, as in the straightforward representation of particular social and economic interests. This development was partly dependent on the creation of a concept of the ‘countryside’ as something more than simply a non-urban environment. The countryside gained in cultural significance as its economic significance declined, creating the peculiar situation in which a predominantly urban, industrial country could foster a selfimage which has been seen as fundamentally rural.13 The vocabulary itself was changing in interesting ways. From denoting simply the rural, as opposed to the urban districts of Britain—literally, the ‘country-side’ 10

J. C. Wedgwood, Labour and the Farm Worker (LP, 1925), 6. See J. P. Mackintosh, ‘The Problems of Agricultural Politics,’ Journal of Agricultural Economics, 21/1 (January 1970), 25. 12 Philip Williamson argues that Baldwin’s ruralism actually played a much lesser role in his rhetoric and political priorities than many have assumed: see ‘The Doctrinal Politics of Stanley Baldwin’, in Michael Bentley (ed.), Public and Private Doctrine (Cambridge, 1993), 181–208, and Philip Williamson, Stanley Baldwin (Cambridge, 1999), 243–52. The most famous of Baldwin’s comments on the countryside were made in a speech to the Royal Society of St. George in 1924, and published in On England (1926). 13 On the cultural significance of ruralism, see Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981); G. E. Mingay, (ed.), The Rural Idyll (1989); David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (1998). 11


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—the word ‘countryside’ evolved to convey rather different associations. In the 1920s, it was still being used in ways that reflected its derivation: things happened on the countryside, rather than in it. However, the countryside was becoming a place and entity in its own right. The word was used increasingly as a generic term: there was such a thing as ‘the countryside’, where there had once been a myriad ‘countrysides’.14 The country/city divide has always carried ideological implications, tending to project rhetorical polarities rather than illuminate the actual characteristics of two communities.15 In the early twentieth century almost all discussion of the rural nation became subsumed into such rhetoric. Whereas political literature in the nineteenth century had talked mainly of the land and of agriculture, in the twentieth century it focused increasingly on the subject of the ‘countryside’. The implications of these terminologies were subtly different. ‘The countryside’ summoned up a specific cultural vision, reflecting the fact that rural Britain had become something that most Britons experienced only vicariously. Although peopled by inhabitants variously considered as the embodiment of fine, national traditions, or as backward and slow-witted, the countryside was largely notable as a landscape to be preserved and cherished. Even the economic and physical variety of rural Britain was becoming overwhelmed by a generalized picture of what the English countryside was supposed to look like: a landscape of southern England.16 The ‘countryside’ discussed in this book was a cultural construct as much as an actual place: it had real roots in a functioning rural sector and economy, but also an existence within ideologies and national identities. The balance between these was always shifting. Raymond Williams observed, ‘there is almost an inverse proportion, in the twentieth century, between the relative importance of the working rural economy and the cultural importance of rural ideas.’17 In the interwar period, the decline of the rural economy was being loudly bemoaned, with a focus on the problems of British agriculture in the face of food imports that were cheaper and of higher quality than home-grown produce. The challenge 14 The use of the plural was still common in the 1920s, e.g. ‘the countrysides were delightful’ (TGWU Record, December 1929), and ‘on almost every countryside’ (Labour Organiser, March 1924). 15 The canonical examination of this phenomenon is Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973; 1985). 16 Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds.), Englishness: Culture and Politics 1880–1920 (1986), 62–4. 17 Williams, The Country and the City, 248.

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from overseas production had been notable from at least the 1870s— often, of course, bringing advantages for the urban consumer. In the process, much British agricultural enterprise, and particularly cereal production, was rendered uneconomic. The artificial fillip administered to British farming by the experience of the First World War created the conditions for a slump from 1921, encouraging a return to the pre-war trend of putting arable land down to grass, or simply allowing it to revert to fallow.18 It is proverbial that farmers always complain. But it was not only farmers who expressed concern about the state of British agriculture. The newly established discipline of agricultural economics grew out of studies on how farming might be conducted more efficiently. On another level, politicians, pundits, and the many observers who published their reflections on the plight of rural Britain (a characteristic genre of the period) considered the place of agriculture within national priorities.19 For many of these people, the problem was not just about making individual farms more economically viable, but about reviving agriculture as a whole, creating more employment on the land, and encouraging a thriving rural sector. The economic problem of how to sustain a rural population intersected with more idealistic images of what rural life might be like and the contribution which it should be making to the moral, even the racial character of the nation. Debates about British agriculture, and about the system of land ownership on which it operated, were often underscored by deep-seated concerns for the future of a nation whose population had become so distinctly urban rather than rural. Much of this discourse was effectively non-party political. Yet when political parties chose to appropriate this rhetoric, Labour seemed at a disadvantage. To a degree almost unrivalled in any other area of policy, the subject of agriculture was thought to demand an expertise which came from practical knowledge and experience. Since most of Labour’s activists, and indeed most of its supporters came from the urban sector, the party was often accused of being unqualified for the task and, just as importantly, nursed its own doubts about its competence. Labour grew 18 On the changes in British agriculture see Edith Whetham, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, viii: 1914–39 (Cambridge, 1978). 19 Some of the best known were Rider Haggard, Rural England, 2 vols. (1902); George Bourne, Change in the Village (1912); J. W. Robertson Scott, England’s Green and Pleasant Land (1925); A. G. Street, Farmer’s Glory (1932). Prominent representatives of the more academic strand included Lord Ernle, English Farming: Past and Present (1912), and C. S. Orwin (with W. F. Drake), Back to the Land (1935).


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out of the industrial sector, which had risen as agriculture declined; its natural constituency was a product of the rural exodus and the beneficiary of imported food supplies, marketed at a price which home producers could not afford to match. When measured against the experience of left-of-centre parties in other countries, the obstacles to Labour’s engagement both with the rural population and with the cultural associations of ruralism do not seem unduly surprising, though the idiosyncratic character of Britain’s tradeunion-based federation, and the place of the modern rural economy within this ‘first industrial nation’, defined a distinctive experience which makes comparisons difficult. When members of the British Labour movement looked abroad to find reflections of their own experience, they found some comfort in the conclusion that, as the ILP’s newspaper observed in 1923, ‘Every workers’ movement in modern Europe, whether political or industrial, has begun among the crowded populations of the towns.’20 The fortunes of socialist parties elsewhere offered occasional examples to emulate, but more usually presented the consolation of a common, and challenging enterprise.21 Comparisons served to encourage an influential typology in which socialist and labour movements tend to enjoy little success in rural areas.22 In practical, electoral terms, no clear constraints appear to have operated: the Australian Labor Party showed that a left-of-centre, trade union party could develop in the rural sector, whilst, on the other hand, the German Social Democrats are thought to have experienced similar problems to the British Labour Party in approaching the rural electorate.23 Nonetheless, the political Right has been considerably more successful in many countries in appropriating rural issues and identities as its own, and, in consequence, Labour’s problems in appealing to rural Britain are often accepted simply as a function of the kind of party Labour was. On the assumption that the Left’s natural environment is urban, Labour’s reputation and experience appear unproblematic. Surprisingly

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New Leader, 6 April 1923. E.g. Neil Hunter, Peasantry and Crisis in France (Left Book Club, 1938), 240 and 254. 22 On the ideological challenges facing socialists, see David Mitrany, Marx against the Peasant—A Study in Social Dogmatism (North Carolina, 1951), and Esther KingstonMann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (Oxford, 1985). 23 Roger McDonald, Reflecting Labor. Images of Myth and Origin over 100 Years (Canberra, 1991); Stefan Berger, The British Labour Party and the German Social Democrats, 1900–1931 (Oxford, 1994), 135–6. 21

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few historians and commentators have treated the subject as meriting discussion or requiring explanation. The dominant view in historical and political science writing is that the British countryside was Tory24 in voting habits and inclination, and that Labour was in no position, nor had any intention of trying to change this situation. ‘ THE KEY TO POWER’: ELECTORAL ARITHMETIC The Labour Party was not content, as most commentators have been, to assume that it had no role to play in the rural nation. It found nothing inevitable about its exclusion from rural politics, and did not renounce the right to develop interests in the rural sector. In part this was a function of Labour’s widening political scope: the party refused to accept that it must be confined to certain areas or interests. After 1918, Labour was anxious to court voters throughout society, aspiring to a degree of comprehensiveness appropriate to a mature, national party, such as it hoped to become.25 As one party leaflet explained in the 1930s, its legitimization as a political force would lie in ‘an effective majority, not only in the electorate as a whole, but in each separate section of those who labour by hand or brain in the industrial centres, in the suburban areas, and in the countryside’.26 Alongside these idealistic formulations, rural Britain also appeared to have more pressing strategic significance for Labour in the early twentieth century. Until its landslide victory at the 1945 general election, when it gained a majority of 146 over all other parties, there was a widespread belief within the Labour Party that it needed to win rural seats in order to form a majority government and fulfil its political potential: to ‘bring home the bacon’.27 The countryside was not part of the Labour Party’s formative experience, but the assumption here was that it must be a part of Labour’s future. 24 This captures the generalization inherent in many assumptions about the politics of the countryside, and is less misleading as a description of rural England than it is for rural Scotland and Wales, where the hegemony tended in practice to be Liberal. The actual political affiliation of the rural constituencies is discussed in what follows, and in Chapter 2. 25 This might also serve to counter the attacks of its political opponents: note, for example, the Conservative MP Charles Oman’s taunts to the Labour Party that it could not claim to be a national party since there were many constituencies where it did not ‘dare to show its face’ (HCDeb, 169, col. 619, 21 January 1924). 26 For Socialism and Peace (LP, December 1934, and January 1938)—my italics. 27 Labour Organiser, December 1935.


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This analysis has proved difficult for historians to accept. The number of obviously rural seats in Britain was in continual decline and the rural sector was becoming ever less important in the economy nationally, so it would seem a strange target for Labour interest. How many such constituencies could there be? Would Labour not have been better advised to concern itself with seats more in character with its own traditions, which were surely more than sufficiently numerous to secure electoral victory? Throughout the twentieth century, Labour remained a party with little rural support; yet, contrary to its own predictions, the party did manage to win general elections. The continued alienation of Labour from the rural sector also casts doubt on the sincerity of its professed interest in these constituencies. On the basis of existing studies, it is difficult to muster much evidence of a commitment to win rural seats. In consequence, Labour’s interest in the electoral potential of the countryside has been dismissed as a curious, misguided, and probably merely rhetorical obsession.28 Despite this, there can be little doubt about the concern expressed within the party between the wars on the subject of the rural constituencies—a concern which acquired a specific emphasis and priority in the context of the 1920s. It formed a persistent refrain at party conferences. The 1923 conference was warned (rather prematurely as it turned out) that Labour would never form a government until the rural districts were organized effectively.29 The achievement of a minority Labour government in 1924 might have been expected to confute this analysis; in fact, it served only to redirect and reinforce it. After Ramsay MacDonald’s brief period as prime minister during 1924, there were calls within the party for a resolution that Labour should never again take office as a minority administration.30 The party was not prepared to commit to any such resolution, but from that point on there was much discussion of how Labour could achieve a parliamentary majority. The problem of the rural seats was now articulated as an issue, not simply about forming a government, but about forming a majority government, with the necessary independence to implement Labour policy. 28 Ross McKibbin refers to the ‘mistaken view—and one would have thought an obviously mistaken view—that the rural county constituencies must be won before Labour could expect a parliamentary majority’ (Evolution of the Labour Party, 151). For a rare example of an historian taking Labour’s analysis at face-value, see David A. Pretty, The Rural Revolt that Failed (Cardiff, 1989), 171: ‘Any hope of a return to power would rest on Labour’s performance in the rural areas’. 29 F. J. Hopkins, 23rd Conference, 1923, 203. 30 E.g. exchange between MacDonald and Ernest Bevin, 25th Conference, 1925, 250.

10


The rural seats were viewed, in this analysis, as likely to determine the difference between ‘government’ and ‘power’. Conference delegates in 1928 were told that the urban seats could sweep Labour into office, but that the rural areas were needed to sweep them into ‘power’.31 George Dallas, an agricultural trade union organizer who had also sat as an MP, told the 1935 gathering, ‘everybody in this Conference knows I am stating a fundamental fact—that if we do not win from 50 to 60 agricultural seats in this country, there is no hope—none whatever—of a Labour Government ever coming into power in our land.’32 By 1936, the party organizer in the Eastern Counties could describe it as ‘almost a platitude’ to state that ‘Labour can never attain power unless we win a considerable proportion of the rural constituencies.’33 The rural electorate was identified as the ‘key’ to success, the ‘lever which would lift the Party to power’.34 It was considered ‘a matter of arithmetic’ that Labour would never be in power until it had won a sufficient number of rural and semirural seats.35 The commonplace even appeared in election addresses.36 Although comments about the need to win rural seats were usually accompanied by statements explaining the importance of demonstrating Labour’s maturity as a national party and its concern to improve conditions in the villages, the primary motivation was sometimes stated very bluntly indeed. As one MP observed at the 1939 party conference, ‘This is not a matter of sympathy; this is a matter of sheer electoral necessity.’37 There are two rather puzzling aspects to this rhetoric. One is that, during the interwar period, Labour’s potential in many other areas had still to be fulfilled. It was not until 1945 that Labour made its breakthrough in Liverpool, previously characterized as ‘not so much a city as a political problem’.38 Birmingham also remained an embarrassment to Labour before the Second World War, described by Herbert Morrison as ‘our outstanding urban problem’.39 Attention was occasionally drawn to Labour’s underachievement in the cities. In 1927, the Labour Party’s Organisation Sub-Committee considered a memorandum on the importance of a 31

32 28th Conference, 1928, 252. 35th Conference, 1935, 225. John Taylor, ‘Labour’s Progress in the Countryside’, Labour, October 1936, 44. 34 Both metaphors were used by W. B. Taylor, 25th Conference, 1925, 213. 35 Christopher Addison, 37th Conference, 1937, 177. 36 E.g. 1929 election address for West Derbyshire, Derbyshire RO, West Derbyshire DLP papers, D 602. 37 George Ridley, MP for Derbyshire Clay Cross (a solid Labour seat), 38th Conference, 1939, 319. 38 President of Liverpool TC and LP, at 25th Conference, 1925, 170. 39 NEC, memorandum, 11 March 1938. 33


11

special effort to ‘get into other urban constituencies not yet won’.40 The chairman of the 1936 League of Youth conference described Labour’s failure to win the big industrial towns as the most disappointing feature of the 1935 general election results.41 At a 1936 Fabian conference on winning elections, one contributor rejected the emphasis on the rural vote: it was a fallacy, he declared ‘to think that it was necessary to win over the agricultural areas . . . Our problem was the industrial borough more than the agricultural division.’42 Such observations were rare beside numerous pronouncements on the necessity of winning rural seats. As early as 1926, Ramsay MacDonald declared urban, industrial Britain to be ‘overwhelmingly Labour’.43 The political contest in urban areas was treated as a battle whose outcome had been decided, as if Labour were moving onto a new stage in its political development.44 ‘The political fight that matters now is the fight in the rural divisions,’ argued an Oxfordshire delegate at the 1928 party conference. ‘The last stronghold of Toryism is the rural constituencies.’45 This analysis affected the party’s appreciation of its electoral progress. In 1926, after a period of considerable Labour success in by-elections, the Daily Herald still chose to emphasize that Labour had won no seats at all in the rural contests.46 The second puzzling element in this electoral analysis is Labour’s impression of how many rural seats there were in Britain, and the party’s belief in the continued political significance of the countryside. At the 1921 census, just 7 per cent of the working population was engaged in agriculture,47 and the rural sector, in both economic and electoral terms, was of a size that Labour could afford to ignore. Yet Labour was impressed by the physical extent of what it saw as rural Britain, and took little 40

NEC, Org. Sub-Comm., 27 February 1927. Speech by Cyril Lacey, report on League of Youth conference, April 1936, NEC. BLPES, Fabian Society papers, J15/6, minutes of conference, January 1936, 9. Maurice Webb believed there to be only fourteen potentially winnable seats in which agriculture could affect the vote. 43 Daily Herald, 2 December 1926. 44 E.g. resolution from Westbury DLP to 1925 Labour Party conference: ‘now that most of the industrial seats are secured’ (NEC, Org. Sub-Comm., 21 May 1925). 45 A. V. Bond, 28th Conference, 1928, 251. 46 Editorial, Daily Herald, 23 December 1926. 47 Comparative figures c.1920 are Belgium, 19%; the Netherlands, 24%; Germany, 31%; Sweden, 41%; France, 42%; Italy, 56%; Spain, 57% (taken from table in Hermann Priebe, ‘The Changing Role of Agriculture 1920–1970’, in Carlo M. Cipolla (ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe, v: The Twentieth Century, part 2 (Hassocks, Brighton, 1977) ). 41 42

12


comfort from the fact that the scattered nature of the rural population, which made it so difficult to target with propaganda, also meant that large expanses of countryside often contained very few voters. There were various estimates of the number of rural seats Labour had to win. In 1927 George Dallas claimed that 20 to 30 rural seats were needed to produce a Commons majority; eight years later he had inflated that prediction to 50 or 60.48 William Holmes, general secretary of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, also gave a figure of 50 to 60 ‘solid agricultural seats’.49 Some calculations were much higher. Tom Williams suggested that Labour would require 135 to make socialism a possibility, a figure which seems to have been arrived at largely on the principle of cancelling out the votes of 135 landowners sitting in the Commons.50 A. E. Stubbs, a former candidate in Melton Mowbray and future MP for Cambridgeshire, argued that Labour needed at least 150 rural and semi-rural seats.51 This apparent exaggeration of the strategic importance of rural constituencies is perhaps best explained by considering Labour’s post-mortem on the general election following its first experience of government in 1924. The disparity between Conservative and Labour votes was most marked in the English county constituencies, where Labour won only 38 of the 230 seats. Egerton Wake concluded, ‘our future problem is the organisation of the rural constituencies’.52 On the assumption that the rural interest was always outside Labour’s orbit, the prominence given to this electoral task appears inherently futile. However, the reputation of agricultural areas as natural Tory heartlands is misleading. Rural Britain was hotly contested political territory. The Conservative loyalties of many English rural constituencies, far from being a normal state of affairs, were a relatively new development in the interwar period. One of the features of rural seats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was in fact their marginality, and oscillations between the Liberals and Conservatives had given rural Britain a surprising degree of influence in deciding the result of general elections,

48

27th Conference, 1927, 180; 35th Conference, 1935, 225. 50 32nd Conference, 1932, 209. 33rd Conference, 1933, 213. 51 38th Conference, 1939, 316. The number of rural seats identified by the National Agricultural Party in the early 1920s was 150, of which 50 constituencies were regarded as ‘wholly agricultural’, with around 100 more where agriculture was the dominating interest (MERL, NUAW, DII/5, cuttings book, press circular from the National Agricultural Party, c.1922; also figures quoted by R. B. Walker at 22nd Conference, 1922, 218). 52 National Agent’s Preliminary Report to the NEC on General Election, 7 November 1924, NEC; Head Office Report to Org. Sub-Comm., January 1925, NEC. 49


13

even whilst its national economic significance was on the wane.53 It has been shown, for example, that the agricultural seats played an important part in depriving the Conservatives of victory in the general elections of 1923 and 1929.54 Yet many constituencies, with a history as marginals, fell into the habit of returning Conservative MPs during the 1920s: examples include Tavistock, Tiverton, North Dorset, Stroud, Thornbury, the Isle of Wight, and the Lincolnshire divisions of Gainsborough, Horncastle, and Louth, all of which returned Liberals for the last time in 1923. Such discontinuity tended to disguise a history of radical traditions in the countryside, often linked to the incidence of nonconformity. The Liberals continued to draw support from this in certain areas (notably in Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland), and its political benefits had once been theirs more widely. Liberals and Conservatives alike were concerned about their electoral prospects in rural areas in the early twentieth century. The Conservatives found in the 1920s that they could not take even their support amongst the farming community for granted.55 Attempts to broaden their appeal to different sectors in the countryside informed the Conservatives’ adoption of elements of Jesse Collings’ programme from the late nineteenth century.56 However, the responsibility for making the land question such an important focus of political debate lay with the Liberals, who also explored its potential as a rural electoral issue.57 The history of Liberal land campaigns in the 1920s has been linked closely to the party’s attempts to hold onto its vote in rural areas.58 Labour’s own interest in rural policy evolved during a period when the scope of agricultural policy was expanding enormously. From the First World War onwards, a great expansion in government intervention in agriculture served to raise the rural community’s expectations of

53

Michael Kinnear, The British Voter. An Atlas and Survey since 1885 (2nd edn, 1981),

16. 54 Simon Moore, ‘Reactions to Agricultural Depression’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1988, 83, 301. 55 Ibid.; Noel Buxton, on ‘the first revolt of the farmers against Toryism’, Labour Magazine, 9 January 1924. 56 E. H. H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism (1995), 218, 221. The famous ‘three acres and a cow’ policy for providing small holdings was advocated as part of the 1885 unauthorized programme. 57 Cf. Ian Packer, ‘The Liberal Land Campaign and the Land Issue c.1906 –1914’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1994. 58 Michael Dawson, ‘The Liberal Land Policy, 1924–1929. Electoral Strategy and Internal Division’, Twentieth Century British History, 2/3 (1991), 272–90.

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politicians. The great demand from the agricultural industry was for economic support, to maintain the national arable acreage and protect farming from the assaults of the international market. Precedents were set under the demands of war: the 1917 Corn Production Act, introduced by the Coalition government, guaranteed minimum prices for wheat and also established a minimum wage for agricultural workers. But the question of support for farmers in peacetime raised the spectre of ‘dear food’. Since the agitation for the repeal of the Corn Laws, the political Left had associated itself predominantly with free trade and the cheap consumption which this was thought to safeguard. Protection tended to be a policy of the Right until at least 1931, when the terms of debate shifted, and it became increasingly difficult to watch the tribulations of farming whilst continuing to defend undiluted free trade. Rural policy was not solely about the problems of agriculture. In the late nineteenth century, and the early years of the twentieth, the topics of landscape and rural leisure had little connection with politics, but issues of preservation increasingly brought the subject of the countryside within the scope of government action. Pressure groups like the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (founded in 1926) called for controls on development to preserve, and even enhance, the beauty of the landscape. Ruralism was entering the sphere of public policy. It was, and is, often presented as a subject outside party politics, but the image of ruralist sentiment as a non-political universal is misleading: it was a cultural phenomenon, and open to different appropriations.59 The British Left had its own history of ruralist sympathies, perhaps best exemplified in the ethical socialism of the 1880s and 1890s.60 There were strong traditions of anti-urbanism and anti-industrialism in radical rhetoric from the early nineteenth century, and continuities have been traced, showing the potency which such attitudes and rhetoric retained into the twentieth century, though studies have rarely ventured far beyond the First World War.61 The important theme of the land question has been treated to an extended history, but with the focus largely on land 59 See John Lowerson, ‘Battles for the Countryside’, in Frank Goldsmith, Class, Culture and Social Change. A New View of the 1930s (Brighton, 1980), 258– 80. 60 See Peter C. Gould, Early Green Politics—Back to Nature, Back to the Land, and Socialism in Britain, 1880–1900 (New York, 1988). 61 E.g. P. J. Ward, ‘Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left 1881–1924’, PhD thesis, University of London, 1994; James D. Young, ‘Images of Rural “Idiocy” and Labour Movements’, Society for the Study of Labour History, Bulletin, 24 (Spring 1972); Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 118–23.


15

as a Liberal policy platform, rather than on the currency which the subject continued to enjoy within the Labour movement.62 The relationship between the Liberal Party and the developing Labour interest was complicated, but there were obvious points of overlap in ideological approach and in terms of personnel. Labour emerged from the Liberal shadow over two generations: firstly with the late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century Lib–Lab trade unionists, and then the more socially heterogeneous former Liberals who joined Labour after the First World War. Both these groups came from a political culture in which the land question had been given considerable priority, and from an organization which claimed a role in the rural political landscape, particularly once working men in the county constituencies had been given the vote in 1884. Labour often found it difficult to claim the Liberals’ former supporters in the countryside as its own electorate, despite taking on the Liberal mantle in many other types of constituency.63 But although the electoral continuities between the two parties were sometimes difficult to establish, the politics of Labour owed a very considerable debt to Liberalism. The rural platform was part of this context from which Labour developed, and one might expect the resulting political formation to bear signs of its origins. Rural Britain was by no means as foreign to Labour’s political background as is often presented. DEFINING ‘RURAL’ CONSTITUENCIES The Labour Party produced no definitive list of the constituencies in the countryside which it judged so crucial to its electoral ambitions, and offered no clear definition of what made a rural constituency rural. The range of constituencies referred to in these terms suggests that the criteria were broad, and often impressionistic. Egerton Wake identified four types of county divisions: industrial; industrial and rural; suburban and rural; and rural.64 In practice, the categories of ‘rural’ and county constituencies often seem to have been conflated.65 Many seats referred to 62 E.g. Roy Douglas, Land, People and Politics. A History of the Land Question in the United Kingdom 1878–1952 (New York, 1976); E. F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform—Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992). 63 The fact that the county seats were single-member constituencies may be of relevance here, since there was no scope for the Lib–Lab electoral arrangements which developed in some urban constituencies. 64 NEC, Org. Sub-Comm., 22 November 1926. 65 E.g. annual report, 25th Conference, 1925, 7.

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as ‘rural’ might more credibly be defined as ‘mixed’ constituencies, sometimes recognized as ‘semi-rural’ divisions, but just as often subsumed in a general category of ‘rural’, or even ‘agricultural’. The terms ‘rural’ and ‘agricultural’ themselves were frequently used interchangeably, although they are not synonyms.66 Between 1926 and 1939 the Labour Party held, or planned to hold, a number of campaigns to win over the ‘rural areas’, and lists of the constituencies selected for these campaigns provide the most explicit indication of which divisions Labour considered to be rural. They form a basis for compiling a picture of what Labour perceived as its battleground in rural Britain.67 What emerges is a list of 171 constituencies. Other divisions were sometimes referred to within the Labour Party as containing important rural elements, but the significance of anecdotal descriptions can be difficult to assess.68 The advantage of using the campaign lists, by contrast, is that they represent identifications in a specific context. Some surprising divisions are thus defined as rural, seemingly on the basis of relatively small agricultural sectors, or of substantial areas of countryside which actually included only small numbers of the electorate. 66

Cf. Raymond Williams, ‘Between Country and City’, in Resources of Hope (1989),

231. 67

Since their significance here is simply in their identification as ‘rural’, divisions are included irrespective of whether the projected campaign actually took place. Where campaigns are known, from other evidence, to have taken place in divisions not included in the initial central list, these have also been counted. A table showing where campaigns did go ahead is included as Appendix B. Some venues for campaign conferences, particularly for the campaigns in 1926 –8, 1931, and 1938, were in fact parliamentary boroughs (such as York, Lincoln, and Norwich), from which Labour hoped to address a wider audience; although identifying rural hinterlands, these do not help in defining particular constituencies. Other listings do not always correlate exactly with parliamentary divisions. For ‘Ayrshire’, North and South Ayr are both included, since both were listed specifically in a draft list for the Scottish Campaigns compiled by Morgan Phillips (Bodleian Library, Addison papers, list 15 February 1939). Where one division was markedly larger than others in a county listed as a venue for campaigning, only the larger division has been counted: Western Stirling is listed for references to Stirlingshire, and Lanark for Lanarkshire (the picture of a plough team on party membership certificates in Lanark, referred to in Labour Organiser, March 1924, also suggests that the agricultural population was seen as a characteristic of the constituency). For ‘Renfrewshire’, both East and West divisions have been included, although West Renfrew clearly had a more dispersed population, across a larger area. East Renfrew was becoming increasingly influenced by its proximity to Glasgow, but was described as a difficult and ‘scattered’ division (cf. Daily Herald, 1 December 1930), observations which Labour frequently associated with ‘rural’ divisions. 68 For example, Tom Williams counted agriculture as one of the main industries in his Yorkshire constituency of Don Valley (Digging for Britain (1965), 47). Don Valley was never specifically listed as a ‘rural’ division, though several other mining constituencies were.


17

The inclusion of particular constituencies in Labour’s rural campaigns implied a notion of political accessibility, as well as of perceived rurality. Leominster and Orkney would qualify as rural under the most rigorous of definitions, but were such hopeless prospects for Labour that there was never any suggestion of their being targeted in the interwar campaigns. It is obviously necessary to apply some additional definition, in order to compile a list of seats which were demonstrably rural in character—and which the Labour Party might be assumed to have regarded as such— whether or not they qualified for inclusion in the party’s rural campaigns. The statistical definitions prepared by Michael Kinnear in the 1960s are useful for this purpose.69 Kinnear compiled a list of 141 constituencies in England, Wales, and Scotland which he considered to contain a significant agricultural element, using the 1921 census figures to identify parliamentary divisions where more than 20 per cent of the occupied male population over the age of 12 was engaged in agriculture. This identifies rural constituencies only on the basis of a pattern of agricultural employment, rather than through the absence of built-up areas or heavy concentrations of population, and does not take account of the increasingly problematic relationship between employment and the rural character of an area, as the countryside became a place where people lived, while working elsewhere. However, it can offer a workable definition of constituencies where agriculture exercised some influence on the nature of the electorate.70 Kinnear’s list and the Labour Party’s campaign lists overlap to a degree, though each features divisions not included in the

69 Michael Kinnear, The British Voter. An Atlas and Survey since 1885 (2nd edn, 1981), 119–21. 70 The 20% marker used by Kinnear may be overly low: working on a ratio of 2:1 between the primary population (dependent directly on the land) and the secondary population (servicing this primary population) a primary population of 40% is particularly notable, placing the overall ‘rural’ population in a clear majority in a given area. (See S. W. E. Vince, ‘Reflections on the Structure and Distribution of Rural Population in England and Wales 1921–1931’, Transactions and Papers of the Institute of British Geographers, 1952 (1953), 57). The 1921 figures must become inaccurate when applied across the interwar period, for areas where agricultural practice was in decline, or, for example, shifting from arable to stock rearing. Some seats which might be termed rural in the early part of the century were far more dubious candidates by the late 1930s, with the growth of new residential sectors, particularly in the south-east of England, but also around cities like Liverpool and Glasgow. Although the agricultural workforce was actually increasing in a few areas, for example with the development of market gardening, it is likely that the position recorded in the census of 1921 represents the maximum extent of agricultural Britain in the interwar period.

18


other’s total. Thirty-two of Kinnear’s agricultural constituencies were never selected for Labour’s special campaigns, and 62 of Labour’s campaign constituencies had less than 20 per cent of their population employed in agriculture. In combination, the lists identify a group of 203 constituencies which may be described as ‘rural’ in the interwar period, for the purposes of considering Labour’s perception of rural Britain and tracking the party’s activities in the countryside.71 This may seem an absurdly large number, representing almost a third of all British parliamentary divisions. However, this in itself is a comment on Labour’s ideas about the political importance of the rural nation. Some estimates of the number of rural divisions were even higher. Sidney Webb suggested that ‘the total number of agricultural constituencies ran to something like 300’—even though his use of the term ‘agricultural’ might seem to imply some more demanding criteria for inclusion.72 The exercise of mapping Labour’s ‘rural Britain’ offers a guide to perceptions, rather than reality. It presents a backdrop against which to investigate Labour’s interest in the politics of rural Britain and to begin to assess the party’s impact on the countryside as an electoral arena. Chapter 5 traces Labour’s organizational history in these divisions, through divisional party activity and membership. The party’s electoral record in these seats is considered in the Conclusion. This book aims to establish a context for the Labour Party’s electoral interest in rural Britain, and to examine the implications which this had for the development of the Labour movement. The party’s rhetoric about the need to win rural seats demands deeper consideration on two counts. Firstly, it had practical consequences, prompting a spate of rural campaigning in the 1920s and 1930s, encouraging organization in rural areas, and influencing the formulation of policies on agriculture and rural life. Secondly, observations about the movement’s present and future relationship with the countryside were more important within the British Left than has been acknowledged. Labour’s somewhat surprising fascination with the politics of rural Britain offers an opportunity to re-evaluate the political culture of the Left before the Second World War. Given the significance of ruralist ideals within national identity, the Labour Party’s urban tradition and reputation clearly becomes more than a problem about access to particular groups within the electorate, or the right to 71 72

The list of constituencies appears as Appendix A. 20th Conference, 1920, 127.


19

represent the agricultural interest; it raises fundamental questions about the character of the party and its national image. The debate about the electoral imperative of winning rural seats provides a starting point for this study, and encourages an emphasis on the history of the political party. However, a focus on the Labour Party alone would be too narrow. A proper understanding of Labour’s electoral interest and activity in the countryside needs to be placed in the context of the broader Labour movement. On one level, this is purely practical: for example, it is difficult to discuss the party’s attempts to build support without considering the involvement of the trade unions. Perhaps most importantly, however, the idea of ‘the Labour movement’ was itself integral to Labour politics and culture.73 Even broader than this, but still tangible, was a notion of ‘the Left’, defined through political and ideological sympathies. The British Left is known as much for fractious fragmentation as for brotherly unity. Yet the individuals and organizations who feature in this story of Labour’s attempts to win the rural seats were operating in an environment in which there were clearly tastes, sympathies, and inclinations which were identified as ‘left-wing’. This association with a world of ‘the Left’ was an essential part of other more instrumental affiliations, with trade unions, cooperative societies, and the electoral and organizational machines of party politics. At the point when the Labour Party began to develop its interests in agriculture, its own identity was very much in flux. The policies and literature issued by Head Office can present a sense of intellectual confusion. Out of these various interests and philosophies, certain dominant themes emerged, but it would be misleading to rationalize these into a thoroughly coherent set of ideas. Part of the variety is explained by the differing perspectives of groups within the Labour movement: agricultural trade union officials sometimes put forward policies at odds with those emerging amongst agricultural workers themselves; those who wanted rural policies primarily as a means to attract voters might disagree with those who thought it more important that the policies be right, than that they be popular; unreconstructed former Liberals diverged from their more socialist colleagues in approaches to thinking about agricultural revival. Ideas about the countryside often revealed the tensions within Labour’s complex traditions and inheritances.

73

As highlighted in History Workshop Journal (Autumn 1981), editorial, 7.

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The discussion which follows is divided into three thematic sections, charting Labour’s attempts to understand and organize rural Britain and to shape its future. Part I, entitled ‘Political Landscapes’, is concerned with different interpretations of, and responses to the countryside. Chapter 1, ‘Dispossession’, explores the historical frameworks within which many on the Left approached issues relating to the land and rural society, looking in particular at the implications of historical narratives for arguments about the rights and wrongs of the private ownership of land, and at interpretations of the rural economy within broader chronologies of national development. Chapter 2, ‘Voters in a Landscape’, turns from the historical to the contemporary countryside, to survey the nature of rural life as it appeared to members of the Labour movement between the wars. It examines the ways in which ideas about rural society and culture defined the countryside as ‘different’ from Labour’s more familiar territory, informing specific approaches to the rural electorate. However, the countryside always represented more to Labour than simply a reservoir of untapped votes. Chapter 3, ‘Rural Idylls’, discusses the political significance of rural Britain from another perspective. The Labour movement cherished a complex set of ideas and sentiments about the rural landscape and the values attached to it, and this chapter explores the nature of ruralism on the British Left. Part II, ‘The Rural Labour Movement’, traces the efforts to establish a Labour presence within rural Britain between the wars. It opens with a chapter on the rural campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s: their organization and funding, and the methods adopted to bring Labour’s message into the countryside. The following two chapters discuss the development of the Labour movement in rural areas. Chapter 5 describes the growth of Labour party organization in rural constituencies, considers some of the specific problems of recruiting members and funding political activities in the countryside, and explores the social composition of the local parties, the role of the party agent, and the selection of prospective parliamentary candidates. Chapter 6 considers the parallel challenges facing trade unions in the countryside, particularly in relation to the organization of agricultural workers. Labour’s campaigns to establish itself in the countryside required, and helped to shape, the development of a programme of policies on agriculture and rural life, which forms the subject of Part III. Chapter 7, ‘Policies for Agriculture’, examines the variety of influences on the making of agricultural policy, and the problems which the Left encountered in attempting to achieve political credibility in this area. It discusses the


21

contributions which agriculture was expected to make to the national life and economy, and the ways in which these related to other parts of Labour’s programme and to appeals to its existing, urban audience. The chapter also highlights some of the constraints on Labour’s ability to define policies to shape the future of agriculture and assert public controls over the use of land and the market for agricultural produce. Chapter 8, ‘Labour and the Farmers’, extends this discussion to consider Labour’s visions of the future of farming itself, looking at questions about the role of the individual farmer, the organization of the industry, and the scale of cultivation. As the farming lobby expressed growing disillusionment with its former political allies on the Right, agricultural experts in the Labour Party began to hope that Labour might court its support; this chapter considers the links between the presentation of policy and attempts to win over that new constituency. Agriculture was always at the centre of programmes for the countryside, but rural policy also embraced commitments to improve the quality of life, to encourage the positive development of rural society, and to enhance the relationship between town and country. Chapter 9, ‘A Land for the People’, looks at these broader aspects of rural policy, tracing the ways in which Labour hoped to preserve rural amenity and utilize the countryside as a national resource for health and leisure. The development of agricultural and rural policy was influenced heavily by Labour’s ambitions to present itself as a credible contender in rural elections. The Conclusion reconsiders the electoral imperative which Labour had identified in the early 1920s, and assesses the party’s achievements in rural Britain by the outbreak of the Second World War. It surveys the electoral record in the rural constituencies, and discusses the contribution of the rural vote to the election of the first majority Labour government in 1945. In the period between the two world wars, rural Britain was the focus of a variety of debates, ideas, and idylls within the Labour movement, and the complex responses to the countryside as a political arena, as a symbol of identity, as an economic sector, as a landscape, and as a remnant of the past illustrate some of the ambiguities of Labour’s political culture. They allow a fresh perspective on the history of a movement which, despite a past rooted overwhelmingly in particular sectors of the nation, aspired to a wider competence and scope: to embrace the farm labourer and the farmer, as well as the factory worker; to voice the interests of agriculture and the countryside, as well as its more established portfolios of urban industry and the welfare of the urban working class.


I POLITICAL L ANDSCAPES England ought to be our home, but it makes a chap feel as though he’s a sort of trespasser. A Countryman Talks about Socialism, 1934


1 Dispossession: Rural Histories on the Left It was a huge covered van of the kind used by travelling showmen; it was painted in bright aggressive yellow, and it bore the announcement of a ‘Lecture on the Land and the People’ for that very night . . . ‘What does it mean?’, said Mary. ‘Radicals, I am very much afraid,’ said Mr. Raif. Richard Whiteing, The Yellow Van, 1903

MERRIE ENGL AND In the eyes of many on the Left, rural Britain in the twentieth century was a shadow of what it had once been. At various points in its history, so it was argued, the countryside had been more productive, more prosperous, more populous. It had laid claim to a vibrant, popular culture, and traditions of democracy and community which seemed to have been lost in the modern period. The notion of a former golden age—often termed ‘Merrie England’—informed the creation of a very particular rural idyll within the Labour movement. In keeping with the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris, ‘Merrie England’ was a place and time uncorrupted by the pollution of capitalist industry, a community sustained by crafts and agriculture. The pastoral happiness of its inhabitants, evoked most exuberantly in illustrations by Walter Crane, was part of the pageantry and iconography of the British Left. In the 1920s, Crane’s cartoons from the late nineteenth century, of maypoles and harvests, were still hanging on walls in Labour homes, adorning membership cards, and providing the inspiration for union banners.1 Merrie England clearly possessed at 1

New Leader, 27 April 1923.

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Political Landscapes

least an aesthetic appeal for those who organized the social calendar of British socialism. In May 1924, the Labour Party in the Yorkshire constituency of Spen Valley chose to decorate the town hall at Cleckheaton as ‘an excellent representation of an Olde English Village’ for a three-day fund-raising event. The local party in Woolwich also hosted a ‘Merrie England’ bazaar that spring, and adverts for ‘olde English fayres’ had featured in the socialist press from the 1890s.2 But Merrie England was more than decorative; it formed a pervasive ideal of what society should be like. This was an ideal whose broad purchase went beyond the British Left, and could be subject to varying political interpretation.3 The focus within this rural idyll was not the landscape or an aesthetic of the countryside, but the village and the quality of life enjoyed by those who lived there. Merrie England was, as it were, ‘full of folk’. The characteristic attributes of this society were ‘mirth’ and ‘joy’. Spontaneous dancing and merriment were celebrated as signs of a happier existence. As a Communist pamphlet from 1921 informed its readers: ‘Instead of living to work as you do they worked to live. And in their simple way they did live: for on public holidays, which were frequent, young men and maidens could be seen dancing merrily on every village green.’4 The important point about Merrie England was that it was not presented as a utopia, an idealization of a society which had never yet existed. It was a self-consciously historical vision. One could go ‘back’ to Merrie England; socialists should aim to ‘re-make’ it.5 The countryside might ring ‘again’ with the ‘mirth and joy of a happy, contented and free people’.6 As an image of true community it was thus historically, if often rather vaguely rooted. One of the important functions of rural history on the Left was to explain why this happy society had not survived to the present day. 2 Labour Organiser, March and May 1924. Cf. the late nineteenth-century Clarion tradition of ‘Merrie England’ events, described in P. J. Ward, ‘Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left 1881–1924’, PhD thesis, University of London, 1994, 43 – 4. 3 Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology, and the English Folk Revival (1993; Manchester, 1994); Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1992); Jan Marsh, Back to the Land. The Pastoral Impulse in England, from 1880 to 1914 (1982); J. W. Burrow, ‘“The Village Community” and the Uses of History in Late Nineteenth-Century England’, in Neil McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives. Studies in English Thought and Society (1974), 255–84. 4 Frank Tanner, The Land Grabbers: A Tale of Robbery (CPGB, 1921). 5 C. A. Pease, Socialism in the Village (ILP, 1920). 6 Land Worker, January 1921.

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In the modern countryside, few signs of Merrie England remained. One had to read the landscape carefully to appreciate what had been lost, and how this had come about. The village green, where the picturesque youth of the old society had danced, was one poignant remnant: as a Socialist League pamphlet described it in the 1930s, a ‘poor relic of the inheritance into which those from whom you came were born’.7 When modern villagers participated in a revival of communal action and empowerment, as they did in the famous boycott of the village school at Burston, Norfolk, in 1914, it was seen as significant that their activities should focus on the green—‘that portion of England left over after the squire and parson have cast lots for the remainder’.8 Access to the land was a defining feature of Merrie England. In radical interpretations of the rural past the issue of the ownership and control of land tended to be given more weight than other criteria (such as personal freedom, political participation, or social equality) in forming judgements about the quality of life which villagers had supposedly enjoyed. It was clear that, by the early twentieth century for certain, and probably from at least the early nineteenth century, most people in Britain had no land of their own, and few rights to make use of land which was once held in common. Both the rural and the urban workforces had assumed their modern character because they were drawn from a landless population. ‘Obviously the surest method for keeping the masses in subjection to their lords in the olden time’, explained Keir Hardie, ‘was to make the land private property. A landless peasantry could have no rights.’9 The main theme of rural histories on the Left was this loss of the land: ‘the Great Disinheritance’.10 All land reformers were sceptical about the sanctity of landed property, but amongst socialists this was replaced by an almost criminal indictment: property in this context was quite literally theft. Existing private property in land was presented not only as an offence against natural rights, but as evidence of historical robbery. A vocabulary of ‘robbery’ and ‘theft’ was characteristic of much discussion of the land issue, and was used to counter the idea that landed estates were a legitimate form of wealth, based on the prudence, industry, and investment of former

7

A Countryman Talks about Socialism (Socialist League, 1934). ‘Casey’, The Burston School Strike pamphlet (autumn 1915). On the events at Burston, see Chapter 2, p. 62. 9 J. Keir Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), 8. 10 J. Bruce Glasier, The Meaning of Socialism (Manchester, 1919), ch. 3. 8

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generations. The ILP advised anyone labouring under the delusion that private ownership of land was fair that ‘If they would study history they would find that robbery by force or cunning has played a much greater part than merit in the building up of estates.’11 Far from having earned their privilege, it was alleged that the landlords were ‘land grabbers’.12 The history of ‘land monopoly’ was, in the words of Ramsay MacDonald, ‘devoid of both honour and honesty’.13 The theft of land in the past had been given a veneer of respectability, but socialists reminded their audience that this was only through legitimization by parliaments controlled by the landed interest: land taken through parliamentary enclosure acts was effectively ‘stolen from the labouring people’, who had no representation in those parliaments.14 In the 1950s, the veteran trade union activist, Sidney Box, was still discussing the land question in the language of his youth, arguing that inherited estates were ‘gifts by degenerate and immoral Kings . . . stealing the land from the common people’.15 For some on the Left, the obvious, if generally unpalatable, political conclusion was that the nation should confiscate the land which was its rightful inheritance. Since, morally, the land was still the property of the people, its return to public ownership could be styled as ‘land restoration’; the nation would ‘reacquire its lost rights’.16 ‘What was there to stop them’, asked J. E. Williams of the Amalgamated Engineers, ‘from declaring that inasmuch as this land was never bought but was stolen, they would return it to the people in the same way it was taken from them. There was nothing unjust about that, and there was nothing immoral about it.’17 Ramsay MacDonald worried that changes of ownership since the initial appropriations meant that land had become ‘woven into our fabric of private possession’; even cooperative societies and workers’ organizations now owned land, which they had purchased fairly. But despite all these reservations, MacDonald, in his pre-prime-ministerial days, still argued that governments should approach the question by acknowledging that ‘land came within the scope of private property . . . by great and simple acts of wholesale theft’.18

11

12 Land and Machinery (ILP, 1901). E.g. Tanner, Land Grabbers. Ramsay MacDonald, Socialism: Critical and Constructive (1921), 161. 14 William C. Anderson, Socialism, the Dukes and the Land (ILP, 1907). 15 S. Box, The Good Old Days (1955), 68. 16 ILP resolution passed at 1914 LP Conference, 14th Conference, 1914, 118. Also 16th Conference, 121. 17 18 23rd Conference, 1923, 215. MacDonald, Socialism, 163–4. 13

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WHO STOLE THE L AND? There was no agreed starting point for the process of dispossession. ‘The land question in this country dates back to the Norman Conquest,’ stated H. Brockhouse, in an ILP pamphlet from 1909.19 The Hastings Labour Party, hosting the Labour Party conference in 1933, also blamed William the Conqueror.20 Others went back further, like the columnist on the agricultural workers’ union journal, The Land Worker, who believed that the land was already parcelled out by the time of Alfred the Great, and that the ‘evil’ arose ‘with the arrival of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons’. Even with such a distant perspective, this writer remained convinced that at some point public ownership had been ‘the system of our ancestors’.21 The game of ‘who stole the land?’ could be pushed further and further back, according to one’s favourite island race. In discussions about the prospects for land nationalization at the 1926 Labour Party conference, one delegate asked: common ownership of the land, by whom? Many of the delegates were Saxons, and ‘the Saxons stole the land originally from the Celts’.22 Although appropriations of the land could be located in such early periods of British history, scarcely anyone believed that the rural golden age had been quite so distant. Village traditions of communality were treated as characteristic of the Middle Ages, only beginning to collapse as capitalism changed the way in which agriculture was organized. The change had supposedly come as farming moved to employ fewer people, and to employ them on different terms, whilst access to the land on a community level became progressively more restricted through the process of enclosure. From as early as the sixteenth century there seemed to have been a worsening of the position of those employed on the land, in both their economic and social condition. The great wave of enclosures in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was charged with destroying the last vestiges of independence amongst rural workers, increasing their vulnerability at just the point when the growth of industrial enterprises needed to attract a cheap workforce away from the land. The tragedy of those forced to leave their rural surroundings for the unpleasant excesses of the early industrial slums lent itself to pathetic 19 20 22

H. Brockhouse, Curse of the Country. The Land Monopoly (ILP, 1909). 21 33rd Conference, 1933, 132. Land Worker, March 1920. 26th Conference, 1926, 222.

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recounting.23 ‘Many of those who left the green fields with hope for happier things never saw those fields again, but died, worn out and broken, in mean back streets of some city slum,’ as the story was told in the agricultural workers’ union’s own rural history.24 The later history of the countryside, that is from the 1830s onwards, received relatively little attention except within the agricultural trade unions, whose focus was primarily on the brave tradition of attempts to organize the rural workforce. For most people in the Labour movement, the significance of rural history was as a prelude to the industrial economy, and to the subsequent, predominantly urban experience of the nation as a whole. Such was the general outline of rural histories on the Left. A canon of academic works became established within the Labour movement as offering authoritative accounts of these changes. A number of people commented on the fact that it had fallen to a foreigner to write the first proper modern history of the English agricultural labourer: Wilhelm Hasbach, professor of politics at the University of Kiel, whose book Die englischen Landarbeiter in den letzten hundert Jahren und die Einhegungen (1894) was published in an English version in 1908 as A History of the English Agricultural Labourer.25 Hasbach was not as unconnected with the British Labour movement as the bald facts seemed to imply: he thanks Sidney Webb and the agricultural trade unionist George Edwards in the introduction to the original German edition.26 The economic historian Thorold Rogers, whose expansive work on prices and wages was another regular inclusion on Labour reading lists for rural history, also had links to agricultural trade unionism, having chaired meetings for Joseph Arch.27 Nonetheless, one of the notable things about the use of these set texts was that it was assumed that history could speak for itself: it did not need to be turned into propaganda through a specifically left-wing rewriting. Introductory sketches were produced within the Labour movement, but these usually directed the reader to the academic, nominally 23 This was also a theme for fiction set in the modern world, e.g. the fate of the village belle in Richard Whiteing, The Yellow Van (1903), driven from her native village by victimization, and eventually found dead on her feet at the washtub in a squalid London slum. 24 The Farm Worker, His Past and Future (NUAW, 1921), 8. 25 Sidney Webb, preface to the English translation, p. vii; E. N. Bennett, Problems of Village Life ([1914]), 9; F. E. Green, A History of the English Agricultural Labourer 1870 –1920 (1920), 6. 26 Wilhelm Hasbach, Die englischen Landarbeiter in den letzten hundert Jahren und die Einhegungen (Leipzig, 1894), Foreword, p. ix. 27 James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages. The History of English Labour (3rd edn, 1890), 513.

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non-political literature on the subject.28 Works by R. H. Tawney and Paul Vinogradoff were recommended as obvious scholarly contributions to understandings of the rural past.29 The labour historian G. D. H. Cole took pride in the fact that his biography of William Cobbett, which focused on Cobbett’s role as the ‘tribune of the transition’ between the agricultural and industrial economies, was well received by reviewers ‘of all shades of political opinion’: although the book bears many signs of Cole’s work as a socialist theorist and educator within the workingclass movement, he set out to write as an historian not a political propagandist.30 J. L. and Barbara Hammond, whose work The Village Labourer (1911) was perhaps the best-known and most warmly recommended book on the history of the agricultural workforce, were particularly sensitive to suggestions that they might have misrepresented material to make a political point. The Hammonds’ position was radical Liberal, and their later relationship with the Labour Party was rather semi-detached, though J. L. Hammond served on a rural policy committee for the party in 1918, earning his place through his reputation as the pre-eminent historian of the agricultural worker.31 It was the subject matter of The Village Labourer, and obviously the sympathetic way in which it was treated, which commended the book to readers on the Left. The book focused on parliamentary enclosure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and on the devastating effects which this had on the villages, leading to the ‘last labourers’ revolt’ of 1830. The canonization of this classic of Labour history owed a great deal to serendipity: the Hammonds had not originally envisaged the book as it stands, and it took on a separate identity as a pragmatic means of dividing up an unwieldy study 28 See for example Montague and T. R. Fordham, The English Agricultural Labourer 1300 –1925. An Historical Sketch (Labour Publishing Company, 1925). Also review of Green, History of the English Agricultural Labourer, in Land Worker, November 1920. 29 E.g. suggested reading in George Guest, An Introduction to English Rural History (Workers’ Education Association, 1920), recommended by the NUAW to its membership (review in Land Worker, January 1921). 30 G. D. H. Cole, William Cobbett, Fabian Tract 215 (June 1925), 19. 31 J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer 1760 –1832. A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill (1913 edn; repr. Gloucester, 1987) pp. ix–xii; Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978), 154 –5, 235, 286–9, et passim. See also Stewart A. Weaver, The Hammonds: A Marriage in History (Stanford, California, 1997). Within the Labour movement, the Hammonds were valued for their historiographical rather than their political credentials: see memo by Walter Citrine, 29 June 1933, re TUC’s publication of a centenary history of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, MRC, TUC, MSS 292/1.91/14.

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which became The Labourer trilogy.32 The subsequent history of the three volumes (The Town Labourer, The Village Labourer, and The Skilled Labourer) showed that only The Village Labourer could really capture imagination and interest sufficient to stand in its own right. It was widely praised as a model for the writing of social history and, more specifically, it quickly established itself as the vital text for all those who were interested in the condition of the agricultural worker past or present. There was no inevitable connection between the study of enclosure and radical politics, nor were all histories of the subject in the early twentieth century necessarily written from the perspective of the Left. W. R. Curtler, writing in 1920, took a forthright approach to countering suggestions about enclosure’s deleterious effects on sections of the population, inverting radical accusations about the theft of the land: ‘But what were the facts? Simply that [the squatter] had enjoyed for years property to which he had no right whatever, which, in fact, he had stolen, and was compelled to restore when legal rights were examined.’33 It was also quite possible to write a positive history, focusing on improvements in agricultural productivity: even the Hammonds were prepared to acknowledge that enclosure had facilitated agricultural advances.34 Nevertheless, much of what was written on enclosure was informed by the new emphasis on social as much as economic history, and from this perspective, attention was readily drawn to the suffering which accompanied agricultural ‘improvement’. As one Labour MP remarked in 1915, ‘Some of the saddest stories in history are associated with the divorcement [sic] of the workers from the soil.’35 People in the Labour movement who were interested in the land question were likely to have had their understanding of rural history shaped by reading Hasbach, the Hammonds, Thorold Rogers, and Tawney, amongst others, or by encountering these authors’ interpretations through periodical and pamphlet literature. The Village Labourer appeared in a cheap edition in 1920, sold to trade unionists on a nonprofit basis for 3/6d.; the agricultural workers’ union specifically recommended it to its membership.36 Some important general histories, such as 32

Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats, 155. W. H. R. Curtler, The Enclosure and Redistribution of Our Land (Oxford, 1920), 247. Hammond and Hammond, Village Labourer, p. ix. See also comments by R. H. Tawney, in The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912), pp. ix–x, and 409. 35 W. C. Anderson, in The Labourer, July 1915. 36 Land Worker, December 1920. Also April 1921, when the book was recommended for NUAW branch book clubs. 33 34

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the Webbs’ History of Trade Unionism (1894), barely acknowledged the countryside’s existence, but exposure to the chronologies of dispossession as recounted in rural histories was not restricted to readers of a specific genre. The narratives also informed a range of literature and debate, from tracts on land tenure to broader expositions of socialist philosophy. The general features of these narratives were well established: the decline of the rural population from the prosperous late Middle Ages, when society and agricultural practice were based on organic community, through the introduction of capitalist ideas and a changing view of land ownership, to the spread of enclosure, destruction of the commons, a movement of population into industry, and the transformation of the peasantry into a landless proletariat. This basic chronology was by no means peculiar to the Left, and different emphases were possible within it, from which differing implications followed. These variations occurred primarily in the dating of rural Britain’s golden age. Interpretations settled broadly into two versions of rural history, which often coexisted, reflecting different interests within the broad coalition of British socialism, and informing distinct ideas about policy and the future face of the countryside. These versions were not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they tended to emphasize different chapters in the rural past: one focusing on the medieval period, and the other on the enclosures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To some degree they also reflected fashions in scholarship: in particular, the prominence given to the last wave of enclosures was a response to the publication of the Hammonds’ work in 1913. GOLDEN AGES At the beginning of the twentieth century, the common focus was on the notion of a medieval golden age. This interpretation retained a particular importance within agricultural trade unionism, partly because it could be associated with the commemoration of the most dramatic historical outbreaks of rural radicalism. The implications of this reading of history also made the notion of a medieval golden age attractive to certain types of socialist, of the communitarian rather than the statist variety, and it seems always to have been the interpretation privileged by the more leftwing. As an account of the rural past, it looked back to very ancient practices on the land, celebrating the nature of the old village community.

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According to this version of the national history, the Norman Conquest was responsible for breaking up forms of landholding, depriving many of the freedom which they had once enjoyed. Yet despite this, as the National Union of Agricultural Workers pointed out, ‘even under these conditions all these men had land which they occupied and used for their own benefit’.37 Accounts of the medieval golden age proceeded to chronicle popular risings, and particularly the Peasants’ Revolt, as demonstrations that memories of an older independence still lingered. The important transitional point was placed only in the late Middle Ages, with the move to pastoral agriculture—‘when sheep ate up men’— and the resulting rural unemployment. The rise of capitalist farming converted the peasantry into ‘sellers of labour power or proletarians’, and even at this early economic stage it could prompt a socialist critique, and shape Thomas More as a ‘worthy precursor of scientific socialism’.38 Thus a society based on mutual obligation became one linked only by financial bonds, with no social responsibility attached to economic power. Within this interpretation, the true golden age could be identified at various points: before the Conquest, under the high feudal system, or in the fifteenth century, when, according to Thorold Rogers, English workers reached the height of their prosperity.39 But for most of those who were influenced by this narrative account, the important feature was less the turning points when change had occurred than the identification of a static prelapsarian society. Sometimes a specific periodization was applied, but it was also common to identify the golden age as simply ‘medieval’. This vocabulary was not without its ambiguities. As a generic adjective in the early twentieth century, ‘medieval’ was often a term of condemnation.40 It implied backwardness, ignorance, and superstition: a primitive society. Yet the influence of nineteenth-century idealizations of the Middle Ages also retained its importance. In this context, the Middle Ages represented a period of creativity, of cohesiveness in society and apparent pleasure in work: in other words, the vision of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, both of whom were widely read by at least the earlier 37

The Farm Worker, His Past and Future—emphasis as shown. Review of Karl Kautsky, Thomas More and his Utopia, in The Plebs, 22/7 ( July 1930), 158 –9. 39 James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages. The History of English Labour (3rd edn, 1890), 326. 40 E.g. Labour Organiser, September 1933; NEC, 22 November 1933, on Rutland and Stamford by-election. 38

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generations in the Labour movement.41 When William Morris envisaged his socialist utopia in News from Nowhere (1890), it was a future dressed as the Middle Ages: his dreamer ‘felt as if I were alive in the fourteenth century’.42 An audience for such medievalism persisted into the interwar period. When the Labour movement in Nottingham organized its May Day pageant in 1921, the theme presented contrasts between life in the Middle Ages and the present day, offered as a story of decline: ‘The debasement of colour in social and industrial life was suggested by the declension from the rich hues of the middle ages to the drab of to-day’. The tableaux aimed to promote a single idea: ‘that the wage-labour of to-day is a phase of history and a passing phase at that’.43 The term ‘feudal’ also had some interesting applications. ‘Feudalism’ in the modern countryside helped to explain the rural population’s political lethargy and resilience to Labour’s message. In use, the word was often full of condescension. Yet this was not universally the case. The progressive social investigator Seebohm Rowntree thought that, where old ‘feudal’ relationships lingered into the modern world, labourers were generally better off, at least in a material sense, than those from more ‘independent’ villages.44 Feudalism need not be ‘a bad thing’, or at least there were some things (such as capitalist exploitation) which were worse.45 The Social Democratic Federation described landlordism within a capitalist system as ‘far and away a meaner, crueller system of plunder than ever it was in the days of serfdom’.46 It was possible for some, even on the far left, to celebrate the Middle Ages as a period of relative economic well-being, despite the fact that this coexisted with fundamental social inequality. Even communists could find something to celebrate in the life of the peasant under feudalism: as a CPGB pamphlet from 1921 argued, ‘all things considered, your ancestors did not have such a bad time after all.’47 The legal and social restraints under which ordinary villagers had lived in the medieval period seemed to be more than compensated for by 41 W. T. Stead, ‘The Labour Party and the Books That Helped to Make it’, The Review of Reviews, June 1906, 568– 82. 42 William Morris, News from Nowhere, or an Epoch of Rest (1890; 1970 edn, repr. 1987), 19. 43 Labour Organiser, May 1921. 44 B. Seebohm Rowntree and May Kendall, How the Labourer Lives. A Study of the Rural Labour Problem (1913; repr. 1917), 320–1. 45 Cf. Henry Harben, The Rural Problem (1913), 44, on the suffering which the too-hasty destruction of feudalism might cause if there was nothing but individualism to put in its place. 46 47 Justice, 28 February 1924. Tanner, Land Grabbers, 4.

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a spirit of community within the village: the gulf between the middle classes and the slum dweller in the 1930s might be greater than that which separated ‘the Saxon serf from the earl’.48 J. L. Hammond saw in the medieval village ‘a form of personal serfdom which is severe and harsh combined with something like a cooperative society’.49 Indeed the medieval village’s major contribution to the intellectual history of the British Left was as a model of cooperative and communal life. It fitted into traditions of a communitarian past, such as those to which Philip Snowden referred in a 1923 attack on modern capitalism: ‘By far the greatest time that man has been upon this globe he has lived not under a system of private enterprise, not under capitalism, but under a system of tribal communism.’50 The notion of a lost communist heritage became a mythology within socialism, notably through Friedrich Engel’s The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), but, in the British context, such allusions were usually linked more closely to specific episodes in the national past. R. H. Tawney described the ‘communism’ of the Levellers as ‘the spontaneous doctrineless communism of the open field village, where men set out their fields, and plough, and reap, laugh in the fine and curse in the wet, with natural fellowship.’51 Such a positive reading of the old society could not be tolerated by all strands of the Left. H. G. Wells (favouring a futuristic, rather than a nostalgic utopia) provided an interesting criticism of this yearning for what he termed the ‘Normal Social Life’—a traditional society based on agriculture and organized around localized communities. Wells thought that the image of this happy state was deeply misleading, focusing only on the more fortunate phases in its existence, when the population was healthy, prosperous, united in its belief system, and enjoying a wide distribution of property. He attacked William Morris in particular as being ‘profoundly reactionary’ in advocating the revival of such a society and expounding an ideal which differed little from that of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton.52 Nostalgia for the medieval village was always open to charges of being politically reactionary, or at least regressive, though 48

H. V. Morton, What I Saw in the Slums (LP, 1933). Bodleian Library, Hammond papers, text of BBC talk on The Village, 27 October 1936. 50 51 Capitalism in the Pillory (LP, 1923). Tawney, Agrarian Problem, 338. 52 ‘The Past and the Great State’, in H. G. Wells (ed.), Socialism and the Great State (1912), 9 and 18. On the problems of incorporating Belloc and Chesterton in the political spectrum, see Logie Barrow and Ian Bullock, Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1996), 296. 49

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curiously it was often subscribed to by some of the most radical, even revolutionary individuals. The medieval village was not the only possible setting for a golden age. The Hammonds’ work highlighted the possibility of identifying a later halcyon period in the history of rural Britain—though the Hammonds themselves were careful to deny that they regarded it as such.53 In this reading of history, the significant shift came in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, marked by the flood of parliamentary enclosures, and neatly coinciding with the industrial revolution. The Hammonds believed that the crucial factor in this late transformation of rural Britain had been the loss of rights to the commons. The golden age for the smallholder, it seemed, could have been as late as the 1830s. But, in contrast to narratives extolling the virtues of the medieval period, this interpretation placed more emphasis on the transition than on the golden age which had been destroyed. The happy state which preceded enclosure tended to be implied (through accounts of the suffering and misery inflicted during the theft of the land), rather than described in its own right. The interesting point about this narrative was the emphasis given to the idea of a transition c.1780 –1830, which formed the organizing principle for a number of historical works on the Left, such as G. D. H. Cole’s biography of Cobbett (1924).54 These emphases, on the medieval period on the one hand and the transitional period of the agricultural and industrial revolutions on the other, bore obvious relation to broad interpretations of national history. The relative significance of the chronologies depended in part on whether one thought that capitalism and the modern society developed through financial power or as companions to the growth of the industrial sector. The emphasis on the medieval village complemented the popularity of medieval history, an interest in legal changes, early urbanization, and the guilds; the interest in eighteenth-century enclosure was more closely related to developments in economic history and attempts to explain how Britain industrialized.55 Both chronologies were informed by an effort to chart the disappearance of a native peasantry: in the language of the land crusades

53

Hammond and Hammond, The Village Labourer, 33–4. I explore this further in ‘G. D. H. Cole and William Cobbett’, Rural History, 10/1 (1999), 91–104. 55 See, for example, the treatment of enclosure in Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (1884). 54

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from the turn of the century, to find ‘who killed Cock Robin’.56 But the eighteenth-century paradigm pointed to a rather different vision of the English ‘peasant’ from that arising from a concentration on the long chronology of dispossession and the distant roots of communal village life. A focus on the legal forms and obligations which had operated in the Middle Ages tended to emphasize community; the vision presented by the Hammonds and their followers was far more individualistic. It followed from this that the significance of the later enclosures lay not so much in destroying village society, as in depriving individuals of their rights to the land. The end of common grazing and the open fields might have been interpreted as a blow to communality; instead it was usually condemned for weakening the individual’s independence and reducing his family’s quality of life. The conflicts of ideology raised by such glorification of an individualistic peasantry are displayed in Sidney Webb’s 1908 preface to Hasbach’s history of the agricultural labourer: while Hasbach looked towards a reorganization of agriculture into a multitude of small peasant holdings, Webb saw much more potential for collectivization.57 These divergent views on the virtues of small-scale cultivation persisted on the Left, in agricultural policy and feeding back into readings of the rural past. Those people who emphasized the importance of enclosure as an historical transition tended to be apologists for smallholding in the modern world. This was an argument which went beyond ideas about the economic organization of agriculture, in terms of farming on a small or a large scale. Smallholding evoked an ideology of independence and self-help: the loss of the land was considered to be a deprivation of liberty as well as wealth. The focus on a relatively late decline in rural Britain also encouraged an ambivalence towards the old society. An important element in left-wing narratives about medieval Britain was the celebration of revolts by which ordinary people had challenged their social confinement and the privilege of the gentleman. But when the ‘peasantry’ made their last ditch revolts against enclosure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, their aim was to preserve the old order rather than create a new one. In historical accounts focusing on the later transition, it is notable that pre-enclosure 56 Whiteing, The Yellow Van, 243; NUAW, BIX/15, Hawkchurch Magazine, June 1918. In an interesting example of how the reference lingered and was adapted, in the early 1920s the question of Cock Robin’s murder was related to the loss of wage regulation in agriculture (e.g. LP leaflet c.1921–2, ‘Agricultural Wages—Who killed Cock Robin? Who betrayed the Agricultural Worker?’). 57 Hasbach, History of the English Agricultural Labourer, p. x.

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land owners tended to be condemned only where they had failed in their social obligations. One of the extraordinary upshots of this was a nostalgia for the old landlords, alongside a nostalgia for the old peasantry. As G. D. H. Cole walked through the countryside with Hugh Gaitskell in the 1920s, his musings revealed what Gaitskell described as ‘a certain nostalgia’ for pre-industrial Britain and the days of the great aristocratic landlords.58 Whatever their faults (and they were several), the landlords were credited with accepting certain obligations, at first in terms of social responsibilities, and later, as the relationship became more based in economics, through providing capital to assist in the cultivation of the land. ‘The system was feudal and despotic—but it worked,’ the Labour Party acknowledged in policy literature of the 1930s, adding the caveat that this justification of the landlords’ position was not tenable in the twentieth century: ‘it does not work any longer. The manor house has long since ceased to provide resources for the development of the countryside.’59 The terms in which these observations were presented suggested that the social hierarchy only became offensive once it was no longer contributing to the maintenance of a productive rural sector. Within the Labour movement, the chronologies of dispossession concentrated almost exclusively on the English case. However, some specific comments were made on the Scottish experience, which provided a severe illustration of the theft of the land.60 The Highland clearances, of which the most notorious were those carried out by the Duke of Sutherland, demonstrated the extreme power possessed by landlords to sweep away whole communities, clearing, for the raising of deer, acres of land which had once supported ‘thousands of industrious and hardy yeomen’.61 Attacks on the rights of crofters were compared to what had happened in England much earlier: ‘Just as in Yorkshire 200 years earlier arable land was formed into sheep farms, so in the Highlands of Scotland in much more recent days—in the memory of our farmers—the land and the hill pasture, and even the right to the rivers and the sea—were taken away’.62 MacDonald, ever stressing the superiority of his countrymen, thought 58 Hugh Gaitskell, ‘At Oxford in the Twenties’, in Asa Briggs and John Saville (eds.), Essays in Labour History (1967), 12–13. 59 How Labour Will Save Agriculture (LP, March 1934). 60 E.g. 17th Conference, 1918, 128. 61 Brockhouse, Curse of the Country. A significant difference from the English experience was that the chief result of these Scottish clearances had been mass emigration, rather than a marked deterioration of the position for those who remained. 62 Margaret McMillan, The Bard at the Braes (ILP, 1909).

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that the feeling remained common in Scotland that private property in land was quite distinct from other forms of property: ‘that trespass is no illegality, that poaching . . . is no crime, and that access to the mountains is a common right’.63 THE USES OF HISTORY The influence of history lies in the telling, as much as in the story itself. Political literature was sometimes devoted entirely to lessons from the past, as in the case of A Countryman Talks about Socialism, a pamphlet published by the Socialist League in 1934. The text tells a story. Set in an English village in winter, it has as its hero a young modern-day ploughman named Tyler Reeves. Tyler, one learns, has never given much thought to his surroundings or his situation in life, but he clearly has some ambition to learn more about the world around him, because he has been following a series of wireless talks: lectures on the history of the landscape and village life. As he reflects on these lectures, Tyler begins to look at his familiar countryside with a greater understanding, and to observe the marks of the past on the landscape: the signs of former settlements, the roads twisting around ancient field boundaries, ridges in the pasture land still showing ‘the swerve of the village plough and oxen’, from ‘far-off days when the land was tilled’. Tyler embarks on a quest to satisfy this newly found curiosity about the past. The village schoolmaster explains to him that land was once held in common, but came to be regarded as private property. The blacksmith takes the story further, describing the process of enclosure and how people were driven off the land, many of them moving to the towns, where their propertyless condition exposed them to exploitation by the factory owners. Tyler remains curious. What sticks in his mind after his lessons on the history of agriculture is that ‘for centuries [village] communities had struggled to keep a near equality in their midst’, and he tries to imagine what such a communal village could have been like. The parson encourages him not to worry about these things, but Tyler eventually goes to talk to Mr Price, a socialist writer who happens (conveniently) to be living in the village. Price explains to the ploughman how life might be different in a society which is organized for the common good and guided by the principle of public service. Tyler finally understands the need for, and the meaning of, socialism. 63

MacDonald, Socialism, 169; idem, At Home and Abroad (1936), 92.

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There were of course two stories being told in A Countryman Talks about Socialism. One described the political awakening of an agricultural worker and his conversion to socialism; the other was a history of dispossession, of changes in village life and the ownership of the land. In the story of political education, an understanding of the past played a crucial role: it is through the realization of how things had once been different that the ploughman begins to think politically and question the contemporary social order. The pamphlet was intended primarily for a rural audience, and its author, H. B. Pointing, editor of the agricultural workers’ union’s journal, was delivering his own lecture on rural history, in the hope that it might prompt reactions in his readers like those experienced by the fictitious Tyler. Pointing often advocated this approach to educating the agricultural worker, advising socialist propagandists in the countryside that their most useful speeches would probably be ‘historical in character’.64 One explanation for the supposed political unconsciousness of villagers was a lack of understanding of their own history: thus a first step in Labour’s political appeal to the countryside would be through the revelation that life there had once been very different. Within the National Union of Agricultural Workers, rural history was not just an interesting subject for its own sake; members should deepen their knowledge of history and turn it ‘to practical account in Union propaganda’.65 When the union issued its own publication on rural history in 1921, it was advertised with utility very much in mind: ‘You cannot put your best into Union work—unless you know Something of our past history.’66 Similarly Hugh Marks, the radical rector of Hawkchurch in Devon, used his church magazine to lecture agricultural workers on their history, as well as on the present-day work of the trade unions, hoping that ‘the plain statement of the great wrong done to the people by enclosure and its still present results [would] stir the labourers to strive for better things.’67 It was not only agricultural labourers who needed lessons in rural history. Narratives of the theft of the land might also help to rouse the political spirit of the urban workforce. The idea of an historical dispossession has not always been given the emphasis which it deserves in studies of the land question. Land reform in Britain was more than a form of economic analysis or an aim based on an idea of abstract justice: it was an attempt to right historical wrongs. When the Liberals were preparing 64

65 Labour Leader, 20 July 1922. Land Worker, April 1921. Ibid. August 1921. 67 NUAW, BIX/15, Hawkchurch Magazine, August 1918 (handwritten and duplicated). 66

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for their land campaign before the First World War, the accumulation of historical material was considered important, including information on the rights which villagers had possessed prior to enclosure.68 ‘It may be thought that these references to former times are not to the point,’ commented A. H. D. Acland, in his introduction to the 1913 report of the Land Enquiry Committee. ‘But it is essential that we should realise how comparatively modern in our long agricultural history are both the unlimited power of the landlord and the landless position of the labourer.’69 Memories of dispossession were thought to be part of oral tradition in some villages in the early twentieth century, relating to the loss of rights many years previously. The rural writer George Bourne described how an old man burned with indignation when he remembered how the common land had once been unfenced.70 As late as the 1920s, enclosure could be described as a ‘living issue in the rural mind’.71 This added an important, and highly emotive element to arguments for land reform. Although many British land reformers seized on the extraordinary combination of theorizing and evangelism offered by the American polemicist Henry George, they had their own, native justifications for focusing on the land question. Those justifications were in essence rather different from the case which George made in the context of the United States, as he himself acknowledged. In a vast country like the United States, where the recent history had been one of expansion and opportunities for land settlement, the approach to questions about land ownership was quite distinct from that in Britain, where private property in land was frequently associated with memories of injustice.72 Thus the 68 Lloyd George to C. Roden Buxton, 23 September 1912, Rhodes House, Oxford, MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 405, box 1, file 1; Gilbert Slater’s historical survey in The Land. The Report of the Land Enquiry Committee, i: Rural (1913), pp. lxi–lxxxiii. 69 Ibid. p. xxvii. 70 George Bourne, Change in the Village (1912; 1966), 73. George Bourne was the pen name of George Sturt (1863–1927), son of a wheelwright in Farnham, Surrey. He began writing articles for the Socialist League paper, Commonweal, in the 1880s, though subsequently turned his back on socialism. F. R. Leavis regarded his books as illustrations of ‘the organic community’; see E. P. Thompson’s foreword to George Bourne, The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923; Cambridge, 1993 edn). 71 The Land and the Nation. Rural Report of the Liberal Land Committee (1925), 198. 72 Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1880; London, 1931), 277. A contrasting view on the relative perspectives in Britain and the United States was expressed by Edward Pease, who reflected that ‘Land may be the source of all wealth to the mind of a settler in a new country. To those whose working day was passed in Threadneedle Street and Lombard Street . . . land appears to bear no relation at all to wealth, and the allegation that the whole surplus of production goes to the landowners is obviously untrue’ (History of the Fabian Society (1916), 21).

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significant distinction was not so much in the underlying analysis of the land question, as in the potential for its popular reception. In Britain, there was an historical narrative available to provide a justification for projected reform. Henry George’s importance for radicalism and the Labour movement has been well acknowledged.73 Eulogies for this latter-day prophet could be remarkably effusive. ‘Ever since 1905 I have known that there was a man from God, and his name was Henry George!’, enthused J. C. Wedgwood, Liberal, and later Labour, MP.74 The great man’s portrait was displayed on walls as an inspiration, to be pointed to as that of ‘a man [who] has come who will teach the people’.75 Yet although British radicals claimed to owe much to his influence, the inferences which they drew from George’s arguments led to different conclusions about the shape which reform should take.76 For Henry George, the important issue was to reclaim the economic benefit of land for the community, rather than to reclaim the land itself. His plan was to use land value taxation as a just means to replace all other forms of state revenue with a ‘single tax’. But British land reformers tended to be excited less by such fiscal possibilities, than by the social and economic potential of a system which would encourage owners to develop sites to their proper potential, releasing more land for housing and boosting employment. George retained his reputation as a prophet, whilst his agenda was largely abandoned.77 As early as 1907, Progress and Poverty was being recommended to socialist readers in Britain on the strength of its past appeal, rather than its inherent merits.78 By the late 1930s, new generations in the labour movement seemed almost unaware of its reputation.79 In the developing debates 73 Cf. John Saville, ‘Henry George and the British Labour Movement’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 5 (Autumn 1962); Elwood P. Lawrence, Henry George in the British Isles (East Lansing, MI: 1957). 74 C. V. Wedgwood, The Last of the Radicals (1951), 70. 75 McMillan, Bard at the Braes. 76 G. D. H. Cole, A Short History of the British Working-Class Movement (1948), 233. On claiming George for socialism, T. Russell Williams, Henry George, Socialism and the Single Tax (ILP, 1907). 77 Veteran land-taxers like Andrew MacLaren, Labour MP for Burslem, remained loyal: in 1943 in the House of Commons, MacLaren described George as ‘a bigger man than Beveridge’ (HCDeb, 386, 1620, 16 February 1943). 78 In A Guide to Books for Socialists (Fabian Tract 132, April 1907), the book was described as containing ‘many inaccuracies due to the author’s limited economic outlook’. 79 At a meeting of the Ellesmere Port League of Youth in 1937, one member read extracts ‘from a book entitled Progress and Poverty by Henry George’—a description which hardly suggests familiarity with the work (Youth Forward—The Merseyside Magazine for all Young Socialists, May 1937).

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about land nationalization in Britain, Henry George’s work continued to be cited as important, but the historical narratives of dispossession had more direct significance in informing the arguments and providing a language for putting them across. RADICAL CHRONOLOGIES The discontinuities resulting from the loss of the land were one theme in the Left’s interpretations of the rural past. However, there were also continuities to be celebrated. The masses were not a purely passive presence in the historical countryside. Indeed one of the important roles of rural history in Labour culture was to establish extended chronologies of radicalism, as a context from which the modern Labour movement could be seen to have developed. ‘We are not an organisation created out of special conditions at a particular moment,’ argued George Lansbury in 1928, ‘No you will find the beginnings of our story in the lives of those rebels, Wat Tyler, the Kett brothers’.80 Although for much of the early twentieth century the countryside had only a tenuous claim to be part of Labour’s present-day territory, it was embraced as a setting for Labour’s history. This was on two grounds. Firstly, there was a sense in which the events of rural history, most particularly through the driving of workers out of agriculture and into other industry, had helped to bring about the situation in which the Labour cause acquired a purpose and a constituency. In this interpretation, Britain, and particularly England, developed a propertyless, urban working class partly because the people had lost their stake in the land and the new agriculture had no need of them. Secondly, the rural past could be taken as an extension of Labour’s own history. Since the industrial dominance of the economy was relatively recent, even in the annals of the ‘first industrial nation’, most of the national history was naturally the history of a largely rural country. Like the land itself, history in Britain seemed to have been appropriated. Pupils of village schools were unlikely to have been told about John Ball or the enclosure acts, since, as a Communist pamphlet observed, it was not the business of the parson and schoolmaster ‘to make you discontented and rebellious by telling you of the countless frauds and robberies of which the members of your class have been the victims for centuries past’.81 Instead schoolbook history had, in the eyes of many on 80

28th Conference, 1928, 150.

81

Tanner, Land Grabbers, 12.

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the Left, been turned into a propagandist saga, ‘with a view to creating a certain spurious “loyalty” to King and Country and Empire, and to begetting generations of servile and slavish working populations for the support and upkeep of landlords and capitalists’.82 E. N. Bennett, onetime Liberal MP, and later Labour candidate, complained in 1914 that children in village schools were taught ‘to ignore or condemn the men who died in a vain attempt to secure justice for the oppressed forefathers of the hamlet.’ He commented that ‘It is indeed a bitter piece of historical irony that the exploits of Elizabethan buccaneers should be cherished while the very names of Tyler, Kett, Wrawe, Cade, Straw, Ball and Grindecobbe have either passed into quasi-oblivion or are used as synonyms for a reckless adventurer or a ruffian.’83 Laments about the class biases of official versions of the national history were to be found throughout the Labour movement.84 A focus on new emphases in the nation’s history was not only a form of revisionism in itself, a corrective against the narrative-bias of schoolbook history; it also fulfilled an important role for Labour as an institution in providing an extended ancestry for the modern movement. The pageants and historical representations of history emanating from socialist and workers’ groups before the Second World War illustrate the attempts being made to integrate the history of Labour with the established national story.85 History was being reclaimed for the Labour interest. This often served to reclaim geography as much as history for Labour. Areas where the movement had little modern strength were eager to demonstrate their historical credentials. Host towns for Labour Party conferences usually attempted to dig up some claim to their place in the great story, ‘ransacking’ their history for ‘democratic worthies’.86 Brighton insisted in 1921 that ‘the story of Labour in this part of the world was very very old indeed’, and the president of the local party instructed conference delegates in its radical associations, encompassing a somewhat curious collection of events: the death of Jack Cade, the birth of Shelley, and the writing of Fields, Factories and Workshops, all of which took place in Sussex.87 The Mid-Buckinghamshire DLP unearthed a radical ancestry, and claimed that, in the 1640s, Buckinghamshire had

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83 Land Worker, April 1921. Bennett, Problems of Village Life, 22. E.g. Labour Organiser, August 1937. 85 E.g. the People’s Pageant at Suffolk Labour Day, 1933 (Suffolk RO, S2/6/3.5); the Pageant of Labour at Crystal Palace, 1934 (MRC, TUC MSS.292/1.91/45). 86 87 Sussex Daily News, 22 June 1921. 21st Conference, 1921, 141. 84

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strongly upheld ‘what were then the progressive forces’, basing this argument largely on the grounds that Winstanley had issued a pamphlet from there.88 Kent was credited with a fine tradition of ‘struggle’, in which John Ball had the starring role.89 As Labour pushed its origins further back, episodes of rural radicalism were embraced as part of its heritage. When Viscount Hastings painted the overthrow of capitalism for the Marx Memorial Library in London in the mid-1930s, an agricultural labourer featured amongst the historical stalwarts leading the assault.90 ‘If modern socialism is primarily a product of the factory and our industrial civilization, its ancestry is to be found in the field,’ David Petegorsky explained in his history of radicalism and the English Civil War, published by the Left Book Club in 1940.91 In establishing such an ancestry, Labour cherished examples of radicalism which showed a common sympathy and cause, linking revolts and philosophies of the past with the interests now represented by Labour. British Radicalism had, to some degree, always celebrated such accounts of its heritage. The important point about these putative ancestries was not whether they represented a true record of continuities, but that the associations made in this way became a living part of the culture of the Labour movement. A focus on the past radicalism of the villages offered some encouragement for those who hoped to rouse the rural population in the twentieth century. An agricultural organizer for the Transport and General Workers’ Union advised other union members that ‘Those who believe that the farm-worker has always been a hopeless “clod”, or one to whom the term “chawbacon” may be contemptuously applied, had better read J. L. and Barbara Hammond’s . . . The Village Labourer.’92 It is interesting that this did not attempt to contradict what were obviously common perceptions of the present-day workforce. In fact where modern rural workers showed progressive tendencies and took an unusually active part in Labour politics, they tended to be described in terms which referred back to

88

Bucks RO, Buckinghamshire Labour News, January 1940. Country Standard, July 1938. 90 Mural in Marx Memorial Library, Clerkenwell Green, London, 1935. John Hastings (1901–90), son of the 15th earl of Huntingdon, studied under Diego Rivera in California, and produced a number of mural paintings in the United States and Britain, including wall paintings at Buscot Park for Lord Faringdon (see p. 123). 91 David W. Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War—A Study of the Social Philosophy of Gerrard Winstanley (Left Book Club, 1940), 9–10. 92 John Beard, in The Record, February 1934. 89

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historical radicalism. The tradition of the ‘village Hampden’ was often invoked.93 Joseph Arch was described as ‘no firebrand but a village Hampden’, and the term was also applied to more obscure trade unionists.94 A Gloucestershire village of only fifty houses, but which boasted thirty-seven members of the Labour Party in 1926, served to illustrate that ‘the race of village Hampdens is not dead’.95 Although the Hammonds drew attention to the neglected episode of the ‘last labourers’ revolt’ of 1830, their book scarcely offered an optimistic vision of the subsequent potential for revolt amongst agricultural workers. The story of a rising suppressed in so devastating a fashion, and motivated by the desperation of a people who had not yet forgotten what it had been to have rights in the land, lent itself to pathos rather than inspiration. Elsewhere on the Left a more glorious ancestry for rural radicalism was rehearsed, without dwelling on the similarly depressing outcomes of earlier labourers’ risings. There were frequent references to the Peasants’ Revolt, and the meetings held in support of the school strike at Burston in Norfolk in 1914 were thought to show how John Ball’s dream of fellowship ‘became reality’.96 J. C. Wedgwood claimed in the mid-1920s that Labour stood ‘in direct succession to Wat Tyler, John Ball and Robert Kett’.97 Activists in the agricultural workers’ union hoped to instil in their membership ‘some of the spirit that inspired [a]nd brought out men like Jack Cade, Sheppard, Latimer, Ball the mad Priest of Kent, and thousands of [o]thers’.98 Robert Kett was much celebrated by Norfolk trade unionists as a local hero.99 The celebration of these ancestries served a purpose in offering encouragement for the rural Labour movement: a people apparently incapable of resistance had its ancestry in those who rose in rebellion under Tyler 93 Cf. Raphael Samuel, ‘The Discovery of Puritanism, 1820–1914: A Preliminary Sketch’, in Jane Garnett and Colin Matthew (eds.), Revival and Religion since 1700 (1993), 222–3. 94 Frances, Countess of Warwick, writing on Arch in, The Autobiography of Joseph Arch (1966), 11; Norfolk Weekly, 5 January 1924, describing a branch secretary to whom W. B. Taylor made a presentation. Also Green, History of the English Agricultural Labourer, 181, on George Hewitt. 95 Labour Organiser, August 1926. 96 ‘Casey’, The Burston School Strike, pamphlet (autumn 1915), copy at Norfolk RO, MC31/68. 97 Labour and the Farm Worker (LP, 1925). 98 National Agricultural Labourers’ and Rural Workers’ Union, leaflet no. 4, (c.1918), MERL, NUAW, DII/4. 99 J. F. Henderson, a socialist councillor in Norwich, organized a memorial to Kett in 1949, on the 400th anniversary of the rebellion (Norfolk RO, HEN 8, 383x6).

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and Jack Cade.100 The modern countryside, it was hoped, might produce another Tyler, Ball, or Kett.101 Yet these early rebels and heroes for rural Labour were also the ancestors of the Labour movement more broadly. Images of revolt were often portrayed through allusion to medieval peasant rebellions. For example, the magazine Poetry and the People printed songs from the Peasants’ Revolt as expressions of the spirit which it hoped to encourage in modern poets.102 The Co-op film Song of the People (1944) began its story of ‘men getting together’ with Wat Tyler in the fourteenth century: the cooperative spirit in this history ‘started as a whisper in a little Essex field’, and ran through to the present day, via an identity parade of rural rebels, and a reconstruction of the Diggers’ communities, as well as the usual litany of urban Labour history.103 However, attitudes to this radical rural past remained very ambiguous. In the context of Labour’s modern exclusion from much of the countryside, it was difficult to acknowledge a history of radicalism in rural Britain. Sometimes history was taken as a consolation: land workers had shown in the past that they had a ‘latent and inherent democratic outlook’, which might be expected to emerge again in support for Labour.104 More often, rural origins were thought to have compromised radicalism. When G. D. H. Cole was making a case for William Cobbett’s importance in labour history, he found it very difficult to reconcile this with Cobbett’s rural background and interests. Cobbett’s rural nostalgia, in Cole’s view, ‘unfitted him in practice for the rôle of an industrial workingclass leader’, and his immense contemporary influence could only be explained as a function of the particular time in which he lived, when industrial workers still felt very strongly their rural origins and responded readily to a ‘peasant’s appeal’.105 Only in such circumstances could Cole justify Cobbett’s radical leadership. He admitted that it was possible for a man to be ‘at once an agrarian and a revolutionary’, but qualified this with the observation that ‘indeed the towns have usually struck the spark that has set the countryside alight’.106 100

D. C. Pedder, The Secret of Rural Depopulation, Fabian Tract 118 (1904), 3. MERL, NUAW, BIX/8, correspondence for The Labourer, 1917. 102 Poetry and the People, June 1939. 103 Co-operative Film Archive, Song of the People, CWS (1944). 104 Labour Organiser, February 1924. Cf. S. B. M. Potter, Socialist Review, December 1926, commenting that the descendants of such men should not be patronized with ‘a spineless parody of Socialism’ (21). 105 G. D. H. Cole, The Life of William Cobbett (1924; London 1927), 11, 268. 106 ‘William Cobbett—A Political Study,’ GDHC/A1/3, typescript, n.d., G. D. H. Cole papers, Nuffield College, Oxford. 101

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Thus, although the rural antecedents of Labour were celebrated within the movement’s extended ancestry, it was rare to emphasize any association of progressive politics with the countryside. During the centenary commemoration of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1934, the fact that they had been agricultural workers received surprisingly little comment.107 They were sometimes referred to as ‘farm labourers’, but, otherwise, simply as the ‘men of Dorset’. Moreover, their occupation was treated largely as a function of the time in which they lived. This meant that their story was applied as readily to modern industrial occupations as to the contemporary agricultural workforce. The Tolpuddle Martyrs were, in this respect, the forbears of all trade unionists, whatever their occupation.108 The rural past was vested with significance for the working class as a whole. A proud peasantry had been destroyed in Britain, leaving its much reduced descendants on the land as a proletariat, without the liberty, selfrespect, or quality of life which they should have enjoyed. But the story of dispossession also had relevance for those employed outside agriculture —a group which formed the great majority of the British workforce in the early twentieth century. Their condition too might be traced back to the loss of the land, which had fuelled the flight from the villages and into the urban mills and factories. In this way, rural history provided the starting point for all Labour history. Yet the identification of rural experience as an historical stage which had made subsequent industrial history possible fostered an image of a countryside which itself belonged to a former age. Rural Britain was often discussed as if it were a part of the past: a relic left over from a time when the history of the rural sector had represented the history of the nation. Once the final wave of enclosures had taken place, or even, in many histories, once the industrial revolution had begun, the later historical experience of rural Britain became something of interest only to agricultural trade unionists. And even to them, it seemed a dubious tradition to recall. The story of the theft of the land was central to views of the countryside on the Left. As an interpretation of the past and present in rural Britain, it carried implications for Labour’s rural policy, particularly on the issue of land nationalization, but also informing debates about smallholding, 107 There are extensive files on the commemoration at MRC, TUC MSS.292/1.91 and 1.92. See Clare Griffiths, ‘Remembering Tolpuddle: Rural History and Commemoration in the Inter-war Labour Movement’, History Workshop Journal, 44 (1997), 145– 69. 108 Cf. The Record, TGWU, March 1931.

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land settlement, and the scope for developing village communities. In addition, it offered explanations and consolations. If the Labour movement in the early twentieth century was by and large excluded from the contemporary countryside, this could be treated as an outcome of historical development, rather than ascribed to any inherent inappropriateness of its politics and organization in such an environment. Labour had apparently been dispossessed of a rightful inheritance because of what the countryside had become in a few, private hands. Thus ideas about what a socialist countryside should be like were closely related to interpretations of the rural past.

2 Voters in a Landscape [T]he pleasant sleepy land of squires, parsons, slovenly farming, miserable wages, and spiritless voters who require to be assured and re-assured that the ballot is secret. Joseph Duncan, 19261

‘ANOTHER WORLD’ When Labour surveyed the political landscape of rural Britain in the early twentieth century, its observations revealed ‘another world’—a nation as yet relatively untouched by the movement.2 There were villages where no Labour meeting, and perhaps no political meeting of any description, had ever been held; places where Labour was unheard of, or where the inhabitants supposedly believed scare-stories that Labour supporters were Bolsheviks in disguise and advocated the nationalization of women.3 In the depths of the countryside, Labour was most notable for its absence. Over huge swathes of the country it had no political or industrial organization.4 From Ludlow in 1923, ‘One might go 25 miles by road in several directions without touching a vestige of Labour life’.5 One of the things which seemed most striking about the countryside was just how much of it there was. Whatever the actual political importance, or unimportance, of rural Britain, and of the agricultural electorate in particular, the Labour Party found it difficult to ignore the sheer extent of rural areas. In its impressionistic descriptions of certain constituencies as ‘rural’ or ‘agricultural’, physical size was an important defining criterion. Delegates from county Labour parties prefaced their contributions at Party Conference with the vital statistics of the constituency they were 1 3 4

2 Socialist Review, September 1926. Labour Organiser, September 1933. 23rd Conference, 1923, 204; Labour Organiser, August 1922. 5 Daily Herald, 2 December 1926. Labour Organiser, April–May 1923.

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struggling to organize.6 This emphasis on how much of the British landscape was still rural in the early twentieth century is one context for understanding why Labour considered its exclusion from the countryside to be a matter of such significance. In 1918, this huge territory belonged to Labour’s political opponents, and the party had scarcely begun to mount a challenge. No constituency with a significant agricultural electorate was contested by Labour before 1918, and, as late as 1945, some of the most rural divisions of all had yet to experience a Labour candidate.7 In their more despairing moments, Labour officials described the rural seats as ‘hopeless’; at the very least they were ‘difficult’. The obituary for one indefatigably unsuccessful parliamentary candidate recorded how he fought ‘forlorn fights in Chelmsford, Tonbridge and Maldon, always realising he was sowing for a later harvest’.8 Dispiriting political experiences did not prompt a reassessment of Labour’s conviction that the rural seats must be won. However, they did serve to encourage particular ideas about the nature of political culture in the countryside, in the attempt to explain why it seemed so difficult for Labour to gain electoral support. Even as the Labour movement began to make modest progress in some places, establishing parties and trade union organization, and fighting election campaigns which proved less damaging to its honour than Ludlow had been, discussions about the countryside tended to concentrate on stereotypes, presenting all rural areas as fundamentally problematic environments. Yet, if Labour was to have any hope of realizing its self-imposed electoral targets, this image had to be reconciled with some interpretation which might offer encouragement for Labour’s political prospects. IMAGES OF RURAL LIFE The characteristic ways in which the countryside was discussed within the Labour movement emphasized its strangeness. The countryside was 6 E.g. A. C. Powell on Monmouth: 400 square miles, 50 miles north–south (26th Conference, 1926, 251); T. Handford on Altrincham: 12 miles long and 8 miles across (32nd Conference, 1932, 261); George A. Brown on St Albans: population of over 100,000 (38th Conference, 1939, 315). 7 E.g. Leominster, Thirsk and Malton, and West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine. Orkney and Shetland was contested by Labour for the first time in 1945. 8 Obituary for William F. Toynbee, NEC report 1939–40, 39th Conference, 1940.

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‘different’, an ‘alien’ land. Labour propagandists spoke about rural constituencies, ‘as if they were inaccessible backwaters that no fellah could reach except he were a Stanley or a Livingstone . . . as if the darkest of Dark Continents lay thirty or so miles from [their] door.’9 Encounters with the rural population reinforced beliefs that the countryside was very different from Labour’s usual heartlands. A party organizer who spent his summer holidays in the south of England in 1933 encountered locals who had ‘the outlook of mediaeval villeins’. He declared: ‘These chaps live in another world.’10 Descriptions of the political countryside suggested that this world was not only different, but in some senses inferior. Whatever the positive attributes of the countryside as the location of ‘Merrie England’ or a setting for present-day leisure, as a forum for political activity it was judged inferior to the towns. Rural constituencies were classified as ‘backward areas’.11 Although this term was used for all regions where Labour organization was at an elementary level—including some of the obdurate London constituencies—in the course of the 1920s it came to be virtually synonymous with the rural divisions. The description reflected the low levels of membership in rural areas, but also implied that the political culture of the countryside itself was underdeveloped. Labour fostered its own version of the ‘idiocy of rural life’. When the Daily Herald ’s cartoonist went ‘in search of “snails” ’, he pictured them in the ‘Sleepy Hollow of Baldwinism’ by a thatched country inn and a ‘go dead slow’ sign.12 Rural Britain was often envisaged as a sleeping nation.13 Labour’s task was to rouse it to its true political allegiance by ‘waking the countryside up’.14 The character of this slumbering nation seemed to indicate a distinctive rural psychology. At the 1928 Party Conference, a delegate from Frome in Somerset talked about the need to capture what he termed the ‘rural imagination’, saying that, until very recently, ‘a big gulf has existed 9

10 Labour Organiser, October 1941. Ibid. September 1933. The term acquired an almost official status, denoting a category of constituency where Labour had little or no organizational presence: see the categorizations in Harold Croft, New Socialist Millions (LP, 1937). 12 ‘Gordge’, Daily Herald, 26 May 1931. 13 E.g. ‘the pleasant sleepy land’, Joseph Duncan, Socialist Review, September 1926; ‘this sleepy but beautiful county of Herefordshire’, Sidney Box, The Good Old Days: Then and Now (Hereford, 1955), 85. 14 Wake the Countryside Up! (LP League of Youth, 1938). Cf. other references to ‘waking the sleepers’ in MLG, SFSU circular, October 1925, and Daily Herald editorial, 19 May 1933. 15 28th Conference, 1928, 254. 11

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between the urban mind and the rural mind’.15 In the period between the wars, things did appear to be changing in a way which might offer better political prospects for the future. By the 1930s, it was noted that psychological and cultural distinctions had begun to blur, under the influence of radio and easier access to urban amenities. The wireless offered education as well as entertainment for villagers, ‘creating a thirst for knowledge’ which might be to Labour’s advantage.16 The fictional villagers in A Countryman Talks about Socialism (1934) were prompted to discuss science and politics by listening to broadcast talks.17 A keener acquaintance with the working and leisure lives of the town’s inhabitants was often credited with influence in breaking down villagers’ reserve and deference. George Lansbury enthused about the ‘motor omnibuses which now go from village to village and town to town’, and which would very soon ‘brighten up life for land and other workers who live far from the madding crowds’.18 An acquaintance with the attractions of life outside the village might have damaging, as much as invigorating effects on the population of the countryside. Young men who encountered a larger world, through service in the army, or even through cinema shows a bus journey away, were reluctant to return to the restricted horizons of their youth. This exacerbated a tendency stretching back through the nineteenth century, namely that villages lost many of their young people to the greater opportunities on offer in the industrial parts of Britain or overseas.19 Philip Snowden described how the agricultural trade union organizer Tom Mackley had worked in the fields until ‘the rebel spirit within him drove him when quite young to seek a wider and freer opportunity in the great industrial north’. In Snowden’s opinion, Mackley was an example of a trend: ‘Our abominable land system, and the tyranny of farmer, squire, and parson, have for generations been driving the best life and spirit from our agricultural districts to feed the commercial and manufacturing life of the nation.’20 Here, the significance of migration lay not only in the relative numerical decline of the rural population, but also in a decline in its qual16

‘The Changing Countryside’, Labour Organiser, July 1926. 18 As discussed on pp. 40–1. George Lansbury, My Life (1928), 283. 19 John Saville, Rural Depopulation in England and Wales 1851–1951 (1957), 5–9. 20 MERL, NUAW, BIX/4, text for The Labourer [1915]. Mackley (d. 1936) began as a farm labourer at the age of 10, losing his job and home in his early twenties, after complaining about the ill treatment of a elderly worker. He went on to work as a coachman, in a mechanic’s shop, and as a drayman. He became involved with the ILP, served as president of the Nottingham trades council, and worked as an organizer for the agricultural workers’ union from 1914, in Shropshire, Lincolnshire, and Nottinghamshire. 17


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ity; it was the villagers with spirit and ambition, the natural leaders and rebels, who took the initiative to leave, while the residual population grew ever more degraded. ‘Those who blame the supine character of the English labourer forget that his race . . . was passed through this sieve,’ wrote the Hammonds, commenting as much on the early twentieth century, as on the 1830s.21 The workforce which remained on the land was believed to be suffering mental and physical decline. The general secretary of the agricultural workers’ union, Robert Walker, was alarmed at the extent of mental illness in the rural population.22 G. T. Garratt, a Labour county councillor in Cambridgeshire, commented on how mental deficiency and inbreeding ate ‘like a canker into our village life’, and observed that there were some villages in which every inhabitant had some ‘hereditary weakness’.23 The personal qualities and mental powers of the rural workforce as a whole did not enjoy a good reputation within the Labour movement. It was a stated aim of Labour’s agricultural policy to allow for the fuller development of the labourer’s ‘body, mind and character’, all of which were considered to be mal-developed under the existing system.24 When the journalist Noel Brailsford wrote to the editor of the Land Worker in 1925, asking for an article to ‘fire the imagination’ of agricultural workers, he added: ‘if the poor devils have any!’25 As a result of such attitudes, many Labour candidates in rural seats adopted a distinctly patronizing approach towards the electorate they were canvassing. Labour’s candidate for the Kent constituency of Chislehurst observed in 1932 that ‘It is astonishing to the townsman, when he begins to talk to [agricultural workers], to find out what a tremendous amount of thinking is going on among many of those who have generally very little to say.’26 A candidate for Thornbury, on the other hand, felt no need to adjust any stereotypes as a result of his experiences with the electorate in Gloucestershire, finding that agricultural workers were ‘often slow witted’, and contrasting them unfavourably with the intelligent and educated middle classes.27 Agricultural workers who were intelligent and thought for themselves 21 J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer (1913 edn; repr. Gloucester, 1987), 239. 22 Daily Herald, 4 May 1925; Clarion, 2 October 1925. 23 G. T. Garratt, Hundred Acre Farm (1928), 21–2, 91. On concerns about consanguinity and resulting mental weakness, see also Rowntree, How the Labourer Lives, 336. 24 Labour and the New Social Order (LP, 1918). 25 H. N. Brailsford to H. B. Pointing, 29 June 1925, MERL, NUAW, DII/5. 26 W. T. Colyer, 32nd Conference, 1932, 243. 27 Godfrey Elton, Socialist Review, October 1926.

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were identified, almost axiomatically, as Labour supporters: ‘The Land Worker who knows his own mind Votes Labour.’28 The agricultural workforce was also commonly assumed to be inarticulate: ‘poor dumb devils’.29 Though he chose to make his home in the Derbyshire countryside, the socialist Edward Carpenter had a low opinion of rural workers in general, believing that they suffered from ‘absolute speechlessness’, their habitual deference having resulted in a real paralysis of thinking and enterprise.30 E. J. Pay, an agricultural organizer and member of the SDF, defended the labourers from charges of being clod-hoppers and ignoramuses, but even he conceded that they were inarticulate. The agricultural worker, he explained, ‘had no opportunity of articulating his thoughts, and that was due to some extent to the isolation of his life in the country villages and also to the isolation of the industry, which was absolutely soul-destroying.’31 Many agricultural labourers spent long hours working alone, without any of the benefits of the company typically enjoyed in the industrial workplace.32 The loneliness of agricultural work was powerfully and memorably portrayed in F. E. Green’s The Tyranny of the Countryside (1913), where the author described an encounter with a farm worker in an isolated field on the South Downs: each day, the man brought his dinner with him to his solitary place of work, leaving it under a black umbrella in the middle of the field while he worked.33 One of Labour’s aims was to dispel this isolation and make agriculture ‘a social industry’, to allow ‘greater opportunity for intercourse amongst those who had to spend the most impressionable years of their life in that industry’.34 The rural environment itself was blamed for encouraging excessive patience, long-suffering, and political backwardness: men and women who worked in the fields reputedly breathed ‘something of the resignation and peace of Nature’.35 Sidney Box, an organizer for the Workers’ Union in Herefordshire, explained his own ‘independent spirit’ as a function of the years he had spent ‘working 28 Land Worker, November 1935, front cover. Cf. Labour Organiser, June 1934: ‘The intelligent ones are nearly all in the Movement already.’ 29 28th Conference, 1928, 250–1. 30 Edward Carpenter, The Village and the Landlord, Fabian tract 136 (1907), 8. 31 32 24th Conference, 1924, 173. 31st Conference, 1931, 213. 33 F. E. Green, The Tyranny of the Countryside (1913), 45–6. Green was struck by this poignant image, illustrated by a photograph facing p. 253. See also Green, A New Agricultural Policy (1921), 147. Green (d. 1922) left a job in the City to take up a smallholding in Surrey, declaring that he wanted to experience, and not merely describe, the life of the worst-paid class in England (Land Worker, February 1922). 34 E. J. Pay, 24th Conference, 1924, 173. 35 Hammond and Hammond, Village Labourer, 238.


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and living in towns’, implying that this would not have developed in a rural environment.36 Where a rural labourer had more spirit and intelligence than might be expected, these traits tended to be described as ‘urban’, ‘industrial’. E. N. Bennett, for example, thought that the wellpaid agricultural labourers in the north of England shared ‘in the selfconfident and independent character of the artisans of great industrial towns’, whereas the southern labourers represented ‘an older civilization, more conservative . . . more easily cowed, more inarticulate’.37 RURAL SOCIET Y AND POLITICAL CULTURE The labourers’ quiescence could not be attributed solely to the rural environment: there were artificial constraints at work. Blame was placed with the nature of rural society, in failing to allow a favourable setting for Labour politics, or arguably for politics of any description. Politics was simply not as advanced or as well followed as in the towns. The Daily Herald complained that many rural people, ‘through fear of victimisation or other causes, [had] never taken an interest in political questions’.38 Although they were ready to talk about national and international affairs, the Radnorshire villagers encountered by one left-wing journalist in the summer of 1939 struck her as ‘politically very ignorant’.39 Tales of rural politics were guaranteed to shock, presenting a picture of a political culture quite unlike that experienced in the rest of Britain. Voters reputedly misunderstood the whole process of elections, returning with their voting slips as proof that they had voted.40 Half a century after its introduction, the principle of the secret ballot seemed to have made slow headway in the countryside. The message ‘Remember the Ballot is Secret!’ was still being printed on Labour polling cards in rural Britain on the eve of the Second World War.41 It was accepted as a common fear in rural areas that figures in authority would know how an individual had voted, and much of Labour’s election literature for rural constituencies gave special emphasis to this subject, as in the case of this reassurance, addressed to the electors of Cambridgeshire in 1924:

36 37 38 39 40

Box, Good Old Days, 62. E. N. Bennett, Problems of Village Life ([1914]), 37. Daily Herald, 21 May 1938. Dianna Armstrong, ‘A Village in Wales’, Country Standard, May 1939. 41 Box, Good Old Days, 65. NLW, Brecon and Radnor DLP, 43.

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1. Reassuring rural voters. The 1929 general election issue of The Land Worker. [By permission of the Museum of English Rural Life, The University of Reading]


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No one can tell how you vote. A great many voters, especially farm labourers, have doubts about this. They are in terror of their landlords or employers. But that secrecy is certain they may rest assured. Therefore they can VOTE LABOUR.42

Such anxieties were perhaps unsurprising, and it may have been the case in some areas that the ballot was not as secret as it should have been. Even without technical breaches of the law, the pressures on voters could be insidious, with local landowners or their relatives in prominent attendance at the village polling booths.43 Stories circulated about polling stations decked out in Tory colours, with pictures of the Tory candidate on prominent display, decorated by the local squire with Union Jacks.44 Elections in the countryside sometimes took place along almost unreformed lines, and could be a revelation for candidates used to urban electioneering. One found himself fighting a local council seat which had been held for thirteen years by a member ‘of the plutocratic family which owned the parish’. The ‘Lady Bountiful’ had been opposed only once, when Labour managed to poll just seven votes, and the workers continued to show enormous loyalty to the family that had ‘bled them for generations’.45 Tenants of the red Countess of Warwick are reputed to have volunteered an analogous explanation for their Labour votes: that you should always vote with your landlord. The ‘rebel peasantry’ around her estate at Easton Lodge, so the story goes, voted Conservative, ‘regarding Socialism as a strange fad of the rich’.46 Even those who thought about politics and were sympathetic towards Labour might be afraid to support the party, or at least to do so openly.

42

Cambridgeshire RO, 416/0.35, Cambridgeshire Election News, October 1924. Socialist Review, September 1926; 39th Conference, 1940, 175. 44 45 Labour Organiser, March 1932. Ibid. September 1933. 46 Socialist Review, December 1926. Frances Evelyn Greville, Countess of Warwick (1861–1938), famous as an heiress and society beauty, inherited Easton Lodge in Essex from her grandfather as a child, and played the lady bountiful there, with lavish hospitality and local philanthropy. Robert Blatchford converted her to socialism in 1895, after writing a scathing attack on the extravagance of a costume ball she hosted at Warwick Castle. She subsequently supported agricultural trade unionism, befriending Joseph Arch. She used her powers of preferment to appoint socialist clergymen to Essex livings, notably Conrad Noel at Thaxted. In 1904 she joined the SDF, becoming a member of the Labour Party after the First World War. She contested Warwick and Leamington for Labour in 1923. Easton Lodge became a venue for Labour gatherings, and she tried, unsuccessfully, to turn it into a Labour college. 43

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Some farm workers, whose progressive sympathies were well known to their neighbours, still displayed Conservative posters in their windows, in keeping with the politics of their employer and landlord. Those who had helped during an election campaign were liable to play safe by wearing blue rosettes on the day of the poll.47 Canvassers sometimes met with a petrified reception: inhabitants of tied cottages were liable to ‘freeze’ when they discovered the Labour candidate on their doorstep.48 The village labourer, then, was not only ignorant and lonely, but scared. Labour developed an image of the countryside as a society of oppression, where freedom of action was restricted by intimidation and fears of victimization. Comments on this ‘tyranny in the countryside’ sometimes verged on hysteria. ‘You people in the cities’, explained George Dallas, ‘do not know the shadow of evil that falls across every village, from the big house up the hill’.49 Even in 1939, a representative from the Newbury Divisional Labour Party claimed that, because of the factor of victimization, ‘every one of our members represents something compared to a thousand members in an industrial constituency’.50 A report on a special campaign in rural Buckinghamshire during 1936 provides an interesting statement on what Labour imagined to be happening in the countryside. Comments on how the propaganda was received in the various villages are riddled with the conviction that villagers were not free to act as they might wish: Swanbourne—Attendance fair. Intimidation rampant. Great Horwood—Smallest meeting of campaign. But better than previous meetings in village. Intimidation here. Winslow—Good meeting. Secured names of several people willing to help quietly. Long Crendon—Fair meeting. People seem afraid.51

Political meetings in the countryside could thus be quite unlike those in the towns. Audiences were ‘scarce, scattered and scared’.52 Having a visible 47

New Leader, 27 April 1923. William Bennett, ‘Village Life under the Yoke,’ Daily Herald, 6 June 1933 (on the Hitchin by-election). 49 32nd Conference, 1932, 244. Green had also used this image: Tyranny of the Countryside, 166. 50 51 38th Conference, 1939, 317. Labour Organiser, July 1936. 52 Ibid. December 1937. Cf. the interpretation offered by the economic historian Reginald Lennard, based on his contact with agricultural trade unionism: ‘In the village meeting the individual is neither inspired by a crowd nor lost in it: he remains an individual and recognizable by his employer or possible informers’ (Economic Review, 22/4, 15 October 1912). 48


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audience was in itself considered an achievement. Arthur Greenwood once spoke on a village green for twenty minutes, without spotting any signs of human life—though the organizer of the meeting assured him afterwards that the speech had been well received by people inside their homes, listening with the windows open.53 The party’s district organizers in the south-west had similar experiences of open-air meetings in villages where the inhabitants locked themselves indoors and would not come out.54 During a campaign in Mid-Bedfordshire in 1938, propagandists played music outside homes where windows were ‘furtively open’.55 Rural campaigners sometimes undertook to provide their own audiences, with comrades converging on a village to form the nucleus of a crowd for the meeting, in the hope that the locals would be reassured that there was safety in numbers.56 Labour activists in the countryside could also find themselves subject to intimidation. Sidney Box claimed to have been shot at, locked up to prevent him from addressing a meeting, and targeted with abusive mail. He regarded these attacks as a tribute to his work.57 Even without turning to physical threats or violence, there were many ways of obstructing Labour activity. Virtually all public meeting places were under the control of the local landowner or the church. Local Labour parties and trade unions were often denied the use of schools or village halls, having to resort instead to public houses, despite the feeling that these were inappropriate venues for meetings, both practically and morally. In 1939, the DLP in Cambridgeshire reported the ‘fading’ of two local parties, precisely because of the absence of an appropriate meeting place: ‘an enormous problem in the work of a village Party’.58 It seemed that the whole scope of public life in the countryside was in the hands of an ‘unholy trinity’59 of squire, parson, and farmer, none of whom was renowned for progressive sympathies. Between them, they controlled village employment, trade, entertainment, and housing, and possessed considerable power to determine the character of village society. There were occasional ‘red squires’, like Stafford Cripps at Filkins 53

54 Daily Herald, 20 May 1933. NEC, 7 September 1932. Country Standard, September 1938. 56 Labour Organiser, December 1921; Somerset RO, Frome DLP, A/AAW, 28, Agent’s memo, 27 January 1939. 57 Box, Good Old Days, 9, 27–8. 58 Cambridgeshire RO, 416/0.20, EC annual report, April 1939, 2. 59 Tom Mackley, Towards the Dawn—The Revolution in Rural England—An Appeal to the Land Workers (ILP, 1919). 55

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in Gloucestershire, or Lord Kimberley in Norfolk; socialist clerics, like Conrad Noel, who flew the people’s flag from Thaxted church in Essex; and Labour farmers, like the Eastman brothers, who held office in the party at Sudbury in Suffolk.60 But individual exceptions did not prompt a wholesale reassessment of these groups’ reputation for being reactionary and tyrannical. They could react vindictively when their position as the natural leaders of society was challenged, as trade unions and local Labour parties made their first forays onto the political stage. When the vicar and most of the farmers lost their seats on the parish council in Burston in Norfolk in 1914, the local teachers (who had encouraged labourers to contest the election) were dismissed from their positions at the village school. This notorious episode of rural victimization led to the formation of the Burston Strike School—notable, in passing, as holder of the record for the longest running strike action, lasting a quarter of a century. The protest was described by trade unionists as a noble struggle ‘against the tyranny of the PARSON and landowners’, and the Strike School quickly became a site of ‘pilgrimage’, where members of the Labour movement gathered to offer solidarity, march, play music, and take tea in marquees.61 The case of Burston was extreme, but it was a common assumption that rural clergy were antagonistic towards Labour. There were instances of clergymen telling women to persuade their husbands to give up their union membership.62 Parish magazines published ‘vile criticism’ of Labour candidates and their policies, in what George Bywater described, with heavy irony, as ‘the Christian work of keeping the countryside for feudalism’.63 Some clerics gave sermons ‘strongly biased against the worker’, though there were also cases where the Anglican church proved supportive of local Labour organization.64 Labour could not afford to 60 Virginia Cowles, No Cause for Alarm (1949), 57; Sidney Dye, (ed.), Conrad Noel (1945); Alun Howkins, Reshaping Rural England (1991), 236; Who’s Who in Suffolk (Worcester, 1935); East Anglian Daily Times, 29 August 1961. On the Eastmans, see p. 155. 61 Norfolk RO, MC 31/63, Tom Higdon to Miss Marsdon, 26 July 1915; MC 31/35, handbill for meeting of London Trade Unionists Committee in Kentish Town, 20 February 1916; MERL, NUAW, BIX/6, draft article by E. B. Reeves, for The Labourer ( [1916] ). The vicar came bottom in the poll, and a labourer replaced him as chairman of the council. For the story of the Strike School, see Reg Groves, Sharpen the Sickle! The History of the Farm Workers’ Union (1949), 151–60, and Bertram Edwards, The Burston School Strike (1974). 62 63 Land Worker, May 1922. Labour Organiser, April 1935. 64 Ibid. July 1931. Christopher Howard describes more positive relations in ‘Expectations Born to Death: Local Labour Party Expansion in the 1920s’, in Jay Winter (ed.), The Working Class in Modern British History (Cambridge, 1983), 68–9.


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antagonize the church unduly. When Tom Mackley, as organizer for the agricultural workers’ union, made ill-judged comments about burning Bibles and assassinating parsons as the best way to advance rural education, the union rushed to distance itself from his statement, and refused to endorse him as a parliamentary candidate.65 The rural population was thought to be more religious than that in the towns, and likely to be alienated by secular attitudes. In the political competition for the Liberal vote, the support of the nonconformist congregations was particularly worth fighting for, and Labour had a significant number of nonconformists amongst its own rural activists. In many areas, Sunday meetings continued to be frowned upon.66 George Edwards did organize Sabbath meetings for the agricultural workers’ union, but these took the form of a religious service, and Edwards was himself a Methodist lay preacher.67 The most infamous control over political activity in the countryside was exercised through the system of tied cottages, which meant that victimization by an employer could result in the loss of one’s home as well as one’s job. The classic symbol of tyranny on the countryside was the eviction: a family turned out of their cottage, their sufferings immortalized by a photographer for the agricultural workers’ union archives, standing in the road, surrounded by their worldly goods.68 The absence of alternative accommodation in many villages meant that an evicted family usually had no choice but to move to a new area. This fear above all was cited as inhibiting Labour support in the countryside. It was argued that Labour officials needed to be ‘free and independent’ individuals, preferably smallholders or workers from outside agriculture. The possibility of victimization meant that there were limits to what could be expected from many members of Labour organizations in rural areas; supporters would receive literature in unmarked envelopes, and might canvass on an individual level, but were unlikely to display posters outside their homes or show open signs of their allegiance.69 Labour colours displayed in a cottage window were interpreted as a sure sign that the inhabitant must be leaving the village and had nothing to lose.70 Labour activists seem to have been remarkably eager to subscribe to this model of the village as a craven environment, defined by antiquated

65 66 67 68 69

MERL, NUAW, BI/5, EC, 25 November 1921. Labour Organiser, October 1923 and January 1936. George Edwards, From Crow Scaring to Westminster (1922), 116 –17. For examples of the genre see Groves, Sharpen the Sickle!, plates facing p. 208. 70 Party Organisation (LP, 1939), 21. 38th Conference, 1939, 317.

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social constraints: to present archetypes of rows of cottages ‘where all the tenants tell you that the local squire has made them sign a pledge that they will always vote Conservative on pain of eviction’.71 However, the restrictions on rural political life were usually more subtle. Pressures to vote in a certain way might be rooted in the relationships within rural society, and loyalties to the dominant local family. The notion of a common interest uniting sections of the community did not necessarily require a backing through disciplinary sanctions. For some observers, those sanctions were in any case becoming less common, and the tone of discussions on the subject depended on the broader context in which they were taking place. Ernest Selley, describing the progress of agricultural trade unionism at a high point of organization in 1919, presented a vision of village freedom far more positive than that recognized by many Labour figures in the late 1930s. Selley believed that the days of cloak-and-dagger organization were already past: the farm worker could attend his branch meeting in broad daylight, rather than standing on the edge of an open-air meeting under cover of darkness.72 There were indeed suspicions that past experiences of victimization were used too readily as an excuse for Labour’s present lack of success in the countryside. ‘It is perfectly true that the farm worker is subject to a particular type of victimization which we, in the towns, have seldom got to face,’ admitted the TUC general secretary Walter Citrine in 1933, but he still considered it reasonable to blame farm workers for failing to achieve improvements in their own condition.73 In practice, the major problem which Labour faced across rural Britain was not that villagers were too frightened to vote for the party, but that it would never have occurred to them to do so. The main national papers could be hard enough to come by in some parts of the countryside, and the chances of exposure to the Labour press were slim.74 In Labour’s caricature of rural Britain, newsagents who had never heard of the Daily Herald were standard dramatis personae.75 The rural population’s access to unbiased information about national and international affairs was generally agreed to be extremely limited: to hear agricultural labourers 71

Labour, June 1938. E. Selley, Village Trade Unions in Two Centuries (1919), 166. 73 MRC, TUC, MSS292/1.91/17, speech to London Trades Council, 9 November 1933. 74 24th Conference, 1924, 175; Country Standard, May 1939. 75 E.g. New Leader, 27 April 1923. These stereotypes notwithstanding, the Daily Herald did have a rural circulation: the Labour agent for Penryn and Falmouth talked about the role played by its ‘one or more readers in almost every village’ (Labour Organiser, September 1929). 72


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discuss the troubles of the mining industry in 1926 ‘was enough to make the angels weep’.76 The county press was often hostile to the Labour cause, and only occasionally adopted ‘an attitude of neutrality’, in the interests of fair reporting.77 It became easy to conclude that the local press actually did much of the Conservatives’ work for them in rural areas: Taunton DLP observed that the local Conservative party had very little contact with the general public, but that this was more than made up for by the press, which gave ‘unusual publicity’ to Conservative activities.78 In areas where little diversity of political opinion was publicly expressed, party political sentiments might be presented as impartial, or non-political. The pressures exerted on women in this respect were seen as particularly insidious. The Labour Party’s national women’s officer commented after the 1924 general election that ‘Where the education and organisation of the electorate was backward the result was even worse for us with the women than with the men because on the whole through their greater ignorance they were more easily stampeded.’79 Women were regarded as especially vulnerable because of the underdeveloped social life in many villages and the lack of entertainment on offer: the few social events which did take place tended to be under the patronage of titled ladies with large gardens, and were used for covert political purposes, when ‘Tory dames’ invited working-class women round for tea and cake. The scope for Labour to retaliate on this front was limited. At a Labour Gala hosted by the Countess of Warwick at Easton Lodge, the chairman remarked that Labour was often said to lose votes because it lacked rich people to lay on such ‘tea fights’.80 The more usual response was to suggest a different scale of activity, holding meetings with tea in members’ homes.81 On a more institutional level, ‘alleged “non-political”, but definitely “anti-Labour” organisations for women’ were seen as a problem.82 Labour had mixed feelings, for example, about the Women’s Institute movement, which spread rapidly after the First World War, with government backing, and was widely credited with helping to revive village life, providing

76

Daily Herald, 2 December 1926. E.g. Wells Journal, 24 November 1922, reflecting on its coverage of the 1922 general election. 78 Somerset RO, DD/TLP/1/1, 16 March 1935. 79 NEC, Report on Women’s Work during the Election, October 1924. 80 Hertfordshire and Essex Observer, 7 July 1923. On large-scale Labour garden parties, see Norman MacKenzie and Jean MacKenzie (eds.), The Diary of Beatrice Webb, iv (1985), 92, 2 August 1926. 81 82 Labour Organiser, July 1924, 13. 24th Conference, 1924, 19. 77

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entertainment and a social focus for women in rural areas.83 Arthur Greenwood enthused about the impact of the institutes on village life, achieving for women in many villages what trade unions had done for men.84 However, the National Union of Agricultural Workers was suspicious of the WI’s influence, and believed that the institutes were creating an atmosphere hostile to rural trade unionism.85 On paper, the WI was a democratic and non-party organization, but H. B. Pointing, of the NUAW, argued that it was actually run by the employing and landowning classes, who concealed their anti-Labour propaganda in supposedly innocuous activities.86 Pointing was not alone in this analysis. Even the WI’s promotion of household management, and its competitions for a cake costing no more than two shillings, or for the best article made from waste, seemed designed to inculcate a sense of contentment amongst working-class women, teaching them to manage on low incomes rather than to question those incomes.87 The WI could be seen as a disguised continuation of the ‘ladies bountiful’: the Country Standard described it as ‘only another form of flannel petticoats and packets of tea’.88 There was clearly some substance to Labour concerns about Tory infiltration of village social life; indeed it was part of the Conservative Party’s strategy. Conservative supporters were encouraged to make personal contact with the labourer through the ‘ordinary channels of village life’: to get involved in popular clubs and flower shows, avoiding ‘any semblance of political bias or partisan spirit on the part of those chosen to direct the minds of the members of the various bodies’. The efficacy of such ‘steady, quiet suggestion’ was recommended in preference to ‘the sledge-hammer blows of political speeches’.89

83 For a re-evaluation of the WI, see Maggie Morgan, ‘The Women’s Institute Movement—The Acceptable Face of Feminism?’, in Sybil Oldfield (ed.), This WorkingDay World (1994), 29–39, and ‘Jam Making, Cuthbert Rabbit and Cakes: Redefining Domestic Labour in the Women’s Institute, 1915–60’, Rural History, 7/2 (1996), 207–19. 84 Introduction to Guest, Introduction to English Rural History (1920), 5. 85 Daily Herald, 7 December 1922. See also H. B. Pointing and Emile Burns, Agriculture (Labour Research Department, 1927), 63. 86 MERL, NUAW, DII/4, report by H. B. Pointing, 2 June 1921, typescript. Also Suffolk RO, Suffolk DLP, Suffolk Federation of Trades Councils, GG 1:2947, conference report, 5 April 1925; and 25th Conference, 1925, 29. 87 The NUAW itself was not above carrying similar articles in its journal, e.g. tips for a warming lentil pie, and dyeing an old dress in red ink for a new look (Land Worker, May 1919). 88 89 Country Standard, June 1936. Conservative Agents’ Journal, October 1927.


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POLITICAL OPPONENTS On the assumption that, despite all these unfavourable circumstances, the rural electorate might still harbour potential left-wing sympathies, it became necessary to find further explanations for Labour’s difficulties in the countryside. There was an understandable reluctance to credit rural voters with any deep or principled attachment to other political parties. The usual diagnosis was that rural seats were Conservative or Liberal according to tradition and apathy rather than innate disposition, and could be turned into Labour’s own heartlands, given time and encouragement.90 Activists suggested that the real challenge in the countryside was not that voters were already firmly committed to one of the other parties, but that no party meant anything to them.91 Labour tended to portray its campaigns in the countryside as a struggle against the Conservatives, who were described as having the rural community in their pocket.92 In fact, where Labour intervened in rural areas in which the Liberals were still active, this often helped to produce a ‘Tory countryside’. In 1929, Labour was strong enough to prevent the Liberals winning back many of the rural seats they had lost in 1924, but not strong enough to win them itself.93 The splitting of the ‘progressive’ vote was perhaps most damaging in such constituencies, and it is notable that a number of rural Labour parties entertained Popular Front sympathies in the late 1930s, as witnessed in their resolutions and correspondence in support of Stafford Cripps.94 A seat like Bridgwater in Somerset, won by an independent progressive in 1938, showed what could be achieved by ‘energy, enthusiasm and unity’.95 The pragmatism of a popular front approach was particularly welcome in many rural areas. An organizer for the Bristol Propaganda Association in 1939 tried to impress upon Head Office the difficulty of getting volunteers to give up their time for rural propaganda unless they saw a realistic chance of defeating the 90 E.g. Suffolk RO, Suffolk Federation of Trades Councils, GG 1:2947, minutes, 12 December 1920. 91 Cf. Ramsay MacDonald, Daily Herald, 6 December 1926. 92 MERL, NUAW, BVI/7, 1934 Conference report. 93 Michael Kinnear, The British Voter. An Atlas and Survey since 1885 (2nd edn, 1981), 48. 94 E.g. Nottinghamshire Archives, Newark LP, DD PP16/1/3, 1/3/39; NLW, Brecon and Radnor DLP, 11 February 1939. The issue may have been slightly confused by the enormous personal popularity which Cripps enjoyed amongst Labour supporters in the countryside, as one of the most favoured and willing speakers on rural topics. 95 Country Standard, December 1938.

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government candidate by keeping the progressive vote intact.96 The Country Standard magazine, founded in Suffolk in the late 1930s, represented the sort of progressive, socially inclusive, anti-war sentiments on which cross-party cooperation in the countryside might be based.97 Labour’s fortunes in most rural areas were heavily dependent on what happened to the Liberals.98 The tenacity of the Liberal vote in county seats was a major cause of irritation for socialists, with this continued allegiance to the Liberal cause being cited as further evidence of the immaturity of rural politics. The Labour candidate for Chelmsford in 1926 commented that Liberalism was ‘dying hard’ in the countryside, and that this was due to ‘political backwardness’.99 According to the Labour Organiser in the mid-1930s, it was only in the ‘more backward areas’ that the Liberals retained any appreciable support.100 The Liberals in the countryside were condemned for being as embedded in rural ‘societyism’ as the Conservatives, and in many areas of the country Labour recognized that Liberal voters would switch to the Conservatives when their own party was not standing in an election.101 However, Labour did take on the Liberal mantle in some constituencies. There were important transfers of personnel: J. C. Wedgwood, George Edwards, Christopher Addison, and Noel Buxton, who became important spokesmen on rural matters for Labour, all defected from the Liberals in the late 1910s and early 1920s. As Buxton metamorphosed ‘from Liberal caterpillar to Labour butterfly’,102 he brought his old constituency of North Norfolk with him; Liberal activity there virtually ceased after he swapped parties.103 96 Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 128/168, R. St John Reade to Morgan Phillips, 2 and 3 March 1939. 97 The Country Standard appeared monthly from March 1936, and self-consciously addressed itself to a broad, progressive audience, though the main figures behind it (including Maurice Cornforth and Jack Dunman) were communist. It was distributed by the Communist Party in some areas (MERL, NUAW, Organising and Political Committee, 21 April 1938). 98 This is discussed more fully in the Conclusion, pp. 326–30. 99 N. H. Moller to Ramsay MacDonald, 4 December 1926, PRO 30/69/1171/I/61. 100 Labour Organiser, July 1935. 101 E.g. Derbyshire RO, South Derbyshire LP, D2928, political survey of constituency (?1929); Labour Organiser, December 1931, on Skipton. 102 His own description: McGill, Noel-Buxton papers, draft autobiography, 120. 103 The Liberals stood only twice after 1918, on both occasions losing their deposit. The Labour vote in North Norfolk was so closely linked to Buxton personally that there was concern on his retirement to the Lords in 1930 that the seat could not be held (MacDonald to Buxton, 30 May 1930, PRO 30/69/1753/4). Buxton’s wife managed to retain it for Labour with a slim majority at the 1930 by-election, but it became safely Conservative from 1931 until 1945.


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There were other continuities between Liberal and Labour activity in the countryside. Labour’s ‘Land Song’ is one example. A version of this was written for the by-election contest at Brecon and Radnor in 1939.104 It was to be sung to the tune ‘Marching through Georgia’, and had the refrain The land, the land, we’re going to set it free From Spillers, Marsh and Baxter and the whole darned company Fair prices for the farmer chaps will do the trick you’ll see; God gave the land to the free.

The words were clearly customized for the by-election, and unsurprisingly, the candidate’s name crops up several times: the electors are assured that ‘Jackson’s the man for the people’. But the song was based heavily on a ‘Land Song’ for more general use. ‘The Land Song’, to the same tune, featured in Daily Herald song sheets, published around 1927, where it was ‘re-dedicated to Labour’s Agricultural Campaign’.105 Here the refrain was The land, the land, ’twas God who gave the land, The land, the land, the ground on which we stand; Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hand? God gave the land to the people!

It had not begun life as a Labour song at all.106 The same lyrics which were being used by Labour in the 1920s had featured on Liberal Land Campaign handbills just before the First World War.107 Ex-Liberals like Addison remembered it in its former political incarnation: ‘At the General Election of January 1910 we went round singing “God gave the Land for the People.”’108 It was in fact Henry George’s ‘Land Song’, recovering some of its true context in a 1920 rendition at a Commons division on the ending of duties on land values.109 Labour took on much of the rural rhetoric of the Liberal Party, and saw itself as the successor to the Liberals’ progressivism, through notions of political evolution. In 1930, the president of the agricultural workers’

104

NLW, Brecon and Radnor DLP, 42, lyrics in manuscript. MERL, NUAW, DIII/2, n.d. C. V. Wedgwood, The Last of the Radicals (1951), 84. 107 Congress House, HD595. 108 Christopher Addison, A Policy for British Agriculture (Left Book Club, 1939), 5. 109 Elwood P. Lawrence, Henry George in the British Isles (East Lansing, MI), 167; Tom Myers, Liberalism and Socialism (LP, 1923), 9. 105 106

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union observed that Gladstone’s portrait was still on display on the walls of some cottage homes, though he was optimistic that ‘in an increasing number of hearts is a growing regard for Ramsay MacDonald’.110 But Labour did not inherit the Liberals’ former support in the countryside in any straightforward way. E. F. Wise observed in 1926 that rural constituencies with Radical traditions, notably in East Anglia and the South West, had become Conservative by default: country people no longer had faith in the Liberals, but regarded Labour as a purely urban force.111 Trade unionism sometimes benefited from a residual Liberalism, even though the electorate proved immune to Labour’s political appeal. The agricultural union in Somerset tried not to confuse its work with politics, since ‘the majority of Somerset farm workers were Liberals and opposed to Labour politics’.112 Labour’s failure to make a political impact on Devon and Cornwall, and over large areas of rural Scotland and Wales, illustrated the fact that considerable areas of the countryside were not defined by Conservatism at all, but by chapel allegiances and Liberalism. Far from inheriting Liberal support in the countryside, the party often found itself in competition with it. PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE From Labour’s perspective, both the Conservatives and the Liberals benefited directly from characteristic features of village society, and even from rural mentalities. By contrast, many aspects of rural life appeared to obstruct Labour’s activities and restrict its support. One significant problem was Labour’s urban image, which Wise had remarked on as an obstacle to inheriting the Liberal vote. Josiah Wedgwood also believed that farm workers were wary of Labour, because of its history of representing urban interests: ‘The Labour Party has been a thing of the town, far off, telling him that he ought to want strange things. He does not

110 MERL, NUAW, BVI/5, 1930 NUAW conference. The value which the county electorate attached to the image of Gladstone provides a comic detail in A. G. Macdonell’s 1933 novel, England, Their England (1983), 137, where the Conservatives display ‘an immense mezzotint of Mr Gladstone’ at their public meeting, ‘for there was no Liberal candidate and it was of paramount importance to catch the votes of all right-thinking Liberals’. 111 New Leader, 6 August 1926. 112 Labour Organiser, January 1936; MERL, NUAW, Organising and Political Committee, 17 November 1932.


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understand or believe.’113 Country people were not necessarily enamoured with the idea of joining forces with a movement of urban workers. Propagandists found that the agricultural worker was jealous of the superior working conditions which town workers enjoyed.114 Farmers were noted for denigrating Labour’s lack of understanding of agriculture and rural matters, but a suspicion of urban influences permeated rural society more widely. A basic problem for Labour was how to identify its potential electorate in rural Britain. Class was a more than usually slippery concept in the countryside. Experienced campaigners advised propagandists to approach the topic with care, since references to class struggle left audiences confused, and more convinced than ever that Labour represented interests quite foreign to their own. Enthusiasts maintained that ‘a worker is a worker all the world over’ and that there should be no insuperable barriers to converting rural workers to a consciousness of their class identity.115 Yet agricultural labourers were notoriously unreliable at recognizing working-class solidarity. The relevance of class identifications within agriculture differed considerably between forms of agricultural employment, producing a widely varied national picture. The closest analogy to classic industrial stratifications was on the large-scale arable farms in the Eastern Counties, where trade unionism had indeed proved most effective. In regions where agriculture was organized into small or nonlabour-intensive units, notably in sheep and dairy farming, the relationship between employer and employee was more complicated; isolated workers may have felt more common interest with the farmer (in whose house they might well live, and who might work in the fields alongside them), than with fellow labourers on other farms.116 At first glance, the poorly paid agricultural workforce looked a promising target for Labour’s propaganda, but many pragmatists advised that the party’s hopes probably lay elsewhere, amongst industrial workforces located within the county divisions, and across rural society more broadly. Those who had experience in rural organization were perhaps more conscious than most 113 114

J. C. Wedgwood, Labour and the Farm Worker (LP, 1925). E.g. comments in NEC report on 1925 by-election in Eastbourne, NEC, 24 June

1925. 115 John Lindsley, Barkston Ash for Socialism! An Appeal to the Workers (Selby Socialist Society, 1910). 116 On employer–employee relations in agriculture see Colin Bell and Howard Newby, ‘The Sources of Variation in Agricultural Workers’ Images of Society’, Sociological Review, 21 (May 1973).

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that there were no constituencies in Britain which could be won on the basis of the farm workers’ vote alone.117 The struggle to locate a likely base of support in the countryside was compounded by a general absence of the networks and associations from which Labour benefited in industrial communities. Norfolk probably came closest to offering the frameworks which bolstered Labour’s vote in urban areas, with large workforces organized into relatively wellestablished trade unions. The agricultural trade union vote had historical affiliations with Liberalism, and once that vote had been renegotiated for Labour, Norfolk proved itself to be relatively accessible political territory: the Labour Party’s chief success story in rural Britain. However, across most of the countryside, the trade union presence was as embryonic as the Labour Party organization. It was normally assumed that industrial organization would precede the growth of political support, but this order was often reversed in practice.118 Far from forming the basis for a Labour vote, trade union membership sometimes developed only after party structures were in place, as part of political propaganda and missionary efforts within a constituency. It was not only the social structures of rural life which seemed to obstruct the development of a Labour vote. The physical setting itself presented major challenges. The electorate in the countryside was naturally more scattered than in the towns, and thus more difficult and expensive to contact and organize. The practical consequences relating to different sizes of constituency formed one of Labour’s early arguments against proportional representation: that PR would make all constituencies larger and more expensive to contest. Ramsay MacDonald could fight Leicester on £400 in 1913, but estimated that he would need at least £3000 to cover Leicestershire and Rutland.119 As a result of the difficulties presented by scale and inaccessibility, transport was identified as the greatest single problem facing Labour in most truly rural constituencies.120 Organizers clocked up huge mileages as they toured a rural constituency: in the Cambridgeshire division, half the electorate was dispersed across 107 villages.121 117 S. J. Gee, ‘The Problem of Rural Constituencies’, Labour Organiser, October 1923; Joseph Duncan, ‘Labour’s Task in the Rural Constituencies’, Forward, 9 May 1931. 118 As discussed in Chapter 5. 119 The Labour Party and Electoral Reform (LP, 1913). Cf. comments by W. E. Williams, of the Railway Clerks, that proportional representation would militate against Labour candidates who wanted to represent the agricultural interest, 18th Conference (1918), 68. 120 121 Labour Organiser, September 1936. Ibid. November 1929.


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Geography was not only a challenge for agents and propagandists travelling around the constituency, but was also thought to disadvantage Labour at the time of the poll. Local Labour organizations in the countryside regularly campaigned for more polling stations, calling for one in every village, or at least wherever there was an elementary school.122 A long walk to the polling booth was considered a great deterrent for potential Labour voters. ‘Jack Cutter’ pictured the temptations offered to the agricultural workers in ‘Slowville-on-the-Ouse’, when confronted with the choice between ‘a four-mile walk in the dark to the polling booth after a hard day grovelling among root crops in heavy soil, and a swift, luxurious ride there and back in a warm car, courteously offered by a smiling lady friend of the Squire’s’.123 Whilst the fleets of Liberal and Tory cars to ferry voters to the poll were a damaging factor in all constituencies, they seemed to be most significant in rural areas.124 Hugh Dalton recalled remarkable numbers of vehicles on electoral duty in Maidstone at the 1922 general election: but whilst his opponents had nearly four hundred cars at their disposal, Dalton, as the Labour candidate, had only two.125 Few of those who offered transportation were as even-handed as A. G. Street’s father, who drove his farm workforce to the poll in a wagon drawn by a horse team with red ribbons on one side and blue on the other.126 Labour voters were sometimes advised that, if they were not able to walk to the poll, they should let the Tory car take them, and then vote for the Labour candidate.127 But many Labour commentators respected the pricks of conscience which prevented workers from voting Labour after riding in a Tory car.128 The prohibition of private vehicles for ferrying voters to the polls was occasionally proposed,129 but the more usual conclusion was that there should be more Labour cars.

122 Cf. resolution from Advisory Committee on Rural Problems that the NEC should press for more polling stations, NEC, 12 February 1919. 123 Labour Organiser, December 1935. ‘Jack Cutter’ was a regular contributor. 124 E.g. comments on the 1924 Holland with Boston by-election (NEC, 2 September 1924). 125 Hugh Dalton, Call Back Yesterday: Memoirs 1887–1931 (1953), 137. 126 A. G. Street, Farmer’s Glory (Oxford, 1983), 76. In this instance, red and blue were, respectively, the Liberal and Tory colours. 127 Cambridgeshire RO, 416/0.34, Our Monthly Magazine, Cambridgeshire DLP, special election issue, 1923. 128 Labour Organiser, March 1921 and January 1938. 129 NEC, 7 May 1919, resolution from Scottish Advisory Council.

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Political Landscapes INTERPRETATIONS

Such challenges called for adaptations of propaganda and campaigning techniques, as Labour tried to make itself known, understood, and accepted by the rural electorate. But the question remained as to whether Labour’s problems were merely a series of practical difficulties, which could be overcome with sufficient resources and application. How different was the countryside? Aside from the issues of physical inaccessibility and the artificial barriers produced by ‘tyranny’ in the villages, might rural Britain actually present the same challenges and opportunities which Labour encountered in other sectors? There were obvious pressures on the Labour Party to convince itself that it had a right to support in the countryside, given the electoral objectives which it had identified. An analysis of rural politics which emphasized contingent, rather than inherent, obstacles at least offered the prospect of future electoral success, and did not condemn Labour to be forever ‘a thing of the town’. The focus was on the supposed constraints on political discussion and activity—constraints arising from the existing organization of rural society. Labour’s adverse political fortunes were explained in the context of these difficulties. Yet at the same time, and often from the same people, there were reassurances about the similarities between urban and rural politics, denying the possibility that Labour’s appeal might actually be inappropriate or alien to the countryside. There were injunctions to treat rural voters as voters anywhere else, but also warnings that the rural voter was not ‘one of us’. The rural electorate required a different terminology and language: Labour could not talk to the country people ‘as we talk amongst ourselves’.130 Labour approached rural Britain with a basic optimism that the countryside and radical politics were not antipathetic. Although Labour was virtually unknown in many rural areas, it seemed possible that the electorate in the countryside offered greater potential than the recalcitrant cities and the industrial anomalies which remained immune to the party’s charms.131 In 1931, John Morgan, a member of Labour’s Agricultural Campaign Committee, observed, ‘In whatever country you like to look, wherever you get progressive agriculture, there you have the most radical 130 Herbert Morrison, 37th Conference, 1937, 192. Morrison likened this to the challenges of communicating with voters in middle-class and residential areas. 131 E. J. Plaisted, Salisbury DLP, ‘We are going to win the first of the backward areas before we win the last of the industrial’ (37th Conference, 1937, 228).


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political element of that country.’ He predicted that mass trade union membership would produce ‘rural areas as solid for Labour as any mining or industrial area is in this country’.132 Another observer thought that, in time, the agricultural workers could become as ‘class conscious’ as the miners.133 Some suggested that there was a higher spirit in the rural population, making them more likely supporters of the Labour cause, if only they became acquainted with it: that Falmouth, Moray, and the Western Isles held ‘more genuine potentialities than much of the drink-sodden slum riff-raff of our industrial centres’.134 Commentators reminded the party of the rural radical tradition, hinting at the possibilities for this to be revived.135 The Left developed a complex attitude towards the rural electorate. Country people were caricatured as slow, inarticulate, cowed, apathetic; but they were also Labour’s hope in its national political ambitions. If one followed the electoral analysis to its logical conclusion, then Labour needed to win the support of these apolitical, slow-witted folk in order to fulfil its potential. Attempts to identify a promising, intelligent community, concealed by the tyrannies of village society, never quite overcame the condescension with which much of the Labour movement regarded the rural population. The resolution of these attitudes lay in a very particular interpretation of the rural areas and their place in national politics. That interpretation was historical. The countryside was continually described as a relic from a past era. Obstacles to Labour’s progress in the villages were presented in terms emphasizing that these were historical survivals. ‘Feudalism’ lurked in the countryside, as ‘squiredom’, constraining the villagers’ freedom of action. A delegate from Tiverton told the party conference in 1923 that the agricultural workers in some districts were scarcely removed from the old feudal system.136 In West Derbyshire, the ‘old feudal thumbscrew’ was reported to be still in existence in 1929.137 Voters on the great landed estates of Rutland and 132

133 31st Conference, 1931, 212–13. 28th Conference, 1928, 250 –1. S. B. M. Potter, Socialist Review (December 1926), 21. Labour did indeed manage to win Falmouth (1945) and Western Isles (1935). 135 Cf. Chapter I, pp. 46–8. 136 23rd Conference, 1923, 204. Cf. Labour, June 1938: ‘there are large areas of England which even at the present time have scarcely emerged from feudalism’. 137 Derbyshire Times, 25 May 1929, report of speech by Labour candidate William Wilkinson. West Derbyshire had a peculiarly bad reputation as a pocket division, with a tradition of sitting members who were either Cavendishes themselves or at least closely connected to the Dukes of Devonshire. Cf. Winston Churchill, in his Liberal days, referred to a ‘turn of the feudal screw’ in rural areas at the January 1910 general election. 134

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Stamford were described in 1933 as ‘living in medieval conditions’.138 Venturing across the Shropshire border was ‘to go back almost to feudalism’.139 This concept of the anachronistic nature of the contemporary countryside was not unique to the Labour Party. A spate of publications on villages in the early twentieth century emphasized the premodern nature of life there; rambles in the countryside were presented almost as explorations of a lost England.140 According to such perspectives, the rural nation was not simply a different side to the British economy, but was, in a sense, Britain undeveloped: this was Britain before industrialization, before urbanization. For the Labour Party there was a further dimension to such interpretations: the countryside was a model of Britain before the advent of Labour. Labour’s difficulties in the countryside tended to be placed in this historical context. The rural nation called for the same pioneering work which had once been required in the industrial nation; rural political culture was not so much different in kind, as retarded. A developing interpretation denied that the rural divisions might be inherently opposed to Labour representation, or that the task of winning them was by nature different from Labour’s previous achievements: they simply formed the next stage. ‘What we are apt to forget’, counselled Joseph Duncan, ‘is that in rural constituencies the Socialists are about where we were 25 years ago in urban areas.’141 Similarly, the New Leader described the remoter parts of the countryside in the early 1920s as resembling the political landscape of the towns thirty years previously.142 The implication was that the experience of fighting rural seats needed to be appreciated as part of an historical progression—though even in this context the relatively slow progress in the countryside was bound to cause disappointment when compared to Labour’s ‘ascendancy in the towns’.143 Likewise, in trade union organization, the countryside presented a new stage in the challenge facing Labour. In a cartoon from an early issue of The Labourer, a farm labourer and a miner shake hands, the miner saying 138

By-election report, NEC, 22 November 1933. New Leader, 27 April 1923. The countryside was still being described in such terms at a much later date; cf. an article in Labour Organiser, January 1969, on Labour’s campaigning in the New Forest, ‘alien territory’ where ‘feudalism seems to linger on’. 140 Amongst the most prominent examples, see George Bourne, Change in the Village (1912) and The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923), and H. V. Morton, In Search of England (1927). 141 142 Socialist Review, September 1926. New Leader, 27 April 1923. 143 Editorial, Daily Herald, 23 June 1933. 139


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to his comrade, ‘I know what you have to face. I’ve been through it myself ’.144 History might offer hope in the face of an apparently hopeless task. In the 1930s, John Dugdale advised representatives of the major industrial unions to visit villages and explain how their own organizations had begun in conditions which seemed insuperable: ‘farm workers should be encouraged to hear about how other workers in years gone by have struggled for the right to combine’.145 Such sentiments were a favourite leitmotiv for the general secretary of the agricultural workers’ union, R. B. Walker, who observed, ‘It was the Railwaymen yesterday. It is the Miners to-day. Come, lads, make it the Agricultural workers to-morrow!’146 In this way, organization in the countryside was believed to be repeating earlier phases in the history of the movement. This developmental interpretation allowed for a degree of optimism in the Labour movement’s approaches to the countryside. Sometimes, Labour saw the capitulation of the rural seats as a foregone conclusion. The rural constituencies were the ‘walls of Jericho’, destined to give way before the noise of Labour’s appeal; Labour had a right to reclaim its ‘lost tribes of Israel’.147 Analogies with an earlier generation’s fight for the industrial vote offered consolation for those trying to organize rural Britain: Labour had been successful in the earlier enterprise, and would presumably succeed in this too. The Daily Herald noted of a by-election in Howdenshire in 1926 that Labour achieved a better showing in its first electoral contest in the division ‘than many first Labour candidates did 20 years ago in industrial constituencies that are now Labour strongholds’.148 Men and women promoting the cause of Labour in agricultural areas were said to be ‘imbued with the same spirit which dominated the old pioneers of our Movement’; in due course, they would ‘reap that success which has been achieved in the industrial centres’.149 Explanations for the strength of rural Conservatism and the resilience of the Liberal Party in the countryside also fitted into this developmental scheme. Conservative loyalties became a function of the primitive nature of rural political culture and the survival of feudal tyranny and village hierarchies; Liberal 144

Labourer, February 1915. BLPES, Fabian Society papers, J23/2 item 11, memo for New Fabian Research Bureau [n.d., c.1934–5]. 146 Land Worker, May 1919. 147 27th Conference, 1927, 267; 33rd Conference, 1933, 213. 148 Daily Herald, 2 December 1926. Some crumbs of comfort, presumably, since Labour finished bottom of the poll and lost its deposit. 149 J. W. Banfield, MP, at a rally in Buckinghamshire, Daily Herald, 12 June 1933. 145

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allegiances were a further illustration of the countryside’s backwardness, adhering to a spent electoral force, all the past virtue of which had since passed to Labour through political evolution. These arguments offered reassurance in the face of Labour’s political fortunes. The party accepted that it was unlikely to win in ‘traditional’ rural areas, where the constraints of a ‘feudal’ society and the political backwardness of the electorate prevented the party from getting its message across. But a changed countryside might be fertile ground for its propaganda. ‘The countryside will vote Labour when the countryside is freshened with active intelligence and becomes alive again,’ prophesied MacDonald.150 The electoral imperative associated with the rural seats meant that Labour could not afford to wait for rural voters to catch up with their more advanced town cousins. The enlightenment and invigoration of the countryside were tasks which Labour had to undertake in order to win support in rural Britain and achieve its ambition to form a majority government. These ‘backward’, ‘difficult’, and even ‘hopeless’ constituencies had to be transformed into a landscape where Labour could win votes and build lasting organization. 150

Daily Herald, 6 December 1926.

3 Rural Idylls To initiate young folks into the love of the hills and the physical endurance which is the homage exacted by the hills is as necessary as to initiate them into Marxian economics. Ramsay MacDonald, 19221

Despite the emphasis on the electoral imperative of winning rural seats, the countryside always represented far more than simply a setting for the Labour Party’s political ambitions. Interpretations of its political culture generated a series of inherently negative responses to rural Britain, but these existed alongside an important tradition of much more positive images of the countryside on the British Left. In analyses of the political environment, there was seemingly much to condemn in the backwardness and ignorance of the villages and the oppressive and tyrannical structures of rural society. However, as a landscape and a place for recreation, the countryside took on a very different aspect. In this light, it became an idealized world, a favoured setting for leisure, the pointed contrast to crowded, unpleasant, and ill-planned urban development, and a metaphor for a better quality of life. The virtues identified with the rural environment could also be appropriated as expressions of political commitment. As Labour men and women hiked and cycled through the countryside, they sometimes drew direct connections between these activities and their political lives. Alongside visions of the countryside as an historical setting and as a distinctive political environment, these responses to the amenity and imagery associated with the rural landscape provide a further context for understanding the meanings which rural Britain held for those on the Left in British politics.

1 Forward, 9 September 1922, reprinted in Ramsay MacDonald, Wanderings and Excursions (1925), 63.

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Political Landscapes RAMSAY MACDONALD GOES RAMBLING

Labour leader, prime minister, and later pariah, Ramsay MacDonald was one of the party’s most famous ramblers, and often wrote about his love of the hills and the countryside. His regular column for the Scottish socialist paper, Forward, was addressed ‘from the green benches’ of Westminster, but his reflections on parliamentary business were frequently displaced by observations set against a background of other greenery.2 For MacDonald, the countryside usually featured as a corrective and restorative against the tribulations of political life. When asked by the editor of The Countryman whether his best work had been done in the town or the country, MacDonald’s reply was tentative. He could produce more work, and of a higher quality in the country, but the real advantage was the stimulus of moving from one to the other: to do all one’s work in the town and one’s play in the country seemed ‘a bad rule’.3 Much of MacDonald’s writing about the countryside, and specifically about walking there, portrays a sense of escape. He was always irritated— perhaps understandably—when his walks were disturbed by people who wanted to talk about the very things he was trying to put out of his mind. Following the 1924 general election, he ‘took to the hills and the moors’, where ‘elections were . . . the frettings of another life’.4 But after a day of wandering through an ‘Arthurian’ landscape, full of ‘romance’, some Labour stalwarts came up to him and whinged about the recent defeat, breaking the spell.5 Even when he was sitting on the front bench in the Commons, he apparently begrudged his metropolitan confinement, and returned often in his imagination ‘to the green roads upon which [he had been] just a few days before’.6 MacDonald regarded his rural wanderings as an escape not only from events, but from capitalism and the ills of modern society, into a world of higher values. Watching the sunset from a hill in Morayshire, he could see that the problems reported in the press were ‘but dark ripples on the 2

Forward, 13 April 1918. PRO 30/69/1438/II/1433, MacDonald papers, MacDonald to J. W. Robertson Scott, 23 January 1928. 4 5 MacDonald, Wanderings, 75– 6. Ibid. 79. 6 Ramsay MacDonald, Home and Abroad (1936), 94. This rhetoric has parallels with Stanley Baldwin’s comments about his own regrets at having to return to Westminster from the country; see Philip Williamson, Stanley Baldwin. Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999), 244. 3

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surface of things’.7 He observed that it was ‘not from the pained life of the crowded towns’ that men gained the inspiration to live in ‘strenuous endeavour’, but ‘amidst the green of budding corn, the white of cherry blossoms and fleecy cloud, and the gay blue of the sky’.8 These insights from nature amounted to more than a mysticism about the power of the rural landscape to show one what really mattered. MacDonald also linked them to his political philosophy. His rambles in the countryside might be an escape from the trials of the professional politician, but they were not a retreat from politics itself. Politics ‘wafted upon the winds’, and renewed the walker’s political faith.9 MacDonald romanticized a direct connection between progressive politics and the inspiration offered by nature. ‘One could write the wisest book on democratic philosophy which has ever seen the light,’ he wrote in 1918, ‘but it would not be original. It would be borrowed from the moors and the villages.’10 He considered such political thinking, imbibed from the landscape, to be on a higher plain from that arrived at in an urban environment. Urban politics was ‘an affair of wages, hours, grub, housing’; on the moors, by contrast, politics was ‘a thing of liberty and of spirit’.11 Political philosophy was linked so closely to exposure to the environment that even an ideology itself could be envisaged as a trek in the hills. Socialism, he wrote in 1911, meant ‘pursuing the pilgrim road which, mounting up over the hills and beyond the horizon, winds towards the ideal’.12 A decade later, in the quotation with which this chapter opens, he gave more practical expression to the metaphor, implying that experience of the rural landscape was in itself a vital part of political education. The great outdoors and the great ideal intertwined. MacDonald’s ruralist sentiments were not always so obviously politicized. Indeed his support for the preservationist movement is often cited as an illustration of how ruralism seemed to cut across party boundaries. On the eve of the 1929 general election campaign, a letter appeared in the national press signed by MacDonald, Baldwin, and Lloyd George, as the leaders of the three main parties, affirming the idea of a countryside whose best interests were above political divisions. ‘During the next few weeks,’ they wrote, ‘we shall differ on so many problems of public importance, that we gladly take an opportunity of showing that on one subject 7 8 10 12

MacDonald, Wanderings, 39. Ramsay MacDonald, At Home and Abroad (1936), 92. 11 MacDonald, Wanderings, 91. Ibid. Ramsay MacDonald, The Socialist Movement (1911), 248.

9

Ibid. 12.

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we speak with a united voice—namely, in advocating the preservation of our countryside in its rich personality and character.’13 The value of the rural landscape and the need for its protection seemed matters too important to be subsumed into party politics, and in any case often lent themselves to cross-party consensus. The dominant rural campaigning organizations of the interwar period, such as the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, the Ramblers’ Association, the National Trust, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, certainly claimed a nonparty stance. In consequence, the pervasive ruralism in British culture in the period tends to be discussed as a largely apolitical phenomenon. However, as MacDonald’s ramblings illustrate, it was also possible to set a preference for rural recreation and an appreciation of the countryside within a specific political context. FOLK TRADITION AND THE BRITISH LEFT One of the ways in which images of the countryside became absorbed within Labour culture was through the celebration of a folk tradition. Elements of this had become so well established by the 1920s that one critic felt the need to remind his fellow socialists that ‘Of course, nature is beautiful, camping is good, folksongs are delightful,’ but they should find beauty in the modern industrial world too; a set of values should not become automatic, he argued, simply because they had been endorsed by a previous generation.14 The reference to the values of a previous generation highlights the inheritance from the ethical socialism of the 1890s and early 1900s, whose iconography and mythology became endowed with special significance for the later Labour Party. Its visions of ‘Merrie England’ were a complement to the historical associations of that mythical country discussed in Chapter 1. Here, the significance of a golden past was not only that the social and economic conditions of the people had been superior to modern experience, but that the workers had enjoyed a higher quality of life in a broader sense, in a more natural and untainted environment.15 This celebrated world was, of course, rural. Even the choice of May Day as the day of the workers served to underline connections between Labour and the folk tradition—a tradition which 13

14 Times, 8 May 1929. Socialist Review, October 1926. See Roy Judge, ‘May Day and Merrie England’, Folklore, 102/2 (1991), 141, describing the 1906 ILP May Day festival in Oxfordshire. 15

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was held to reside almost exclusively in the rural nation. In his May Day exhortation of 1923, MacDonald entered enthusiastically into its associations. Socialism, he claimed, was ‘a renewal of life’, which would ‘come like the Spring everywhere—in the sky, in the fields, in the woods’.16 Walter Crane’s May Day cartoons, such as the famous ‘Workers’ Maypole’ of 1894 and the ‘Garland for May Day’ of 1895, were frequently reproduced and imitated.17 Partly through such memorable imagery, many aspects of folk culture became linked—though never, of course, exclusively—with the Left. Barbara Castle recalled growing up in Pontefract around the time of the First World War, where her mother, ‘a William Morris socialist’, duly put up a maypole each spring, decorated with flowers and ribbons, for the children to dance around.18 George Lansbury’s vision of a recreated rural England in the mid-1930s also involved maypoles: ‘village greens with the Maypoles once again erected and the boys and girls, young men and maidens, all joining in the mirth and folly of May Day’.19 Folk dancing became a popular inclusion at Labour gatherings. George Bernard Shaw danced at Fabian summer schools, and Margaret Bondfield was a member of the National Advisory Council of the English Folk Dance Society.20 Morris dancing was one of the entertainments on offer in the ‘red’ parish of Thaxted while Conrad Noel was the incumbent.21 The movements for the ‘rediscovery’ of folk song and dance attracted many socialist advocates. A number of the composers involved in the English musical renaissance, and inspired by the folk song movement, had a reputation for advanced political views. When the musician Hugh Allen saw the young composer and folk enthusiast George Butterworth walking through Oxford with a friend, he remarked, ‘There goes more red revolution than in the whole of Russia.’22 Most famously, Cecil

16 New Leader, May 1923. May Day was of course an international celebration, and the association between socialism and spring had parallels in other countries: see Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe 1870–1914’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1992), 283–5. 17 See John Gorman, Banner Bright (Buckhurst Hill, 1986), 168, 178. 18 Barbara Castle, Fighting all the Way (1993), 1. 19 George Lansbury, My England (1934), 93–4. 20 See photograph of George Bernard Shaw in action in Daily Herald, 10 June 1933; Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village (1993), 121. 21 Sidney Dark (ed.), Conrad Noel, An Autobiography (1945), 104 and 106; Herts and Essex Observer, 7 July 1923, on Labour Gala at Easton Lodge. 22 Quoted in Michael Barlow, ‘George Butterworth: The Early Years’, Journal of the British Music Society, 5 (1983), 91.

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Sharp had claimed to be a socialist, though by the end of the First World War he acknowledged that he took ‘the conservative view in politics’.23 As well as their supposed links to historical tradition, folk song and dance were characterized as specifically rural in origin. The Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) encouraged its rural branches to include folk song in their work, making this contrast of town and country explicit: to sing fine songs that belong to the countryside (instead of the poor lame things that find their way down from the towns); to dance again the dances that only vigorous country people could ever have devised24

There was a degree of irony in the enthusiasm of an essentially urban political movement to embrace aspects of rural culture and endorse its superiority. An ideological rationale also confirmed the value of these cultural forms for the Left. Unlike many other arts and activities, they were not seen as individualistic or competitive. Folk songs could not be attributed to any single author, and it was claimed that such music was particularly beautiful as the product of a ‘group’ of people, adapted and added to across the generations. Folk song thus demonstrated the ability of ‘natural, uneducated man to produce beautiful things’.25 It was regarded as an expression, not only of the talent of ordinary people, but of the achievements of cooperative activity. Similar claims were made on behalf of folk dance by Joseph Reeves, a leading educationalist in the Co-operative Movement: ‘Such dancing is purely co-operative,’ he explained, ‘because it is a form of collective activity.’26 Not only this, but dancing was commended for embodying a spirit of Socialist rejoicing: ‘Dancing is for Socialists.’27 ANTI-URBANISM The links with folk tradition were part of a wider ruralist inheritance. Much of the early twentieth-century critique of the industrial world, which tended to accompany such aesthetic preferences, had been borrowed from nineteenth-century figures such as Cobbett and Carlyle, who were sceptical about the benefits of urbanization and finance capital. In 23 24 25 26 27

Dave Harper, ‘May Cecil Sharp be praised?’, History Workshop, 14 (Autumn 1982), 60. Land Worker, April 1920, 2. Alec Hunter, ‘Back to Merrie England,’ Labour Magazine (August 1923). Joseph Reeves, Education for Social Change (2nd edn, 1936), 27. Labour Organiser, January 1938.

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the 1920s and 1930s, cities were still sometimes denounced in directly Cobbettian terms. Herbert Drinkwater, editor of The Labour Organiser, hated London, railed against the Black Country, and could hardly bear to approach a ‘great wen’.28 The Clarion Cyclists likewise saw Birmingham as a ‘Great Wen’, the term which Cobbett had applied to London.29 But whereas Cobbett found ‘the Wen’ objectionable as the centre for ‘the Thing’, namely the whole political and financial system of which he disapproved, the Clarionettes’ ‘Wen’ was essentially something which offended their aesthetic sensibilities.30 The Left had special purchase on this type of anti-urbanism, since many ugly aspects of the urban nation could be readily interpreted as capitalism run riot. Lansbury observed that the ‘indiscriminate pursuit of wealth’ had led to men, women, and children living ‘amid sordid ugliness’.31 In a Labour Party pamphlet from 1933, the travel writer H. V. Morton described the Five Towns of the Potteries as ‘a perfect example of the kind of hell which private enterprise harnessed to greed created during the industrial expansion of the nineteenth century’. Sheffield was also characterized as a form of hell, looking like Dante’s Inferno as one passed through on the train, and offering a grim monument to industrialism. No one had ever described Sheffield as beautiful, Morton observed, though one might at least find some consolation in the fact that no city in England lay within easier reach of open country.32 Capitalist despoliation of the landscape was not simply a legacy of industrialization in the previous century. Labour’s policy statements described how unchecked individualism was still resulting in ‘the industrial devastation of a great countryside’.33 The relatively new phenomenon of ribbon development was blamed on capitalist ethics, and on the ‘cheap get-rich-quick and get-rich-anyhow methods’ which had made Britain’s industrial towns ‘the most hideous in Europe’.34 28 Ibid. August 1931. Drinkwater took some of his anti-urbanism from Blatchford: see his reflections on the offensive consumerism of Liverpool, ibid. December 1922. 29 Clarion Cyclist, August 1936. 30 The term ‘Clarionette’ applied to both male and female members of the Clarion organizations, despite what the spelling might suggest. 31 George Lansbury, The Futility of the National Government (LP, 1933). 32 H. V. Morton, What I saw in the Slums (LP, 1933). Morton was not affiliated to any political party. On his travel writing in the 1920s and 1930s, see David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (1998), 64–7. 33 Lancashire. Report of the Labour Party’s Commission of Enquiry into the Distressed Areas (LP, September 1937), 23. 34 NEC, proof of report on ‘How Women Fare under a Reactionary Government’, for presentation to National Conference of Labour Women, 14–16 June 1932.

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Cities became unhealthy and unpleasant through unregulated, competitive, industrial enterprise, and it was consistent to object to the consequences of a capitalist system one opposed. Yet, historically, the sequence of these associations had often been reversed. In the late nineteenth century, many individuals were drawn to socialism precisely because of their distaste for aspects of modern society, and the retreat from ‘beauty’ which these presented. The aesthetic critique of urban industry, and the ruralism which was its complement, were inherent to this ideology, rather than simply offshoots from it. The socialist journalist Robert Blatchford’s objection to capitalist society was partly that it was so ugly: that it produced places like Oldham, where the John Smith of his socialist primer Merrie England had the misfortune to live. ‘The relative beauty and pleasantness of the factory and country districts do not need demonstration,’ Blatchford insisted, ‘The ugliness of Widnes and Sheffield and the beauty of Dorking and Monsal Dale are not matters of sentiment nor of argument—they are matters of fact.’35 Individuals of a later generation, with different experiences of the urban environment, were likewise converted to socialism partly on aesthetic grounds, finding a resonance between their own preferences and the associations drawn by critics such as William Morris several decades earlier.36 This anti-urban rhetoric represented a decidedly ambiguous attitude towards the environment from which organized Labour drew most of its support, and where the majority of the working class earned a livelihood. At times it seemed that the virtues of the urban landscape could be claimed only on the basis of non-aesthetic arguments, and against one’s instincts. The Clarion Cyclist, the journal of the National Clarion Cycling Club, devoted most of its issues to rural expeditions and had to make a special, rather grudging justification for cycling in industrial areas, through settings ‘which may not be pleasant to the eye, but which are necessary to man’s existence’.37 Clarion cyclists were encouraged to visit areas such as Nottingham and Birmingham out of a sense of piety, rather than for pleasure. There were, of course, many grounds for deploring sites of derelict industry, for being morally, as well as aesthetically, objectionable.

35 Robert Blatchford, Merrie England (1893; 1976), 8–9. Merrie England, a collection of letters first published in the socialist newspaper The Clarion, was responsible for many political conversions. 36 See G. D. H. Cole, British Labour Movement—Retrospect and Prospect, Ralph Fox Memorial Lecture, April 1951, Fabian Special Tract 8 (1951), 4. 37 Clarion Cyclist, December 1936.

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When the poet and former miner Idris Davies enjoined his readers to ‘see Dowlais and sigh’, he was moved to criticize industrial sites as eye-sores, not because of their industrial intrusion on the landscape, but because they were ruined and no longer providing jobs. Elsewhere in his poetry, however, he reflected on the initial spoliation of the Valleys by capitalism, as much as on the results of the more recent economic depression.38 A preference for the countryside was, and is, sometimes treated as a given—a natural inclination, which was perhaps all the more obvious when urban conditions were often poor and unattractive.39 However, these tendencies within the Labour movement do raise questions. Many of the ways in which ruralist and anti-urban sentiments were articulated suggest that these visions of the countryside could be politicized, with attempts to link them to ideological positions: in other words, to appropriate them for a socialist perspective. The rest of this chapter explores two particular areas in which the Left had opportunities to develop its own distinctive brand of ruralism. The first of these was recreation in the countryside. Hiking, cycling, and other forms of rural leisure had widespread followings in the period, across social classes and political tendencies, but it is clear that some groups on the Left were able to find their own contexts for these popular pursuits. The second topic concerns the rural idyll itself. If one were to find any sector questioning idealizations of the rural world in the early twentieth century, one might expect to find it on the political Left. After all, part of the construction of the dominant image of rural Britain involved the concealment of less attractive elements in that world, usually relating to the experience of its poorest inhabitants.40 In this context it is interesting to look at how far socialist visions differed from other versions of the rural idyll which were consumed with such enthusiasm at the time.

38 Poetry and the People (February 1939); Gwalia Deserta (1938) in The Complete Poems of Idris Davies (Cardiff, 1994). Idris Davies (1905–53) left school at fourteen to work in the mines, but began a career as a teacher when his pit closed. His most famous sequence of poems, The Angry Summer, about the 1926 general strike, was written during the Second World War, and published in 1943. 39 Philip Lowe points out that anti-urban sentiments in the nineteenth century were not irrational: most industrial towns were foul and insanitary (‘The Rural Idyll Defended: from Preservation to Conservation’, in G. E. Mingay (ed.), The Rural Idyll (1989), 116). 40 A phenomenon which has been explored for earlier periods, notably in John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730 – 1840 (1980).

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Political Landscapes HIKING, CAMPING, AND CYCLING FOR SOCIALISM

It was a common belief that open-air activities promoted moral and physical well-being. Robert Blatchford was one of many commentators who emphasized clear connections between good health and the countryside —an equation which provided a pragmatic foundation for ruralist preferences amongst the working class.41 Regular escape into the countryside was a vital part of many urban workers’ lives: as the saying went, hiking replaced beer as ‘the shortest cut out of Manchester’.42 The opportunity to leave the urban, industrial environment behind for a few hours was valued by significant numbers of working-class people, and was of notable cultural importance in the northern conurbations of Manchester and Sheffield, where a tram or bus ride brought enthusiasts out of the city and into the Peak district in a relatively short time, and relatively cheaply. Exposure to the rural environment was believed to help reform character, as well as promote good physical health. The Sheffield Clarion Ramblers took as their motto ‘A rambler made is a man improved.’43 The organization began in 1900, when a local engineer, G. H. B. Ward,44 advertised in The Clarion for companions to join him on a ramble around Kinder Scout. By 1902, Ward was organizing a regular programme of outings on Sundays and Saturday afternoons, inviting walkers to ‘Come and enjoy with us the beautiful scenery so near to “black and smoky” Sheffield.’45 The organization went from strength to strength, offering

41

Blatchford, Merrie England, 8–10. C. E. M. Joad, A Charter for Ramblers (1934), 12, and The Untutored Townsman’s Invasion of the Country (1946), 17. 43 Howard Hill, Freedom to Roam. The Struggle for Access to Britain’s Moors and Mountains (Ashbourne, 1980), 32. 44 G. H. B. Ward (1876–1957), ‘Sheffield’s Prince of Ramblers’, was born into a working-class household in the Park district of Sheffield, and served an apprenticeship in engineering. He became involved in Labour politics and wrote for the local socialist paper, The Sheffield Guardian, from its foundation in 1906. Having joined the civil service in 1911, he spent the war years in London, returning to Sheffield as advisor to the Ministry of Labour. Deeply committed to issues of access to the countryside, he was a key figure in the formation of several local societies concerned with preservation, heritage, and outdoor pursuits. 45 1902 programme of rambles, reproduced in Reg Sykes, One Hundred Years of Rambling. Sheffield Clarion Ramblers 1900 to 2000 (Sheffield, 2000), 8. 42

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a social programme and also playing a significant role in the agitation for greater rights of access to the moorlands of Derbyshire. A dedication to hiking was often a sign within the working class of ambitions for self-improvement.46 Many leading lights in the Labour movement at a national level, from diverse social backgrounds, were themselves enthusiastic ramblers, including Jennie Lee, Barbara Castle, and Hugh Dalton, who later became president of the Ramblers’ Association. Arthur Creech Jones, the Labour MP who introduced the Access to the Mountains Bill in 1938, was a formidable hill walker and mountain climber. However, enthusiasts for rural recreation did not necessarily make political observations about the world through which they hiked. Raphael Samuel remembered frequent country outings with his Communist mother, a dedicated hiker, but noted that they took no interest in rural life, in the people who lived and worked in the countryside, or indeed in any of the man-made elements in the landscape. ‘Scenery only began where the cultivated fields came to an end,’ he recalled.47 There were two distinct aesthetics being pursued by these disparate hikers and ramblers. One might be described as a ‘mainstream’ vision of the countryside, easily accessible — the archetypal English landscape of gently rolling hills and picturesque villages. This had a wide, nonpolitical appeal, though many socialist ramblers situated their own enjoyment of the countryside within that setting. G. D. H. Cole was one of the Labour walkers who liked hills only if they were ‘green all the way to the top’.48 The other aesthetic celebrated the wilderness, and drew in part on the cult of the ‘sublime’, which had some historical links with progressivism.49 The wilderness was best experienced alone. The Countess of Warwick talked about the pleasure for the ‘cultivated mind’ in beholding nature at its ‘most solitary moments’.50 Where the countryside was credited with developing the character of individuals, it was usually through solitary walking.51

46 Cf. Leonard Bast in E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910; 1989); G. A. W. Tomlinson, Coal-Miner (1937), esp. 50, 99. 47 ‘Country Visiting: a memoir’, in Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (1998), 140–1. 48 Margaret Cole, The Life of G. D. H. Cole (1971), 35. 49 Cf. Avner Offer, Property and Politics (Cambridge, 1981), Ch. 20. 50 H. G. Wells (ed.), Socialism and the Great State (1912), 63. 51 E.g. Idris Davies’ autobiographical reflections, in Complete Poems (1994), p. xvi.

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On a more convivial note, country outings were a feature of the social calendar for many Labour organizations.52 The far-left British Workers’ Sports Federation had a ‘rambling section’, which took a significant part in the great trespasses in the Peak District. In the early 1930s, they were organizing mass rallies ‘of Northern Ramblers and Cyclists’ in Derbyshire, complete with mass singing, political speeches, and open-air sketches performed by members of the workers’ theatre movement. The political context was implicit in such events, which were deliberately delineated from non-politicized leisure: in distancing themselves from the non-aligned rambling organizations which would later become the Ramblers’ Association (1935), comrades were encouraged to ‘Bring your mates along and help to build a REAL ramblers’ federation.’53 Trips into the countryside were an attraction used by the socialist agitator in Walter Greenwood’s novel Love on the Dole to encourage a local girl to come along to the Labour club, escaping the misery of their immediate surroundings: ‘It isn’t all politics there’, he told her, ‘There’s the Sunday rambles in to Derbyshire’.54 Many League of Youth branches arranged weekly rambles in the summer, usually on Sundays, and no Fabian summer school or Labour youth gathering was complete without its organized hikes.55 The philosopher and preservationist Cyril Joad recalled how he first started walking in the company of Fabians from London who ‘tramped through the beechwoods about Chorley Wood, or the chalk hills near Wendover’, talking about ‘the new world of Socialism’.56 While some of these earnest ramblers may well have discussed socialism as they hiked, much of this outdoor activity looks virtually indistinguishable from a more general pattern of rural recreation, and had 52 For example, rambles organized by the Railway Clerks’ Association, Railway Clerk, 15 September 1917. Charabanc tours were probably an even more common way of enjoying an organized Labour outing in the countryside, like the Birmingham busmen’s holiday in the summer of 1928, to Church Stretton and back via Bridgnorth, through ‘wonderful surroundings’ (Record, August 1928). Some took the opportunity of combining rural tourism with political pilgrimage in the 1930s, combining a visit to Tolpuddle with a tour of ‘Hardy country’ (files in papers of TUC, MRC, MSS 292/1.91/20 and 1.92/3). 53 Letter by J. H. M. Macy, secretary of the Rambling Section of the BWSF, in The Signal (Manchester Railwaymen’s Minority Movement, c.1931). I am grateful to Patrick Renshaw for lending me his father’s papers relating to the Minority Movement, now housed at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick. 54 Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (1933; 1993), 87. The novel is set in a fictional district of Salford. 55 See, for example, Youth Forward—The Merseyside Magazine for All Young Socialists, 1937. 56 Joad, Untutored Townsman’s Invasion, 48.

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only a limited political context. Indeed some recreational groups which began with a political definition became noticeably less political as time went on, as was the case with the Co-operative Holiday Association.57 There were even warnings against the politicization of leisure. The Daily Herald’s camping correspondent, John Walsh, encouraged hikers to leave politics at home when they went out walking, though this was in the context of concern about youth movements in Continental Europe being hijacked by extremists in the early 1930s.58 Other enthusiasts believed that there was something political about outdoor recreation itself, and that certain activities were particularly appropriate for socialists. Rambling was encouraged in the League of Youth as showing the meaning of ‘true fellowship’.59 In camping, too, one supposedly found ‘the spirit of comradeship that is the essence of Socialism’.60 For individuals, like MacDonald, solitary walking in the countryside was the ideal, but the common emphasis was on organized leisure in groups, celebrating cooperation and fellowship. An important feature of activities like rambling was their low cost. For those wanting to make a tour rather than a day-trip, there were new hostels springing up to provide basic, low-cost accommodation along Continental models. In 1932, the Labour Party affiliated with the Youth Hostels Association on behalf of the League of Youth, although it noted that the YHA was ‘not essentially a Labour organisation’.61 The first self-proclaimed Socialist Youth Hostel was opened at Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire in the summer of 1933, supported by the Clarion Youth, the Labour League of Youth, the University Labour Federation, and the Workers’ Sports Association. The hostel was an ‘old manor house’ in ten acres of grounds, and full board for a weekend cost six shillings and sixpence. For entertainment, there was swimming, boating, tennis, and a library, as well as organized rambles and talks (topics in the first season included ‘Socialism and Art’, and, more disturbingly, ‘Breeding out the unfit’).62 Youth hostels could foster a radical ambience: one group of Clarion cyclists reported that they had a ‘real class-conscious time’, 57 Ramblers’ Association, In Memory of T. Arthur Leonard, a Great Pioneer of HolidayMaking and Lover of the Joys of Fellowship and the Open Air (1948), 4. 58 59 Daily Herald, 17 June 1933. League of Youth Bulletin, May 1931. 60 Ibid. August 1931. 61 NEC, report on League of Youth conference, 9 January 1932. J. S. Middleton described the YHA as ‘concerned with matters entirely outside of politics’ (NMLH, LP/JSM/SU/21, Middleton to R. A. Palmer, 7 June 1934). 62 Daily Herald, 2 June 1933; Labour Organiser, June and November 1933.

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staying in a hostel which boasted a ‘bolshie’ caterer, two vegetarian communists, a crowd of Woodcraft Folk, and a hostel warden who was an ‘intellectual’.63 Camping offered an even more economical alternative to hostels. For the socialist youth organization the Woodcraft Folk, nights in the open air were an article of faith, a vital part of the commitment outlined in the declaration made by all members.64 Clarion and League of Youth propagandists also took up the challenge of camping with enthusiasm: as well as being enjoyable, it helped to cut the cost of their campaign tours in rural England.65 Outdoor pursuits like hiking and camping acquired an association with the Left because they were considered particularly open to workingclass participation. There was obviously a distinction in kind between the open-air activities of county society and the options available to ordinary people: few in the Labour movement could indulge in shooting, a popular pastime for the red squire Charles Trevelyan on his country estate in Northumberland, though both Trevelyan and Morgan Philips Price, a Labour candidate and journalist, felt able to declare this hobby amongst their listed recreations in Labour’s Who’s Who.66 There was a general hostility towards hunting through its association with game preservation: poachers of the past and trespassers of the present were equally celebrated. The Fabian Society’s report in 1913, The Rural Problem, was unusual amongst radical programmes of its time in having something positive to say on the topic of game preservation. Not only did it argue that it was a good thing to have ‘spots of wild beauty where the pheasant is bred and the fox comes to make his home’, but it denied that the resulting sport was limited to only one class: ordinary villagers ‘turn out for many a day’s enjoyment when the shooting season begins, and earn good wages as beater and a hearty lunch into the bargain’.67 The relatively low cost of cycling helped to promote an identification between that sport and working-class organizations. The bicycle was described as the ‘only vehicle within the means of the workers’, though of course cycling was also enormously popular amongst the middle 63

Clarion Cyclist, February 1937. Leslie Paul, The Folk Trail. An Outline of the Philosophy and Activities of Woodcraft Fellowships (1929), 30. 65 The campaigns are discussed in Chapter 4. 66 Labour’s Who’s Who, 1927; Hugh Dalton, Call Back Yesterday: Memoirs 1887–1931 (1953), 196. 67 Henry D. Harben, The Rural Problem (1913), 97–8. 64

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classes.68 Aside from these practicalities, distinct values became attached to cycling, which some within the Labour movement regarded as appealing almost exclusively to the ‘Socialist classes’. In the Labour Organiser, the columnist ‘Jack Cutter’ reassured readers who imagined that cyclists in black outfits must be Fascist supporters: the Right, he told them, could not organize cyclists, because ‘it is not a sport for snobs’.69 The most important socialist organization for cyclists was the National Clarion Cycling Club (NCCC), which existed to organize cyclists, ‘for Mutual Aid, Good Fellowship, and the Propagation of the Principles of Socialism, along with the social pleasures of Cycling’.70 It acted as a form of cyclists’ union, providing insurance against accidents, and promoting a distinctive cycling culture, with its own baffling codes: members who encountered each other on the road would shout ‘Boots!’ as a greeting, to which the expected reply from a fellow member was ‘Spurs!’ There were Clarion Cycling clubhouses scattered around the country, offering refreshments to the passing cyclist. Judging from the small notices in its journal, and from the themes of the cartoons and articles, the Club also functioned in no small part as a marriage bureau. Many a local president and secretary seem to have ended up cycling off together on a tandem. The political content of the club was always more problematic.71 Although part of its aim was to propagate socialism, much NCCC activity did not differ greatly from that of ‘capitalist’ cycling organizations like the Cyclists’ Touring Club. There were many purely social cycling clubs, some of whose members were, much to the NCCC’s frustration, politicized in other aspects of their lives.72 Although nearly all members of the NCCC were members of the Labour Party, far from all socialist cyclists were members of the NCCC. Organized cycling acquired an increasingly politicized culture during the 1930s, with the growth in motor transport and a burgeoning militancy amongst motorists, some of whom were calling for cycles to be banned from roads as a dangerous menace. This politicization did not necessarily connect the interests of cyclists to any wider agenda. For the

68

H. Briercliffe, ‘Cycling is Political’, Clarion Cyclist (August 1936). Labour Organiser, August 1934. For a history of the club, see Denis Pye, Fellowship is Life. The National Clarion Cycling Club 1895–1995 (Bolton, 1995). 71 Pye, Fellowship is Life, 16, 18, 21, 26, 79–81. 72 Clarion Cyclist, October 1936. 69 70

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2. Cycling for socialism. Members of the League of Youth set out on a tour in Hertfordshire, 1938. [© Science and Society Picture Library]

Clarion Cyclists, however, the conflicts between motorists and cyclists were a battle between capitalism and socialism: ‘a disguised version of the incessant capitalist war on the working class’. There were suspicions about the real motives behind motorists’ campaigns to clear cycles from the roads, part of their dislike of cyclists being attributed to the class identities associated with the two modes of transport: motoring capitalists, fearing the growth of cycling as a ‘menace to their own transport investments’, supposedly targeted it with their spite as a ‘great pastime of mere working men’.73 Cycling was credited with virtues quite absent from motoring. One imaginative contributor to the Clarion Cyclist envisaged the future as a world in which ugly cities would be demolished, and cars banished to high-speed tracks, returning the old highways for use by pedestrians and cyclists.74 Thus, contemporary debates about road use helped to re-focus connections between socialist cycling and a ruralist idyll. 73

Ibid. October 1936, and January 1937. Ibid. August and September 1936. This seemingly fanciful traffic policy bore strong similarities to suggestions put forward by C. E. M. Joad that disused railway tracks should become high-speed roads, as a means of confining motor traffic (A Charter for Ramblers (1934), 56–7). 74

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ACCESS The rights associated with outdoor recreation were an important issue in the years before the Second World War. The Daily Herald promoted its League of Hikers, under the presidency of Ramsay MacDonald, to defend the pastime against attacks, including slanderous suggestions about hikers’ sexual morality.75 C. E. M. Joad proposed a ‘Charter for Ramblers’ (1934). But the question of rights was often interpreted as lying quite outside the usual sphere of politics. For the Clarion Cyclists, the militancy of motorists was a new expression of class war; for others, it was simply an issue of relative priorities and interests, with no obvious connection to political or economic experience. The Herald ’s League of Hikers claimed to be an organization without politics, its main creed summed up in the rallying song ‘I’m Happy when I’m Hiking’.76 Likewise, the party politics of access were complicated. There was certainly a fundamental objection on the Left to restrictions of rights of way, as part of the system of private property in land which Labour was pledged to abolish. When George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Unsocial Socialist’ incited a crowd to throw down a wall obstructing an ancient right of way, he placed the action in the wider context of the land question: the protesters carried a banner bearing the words, ‘THE SOIL OF ENGLAND THE BIRTHRIGHT OF ALL HER PEOPLE’.77 The issue of access was not only about maintaining existing rights, but about widening the whole scope of access to the land. Several Labour MPs, including Ellen Wilkinson, Charles Trevelyan, J. C. Wedgwood, Hugh Dalton, and Philip Noel-Baker, put their names to the series of Access to Mountains Bills which came before Parliament in the 1930s, but the agitation had been raised by Scottish Liberals at the beginning of the century, and enjoyed much cross-party support. In the interwar years, an ideology of trespassing extended beyond walkers on the political Left. The great mass trespasses in the Peak district in 1932 involved sizeable contingents from Labour organizations and from the far-left Workers’ Sports Federation, but anger against the landlords and their gamekeepers who kept walkers off the moors was spread far more widely across classes and political affiliations; Lloyd George and the Daily Express were allies to the cause of access.78 75 77 78

76 Daily Herald, 4 May 1931. Ibid. 11 May 1931. George Bernard Shaw, An Unsocial Socialist (1884; London, 1988), 145–8. Hill, Freedom to Roam, 59, 62–71.

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Moreover, even on the Left, the issue of mass access to the countryside was problematic. It could be difficult to reconcile rights for popular recreation with ideas about preservation. As more people visited areas of natural beauty, their presence threatened to destroy the very thing they had come to experience. The refreshment stands, advertisements, and petrol stations, which tended to follow burgeoning numbers of visitors, were common targets for preservationists’ ire.79 Before mass excursions and the growth of private car ownership, observers could perhaps be more sanguine about the impact of ramblers in the countryside, protesting that ‘views are not damaged by being looked at’ and that ‘blackberrying breaks few hedges’.80 By the late 1920s it became necessary to defend the opening of beauty spots once accessible only to the wealthy and leisured few, and to stress that there were virtues as well as vices to ‘democratic sight seeing’.81 ‘There is no need to fear the crowd,’ Christopher Addison reassured Left Book Club readers in 1939, ‘There is plenty of room on our heaths and hills and downlands for all those who are prepared to walk.’82 The trade unionist and socialist propagandist, Joseph Duncan, spoke up for the ‘despised charabanc’, and for the prospect of ordinary people finding relief from their industrial lives in the beauties of a countryside once open only to a few.83 On the other hand, Ramsay MacDonald identified with those who found the prospect of mass tourism in the countryside a worrying development. In 1928, he refused to endorse a ‘Welcome to Scotland’ initiative, because of the damage as well as dollars which tourists would bring to his home country: any disadvantages of the tourist’s presence were lost in a city like London or Paris, he argued, but in the country, ‘he spoils everything he touches and completely destroys the spirit of our land’. ‘I am all for opening up the country to the crowd,’ he added, rather unconvincingly, ‘but to help to open the flood gates for a turgid crowd is quite another matter.’84 Likewise, while in opposition in 1926, the great trespasser, who denied rights of private property in land, was notably 79 See the discussion of preservationist arguments in Matless, Landscape and Englishness, esp. 25–61. 80 Lt-Col. D. C. Pedder, The Secret of Rural Depopulation, Fabian Tract 118 (1904), 19. 81 Rhodes House, MSS.Brit. Emp. s.332/6/1, Winifred Holtby to Arthur Creech Jones, 15 November 1929, re ‘The Beauty-Spot Tragedy’, by Cicely Hamilton, published in Time and Tide: the story of a war veteran who kills the author of a series of books on unspoilt places, to prevent their being ruined by an influx of visitors. 82 Christopher Addison, A Policy for British Agriculture (1939), 278. 83 Forward, 24 August 1929. 84 PRO 30/69/1438/I/203, MacDonald to R. McKean Cant, 30 January 1928.

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unsympathetic to complaints from the Princes Risborough Labour Party about problems of access to the estate around the official prime ministerial residence at Chequers. MacDonald was more concerned about the lack of privacy on a hilltop near the house where he had liked to take his friends, but which was overrun with people at weekends, carving their names on the turf and engaging in forms of behaviour which apparently revealed how unfit they were to enjoy the landscape.85 Others on the Left combined agitation for increased access, with accusations of their own about the damage which some visitors inflicted on the countryside. Attitudes towards access were often underlain by elitism, but this was an elitism based on character and experience, rather than on class. MacDonald’s concern was not about crowds per se, but about ‘turgid’ crowds. In 1939, Christopher Addison recommended the Access to Mountains Bill as a measure of ‘disciplined access’.86 Cyril Joad believed that people had become so divorced from the country that their ‘untutored’ enthusiasm might easily lead them to damage the landscape to which they were drawn, or ruin the experience which other, more discerning visitors hoped to find there.87 Labour brought some of the more general preservationist concerns into its own political literature, including that topos of preservationist critiques, the blaring radio in the countryside. A Labour Party pamphlet from 1934 used this sound picture to encapsulate its condemnation of the degraded state of British agriculture: ‘The countryside of Britain—neglected, wasted, destroyed—is becoming a mere convenience for the townsman to drive into on Sunday evenings and listen to his radio in the open air.’88 WOODCRAFT One way to ensure that future generations would behave appropriately in the countryside was to educate them. The Woodcraft movement 85 PRO 30/69/1171/II/48–9, MacDonald to J. S. Middleton, 17 March 1926. Chequers brought out MacDonald’s snobbish tendencies more generally: he told Harold Nicolson that he would rather have been a country landowner than prime minister. Hugh Dalton observed that no Labour cabinet colleagues were invited to spend weekends at Chequers during MacDonald’s premiership, though his aristocratic friends were welcomed there (Dalton, Call Back Yesterday, 179). 86 HLDeb, 112, cols. 976–80, 9 May 1939. 87 An idea used in the title of his post-war book, The Untutored Townsman’s Invasion of the Country (1946). After flirting with Mosley’s New Party, Joad was allied to progressive organizations by the mid-1930s. 88 How Labour Will Save Agriculture (March 1934), 3.

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developed as an attempt to inculcate respect for nature and the landscape. Woodcraft was a whole educational system, which encouraged children to live in cooperation and in harmony with their environment, as active creators of a culture, rather than passive recipients of an unnatural way of life. Many of its preoccupations grew out of the peculiar obsessions of the founder of the Kibbo Kift, John Hargrave, and the ‘Headman’ of the Woodcraft Folk, Leslie Paul.89 The movement’s trappings were a confused mixture of tribal and mystical influences, combined with nature study and a cult of the great outdoors. Within this amalgam, there was a distinctly anti-industrial and anti-capitalist ideology. Woodcraft was conceived as a means of ‘fighting . . . the effect of the capitalist system upon [children’s] growing brains and bodies . . . giving them the chances of life denied in the cities’.90 One of the aims of the Woodcraft Folk was to get urban children out of the city and provide them with recreation. Leslie Paul was so concerned about physical decline in the race that he feared there would soon be nothing left worth saving for the future cooperative commonwealth under socialism. Woodcraft seemed to offer an opportunity to strengthen the next generation to withstand ‘the evils of industrialism’. The culture of woodcraft is difficult to place politically, and there were many struggles over what should be the authoritative expression of the movement.91 The Woodcraft Folk had close links with the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society, though official recognition and support from the Co-operative Union nationally was slow in coming.92 The NEC of the Labour Party also remained suspicious that the organization had Communist links through its association with international and peace movements; the Labour Party had no direct connections with the Woodcraft Folk, though it did circularize local parties on their behalf.93 Despite these reservations, the Woodcraft Folk were generally regarded as the acceptable face of scouting on the Left. A reaction against the militarism and imperialist values of mainstream youth organizations was

89 See Paul’s volumes of (semi)autobiography, Living Hedge (1946) and Angry Young Man (1951). 90 Paul, Folk Trail, 240. 91 See Brian Morris, ‘Ernest Thompson Seton and the Origins of the Woodcraft Movement’, Journal of Contemporary History, 5/2 (1970), 183–94; and David Prynn, ‘The Woodcraft Folk and the Labour Movement 1925–70’, Journal of Contemporary History, 18 (1983), 79–95. 92 Labour Organiser, December 1934; Paul, Folk Trail, 16. 93 NMLH, LP/JSM/SU/20–2.

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implicit in the Woodcraft Folk and in its even more ambiguous parent organization, the Kibbo Kift, both of which had grown out of, and away from Baden-Powell’s scout movement. Part of the impetus behind socialist youth organizations at the time was an attempt to counter the influence of other groups which were successfully exploiting the evident enthusiasm amongst children and young adults for outdoor recreation and group activities. Concern about general political apathy amongst the young placed a premium on new efforts to package political affiliation in more attractive ways, particularly in the light of the popularity of rightwing youth organizations in Italy and Germany.94 There were laments that Labour had gone for too long without ‘its Baden-Powell’: as well as being a political movement, Labour should aspire to be ‘a great idealistic Movement, providing recreation and health-giving pleasure’.95 In this context, the Woodcraft Folk could be welcomed as offering a colourful appeal to children through ‘simple but picturesque ceremonies and ritual, and tribal training’.96 For all its ambiguities, the Woodcraft movement sited itself under the umbrella of the political Left. Its version of ‘clause four’ was clause three of the Woodcraft Charter, where the elfins and pioneers committed themselves to common ownership of the means of production, common use of all things for the general good, and a turning from private greed to common fellowship.97 Ruralism was integral to this philosophy, and its links to political ideology were made explicit. The educational programme of the Folk was to instruct children in ‘world history’, teaching them a version of the past with the working-class heroes put back in. But the corrective offered by Folk activities was not confined to such obvious lessons. The tribal concept was itself an education. Leslie Paul believed that it was impossible to teach children the importance of cooperation through lectures on civics and the achievements of workers’ organizations; through recreating the experience of ‘the primitive tribe’, on the other hand, cooperation impressed itself upon the child ‘as a vital creed’.98 Here was a definite expression of the idea that the countryside and democratic politics were organically linked. The junior branch of the League

94 The 1934 Pageant of Labour was one such attempt to reach the young through spectacle, music, and dance (MRC, TUC, MSS.292/1.91/45). On connections between ruralism and the extreme Right, see Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil (Abbotsbrook, 1985), and Ecology in the Twentieth Century. A History (New Haven and London, 1989). 95 96 36th Conference, 1936, 245. Labour Organiser, March 1937. 97 98 Paul, Folk Trail, 19, 31, 52. Ibid. 45.

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of Youth, the Red Falcons, also combined a telling mixture of folk dancing, nature study, and lectures on camp life, alongside physical drill and education on socialist subjects. One of the ‘laws’ of the Red Falcons was that a member should be a ‘friend of nature’.99 IMAGES OF THE COUNTRYSIDE The image presented of the countryside was almost always that of a traditional world, scarcely touched by modernity. Indeed, where the modern world did impinge, it was seen as having a predominantly deleterious influence. For the Labour newspaper, the Daily Herald, the countryside was a picturesque entity to decorate back pages. In the 1930s, a series of photographs portrayed ancient crafts such as basket making, carried out by aged yokels. The same issues which recorded Labour’s attempts to campaign in the countryside and to launch agricultural policies addressing the many problems associated with the state of agriculture and rural life carried photographs celebrating another world altogether. Readers were treated to huge pictures of ‘quaint villages’, like Castle Combe and Little Milton, and were introduced to Stanton, in Gloucestershire, whose inhabitants lived in ‘picturesque stone houses with thatched roofs’.100 The summer of 1933, when Labour launched one of its major agricultural campaigns, was marked by the Daily Herald with images of the ‘English countryside at its best’: of cows grazing by a tranquil stream and horse teams on their way to the field, making ‘a delightful study of English rural life’.101 Even in the ‘Countryman’s Log’,102 the Herald ’s weekly country column, written by the Labour farmer John Morgan, under his pen name ‘John Sussex’, the countryside was largely non-politicized. There were occasional issues to be dealt with regarding the quality of housing and the economic difficulties facing farmers, but otherwise this was a countryside where people kept bees and made their own wine. The countryside came

99 Labour Organiser, September 1934. There were ‘Falcons’ in many countries, as part of international socialist youth movement. 100 E.g. Daily Herald, 24 and 26 July, 15 August 1933. The Daily Herald’s photographic archive, now at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, contains the fruits of numerous assignments intended to produce picturesque, and apparently uncritical images of rural life and agriculture. Cf. comments at the Agricultural Economics Society conference in 1934 complaining about the unrealistic illustrations of rural life published in the Daily Herald, JAE, 3/3 (December 1934), 172. 101 102 Ibid. 15 July 1933. Later known as ‘Countryside News’.

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3. Traditional images of the rural landscape, used to promote Labour’s agricultural programme in A Prosperous Countryside (1927). [By permission of the People’s History Museum and the Labour History Archive and Study Centre]

across as a romantic remnant of a former age, whose villagers were now faced by the encroachment of urban civilization on the ‘quiet, even tenor of their rustic ways’.103 The Daily Herald was largely a commercial enterprise by the 1930s, when this ruralism reached its apogee, and its use of popular imagery is perhaps unsurprising. But similar images of the countryside were also found in more straightforwardly political literature. When Labour published its pamphlet A Prosperous Countryside, setting out its agricultural policy in 1927, it incorporated border illustrations taken from the Pall Mall Magazine. The result was a beautiful and much praised publication, which appeared not to question the idyll summoned up by the conventional panorama of a gentle, rolling countryside, with villages nestling in folds between the hills, cattle grazing, and a solitary ploughman working with a plough team. 103

Daily Herald, 3 May 1938.

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Nor does this idyllic ruralism seem to have been the preserve merely of the urban movement. The National Union of Agricultural Workers generally endorsed, rather than questioned, a romantic vision of rural life. It was natural that the union’s imagery should be based on the occupation of most of its membership, namely agriculture, but the character of that imagery was not automatic. Instructive comparisons may be made with agricultural trade unions on the Continent, with which the English union came into contact through the International Landworkers’ Federation. The pastoral woodcuts which decorated the NUAW journal, the Land Worker, were very different in character from the cover designs of contemporary union journals abroad, especially from Germany and Austria in the 1920s, where the imagery of the industry was maintained, but interpreted in a far stronger, more consciously modern style. Part of this difference could be explained by national fashions in design, but there may also have been a difference in self-perception. The union in England and Wales seemed to become increasingly conscious of its special character as an organization of the countryside. In its early years, the union used the general motifs of trade unionism for its badges and banners, notably the clasped hands and images of unity common across the Labour movement. However, from around 1920, the imagery became more specific, and the union adopted the plough team as its main, and enduring, device. This was in marked contrast to the way in which agricultural unions elsewhere in Europe felt able to make use of imagery from other industries. There is no English counterpart, for example, to the distinctly unpastoral, German cartoon of a construction digger, labelled with the landworkers’ union badge and the legend ‘wage increases’, emptying out quantities of coins for a grateful crowd.104 Meanwhile the NUAW persisted in showing the worker in direct contact with the earth, concentrating on timeless images rendered in woodcuts for the cover illustrations to its journal, including a number of engravings by Clare Leighton, taken from her book on gardening, Four Hedges.105 It is interesting that an agricultural union should feel so at home in a mode more often associated with the nostalgia of the urban nation. One explanation may be that we are still looking at a townsman’s vision of the 104 Deutscher Landarbeiter-Verband, Die Arbeiter in Feld und Wald und ihr Verband (Berlin, 1929), 41. 105 Clare Leighton, Four Hedges. A Gardener’s Chronicle (1935). Leighton (1898–1989) had left-wing sympathies, and lived for many years with the progressive journalist, Noel Brailsford. Much of her work in Britain, and later in the United States, presented images of workers on the land.

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country, imposed on a rural audience: the editor of Land Worker, H. B. Pointing, was not a farm worker himself but a journalist and one of the first residents of Welwyn Garden City. However, the obvious conclusion may be that an idyll with such strong appeal to urban psychology also had powerful attractions for the rural community itself. A general acceptance of idyllic views of the countryside and village life posed potential problems for Labour. Much of its political rhetoric about the state of agriculture and the condition of the rural working class focused on the ‘scandals’ of the contemporary countryside which lurked behind such popular images. George Lansbury proposed to improve agricultural labourers’ cottages off the face of the earth, and rebuild planned villages, though at the same time he was anxious that no one should suppose that he was trying ‘to destroy the beauty of rural England’.106 A poem in the agricultural workers’ union journal also urged the demolition of wretched cottages That are fair and picturesque without But fever dens within.107

Country cottages, the union observed, were ‘picturesque enough to look at, and when transferred to canvas form quite a lovely picture’, but their loveliness was not quite so obvious for the labourer and his wife who had to live there: this picture of ‘old England’ had no rightful claim to stand as part of the national heritage, at the expense of those who had to live in such insanitary and unhealthy accommodation.108 John Dugdale complained in a Labour Party pamphlet in 1933 about the ‘many “quaint little villages” that Americans love to come and see’, and which were ‘a disgrace to any civilised community’.109 Edwin Gooch, president of the NUAW, concurred: he wished that the American tourists would take the landworkers’ cottages back with them, along with the other bits of the old country which they bought up.110 There was also a common idealization of agricultural work itself. Joseph Duncan was one of very few leading figures on the Left who was willing to see a decline in agricultural employment, stressing that there was ‘no virtue in work on the land any more than in work in the pit or in 106

107 Lansbury, My England, 27, 92. Labourer, March 1914. Ibid. January 1916. 109 John Dugdale, A New Deal for the Farm Worker (LP, 1933), 5. 110 NUAW 1930 conference, MERL, NUAW, BVI/5. This came against a background of several high-profile cases of buildings being bought by wealthy Americans to be taken down and reconstructed in the United States. 108

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the factory’.111 He felt this needed saying, having observed ‘a sentimental attitude toward farm work which we do not find towards any other form of employment’.112 He worried that this stood in the way of making policy for the industry’s future development. ‘If the Labour Party wants an agricultural policy,’ he warned, ‘it will have to shed the illusion that agriculture and arcady are synonymous.’113 It certainly seemed at times as if the ideal future for rural Britain would be for it to resemble romantic stylizations of country life. Thus when F. E. Green enthused about rural workers on strike in Helions Bumpstead in 1914, he saw them as an illustration come to life: ‘this motley, bucolic crowd singing songs and lifting hayrakes and forks high aloft like some decorative panel of Walter Crane’s.’114 Unsurprisingly, there was little of this particular brand of romanticism amongst agricultural workers themselves. The poetry emanating from the agricultural trade unions offered ironic versions of pastoral. The farm labourer lived his whole life surrounded by the beauties of nature, yet his hard toil prevented him from appreciating them; it was difficult to take delight in picturesque clouds when each shower of rain only served to expose the inadequacy of one’s footwear. Only by a reduction in hours, might the labourer be in a position to ‘by sweet leisure know | Of all the artistry of God.’115 Union officials who came from outside agriculture could afford a less ambiguous reaction to the beauty of their rural surroundings. Edwin Gooch told the House of Commons in 1945: I live in the country. I am one of those men who can see beauty in a country lane in December. I love works of art, but to me there is nothing so beautiful as the natural art of the countryside. Townsmen’s views of the country are entirely different. They see the mud and the poor roads and houses.116

Here it was the townsman who was distracted by the messy facts of rural life, and the countryman who could see beyond them, to appreciate the beauty of his surroundings. Whilst the Labour movement might take issue with some aspects of the rural idyll, the inherent cultural value of the countryside was rarely questioned, either aesthetically or morally. If there were rural-sceptics on the 111 113 114 115 116

112 Forward, 21 March 1931. Ibid. 15 November 1930. Joseph Duncan to G. D. H. Cole, 4 September 1919, NLS, Duncan papers. F. E. Green, History of the English Agricultural Labourer 1870– 1920 (1920), 217. MERL, NUAW, BIX/11, 1917. HCDeb, 417, col. 1557, 20 December 1945.

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Left, who doubted the potential of the rural environment and folk culture to improve the quality of life of the individual or of society as a whole, their alternative vision has been overwhelmed by the voices of the enthusiasts. Some saw ruralism as socialist in its implications; for others, it was a vital, if essentially non-political complement to socialism. Indeed, perhaps the greatest testimony to Labour’s belief in the value of things rural was a willingness to place the interests of the countryside beyond politics, whether in a ‘national’ policy for agriculture, or a common front on preservationist issues. The challenge which faced the Labour movement between the wars was to build support in a rural environment which so many of its members valued and often idealized, but which seemed to belong in practical and political terms to its opponents.


II THE RURAL L ABOUR MOVEMENT The divorce of town and country is coming to an end . . . As a result of this, a Party like the Labour Party, whatever may have been its town origins, will not be shut out from the countryside. R. B. Walker, Speed the Plough, 1924


4 Campaigning in the Countryside [T]he scenery was so beautiful it really seemed a shame to shout at it. Dora Seed, campaigning in the Skipton constituency, 19311

PIONEERS Since the late nineteenth century, various groups on the political Left had sent propagandists into the countryside to shout their message at an often indifferent audience. The most striking manifestations of this were the propaganda vans touring the villages, coming along the country lanes in a ‘gaily-coloured stream’, the colours of the vehicles denoting the cause which each represented: red for land restoration, yellow for land nationalization (as in Richard Whiteing’s 1903 novel, The Yellow Van).2 The political activity often took on a missionary quality, so characteristic of that generation of land reformers and socialists. Before the First World War, ILP cycle scouts aimed to bring socialism to everyone accessible by bicycle, and ‘carried the message’ to outlying districts: in systematic manner, by mapping a campaign of villages to visit, and also in more haphazard ways, as members took political literature with them on their recreational cycling trips.3 The ILP helped the agricultural union in Norfolk, and on one occasion 150 cyclists poured out of Norwich to spread the word.4 ‘Get your bikes ready boys and girls’ was the injunction to ILP Scouts in Ipswich, ‘our fellow workers of the fields are calling.’5 Philip Snowden recalled this early culture of rural propaganda within the ILP: 1 2 3 4 5

Labour Organiser, September 1931. L. Marion Springhall, Labouring Life in Norfolk Villages (1936), 111. Labour Leader, 22 May and 12 June 1913. Reg Groves, Sharpen the Sickle! The History of the Farm Workers’ Union (1949), 129. Suffolk RO, Robert Ratcliffe papers, S2/6/9.4, 1909 Annual Report of Ipswich ILP.

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The Rural Labour Movement

Vocal unions were formed which accompanied cycling corps into the country at week-ends, and audiences were gathered on village greens by the singing of the choirs; then short and simple addresses on Socialism were given. On their country jaunts the cyclists distributed leaflets and pasted slips on gates, and sometimes stuck them on cows, bearing such slogans as ‘Socialism the Hope of the World’, ‘Workers of the World Unite.’6

Other pioneers in rural campaigning were motivated by more defensive objectives. When the union agitator Tom Mann launched a campaign amongst agricultural labourers in Lincolnshire in 1891, it was with the hope of preventing an influx of blacklegs into the ports of Grimsby and Hull, rather than in the interests of agricultural trade unionism itself. The need to neutralize the danger of strike breaking was an important impetus behind early campaigns to rouse the rural worker to political consciousness. Such rural campaigning entered a new phase and acquired enhanced significance in the context of Labour’s electoral analysis about the importance of winning rural seats, and concentrated campaigning in the countryside was largely a development of the interwar period. It took place on two levels. An ongoing, informal effort by groups and individuals at a local level drew on, and often made conscious reference to, earlier traditions and was marked by similar combinations of enthusiasm and amateurism. However, one of the features of the 1920s and 1930s was the attempt to set this activity in a national framework, and encourage more systematic programmes of propaganda. ELECTION CAMPAIGNS Around 1918, some rural constituencies began to experience Labour propaganda for the first time in the context of election campaigns. Although it was difficult to envisage winning many such seats in the immediate future, it seemed important for Labour to establish a presence in the countryside and contest elections there: the showing in these contests added up to a stronger total of votes across the country as a whole, and was thought to influence public attitudes towards Labour, despite having no direct consequences for the make-up of the House of Commons.7 New 6 Philip Snowden, An Autobiography (1934), i. 71. On the cow as billboard, see Dennis Pye, Fellowship is Life. The National Clarion Cycling Club 1895–1995 (Bolton, 1995), 30. 7 25th Conference, 1925, 6.

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initiatives were devised to enable fledgling parties to stage election campaigns, with the establishment of a by-election fund in 1925, and a scheme to insure against the loss of electoral deposits from January 1933. Participation in elections provided a valuable education for local organizations. The experience of the campaign, and the voluntary resources from which a constituency could expect to benefit during by-elections in particular, represented a level of propaganda beyond the scope of a local party’s normal activities. Propagandists and union organizers from surrounding areas, as well as a number of national speakers, would flock to bolster, and often run a by-election campaign. Whilst this concentration of effort was common to by-elections in all types of constituency, the impact was especially significant in under-developed rural divisions. The Countess of Warwick was understandably disappointed when the by-election which she was contesting for Labour in Warwick and Leamington merged into the 1923 general election; the additional helpers, on whom she had been counting, were scattered to their own constituencies, exposing her division’s ‘non-existent organisation’.8 Buckrose, in Yorkshire, was more fortunate when a by-election was called there in 1926. It was the first time that Labour had contested the seat, though an Independent Labour candidate stood there in 1918. Buckrose was described as having ‘no foundation’ for organization, with scarcely a trade unionist in the whole constituency, but during the 1926 by-election it had the benefit of party workers from Scarborough, Leeds, Hull, and York, as well as four full-time agents who were drafted in to manage the campaign. Despite all this assistance, the Labour candidate still came third in the poll and lost his deposit.9 Where Labour’s prospects were especially hopeless, the party would not even attempt to contest a by-election, and during general elections rural constituencies were likely to be left entirely to their own devices. Nonetheless, some of Labour’s earliest concerted attempts to establish itself in rural Britain were associated with election campaigns. It was in this context too that the Labour movement as a whole first conceded some responsibility for activity in the rural areas. Arthur Henderson recognized that a large number of rural and semi-rural constituencies ‘could only be fought under the auspices of the Labour Movement itself ’.10 A fund was set up at the Labour Party conference in 1923 for the purpose of contesting rural divisions in a general election, and a whip-round 8 9

Frances Evelyn Greville, Life’s Ebb and Flow (1929), 271. 10 NEC, 28 April 1926 and 23 June 1926. 24th Conference, 1924, 184.

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amongst the delegates immediately raised over £900 in cash and promises.11 When it became obvious that a general election was close at hand, the appeal was widened, and the fund eventually reached a total of £23,565, £10,000 of which came from the National Union of Railwaymen.12 What had begun as a fund to support rural candidates was subsumed into a general fund from which over twice as much was spent on fighting urban constituencies as on rural seats, though individual rural divisions did receive higher grants on average: 57 rural constituencies were given a total of £5,175, whilst £11,600 was divided amongst 158 urban constituencies.13 Arthur Henderson later apologized that the NEC had not been able to restrict the fruits of the appeal to rural constituencies ‘when they saw the Election so near’.14 The Labour Party began to acknowledge the limitations of this sort of assistance. In a report of January 1925, Head Office signalled a new approach, concluding that the most effective way to assist the county divisions was ‘not by grants only when an election comes, but by assisting in the development of organisation and propaganda between elections’.15 Many constituencies required special campaigns, not only to contest elections, but to provide the very conditions under which a contest was possible: a minimum level of organization and preparatory propaganda. There had already been a few experiments at such propaganda. In October 1923, the national party carried out a short rural campaign of about twenty meetings in Sudbury and Woodbridge, assisted by MPs and local speakers, with two cars loaned for the enterprise.16 More significantly, special attention for rural areas was seen as an important responsibility for the national propagandists whose salaries were paid from central funds. Edward Gill’s first duties as national propagandist in 1921 involved a week’s work in Maldon, followed by campaigns in East Dorset, South Dorset, and Petersfield, all of which were regarded by Labour as rural divisions.17 In utilizing the services of the party’s national propagandists, the Executive decided that priority should be given to the needs of ‘out-lying county constituencies, where the distances and 11

12 23rd Conference, 1923, 205. 24th Conference, 1924, 74. NEC, memo, ‘Special Election Fund’ (September 1924). See Ross McKibbin’s discussion of the fund, and of Henderson’s reluctance to reveal how the money was raised and spent, The Evolution of the Labour Party 1910–1924 (Oxford, 1974), 159 – 61. 14 24th Conference, 1924, 184. 15 NEC, Head Office Report to Finance Committee, January 1925. 16 NEC, ‘Report on Work of Propagandists’, 30 October 1923. 17 NEC, Org. Sub-Comm., 1 December 1921. 13


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scattered character of the areas makes propaganda difficult for the local parties’.18 The scheme of national propagandists was expanded in 1922, with two further appointments, and when a vacancy arose, Head Office decided to appoint someone for special work in the rural constituencies. The person chosen was F. J. Hopkins, a former Primitive Methodist minister with a special interest in ‘rural life and conditions’.19 Hopkins was soon reported to be doing ‘splendid’ work in the notoriously difficult South-West region, and was ‘full of enthusiasm for the vast unbroken area which he is tackling’, where ‘new ground [was] being broken every week’.20 Hopkins was not the only member of staff with a special interest in rural areas. William Holmes, one of the two national organizers appointed in 1913, worked on a farm as a boy, and his father had been involved in the agricultural trade unions of the late nineteenth century. Holmes’ appointment raised hopes of closer cooperation between the Labour Party and agricultural trade unionism.21 In 1916, he addressed a series of NALRWU meetings in his capacity as party organizer,22 and went on to become president of the NUAW in 1924, resigning his position with the Labour Party in 1928 to take over as the NUAW’s general secretary. Another of the national party organizers, Herbert Drinkwater, who was appointed parttime in 1918, and became full-time the following year,23 made no secret of his own rural enthusiasms. Through the journal The Labour Organiser, which he founded and edited, Drinkwater gave prominent attention to Labour’s activities in rural Britain, and to the need for the whole Labour movement to become involved in the effort to win rural seats. These appointments, and schemes to support local party activity, were part of a response to the challenges of taking Labour’s message into the countryside in the early 1920s. The task was perceived as increasingly urgent. In the year following the 1924 general election, emphasis was given to focusing propaganda on the rural and county divisions, and

18

Ibid. 2 May 1922, propaganda report by Egerton Wake. NEC, Special Report on Organisation Department, 26 February 1924. Hopkins (d. 1934), who came from Dorset, left the ministry to devote himself to political work. In 1928, he took over from William Holmes as the Labour Party’s district organizer for the Eastern Counties. He stood as Labour candidate for East Dorset (1922 and 1923), Penryn and Falmouth (1924 and 1929), and St Ives (1928 by-election). 20 21 NEC, Report on Propagandists, 16 July 1924. The Labourer, July 1915. 22 National Agent’s Report, 16th Conference, 1917, 30. 23 NEC (with Parliamentary Party), 12 February 1918, and Joint Organisation and Finance Sub-Committee, 7 October 1919. 19

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‘nearly 200’ such constituencies received a week’s attention each from one of the national propagandists.24 But this approach still fell short of the concentrated effort which some were demanding.25 NATIONAL CAMPAIGNS With the growing emphasis on the electoral significance of rural seats, the Labour movement started to foster more coordinated programmes of propaganda in the countryside. In early 1924, the ILP began planning a campaign to popularize its agricultural programme. By the time it was launched in January 1925, the campaign was being referred to as the ‘Movement for the Backward Areas’, and the ILP was ambitious about what it might achieve: an editorial in the New Leader fantasized about winning the countryside for socialism within five years.26 P. F. Pollard, veteran of the Ludlow by-election, and R. B. Walker, from the agricultural workers’ union, were amongst those involved in developing the scheme. The budget rose from £150 to £500, with some suggestion that it should be raised further, and a campaign committee planned ways to put the ILP’s message across, with lantern slides, leaflets, pamphlets, cartoons, illustrated charts, and speakers including ‘ILP farmers’.27 The rural campaign ran for three months, beginning with a launch in London on 18 January. One hundred and fifty speaker meetings were organized as MPs toured the rural constituencies, and seven divisions were selected for more concentrated propaganda, with the services of a ‘missioner’ for a week, or in most cases a fortnight.28 What came of all this is less clear. The campaign attracted little publicity, and when the Labour Party began its own rural drives the following year, there was no reference made to the ILP’s initiative. While the ILP was planning its campaign in 1924, the TUC was also preparing to campaign in rural Britain. There had been an earlier attempt 24

25th Conference, 1925, 24. E.g. resolutions to 1924 Labour Party Conference, remitted to Org. Sub-Comm., 21 May 1925, NEC. 26 New Leader, 28 November 1924. The ILP found it necessary to clarify what it meant by a ‘backward area’ in this context: ‘a country area, hitherto mainly unworked, having at least one established branch of the Party in its proximity to serve as a base of operations. Preference will be given to constituencies with a reasonable chance of electoral success’ (New Leader, 19 December 1924). 27 ILP, National Administrative Council minutes, 17–18 May 1924. 28 Ibid. 31 January–1 February 1925. 25


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to encourage trade union membership in the countryside in 1917, when the TUC called for donations to support efforts to organize the agricultural workforce. The Railway Clerks and the Boot and Shoe Operatives were prominent promoters of the case: T. F. Richards of the Boot and Shoe Operatives spoke of the ‘shame’ of having ‘the oldest and the largest industry in the country unorganised’, and pledged that his organization would give £50 a year to the cause, if nineteen other unions would do likewise.29 Far from generating an annual income of £1000, however, the resulting circular from the TUC solicited a collection of just £577, of which £100 was a grant from the Parliamentary Committee.30 This money was handed over to the Agricultural Labourers’ Union. Returning to the subject in 1924, the Congress voted that the General Council should spend £1000 on an organizing campaign to improve the conditions of agricultural workers.31 This sum was augmented by trade union donations of £2201, including £500 from the Railway Clerks’ Association—a generosity prompted, according to its secretary, A. G. Walkden, because the organization felt the competition of underpaid farm workers very keenly.32 Even with funding in place, there were disagreements over how the money should be used. The NUAW was initially reluctant to take part at all, arguing that the TUC would do better to make a direct grant to union funds, and citing as a precedent the ‘sound investment’ of a grant from the TUC in 1913, which had enabled the union to place more organizers in the field.33 Further problems arose through the rivalry between the two unions responsible for organizing agricultural workers. Agreements were brokered on a county-by-county basis over whether the NUAW or the Workers’ Union should benefit from new recruitment in any given area, but the NUAW threatened to 29 Proceedings of the 49th Annual TUC (1917), 273–4. This followed an unsuccessful attempt by Ernest Bevin at the Labour Party conference in January to impose a levy on affiliated unions to fund a comprehensive scheme of industrial organization of rural workers (16th Conference, 1917, 119). 30 The fund was made up of 50 separate donations, a number of them from various regional branches of the Typographical Association. Four unions, namely, the Railway Clerks, the Cotton Spinners, the Amalgamated Weavers’ Association, and the NUR, donated £50 each. Proceedings of the 50th Annual TUC (1918), 106. 31 Proceedings of the 56th Annual TUC (1924), 431. 32 MRC, TUC, MSS.292.53.1/5, GC Organisation Committee, 17 February 1926. Forty-five unions had contributed to the fund by September 1925. After the RCA’s, the next largest donations of £50 each came from the MFGB, TGWU, and the Boot and Shoe Operatives (Proceedings of the 57th Annual TUC (1925), 54). 33 MRC, TUC, MSS.292.53.1/4, R. B. Walker to Walter Citrine, 6 February 1925; deputation to Organisation Committee, TUC GC, 2 February 1925.

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withdraw from the campaign in early 1926, because it believed that the Workers’ Union was receiving preferential treatment.34 After a hiatus, while the General Council struggled to adjudicate on the two unions’ claims for the remaining rural counties, campaigning resumed in the summer of 1926. The TUC’s campaign was organized around local centres, each of which set up a committee to arrange village meetings, distribute propaganda, advertise in the local press, produce its own publicity material, and meet as much of the cost as possible. Demonstrations were held in local market towns, typically featuring an afternoon procession with bands and banners, followed by a speaker meeting. In some areas, district conferences were also arranged for representatives of the local trade unions.35 The campaign was launched during the summer of 1925, and covered ten areas in the first instance: Lincolnshire, Dorset, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Cornwall, Anglesey, Hereford, Cheshire, and Surrey.36 Agricultural workers and their wives were urged to ‘Come in crowds and hear the truth about the Trade Union Movement’, and the subjects of ‘Organisation and its Power’ and ‘Why Land Workers must unite’ were addressed at mass meetings, open-air meetings, and meetings with tea at two shillings.37 By the time the special funds were exhausted in September 1926, it was estimated that around 6000 new members had been enrolled in the agricultural unions.38 The TUC emphasized that this was an ‘industrial’ campaign, not a political one. Even though political speakers from outside agriculture were used to draw in large audiences for meetings, campaigners were warned not to confuse the audience by attempting to mix the subjects.39 A joint campaign with the Labour Party had been considered at one point, but the idea was abandoned, partly through concerns that the trade union message could be lost in a political appeal to a broader social constituency: ‘not only to the agricultural workers, but to farmers, residential people and others’.40 There was also the important consideration

34 MRC, TUC, MSS.292.53.1/4, memo, ‘The Two-Union Problem’, 16 March 1925; R. B. Walker to Walter Citrine, 12 February 1926; interview between GC of TUC and EC of NUAW, 10 March 1926. 35 MRC, TUC, MSS.292.53.1/4, memo from J. R. Clynes, 23 April 1925. 36 Ibid. memo, 20 April 1925. 37 MRC, TUC, MSS.292.53.1/3, posters and handbills, July and August 1926. 38 Proceedings of the 59th Annual TUC (1927), GC report, 156. 39 MRC, TUC, MSS.292.53.1/4, memo on campaign, 1 April 1925. 40 MRC, TUC, MSS.292.53.1/5, TUC, GC, Organisation Committee, 6 February 1925.


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that the Labour Party was not prepared to put up £1000 to match the TUC’s own grant. THE L ABOUR PART Y ’S RURAL DRIVES Funding was one of the main problems restricting the Labour Party’s activities in rural constituencies. ‘The penetration of these divisions, the organisation of these scattered areas and the maintenance of propaganda, will be a costly undertaking,’ warned a Head Office report on the subject in January 1925.41 The ordinary resources of the general fund were judged inadequate to the task of extension and development, and therefore a ‘great and continuous national effort should be organised to provide the Party with the necessary funds to penetrate into these rural and isolated areas’.42 Fund-raising had to be the precursor to any rural campaign, establishing an important principle for Labour’s agricultural campaigns before the Second World War. Although it was often claimed that the campaigns were an extension of the party’s normal work, rather than a new departure, the NEC never envisaged that large-scale rural campaigning could be paid for out of the party’s general finances. There were two main phases of rural campaigning by the Labour Party: the first in the late 1920s, and the second in the period from 1933 to 1939. Between December 1926 and March 1928 the Labour Party conducted what was envisaged as ‘an intensive Agricultural Campaign, exceeding anything the Party has yet attempted in this direction’.43 It was the party’s first major propaganda exercise on a national scale. A large number of constituencies were targeted in a campaign based on a formula of ‘conferences and demonstrations’, at least 119 of which were held.44 The main focus was on publicizing the party’s new agricultural policy, ratified by Conference and the TUC in 1926, summarized in Labour’s

41

NEC, Head Office report to Org. Sub-Comm., 21 January 1925. NEC, Head Office report to Finance Committee, January 1925. 43 NEC, 23 June 1926. A total of 101 rural constituencies were visited in the campaign, with additional conferences in county boroughs and cities with agricultural hinterlands. 44 Lists of venues were printed in 27th and 28th Conference, 1927 and 1928, 17 and 21, respectively. George Dallas criticized this method of operation, which had been laid out in a memorandum by Egerton Wake (NEC, Org. Sub-Comm., 22 November 1926), describing it as ‘hopeless’: ‘a few spasmodic demonstrations . . . will never create enthusiasm or bring in money’ (Dallas to MacDonald, 9 December 1926, PRO 30/69/1171/I/ 312–13). 42

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Policy on Agriculture, and begetting campaign leaflets with titles such as ‘What the Farm Worker Wants’, ‘Labour demands the Land for the People’, and ‘The Farmers and the Labour Party’. In each locality, a central conference was arranged to expound and discuss the policy, followed by a demonstration, with speeches by Labour MPs. In addition to these conferences and demonstrations, which were held in large centres of population—and in some cases even in cities, like York and Leeds—there were attempts to bring the campaign directly to voters in the countryside, with canvassing, leaflet distribution, and meetings. Except in very remote parts, campaigning itself was not carried out by party staff, but was delegated to local party workers and trade unionists: part of the intention behind the campaign was to train and encourage party activists to ‘help themselves’.45 The annual report for 1928 described the campaign as ‘one of the most successful pieces of work ever undertaken by Headquarters’, and the NEC claimed that ‘the message of the Party was brought into actual touch with the countryside’.46 In private, the NEC was more circumspect. There had been a good deal of press coverage and the conferences were, on the whole, successful, but the demonstrations were not so well attended, ‘and in some areas were very disappointing indeed’.47 Despite efforts to define a comprehensive agricultural policy prior to launching the campaign, even Ramsay MacDonald felt ill-prepared to speak at meetings in the countryside. He was critical of the briefings he received, contrasting them unfavourably with the quantity, and quality, of information which the Liberal leader Lloyd George seemed to have at his disposal.48 The Liberal land campaign, launched in September 1925, was an obvious competitor with Labour’s rural efforts, and it was by no means clear that Labour had the radical edge in appealing to the rural voter.49 Labour’s 1926–8 campaign ran to a tight budget. No additional staff were appointed, and financial considerations restricted the scope for experimentation with propaganda methods. The loudspeaker vans which

45

46 NEC, Org. Sub-Comm., 22 November 1926. 28th Conference, 1928, 21. NEC, report on the agricultural campaign, 25 July 1927. 48 Ramsay MacDonald to George Dallas, 10 January 1927, PRO 30/69/1172/ I/438– 9. Also MacDonald to Egerton Wake, 10 January 1927, PRO 30/69/1172/ II/767–9. 49 Although Labour was envious of its rivals’ campaign organization, it may have overestimated the appeal of the Liberals’ rural rhetoric: see Michael Dawson, ‘The Liberal Land Policy, 1924–1929. Electoral Strategy and Internal Division’, Twentieth Century British History, 2/3 (1991), 272–90. 47


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were later to establish themselves as the most popular aspect of Labour rural campaigning were initially ruled out as too expensive to contemplate.50 George Dallas had to raise funds through a separate appeal to finance the acquisition of two horse-drawn vans in February 1927, to use for experimental tours: small donations came even from the mining villages, at the time normally the beneficiaries of Labour appeals, rather than contributors to them.51 For the most part, campaign costs were met by the local organizations involved. The services of visiting speakers were offered to constituencies without charge, but only where a division could meet local expenses and organize the conference and demonstration. These arrangements were based on the idea of giving help to those who could help themselves. The central cost of four months’ campaigning in 1927 came to under £500, some of which was re-couped from collections at meetings.52 At the 1927 party conference, there was much comment on how inexpensive the agricultural campaign had been, and what good value it represented: that there would be a greater return in votes for every pound invested in the countryside than from money spent on traditional Labour territory.53 Moreover it seemed that the campaign might already be having a positive effect. At a by-election in the Liberal seat of Carmarthen in June 1928 Labour took an increased share of the vote, which George Dallas linked to the party’s recent efforts in the countryside. He thought it regrettable that the agricultural campaign was at that point being shut down for lack of money, ‘as we had reached a point when we were getting the farming people really interested’.54 Despite such encouraging signs, the enterprise was not repeated until 1931, when a further series of conferences and demonstrations was held, this time in support of the agricultural policy of a Labour government. The campaign was a conscious imitation of its predecessor in terms of organization, funded by a special appeal.55 By October 1931, conferences had been held in 42 towns.56 Once again the central cost was very low, the expenses for the conferences amounting to under £200.57 But agricultural campaigns, no matter how cheaply run, were an expense the party could not afford after the disastrous 1931 general election. Amongst other 50 51 52 53 54 55 57

NEC, Org. Sub-Comm., memo by Egerton Wake, 20 November 1926. Ibid. 21 February 1927, and NEC, 23 February 1927; 27th Conference, 1927, 180. NEC, report on agricultural campaign, 27 July 1927. 27th Conference, 1927, 180. Dallas to MacDonald, 25 July 1928, PRO 30/69/1173/270–1. 56 NEC, 25 November 1930. 31st Conference, 1931, 9–10. 32nd Conference, 1932, statement of accounts for 1931, 80.

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economies, the scheme of national propagandists, from which many rural areas had benefited, was also discontinued.58 Labour’s next experiment with a rural campaign came in 1933, focusing on seven divisions in the Eastern Counties, as a pilot scheme for a larger drive throughout rural Britain.59 The Daily Herald provided free leaflets, and the campaign received much assistance from the NUAW, in whose heartlands it was being run.60 Hailed as an ‘outstanding success’, this marked the start of a series of annual campaigns in the countryside.61 Whilst the campaigns of 1926 – 8 and 1931 had been fairly undiscriminating in their propaganda, covering areas with any agricultural element, largely irrespective of electoral prospects, those from 1933 onwards were designed with more precise goals in mind. Forty-three of the 101 constituencies which had been targeted in the 1926 – 8 campaign were not included in any rural campaign after 1931. Some of the later omissions were not rural divisions in any obvious sense, but constituencies with a relatively small agricultural element, such as Crewe, Bishop Auckland, the Wirral, and Macclesfield. Others were undoubtedly rural, but were hopeless causes for Labour: divisions where Conservative dominance appeared unshakeable, as in the Shropshire constituencies of Ludlow and Oswestry, and where Labour struggled even to save its deposit at elections, as in Rye, Buckrose, and North Cornwall. This more selective list of constituencies to include in rural campaigns emerged from discussions in the party’s Organisation Sub-Committee in May 1933. Barbara Ayrton-Gould,62 a member of the NEC and Labour candidate in the Cheshire constituency of Northwich, suggested that they should identify rural divisions where electoral success was within reach, and which might repay some concentrated effort.63 A list was presented to the Agricultural Campaign Committee in November, grading 81 constituencies into three divisions; those in the first group (39 in all) were to be given priority as ‘the most promising generally for the purpose of the 58

Ibid. 29. The constituencies involved were Brigg, Gainsborough, Grantham, Isle of Ely, King’s Lynn, South Norfolk, and South-West Norfolk. 60 NEC, Research and Publicity Committee, 16 June 1933. The Daily Herald also promised publicity in the paper, though this only amounted to a mention in the editorial column and half a dozen reports. 61 33rd Conference, 1933, 27. 62 Ayrton-Gould was publicity manager for the Daily Herald 1919 –21, and a member of Labour’s NEC from 1929, going on to chair it 1939–40. After standing unsuccessfully in a number of seats, she was elected to parliament for Hendon North in 1945. 63 NEC, Org. Sub-Comm., 16 May 1933. 59


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Campaign and offering the greatest electoral possibilities’.64 Several of those ranked in this ‘first division’ had not featured in earlier rural campaigns.65 Armed with a more tactical approach to rural campaigning, the party began a series of annual drives on the countryside. Except for a mammoth effort in 1938, these campaigns generally targeted a relatively small number of constituencies: Year 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939

Numbers of constituencies 7 21 26 30 37 86 17

Some divisions were visited several years running: fifteen constituencies were selected to participate in at least four out of the six campaigns between 1934 and 1939.66 Of the 116 constituencies visited in the campaigns from 1933 to 1939, 46 (many of them in Scotland) were included only in the more expansive programme of 1938, and most of the others featured only in one or two drives (see Appendix B). So, although a considerable number of constituencies were defined as rural and proposed as possible participants for the campaigns, concentrated effort was lavished on only a few of these. The general form of campaigning in the 1930s was once again on the ‘conferences and demonstrations’ model. These events functioned as a focus around which other activities took place to encourage and educate local organizations. The conferences were aimed mainly at the existing faithful, as an opportunity to discuss agricultural policy and approaches to organizing the rural areas. Outside this framework, as in earlier campaigns, the central committee tended to devolve much of the primary 64

NEC, Agricultural Campaign Committee, 21 November 1933. Including three of the Norfolk constituencies, Belper, Faversham, Gravesend, Stafford, Wrekin, Dumbartonshire, and Moray and Nairn. 66 The number of campaigns is given in parentheses: Brigg (5), South Norfolk (5), South-West Norfolk (5), Rutland and Stamford (5), Wellingborough (5), Brecon and Radnor (4, plus offer of campaign in 1937), Cambridgeshire (4), Frome (4), Holland with Boston (4), King’s Lynn (4), Louth (4), Maldon (4), Newark (4), Penryn and Falmouth (4), Skipton (4). Eight of these constituencies had already returned Labour MPs by 1934 (Brigg, South Norfolk, South-West Norfolk, Wellingborough, Brecon and Radnor, Frome, Holland with Boston, and Maldon). 65

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propaganda work. In 1935, they gave a grant of £10 towards propaganda in the Western Isles, rather than making any arrangements to include this remote and scattered constituency in the main campaign.67 From 1934 onwards, the committee also made grants towards campaigns organized by the Clarion Youth movement, and the two organizations often worked in close cooperation.68 Apart from such specific delegation, all campaigning was fundamentally dependent on support from local Labour parties, whether financial or in terms of personnel. The national committee also sought to work closely with trade unions in the countryside, though, as we have seen, the TUC chose to go ahead with its own unilateral campaign in 1925, and trade unions remained suspicious about the advantages to be gained from predominantly political campaigns.69 Campaigning in each division took place over the course of a week or a fortnight, during which time the propagandists travelled as widely as possible. On average, around 25 meetings were held in each constituency, though this number could rise as high as 70.70 Five or six villages might be visited in a single day, followed by a couple of evening rallies held in the larger centres.71 Hospitality for the speakers and the van driver was provided by local stalwarts, unless the campaigners were Clarionettes, who chose to camp out. The cost to central campaign funds was thus limited in most cases to providing leaflets and publicity, and subsidizing speakers and propagandists. In 1933 and 1934, the Daily Herald relieved the party of some of its expenses by providing free stocks of campaign literature.72 Once motor vans with loudspeakers were introduced, costs increased substantially, but otherwise a summer’s campaigning could be organized relatively cheaply: in the early 1930s, central expenditure amounted to around £200 for each campaign.73 Donations to the campaign fund ranged from individual gifts of £10, to contributions from the unions, amongst 67 NEC, Agricultural Campaign Committee, 11 December 1935. Western Isles was won for Labour at the 1935 general election. 68 See below. 69 MERL, NUAW/BII/5, Finance and General Purposes Sub-Committee, 18 July 1935. 70 Figures for some of the campaigns can be found in the NEC’s Agricultural Campaign Committee minutes, 16 June 1936 and 9 February 1938 (NEC); Labour Organiser, July 1936 (North Buckinghamshire); Somerset RO, A/AAW, 28, General Committee, 11 September 1937, and Agent’s Report, 22 January 1939 (Frome); Country Standard, September 1938 (Mid-Bedfordshire); and South West Suffolk Echo, 1 June 1935 (Sudbury). 71 Labour Campaigner, July 1935, in papers of Brecon and Radnor DLP, NLW. 72 NEC, Research and Publicity Committee, 16 June 1933; Agricultural Campaign Committee, 21 November 1933. 73 32nd Conference, 1932, 80; NEC, Agricultural Campaign Committee, 11 December 1935.


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4. An open air meeting in the countryside. Mural by John Hastings at Buscot Park (1930s). [By permission of the estate of the artist and the Faringdon Collection Trust]

which the NUR was by far the most generous.74 One of the most notable individual contributors was Gavin Henderson, second Baron Faringdon, who made annual donations to the rural campaigns from 1936, as well as helping to fund Clarion activities and offering the use of his home, Buscot Park in Oxfordshire, for conferences and summer schools.75 Stafford Cripps also sent donations (anonymously) to campaign funds.76 74

Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 128/168. Alexander Gavin Henderson (1902–77), educated at Eton College, McGill University in Canada, and Christ Church, Oxford. He succeeded to the title in 1934. 76 Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 130/168. 75

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The determining factor in all Labour’s rural campaigning was not what needed to be done, but rather what the party could afford. The campaigns in 1928 and 1931 ran until funds were exhausted; from 1933, campaigns were tailored in advance according to the funds available. The most extreme illustration of this came in 1939, when sweeping cuts in the party’s expenditure took a heavy toll on the agricultural campaign. The campaign committee lost seven-eighths of the grant it had been expecting, and that summer’s rural drive was scaled down dramatically in consequence; only 17 of the planned 62 divisional campaigns took place. Of the overall saving of £3050 needed to reduce the party’s deficit, £1750 was taken from a single source: the rural campaign.77 On one level, this episode is a comment on the party’s priorities: campaigning in rural seats was rather easily sacrificed. But it should also be viewed in the context of Labour’s previous work in the countryside. Despite the emphasis on the importance of capturing rural seats to ensure a Labour majority government, the rural campaigns were always an add-on to general party activity. The fact that the 1939 campaign was going to be financed out of general funds at all was merely a reflection of the difficulties of raising money in the appeal-fatigue of the late 1930s, when international causes had exhausted donors’ generosity at the expense of the domestic.78 In 1937, the agricultural campaign committee was reconstituted as a subcommittee of the General Campaign Committee, though the NEC remained reluctant to admit that staff and services which had arisen as a result of special appeals should become a charge on normal party funds.79 The subcommittee made representations that the 1939 campaign should be charged to the General Election Fund as important preparatory work for the next election, but the much-diminished rural campaign went ahead with only a small contribution from Head Office, and largely on the traditional basis of a special appeal, in which the donations of a single individual—Lord Faringdon—played a significant part.80

77

NEC, memo on financial position of the party, [April 1939]. NEC, financial review, January 1938. NEC, general campaign propaganda memo, n.d. (?27 October 1937); NEC, memo on financial position of the party, [April 1939]. 80 NEC, Agricultural Campaign Sub-Committee, 9 November 1938 and 29 June 1939; 39th Conference, 1940, 58. In 1939, Faringdon provided £108 out of the Agricultural Campaign’s total budget of £520. 78 79


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THE CAMPAIGNS AT LOCAL LEVEL The financial constraints on Labour’s campaigns limited not only the number of constituencies which could be targeted in any one year, but also the form of help which they were offered. It is clear that the national party relied on there being a basic degree of organization in at least part of a constituency, so that it could delegate most of the work to local activists. In advance of the 1937 campaign, for example, the organizer for the Eastern Counties was deputed to visit Gainsborough, after the campaign committee raised doubts about whether ‘machinery could be evolved to justify the inclusion of that Division in the Campaign’.81 Organization on the ground was also necessary to convert initial enthusiasm into the longer term commitment of party membership. Subsequent canvassing was particularly important given the tendency for enrolment to take place after a campaign had ended. Many agricultural workers, and even small tradesmen in the countryside, would take away a leaflet and become members discreetly at a later date, rather than give their names at a meeting or sign up on the spot. There were concerns that Head Office was not providing more assistance for this vital work of transforming propaganda into organization. More support was made available to constituencies involved in the campaigns in the later 1930s, and from 1937 the campaign employed a flying organizer, to help those divisions where arrangements would have placed too great a strain on local officials.82 These central efforts to take active charge of propaganda at the local level came at a heavy cost, necessitating a campaign budget running into four figures, rather than the three-figure budgets typical of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The 1938 effort cost over £2500, and in 1939 the committee was hoping to raise £5000, to include finance for new vans.83 These good intentions had to overcome other significant reservations about the extent to which responsibility should be removed from local parties. It is interesting to note that when the Agricultural Campaign Committee had an abnormally swollen budget in 1938, it preferred to use this for extending the campaign to include more constituencies, rather than lavishing greater attention on a few.

81 NEC, Agricultural Campaign Committee, 19 April 1937. Presumably these doubts were not allayed: Gainsborough was not included in the campaign. 82 83 37th Conference, 1937, 33. Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 128/168.

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As is evident from a description of how the rural drives were organized, considerable responsibility had to be assumed by local parties, even for campaigns held under national auspices. Selected divisional parties were invited to participate, subject to their agreeing to contribute towards expenses and organize meetings. Nothing so irritated Head Office as squandering national speakers on meetings which were poorly organized, poorly advertised and, in consequence, poorly attended. Some local parties had to decline invitations to take part in the campaigns because they could not fulfil their side of the arrangements. Bedford, Belper, and Stafford were amongst the divisions approached for the 1934 drive, but decided that it would not be worth their while to participate.84 In 1937, the Brecon and Radnor DLP was unable to accept an offer from Head Office for inclusion in a campaign, because of the parlous state of divisional finances.85 The contributions required of local parties were relatively small, but divisional finances often ran on a tight margin. West Derbyshire agreed to pay up to £3 in expenses for the 1938 campaign; Frome was prepared to allocate £5 10s. for a fortnight’s activity in September 1937, and in the event managed to re-coup £5 from collections and the sale of literature.86 Most speaker meetings in the countryside seem to have at least covered costs through the collections taken, and some showed net profits; it was canvassing, leaflet distribution, and over-ambitious social events, like fêtes, which proved the major drain on party funds. To take responsibility for arrangements, most divisional parties appointed a special committee, as in the case of a model campaign in North Buckinghamshire in 1936, a report on which was printed in the Labour Organiser for the edification of others. The divisional committee began with a survey of their constituency, selecting areas to target where there were good prospects for establishing party organization, or where the concentrated effort of a campaign seemed the only opportunity to make contact with the local population. Subcommittees were formed to distribute propaganda material, and arrangements were made with the agricultural workers’ union to secure additional speakers and contacts. In the week preceding the campaign, the divisional committee toured 84 Bedford had been included in the 1927 campaign, and Belper and Stafford both took part in campaigns in the late 1930s. 85 NLW, Brecon and Radnor DLP minutes, 8 May 1937. 86 Derbyshire RO, D1650 G/M2, West Derbyshire DLP minutes, 17 September 1938; Somerset RO, Frome DLP, A/AAW, 28, EC, 11 June 1937, and General Committee, 1 September 1937.


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the area with loudspeaker equipment, advertising the forthcoming meetings.87 Local arrangements were rarely recorded so clearly, but elements of such preparatory work are to be found in the records of other divisional parties. West Derbyshire appointed a subcommittee of three to coordinate what turned out to be an abortive campaign in September 1938: the speaker van was called away from the constituency during the Munich crisis, but the constituency had better luck the following year, when the van visited them in June.88 The party in Newark took the opportunity at its general meeting to appeal for helpers for the 1936 campaign.89 Frome DLP wrote to local Co-operative societies and the General and Municipal Workers’ Union, asking for their support with a campaign in 1937.90 In addition to the role which they played in the national drives, there is evidence of divisional parties organizing rural campaigns on their own initiative. Some of these efforts pre-dated the national party’s campaigns. ‘What’s the good of talking about launching the rural campaign?’, moaned one of Ramsay MacDonald’s correspondents in 1926, reminding the party leader that some of them had been ‘launching and relaunching the darn thing for years’.91 By 1922, the local party in Stroud had acquired a car and was canvassing its rural districts; the local agent drove out to villages accompanied by four ladies armed with leaflets, who ‘did’ a village thoroughly, before moving onto the next.92 In South Derbyshire, the local party in the mining area of Swadlincote organized regular summer campaigns in the surrounding countryside from 1923, with village meetings, distribution of copies of the Daily Herald, and a canvass carried out by members of the women’s section.93 The ILP gave considerable publicity to the example offered by Clement Attlee, who ‘adopted’ the ‘backward’ constituency of Epping: he inspired another 20 Labour MPs

87

Labour Organiser, July 1936. Derbyshire RO, D1650 G/M2, West Derbyshire DLP minutes, 7 September 1938, 20 October 1938, and 1 June 1939. 89 Nottinghamshire Archives, DD PP 16/1/3, Newark DLP minutes, 26 August 1936. 90 Somerset RO, A/AAW, 28, 6 August 1937. 91 H. O. Coleman, Berkhamsted LP, Hertfordshire, to MacDonald, 6 December 1926, PRO 30/69/1171/209. 92 Labour Organiser, September 1922. 93 Derbyshire RO, South Derbyshire DLP, D2928, Secretary’s report 23 June 1923, and 8th Annual Report, 1925–6. Women’s Work in the Labour Party, (LP, c.1922–3), 12, advocated women’s sections’ holding meetings in villages in the summer, noting that an open air meeting with all female speakers was so unusual that one normally got an audience. 88

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to follow suit and adopt a rural division.94 Drinkwater’s Labour Organiser, from its first issues in 1920, regularly offered advice on how to canvass one’s local, undeveloped rural area. This highlights another side to rural campaigning, which went on independently of the centrally directed efforts. In the same way that established sections of the Labour movement were encouraged at a national level to take responsibility for developing organization in rural Britain, so individual industrial centres sometimes undertook to encourage the rural areas on their own doorstep.95 Almost the first action of the newly formed Suffolk Federation of Trades Councils and Labour Representation Committees in 1918 was to inaugurate a scheme of colonization to establish trades councils in each town which would then be responsible for the political and industrial organization of their surrounding rural districts.96 One of the most highly developed of these early initiatives was in Leicester, where the organizing secretary boasted that the city had taken the surrounding area ‘under its wing’; propagandists had ‘penetrated into practically every village, with the result that to-day there are, in three out of four constituencies, strong and active Divisional Parties well able to stand on their own feet’.97 To any ‘live’ organizer, the presence of backward areas within a division was an obvious incitement to propaganda, particularly where it seemed that the votes of the unconverted villagers were telling against the good organization of miners or railway workers. In 1927, Frome Divisional Labour Party, which enjoyed strong support amongst the mining communities, produced a report on organization, recommending the immediate launch of a rural campaign; £100 of divisional funds was earmarked for activities in rural areas. Twelve years on, having benefited from a number of the national party’s rural campaigns, the divisional party came up with a more comprehensive propaganda scheme of its own. Every third Saturday in the month would be devoted to mass literature distribution and evening meetings. The activity was to be organized around five centres, and campaigners would be provided with notebooks to take down the names of interested 94 New Leader, 28 November 1924. Attlee was MP for Limehouse at the time. Epping was a safe Conservative seat: though it was not notably rural, Attlee was able to enthuse about a meeting of fifteen farm workers in a village schoolroom, which he found more rewarding than many mass demonstrations (New Leader, 30 January 1925). 95 E.g. the party in Bermondsey ‘adopted a piece of rural England’ within easy reach (Daily Herald, 10 January 1927). 96 Suffolk RO, GG1:2947, Quarterly Meeting, 1 September 1918. 97 W. Howard, writing in Labour Organiser, October/November 1924.


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persons, so that the agent and other available members could follow up these contacts with a personal visit.98 By the late 1930s, the scope for such schemes had expanded beyond the boundaries of individual constituencies, with the establishment of a Labour Propaganda Association in Bristol to orchestrate campaigning in the rural areas of Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, and Somerset.99 PROPAGANDA AND PLEASURE Rural campaigning was often helped by the participation of Labour hiking and rambling clubs, transformed into propaganda corps by combining their more usual activities with leaflet distribution and canvassing. Labour hikers were diverted from their rambles to assist with election campaigns, as during the 1931 by-election in the Lanarkshire constituency of Rutherglen.100 Cyclists and hikers were also enlisted between elections, acting as ‘flying columns’, distributing literature, holding meetings, and visiting struggling parties.101 Sometimes leisure and political activities were linked explicitly, as in Wellingborough, which was reported to have formed a cycle club ‘for propaganda visits to the villages’.102 League of Youth branches were encouraged to make their rambling and cycling parties ‘both enjoyable and helpful to the Party’ by taking in villages en route and handing out propaganda material in remote areas.103 The most prominent of such groups was the Clarion Youth movement, described as ‘virtually a cavalry arm of the Party’.104 From its foundation in 1894, the National Clarion Cycling Club had established a tradition of holding village meetings and distributing leaflets.105 Members of Labour’s League of Youth in the interwar period were encouraged to emulate this earlier generation of cyclists and arrange a ride or ramble to a country place ‘where the people know little of labour politics’. This voluntary activity was presented as part of a noble heritage: such propagandists had ‘helped to build up our modern Labour Movement by their easy-go-lucky methods of propaganda’.106 98

Somerset RO, Frome DLP, A/AAW, 26 and 28. 100 Labour Organiser, March 1938. Daily Herald, 20 May 1931. 101 102 Labour Organiser, August 1923. Ibid. March 1926. 103 The League of Youth (LP, 1931). The Conservative Junior Imperial League also went off on ‘propaganda rambles’ (Conservative Agents’ Journal, August 1926). 104 Labour Organiser, September 1934. 105 Ibid. May 1930; Clarion Cyclist, July 1936. 106 League of Youth Bulletin, March 1931. 99

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5. Start of the Clarion rural campaign, July 1934. The van sets off from Hoddesdon, with Herbert Morrison amongst those in attendance. [© Science and Society Picture Library]

In the 1930s, the Clarion movement was once again blazing a trail for rural propaganda. The usual pattern of the ‘Clarion Rural Campaign’, which began in 1933, was for propagandists to camp for a week or fortnight in a particular constituency, canvassing local villages, holding meetings, and distributing literature. In 1934, the Clarion Campaigners organized twelve weeks of rural campaigning in the West, the Midlands, and the Eastern Counties; in the first three weeks, they held over 50 village meetings and reputedly enrolled 200 new party members.107 Labour’s campaign committee made a grant towards their costs, and helped them purchase a van the following year.108 Each campaigner made a contribution in order to participate: for a cost of just £1, the young propagandist was promised ‘the best holiday you’ve ever had’.109 They

107 108 109

Labour Organiser, September 1934. NEC, Agricultural Campaign Committee, 17 May 1934; 35th Conference, 1935, 25. Plebs, May 1937, 112.


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also expected support from local divisional parties: for example, when the Clarion Campaign visited Taunton in 1936, the divisional party prepared a list of villages for the campaigners to visit, organized camp sites, and provided a grant of £5.110 By 1938, the scale of the Clarion work was a helpful addition to the Labour Party’s own efforts. That summer the Clarion campaign ran two tours, one in the north of England, beginning in Cheshire, and covering Lancashire, Westmorland, Skipton, and Cumberland, and the other in the south-west, starting in Winchester, and moving through Salisbury, East Dorset, and Yeovil to constituencies in Devon and Cornwall. Altogether the campaign held 285 meetings and ranged over 22 divisions, 12 of which were not otherwise being covered by Labour, even in that most extensive of summer campaigns.111 The choice of constituencies for the Clarion tours in 1938 said much about the ethos of its campaigns. The tours operated in popular holiday regions—in this case, the Lake District and the West Country—and took place in the summer months of June to September. Participation was described as an alternative form of vacation. Clarionettes would ‘canvass in the morning, rest and enjoy ourselves in the afternoon and hold meetings in the evening’.112 For the ambitious young activist, campaigning combined the enjoyment of exploring the countryside with an opportunity to gain experience in public speaking. ‘The village green is an excellent school for the would-be orator,’ promised the Clarion secretary Peter Pain, ‘and at the end of the week even the shyest campaigners find that they can address a meeting without difficulty.’113 Many of these trainee propagandists were university students, such as those who visited Taunton in 1936, and the group of Oxford undergraduates which Stafford Cripps’ son, John, led down to Frome in 1934.114 Whilst the Clarionettes arranged their tours well in advance, soliciting approval, cooperation, and usually a financial contribution from the local party, much leisure-propaganda was far more informal. Holidays and day trips were seen as opportunities to introduce the greater political

110 Somerset RO, Taunton DLP, DD/TLP/1/1, EC minutes, 30 May 1936, and General Committee minutes, 6 June 1936. 111 38th Conference, 1939, 68. The Clarion campaign overextended itself in these tours, running up substantial deficits on its 1938 and 1939 work. 112 113 Labour Organiser, May 1938. Plebs, May 1937, 112. 114 Somerset RO, Taunton DLP, DD/LP/1/1, minutes of annual meeting, 22 February 1936; Frome DLP, A/AAW, 27, EC minutes, 12 January 1934; Labour Organiser, April 1938, on the work by members of the University Labour Federation on holiday in rural constituencies.

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experience of the towns to rural and coastal areas.115 The Labour candidate for Bridgwater called for all Labour supporters on holiday in Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall to ‘combine a little propaganda with their pleasure’.116 The ILP, taking a more coordinated approach, suggested that voluntary propagandists who were holidaying in the countryside should inform Head Office, or at least the divisional council, so that meetings could be arranged to take advantage of their presence.117 It was not only those intending to combine their holiday with propaganda who might find themselves expected to lend a hand. Activists staying in a ‘backward’ area were always at risk of having their expertise commandeered by a local party hungry for propaganda, like the participants of a summer school booked into a Matlock guest house, whom the West Derbyshire DLP badgered to address public meetings during their visit.118 One unfortunate consequence of Labour’s identification of propaganda as a holiday activity was that much Labour campaigning in the countryside actually took place at what was regarded as the least appropriate time of year. Summer was an attractive season for going hiking, but it was not the best time for propaganda in rural areas. It could prove difficult to get an audience for meetings, and campaigns found themselves overshadowed by the rival attractions of agricultural shows and village institute gatherings. It was in fact the ‘close season for propaganda’.119 Agricultural trade unions abandoned their propaganda work entirely at the time of the harvest, realizing that the men were far too busy to attend branch meetings, and the NUAW traditionally encouraged its organizers to take their holidays at this point in the year.120 By contrast, when working hours on the farm were shorter in the autumn and winter, 115 Cf. Communist, 2 September 1922: ‘Many Communists are now enjoying their annual holiday in the country. It is to be hoped that they will spend some of their time telling the people they meet there something about the Labour Movement.’ 116 Record, September 1929. The party in Penzance also advertised for help from ‘comrades’ spending their holidays in the Cornish Riviera (New Leader, 20 April 1923). Most seaside resorts counted as ‘backward’ areas for Labour (Labour Organiser, August 1929). 117 ‘How to Win the Rural Areas’, Labour Organiser, August 1923, reprinted from the ILP Chronicle. 118 Derbyshire RO, West Derbyshire DLP, D1650, EC minutes, 30 April 1936. 119 E.g. points raised at 1925 Annual Conference of Women (Labour Organiser, June 1925); MRC, TUC, MSS.292.53.1/4, report on TUC campaign in Lincolnshire, 7 August 1925; Labour Organiser, July 1934. 120 E.g. MLG, ML SS TU F.331.8813 SCO, SFSU circulars, August 1926 and August 1929; Record, September 1931, and August 1932; MERL, NUAW/BI/7, EC, 14 and 15 September 1926, BIII/4, Organising and Political Sub-Committee, 17 July 1930, and BIII/5, 20 September 1934.


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people had time on their hands, and surprisingly good audiences could be achieved at evening meetings, despite the long distances many had to travel after dark and in bad weather in order to attend. In some ways then, nothing could have been more inappropriate than the meetings on village greens in high summer, which were the ‘usual idea of rural propaganda’.121 HOW TO CAMPAIGN IN THE COUNTRYSIDE So, whether one were there as part of an official ‘rural campaign’, as a propagandist from the local town, or simply on holiday, how did one campaign in the countryside? The advice on offer covered everything from practicalities to psychology. The agent for North Norfolk, on the practical side, advised anyone contemplating rural campaigning to pay attention to their choice of clothing. ‘A pair of heavy farm boots, a pair of leggings, a pair of waterproof trousers (which come up well over the knees), and a long waterproof cape, and a tweed hat’ were, in his view, the essentials; propagandists should also equip themselves with a one-inch map and a good electric torch.122 Others emphasized the need to be prepared against the idiosyncrasies of country people, as much as the inconvenience of muddy roads. The common theme throughout Labour’s discussion of rural areas was that the countryside required very different treatment from the towns. It was partly a difference of scale. In 1931, campaigners in the Skipton constituency travelled over 400 miles in a single week, whilst managing to address just 140 people.123 After a national propagandist spent a week touring another county constituency, reaching a total audience of 100 people, one agent (and a rural agent, at that) asked, ‘Does the Movement get its money’s worth from the speaker in such circumstances?’124 Transport, facilities, and advertising all presented challenges. Settlements were sometimes so scattered that parties were advised to use the post for literature distribution, rather than trying to canvass in person on a regular basis.125 Yet the distinctiveness of rural constituencies was also felt to lie in something more fundamental. Methods of propaganda on which Labour relied in urban areas would not succeed in the countryside, not only because of the practical obstacles in their way, but because of the nature of rural life itself. 121 123 124 125

122 Labour Organiser, December 1937. Ibid. November 1923. Ibid. September 1931. The agent for Maldon in Labour Organiser, December 1927. Labour Organiser, August 1922 and August 1925.

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It appeared that even propaganda material for the villages had to be different from that used in towns. A premium was set on straightforward language, with illustrations if possible. In its 1925 campaign, the TUC opted for leaflets in ‘simple untechnical language’, with cartoons on the back.126 The Labour Party also published special pamphlets and leaflets for its campaigns.127 In a more ambitious plan, the Agricultural Campaign Committee attempted to launch a monthly journal called Country Folk, aimed specifically at the rural electorate, though it proved impossible to secure sufficient orders from divisional parties to make the publication viable, even with a substantial subsidy from campaign funds.128 Yet suitable printed material was regarded as a more valuable tool in villages, where it was ‘certain’ to be read and re-read, than in towns, where political leaflets were wasted in indiscriminate distribution. Like Richard Jefferies in the previous century, Labour’s propagandists thought that the arrival of a circular through the post remained a significant event in villagers’ lives.129 One of the themes running through Labour’s campaigns in the countryside was the concern that the party should not show itself to be ‘a thing of the town’.130 Labour’s candidate for Holland with Boston observed that many potential candidates would not take on rural divisions, for fear of being caught out ‘by not knowing the difference between mangolds and swedes’.131 Keen to capitalize on such weaknesses, the secretary of the Conservatives’ Primrose League suggested that socialist visitors should be confronted by informed questioning on the subject of agriculture: under 126

Proceedings of the 57th Annual TUC, 1925, 242. The Daily Herald provided 10,000 copies of each of six different leaflets in 1933, and 10,000 copies of two leaflets in 1934 (NEC, Research and Publicity Committee, 16 June 1933, and Agricultural Campaign Committee, 21 November 1933). For the 1936 campaign, Labour gave participating parties 5,000 copies of each of two leaflets free (Agricultural Campaign Committee, 16 June 1936). 128 NEC, Agricultural Campaign Committee, 5 March, 20 April, 16 June, and 14 September 1936; Publicity, Research and Local Government Committee, 21 May 1936, NEC. A specimen copy survives in the Addison papers, 130/169. 129 Labour Organiser, November 1923; cf. Richard Jefferies, The Life of the Fields (1884; Oxford, 1983), 201. 130 Cf. J. C. Wedgwood, Labour and the Farm Worker (LP, 1925). 131 New Statesman and Nation, 7 August 1937. Mangolds were obviously a tricky subject. At Ormskirk during the 1929 general election campaign, Stanley Baldwin taunted Labour MPs about their ignorance of agriculture, saying that most of them could not tell mangolds from swedes (PRO 30/69/672/I/63–4). G. T. Garratt (Hundred Acre Farm (1928), 12) recalled a Labour MP who finished off an otherwise admirable speech with some sadly ill-informed comments about pulling mangels in frosty weather. Even Lloyd George was taken to task over a faux pas about mangel-worzel-eating-pheasants (Martin Pugh, David Lloyd George (1989), 65). 127


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such interrogation, they would ‘soon disappear’.132 National speakers were sometimes counselled to speak on any subject but agriculture, lest they alienate their audience through displays of ignorance.133 For those who dared expose themselves on the subject, a special Agricultural Speakers’ Handbook was produced in 1934, drafted by Christopher Addison to supplement the sections on agriculture and rural policy in the general speakers’ guides.134 The importance of emphasizing agricultural matters in the political appeal to rural Britain may have been over-played. On the one hand, these were normally the aspects of the economy which affected rural communities most directly, and the Conservatives frequently presented a candidate’s direct experience of farming as a qualification for holding an agricultural seat. On the other hand, rural electors had many of the same concerns as those in the towns. Herbert Drinkwater complained that it was a townsman’s delusion to suppose that the dweller in the country ‘dreams only of pigs and poultry’.135 Political appeals in 1938 and 1939 were dominated by the peace issue in town and country alike.136 However, such was Labour’s caution in approaching the unknown electorate of the villages that a show of interest in anything outside agriculture was likely to excite comment, whether in the case of the Wiltshire agricultural workers who talked about economics in the pub, or a Norfolk audience kept enthralled by a discussion on foreign affairs.137 The party’s organizer for the Eastern Counties positively encouraged speakers from industrial areas to visit agricultural districts: ‘It is seldom realised that rural audiences get tired of speeches on agriculture and welcome addresses on other issues.’138 In practice, the rural drives were closely connected with the exposition of agricultural policy, and a lack of qualified speakers was felt to be a major constraint on the scope of the campaigns.139 Labour MPs were encouraged to develop a specialism in the subject of agriculture, partly to counter the usual accusations that Labour had no expertise in the area, but also 132

Morning Post, 28 March 1921, letter to editor. E.g. George Dallas advised, ‘Above all keep your town speakers off agriculture, unless they are admitted experts’ (Interview in Labour Organiser, December 1924). 134 NEC, Agricultural Campaign Committee, 2 November 1933; Research and Policy Committee, 22 February 1934. For the 1938 campaign, the special notes covered topics including milk, rural housing, and electricity in rural areas (Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 130/168). 135 Labour Organiser, December 1936. 136 E.g. report on Bridgwater by-election, Country Standard, December 1938. 137 27th Conference, 1927, 219; Labour Organiser, November 1923. 138 John Taylor to J. S. Middleton, 24 October 1937, NMLH, LP/CAMP/3/4. 139 NEC, Agricultural Campaign Committee, 13 January 1936. 133

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because the presence of MPs at conferences and demonstrations tended to give events a higher profile and attract good audiences.140 One aspect of the Campaign Committee’s work was indeed to train speakers to deal with agricultural topics. Agricultural speakers’ classes were run by Christopher Addison, George Dallas, and Walter Smith at Transport House in 1935, attended by between 25 and 30 every Friday evening.141 The more usual format for training consisted of schools held in Oxford, at Faringdon’s home at Buscot Park, or at Dollarbeg in Scotland, to educate candidates and speakers in Labour’s agricultural policy.142 Despite anxieties about an inherent lack of expertise, one of the striking features of Labour’s campaigns is just how large a pool of speakers they were able to draw upon, including substantial numbers of MPs, leading figures from rural trade unionism, and others who had particular interests in rural matters, such as John Morgan, the Daily Herald’s countryside columnist. Over 100 speakers are named in connection with the campaigns of the 1930s.143 Many of these operated only in their home districts. Nonetheless, a number of national political speakers became particularly associated with the rural campaigns. Walter Smith, Morgan Philips Price, Tom Williams, Christopher Addison, Frank Knowles, and David Quibell were some of the most prominent. Clement Attlee (even before becoming party leader in 1935), Stafford Cripps, Hugh Dalton, and Tom Kennedy were also regular speakers during campaigns and at rural by-elections. Perhaps the most devoted of the rural speakers were George Dallas and William Bennett. Dallas was one of the movement’s main advocates of action on the countryside, an official of the Workers’ Union, and a leading figure behind the Labour Party’s policy statements on agriculture. Alderman Bennett, on the other hand, seemed to have a thoroughly urban pedigree, as one-time MP for South Battersea, and a representative on the London County Council; yet he made a second career for himself fighting Labour’s cause in the rural areas. When he contested Hitchin at the 1933 by-election, the Daily Herald described how Bennett ‘invaded a rural area, took off his coat, worked sixteen hours a day—and added 2000 to the Socialist vote’.144 An obituary remembered 140

NEC, memo by Egerton Wake, 22 November 1926. NEC, Agricultural Campaign Committee, 18 January and 22 March 1935. NMLH, LP/AG/30/89–91, 92–4, 96–7, 101. 143 From lists in the Daily Herald, 26, 29, and 30 June, 3 and 6 July 1933; NEC, Report on Agricultural Campaign 1934; NEC, Agricultural Campaign Committee, 15 January 1936, 5 March 1936, and 12 October 1937; 38th Conference, 1939, 67. 144 Daily Herald, 10 June 1933. 141 142


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him as ‘one of the ablest and most active Party propagandists in the rural constituencies’, ‘revelling’ in van work and loudspeaker technique.145 Rural campaigners prided themselves on adopting ingenious methods to grab villagers’ attention. Encouraging country people to come to meetings proved a particular challenge, though the absence of other entertainment turned a meeting into ‘an event in comparatively uneventful lives’.146 The politics might be made more palatable by mixing it with entertainment and adopting some licence in the way the functions were billed. Venues could be filled to capacity by advertising ‘Concert Meetings—Admission Free’, overcoming villagers’ anxieties about attending indoor political meetings.147 At musical evenings organized by the Maldon division, the national propagandist was reduced to speaking in the interval, while the concert party were having coffee.148 Events were tailored to fit the needs of the rural population, and had to finish earlier than they would in a town, since some of the audience might have a threemile walk home, and a five o’clock start to look forward to the next morning.149 Public meetings were often advertised by personal invitation, in the belief that villagers would not attend unless they felt their presence to be specifically requested. Model invitations were printed in the Labour Organiser, winding up with a ‘typically country note’: ‘Friday is also a good night; there is a full moon, and it will be pleasant out-of-doors. If all the village comes . . . it will be a bumping meeting.’150 To ensure that all the village did indeed attend, the agent for North Norfolk, Stephen Gee, lurked around village schools, presenting the children with handbills inviting their parents to that evening’s meeting, while the agent for Gainsborough toured the district prior to a meeting, ringing a bell to summon an audience.151 Elsewhere, activists turned to music and brought Labour choirs to the villages.152 One gets the impression that Labour’s activities in the countryside could be very noisy indeed: almost a literal response to injunctions to ‘wake the countryside up’. The rowdy Clarion campaigners breezed into the countryside with all the subtlety of the new holiday camps. At any point, they enthused, the peace of a rural holiday 145

146 38th Conference, 1939, 106. Labour Organiser, December 1926. It could also be easier to hire village halls and schoolrooms for a concert than for a Labour meeting (Labour Organiser, May 1927). 148 Labour Organiser, December 1927. Maldon boasted five Labour concert parties, which toured rural districts over the winter. 149 150 Ibid. November 1923. Ibid. February 1921. 151 Ibid. November 1923 and November 1922. 152 Ibid. June 1925; Country Standard, September 1938. 147

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might be shattered by the amplified tones of ‘Good evening, people of Nether Wallop! This is the Clarion Campaign calling.’153 By the late 1930s, one of the most significant contributions to Labour’s noisy presence in rural Britain was the loudspeaker van. Above all other aspects of the rural campaigns, it was the efficacy and popularity of the vans which received the warmest testimony. At their most basic, earlier horse-drawn vans simply combined a means of transport with a practical platform for addressing open-air meetings. However, their association with socialist propagandists of the late nineteenth century added a certain romance. The modern Labour Party adopted the use of vans with these glorious days of propaganda firmly in mind: ‘in the name of the old ideals and sacrifices and the present necessity’.154 In proposing the acquisition of vans for the rural campaigns, Dallas evoked memories of ‘the old Clarion vans and the magnificent work they did’. ‘If a van went into a village,’ he recalled, ‘it became a sensation. The children came, the fathers came, and the mothers, too; they all turned out and the van became a great source of attraction.’155 The addition of amplification during the 1930s added a new dimension to the use of vans in campaigning. After the 1934 campaign visited Frome, the local agent declared that the meetings were the best attended he had ever seen in that constituency, and that this was due to the use of ‘loud speaker apparatus’.156 When £50 was spent on the services of a loudspeaker van in the 1933 Rutland and Stamford by-election, the report on the campaign offered reassurance that every penny was money well spent.157 The Labour Organiser urged all rural parties to buy a loudspeaker to use at outdoor meetings, to reach workers in fields, isolated hamlets, and scattered cottages.158 Loudspeakers seemed to offer a way to overcome villagers’ supposed reluctance to brave attendance at political meetings, as a Clarion ‘vanner’ explained in 1938: Everyone who has worked in country districts knows that few people care to be seen at a Labour meeting. Most only dare sit in their homes and catch a few words here and there. The loudspeaker has put an end to all this. It is Labour’s ideal weapon. It brings every house in a small village within earshot and no one need take the risk of being seen at the meeting.159

153 155 156 157 159

154 Labour Organiser, May 1938. Labour Magazine, December 1924. 27th Conference, 1927, 180. Somerset RO, Frome DLP, A/AAW, 27, EC minutes, 26 September 1934. 158 NEC, 20 December 1933. Labour Organiser, March 1935. Labour, June 1938.


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The use of motor vans with loudspeaker equipment made the campaigns of the late 1930s far more expensive than their predecessors. In 1938, the average yearly cost of running a van was estimated at £325–£350.160 The Agricultural Campaign Committee deliberated for a long time about the feasibility of engaging in this type of propaganda, though fully aware of its potential value, on the basis of examples at home and abroad.161 The Labour Party in London was already using loudspeaker vans in the capital by 1923, and the Conservatives led the field in their use of cinema vans.162 The Daily Herald had also acquired film vans, one of which toured the villages around Dorchester in 1934 to publicize the TUC’s centenary commemoration of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.163 In 1935, the Herald gave Labour the use of a film motor van to support the party’s efforts in the backward areas, whilst also promoting the paper’s circulation.164 However, the Labour Party itself does not appear to have used film propaganda on the countryside before the Second World War, and it was only in 1937 that the party acquired a loudspeaker van of its own specifically for rural campaigns. By the summer of 1938, it was running four vans, one of which was a gift of the TGWU for use in Scotland.165 Rural campaigning was often a compromise between the distinctive approach which Labour believed was required and the diverse and generally inadequate resources to which the movement had access. Even where a titular framework was provided, as in the rural drives launched by the party’s Head Office, there could be considerable variation in the campaigning experienced in the various constituencies. A lead might be given through the issue of special publications and a relatively standardized format of agricultural conferences and demonstrations, but much depended on local initiative and enthusiasm. In the many rural constituencies untouched by Labour’s national campaigns, propaganda was still more haphazard. 160

NEC, Agricultural Campaign Committee, 20 September 1938. E.g. the German Social Democrats’ use of loudspeakers in remote districts (NEC, letter from SPD to LP Press and Publicity Department, 13 June 1928). 162 Labour Organiser, October 1923 (these were former Clarion vans which the party had taken over); NEC, Organisation Sub-Committee, 22 March 1926; T. J. Hollins, ‘The Conservative Party and Film Propaganda between the Wars’, English Historical Review, 96/379 (1981), 359–69. The ILP had a motor van operating in the countryside by 1924 (Labour Magazine, December 1924). 163 An illustration of such a van in use appeared in The Tolpuddle Martyrs. How the TUC Will Commemorate the Dorsetshire Labourers’ Centenary (TUC, 1933). 164 NEC, 22 February 1935. 165 NEC, Agricultural Campaign Committee, 20 September 1938. 161

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6. Loudspeaker van for use in rural Scotland, April 1939. [© Science and Society Picture Library]

Underlying this picture of underfunding and ad hoc arrangements, there was a philosophy with significant bearing on Labour attitudes towards the countryside. The rural campaigns were presented as a test and an opportunity for the modern movement. As the work of political and industrial organization became increasingly professionalized, here was a task in which the rank-and-file member could not simply rely upon paid officials to do what was needed. Just as the rural seats were an analogue for the towns before the advent of Labour, so the effort of winning them was a chance to recapture pioneering days—Clarion vans and all. Such rhetoric appealed to those who wished to emulate the founding fathers, as well as to those who believed that membership should involve some more active contribution than the paying of subscriptions. Rural campaigning was sometimes envisaged in terms of ‘sacrifice’, through gifts of money and time, and through the voluntarism which operated at the local level. One of the earliest suggestions for raising money for a rural campaign was the organization of a ‘self-denial


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week’.166 The national propagandist F. J. Hopkins encouraged party members to follow his example: he had given up many things, including his religious ministry, to devote himself to Labour’s task in the countryside, and everyone should make some sacrifice, if only by contributing to the rural fund.167 ‘Sacrifice’ was a crucial element in campaigning anywhere, not just in the countryside, but in combination with the perceived imperative of winning rural seats it took on further significance.168 At the same time—and perhaps increasingly as the 1930s progressed— propaganda on the countryside was described in ways which made it sound more pleasure than sacrifice. When one ‘sacrificed’ an evening of a holiday, or even dedicated a whole vacation to the work, there was still enjoyment to be had. The connection was often made explicit: ‘Propaganda and Pleasure’, ‘Politics and Play’, ‘the best holiday’.169 By far the most vivid image of Labour’s campaigning in the countryside is not that of the conferences and demonstrations organized by Head Office, but of bands of enthusiastic volunteers from the towns participating in the great interwar activities of hiking, camping, and cycling, with the added element of political campaigning thrown in. It would be difficult to estimate how many members of the party took a stock of leaflets with them on a day trip to the country, but it was an enterprise much encouraged by Labour publications. Combining ‘useful leisure’, sacrifice, and a chance to recapture the spirit of the pioneering days of socialism, Labour’s campaigns on the countryside appear at times to have served an emotional, as much as an electoral need within the movement. 166 NEC, memo, ‘Labour and the Countryside—Suggestions for Special Fund’, September 1923. 167 23rd Conference, 1923, 203. 168 Cf. ‘Victory for Socialism’ leaflet, October 1933, NEC. Also Record, January 1931. 169 Labour Organiser, May 1930; League of Youth Bulletin, March 1931; Plebs, May 1937. Also League of Youth Bulletin, December 1931 and April 1932.

5 The Rural Labour Parties Darkest England . . . in which Labour Agents can be counted on the fingers of one hand, leaving enough fingers left over to play ‘Land of Dope and Tory’ on the piano. Labour Organiser, September 1933

ORGANIZ ATION Labour’s rural campaigns were intended not only to win votes, but ‘to organise [electors] into Parties to enable them to provide local finance and to prepare themselves for elections of all kinds’.1 Tremendous significance was attached to the business of organization in the Labour Party before the Second World War. Walter Greenwood’s model party agent boasted of it as the party’s greatest achievement: ‘the biggest testimonial as to whether Labour is fit to govern the country—the fact that it is capable of governing its own affairs so supremely well.’2 The concern with organization went beyond practical matters of party management, and underlay a whole political culture. Party members often stressed that Labour was different from the other two main parties, not only in its policies, but in its whole mode of operation: it was not intended as the product of a few individuals and their wealth, but as a cooperative effort, built on the work of a mass membership. The place of local and divisional Labour parties within the national structure of the Labour Party was given full recognition in 1918. The Divisional Labour Parties (DLPs) took over the functions of the pre-war representation committees and trade councils in coordinating the political activity of local trade unionists and socialists, and also offered a focus 1 NEC, Memo on future work, by J. S. Middleton and G. R. Shepherd, endorsed at Agricultural Campaign Committee, 15 January 1936. 2 Walter Greenwood, How the Other Man Lives (1939), 255.

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for a new category of individual membership, which had previously found its voice through various affiliated socialist groups including, preeminently, the Independent Labour Party. There was great pressure in the interwar years for rural parties to conform to general definitions of these new party structures. ‘A rural constituency polls a Labour vote of thousands,’ observed Harry Croft in the 1930s. ‘It must be and is possible to build up parties if work is done to get at these supporters . . . One must not magnify difficulties’.3 Difficulties there undoubtedly were. The factors which appeared to inhibit the Labour vote in rural areas, including isolation, intimidation, deference, and the weaknesses of political education, had obvious repercussions for party membership and activity. Organization could be an uphill struggle. A form of heroism came to be attached to this pioneer enterprise in the countryside, which was often presented as the most significant organizational challenge facing the party. Yet there was official resistance to the idea that these difficulties might shape the rural movement as something distinct from the party elsewhere. Labour remained tied to models and practices of organization as operated in the very different circumstances of urban, industrial constituencies, where members lived in close proximity to each other and tended to be organized already through their membership of trade unions. This ideal was only rarely questioned. Joseph Duncan was a lonely heretic, arguing in the 1920s that it was ‘quite impossible for local parties to function’ in most of the constituencies in rural Scotland: the population was simply too dispersed, and even if it were possible to recruit members, there would not be enough for a party to do. He believed that Labour should follow the example of other parties, which did not invest in formal organization in such areas, but made arrangements with particular individuals in each district to help during elections.4 There were certainly some constituencies whose unpromising record of party organization did not preclude electoral success, and Scotland offered one of the most striking examples in the case of Western Isles. NEC reports recorded the existence of a DLP there from 1923, though there is no reference to the payment of any 3

Party Organisation (LP, 1939), 21. Forward, 19 October 1929. Looking at this from the other side, Ramsay MacDonald’s son, Malcolm, was frustrated when fighting Ross and Cromarty as a National Labour candidate in 1936 to find that the Liberal Association had ‘no membership and no subscription, and no anything, except local agents who are called on to do duty a few hours before an election starts’ (Malcolm MacDonald to Ramsay MacDonald, 5 September 1936, PRO 30/69/1182/171–4). 4

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affiliation fee before 1935. Nevertheless, at the 1935 general election Labour managed to win the constituency from the Liberals, polling a vote of 5421.5 In the same year the divisional party reported a membership of 180 and paid a national affiliation fee of £3, which was £1 lower than the official minimum. By 1936, the Western Isles DLP was once more unaffiliated. Despite Duncan’s views, and the evidence of curious results such as that in Western Isles, rural election campaigns were more usually cited to illustrate the limitations of ad hoc enthusiasm. The national administration made every effort to prevent candidates standing in constituencies which lacked a basic level of organization, arguing that such campaigns could only be a scramble for votes, directed by an election staff who were, like the canvassers at the 1923 Ludlow by-election, ‘an alien body in a strange land’.6 Enthusiasm was considered no substitute for ‘solid methods’ of organization. Herbert Drinkwater, the great evangelist of organization, argued that Labour would not sweep the countryside ‘till we have trained the workers and provided a machine’.7 The challenge of establishing the party in the countryside proved a stimulus for more general discussion of organizational practice, and the problems faced by rural parties featured prominently in The Labour Organiser, the journal for Labour election agents and organizing secretaries.8 The countryside seemed to demonstrate, more than anywhere else, the need to define party structures, and to make full use of the methods which were being promoted as part of a science of professional political organization. When party members talked about the organizational difficulties in rural divisions, they tended to blur geographical and cultural differences amongst these constituencies. Labour distinguished parts of rural Britain as more or less politically accessible according to their patterns of employment and settlement, but these distinctions were applied more frequently to electioneering than to the prospects for organization. Literature and initiatives were directed at the rural parties as a specific category, and rural parties themselves seem to have recognized a common identity. In the 1920s there were attempts to mobilize this into a pressure group: a body comprising rural DLPs and rural parliamentary candidates was granted 5 Malcolm Kenneth Macmillan, the victorious Labour candidate, was only 22 at the time. He held the seat until 1970. 6 New Leader, 27 April 1923. 7 Labour Organiser, October 1921, re the Louth by-election. 8 The journal began publication in 1920 and was edited, and very largely written by, Herbert Drinkwater until August 1944.


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representation on the Labour Party and TUC’s Joint Committee on Agricultural Policy.9 More generally, the group identity existed as a shared sense of grievance and hardship, but also of participation in a vital stage of the party’s development. PART Y FORMATION Most rural areas had no Labour Party organization before 1918. Parties had been formed by the end of the First World War in a number of market towns, including Bridgwater and Taunton: former county boroughs that were incorporated into county divisions by the parliamentary boundary commissioners prior to the 1918 general election.10 But Labour’s few early political organizations in rural Britain tended to be local rather than divisional in scope, and were not considered sufficiently well organized to participate in parliamentary elections. Even affiliation with the national party was judged too ambitious for a party formed in North Hertfordshire in 1917, and was to be delayed ‘until the organisation had taken more definite shape’.11 The stimulus for more widespread party formation came after 1918, with the new accent on individual membership, and the resolution that Labour should fight parliamentary contests as widely as possible. In 1919, the National Agent expressed the intention of establishing ‘a sound and active organisation’ in every constituency in Britain.12 From 1921, the Labour Party’s annual reports began listing affiliated parties by reference to a complete list of parliamentary constituencies, thus making it clear where organization had yet to be created, and symbolizing Labour’s ambition to cover the entire country with a party structure. Many Divisional Labour Parties in county constituencies were founded around 1920. According to the national figures for affiliations, only 45 of the 203 ‘rural’ constituencies were without a DLP or other political organization in 1921, though these absentees did account for most of Scotland and the East Riding, much of Wales, the North Riding, 9 NEC, 17 December 1925. The NEC initially refused recognition to a Labour Agricultural Group, which sought the affiliation of local parties in 1924 (NEC, 28 May 1924). The Group agitated for more help in organizing rural parties and for a clearer party policy on agriculture (NEC, Org. Sub-Comm., 15 July 1924). 10 Ibid. 17 June 1917; NEC, 15 February 1909. 11 NEC, Org. Sub-Comm., 19 June 1917. Hitchin DLP affiliated in 1919. 12 19th Conference, 1919, National Agent’s report, 31.

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and Devon.13 Parties were formed in almost all the remaining constituencies during 1923, though political development in some divisions was severely retarded. There is no evidence of any Labour Party organization in Kincardine and West Aberdeen, or in Argyll, until 1934; at that date, a further three Scottish divisions (Caithness and Sutherland, Western Isles, and Orkney and Shetland) had yet to pay any affiliation fee. Wales was covered by a more complete political structure, with parties established in all its rural constituencies by 1923, all of which were properly affiliated by 1930. The title of Labour’s ‘Most Backward English Division’ probably belongs to Leominster, which seems to have had no party organization until 1928, and apparently paid an affiliation fee to the national party only once (in 1933) during the period before the Second World War. Some of the rural parties rested on very uncertain foundations. The party in the Lincolnshire constituency of Horncastle is an example of one which failed in its very first years. In 1920, Horncastle was contested in a by-election as a ‘pioneer’ fight, backed by no political organization whatsoever. A divisional party was subsequently formed in 1922, though it was in serious trouble by July 1924 when William Holmes visited the division in his capacity as national organizer and arranged meetings and a conference with the object of ‘re-forming’ the DLP.14 Periods of desuetude were recognized as a common experience for many parties in the countryside. Rural parties proved particularly vulnerable because of their generally poor finances and dependence on a small number of enthusiasts to handle the administration. There are often substantial gaps in constituency party records, where these survive at all. Local structures were frequently too weak to carry on when organization failed at the divisional level. In West Derbyshire there was no divisional party in existence between 1931 and 1935, and when organization was re-established, it was found that only three of the local parties in this huge constituency were still functioning.15 In 1938, the party in Wells was reported to have re-formed after years of inactivity, during which the only continuity 13 These figures exclude divisions which had only a trades council, and also those which paid fees during 1921 for affiliation in the following year. The Labour Party’s annual report in 1920 presented a more impressive picture, observing that ‘local Parties have grown up in many cases quite spontaneously until today there are not six constituencies out of the 602 in England and Wales where some form of Labour Party organisation does not exist’ (20th Conference (1920), 14). 14 NEC, Org. Sub-Comm., 16 July 1924. There is no record of Horncastle paying affiliation fees to the national party until 1928. 15 Derbyshire RO, West Derbyshire DLP papers, D 1650 G/M1, minutes. The party’s outstanding debts were another, less welcome link with the past.


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was apparently provided by an elderly lady’s efforts in delivering the Labour Woman.16 MEMBERSHIP The major problem faced by parties in the countryside was the recruitment of a sufficiently large membership to make organization viable. Individual members were of greater significance than in most industrial constituencies, because their subscriptions provided vital income in the absence of substantial trade union affiliations: Eddisbury DLP, for example, was described as ‘actually only a group of individual members’.17 The NEC insisted that, ‘The surest and most permanent way of increasing the strength, especially the financial strength, of Constituency Parties, is to build up a bigger individual membership.’18 But rural parties, so dependent on this source of income, tended to have a small membership. In the 1920s, organization in West Derbyshire amounted to ‘a little handful of people calling itself the West Derbyshire Labour Party’, and in 1935, after a rise and subsequent fall in membership, the constituency could still boast only 140 members.19 Despite these figures, West Derbyshire had to affiliate to the national party on a basis of 240 individual members: a hundred more than the actual number, but the minimum affiliation acceptable after 1930 under party rules.20 Some indication of the size of the parties can be gained from the lists of affiliated membership published in the Labour Party’s annual reports. From 1928 onwards, these quoted the membership of each divisional party according to the fees which it paid to Head Office; prior to 1928, the lists merely recorded whether there was an affiliated party in the constituency. But as the case of West Derbyshire shows, the central figures can be misleading, particularly where a party affiliated on the minimum membership. Rural constituencies by no means dominate the lists of those DLPs which took the minimum number of membership cards, 16 Labour Organiser, May 1938. The national records, meanwhile, registered an unbroken record of membership for Wells, giving the impression of a DLP which was still functioning. 17 NEC, Finance and General Committee, 7 May 1931. 18 NEC, 26 July 1933. 19 Derbyshire Times, 25 May 1929; Derbyshire RO, West Derbyshire DLP papers, D 1650 G/M1, minutes, 28 September 1935. 20 Previously the minimum affiliation was on the basis of 180 members.

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and were joined in this category by parties in London, Bradford, and Wolverhampton, amongst others. But although urban, industrial constituencies sometimes qualified as ‘backward areas’ on the grounds of their membership figures, low membership tended to be a characteristic of rural divisions. Many frequently went unaffiliated and unrepresented at the party conference. It is difficult to tell in these circumstances how many such parties were still genuinely functioning, although the national reports do list the names of parties which paid no affiliation fee, seeming to distinguish these from divisions where there was no DLP in existence. Some rural parties affiliated repeatedly on the minimum permissible figure: Eddisbury, Camborne, North Dorset, Hereford, Sevenoaks, Newark, Devizes, Kidderminster, and Perth only ever affiliated on the minimum membership in the period up to 1939. The central records of membership thus cannot provide a convincing guide to the actual size of these parties. As one illustration of this, the stated male and female membership of many parties had a suspicious habit of adding up to exactly 240 (the minimum membership level from 1930). Evesham recorded a perfectly balanced membership of 120 men and 120 women for six years in succession. Other parties returned different combinations annually, always adding up to the magic total.21 In a few cases, the NEC was prepared to concede affiliations below the official minimum. In 1938 St. Ives affiliated on 120 members, Rye paid on a basis of 89, and the Western Isles registered a startling imbalance between the sexes, with a membership of 70 men and 5 women. Buckrose affiliated on a total of 50 individual members for 1936; by 1938 this had been adjusted to 64.22 The lowest membership of all was for Kincardine and West Aberdeen in 1939, which could muster only 11 members. The DLP there paid an affiliation fee of 4s. 11/2d., at a time when the official minimum affiliation was £4 10s. Some rural parties were far more successful. Amongst the thoroughly rural divisions, Cambridgeshire was one of the most outstanding, consistently returning a membership of over a thousand; North Norfolk was also in that league in the late 1920s, though its affiliation slumped to more modest levels after 1930. In the 1920s, the Labour Organiser treated a membership of a thousand or more as a mark of a party’s success; by 1933 the journal was inclined to regard anywhere with fewer than a 21 E.g. Richmond, in Yorkshire: 200/40 (1934), 190/50 (1935), 140/100 (1936), 170/70 (1937), 180/60 (1938). 22 37th Conference, 1938, 126; 38th Conference, 1939, 185–210.


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thousand members as a ‘backward area’.23 During the 1930s, 2000 members became a benchmark of significance.24 Few rural parties made it into these élite divisions, though promotion could come rapidly, as it did for Thornbury, which recorded 1369 members in April 1930, a thousand of whom had been acquired since the 1929 general election.25 For those rural parties with high membership figures, the achievement was proclaimed as particularly remarkable, given the generic difficulties of their situation. The central records may be used to estimate the overall scale of party membership in rural Britain, though many caveats apply: there were no figures entered for some parties, even where an organization was still apparently in existence, while others registered an artificially inflated figure, because of the rules on minimum affiliation levels. The year 1928 is the first year for which any calculation is possible, when the membership across the 203 rural constituencies amounted to 63,224; for the specifically agricultural constituencies listed by Kinnear, the total recorded party membership was 36,439. At the time, the Labour Party’s total affiliated membership nationally was over two million, of which nearly 215,000 held individual membership. During the 1930s, there was an expansion of individual membership across the country as a whole, and by 1939, the national total had risen to over 400,000. In the 203 rural constituencies, the total recorded membership was 97,028 in 1939. This is likely to be an overestimate, though perhaps not dramatically so. Forty-five of the returns were at the minimum membership level of 240, accounting for a little over 10 per cent of the total. Even assuming a significant error built into these figures, the total rural membership may still have numbered over 90,000. Seven parties had in fact been allowed to affiliate below the minimum level. At the other end of the spectrum, seventeen of the parties had a membership in four figures.26 These extremes aside, the average membership level in 1939 remained relatively low, creating a range of financial and organizational difficulties for parties in the countryside. Even a thousand members spread over a large division represented something very different from a thousand members in an urban constituency. The scattered nature of the population put strains on the substructures of a divisional party. An unusual village, like Frampton Mansell in 23

24 Labour Organiser, February 1933. NEC, 16 September 1936. Labour Organiser, April 1930. 26 Buckingham, Cambridgeshire, Altrincham, Whitehaven, South East Essex, Winchester, St Albans, Chislehurst, Faversham, Harborough, Frome, Mitcham, Lewes, Rugby, Swindon, Cleveland, and Llandaff and Barry. 25

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Gloucestershire, might have such a high incidence of membership that local structures could be sustained: in this hotbed of Labour support, fifty households yielded 37 party members.27 Elsewhere, local organization was more problematic. Basingstoke boasted only three local parties in the whole division in 1934.28 One may contrast this degree of organization with that in the mixed constituency of Frome, with 60 local parties in operation in the 1930s.29 One of the most rural of all constituencies, Cambridgeshire, had 30 local parties in 1929, with some impressive membership records: there were 126 individual members in Willingham, drawn from a total electorate of 800.30 The division as a whole embraced 132 villages, many of which had village ‘correspondents’ rather than formal party structures—a system which effectively represented a version of the pragmatism advocated by Joseph Duncan. In twenty Cambridgeshire villages, party work was subcontracted to the Workers’ Union.31 Cambridgeshire DLP was in fact a model operation in such circumstances, and some of its expedients were echoed in more generalized prescriptions.32 A large individual membership could not always conceal the fact that parts of a division might be seriously neglected. Divisional structures tended to be imposed on a patchwork of existing bodies engaged in propaganda and fighting local elections.33 The significance of having a divisional organization rather than just a collection of local parties was that activists could aspire to fight parliamentary elections. This history of development, from pockets of activism to the ambitions of a constituency party, was often reflected in the uneven nature of later patterns of organization. But the neglect of certain districts could also be tactical. The Chelmsford constituency in 1935 contained three large engineering works, a substantial dormitory population, and ‘innumerable villages and hamlets mainly or wholly agricultural’; Labour had ‘efficient’ parties operating in the two main centres, but elsewhere drew on the support of NUAW branches in some of the bigger villages.34 It was generally more productive to concentrate organization on the more densely populated sectors: after all, as it was argued, there might be more electors in one ward of a town than in half a dozen villages.35 27

28 Labour Organiser, August 1926. NEC, 25 April 1934. Somerset RO, A/AAW, 27 December 1936. 30 NEC, 21 April 1925, report on work of Labour Party in women’s interests. 31 32 Labour Organiser, November 1929. Party Organisation (LP, 1939). 33 For example, the conference of local parties which formed Newark DLP in 1920: Nottinghamshire Archives, minute books of Newark LP, DD PP 16 /1/1. 34 35 New Statesman, 7 December 1935. Country Standard, April 1939. 29


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Pockets of industry, such as mining, appeared to offer the best prospects for Labour to infiltrate rural divisions, and industrial workers moving into a constituency were seized upon as potential Labour sympathizers. The West Derbyshire DLP targeted workers from the ‘north country’ who were employed in building the Derwent Valley reservoir, in the hope that they might be persuaded to form a local party.36 The Labour Organiser was encouraged by the fact that most agricultural constituencies had an industrial nucleus or small town to provide a focus for organization.37 Parties were advised to seek out such centres, moving on later to ‘percolate’ the rural areas and organize the villages.38 Two assumptions lay behind this: that, on limited funds, propaganda was better deployed amongst concentrated sections of the electorate, and that these groups were also more likely to respond to Labour’s message. However, this second assumption was not always justified: market and county towns proved to be some of the most hopeless environments for Labour. As organization spread, there were cases of party growth in the villages beginning to outstrip that in the towns, though this was always remarked upon as surprising. Brecon and Radnor, for instance, was considered to be better organized in its agricultural areas than in the southern mining districts by the 1930s, while a report on the 1937 by-election in North Buckinghamshire noted that ‘The particular weakness of this Division, strangely enough, is in the railway towns of Wolverton and Bletchley’.39 During a by-election in Stafford in 1938, each section of support doubted the other: the townspeople asked how Labour was doing in the villages, and in the countryside they asked if Stafford would let them down.40 In the 1930s, the awakened countryside sometimes harboured suspicions about the backward towns. Much of the countryside, particularly in the south-east of England, was undergoing major changes in the interwar years, with consequences for party organization. Transport improved, as bus routes expanded, and cycles and cars became more readily available.41 In some areas, demographic change was even more significant than this modernization of village life. The NUAW closed down its branch at Becontree Heath, Essex, in 1928, as building for the new housing estates encroached and there was 36

Derbyshire RO, D1650 G/M1, 19 September 1936. 38 Labour Organiser, December 1921. Ibid. June 1931. 39 NLW, Brecon and Radnor DLP minutes, 19 December 1936, 8 May 1937; NEC, 23 June 1937. 40 Daily Herald, 8 June 1938. 41 See comments in Labour Organiser, July 1926, and October 1941. 37

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practically no agricultural work being done in the area.42 In 1918, the Romford constituency was regarded as a ‘typical county Division, more rural than urban’, but by 1936 it was ‘a huge conglomeration of industrial centres, housing estates and smaller urban districts’.43 The spread of residential development seemed to bring a merging of town and country, as areas close to big cities like Glasgow became increasingly suburban. The unsuccessful Labour candidate at the 1930 by-election in East Renfrew blamed his defeat on the influx of large numbers of middle-class dormitory residents into the constituency.44 Many recognized that this suburban population posed at least as great a challenge for Labour as did the muchmaligned agricultural worker.45 Labour’s task in the rural divisions was conceived initially in terms of the difficulty of organizing agricultural workers, but there were very few constituencies where agricultural employment accounted for the major part of the electorate. Rural campaign literature continued to target the farm worker specifically, but rural parties had to campaign amongst a far more heterogeneous population. Nor did agricultural workers on the whole prove a dependable element in local village parties. The peculiar position of many farm labourers in their local communities made them shy of active participation in party activities, so that rural parties relied very largely on members drawn from other social groups. The enormous size of many divisions meant that even travelling to meetings might be beyond the capacity of the farm worker, sometimes involving journeys of as much as 35 miles.46 The objections of nonconformists in the countryside tended to dissuade rural parties from holding meetings on Sundays, when at least most participants did not need to take time off work. In many rural areas, the backbone of party support came from nonagricultural workers, particularly at the level of party officials, with a nucleus of men who were ‘free’: railwaymen, smallholders, country cobblers, or small tradesmen.47 The difficulty of finding local secretaries could inhibit party expansion into the villages.48 When the agent Stephen Gee was trying to start a party in the village of Itteringham in North 42

MERL, NUAW, EC, 10 August 1928. 44 Labour Organiser, September 1936. Daily Herald, 1 December 1930. 45 Cf. Labour Organiser, June 1935, January 1937, and June 1938 (on ‘New Estates and the Owner Occupier’). 46 47 Labour Organiser, January 1930. Ibid. April–May 1923. 48 E.g. Derbyshire RO, West Derbyshire DLP, D 1650 G/M1, minutes, 28 September 1935. Also Cambridgeshire RO, Cambridgeshire DLP, 416/0.3, minutes of Organisation Sub-Committee, 24 October 1929. 43


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Norfolk in the early 1920s, he called a meeting in the village schoolroom, attended largely by members of the agricultural trade union. The individual who distinguished himself by asking sensible questions, and ended up being chosen as secretary for the new party, turned out to be a postal worker from London who had moved to the village in retirement. Gee thought this was a significant incident: the farm workers had ‘elected a young man whom they recognized as a leader not of their own ranks, but one who was independent’.49 The usual assumption was that a railwayman would be the first choice to organize a rural party, like the signalman Harry Allen, founder and first honorary secretary of the North Norfolk DLP.50 The rail unions had members scattered in virtually every constituency, and signalmen and station masters lived in many villages before the days of Beeching and automation. George Ridley, MP for Clay Cross, in Derbyshire, suggested that half the rural parties in the 1930s would not exist but for the substantial contribution made by the NUR.51 The cover illustration of the Country Standard, published in Suffolk in the late 1930s, emphasizes the diversity of the rural population which progressives were looking to organize. The central figure portrayed was, interestingly, a farmer, with dog and shotgun. The pictures around him show a teacher, a stockman, a doctor, a nurse, a postman, a blacksmith, and a shopkeeper. The Country Worker, forerunner to the Country Standard, similarly described itself as a magazine ‘for those who work in the country districts, for farm workers, small working farmers, shoemakers, carpenters, wheelrights [sic], postmen, carriers, roadmen, blacksmiths, harness makers, painters, motor mechanics’.52 Some of these occupational groups were significant not so much for the numbers they contributed to party membership, as for the leadership they provided, and the fact that they enabled parties to operate at all. The quality of local leadership was judged to be extremely important in villages where the Conservative Party all too often had the benefit of endorsement by squire 49 Labour Organiser, October 1927. Before taking up his party job in Norfolk, Gee had also lived in London (21st, Conference, 1921, 202). 50 Cf. Labour Organiser, October 1923 and April 1942. 51 37th Conference, 1937, 154. 52 Country Worker, January 1935. Country Worker was a Socialist and anti-war magazine. Only two issues were published—a duplicated edition in January 1935, and a printed issue in June 1935. The British Library has the first issue only; the Marx Memorial Library has both. The Country Standard was a more professional production, and appeared monthly from March 1936. Communist Party members Max Morton and Jack Dunman helped start the magazine as part of their political propaganda in the countryside (Max Morton, foreword to Jack Dunman, Agriculture: Capitalist and Socialist (1975), 8).

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7. Rural society, as pictured on the cover of The Country Standard. [By permission of the Marx Memorial Library, London]


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and parson. ‘A Socialist vicar, a Labour schoolmaster, an enlightened and converted small farmer will make oceans of difference to the election result in any given polling district,’ observed the agent for North Norfolk.53 In many rural areas, local party organization did not obviously reflect Labour’s historical identity as a party of the working class. Middle-class professionals, employers, and the self-employed frequently filled administrative positions and took the initiative in developing the party in constituencies with a limited tradition of trade unionism. School teachers, shopkeepers, religious ministers, even farmers were not unusual amongst Labour’s activists in the countryside. The president of Holland with Boston DLP was a member of the NFU, who was reported, rather embarrassingly, to employ non-union labour on his farm.54 Two farming brothers, Arthur and Duncan Eastman, were the mainstay of the Labour Party in Sudbury, holding party office and making regular, substantial donations to keep the organization afloat.55 Another farmer member of the party in Sudbury, R. M. Sivier, served on the editorial board of the Country Worker. The popularity of rural retreats for holidays and retirement also endowed some local parties with unusual supporters. Dudley Leigh Aman, a product of Marlborough College and the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, devoted himself to the cause of Labour in his retirement: he was secretary of the East Hampshire DLP in 1924, and chairman of the Fareham DLP by 1927.56 Bertrand Russell’s wife, Dora, was involved in the party at St. Ives in Cornwall, and spoke at the party conference on the problems of the rural divisions.57 ‘Dying of solitary loneliness’ in deepest Northamptonshire, the author H. E. Bates claimed that he joined the local Labour party in an attempt to alleviate his boredom.58 53

Labour Organiser, October 1923. MERL, NUAW, Org. Sub-Comm., 16 March 1933. 55 The Eastmans were poultry farmers in Hadleigh, where Arthur was chairman of the local party, while Duncan chaired the Sudbury DLP and the Suffolk Labour Federation: Suffolk RO (Bury St Edmunds), Sudbury DLP papers, GK 512/1, accounts; Who’s Who in Suffolk (Worcester, 1935); East Anglian Daily Times, 29 August 1961. 56 Labour’s Who’s Who (1924 and 1927). He helped to form associations of rural Labour parties and candidates in the 1920s, as discussed on p. 175. 57 26th Conference, 1926, 233. 58 H. E. Bates to Edward Garnett, 19 March 1926, cited in Paul Rich, ‘Imperial Decline and the Resurgence of English national identity, 1918–1979’, in Tony Kushner and Kenneth Lunn (eds.), Traditions of Intolerance. Historical Perspectives on Fascism and Race Discourse in Britain (Manchester, 1989), 37–8. I am grateful to Jon Bates for this reference. 54

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The Rural Labour Movement THE ROLE OF TRADE UNIONISM

The diverse character of Labour’s supporters and stalwarts in the countryside points to an important feature distinguishing the rural movement from that in urban, industrial areas: the relationship between local parties and trade unionism. It was assumed throughout the interwar period that Labour parties must be rooted in trade union membership. Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Aylesbury in 1928 said that if he had to choose between getting a man into the union and getting his vote, he would choose the union, ‘because I am sure if I got him into the Union I would get his vote afterwards’.59 This belief was reinforced by examples from the party history. Walter Smith, of the NUAW, pointed out that trade union membership had been the foundation of political success in industrial centres, and that it must also be the primary requirement in building organization in rural constituencies.60 However, by 1939 it was clear that there was no straightforward correlation between political and trade union membership in rural areas. The TGWU complained that Leicestershire was one of the worst organized areas for trade unionism, despite the fact that it was ‘one of the best organised counties from the political Labour point of view’.61 In the constituency of Lewes in Sussex there were villages with healthy party memberships, but almost no trade unionists.62 In other parts of the country, the situation was reversed. Dorset was a good area for NUAW organization, but resistant to Labour’s political message. Even where union and party memberships were mutually reinforcing, there was no predictable relationship between the two. In some areas, Labour Parties themselves took a lead in organizing trade unionists, as in Taunton, where the DLP helped the NUAW to establish new branches in the 1930s.63 Elsewhere, as in North Norfolk, local parties were grafted onto agricultural union branch membership. In Chichester, four new local party branches were formed after the NUAW provided the divisional secretary with names and addresses of its members.64 The NUAW sometimes played a part in establishing DLPs, including that at Eye in Suffolk, and between 1919 and 1939, the NUAW was, at various points, affiliated to 102 Divisional 59 61 63 64

60 28th Conference, 1928, 253. Daily Herald, 15 December 1926. 62 Record, April 1931. 29th Conference, 1929, 203. Somerset RO, DD/TLP/1/1, minutes, 24 February 1934. 38th Conference, 1939, 316.


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Labour Parties in England and Wales, though not all at once.65 Even where the NUAW had a special interest in a constituency, it made grants towards election expenditure rather than annual grants for organization, so no DLP could rely on the backing of the agricultural trade union to guarantee its day-to-day finance. In Scotland, the Farm Servants’ Union paid grants or affiliations at one time or another to DLPs in West Perth, West Fife, Forfar, North Lanark, North Midlothian, South Midlothian and Peebles, West Lothian, and North Ayrshire, but it did not have sufficient local strength to determine the character of the Labour Party in any particular constituency.66 In 1926, the Suffolk Federation of Trades Councils and Labour Parties forwarded a resolution calling upon the national Labour Party and the TUC General Council to assist unions organizing in rural areas, on the grounds that ‘in [agricultural] constituencies, Industrial Propaganda and Organisation must precede Political Organisation’.67 In fact, political organization already seemed to be outstripping the progress of trade unionism. Drinkwater observed that industrial organization had assisted political development in the countryside during the boom years of 1918 to 1920, but that since then Labour organization had become ‘mostly party political’.68 The discrepancy between party and trade union growth began to cast doubt on the utility of the rule passed at the 1924 Conference, requiring party members to be members of their relevant trade union.69 Drinkwater objected to this as a constraint on the development of the party: ‘How can we tell the rural worker in the large tracts of the country where no trade union organisation exists that he is eligible for a Union, and that he must join one before we can take his money?’70 This situation had arisen partly because of the inherent difficulties facing rural trade unionism.71 Where trade unions gave assistance to political organization in the countryside, it was often out of self-interest, as a way to contact their own potential membership. When the National Federation of Building Trades Operatives offered help with advertising political propaganda meetings in rural areas in 1925 the quid pro quo was that local parties would send in the names and addresses of unorganized building workers in their area.72 Rural parties felt under an obligation to 65 66 67 68 70 72

MERL, NUAW, BIII/1–6, Organisation and Political Committee minutes. MLG, SFSU papers, EC minutes, 8 and 9 November 1924, and 17 and 18 August 1929. Suffolk RO, GG 1:2947, annual meeting, 14 March 1926. 69 Labour Organiser, March 1924. 24th Conference, 1924, 153 – 4. 71 Labour Organiser, January 1927. As discussed in Chapter 6. Labour Organiser, July 1925.

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promote trade unionism in their district, and the most obvious target for their attentions was the agricultural worker. The orthodox view was that expressed in the Labour Organiser: ‘The welfare and progress of the NUAW is of prime and immediate concern to the Labour Movement in practically all county constituencies, and to the movement for the organisation of farm workers we must look to provide that backbone of industrial organisation so necessary if we are to win the great rural areas.’73 The South Derbyshire DLP responded piously to such sentiments in 1925 when its agent organized a survey of agricultural workers in the division: ‘the Labour Party being built upon the foundation of Trade Union organisation, it is our duty to strengthen this foundation, and to widen its base until it embraces all classes of workers’. The results were dispiriting: it appeared that there were actually relatively few agricultural labourers within the division, ‘and owing to their being very scattered it would be a somewhat difficult matter to get them organised’.74 On the other hand, urban voters made up about 62 per cent of the electorate, and there were mining and textile communities from which to draw support.75 Brecon and Radnor DLP was similarly keen to expand agricultural trade unionism within its division, with rather more scope to the enterprise. In 1934, a member of the party wrote to the NUAW suggesting that he be appointed as full or part-time organizer in the region: the union was unable to consider this, but offered to pay 6d. for every member enrolled into a branch.76 In certain areas, notably in Norfolk, there was undoubtedly a great deal of overlap between trade union membership and local Labour parties. However, the absence of a direct identification between the two could be liberating. Where the local NUAW branch and the local Labour Party involved many of the same personnel, the party often looked like the union operating under another name. Women easily felt excluded in such circumstances, and all the more so where meetings were held in the village pub.77 In other rural divisions, women could form the mainstay of local organization, and their involvement in the party was surely encouraged by the widely approved technique of conversion by personal contact, with much propaganda taking place in private homes, or by means of literature delivered through the door. ‘Cottage meetings’ were considered 73 75 76 77

74 Ibid. July 1927. Derbyshire RO, South Derbyshire DLP, D2928. Ibid., sketch map of the constituency, c.1929. MERL, NUAW, Org.Sub-Comm., 20 September 1934. Labour Organiser, November 1923.


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a particularly useful approach in rural areas: a party member would lend a kitchen or front room and invite a few friends round for an hour in the afternoon, while a woman speaker talked to them in a ‘pleasant and homely way’.78 In 1926, the party’s chief women’s officer reported that ‘In many cases the bulk of the Party in small towns and villages is women, and often the attendance at Labour Party meetings shows a majority of women.’79 Membership statistics in the NEC reports are broken down by sex only from 1933 onwards, and in most cases do not appear to endorse this impressionistic analysis. There were very few rural constituencies in the late 1930s in which women outnumbered, or even rivalled the male membership.80 As already noted, a number of those parties which persistently returned minimum affiliations estimated their membership as evenly balanced between the sexes, but it is difficult to know how far this reflected the reality. Where rural political organization was essentially independent of trade union organization, alternative approaches were needed to contact the potential membership. Some promising networks already existed in many places, particularly in the form of the nonconformist congregations, which could sometimes be eased away from Liberalism. ‘Where there is a chapel in a village it is commonly supported by at least two or three families of superior intelligence, who are the natural leaders in progressive causes,’ advised Sardius Hancock—a somewhat partisan observer on the subject, as a former president of a Free Church council.81 Itteringham in North Norfolk was an outstanding example of these connections in action. There were two Methodist chapels in the village, supported and maintained by the same people who ran the local Labour Party and the agricultural trade union branch. Seven of Itteringham’s eight parish councillors were Labour in 1927: a rural Labour success story.82 Nonetheless, many nonconformists elsewhere remained loyal to the ‘old religion’, with the chapels described as ‘virtually Liberal recruiting stations’, as in Penryn and Falmouth in the 1930s.83 Preaching circuits and the collective effort which lay behind the construction of chapels were just two elements of nonconformist enterprise

78

People of Britain! All Your Valleys Call You! (LP, ?1938), NMLH, LP/AG/30/106. 26th Conference, 1926, 7. 80 The strangest return was that for St Ives in 1935, which suggests that the party had 40 women members and no men at all. 81 82 Labour Organiser, January 1936. Ibid. October 1927. 83 A. L. Rowse, A Man of the Thirties (1979), 56. 79

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which seemed to offer valuable lessons for local parties.84 Labour parties began to mimic the social events of both chapel and church, as they held bazaars and harvest festivals to raise funds and provide a social focus. ‘No chapel or church in this Division has ever had such a wonderful display,’ was the Labour Organiser’s comment on a Labour harvest festival in the Bosworth constituency.85 Labour parties produced their own versions of other social events in the rural calendar, with Labour flower shows in Shrewsbury and King’s Lynn, and a Labour harvest home in the Frome division.86 In thriving Labour parties, the balance between social and political activity was often heavily tilted towards the social side. In the course of a single year in the early 1930s, the local party at Lode in Cambridgeshire, with a healthy membership of 60, staged four whist drives, five dances, six concerts, and six smoking concerts. During the same period, the party held only two political meetings.87 Labour parties tried to become part of the rural community and build strength within it. Yet, when one surveys the fortunes of rural DLPs, no amount of patient organization seems to have had such a positive effect on party membership as the sudden stimulus of an election contest or a lightning campaign. Parties could grow with extraordinary rapidity. Princes Risborough Labour Party had been in existence for three weeks, with a membership of eight, when a by-election was called in the MidBuckinghamshire division in 1938. Following the contest, the party had contacts in almost all the surrounding villages, and was on its way to having 200 members.88 Fighting an election offered the best opportunity for many parties to expand their organization; in the meantime they could only hope to create the local cells of activity on which a future campaign would be based.89 THE CANDIDATE Great significance was attached to having a prospective parliamentary candidate in place: it showed that a party was in earnest, and justified the DLP as a mechanism for fighting parliamentary elections. This is not 84 85 86 87 88 89

Labour Organiser, January 1932, September 1935, and January 1938. Ibid. December 1932. Ibid. October 1920; Somerset RO, A/AAW, 28, minutes, 10 October 1938. Cambridgeshire RO, Cambridgeshire DLP, 416/0.20, DLP annual report, 1934, 3. Bucks Labour News, August/September 1938. E.g. West Derbyshire: Derbyshire RO, D 1650 G/M1, minutes, 16 July 1936.


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to play down the importance of local politics. Labour members on parish, district, and county councils were credited with bringing about enormous changes to life in the countryside, and representation in local government was often discussed as the most important target for rural parties.90 The prospective candidate in Cambridgeshire, Geoffrey Garratt, ‘reminded’ party members that Parliament could pass laws, but local bodies would determine whether these were effective or ineffective.91 North Norfolk was one area with a ‘proud record’ in local government: Labour won 100 of the 250 seats in the parish council elections of 1925, and five of the ten county council seats, as well as accounting for 25 of 175 district councillors.92 Here the party was as well organized for local as for national politics. However, many parties found local government surprisingly difficult to penetrate. It was partly a problem of finding people who could take time off work to attend council meetings—bearing in mind, too, the distance they might have to travel to serve at county level. There was also a large degree of apathy about local government, which was sometimes treated as almost apolitical.93 When one of Labour’s national organizers visited Cornwall in 1930, she was shocked to see how little interest there was in the work of local authorities: very few Labour candidates were put up, whilst a few party members actually ran as Independents or ratepayers.94 Parliamentary elections were a very different matter. DLPs were encouraged to acquire a prospective candidate, as a ‘rallying point’,95 to inspire their membership and prompt interest amongst the wider electorate. Candidates were sometimes chosen long before a party was actually in a position to fight an election. Nowhere was this so extreme as in Knutsford in Cheshire, where a candidate was first selected in 1921, although Labour was not to contest the division until 1945. Finding an appropriate candidate was not easy. Rural divisions could be unattractive prospects. ‘Travelling alone occupies much of the candidate’s available 90 NLS, Duncan papers, memo by Maurice Hewlett, ‘Local Government and the Village’, LP Advisory Committee on Rural Problems, 7 August 1918; The Labour Party and the Countryside (LP, 1921), 11. 91 Cambridgeshire RO, Cambridgeshire DLP, 416/0.35, Labour Lead On!, leaflet, 14 July 1924. 92 Labour Organiser, August 1926. 93 See J. S. Rowett, ‘The Labour Party and Local Government: Theory and Practice in the Inter-war Years’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1979, passim. 94 NEC, consultation of organizing staff, 10 October 1930. 95 Cf. comments by Herbert Drinkwater, Derbyshire RO, West Derbyshire DLP, minutes, 14 December 1935.

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time, and adds to his expenses,’ observed the candidate for Holland with Boston. ‘A constituency which may be forty miles long by as much across seems to offer small chance to busy people.’96 A previous Labour candidate for the constituency, Hugh Dalton, remembered his own efforts there with greater pleasure: he found the by-election campaign of July 1924 a ‘healthy’ experience, motoring around in an open-top car. He also painted an idyllic picture of summer campaigning around the villages of Maidstone after being adopted as the candidate there; he and his wife spent part of August 1922 staying in a succession of country pubs and addressing meetings.97 William Wilkinson, an employee of Rolls Royce in Derby who was selected for West Derbyshire in 1926, likewise devoted his holidays to canvassing his new constituency, though he had still not covered it all after two years at the task.98 Wilkinson had faced little competition for his selection to fight West Derbyshire: ten others were invited to be the candidate, but they ‘came and saw and went away’.99 Rural seats were not promising selections for anyone hoping to be elected to Westminster in the near future, though the chances of getting selected to fight them in the first place were potentially quite high. Indeed, would-be candidates were sometimes suspected of taking an interest in agriculture for purely careerist reasons, in the hope of being selected for a seat.100 The generally poor quality of candidates was cited as a contributory factor in Labour’s disappointing showing at elections in rural areas, and rural divisions objected to what they saw as Head Office’s habit of allocating them novice candidates, treating these seats as a chance to provide electoral experience. The basic qualification which rural DLPs wanted in a candidate was an interest in the special problems of divisions like their own. A few were outrageous in their ambition, like the party in East Norfolk, which suggested that the national leadership should resign their seats to contest constituencies where Labour faced an adverse majority of over 6000 votes.101 Most accepted that they were not going to get a star candidate, and that the best they could hope for was someone qualified for the task at hand. E. J. Pay criticized agricultural experts like F. W.

96

New Statesman and Nation, 7 August 1937. Hugh Dalton, Call Back Yesterday: Memoirs 1887–1931 (1953), 136 and 149. 98 99 Derbyshire Times, 25 May 1929. Ibid. 100 See Joseph Duncan to G. D. H. Cole, 4 September 1919, NLS, Duncan papers, Acc. 5601/F2. 101 NEC, Finance and General, 2 August 1939. 97


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Pethick-Lawrence and Josiah Wedgwood for ‘wasting their time’ in urban constituencies, when they should be in the countryside, where the party had such need of their expertise.102 Some rural candidates were agriculturalists themselves, or had links with agriculture, like Frederick Temple, the candidate for Aylesbury at the 1929 general election, who was the son of an agricultural labourer and had lived in a tied cottage, or James Lunnon, the candidate for Taunton, who was a smallholder and member of the NUAW.103 Others came from a rural radical tradition, like Charlie White, Labour candidate at the 1938 West Derbyshire by-election, and victor in the 1944 contest, who was born in a village in the constituency, and whose father, a ‘radical cobbler’, had represented the division as a Liberal between 1918 and 1923.104 Representatives of the shoemaking union, including F. Gould (Frome), Walter Smith (Wellingborough), and Leonard Smith (Wells), stood as candidates in divisions where their union had an interest.105 Railwaymen predictably accounted for a number of candidates in rural seats, including P. H. Black in East Norfolk, W. J. Abraham in Camborne, and Harry Brooks,106 signalman and playwright, in North Dorset. The NUAW was approached by several constituencies looking for a union candidate, but its electoral interventions were limited.107 In 1922, the union had six parliamentary candidates, though not all of these were official and funded by the union. Only one NUAW candidate stood at the 1929 general election: the general secretary, William Holmes, who came bottom of the poll in East Norfolk.108 Nor did the union seem to wield much influence over the nomination of divisional candidates. Controversy arose over the selection of Lucy Noel-Buxton to succeed her husband as candidate in North Norfolk in 1930. North Norfolk was, 102 26th Conference, 1926, 251. They represented Leicester West and Newcastleunder-Lyme. 103 28th Conference, 1928, 253. 104 Daily Herald, 2 June 1938. For an account of the 1944 by-election (‘an entertainment worthy of ITMA itself’), see Angus Calder, The People’s War (1992), 552 – 4. 105 Alan Fox, A History of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives (Oxford, 1958), 471; Somerset and West of England Advertiser, 3 November 1922. Walter Smith was also president of the NUAW. F. Gould ran a smallholding with his twin brother (HCDeb, 245, col. 286, 18 November 1930). 106 Brooks wrote the play Six Men in Dorset, which, polished by Miles Malleson, was one of the focal points of the TUC’s centenary commemoration of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1934. 107 E.g. by Oswestry, MERL, NUAW, Org. Sub-Comm., BIII/4, 18 October 1928. 108 Election addresses, MERL, NUAW, DII/4; Reg Groves, Sharpen the Sickle! The History of the Farm Workers’ Union (1949), 215.

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of all constituencies, the most closely linked to the NUAW; yet the union had little say in the selection, about which it complained formally to the NEC.109 The NUAW had hoped that its president, Edwin Gooch, would be selected—only to read in the newspapers that Lady Noel-Buxton had already been chosen by the DLP executive committee, without any wider consultation.110 Although the union opted to support the official candidate, rather than press for a selection conference, relations remained frosty. In late 1931, the NUAW again complained that it was not properly represented on the DLP, and the NEC threatened North Norfolk with disaffiliation unless it complied with party rules.111 North Norfolk’s registered membership fell sharply in 1930 and never returned to its previous high level; Stephen Gee was replaced by another agent in 1935, by which time North Norfolk was no longer the wonder of the Labour countryside it had once been. Good candidates could be hard to find. In discussing George Edwards’ old seat of South Norfolk, Ramsay MacDonald thought that the party might usefully approach candidates ‘who have fought other rural constituencies of a hopeless character’, not only because they might be more likely to contemplate such a division, but also because they might ‘appeal to the agricultural labourers by [a] knowledge of, and interest in, rural affairs’.112 Individuals with obvious agricultural interests, including Charles Roden Buxton (brother to Noel Buxton) and E. N. Bennett, were approached, but Buxton was not prepared to look at South Norfolk, and Bennett would not consider a county division at all.113 MacDonald himself tended to dissuade potential candidates from throwing their prospects away on ‘hopeless’ county constituencies.114 Meanwhile, divisional parties often had a quite separate agenda. The choice of candidate had many implications, including financial ones, and a wealthy candidate could prove the answer to a DLP’s prayers. When Frome DLP challenged the NEC in 1933 in order to get the Australian 109 Suggestions that Noel Buxton himself had been foisted on the division when the NUAW wanted to nominate ‘a real working man’ may refer to more enduring discontent over selections for North Norfolk (1932 NUAW conference, MERL, NUAW, BVI/6). 110 MERL, NUAW, BI/7, EC minutes 13 and 20 June 1930. 111 Ibid. BIII/4, Organisation and Political Committee, 17 December 1931; NEC, Org. Sub-Comm., 20 January 1932. 112 PRO 30/69/1172/II/766, MacDonald papers, MacDonald to Egerton Wake, 10 January 1927. 113 Ibid. 771, Egerton Wake to MacDonald, 13 January 1927. 114 E.g. in correspondence with his son Malcolm, and with G. D. H. Cole, in MacDonald papers, PRO 30/69.


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lawyer Ronald Mackay endorsed as their prospective candidate, questions about expertise in the subjects of agriculture and mining (the two major local industries) were perhaps not foremost in their minds. With Mackay as candidate, Frome could once more maintain a paid agent, as it had done when the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives funded most of the party’s work; Mackay paid half the agent’s salary, and arranged part-time employment for him as secretary for a company in which he had an interest.115 It was not unusual for a candidate to bear the burden of funding in the absence of union sponsorship. Divisions could effectively be bought by a candidate prepared to shoulder his own election expenses, and perhaps to support a divisional agent’s salary as well.116 When the hobby farmer and retired civil servant Geoffrey Garratt tried to step down as candidate in Cambridgeshire, he suggested that the DLP should look around ‘for someone young, wise, wealthy, etc.’.117 The successful applicant seemed promising: Michael Franklin, young and well connected, son of a banker and nephew to Herbert Samuel, offered to ‘run’ the constituency on the same financial basis as his predecessor. Generous with funding, he was less keen to spend time in the division. Cambridgeshire, he observed, was ‘just the sort of constituency that I could nurse from London, with . . . every prospect of success.’118 Such pragmatism over the selection of candidates might be a division’s only hope of contesting parliamentary elections. The ‘dangerous but growing practice of making the selection of candidates depend on cash considerations’ was one of the problems discussed by the Society of Labour Candidates in 1933: the society urged the NEC to arrange a pooling of funds to help organize backward areas, so that the selection of candidates might be based on more appropriate criteria.119 It was common to turn to the candidate for specific capital expenditure, as well as ongoing costs: the party in Cambridgeshire gained a typewriter, courtesy of one candidate in 1924, and loudspeaker equipment from another in 1927.120 A candidate’s financial commitment could be very considerable, 115

Somerset RO, Frome DLP, A/AAW, 27. Of course, candidates still had to be endorsed by the NEC after local selection. 117 Garratt to Michael Pease, DLP secretary, 18 March 1930, Cambridgeshire RO, Cambridgeshire DLP, 416/0.21. 118 Michael Franklin to Michael Pease, letter of application, 1 April 1930, Cambridgeshire RO, Cambridgeshire DLP, 416/0.21. Franklin jumped ship to support the National Government in September 1931. 119 NEC, Liaison Sub-Committee, 15 March 1933. 120 Cambridgeshire RO, Cambridgeshire DLP, 416/0.2, EC minutes, 1 January 1927, and 416/0.20, 1934 EC report, 4. 116

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and might outlast the candidature itself, as Peter Freeman discovered when he stood down as Labour candidate in Brecon and Radnor, only to find himself still liable as a guarantor for the party’s overdraft.121 Freeman had been donating £150 p.a. to divisional funds, though he reduced this to £50 p.a. in 1932, at which point the party threatened to suspend its organization, ‘pending the securing of a candidate who is prepared to contribute a substantial portion towards the cost of maintenance’.122 Freeman’s successor as candidate, Dr. Leslie Haden-Guest, undertook to provide £100 p.a. for organization, and had similar difficulties in extricating himself from responsibility for Brecon and Radnor’s debts when he too moved on to a candidature elsewhere.123 FUNDING Most rural Labour parties existed in a state of continual financial crisis. In 1946, a representative of Rutland and Stamford DLP claimed that many rural divisions had been almost bankrupt since the day they were formed.124 The minutes of the party in Brecon and Radnor provide a good illustration of what this meant in practice, offering a blow-by-blow account of the continual battle for survival, interspersed with periods of financial paralysis. The DLP showed a credit balance for the first time in its history at the end of 1938. For much of the time prior to that, it survived only on the goodwill of party officers (who were prepared to shoulder debts on the party’s behalf ), and by running the party agent’s salary months into arrears.125 Many rural parties dreamed of bringing about, in the eloquent words of a representative of the West Derbyshire DLP, ‘the proud position of solvency’.126 Faced with such financial insecurity, parties easily fell into reliance on the generosity of a few individuals. Helen and Michael Pease, daughter and son-in-law of J. C. Wedgwood, provided much of the funding for the Cambridgeshire DLP, while a fruit-grower, T. H. Langan, met most of the party’s expenses at the 1918 and 1922 general

121 NLW, Brecon and Radnor DLP, minutes, 17 December 1933. Freeman was MP for Brecon and Radnor during the second Labour government. 122 NLW, Brecon and Radnor DLP, minutes, 3 June 1932. 123 124 Ibid. 25 September 1937. 45th Conference, 1946, 131. 125 NLW, Brecon and Radnor DLP, minutes, passim. 126 Derbyshire RO, D 1650 G/M1, 10 August 1929.


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elections.127 While W. S. Royce128 was MP for Holland with Boston, the local party enjoyed a healthy financial position on the basis of his donations; after his death it was reduced to ‘a small number of faithful members . . . who spent their time thinking up new gimmicks for getting money to pay the agent’s salary’.129 Large donations from a candidate or local benefactor could transform a party’s prospects, but were not always a blessing in the longer term. Head Office worried that such patronage led to ‘dependence, and in some cases to actual slackness’.130 South Norfolk DLP was reportedly so ‘spoon-fed’ by its honorary president, Lord Kimberley, that the local people had never learned to raise money themselves.131 The national leadership preferred to encourage systems of self-help, however humble. A ‘penny a week’ approach to collecting members’ contributions was much praised. The register for Boxford branch of the Sudbury DLP shows something of the reality of such schemes. Boxford had a population of 505, including 32 party members. By 1933, there were only 9 contributing members of the branch, of whom 6 were regular contributors, giving 1d. a week. Others were unable to give at all. One was described thus: ‘cannot contribute but good Labour man’. Boxford raised £1. 9s. 4d. in a year, essentially on the basis of regular offerings from three families.132 A ‘penny a week’ scheme also operated in Whittington, a small village in the Evesham division. In 1935, the village had just 18 party members, mostly old-age pensioners and farm labourers, but by paying a penny a week, selling literature, and holding 127 Cambridgeshire RO, 416/0.1, Cambridgeshire TC and DLP minute book; 416/0.43, Cambridgeshire Labour, October 1964. Helen and Michael Pease were Cambridge graduates who played an active role in public life and were leading figures in the Cambridgeshire DLP. Helen sat on the Executive Committee from 1923, and was president in 1930, and her husband was president in 1934. 128 William Stapleton Royce (1858–1924) made a fortune in South Africa, and returned to his native Lincolnshire to take up life as a country squire. He was Labour MP for Holland with Boston from 1918 until his death in 1924, having previously contested the old seat of Spalding for the Conservatives and been president of the Holland-withBoston Unionist Association. 129 J. H. Smith, From Plough to College (Boston, 1993), 183. These financial schemes were not enough to save the agent. 130 NEC, 26 July 1933, memo on parliamentary candidatures and constituency finance. 131 PRO 30/69/1172/II/771, MacDonald papers, Egerton Wake to Ramsay MacDonald, 13 January 1927. 132 Suffolk RO (Bury St Edmunds), GK 502/1, Boxford branch members’ register. Maurice Cornforth described Boxford as an ‘out-of-the-way place . . . miles from any railway’, but in 1943 the CPGB could attract an audience of 45 for a meeting there (Party Organisation—Weapon for Victory (CPGB, 1943)).

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cottage whist drives, they raised £5 for the DLP’s effort to fund an agent.133 Fund-raising was an important supplement to membership contributions: indeed, in the late 1930s, whist drives were the main source of income for the Newark DLP.134 At their most successful, social events were not so much frivolous elements in a party’s calendar, as a vital part of financing political campaigning. The precarious financial position of the rural parties was a real threat to their survival. One solution to the problems of funding would have been for the party at a national level to take responsibility for underwriting constituency organization. Requests for assistance from central coffers were a common refrain, and not just from rural parties, but the general absence of funding from trade unions in the countryside made the issue particularly pressing there. The iniquity of inadequate financial support from Head Office was a recurring theme at early meetings of the DLP in Cambridgeshire, which sent its secretary along to Conference in 1923 with specific instructions to raise the subject at every opportunity.135 Egerton Wake was conscious that special appeals, like the ‘fighting fund’ raised by the party in 1923 for election campaigning in the rural seats, needed to be supplemented with help for day-to-day organization.136 But the question of how to provide such financial support remained unanswered. The basic principle within the Labour Party was that each divisional organization should be self-supporting. Schemes for the pooling of resources nationally were always rejected by the NEC, though a measure was implemented which effectively capped levels of trade union sponsorship for constituencies, in the hope of encouraging a wider distribution of their political funds.137 The only ways in which the rural parties were able to benefit from central funds during the interwar period were through Head Office support for propaganda work, assistance at the time of by-elections (through the scheme for insuring deposits and help with campaigning), and a system of grants-in-aid to subsidize an agent’s salary.

133

Labour Organiser, September 1935. Nottinghamshire Archives, DD PP 16/1/3, minutes. Cambridgeshire RO, 416/0.1, AGM minutes, 28 April 1923. 136 24th Conference, 1924, 182. 137 NEC, report of conference on financing of constituency Labour Parties, 12 June 1933. On the failure to pool party funds and its consequences, see discussion in Ross McKibbin, Evolution of the Labour Party 1910–1924 (Oxford, 1974), 156 – 62. 134 135


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THE AGENT Parties needed money to finance election campaigns, for routine administrative costs of printing and publicity, hiring premises, and meeting expenses for postage, telephone, and transport. Much party work was in fact done on a voluntary basis, bypassing the treasurer’s purse altogether. Sheer energy and enthusiasm could achieve impressive results in propaganda and canvassing, even when money was short. Yet there were growing pressures on parties to pay for professional help. Increasing emphasis was placed on the technical business of running a local party. ‘Running a Labour Party is not only a work for idealists and politicians, but for business men and women’, enthused Herbert Morrison.138 One important aspect of this more professional approach was the growing role of the party organizer, or agent. From 1913, the Labour Party at a national level had employed a staff of organizers, most of whom had responsibility for particular parts of the country.139 There was also a national women’s organizer. The role of these national and district organizers was to oversee local party development, adjudicate in disputes, direct primary propaganda in areas where no organization was yet established, and act as agents in by-elections. However, during the 1920s, more and more constituency Labour parties came to employ a professional organizer of their own.140 It might be assumed that rural divisions had greater need of organizational assistance than other types of constituency, on account of the huge areas involved, the frequent absence of trade union organization on which to build, and the relative youth and inexperience of all Labour’s rural parties. Their financial position, on the other hand, meant that rural parties were very unlikely to have full-time agents or organizers. The areas which faced the most serious obstacles to organization had least opportunity of enjoying the benefits of the professional help which was becoming so highly prized in the party in the interwar years. Labour’s Head Office encouraged the trend for professionalization with the introduction of financial support towards the costs involved. The grants-in-aid scheme had its genesis in 1911 in debates about how the NEC could best help local organizations, the idea being to assist 138 139 140

Labour Organiser, October 1929. By 1920, the country was divided into nine regions for the purposes of organization. For a portrait of a Labour agent, see Greenwood, How the Other Half Lives, 251– 6.

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parties which employed full-time agents through grants not exceeding 25 per cent of the agent’s salary.141 The scheme was in operation by 1913.142 In keeping with good Labour principles, it was not meanstested. The maximum grant payable was set initially at £32 10s., rising to £40 in 1917. In 1932, as economies were introduced throughout the party’s expenditure, the maximum grant was reduced to 20 per cent of an agent’s salary. Surely the rural parties were precisely those which should have benefited from this attempt to help constituency organization? After all, it was widely acknowledged that Labour faced peculiar difficulties in the countryside, and that the whole movement needed to support its efforts there. Unfortunately, the grants-in-aid often failed to bring an agent much more within reach for these ‘backward’ divisions. The scale of the financial assistance was one point of concern, but the more immediate limitation of the scheme from the point of view of rural parties was that the grants applied only to salaries paid to full-time agents. For those hoping to break into the world of professional assistance by making a part-time appointment, rather than no appointment at all, there was no help on offer. Bridgwater’s unsuccessful request for help in maintaining a part-time organizer was described by the National Agent as ‘typical of many requests for assistance which were pouring in from the countryside’.143 Saffron Walden was another constituency hoping in vain for a grant towards a part-time agent144; it employed an agent between 1929 and 1933, but was never in receipt of a grant-in-aid, presumably because the party could not afford to meet the conditions applied. For most DLPs in the countryside, the realities of organization were a part-time agent, or an agent employed spasmodically, whenever funds allowed. For those which could afford it, having a full-time agent became almost a definition of their success. In 1929, Cambridgeshire DLP was praised specifically for supporting an agent on its own for three years.145 According to national records, fewer than 17 per cent of rural constituencies benefited from a full-time agent at any point during the period from 1920 to 1931, either in their own right or by sharing one with another constituency. During the period from 1932, the percentage

141

12th Conference, 1912, 15. See McKibbin, Evolution of the Labour Party, 31–3. 143 13th Conference, 1913, 7. NEC, Org. Sub-Comm., 20 December 1926. 144 Ibid. 18 February 1931. 145 Labour Organiser, November 1929. They had lost a previous agent because of ‘financial stringency’ (Cambridgeshire RO, 416/0.2, EC minutes, 15 August 1925). 142


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employing an agent fell to an average of below 9 per cent.146 Agents tended to be found in the more mixed constituencies, often those with a substantial mining or railway element, like Whitehaven, Bassetlaw, and Crewe. The sheer expanses over which Labour had no organizers at all are very notable. There were no agents reported for any of the Scottish rural divisions during the 1930s, except for Dumbartonshire, which had an agent in 1930; Brecon and Radnor was the only Welsh rural division employing an agent for any of that period. A comparison with the employment of agents over the country as a whole shows how relatively disadvantaged the rural divisions were. In 1930, there were 173 Labour Party agents in Britain; proportionately one would expect the 203 rural divisions to account for 60 of these, but in fact they had only 31. By 1939, the discrepancy had widened further. Of the 133 party agents, one might have expected 46 to be in the rural divisions; in fact, there were just 15.147 It is not difficult to see why so few rural divisions could afford a fulltime agent. In 1920 the national salary of a party agent was set at £337 10s.—more than twice average earnings at the time.148 That represented a large number of pennies a week, even putting all other divisional costs aside. Only a party with a large affiliated membership (in four figures, if paying at the basic subscription), considerable support from trade unions, and/or an open-handed candidate could afford such expense. The National Union of Labour Organisers and Election Agents agreed salary minima, and special permission was required to pay a lower amount, with applications considered by an adjustments board made up of representatives of the NEC and the agents’ union. South-West Norfolk was given permission in 1931 to start an agent on a salary of £200, with the proviso that this should be reviewed after twelve months. At the same meeting of the Adjustments Board, North Hertfordshire offered to pay its agent £221 p.a., which was raised to £231. Suspicions obviously remained that the constituency should be able to pay more, and a deputation visited the division a few months later to advise on how to increase revenue and enable the party agent to receive an ‘appropriate’ salary.149 But if parties could not afford to pay the official salary, was that salary too high? At the national negotiating committee in 1920, representatives of rural parties raised the specific problems faced by ‘scattered and rural 146 147 148 149

Taking the 203 constituencies defined in the Introduction and listed in Appendix A. These figures exclude any consideration of the university seats. Labour Organiser, August–September 1971. NEC, Adjustments Board, 29 July 1931 and 8 March 1932.

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constituencies’, suggesting that there should be separate rural and industrial levels for agents’ salaries.150 William Holmes expressed unease about the situation, admitting to the parties in Suffolk that ‘the high wage for organisers was not altogether a good thing’.151 The issue raised questions about the role of professionalization in the Labour movement, and about the relationship between party officials and the rank and file who paid their wages. A more pressing concern for many of those trying to build the Labour Party in the countryside was that agents were pricing themselves beyond what rural parties could afford to pay, and that those most in need of their services were being deprived as a result. The man largely responsible for this unrealistically high assessment of the agent’s worth was Herbert Drinkwater. Despite his sympathy for Labour activists working in the countryside, Drinkwater had a clear professional position, which made him hawkish on the question of agents’ salaries. Through his role as founding secretary of the National Union of Labour Organisers, he was determined to establish agents’ professional standing, using his influence not only to keep full-time salaries high, but to discourage other forms of appointment. He discounted the value and ethics of part-time appointments, arguing that no success was possible unless such agents were giving up their unpaid spare time—which he equated with both exploitation and blacklegging.152 Drinkwater insisted that the Agents’ Union was not blind to the straitened circumstances of certain parties and ‘where the Union is satisfied that the resources do not exist and that there are prospects of development, it has, while not abating its objections, admitted part-time Agents to membership’. However, he added that, in such cases, ‘The Union has also tried to insist that efforts will be made to raise the post to full-time.’153 It was mainly through Drinkwater’s influence, particularly through his editorship of the Labour Organiser, that the importance of professional organizational assistance was impressed upon divisional parties. The implication was that flourishing parties were successful because they employed an agent; in fact, it was safer to conclude that only successful parties could afford to employ an agent. In an attempt to break into this circle, parties made special efforts to engage an organizer, even if they 150

NEC, 23 June 1930. Suffolk RO, GG1:2947, Conference of Suffolk Federation and County DLPs, 12 July 1925. 152 Derbyshire RO, South Derbyshire DLP, D2928, National Union of Labour Organisers and Election Agents, annual report of EC, 1933, 2–3. 153 Labour Organiser, June 1939. 151


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lacked the regular income to justify it. Sudbury had an ‘organiser’s fund’ from at least 1932, based on individual donations and the proceeds from concerts and other events. In September 1934, the DLP was able to employ one Henry Talbot on a meagre £1 10s. a month, but his last wages were paid in February 1936, as the state of the DLP’s overdraft brought the experiment to an end.154 This arrangement did not even register on the central list of parties with agents, and it is possible that other modest attempts to employ an organizer are absent from the national record.155 Evesham was also fund-raising for an organizer in 1935, and for a brief period employed E. J. Alford, previously agent for Penryn and Falmouth; in 1936, Evesham once more dropped from the list of divisions with agents.156 Ludlow appointed an organizer for three months in 1923, in the hope that the arrangement might become permanent.157 Yeovil was employing H. D. Brooks as an ‘organising secretary’ from at least early 1928, but his salary was paid only spasmodically and did not amount to a full-time wage.158 There were cases where the growing maturity of a party enabled arrangements to be made more permanent, as happened for South Derbyshire, whose agent was appointed on a part-time basis in 1919 and became full-time nine years later.159 This was always an aspiration—that having an organizer, even on a part-time basis, would beget success and enable a party to progress to higher things—so there was particular impatience at the refusal of Head Office to adjust its rules to local circumstances. In some areas individual DLPs could not afford an agent, though a group of them could, but such arrangements were never countenanced by Head Office. Horncastle and Grantham DLPs applied jointly, and unsuccessfully, for assistance in 1929.160 A joint organizer was also the initial ambition for the parties in Sudbury and Woodbridge, and Cambridgeshire hoped to share an agent with Huntingdon and the Isle of Ely after it gave notice to its agent in 1930.161 154

Suffolk RO, Sudbury DLP papers, GK 502/1. David Pretty found references in the local press to rural Welsh constituencies employing organizers during the 1920s; see David A. Pretty The Rural Revolt that Failed (Cardiff, 1989), 166. 156 Labour Organiser, September 1935; 35th Conference, 1935, 284. Evesham had had a part-time agent briefly in 1928 (Labour Organiser, May 1928). 157 Ibid. June 1923. It didn’t. 158 Somerset RO, Yeovil DLP, DD YLP/2/2/4, accounts. 159 Derbyshire RO, South Derbyshire DLP papers. 160 NEC, 23 October 1929. 161 Suffolk RO, HA 118:2991; Cambridgeshire RO, 416/0.22, circular, 11 December 1931. 155

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Inflexibilities over the character of appointments and the qualifications for grants-in-aid may have been especially damaging for rural constituencies. At the party conference in 1946, the delegate from Rutland and Stamford attacked the short-sightedness of such policies. His DLP had had guarantees for two-thirds of the cost of a full-time agent, but had been refused assistance to make up the rest: the Conservatives won in Rutland and Stamford in 1945 by two thousand votes, and he suggested that an agent might have made all the difference to the party’s fortunes.162 A reliance on voluntary service was the lot of most rural Labour parties between the wars—whilst all the time being led to believe that, without professional assistance, their organization could never be entirely effective. GRUMBLES AND GRIEVANCES It was not only over grants for organization that Labour’s Head Office took an unhelpful and inflexible line towards the rural parties. Other party rules seemed inappropriate in many county divisions, and rural stalwarts grew frustrated by the national party’s tendency to outlaw pragmatic expedients. This was perceived as part of a wider problem: that people in the countryside were giving all they could to win new areas for Labour, whilst the national leadership would not even concede a few rules to the cause of practicality. It is indeed surprising how little influence rural parties had, given the official emphasis on the importance of winning rural seats. Through the difficulties under which they laboured, and the particular interests which they shared, Labour organizations in rural divisions developed a sense of common identity, even across areas of vastly different populations and electoral potential. An important feature of this identity was a culture of complaint. Rural constituencies were notorious for complaining: Drinkwater characterized many of the ‘so-called backward areas’ as ‘the cowards’ castles of grumblers’.163 Rural DLPs had plenty to moan about in terms of the electoral and organizational task with which they were faced, but to this they could add the grievance of neglect at the hands of Head Office. At Party Conference in 1926, the 162 45th Conference, 1946, 131. Rutland and Stamford had a full-time agent in its early years, but the agent was dismissed when the candidate retired after the 1922 election, presumably implying that the agent’s salary was met by the candidate (NEC, 26 September 1923). 163 Labour Organiser, July 1935.


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delegate for Monmouth refused to support a motion congratulating the executive on what they had done for rural areas: ‘He was not prepared to do that because he contended they had done very little.’164 ‘Our candidate nearly killed himself with work,’ grumbled a party member from Hertford, ‘and, if headquarters had sent one or two good men to help him, he would have been E. Selley MP, now.’165 The Labour Agricultural Group in the mid-1920s and the Group of Rural DLPs and Rural Parliamentary Candidates (with Leigh Aman as a prime mover in both) grew out of such dissatisfactions. The Labour Agricultural Group invited affiliations from local parties, and hoped to address the needs of rural candidates, providing a mechanism for ‘exchang[ing] opinions and ventilat[ing] grievances’.166 Such developments were greeted by the centre with concern. The NEC refused to grant the group recognition or support.167 George Dallas claimed to have done everything he could to stop the movement, managing to forestall it only with promises ‘that a great special effort would be made by the Labour Party Headquarters to help the rural areas’. ‘For a long time now, there has been a deep undercurrent of discontent amongst the candidates in rural constituencies and rural MPs,’ he warned.168 Problems of morale within rural parties provide an additional context for the rural campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s. A Daily Herald editorial in 1933 observed that party activists in the country had complained for years about isolation and meagre support from the centre, but that these complaints should die away with the launch of that summer’s campaign.169 If the situation in rural divisions prompted a readiness to complain, it also helped create a common feeling of struggle against adversity. The rural divisions were understood to be at a very special point in the development of the Labour movement. Stalwarts in the countryside were still ‘pioneers’, operating in an environment where the spirit of ‘sacrifice’ remained strong.170 There was often a proud despair in the way they talked about their work. At the 1931 Party Conference, Anna Ashman from the Newbury DLP announced herself: ‘I have come from one of our rural areas, one of the places where time after time we have put up a 164

165 26th Conference, 1926, 251. Daily Herald, 13 December 1926. Cambridgeshire RO, 416/0.18, typescript ‘Labour Agricultural Group’, n.d. [c.1924 –5]. 167 NEC, 28 May 1924, responding to approach from G. T. Garratt. 168 PRO 30/69/1171/I/312–13, MacDonald papers, George Dallas to Ramsay MacDonald, 9 December 1926. 169 170 Daily Herald, 23 June 1933. Labour Organiser, January 1930. 166

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Labour candidate, got into debt and lost our deposit.’171 Those who were struggling to build support for Labour in the countryside might be forgiven for feeling that the rest of the movement did not take their efforts sufficiently seriously. Michael Pease complained about the condescension of visiting speakers. He had high hopes of one unnamed MP, an ‘intellectual’ and ‘rising hope’ in the national party, who came to address a meeting in Cambridgeshire in 1925. Unfortunately the guest seemed to assume that his audience was made up of village idiots, and his speech consisted merely of a few ‘amusing’ comments, interspersed with patronizing compliments on the size of the gathering.172 Pride led many to react against the customary labelling of rural divisions as ‘backward’. Herbert Drinkwater waged his own campaign against what he regarded as the term’s misuse in being applied wholesale to all rural areas. ‘Our heart goes out to the gallant workers in many a difficult constituency, but we would not insult them by calling these places backward areas,’ he insisted, suggesting that the term served to detract from the dedication and sacrifice of many rural activists, and had become ‘an umbrella and an excuse for cranks and shirkers’: the phrase should only be used ‘when the Party is too slothful or unbusinesslike or lacking in Socialist spirit to seize its chances’.173 A local party in the New Forest and Christchurch division discarded the word ‘back-ward’ [sic] precisely because they thought it was ‘an indication of our own want of effort’.174 Optimistic attempts to treat rural parties in much the same way as divisional parties across the country as a whole ran the risk of glossing over the real difficulties which confronted rural organization. Most Labour parties in the countryside had very little of the organizational and financial support from trade unions which sustained the more successful of the industrial parties. The cultural and geographical obstacles to mobilizing a Labour vote at election time also tended to inhibit party formation and the maintenance of a viable party machine. During the interwar period, the national party failed to respond to the peculiar challenges facing organization in rural areas. Head Office offered very little practical support to the rural parties, many of which led a continual battle for survival, on extremely limited funding, and often with a very small individual 171

31st Conference, 1931, 214. New Leader, 13 November 1925. The offending speaker was probably Hugh Dalton, who addressed the Cambridgeshire AGM in April 1925. 173 174 Labour Organiser, March 1934. Ibid. June 1936; also July 1938. 172


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membership. General party regulations were adhered to, even when these appeared unhelpful. This failure to adapt party structures to meet the needs of the rural movement might seem to contradict the emphasis placed on the strategic importance of organizing rural areas and on the responsibility of the party nationally to support rural propaganda. Yet in many respects it echoed approaches to the rural campaigns: the focus on self-help, a reluctance to make the rural crusade a cost to general party funds, and, above all, the determination to treat the countryside as an appropriate target for Labour efforts. Although Labour recognized that rural areas demanded adaptations in methods of propaganda, it was still assumed that the party should approach the question of their organization in much the same way as for other, more familiar types of constituency.

6 Trade Unionism in Rural Areas [O]rganisers, of whom the town knows nothing, tramp or cycle season after season, from village to village, keeping alight the flickering flame of Trade Unionism in these difficult places. New Leader, 28 November 1924

HERITAGE For trade unionism, as for political Labour, the countryside seemed to represent the final frontier. Trade unionists visiting rural areas were apt to encounter an unfamiliar world and elementary degrees of organization. When the TUC marked the centenary of the trial of the Tolpuddle Martyrs with a programme of events in deepest Dorset, it found that the principles for which six farm labourers had suffered in 1834 were largely neglected in 1934. There was a woeful absence of trade union organization in transport, catering, building, and other basic trades in the area around Dorchester. Despite being under considerable pressure to employ only unionized workers in preparing for a commemoration of trade union values, the TUC recognized that this was actually impractical, and that ‘the fact that Dorchester is a rural area makes a tremendous difference in this connection’.1 Across the Labour movement as a whole, the problems of rural trade unionism tended to receive rather less attention than the problems of political organization in the countryside, but for certain trade unions they had long been of more pressing relevance. The common reputation of the rural worker amongst most trade unionists was not as a poor, inarticulate labourer, liable to victimization and deserving of sympathy and assistance, but as a blackleg. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the countryside provided a reservoir of low-paid workers, who 1

E. P. Harries to Walter Citrine, 9 March 1934, MRC, TUC, MSS 292/1.91/17.

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were all too easily persuaded to undermine industrial action elsewhere. Farm workers from Lincolnshire were brought in to break port strikes in Hull in the 1870s, and the 1912 London dock strike was disrupted by an influx of young men from Suffolk and Essex.2 In the 1920s, agricultural workers were still being labelled as a ‘menace’: ‘a mass of low paid workers, from which in the past the employers have drawn when endeavouring to beat down the docker’.3 Agricultural workers were not only a ‘menace’ in time of strikes; their weak position acted as a deflationary influence on wages more generally. Agricultural wages served as a benchmark around which other wages were set, within a ‘hierarchy of earning power’ in the villages.4 Railwaymen and postmen in the countryside were particularly sensitive to suggestions that, even if their wages were reduced, they would still be attractive to the worker on the land. ‘So long as you have this mass of underpaid labour on the countryside, it constitutes a menace to the well-being of each and every one of us,’ a representative of the Post Office workers warned the TUC in 1924.5 Whether they stayed in the countryside or moved to the towns, agricultural workers tended to undermine the position of organized workers. The general president of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, speaking at the 1917 Congress, described them as ‘the greatest curse in the labour world’.6 As the use of words like ‘menace’ and ‘curse’ indicates, attitudes of trade unionists towards the unorganized workers of rural Britain were often less than benevolent. Even the chairman of the TGWU’s agricultural section, Jack Shingfield—himself the son of a farm labourer—thought that sympathy for the farmworkers’ position should not obscure the fact that their low wages represented ‘a constant menace’.7 Workers in other industries began to see it as a matter of self-interest to encourage the development of trade unionism within this constituency of potential strike-breakers. The Railway Review reminded its readers ‘Why Railway and Agricultural Workers Should Always Co-operate’: railway workers had once been recruited largely from the rural districts, and now they should help ‘our 2 Ken Coates and Tony Topham, The Making of the Labour Movement. The Formation of the Transport and General Workers’ Union 1870–1922 (Nottingham, 1994), 27. 3 Record, February 1922. 4 See PRO, MAF 47/164, report of meeting at Downing Street, 30 October 1947, on the pressures to re-establish traditional wage differentials after the Second World War. 5 Proceedings of the 56th Annual TUC, 1924, 433. 6 Quoted in A. Fox, A History of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives (Oxford, 1958), 376–7. 7 Record, November 1937.

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agricultural brethren . . . not only rendering good service to them but doing much to make our own position secure.’8 Although the first national trade union for agricultural workers, formed under Joseph Arch in 1872, was a movement from within the industry, the impetus for later generations often came from outside, as in 1890, when the Dockers’ Union targeted Oxfordshire and Lincolnshire with propaganda.9 The Workers’ Union’s pioneering agricultural organizers, John Beard and John Simpson, were former farm labourers, but agricultural trade unionism was generally known for a leadership only loosely connected with the industry which it represented. William Holmes, president, and later general secretary of the NUAW, had worked on a farm near Norwich as a boy, but his main career was as a political organizer for the Labour Party. His successor as president, Edwin Gooch, began work in a blacksmith’s shop, trained as a printer’s compositor, and edited the Norwich Mercury: he was remembered in an obituary as ‘the last of a few public spirited men who, although never farm workers themselves, came to the assistance of those who in the early days struggled to get the Union on its feet’.10 George Dallas, the chief agricultural organizer for the Workers’ Union, had never worked in agriculture, though his varied career included employment in a coal mine and running his own menswear shop in Motherwell. Joseph Duncan, the dominant figure in the Scottish Farm Servants’ organization, was the son of a smallholder, but spent almost all his working life as a professional organizer and propagandist in the Labour movement. When such men took an interest in rural organization, the motivation was not solely to neutralize a menace to other trade unionists. The plight of the rural workforce was also presented as a moral cause to be taken up by the movement at large: an almost filial duty. As the union journal, The Record, observed, ‘These men in the villages are the fathers of men who work on trams, buses, road transport, in metal works, brick and cement works, and every kind of factory and industry; therefore, if their fathers are not organised, how should they be the parents of worthy sons.’11 Only sympathy, comradeship, and assistance would help farm workers to shake off ‘that deadly feeling of apathy and despair’, and recapture ‘the spirit of their forbears who made history in the revolts of the countryside’.12 Some trades councils assumed a missionary responsibility for organizing 8 9 10 12

Railway Review, 22 September 1922. My italics. Reg Groves, Sharpen the Sickle! The History of the Farm Workers’ Union (1949), 86. 11 Land Worker, September 1964. Record, April 1934. Ibid. March 1936.


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workers in neighbouring rural areas.13 There could sometimes be a rather patronizing element in this enterprise, treating the land worker as ‘a sort of poor relation who is not fit to look after himself ’, as Joseph Duncan described it.14 The brotherhood of urban and rural workers was by no means automatic, and mention was often made of a ‘jealousy’ existing between the two groups.15 Nor did their interests always coincide. This was especially problematic in relation to the traditional demand of the urban workforce for cheap food, which might be cheap at the expense of rural workers’ wages. It was said that TGWU members would not dare admit to buying cheap boots from a non-union firm, but that they had no qualms about eating bread which came at a low price ‘because of the farm workers’ poverty’.16 The low wages of agricultural workers were proverbial, and presented a strong case for trade union organization. A survey by Seebohm Rowntree illustrated that, where neighbouring industry provided competing sources of employment, particularly around mining districts in northern England, agricultural wages could be as much as four shillings higher than in southern and eastern counties like Oxfordshire and Suffolk.17 But wages were extremely low across the whole of Britain. The problem of low pay in the countryside was not confined to agricultural workers. For a variety of occupations, including construction and employment by local councils or on the railways, there were different wage rates in operation for rural as opposed to industrial areas.18 Conditions of employment also differed in other qualitative ways, and rural workers were perceived to have much less personal freedom than their urban brothers. The NUAW talked of raising the status and standard of life for agricultural workers ‘from a state of feudal serfdom’.19 With characteristically epic solemnity, George Edwards spoke of having devoted his life to leading his people ‘out of the land of bondage into the land of freedom’.20 13

E.g. in Cambridgeshire, ibid. July 1933. Scottish Farm Servant, December 1921. 15 E.g. Frank Tanner, The Land Grabbers: A Tale of Robbery (CPGB, 1921), 11. 16 Record, April 1932. 17 See inset map in front of B. Seebohm Rowntree and May Kendall, How the Labourer Lives—A Study of the Rural Labour Problem (1917). 18 E.g. Record, March 1925 and October 1937; Bucks Labour News, November/ December 1938. 19 W. R. Smith, introduction to George Edwards, From Crow-Scaring to Westminster (1922), 11. Also, comments by J. R. Clynes, on the joint role of the wages board and trade unionism in liberating agricultural workers from ‘serfdom’ (HCDeb, 144, col. 299, 5 July 1921). 20 Proceedings of the 57th Annual TUC, 1925, 501. 14

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With such a large task before them, rural trade unionists shared a spirit of heroic sacrifice which seemed to belong to another age. Ernest Bevin reflected that ‘when you get into these [rural] areas you are conscious of the sacrifice and great voluntary work given . . . getting out of the realm of the super-critic and cynic and into the environment of the spirit of endeavour.’21 Such pioneering ventures acquired a certain romance. In the preamble to the 1920 rule-book of the NUAW, the language of the struggle remained peculiarly alive: In the past the pioneers of our union suffered and struggled against untold odds. They carried the message of enlightenment and freedom at terrible risks, and those days were dark ones for the toilers on the land. By sacrifice and devotion, amounting sometimes almost to heroism, the banner of futurity was carried high in the storm.22

The extent of an organizer’s commitment and sacrifice was often expressed in terms of the number of miles he had cycled on union business. When the NUAW celebrated the career of its general secretary, William Holmes, it remembered that ‘Back in the pioneering days he sometimes cycled eighty miles on the rough roads of Norfolk on a Sunday to address three meetings . . . He was chased out of villages and stoned from platforms.’23 Rank-and-file members were also praised for their dedication, cycling long distances to meetings at the end of a working day, and listening to speakers in the pouring rain.24 In a single year, one member of the NUAW branch in Collingham, Nottinghamshire, travelled over 156 miles on foot, 392 miles by bicycle, and spent £6 on rail fares, all to attend union meetings.25 UNIONIZ ATION AND EMPLOYMENT IN RURAL AREAS The problems faced by trade unionism in the countryside were not simply to do with the difficulties of organizing the agricultural workforce, 21 Record, June 1927. The superior value of voluntarism was one of Bevin’s favourite themes, cf. comments in Record, December 1923. 22 MERL, 2 NUAW, CI/4. 23 Programme for presentation to William Holmes, 9 January 1945, MERL, NUAW, DIII/2. 24 Record, December 1932; also March 1931, June 1931, May 1936. 25 Land Worker, April 1920.


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although they were often generalized in those terms. Most of this chapter is concerned specifically with the history of agricultural trade unionism, but it should be prefaced with some comments about other types of workers in rural areas, many of whom were unorganized in this period. When the Workers’ Union began its first experiment in organizing agricultural workers in North Shropshire in 1899, it had not set out to target them at all: the original aim was to unionize low-paid ironworkers living in rural surroundings.26 The main groups of non-agricultural workers to be targeted by trade unions recruiting in the countryside were railwaymen and council employees, with efforts also to organize builders and distributive workers. In some parts of Britain, mining also offered promising Labour enclaves within rural constituencies. Indeed many miners inhabited a distinctly rural world, as in the Nottinghamshire coalfields described by D. H. Lawrence and G. A. W. Tomlinson.27 The General Strike of 1926 brought some of these features to light, with stories of miners trapping rabbits and receiving food from local farms.28 Idris Davies’ poetry sequence, The Angry Summer, conjures up a picture of bands of miners walking out of the Welsh coalfields and into the countryside, busking to raise funds during the strike: And here we come tramping and singing Out of the valleys of strife, Into the sunlit cornlands, Begging the bread of life.

His miners even entertained fruitless hopes of winning the support of the farming community for their cause: And perhaps the farmers and their folk Will be our friends and greet us And know the truth behind the battle As we play on violins.29

A few specialized manufacturing enterprises were still located in the countryside in the early twentieth century, though their ancestors, the 26

Richard Hyman, The Workers’ Union (Oxford, 1971), 27. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’, The New Adelphi ( June–August 1930), 255–63; G. A. W. Tomlinson, Coal-Miner (1937), esp. Ch. 13. Cf. also Huw Beynon and Terry Austrin, Masters and Servants. Class and Patronage in the Making of a Labour Organisation (1994), 114–19. 28 Jeffrey Skelley (ed.), The General Strike, 1926 (1976), 248, 343. 29 Idris Davies, The Angry Summer (1943; Cardiff, 1993), poems 21 and 24. 27

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rural craftsmen, were already regarded as an endangered species, their disappearance marked by elegies such as George Bourne’s evocation of the wheelwright’s shop, and H. V. Morton’s discovery of the ‘last bowl-turner in England’.30 In 1902 Ipswich Trades Council planned to visit ‘our friends the Mat Weavers in the country districts’.31 The Workers’ Union organized female glove workers in isolated parts of Somerset during the First World War.32 In 1932, the NUAW had a branch in Skelmersdale made up of employees from a straw-rope works.33 More geographically widespread was the continuing tradition of shoemaking in the countryside: even in the mid-1930s, just over half the workforce in shoe manufacturing was employed in ‘small units’: along with the persistence of outwork, this gave the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives a substantial interest in rural areas.34 Even occupations which were strongly unionized elsewhere seemed more of a challenge for trade unions operating in rural areas, but agricultural trade unionism presented many distinctive problems. In the first place, the agricultural workforce was very scattered, only gathered into significant concentrations in a few parts of the country, marked by particular patterns of cultivation. Secondly, the workers were very poorly paid, historically one of the lowest income groups amongst men in fulltime employment. Thirdly, trade unionism in agriculture had to overcome peculiar obstacles relating to the control exerted by employers. The employer–employee relationship was complicated by certain structural features of rural life, most notably the system of tied housing, which acted as a constraint on workers’ personal freedom.35 The position of the agricultural labourer was more ambiguous than that of many industrial workers. Farms might have only one or two paid employees—often working alongside the farmer’s own family, and possibly living in the family home. In such circumstances, class identities and interests were not necessarily clear-cut, and socialists and trade unionists were readily criticized for attempting to disrupt time-honoured, organic relations between master and men in the countryside. Winifred Holtby’s 30 George Bourne, The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923); H. V. Morton, In Search of England (1927; 1936 edn), 7–11. 31 Suffolk RO, Robert Ratcliffe papers, S2/6/3.1a, 18th Annual Report of Ipswich and District Trades and Labour Council, 1902. 32 Hyman, Workers’ Union, 111. 33 MERL, NUAW, Organisation and Political Sub-Committee, 16 June 1932. 34 Fox, Boot and Shoe Operatives, 422. 35 Cf. Colin Bell and Howard Newby, ‘The Sources of Variation in Agricultural Workers’ Images of Society,’ Sociological Review, 21 (May 1973), 229–53.


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novel, Anderby Wold, dramatized the reception of such agitators in a scenario modelled on her father’s experience as a farmer in the East Riding in 1918. A young socialist, who knows nothing about the practicalities of farming, arrives in a paternalistic village and stirs up a strike amongst the agricultural workers. Holtby’s sympathies were clearly divided: her own politics were supportive of the principle of collective action and asserting individual rights, but she also understood the pain caused by the unsettling introduction of trade unionism into a stable, hierarchical society. The plot ends in tragedy, when the agitator is shot dead by a loyal, forelock-tugging farmhand. Back in the real world, Holtby’s father was so disheartened by the strike amongst his workers that he retired from farming.36 The story, in fact and fiction, highlights classic elements in critiques of rural trade unionism in the early twentieth century: that trade unionism was essentially an alien intrusion, deploying urban political analyses which were ignorant of agriculture, and producing a wilful and unnecessary disruption of traditional labour relations. At the time when Holtby was writing, there were three main unions responsible for organizing agricultural workers in Britain: the National Union of Agricultural Workers (NUAW), the Workers’ Union (WU), and the Scottish Farm Servants’ Union (SFSU). By the Second World War, the WU and SFSU had been absorbed within the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) after financial failure made it impossible for them to carry on independently, though the NUAW successfully resisted overtures for merger, only amalgamating with the ‘One Big Union’ in 1982.37 All these initiatives in agricultural trade unionism dated from the early years of the twentieth century. There had been farm workers’ unions in the nineteenth century, including, most famously, the lodge of the Grand National at Tolpuddle in 1834. In 1872, Joseph Arch in Warwickshire established the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union, but this and a later experiment in the 1890s were short-lived. At the turn of the century there were only a few local organizations in existence to mark obscure continuities with the nineteenth-century ‘great awakening’.38 36 Winifred Holtby, Anderby Wold (1923); Marion Shaw, The Clear Stream. A Life of Winifred Holtby (2000), 31–4. 37 Bob Wynn, Skilled at All Trades. The History of the Farmworkers’ Union, 1947 – 1984 (1993), 124–31. 38 J. P. D. Dunbabin, Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain (1974), 84 lists two unions which survived from Arch’s movement into the twentieth century. Reg Groves suggested that five small unions lingered on until the turn of the century, but that, by 1906, only one village union was on record, with 22 members (‘Fifty Years of Union’, Farmers’ Weekly, 11 May 1956, 75).

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Trade unionism in agriculture was thus notable in the early twentieth century for having no continuous history. This left a peculiarly pessimistic legacy within the Labour movement. It had still to be proven that agricultural trade unionism could become a lasting institution, rather than a short-term response to particular grievances. Even Joseph Arch came to despair of the prospects for an enduring organization, greeting the collapse of the National Union in 1895 with tears and warning his younger colleague, George Edwards, that he should ‘never trust our class again’.39 When Edwards ignored this warning to help found an agricultural union in Norfolk in 1906, there was little confidence in its potential for long-term survival. ‘I used to fear that the permanent organisation of agriculturalists in a Trade Union was too hard a task,’ commented the Fabian Edward Pease in 1915, ‘but I am glad to know that the almost impossible is happening.’40 Surprise continued to be expressed that the new experiments in agricultural unionization were proving so enduring. As late as 1934, the NUAW remained acutely conscious of its special achievement: in his address to the union’s conference in that year, the president Edwin Gooch stressed that, whilst the union was still one of the ‘wonders of the trade union world’, it had at last proved that it was possible to organize land workers.41 Although there was almost no institutional continuity from earlier periods, personal links with the past were cherished. As new branches formed across the country, veterans emerged, like the two men who came forward during a meeting at Craven Arms to testify that they had been members of Arch’s organization.42 In Cambridgeshire in the 1930s, memories of the earlier movement were kept alive: ‘The stories of those fights [could] still be heard around the fire of the village inn in winter time, as well as the songs in which some of them are recorded.’43 Trade union sympathies passed down the generations in some rural families. In 1935, the TGWU in East Anglia benefited from the assistance of a retired postal worker whose father had participated in Arch’s movement: the family had had to leave the area when he was a boy, because of victimization, but now he had returned, and was helping with meetings to organize another generation of agricultural workers.44

39 41 42 43

40 Edwards, Crow-Scaring, 90. MERL, NUAW, BIX/1. Ibid. BVI/7, 1934 conference. F. E. Green, A History of the English Agricultural Labourer 1870–1920 (1920), 276. 44 Record, July 1933. Ibid. April 1935.


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AGRICULTURAL TRADE UNIONS IN ENGL AND AND WALES Aside from such isolated connections, the new agricultural trade unions had to start from scratch. The Eastern Counties’ Agricultural Labourers’ and Small Holders’ Union was formed as the result of a conference in North Walsham, Norfolk, in July 1906, in response to complaints about victimization in rural areas following the Conservative defeat in the general election. George Edwards provided the new union with a motto appropriate to the circumstances of its foundation, though somewhat melodramatic—‘Be Just and Fear Not’.45 The union affiliated with the TUC in 1909, but retained a strong Liberal character until 1911, when there were major changes of personnel on the executive in the wake of an unsatisfactory settlement to a long-running strike at St Faith’s in Norfolk. Walter Smith, a socialist from Norwich, replaced the Liberal MP George Nicholls as president. Later that year, the union began to organize outside Norfolk, and by October 1912 it felt qualified to rename itself the National Agricultural Labourers’ and Rural Workers’ Union. In 1918, its concentration on Norfolk came to a symbolic end, with the relocation of the Head Office to London, and the union became known as the National Union of Agricultural Workers from 1920, thus emphasizing that this was a union organizing a single industry, rather than a general union for all workers in rural areas.46 By 1920, the NUAW seemed to have achieved remarkable success. It laid claim to a membership of 180,000.47 Other estimates suggest a membership of closer to half that number, but 1920 –1 was certainly a high point for the union, when it was organizing perhaps 16 per cent of

45 Edwards, Crow-Scaring, 119. The union’s motto does not appear to have been a fixed matter: a leaflet from c.1921 cited ‘Defence not Defiance’, which was also a motto for the NFU! A 1923 poster gave as a motto ‘Protection and Security for All our Members’ (MERL, NUAW DII/4 and 5). 46 The main histories of the NUAW are Reg Groves, Sharpen the Sickle (1949); Alun Howkins, Poor Labouring Men. Rural Radicalism in Norfolk 1870–1923 (1985); Michael Madden, ‘The National Union of Agricultural Workers 1906–1956’, BLitt thesis, University of Oxford, 1956; F. D. Mills, ‘The National Union of Agricultural Workers’, PhD thesis, University of Reading, 1965. 47 Figures from return to the Chief Registrar of Friendly Societies, given in F. D. Mills, ‘The National Union of Agricultural Workers’, JAE, 16/2 (1964), 248.

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the regular adult workforce in the industry.48 Its growth during the First World War had been impressive, even in the context of the general trend for rapid union expansion during the war. One of the crucial influences on the NUAW’s development was the system of statutory wage regulation, first introduced in 1917 as part of the Corn Production Act, under which wage levels were determined for each county by boards composed of workers, farmers, and independent members. The system gave the unions an institutionalized position, since they nominated members to the boards to represent the workers’ interests: as the editor of the NUAW’s journal later wrote, wage regulation helped ‘lend status’ to agricultural trade unionism.49 But if the wages boards succeeded in ‘lending status’ to the unions, they conferred a dubious honour. The establishment of trade boards in the early twentieth century was a recognition of failures of worker organization within an industry and a compensation for the absence of effective collective bargaining. The weaknesses of the NUAW’s own negotiating powers were soon to be exposed. By 1921 the cost of maintaining controls in wheat production had become too high, in the face of falling world prices for crops, and Lloyd George’s administration repealed the Corn Production legislation. This was remembered in the agricultural community as the ‘great betrayal’. Although the focus is usually on the betrayal of the farmers’ interests,50 the agricultural workers also claimed this as the ‘grossest betrayal’ they had ever suffered.51 Statutory wage regulation was replaced by a voluntary system of conciliation committees, in which workers and farmers met without independent arbiters, to produce guidelines which had no legal force. Seven of the 63 conciliation committees in England and Wales failed to reach any agreement during the three years of their existence, and, at any one point, many counties had no valid wage rate in operation. With deregulation, wages fell rapidly, as did union membership, which shadowed the graph of wage rates throughout the interwar period. The 48 Madden, ‘The National Union of Agricultural Workers 1906 –1956’, appendix B, p. 297. 49 J. [sic] Pointing, in G. D. H. Cole, British Trade Unionism To-day (1939), 439. In fact, Pointing’s initials were ‘H. B.’. 50 E.g. K. O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government 1918–1922 (Oxford, 1979), 159; Edith Whetham, ‘The Agriculture Act, 1920 and its Repeal—The “Great Betrayal”’, Agricultural History Review, 23 (1974), 36 – 49. 51 ‘Facts which will interest you’, NUAW leaflet for 1922 general election, in MERL, NUAW, DII/4. This scrapbook also contains an undated NUAW leaflet (c.1921) specifically entitled ‘The Great Betrayal—The Government break their pledge to agriculture and to farm workers’.


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main thrust of union campaigning focused on the reintroduction of the Wages Board, duly delivered by the Labour government in 1924, though in a much weaker form.52 Membership gradually began to pick up again, though the main function of wage regulation after 1924 was to defend existing wage levels against reductions, rather than to raise wages. The relationship with wage regulation became an important aspect of the NUAW’s self-definition. It seemed that only a system of wages boards could secure reasonable employment conditions. When he introduced the 1924 legislation, Noel Buxton referred specifically to the ‘helplessness’ of agricultural workers in collective bargaining.53 A measure which was really a recognition of the failures of worker organization helped to guarantee the NUAW’s very survival. ‘Give us strong rural Unions,’ wrote G. D. H. Cole in 1923, ‘and we shall need no Wages Board.’54 Yet the NUAW regarded the Wages Board as no condemnation of its organization, managing to present an interpretation of agricultural wages regulation in which the machinery was treated as an acknowledgement of union influence, and as beneficial to union organization. In its own interests, the NUAW stressed the need for strong union membership to back its representatives on the wages committees; in practice, the nature of other employment in an area was more significant in influencing favourable wages orders. Some of the highest rates prevailed in areas where the NUAW was weak or simply absent. As one delegate complained at the union’s 1926 conference, whilst Norfolk was the premier county for NUAW organization, it had the lowest rates of pay in the country, ‘due to the fact that there was no other industry competing for labour, whilst their comrades in the north, with factories all around them had a competing industry’.55 As the Depression took hold in industrial areas, it began to remove the inflationary influence which had previously operated in counties like Durham and Northumberland.56 By the late 1930s, the geography of agricultural wage levels was very different from its historical pattern, suggesting a more favourable, though essentially coincidental, correlation between wage levels and union strength. 52

See pp. 238 and 254. HCDeb, 174, col. 914, 2 June 1924. In her study of the trade boards, Dorothy Sells took agriculture as a case study of an ‘unorganised’ trade (The British Trade Boards System (1923), 174). 54 New Leader, 13 April 1923. 55 1926 NUAW conference, MERL, NUAW, BVI/3. 56 W. H. Pedley, Labour and the Land (1942), 45. 53

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Agricultural wage levels in this period were largely outside the union’s control, but the NUAW could still make a case for its contribution to any benefits experienced by its membership. Even when wage rates had been determined in committee, they still had to find their way into workers’ pockets. Underpayment was rife in agriculture, as were evasions of the regulations surrounding other benefits and overtime. It was in ensuring that the minimum wage was paid, rather than in setting the rate itself, that the union played its most effective role. ‘If you are NOT a member, you MAY get yours. If you ARE a member, you WILL get it,’ insisted the NUAW publicity.57 The emphasis on informing members about their entitlements, monitoring the system, and contesting cases of underpayment shaped the character of the NUAW under the Wages Board. The great strike in Norfolk in 1923 marked the end of the union’s career of militancy. From 1924, the NUAW’s main focus became administrative, with particular importance placed on the legal department. It is fitting that the first head of that department, Alfred Dann, went on to become the NUAW’s general secretary in 1945.58 The other major union organizing agricultural workers in England and Wales was the Workers’ Union, a general union for unskilled workers. It first enrolled agricultural members in 1899, though the main effort in recruitment came after 1912, when the union began organizing in Herefordshire. Paralleling the experience of the NUAW, agricultural membership levels for the WU dropped sharply after wage deregulation in 1921. In 1929, the union merged with the TGWU, which formed an agricultural workers’ section in recognition of this new element in its membership.59 The peak agricultural membership claimed by the WU was 160,000 in 1920, at a time when the NUAW, also at its peak, claimed 180,000.60 In principle, the NUAW was an industrial61 union, and this was its main argument for pre-eminence over the WU, though it was not always the 57 ‘Wanted One Hundred Thousand New Members for the NUAW’ poster, 1924, MERL, NUAW, DII/5. 58 Born in Lambeth, Dann worked in a solicitor’s office before serving with the army in Egypt during the First World War. Back in England, he volunteered for land work, becoming one of the first tractor drivers, and at the end of the war, he answered an advertisement to run the agricultural workers’ union’s legal department. He became acting general secretary in 1941 (Groves, Sharpen the Sickle, 232; Wynn, Skilled at all Trades, p. 42). 59 The main history of the union is Hyman, The Workers’ Union. S. Box’s The Good Old Days: Then and Now (Hereford, 1955) is a memoir of WU organization in Herefordshire. 60 Hyman, Workers’ Union, 101. Membership figures were always estimates. 61 I.e. organizing within a single industry.


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victor in public relations. The prominent role of the Workers’ Union organizer George Dallas in debates on agricultural policy made him one of the best-known spokesmen for the farm worker: the NUAW had to correct Reynold’s Newspaper for describing this WU official as a member of its own organization. In fact the WU was frequently identified as the main organization for land workers, despite its general union status. A tendency for each union to concentrate its activities on certain regions meant that the WU was indeed the primary organization for agricultural workers in some places. An indication of the organizations’ relative strength in different parts of the country emerges from their representation on county wages committees—though, since workers’ membership of the committees was prescribed by statute, unions sometimes had to nominate representatives in areas where there was virtually no union organization. The fact that the NUAW provided four representatives for the wages committee in Monmouth in 1927 does not in itself tell us much about the strength of the union locally: there were only four branches in the county. The unions were often hard-pressed to find nominees. In 1937, the NUAW organizer W. T. Fielding was serving on five Welsh wages committees, as well as the Worcestershire committee, and had only recently been replaced on the committee for Shropshire.62 However, the issue of whether the NUAW or the WU should furnish members for these committees was negotiated between them, on the basis of each union’s claims on a particular county. Of the workers’ panels on the 47 county committees established under the 1924 orders, 15 were evenly balanced between the two unions, 8 were dominated by the Workers’ Union, 18 by the NUAW, and 6 were represented entirely by the NUAW.63 The Workers’ Union’s main strengths were in Bedford, Cheshire, Hereford, Cornwall (where they had six members of the committee to the NUAW’s one), Surrey, and Anglesey. In 1924 the NUAW had a monopoly on workers’ representation on the committees for Dorset, Durham, Holland, Norfolk, Northampton, and Nottinghamshire, these being apparently the only areas at that time where it had official recognition as the sole union with responsibility for organizing agricultural workers. During the TUC’s agricultural campaign in 1925 and 1926, the unions were treated as if their claims on the agricultural workforce were rather more comparable.64 The NUAW was credited with 20 counties, though within this allocation 62 63

MERL, NUAW, BIII/6, Organising and Political Sub-Committee, 21 October 1937. 64 PRO, MAF 62/6. See pp. 115–16.

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it had only the eastern part of Suffolk, and was to acknowledge the rights of the WU in Leicestershire and Rutland. The WU was allocated 13 counties, including Hereford, Cornwall, and much of Wales. The Home Counties and the West Midlands were more disputed areas, where the unions were given equal rights.65 The WU had begun by organizing agricultural workers in the West Midlands, along the Welsh border, but by the 1930s it had discovered, like the NUAW, that the most fruitful territory was in East Anglia. In 1929, branches in Essex, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire accounted for half the WU’s agricultural membership.66 Judging from the emphasis in the agricultural pages of the union journal, The Record, Suffolk became the pre-eminent county for the agricultural section of the TGWU, much as Norfolk was for the NUAW. Where they overlapped, the WU and the NUAW coexisted only with difficulty. It is clear that policies on organization were sometimes determined, not by a need for primary propaganda, but to counteract the activities of the rival union. In July 1920, the NUAW appointed extra organizers in response to WU attempts to gain a foothold in Cambridgeshire—a move which was evidently an insufficient deterrent, since, in June 1922, a WU organizer was once more trying to form branches in locations where NUAW branches already existed.67 NUAW branches elsewhere reported incidents of poaching by the WU, an offence for which the general union was already notorious in other settings. Official NUAW policy was opposed to establishing branches where another union was already operating, though a more buccaneering spirit is reported in the Land Worker for March 1920: ‘After a strenuous campaign at Rettendon Common, where the Workers’ Union was firmly established, we have not only succeeded in opening a branch, but have convinced the majority of the Workers’ Union members that we are their proper Union. Nearly all have joined our branch. (Bravo!—Ed.)’68 There was principle at stake, as well as local pride. The question centred on whether agricultural workers should be organized in a general or an industrial union, complicated by the further issue of whether the NUAW could support its members’ interests on the basis of agricultural contributions alone. Some argued that the WU was better placed to relieve distress amongst agricultural workers during periodic or seasonal 65 66 67 68

Proceedings of the 58th Annual TUC, 1926, 168–9. Hyman, Workers’ Union, 152. MERL, NUAW, EC, 7 July 1920, and 1 June 1922. Land Worker, March 1920.


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depressions in the industry.69 A powerful part of general unionism’s appeal was the strength in numbers: the moral and financial support which it could provide from members in other industries. At a harvest ‘horkey’ in Bury St. Edmunds in 1938, the TGWU’s area organizer reminded farm workers that membership of the TGWU gave each individual member the financial backing, ‘not of a little parochial organisation, but the strength of the biggest Union in the world’.70 The general union nursed ambitions of absorbing the NUAW in the interests of unity.71 Charles Duncan of the WU first broached the subject of amalgamation in 1917, to be greeted with the firm reply that ‘rural workers should belong to their own organisation’.72 The NUAW’s objections were not based on arguments of a simple divorce of interests between rural and urban workers, but reflected the belief that agriculture was an industry, and should maintain its own organization.73 In 1928, proposals for amalgamation came from Ernest Bevin of the Transport Workers; two years later, the TGWU made further overtures via the TUC. In the late 1930s, having absorbed the near-bankrupt WU in the meantime, the TGWU again declared its interest, proposing an amalgamation which would ‘for the first time in the history of agricultural workers, put behind them sufficient financial and other assistance so as to enable the whole question of organisation to be tackled thoroughly from one end of the country to the other’.74 The NUAW continued to reject these approaches, though some agreement was reached in defining the geographical regions of each union’s competence: the TGWU was to withdraw from agricultural organization in all but specified areas, whilst being granted prescriptive rights to organize in Scotland, Ireland, and North Wales—regions where the NUAW did not operate.75 For all its talk about organization by industry, the NUAW was often a catch-all union in the countryside. The 1912 rule-book listed a varied assortment of persons eligible to join the National Agricultural Labourers’ 69 See correspondence in Oxford Chronicle, August and September 1921, MERL, NUAW, DII/2, cuttings book. 70 Record, October 1938; also October 1937. 71 The NUAW had itself successfully absorbed other organizations, including local agricultural unions, like the obscure Haypressers Association in Spalding. (MERL, NUAW, BIII/1, Organising and Political Committee, 17 March 1921). 72 MERL, NUAW, EC, 20 October 1917. 73 See R. B. Walker to General Council of TUC, MERL, NUAW, BII/4, 10 January 1928. The Chelmsford branch had the slogan ‘Organise by Industry’ emblazoned on its banner (Land Worker, May 1920, p. 5). 74 75 Record, August 1939. MERL, NUAW, EC, 17 February 1939.

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and Rural Workers’ Union: ‘Allotment and Small Holders, Agricultural Labourers, Gardeners, Navvies, Yardmen, Carters, Roadmen, Female Workers, Carpenters and Skilled Artizans, who from health, age, distance of nearest branch, or other sufficient reasons are unable to join the recognised Unions of their respective trades’.76 The 1915 rules simplified this list to men and women ‘engaged in the work of Agriculture, also roadmen and others engaged in rural work’, the last category being left conveniently vague.77 Eligibility was in practice extended to anyone who had been accepted by a branch, and was not actually vetoed by the executive committee. The 1920 rules, for a union whose name now specified ‘agricultural’ rather than ‘rural’ workers, defined membership as open to ‘any worker employed on, or about, the land’.78 The NUAW developed membership in occupations other than agriculture for two reasons. Firstly, it was often the only trade union organizing in an area, and it was thought better that people should be organized in the wrong trade union than in none. Secondly, agricultural members who had lost their jobs, perhaps through victimization, sometimes maintained their union membership when they took up other employment. Indeed the diversity of the NUAW’s membership reveals something of the fluidity of employment in rural areas. It was often the case that people worked in agriculture for only a part of their working lives: Joseph Duncan described agriculture as ‘run by adolescent labour and senile management’.79 Many certainly treated it as an occupation for their early working years, or alternated farm work with periods in other forms of employment, such as construction work, or work on the roads or the railways.80 A notable example of such a varied career was George Edwards himself, styled through his role in the agricultural union as the archetypal farm worker, but who spent almost as much time employed in brick making, as he did on the land.81 Cases of mixed employment histories crop up in union records when procedures were established to transfer memberships between organizations in the late 1930s. A member from Spalding, who had left farm work in 1937 and joined the NUR, returned to agriculture the following year and re-transferred his union membership;

76

77 78 MERL, 2 NUAW, CI/1. Ibid. CI/2. Ibid. CI/4. Joseph Duncan, ‘Organising Farm Workers’, JAE, 4/3 (November 1936). 80 There is evidence that some farmers in the 1930s were attempting to restrict this job mobility in order to retain a hold on their workforces and keep wages down: see reports in Record, September 1936, and January 1937. 81 Edwards, Crow-Scaring, 29, 30–2, 42–6, 48, 50, and 95–7. 79


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in another case, in 1938, a man re-transferred his membership from the Builders’ Labourers and Construction Workers’ Union after a short absence from agricultural employment.82 Roadmen formed one of the most substantial non-agricultural groups in the NUAW, roadwork being a common means of absorbing excess labour in rural areas.83 Other occupations included in the union’s membership showed a strong representation in land work which was not strictly agricultural, and in support industries for agriculture. The former category consisted mainly of those involved in horticulture. The NUAW absorbed the National Union of Horticultural Workers in 1921 and, from relatively unpromising beginnings, this side of operations became a new pioneering focus for the NUAW. Traditions of victimization were still widespread in England’s market gardens, and the horticultural workers of the Lea Valley were amongst the NUAW’s most militant members during the 1920s. The NUAW’s membership in support services to agriculture included warehousemen and lorry drivers employed by the corn merchants in Spalding. The union accepted some workers from food-processing factories, including breweries and flour mills, though it believed on the whole that such workers belonged in a union like the General and Municipal Workers. Sugar processing represented a slightly different case: from 1925 the union made a positive effort to organize all workers engaged in the sugar beet industry. The NUAW, and indeed the Labour movement generally, had high hopes of the possibilities offered by the sugar industry, the development of which was believed to be ‘of definite advantage to the agricultural worker’.84 Unfortunately, agricultural workers did not always benefit from the new employment opportunities: at some factories, signs were displayed stating that agricultural workers would not be considered for positions, which should go to the urban unemployed for preference.85 Trade unionism in the countryside was predominantly a male enterprise. In 1938, William Holmes estimated the number of women employed in the agricultural sector at about 45,000, with an additional 27,000 in casual work. Most of this employment was in dairying, horticulture, market gardens, and flower cultivation: women worked 82

MERL, NUAW, EC, 22 July 1938 and Finance and General Committee, 19 May 1938. William Holmes to Walter Citrine, 20 October 1937, MRC, TUC, MSS.292.84.3/48. The union also organized other local authority employees, including workers on a corporation sewage farm in Nottinghamshire in the 1930s. 84 Memo drawn up for UK Sugar Industry Enquiry, MERL, NUAW, EC, 20 April 1934. 85 MRC, TUC, MSS 292.53.1/4; MERL, NUAW, EC, 16 March 1927. 83

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alongside their families on smallholdings and family farms, but otherwise few married women worked in agriculture, and very few women altogether were employed in arable farming.86 The historian looking for women’s experiences in agricultural trade unionism is not overwhelmed with material.87 Women’s most common role in the unions was as caterers and supporters to the main players: as influences on their husbands, rather than as workers in their own right. At least one organizer included wives in the audience for his publicity material: handbills for meetings exclaim, ‘All Farm Workers and their Wives should be there!’88 The NUAW addressed women principally as consumers, struggling to stretch their husband’s weekly wage to fit the grocery bill. While occasional women’s features in the union journal were full of economical cooking tips, leaflets presented the case for the living wage to the housewife, advising her to ‘Talk it over with your husband’.89 Publicity aimed at rural women was intended primarily as another approach to reach, and preferably recruit, their male relatives. But the NUAW did have some female members, and there was even a branch at Sleaford in Lincolnshire which was described as ‘rather unique, composed entirely of women workers and managed by women’.90 Later references to female members often concerned support services to agriculture, rather than farm work itself, as in the case of members at a pea factory in Spalding in 1936.91 A women’s organizer was appointed in 1919, but the experiment was not a success, and she was given notice within the year.92 Yet when Robertson Scott wrote a profile of the union in 1922, he found that a fifth of the membership were women, and two women sat on the executive committee.93 One of these, Catherine Flory, 86 William Holmes, Report to International Labour Office Permanent Agricultural Committee, on Agricultural Workers’ Conditions in England and Wales, 7 February 1938, MERL, NUAW, DI/1. 87 See David A. Pretty, ‘Women and Trade Unionism in Welsh Rural Society, 1889 –1950’, Llafur, 5/3 (1990), 9. 88 MERL, NUAW, DII/6, publicity materials from the Wiltshire and Isle of Wight district, c.1926. 89 Ibid. DII/5, NUAW leaflet, ‘A Word to the Farm Worker’s Wife’, n.d. (c.1923). 90 The Labourer, January 1918. The branch numbered 100 members, complementing a larger, all male branch in Sleaford, and was presumably a result of the wartime mobilization. 91 MERL, NUAW, EC, 20 March 1936. Spalding branch was allowed to increase the size of its committee to include two women members, in special recognition of its female membership. 92 Ibid. BIII/1, Organisation and Political Committee, July 1919. 93 J. W. Robertson Scott, ‘The Farm Labourer’s £90,000 Nest Egg, and Other Facts in his Relation with the World’, The World’s Work, November 1922.


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resigned the following year over some dubious expenses claims, but the other, Ruth Uzzell, was a true stalwart of the union, serving on the executive for 22 years, retiring shortly before her death in 1945. She does not seem ever to have worked on the land herself, though she was a servant in a farmhouse as a young girl. Her father and grandfather were both members of Arch’s union in Warwickshire, and she and her husband became prominent in the Labour and Co-operative movements in Oxfordshire; she was the first woman to be elected to Oxford City Council. She was effectively a flying organizer for the NUAW, drafted in to replace speakers and sort out local issues, and enjoyed much popularity within the union, consistently attracting the highest vote in the ballot for the executive committee. At the 1930 biennial conference, she objected to the suggestion that she had received votes largely out of sentiment, declaring that if she thought her seat had been given to her because she was a woman, she would stand down from the committee. Although she sometimes gave greater emphasis than other speakers to the problems of the rural worker’s wife, she did not use her position to argue a special case for women in the workforce; in 1926, it was she who moved that a woman at headquarters should not be re-employed after her marriage. There is little evidence of women holding office at lower levels in the union. Only two female branch secretaries are named in the national records: Mrs Edwards, a ‘middle-class lady’, who was appointed to a new branch at Wildern in Hampshire in 1936, and a Mrs Butterfield of Ongar in Essex, who sent back part of a benevolent fund grant in 1937, because she thought it was over-generous for the member concerned.94 Given the general absence of female involvement in the union, it is not surprising that the NUAW showed relatively little interest in improving the position of those women who did work in agriculture. Members and officials sometimes exhibited considerable antipathy towards the employment of women, whom they tended to regard as part of a wider problem of workers who depressed rates of pay in the industry—a group which also included the young, the old, the infirm, and the Irish.95 A resolution at the 1926 union conference called for Labour MPs to sponsor legislation to prevent women from working on the land during the slack half of the year, as they kept wages down and took jobs which should have gone to men. In 1939, the WI petitioned the NUAW for more female 94 MERL, NUAW, BII/6, Finance and General Purposes Sub-Committee, 14 January 1937. 95 Contributors argued the case for and against women working on the land in a series of articles in the union journal (Land Worker, January, February, May, and July 1921).

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representation on the statutory wages committees, but the request was not well received: the union replied that it was always prepared to give women representation in proportion to their presence in the membership, and had been pressing women’s claims since the establishment of the wages boards, so that ‘where women did men’s work on the land they should be paid the same rate as the men’.96 There were soon to be many women ‘doing men’s work on the land’, but the implication of the union’s policy was that, at least in peacetime, women should be paid the same as men, in order to prevent them from taking men’s jobs. THE SCOT TISH FARM SERVANTS Agricultural trade unionism was organized quite separately in Scotland. The Scottish Farm Servants’ Union (SFSU) was never as strong or as stable as its brothers south of the border, and it is doubtful that it would have lasted as long as it did, were it not for its forceful general secretary, Joseph Duncan, who seemed to run it almost single-handed. Even with Duncan’s best efforts, the union was bankrupt by 1933, and had to be rescued from collapse by the TGWU. Duncan devoted his time increasingly to the international labour movement and agricultural economics.97 The SFSU was founded in 1912, at Turriff, on the outskirts of Aberdeen, when a group of farm workers asked the local trades council for help in establishing a union to fight for higher wages. By June 1912, the union had recruited nearly a thousand members, and adopted a formal constitution. A former Liberal MP for Caithness, Dr G. B. Clark, became President, and a railwayman, James Rothney, served as secretary. By the end of the year, the union claimed 5000 members, across 17 Scottish counties.98 It started its own monthly journal, The Scottish Farm Servant, in spring 1913. Duncan began as a vice-president, was union treasurer from 1913, and took over the role of secretary following the death of the previous incumbent. Initially, Duncan discharged these 96 MERL, NAUW, EC, 17 February 1939. There was indeed a problem of committees failing to define rates for women’s pay, and the Central Wages Board regularly had to remind them of a responsibility to set rates, whether or not women were employed on the land in a particular area. 97 The only substantial study of the history of the SFSU is J. H. Smith, Joe Duncan— The Scottish Farm Servants and British Agriculture (Edinburgh, 1973). 98 Mitchell Library, Glasgow, SFSU papers (ML SS TU), F.331.8813 SCO, minutes of union conferences, 9 June and 8 December 1912.


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responsibilities whilst still employed by the Aberdeen-based Scottish Steam Fishing Vessels Enginemen’s and Firemen’s Union, for which he had been general secretary since 1904, but in 1919 he became a full-time secretary for the SFSU, at its new head office in Stirling.99 Unlike the NUAW, the SFSU had no obvious regional heartland. Geographical expansion came rapidly, such that, within two years, the union claimed to have branches over almost all of Scotland, being absent only in the far north and the south-western corner.100 One of its strongest areas was East Lothian, where the union staged a successful strike against increased hours in 1923. As a membership-based organization, the SFSU was not a great success, though Duncan argued that it wielded influence ‘out of all proportion to its actual membership’.101 It has been estimated that the union can never have incorporated more than a third of employed farm workers in Scotland, and its membership was usually far lower.102 By December 1932, when the SFSU held a ballot on merger with the TGWU, there were only 1800 members eligible to vote.103 Duncan was president of the International Landworkers’ Federation from 1924 until 1950, and the Scottish union tended to look abroad for its contacts, rather than to its English neighbours. In the early days of the SFSU, the unions in England were taken as an example to encourage the enterprise, since ‘some of what was being asked for in Scotland, the Agricultural Worker in England already enjoyed as a result of his organised efforts’.104 Reciprocally, the NUAW (then the NALRWU) modelled its journal on the format of The Scottish Farm Servant.105 However, there was little suggestion that the two organizations might learn from each other more generally, and for most of the interwar period there was little contact between them. Major differences over policy made it impossible for the SFSU and the NUAW to present a common front, even as lobbyists; the Scottish union was perhaps somewhat closer to the WU’s 99 Ibid. EC minutes, 19 May 1919. The head office moved to Airdrie in Lanarkshire in 1931 (EC minutes, 31 May 1931). 100 Ibid. report of second Annual General Meeting, 20 June 1914; also NLS, Duncan papers, Acc. 5601/F4, memorandum on Scottish Servants, [?1914]. A separate organization for farm servants in Dumfries and Galloway (MLG, SFSU minutes, 28 April 1917) may account for the SFSU’s absence from the south-west. 101 MLG, SFSU papers, report to general meeting, 18 June 1938. 102 Smith, Joe Duncan, 38. 103 MLG, SFSU papers, EC minutes, 3 December 1932. 104 Ibid. F.331.8813 SCO, G. B. Clark, presidential address to SFSU conference, 8 December 1912. 105 MERL, NUAW, BIX/14.

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position, but not much. The statutory wage regulation which was so important in England and Wales was completely rejected by Duncan’s organization. Duncan preferred workers to secure better conditions for themselves, rather than relying on the state, and had even argued against the SFSU’s becoming an approved society for National Insurance in 1912.106 His experience of wages boards under the 1917 legislation suggested to him that they did nothing to improve conditions, ‘where there is any spirit or fight in the workers’.107 When the wages board was reinstated in 1924, Scotland asked to be excluded from the legislation. Duncan’s objection to minimum wage legislation was based on a belief in the virtues of collective bargaining to advance all the workers’ interests, both industrial and social.108 His whole political approach favoured the encouragement of personal initiative and responsibility, and was mistrustful of anything which might take agency away from the farm worker. ‘The Union is not a machine,’ declaimed one SFSU circular in 1939, ‘It is an organisation of workers who combine to improve their conditions. It cannot do more than the members are ready to do.’109 Even when the SFSU was forced to shed its staff of professional organizers, Duncan saw the positive side as a reassertion of the responsibility of the rank and file for recruiting new members.110 He believed that the agricultural worker was in as good a position as any other worker to fight for decent conditions, and should not be ‘spoon-fed’ by the state.111 ‘It is much more important’, he argued, ‘to develop self respect and independence in country districts than to rely on politics.’112 Contemporary observers tended to connect the SFSU’s independence of wages regulation with superior union strength, believing that there was no wages board in Scotland, ‘because there is in Scotland a very efficient Farm Servants’ Union’.113 Certainly, in 1924, the Scottish agricultural workers appeared to have no need of wage regulation. Wage levels were much higher than those in England and Wales, and a labour shortage gave 106

MLG, SFSU papers, F.331.8813 SCO, report of conference, 9 June 1912. Joseph Duncan, Agriculture and the Community (1921), 108. Joseph Duncan, ‘A New Policy for Agricultural Labour,’ International Labour Review, 25/2 (February 1932), 186. 109 MLG, SFSU papers, circular, February 1939. 110 Ibid. circular, October 1929. Some temporary posts were later funded from a TGWU grant (SFSU papers, committee minutes, 30 January 1938, and report of general meeting, 18 June 1938). 111 22nd Conference, 1922, 228. 112 NLS, Duncan papers, Acc. 5601/F1.iv, Joseph Duncan to Alfred Dann, 4 July 1949. 113 Comment by J. T. Hinckes at the 1930 Agricultural Economics Society Conference, JAE, 1/4 (September 1931), 13. 107 108


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farm servants a strong bargaining position. It was only in the 1930s that wages began to fall, following a decline in emigration and reduced demand for labour in heavy industry, mining, and the docks. The union was then forced to ask for a wages board, which was established in Scotland in 1937.114 Duncan hoped, vainly, that farm workers would continue to bargain for higher rates than those prescribed by the boards: ‘Don’t be a Minimum Man’, they were urged.115 Despite Duncan’s optimism about the power of collective action, the farm servants had had to seek belated refuge in state-sponsored wage regulation, with the virtual collapse of their union in the meantime. The relative strength of union organization in England and Scotland by the 1930s was its own comment on these respective policies. Duncan’s SFSU also appeared less concerned than its English neighbours about some aspects of agricultural employment—considered detrimental to workers’ status and self-esteem in England, but treated in Scotland as simply part of the job. The tied cottage system was condemned by unions in England and Wales, but Scottish union leaders tended to place no particular value judgement on it. The greater isolation of many Scottish farms made the provision of such housing more necessary, and indeed many farm servants still lived in communal ‘bothies’, or dormitories; Duncan rejected suggestions that this left them prone to victimization for political or trade union activity.116 There were also differences of approach over hiring fairs. These were largely a thing of the past in England, and the NUAW argued that those few which remained should be discontinued rather than reformed.117 In Scotland, where most hiring was done in this way, the SFSU came to play an increasing role in running the fairs, though it did agitate for shorter terms of employment, weakening the tradition of annual contracts. The distinctive modes of agricultural employment in Scotland had implications for unionization. The farm servant system lingered in only a few places in England and Wales, notably in the East Riding, and where it did persist, trade unionism and the wages board functioned as forces hostile to its survival, ordaining the payment of weekly wages and calculation of overtime.118 In Scotland, by contrast, most agricultural workers 114 See Richard Anthony, ‘The Scottish Agricultural Labour Market, 1900 –1939: A Case of Institutional Intervention’, Economic History Review, 46/3 (1993), 558 –74. 115 MLG, SFSU papers, circular, October 1938. 116 NLS, Duncan papers, Joseph Duncan to Alfred Dann, 4 July 1949. 117 Daily Herald, 30 November 1927. 118 Cf. Stephen Caunce, ‘Twentieth Century Farm Servants: The Horselads of the East Riding of Yorkshire’, Agricultural History Review, 39/2 (1991), 143– 66.

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were still employed on long engagements. This actually resulted in a far more mobile workforce. English workers tended to remain on the same farm throughout their working lives in agriculture, whereas in Scotland it was unusual for labourers to stay on a farm two years running. The annual ‘shifting’ was a major challenge for union organization: the recurring theme in SFSU circulars to branches was ‘send all changes of address to Head Office’. Difficulties of maintaining contact produced a union in which the membership was ever changing. The system dictated a distinctive pattern to union activity, with the union most active in the run-up to hirings at Whitsun and Martinmas, providing information for workers who were about to commit themselves to a contract and employer for a whole year. At the time of the hirings, the Scottish union tried to adopt a trade union role more conventional than that of its English counterparts, by organizing the workforce to agree collectively on the price to place on their labour. From 1927, the SFSU advised workers against moving places, in an attempt to keep the hirings small and fight proposed wage reductions, but the system began to recover in 1937, when workers were apparently sufficiently optimistic about securing a favourable contract to risk changing their employer.119 THE CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZ ATION There were certain characteristics which all agricultural trade unions had in common. No other type of union required such an extensive branch structure, and, depending on the forms of agricultural employment in a particular region, branches were sometimes impossible to maintain because the workforce was so scattered. In Scotland, a ‘large’ farm might employ just eight men.120 Joseph Duncan had a concept of the minimum viability of trade union organization in such circumstances; for example, he advised against investing time and resources on work in the Highlands and Islands, where the size of branches could never be practical, and where the work involved was bound to be a disproportionately heavy burden on the union.121 The challenges presented by the geography were compounded by the weaknesses of union finances: another characteristic shared by the 119

MLG, SFSU papers, circulars, February 1927 and October 1937. Duncan, ‘Organising Farm Workers’, JAE, 4/3 (November 1936), 250. 121 MLG, SFSU papers, minutes of committee for Scottish Farm Servants’ section of TGWU, 23 October 1937. Cf. Duncan’s similar view of Labour Party organization in the countryside, p. 143. 120


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agricultural unions was that they had to be funded on the basis of a very low subscription. When the WU was absorbed into the TGWU, the merger allowed for the agricultural workers’ subscription to remain at a lower level than the general membership fee. The paucity of funding placed restrictions on trade union activity, as illustrated by the experience of the SFSU. One of the fundamental problems which undermined the viability of the Scottish union was its high expenditure on benefits. Sickness benefit for members was introduced at an early stage and proved a heavy burden on funds, particularly during the winter months. In 1922, sickness benefit accounted for £1718 out of total expenditure of £2300.122 In 1927, benefit levels were cut, and Duncan had to remind the membership that no union had a contribution as low as theirs; yet no other union paid sickness benefit out of the ordinary contribution either.123 At the time, for every 10d. which Head Office received from women members, it was paying out 11d. in sickness benefit, amidst suspicions that some women were joining the union for this benefit alone; the SFSU certainly had a much higher female membership than the NUAW, and the explanation may not lie entirely in different employment patterns in England and Scotland.124 The SFSU had further problems with people exploiting the cheap legal aid which it provided: in 1938, more than half the legal aid claims came from those who had recently joined the union, and it was decided, rather late in the day, that legal aid should not be extended to those already involved in a dispute before joining.125 The NUAW had been more prudent than the SFSU, for many years resisting pressure to introduce friendly society benefits, emphasizing that it was a ‘fighting union’, and that contributions were an insurance against poor employment conditions, not against ill health and changes in personal circumstances.126 Such eventualities were covered only by a voluntary scheme of benevolent funds, though the award of these grants was acknowledged to provide good publicity for the union.127 The main benefit offered by the NUAW was legal assistance. The vulnerability of land workers to eviction, redundancy, and physical accident made this an important part of the union’s work. In 1937, the compensation

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MLG, SFSU papers, EC minutes, 11 March 1922. 124 Ibid. statement to branches, April 1927. Ibid. circular, June 1927. 125 Ibid. circular, November 1938. 126 MERL, NUAW, DII/3, R. B. Walker to the press, July 1921. 127 Handbills advertised meetings where cheques would be presented to members, ibid. DII/6, handbills, c.1926–8. 123

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settlements which the legal department managed to secure for union members exceeded the value of the NUAW’s total income by £3224.128 When compensation cheques were presented, this was usually made a public event, for example as part of a meeting in the village schoolroom, or during a union demonstration. Compensation cheques were reproduced on propaganda literature, as ‘proof ’ that the union got its members the benefits it promised: that membership was ‘worth while’.129 The benefits which members enjoyed were thus largely indirect: not payments from union funds, but large sums nonetheless, in the form of negotiated wages and compensation payments. Whilst emphasizing how much money it had been able to secure on its members’ behalf, the NUAW was at pains to point out how little it spent on its own organization. William Holmes, as president of the NUAW, claimed in 1926 that theirs was the cheapest union executive in the country, and that their officials were the worst paid of any union.130 The emphasis on economy was a vital part of public relations. One legacy which had survived from the nineteenth-century agricultural unions was the suspicion that union officials made unreasonable profits from their impoverished membership. There had been disputes within Arch’s union about the use of money, especially the union’s sick funds. ‘In later years’, wrote Reg Groves, the NUAW’s official historian, ‘attempts to win the farm workers for trade unionism were hampered by memories among the villages of these reports about the misuse of union funds.’131 Suspicions could be easily aroused. When F. O. Roberts borrowed a car to get to a meeting during an organizing tour for the NUAW, his mode of transport started a rumour: ‘That is where your money is going—to pay for the motor car.’132 There was even debate over whether details of organizers’ salaries should be made public, in case farmers used the figures to poison the minds of the workers against the union.133 John Beard related a ‘common view’ among farm workers that by joining a union they would only be ‘paying money to create big salaries for agitators’.134 There are certainly examples of this theme being taken up in opposition propaganda. At the 1921 by-election in Taunton, campaigners for the coalition candidate

128 129 130 131 132 133

Ibid. BVI/7, presidential address at 1938 conference. E.g. NUAW leaflet, ‘Is it worth while?’, c.1925 (ibid. DII/5). Ibid. BVI/3, William Holmes at 1926 conference. Groves, Sharpen the Sickle, p. 83. MERL, NUAW, BVI/5, 1930 conference. 134 Ibid. BVI/3, 1926 conference. Hyman, Workers’ Union, 190.


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Arthur Griffith-Boscawen told electors that half of all contributions to the NUAW went on salaries and expenses.135 Agricultural trade unionism seems to have been particularly vulnerable to accusations of improper conduct. When R. B. Walker was forced to step down as general secretary of the NUAW in 1928, the executive planted hints that his departure was due to financial misconduct, encouraging members not to press for any further details, in case these became public, damaging the union’s reputation.136 In fact, the NUAW executive committee minutes reveal a potentially embarrassing record of branch secretaries helping themselves to union funds in the 1920s and 1930s, often to settle debts or pay their rent following victimization resulting from their involvement in the union. Victimization, whether feared or actual, was recognized as one of the constraints on trade unionism in rural areas. Unions often chose not to publicize names and addresses of branch secretaries, ‘because these names and addresses in other people’s hands might be a considerable disadvantage to the persons concerned’.137 Some organizers took up a career in Labour organization because of victimization by local farmers. William Codling, who retired as an NUAW organizer in 1928, at the age of 70, lost his farm job after winning a seat on the rural district council; thereafter he combined work for the union with a job as a hawker. When workers in Lincolnshire in 1939 started wearing their union badges in public and contesting the job of secretary (which had once been difficult to give away) this was taken as a sign that victimization was at last becoming a thing of the past.138 Agricultural workers were often reluctant to take a leading role in their own union. The individual who acted as branch secretary and county chairman for the NUAW in Devon resigned both positions in 1932 ‘on 135 MERL, NUAW, DII/3, f.47, campaign literature. The NUAW issued a circular in response, entitled ‘Political Trickery Exposed’ (DII/4, cuttings book). Griffith-Boscawen was trying to regain a seat in the Commons, after the indignity of losing the by-election in Dudley precipitated by his appointment as Minister of Agriculture. 136 MERL, NUAW, BVI/4, 1928 conference, comments by William Holmes. Walker’s departure from the union marked an important watershed, his radical political views at variance with the moderate leadership which succeeded him. Reading through the union archive it is easy to succumb to the executive’s version about Walker’s financial misconduct—the supposed truth lurking behind the vague comments about ‘ill health’ offered to the membership. However, Nick Mansfield reports one activist’s alternative version of events: that Walker had left his wife for another woman, and that the moralistic Methodist faction in the union forced him out (‘Agricultural Trades Unionism in Shropshire 1900–1930’, PhD thesis, University of Wolverhampton, 1997, 106 n. 38). 137 MERL, NUAW, BVI/6, Edwin Gooch at 1932 NUAW conference. 138 Country Standard, January 1939.

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the grounds that the Devonshire farm worker was too ignorant and careless to protect himself and his interests and that he was tired of trying to work for him.’139 Yet Holmes celebrated the fact that the NUAW was the first organization of its kind to be self-supporting, rather than dependent on wealthy supporters, as Arch’s union had been. Ten of the twelve members of the NUAW executive in 1928 were ‘presently engaged’ as workers on the land, and the other two closely connected to it.140 Duncan was also proud that, as he saw it, agricultural unions in Britain had been a ‘genuine effort arising out of the farmworkers themselves’, unlike organizations elsewhere in Europe.141 In practice, agricultural trade unionism often benefited from help from outside the industry. At Aberffraw, on Anglesey, branch meetings were chaired by the village schoolmaster in the schoolroom.142 Railwaymen were prominent in local organizations from the beginning: the Collingham branch of the NALRWU in Nottinghamshire, for example, was established in 1916 at a meeting held under the joint auspices of the NUR and the agricultural labourers’ union.143 The organization of agricultural workers around Dorchester during the First World War was begun by railwaymen from Poole.144 Railway workers frequently acted as branch officers when other union members were afraid to do so.145 In one part of Norfolk, six out of eighteen agricultural union branches had secretaries who did not work in agriculture.146 This was common across the country, and there was no automatic expectation that NUAW branch secretaries should be members of the union in which they held office: when a postman stepped into the breach to replace a disgraced local secretary in 1927, the only condition was that he should be a member of his own union, namely the Postal Workers.147 The secretary of the NUAW branch at Gipsey Bridge in Lincolnshire was a member of the NUR, but never became a member of the NUAW, despite running the branch for twenty years.148 There were concerns that workers from other industries could have different priorities from agricultural workers themselves and, in particular, that they might be more inclined towards militancy; strike action was 139 140 141 142 143 144 146 147

MERL, NUAW, Organisation and Political Sub-Committee, 21 July 1932. Ibid. BVI/4, 1928 conference. Duncan, ‘Organising Farm Workers’, JAE, 4/3 (November 1936), 251–2. Record, November 1930. MERL, NUAW, BV/2, secretary’s minute book. 145 Land Worker, January 1921. Box, Good Old Days, 3. MERL, NUAW, BVI/7, 1934 conference. 148 Ibid. EC, 19 January 1927. Ibid. EC, 21 April 1939.


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notoriously difficult to bring to a successful conclusion in agriculture, and had often proved the downfall of unions in the past.149 But workers from other backgrounds were at least more likely to have some experience of trade unionism. The TGWU seized on former miners and others from the depressed areas who were now working in horticulture, and might be of ‘great assistance’ in efforts to build up organization amongst horticultural workers.150 There were maverick agitators too, like Gerald Shove, the economist, who spent the First World War looking after poultry on Philip Morrell’s farm at Garsington, and promptly organized his fellow conscientious objectors into a trade union: the farmworkers from the village proved less enthusiastic to join.151 When non-agricultural workers acted as spokesmen for land workers this could raise questions about whose interests were actually being promoted. NUAW nominees on agricultural wages committees usually had some connection with agriculture, but the same was not necessarily true of Workers’ Union representatives. The leader of the workers’ side on the committee in Kent had started life as a dock worker.152 The TGWU’s representatives on the Brecon and Radnor wages committee in 1935 were railwaymen and others unconnected with farming, who voted with the farmers against an increase in agricultural wages.153 WORKERS AND L ABOURERS Additional tensions afflicted the relationship between agricultural trade unionists and representatives of other industries. When the Workers’ Union began recruiting agricultural workers, it justified this on the grounds that, like others amongst its members, they were unskilled; John Beard (himself once a farm worker) commented that ‘any man who has ordinary gumption and strength’ could work on a farm.154 The NUAW, by contrast, strenuously rejected the notion that any form of agricultural work was unskilled, and resisted moves within farming to categorize workers as ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’, reflected in different 149

E.g. ibid. EC, 10 November 1919, comments on a dispute in Staffordshire. Record, July 1936. Sandra Jobson Darroch, Ottoline. The Life of Ottoline Morrell (1976), 24. 152 Record, February 1933. 153 MERL, NUAW, EC, 23 August 1935; PRO, MAF 64/97, minutes of Brecon and Radnor Wages Committee. 154 50th Annual Report of the TUC, 1918, 155. 150 151

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grades of pay.155 Nonetheless, the reliance on a casual workforce at crucial points in the farming year weakened the claim to skilled status of those regularly employed in agriculture. Some kinds of agricultural work were recognized in any case as lying essentially outside the remit of the regular workforce, including gathering flowers, fruit, peas, and potatoes, and tying, training, and picking hops.156 Before extensive mechanization, farming was dependent on an influx of labour at harvest time which could not be accommodated in agriculture during the rest of the year. One important consequence of this was the existence of a special harvest wage: the harvest workforce, employed in other occupations for most of the year, could only be hired on wages substantially above those with which farm workers usually had to be satisfied.157 Much of the NUAW’s time was taken up in negotiating the annual harvest rate, despite the fact that the union disapproved of the system: there should be a living wage throughout the year, rather than low, regular wages topped up by a seasonal bonus. Workers from outside agriculture were also to be found on the land at other times of the year. It was an uphill struggle to convince the rest of the Labour movement that agriculture was a skilled occupation, and thus inappropriate as an additional, casual source of income for those engaged full-time in other lines of work. In 1921, NUAW branches in Devon and Cornwall complained about railwaymen working on the land in their spare time, and officials of the NUR were said to be doing their utmost to stop the practice.158 The problem became more widespread, or at least was more widely reported, in the 1930s, with cases of miners in Yorkshire, and railwaymen in Wales, Devon, and Shropshire, working on the land while agricultural workers were unemployed. In 1939 the executive of the NUAW condemned members of other unions in Worcester who were working on farms in the evenings and on Saturday afternoons, for wages 155 MERL, NUAW, EC, 21 October 1938. Despite the fact that ‘special classes’, e.g. stockmen and teamsmen, were recognized in the wage rates set by committees, it was only in 1958 that official NUAW policy accepted the principle of a graded system (S. Winyard, Cold Comfort Farm—A Study of Farmworkers and Low Pay (1982), 23). 156 NUAW agreement re unemployment insurance, MERL, NUAW, EC, 7 May 1936. 157 See Madden, ‘The National Union of Agricultural Workers 1906 –1956’, 36. The harvest contract provided a valuable lump sum for agricultural workers—to settle debts accrued during the year and to purchase items such as boots and clothing, which their paltry weekly wages were otherwise hard pressed to cover. 158 MERL, NUAW, EC, 13 July 1921. Other unions were generally helpful in such cases: for example, the secretary of the Spalding branch of the NUR intervened to stop two railway porters pulling peas in their spare time.


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below the fixed rates.159 Despite the reputation of agriculture as a source of blackleg labour, the experience of the interwar period shows its workforce as much scabbed against as scabbing. An important aspect of the NUAW’s mission, then, was a redesignation of agricultural employment, to lend it an enhanced status which would deter such opportunistic casual workers. There was significance even in terminology, in the distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘labourers’. In the nineteenth century, the term ‘labourer’ was unquestioned, and applied to manual work in all industries. In the twentieth century, however, despite the fact that organized workers had taken ‘Labour’ as the title of their political party, something of the dignity seems to have disappeared from the name. The description of ‘labourer’ simultaneously became less comprehensive. By the early 1920s, it was particularly identified with agricultural employment, as in the Daily Herald ’s appeal for funds during the 1923 Norfolk strike, where an advertisement declared, ‘The Workers’ Pence . . . Are Saving Norfolk Labourers . . . From Starvation’: the ‘workers’ were the paper’s largely urban readers, while the ‘labourers’ were the struggling rural trade unionists, in receipt of the former’s donations.160 In 1920, the NALRWU dropped the word labourer from its title for the first time, to become the National Union of Agricultural Workers. Even after this official change it was often referred to in the press as the ‘Agricultural Labourers’ Union’, and NUAW officials themselves were not beyond using the terms interchangeably. But it seems that, at least in theory, the distinction was important. When the NALRWU’s journal, The Labourer, was launched in 1914, R. B. Walker conceded that ‘the title of this paper may receive some criticism on account of the fact that the worker on the land is a good deal more than a “labourer”.’161 In January 1919, the executive committee discussed changing the title to the Rural Workers’ Review, and The Labourer was replaced by The Land Worker in May that year. The word ‘labourer’ came to be understood as a term of condescension, and certainly as a means of reducing status. One horticultural representative reported in 1926 that opponents on the wages committees persisted in describing him and his colleagues as members 159

Ibid. EC, 21 April 1939. Daily Herald, 18 April 1923. In How the Labourer Lives, Seebohm Rowntree had taken ‘labourer’ to refer to the agricultural worker, though of course the word continued to be employed in non-agricultural contexts, for those in manual, largely unskilled jobs, e.g. builders’ labourers. 161 The Labourer, March 1914. 160

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of the ‘Agricultural Labourers’ Union’ because ‘they want us to be classed as labourers and get labourers’ pay.’162 Nomenclature appears to have been less of an issue in Scotland, to the surprise of some sassenachs, who thought the term ‘farm servant’ particularly degrading. The journalist J. W. Robertson Scott saw it as ‘curious’ that in Scotland, where the man working on the land was better educated than in England, he called his union the Farm Servants’ Union. He seemed disappointed when Duncan explained that ‘farm servant’ was simply a statement of the prevailing legal position.163 The NUAW’s attempts to break the identification of ‘agricultural workers’ with ‘labourers’ were part of an effort to put agricultural employment on a par with other occupations and to lessen as far as possible the special character of agricultural contracts. In the early twentieth century, there was far less standardization of employment conditions in agriculture than in other industries, and matters of custom loomed large. In a dispute in Lincolnshire in 1930, over the ‘walking’ time allowed within the working day to reach the place on the farm where the men were currently working, the workers’ defence was that half an hour had been allowed at each end of the day, ‘since the oldest inhabitant could remember’.164 In practice it was the institution of the Wages Board, rather than union activity, which began to standardize the terms of employment, and define them on some basis other than the memory of the oldest inhabitant. As the committees set minimum wage rates for a working week of a specified number of hours, they established the concept of overtime, which was previously almost unheard of on the farms. But there were definite constraints on attempts to extend to agricultural workers the rights enjoyed by workers elsewhere. Lambing did not fit in with notions of set hours of employment; weather and the hours of daylight determined working patterns as in few other occupations. Despite this, agricultural trade unionists maintained that farm workers could, and should, enjoy the conditions achieved by unions in other industries, with strict working hours, an end to the system of tied housing, a decent weekly wage to replace seasonal bonuses and piece work, and inclusion in a scheme of unemployment insurance.165 162

MERL, NUAW/BVI/3, 1926 conference. The World’s Work, November 1922, 452, and March 1923, 369. In fact, there had been various attempts to rename the union, the ‘Scottish Agricultural Workers’ Union’, ‘Scottish Landworkers’ Union’, or ‘Farm and Casual Workers’ Union’ (MLG, SFSU papers, F.331.8813 SCO, resolutions for annual general meetings in 1915, 1922, and 1924). 164 MERL, NUAW, BIII/4, Organising and Political Committee, 20 March 1930. 165 On unemployment insurance, see pp. 254–5. 163


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Some argued that hours were a more pressing issue than wages, and that workers cared about them more. Agricultural trade unions increasingly addressed themselves to the life of the worker outside work, recognizing the importance of leisure time for an individual’s educational and social development, allowing him to read, discuss, and take part in activities and organizations—including the union itself. The flowery preamble in the NUAW’s rule-book looked forward to a time when the agricultural worker would ‘become possessed of all those intellectual gratifications that cultured human beings enjoy’.166 In the 1930s, the union sought to ‘shorten the machine life of the man and lengthen the intellectual life of the man’, because workers ‘did not live during work; they only lived during leisure’.167 Behind this, lay a certain ambiguity on the part of union officials towards the main occupation of their members. Alongside attempts to secure a skilled status for agricultural work, there were admissions of the monotony, hardship, and lack of satisfaction which the job often involved. When farmers taunted E. J. Pay that, although he still sat on the NUAW executive, he was no longer a bona fide agricultural worker, he concluded that this was no discredit to him. ‘Only fools and old horses’ stayed on the land, was his comment—a slightly strange observation to make at an agricultural union conference.168 It seemed that workers could only be persuaded to stay on the land at all by making their life outside work more interesting, and by extending leisure time. Farmers greeted such changes in outlook with suspicion: as the farmers’ union in Poole complained, farmhands who had been out at whist drives until the early hours were in no condition to work the next day.169 Trade unionism also aimed to transform the agricultural worker’s place in the community, helping to foster an independence from the established village power structure. It saw itself as a revolt, an affront to the farming class. Its propaganda was often insolent and insubordinate, expressed in cartoons in the Land Worker showing the worker getting one up on his employer. Its watchword was ‘Don’t be a farmer’s man’.170 There was pride in the fact that workers no longer had to thank the farmers for their ‘horkeys’, or harvest homes: instead they ran them for themselves.171 Trade unionism could give the agricultural worker a confidence he had 166 167 168 170 171

MERL, 2 NUAW, C I/4, 1920 rule-book. H. E. Durham at the 1932 NUAW conference (ibid. BVI/6). 169 Ibid. BVI/3, 1926 NUAW conference. Land Worker, May 1921. E.g. text on NUAW calendar for 1923 (MERL, NUAW, DII/7). Country Standard, November 1936.

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not previously possessed: it claimed to be his ‘big brother’, to take away ‘that lonely feeling’.172 When the NUAW’s general secretary, William Holmes, addressed his union’s conference in 1934, he spoke of how union membership might open up wider horizons and ambitions: This organisation, apart from the mere trade union point of view of extra wages and better hours, was for the purpose of lifting up the agricultural worker and making him a power . . . If a man could function in his organisation he could function on the Parish Council or in Parliament. There was no other organisation that could train agricultural workers to take their proper place in the public life of this country than the Agricultural Workers’ Union.173

These grand hopes of making the agricultural worker a ‘power’ suggest a more far-reaching vision of the potential for rural trade unionism than is generally acknowledged, and invite some revision of the movement’s prevailing reputation. Books on the subject have often been organized around a theme of failure: revolts that failed, studies in powerlessness.174 This tends to obscure some of the achievements of agricultural trade unionism in the early twentieth century. Although membership fell off very dramatically following the slump in wages in 1921, the NUAW had once been one of the largest industrial unions in Britain. Its journal was highly regarded as a model of its kind. A profile of its London headquarters in the early 1930s found much to praise: well-appointed offices in an impressive building on Gray’s Inn Road, and an efficient administration, with a good record for securing compensation for its membership and ensuring employers’ compliance with minimum wage orders.175 In the early 1920s, the NUAW was even celebrated for its wealth, in an article by J. W. Robertson Scott, sensationally entitled, ‘The Farm Labourer’s £90,000 Nest Egg’.176 Within the wider Labour movement, agricultural trade unionists occupied positions of prominence: R. B. Walker was president of the TUC in 1921, William Holmes was its chairman in 1939, and George Dallas was chairman of Labour’s NEC from 1937 to 1939. Yet, despite these successes, the trade union presence across much of the British countryside remained very limited. In 1939, G. D. H. Cole 172

173 MERL, NUAW, BVI/7, 1934 NUAW conference. Ibid. E.g. David A. Pretty, The Rural Revolt that Failed. Farm Workers’ Unions in Wales 1889 –1950 (Cardiff, 1989); Renée Danziger, Political Powerlessness—Agricultural Workers in Post-War England (Manchester, 1988). 175 Article by R. B. Suthers, in Labour Magazine (April 1932), 547–51. 176 The World’s Work, November 1922. The editor of this magazine of ‘social progress’ used this as an opportunity for scaremongering about the resources of ‘rampant Socialist’ organizations. 174


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listed agricultural workers as one of six groups within the workforce that trade unionism had scarcely touched.177 An explanation of this lies partly in the fact that the variety of working experience was probably greater in agriculture than in any other industry. The most fruitful areas for organization tended to be those with large workforces on the land, usually in arable areas, and particularly in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire. Where farming was on a smaller scale, for example in dairy and stock areas in Wales, much of Scotland, and the West Country, it was more difficult to contact and inspire the workers. Regions dominated by family farms were unpromising territory for the trade unions.178 Accordingly, union strength varied widely with geography. The troubles of the SFSU revealed the limitations on organizing the rural workforce in parts of Britain, but, by the 1930s, its union cousins in England and Wales had shown that it was possible to form a ‘continuous association’ in agriculture. In some villages, a trade union culture was successfully established: the Workers’ Union had branches where whole villages had joined en masse in the boom years of 1916 and 1917, and where, almost two decades later, there were ‘stalwart men, grown old in the Trade Union Movement . . . men who have proved their faith.’179 Agricultural trade unionism survived by adapting, by reaping the benefits established by the Wages Board, and by weaning its membership off the strikes and militancy which had always proved the downfall of organizations in the past. In its new guise, as a movement focused on legal and administrative work, with a semi-institutionalized status resulting from the system of wage regulation, it acquired a stability few had guessed possible in the years before the First World War. 177 Cole, British Trade Unionism To-day, 275. The others were domestic servants, clerks and typists, women, distributive workers, and unskilled and casual workers. 178 MERL, NUAW, BIII/5, Organising and Political Committee, 28 June 1934. 179 Record, April 1934.


III PL ANNING THE FUTURE The problems of land, agriculture and village life are but parts of the same great problem—how to ensure that rural Britain shall find its proper place in the national economy, make its due contribution to the national well-being, and in the doing of these things find its own salvation. Labour’s Policy on Agriculture, 1926


7 Policies for Agriculture Great concern is expressed as to what would happen to agriculture if a Labour Government came into power. I say this, that for the first time, with a Labour Government in power, you will have agriculture looked at from the point of view of both town and country. Ramsay MacDonald, January 19241

‘ T WO VOICES’: TOWN AND COUNTRY The Labour Party’s early political and organizational absence from the countryside had long-term consequences for its approach to rural policy. Labour was widely assumed to have neither interest nor expertise in agricultural matters. By contrast, the Conservative Party prided itself on a ‘special understanding’ of agriculture.2 During the first Labour administration in 1924, the Conservative MP for Yeovil described it as ‘a matter of sincere regret to everyone interested in agriculture’ that so few Labour MPs had links with the rural constituencies or any first-hand knowledge of agriculture, meaning that the party was unable to consider the subject ‘in the way it ought to be considered’.3 Labour was sensitive to such comments. In objective terms, there was nothing to disqualify the party from defining policies for a sector in which its members had little direct involvement, any more than there was to exclude it from policy making on foreign affairs or financial matters, which were perhaps even further outside its collective experience. In practice, Labour was strongly influenced by the belief that only agriculturalists could speak with authority about agriculture. A lack of confidence 1

HCDeb, 169, col. 659, 21 January 1924. Neville Chamberlain, preface to F. N. Blundell, A New Policy for Agriculture (1931), p. ix. 3 HCDeb, 171, col. 2486, 3 April 1924. 2

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in its own capabilities and a fear of being criticized for ignoring expert opinion were striking features of Labour’s approach to rural policy. The fact that Labour’s membership was drawn predominantly from outside the rural nation seemed not only to deny the party any practical understanding of agriculture, but indeed to align it with the interests of urban consumers and against rural producers. Liberal and Conservative propaganda seized on this, suggesting that Labour could have no natural sympathy with the agricultural sector, as a consequence of its electoral base amongst the urban working class, and the central commitment to cheap food which that constituency demanded. Whatever new electorates Labour hoped to win by developing attractive policies for the countryside, suspicions certainly remained that those policies might jeopardize established support elsewhere: that subsidies to agriculture, to take one important example, would make Labour’s position ‘indefensible in the large industrial centres’.4 In the early 1920s, MacDonald argued that ‘the very first essential’ of a good agricultural programme was to get town and country united ‘in a national policy’,5 and Labour continued to advocate a ‘co-operative understanding’ between town and country, contrasting this with a Conservative policy which would supposedly bring the two nations into conflict.6 Such attempts to promote the common interests of the urban and rural populations did not prevent opponents from pointing, with some justification, to apparent inconsistencies in Labour’s programme. When comparing the party’s stance on agriculture with the policies it put forward to its urban supporters, the Conservatives described Labour as speaking with ‘two voices’.7 Some Labour spokesmen, meanwhile, provided plenty of evidence to support criticisms that their party was fundamentally unsympathetic towards agriculture. In defining themselves against the Conservatives, Labour politicians tended to reject assumptions about the privileged status of farming, traditionally associated with the political right.8 Long 4 Memorandum by J. H. Alpass and Fred Gould, circulated to Cabinet 1 May 1931, C.P.112(31), CAB 24/221. 5 HCDeb, 169, col. 660, 21 January 1924. 6 ‘A Warning to Farmers’, Daily Herald leaflet (1933). 7 ‘The Two Voices’, handbill issued by National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations (August 1938). 8 The priority accorded to agriculture was in fact becoming a less significant feature of the Conservative Party itself in the interwar period: see Simon J. Moore, ‘Reactions to Agricultural Depression: The Agrarian Conservative Party in England and Wales, 1920 –1929’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1988, passim; Andrew Fenton Cooper, British Agricultural Policy (Manchester, 1989), 2–4, 215.

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before a Labour MP coined the memorable description of farmers as ‘feather-bedded’ under a Labour government, Philip Snowden characterized agriculture as ‘the pampered darling’ of the Conservative Party, and ‘a parasite upon the general industry of the country today’.9 Few Labour MPs between the wars were as blunt as Frank Hodges, who suggested that agriculture in Britain should be ‘written down as a failure’ unless it could support wage levels comparable to those in other industries, leaving the country to concentrate entirely on industrial production.10 Yet such attitudes were not uncommon on the Left, even once the Labour Party was making concerted efforts to engage with rural policy as part of its electoral campaigns in the countryside. The Labour Party developed agricultural policies for two main reasons. In the first place, it aspired to the broad political programme which befitted a mature party. Before the First World War, when it was functioning primarily as a pressure group and concentrating on a narrow range of issues, the party gave relatively little attention to the subject; as Labour extended the scope of its programme, agriculture came increasingly within its remit, as an important sector of the economy, and one of the largest employers.11 Moreover, the significance of agriculture seemed to extend beyond its contribution to the national economy. ‘When a nation becomes predominantly industrial,’ urged the 1926 policy document, Labour’s Policy on Agriculture, ‘the national life suffers, and we should therefore, strive to maintain a substantial portion of the population away from the towns.’12 Agricultural policy had a further, more instrumental importance for Labour in the interwar period: it was considered a crucial element in rural campaigning, and so became closely linked to Labour’s efforts to win seats in the countryside. As early as 1921, reference was being made to ‘an Agricultural and Rural electoral policy’.13 Labour’s 1926 rural programme was introduced to the party conference as a ‘practical and attainable policy’, which was needed ‘to separate thousands of the rural population from their allegiance to the orthodox parties’. George Dallas, the principal author of the document, asked delegates to endorse the policy, so that they might ‘win the countryside and secure a great Labour 9 HCDeb, 196, col. 472, 20 May 1926. Stanley Evans, MP for Wednesbury, made his famous attack on state support for farming in 1950. 10 Quoted in NFU News Sheet, 12 May 1924, MERL. 11 Until the 1901 census, it had been the largest source of employment: see Alun Howkins, Reshaping Rural England (1991), 8. 12 13 Labour’s Policy on Agriculture (LP, 1926). NEC, 24 June 1921.

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majority’.14 The content of agricultural policy could never be divorced from the challenge of appealing to the rural electorate, a fact which Christopher Addison spelt out clearly in his comments on a draft of the 1926 proposals: Our purpose is, I take it, not only to formulate a sound policy, but to be able to present it in such a form that it will enable us to win a sufficient number of seats in rural areas . . . We should, therefore, limit as much as possible, the recital of things which, although very important, are not readily understood by the ordinary countryman.15

This pragmatism illustrates the way in which the electoral imperative not only demanded that Labour acquire an agricultural policy, but also tended to shape the form and presentation of that policy. Criticism of agricultural programmes within the party often focused on whether they would help the rural campaign, rather than on any more ideological or principled concerns. In 1925, the editor of the Land Worker read Labour’s proposals with dismay: ‘if Labour cannot turn out anything better than this wish-wash as an Agricultural Policy they have as much chance of capturing the countryside as they have of shooting the moon with a popgun’.16 Joseph Duncan, on the other hand, worried that the party’s programmes shied away from the constructive policies which agriculture needed, being ‘more concerned about the voter than the industry’.17 Attempts to formulate policy were complicated by these constraints. To whom should Labour be appealing in developing and promoting an agricultural programme? Could the interests of town and country really be combined? Did Labour have to choose between producers and consumers, and between farmers and farm workers? By the 1930s the party was claiming a record to contradict its prevailing reputation for hostility towards and ignorance of agriculture.18 It was no longer a party without rural policies. This chapter focuses on the development of Labour’s agricultural policy, including the approach taken towards agriculture while Labour was in government. Chapter 8 looks at Labour’s attitudes towards farming, and the degree to which these were shaped 14

26th Conference, 1926, 168 and 236. ‘Notes on the Draft Report of Agricultural Policy’, [1926], Bodleian, Addison papers, 129/165. 16 H. B. Pointing to R. B. Walker, 26 September 1925, MERL, NUAW, DII/5. 17 Joseph Duncan, ‘Has Labour an Agricultural Policy?’, Socialist Review (September 1926). 18 E.g. George Dallas, What Labour Has Done for Agriculture and Farm Workers (LP, 1934). 15


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by political calculation, producing tensions in the creation of a nominally socialist programme. The final chapter of this section explores rural policy more broadly, discussing Labour’s proposals for the future of rural communities, and its interest in landscape, preservation, and access. POLICY MAKING In policy making for the countryside, as in political campaigning there, the ILP took a pioneering role, publishing a number of pamphlets on aspects of rural policy before the First World War. The Fabian Society also showed early interest in the subject: a committee of enquiry on the land question and rural development, chaired by Henry Harben, presented its findings as a supplement to the New Statesman, and subsequently in book form, as The Rural Problem (1913).19 The first statement on agricultural policy from the Labour Party itself came in 1914: The Labour Party and the Agricultural Problem, the fruit of a small committee which devoted much of its time to making comparative studies of farming cooperation and working conditions in Ireland and Denmark.20 Although the committee claimed to have kept in mind ‘the ultimate aim of public ownership’, its report had little to say about the fundamental economic structure of the agricultural industry, its main concerns being the level of agricultural wages, the provision of smallholdings, and the condition of rural housing. All this was completely overshadowed by the scope and impact of the report by the Liberal Land Enquiry Committee, issued around the same time.21 From 1918 onwards, the Labour Party had a series of standing committees responsible for developing agricultural and rural policies, and 19 This was remembered as ‘useful’, though not ‘epoch-making’ (Edward R. Pease, The History of the Fabian Society (1916), 228). Harben was making his political progress steadily leftwards: he contested Eye for the Conservatives in 1900, Worcester and Portsmouth for the Liberals in 1906 and December 1910, respectively, and Woodbridge for the Labour Party in 1920. 20 The Labour Party and the Agricultural Problem—With Reports of Visits to Ireland and Denmark (LP, 1914). Denmark remained a source of inspiration for the British Left, as an example of how a nation could transform its agriculture from uncompetitive cereal growing to develop specialized production (particularly in bacon), with the help of cooperative methods and marketing. 21 The Land. The Report of the Land Enquiry Committee, i: Rural (1913). On the competition between the Liberals and Labour, see Michael Tichelar, ‘Socialists, Labour and the Land: The Response of the Labour Party to the Land Campaign of Lloyd George before the First World War’, Twentieth Century British History, 8/2 (1997), 127– 44.

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major policy statements were issued in 1921, 1926, and 1932. The first of these, The Labour Party and the Countryside, outlined a broad programme, ranging from social measures to improve housing conditions and enhance village life, to economic plans to maximize food production and ensure that farming was carried out efficiently. The system was to be based on public ownership of land, and overseen by representative local agricultural councils. The 1926 document, Labour’s Policy on Agriculture, further developed this scheme for encouraging good husbandry and managing the land, to include a national agricultural commission and proposals that local agricultural committees might cultivate land themselves. It also introduced to official party policy the idea of controlling food imports through an import board, offering safeguards for domestic agriculture without introducing tariffs. The final major policy statement of the interwar years, The Land and the National Planning of Agriculture (1932), presented much more detailed proposals for planning cultivation, including the prospect of direct, public farming, alongside policies to stabilize farm incomes and the prices of agricultural products. Constant themes running through all these programmes reiterated commitments to improve agricultural wages and maintain a population on the land. Labour’s first standing committee on ‘rural problems’ was formed in March 1918 as part of a broader scheme of nine advisory policy committees.22 In 1920, it was replaced by a joint committee on agricultural problems, consisting of representatives of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the NEC, including the rural MPs W. S. Royce and Walter Smith, and the land reformer Josiah Wedgwood, alongside Ramsay MacDonald and Sidney Webb. In addition, the NEC appointed its own subcommittee on agricultural policy in October 1920, motivated by the need to ‘formulate without undue delay a comprehensive policy to submit to the electorate of rural constituencies dealing with the whole range of rural problems—agriculture, labour, health, housing, education, etc.’23 These efforts reflected escalating concerns that the absence of a properly defined programme was detrimental to Labour’s prospects. At the 1921 party 22 It was chaired at various points by F. W. Green, Maurice Hewlett, and E. N. Bennett. Committee members included Joseph Duncan, George Dallas, Walter Smith, George Nicholls, and G. B. Clark. Topics of discussion included smallholdings, local government, the settlement of war veterans, guaranteed prices, council housing in rural areas, and land nationalization. 23 LP papers, LP/JSM/AG/7, report of subcommittee, n.d. Members included J. Bromley, W. H. Hutchinson, Tom Shaw, and Sidney Webb, J. Bell, and Tom Myers. The NEC rejected suggestions to augment this committee with figures better known for their agricultural expertise (NEC, 17 November 1920).


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conference, Sidney Webb moved an NEC resolution describing agricultural policy as one of the most ‘momentous’ subjects Labour had to face: ‘Up and down the country they had local Labour parties working in the agricultural districts, and they must not leave them without some inclination of the mind of the Conference upon the agricultural issue.’24 The resolution itself talked about the need to restore the agricultural population to a ‘condition of prosperous security’, in which ‘the land of the community is put to its highest use’, stating commitments to ‘better living’ and ‘better farming’, better working conditions for the farm labourer, security for farmers, and the abolition of landlordism.25 To the NEC’s disappointment, its proposals were not welcomed with open arms. With an opposition led by Joseph Duncan, the conference rejected the resolution, less on account of the proposals themselves, than in protest at the high-handed manner in which the subject was being treated. The NEC responded by convening conferences of representatives from rural constituencies in July and October 1921 to produce a new report.26 The resulting document, The Labour Party and the Countryside, was issued as a penny pamphlet, with much emphasis on its democratic and specifically rural origins: instead of allowing its policy to be settled by its industrial members or those who lived in London, Labour explained, ‘practical countrymen’ had ‘hammered out’ a policy for themselves.27 By 1926, Labour was in search of an up-to-date agricultural programme on which to mount its planned campaign across rural Britain and, against a background of complaints about the lack of time devoted to the subject at party conferences, the NEC attempted to repeat the public relations success of its 1921 policy-making experiment.28 Once again, special conferences were held, bringing together representatives from organizations which had recently put forward resolutions on agriculture 24

25 21st Conference, 1921, 202. Ibid. 201. Ibid. 202 and 213. NEC, 7 September and 18 October 1921; 22nd Conference, 1922, 84. 27 The Labour Party and the Countryside. A Statement of Policy with Regard to Agriculture and Rural Life (LP, 1921), 1. Cf. later accusations that Labour’s land policy had been drawn up by ‘inexperienced townsmen’, in What is the Socialist Land Policy? (National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, May 1929). 28 There had been a number of policy committees addressing the subject in the meantime. In 1923, a new Agricultural and Rural Problems committee (chaired by George Dallas, with Noel Buxton, and later R. B. Walker, as vice-chairman) grew out of the group which drafted The Labour Party and the Countryside, spawning two subcommittees in 1927 on marketing and the acquisition of land. 26

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to the party conference or the TUC.29 Despite this show of consultation, the policy was soon being criticized as an imposition from above.30 Just two conferences were held, each with an attendance of around 30, described in the minutes simply as sessions of the joint advisory committee. The draft report which emerged was approved by the party at Margate in October 1926, in by far the longest debate on agriculture at any Labour Party conference before the Second World War, occupying the whole Wednesday session.31 The 1926 programme remained Labour’s main statement on agriculture as the party entered a second period in government. In the new political world following the 1931 crisis, a new agricultural policy committee was formed, in April 1932, chaired by George Lathan, and incorporating a committee on quota policy originally convened in December 1931.32 The committee met half a dozen times a year, and prepared reports on a variety of topics, including the sugar subsidy, tithe, and import boards; its first task was to draft the policy document The Land and the National Planning of Agriculture. Members included Addison, Attlee, Dallas, Dalton, Walter Smith, Tom Williams, the cooperators A. V. Alexander and Alfred Barnes, John Maxton, and Professor A. W. Ashby. John Beard, John Bromley, and William Holmes were brought on for the TUC, and John Morgan, Philips Price, and David Quibell were later additions. By the 1930s, Labour could call upon increasing numbers of individuals with a genuine interest in agriculture, or at least some rural credentials. Its first land committee, in 1912, had comprised just four members: George Roberts, Arthur Henderson, G. N. Barnes, and James Parker. By 1918, all except Henderson had left Labour to remain in the coalition government; in 1912, they held prominent positions in the party,33 though only Roberts and Parker had obvious connections with the land.34 29 Invitees included some borough parties, e.g. Holborn, Richmond, Camberwell, Portsmouth, and Manchester (NEC, Joint Committee on Agricultural Policy, 17 December 1925). 30 PRO 30/69/1171/I/649–51, MacDonald papers, Jesse Hawkes to MacDonald, 1 December 1926. 31 26th Conference, 1926, 213–36. The conference was held over five days. 32 These were technically subcommittees of the party’s policy subcommittee. 33 Henderson was party secretary, Parker was vice-chairman of the parliamentary party, and Roberts was chairman of the NEC. Barnes’ qualification came through his connections with the cooperative movement. 34 Parker, the son of a farm labourer, spent his early years near Louth, in Lincolnshire, before moving to Halifax. Roberts’ father was a village shoemaker, though Roberts himself trained as a printer in Norwich; he subsequently took an interest in the condition of farm workers and had links with agricultural trade unionism.


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From 1918, and particularly from the 1920s onwards, the committees on agriculture and rural affairs were drawn from an expanding pool of expertise. In 1930 there was a sufficiently vociferous group of Labour MPs with an interest in the subject to be labelled sarcastically by one observer as ‘what appears to be an Agricultural Sub-Committee of our Party’.35 Leading figures, such as Stafford Cripps and Hugh Dalton, had genuine rural interests, and were able to command respect amongst agriculturalists. John Dugdale, who served on policy committees in the 1930s, was the son of a Tory farmer,36 while another advisor on agricultural policy, John Morgan, was a farmer in his own right and wrote agricultural columns for the Daily Herald under the pseudonym ‘John Sussex’. Even so, there were still relatively few who were qualified by either background or interest. When the Fabian research bureau tried to set up an agricultural group in the early 1930s, it found that the membership overlapped entirely with the Labour Party’s agricultural policy committee, and the two parallel structures proved unsustainable.37 The issue of who was involved in developing agricultural policies had implications for attempts to define a distinctive Labour programme. Joseph Duncan thought that its lack of roots in the agricultural sector had made it difficult for the party to develop a policy of its own: ‘Because it has largely grown from the industrial centres, and has been so closely identified with the Trades Unions which have had little rural experience, the Labour Party has been ready to give shelter to any homeless offspring of rural theorists.’38 There are indeed examples of people who seem to have embraced the party with hopes of injecting their own policy ideas into the vacuum.39 Labour’s frequent dependence on imported agricultural policies led to problems of definition and coherence. Individuals were sometimes able to give a lead in agricultural policy simply on the basis of superior rural expertise. The degree to which the Labour movement as a whole engaged actively in agricultural debates should not be overestimated. Discussion at party conference was usually relegated 35

PRO 30/69/244/456, MacDonald papers, Tom Shaw to MacDonald, 1 July 1930. Bodleian, Addison papers 130/168, Ethel Dugdale to Christopher Addison, 26 February 1934. 37 BLPES, Fabian papers, J22/4/2, E. A. Radice to Helen Keynes, 3 June 1932. 38 Duncan, ‘Has Labour an Agricultural Policy?’, Socialist Review (September 1926). 39 E.g. Arthur Grenfell: a man without a party before the First World War, promoting societies of allotment and smallholders. In 1918 he became a member of Labour’s advisory committee on rural problems, where his views offended Joseph Duncan (PRO 30/69/ 1156/72–5, MacDonald papers, Arthur Grenfell to Ramsay MacDonald, n.d.[?1912]; NLS, Duncan papers, Joseph Duncan to G. D. H. Cole, 5 August and 19 September 1919). 36

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to fairly low-profile sessions. Land and agriculture were not topics to excite most delegates’ interest, allowing scope for small groups within the party to impose their views as party policy.40 The most controversial influence on Labour’s agricultural policy came from Liberalism. When Labour drafted its first statement on agriculture, MacDonald acknowledged a ‘striking harmony’ with the Liberal Party’s proposals; others regarded it as more than mere coincidence, in view of the parties’ electoral pact.41 Labour’s programme fell under more definite Liberal influence as a number of former Liberals with interests in agriculture came over to Labour during, and shortly after, the First World War. Charles Roden Buxton joined the ILP in 1917, and E. G. Hemmerde defected to Labour in 1920; both had served on the pre-war Liberal land enquiry.42 One of the most prominent British advocates of land value taxation, Josiah Wedgwood, was accepted as a member of the Parliamentary Labour Party in September 1919; as early as 1913, he had been corresponding with MacDonald about the possibility of supporting Labour if the party were to adopt the policy of taxing land values.43 Both Labour’s interwar Ministers of Agriculture were former Liberal MPs. Noel Buxton, minister under the first Labour government in 1924, and again from June 1929 to June 1930, joined Labour in 1919, believing that it was doing what the Liberal Party should do, and no longer did.44 Christopher Addison, who took over as minister in 1930, was a later recruit, unusual, as Kenneth and Jane Morgan point out, as ‘the only leading Coalition Liberal to move into the Labour Party’.45 Addison declared his support for Labour in November 1923, joined the ILP in December 1924, and was elected as 40 See comments by G. T. Garratt on how ‘the small but determined group of “land taxers” managed to push their views on to a collection of delegates anxious to hasten on to some more congenial topic’ (New Leader, 13 August 1926). 41 Clarion, 24 October 1913. 42 Charles Roden Buxton (1875–1942), younger brother to Noel Buxton, trained as a barrister and taught in workers’ education in London. Briefly Liberal MP for Ashburton, Devon, in 1910, and Honorary Secretary to the Land Enquiry Committee in 1912, he went on to serve as Labour MP for Accrington (1922–3) and Elland (1929–31). E. G. Hemmerde (1871–1948) was also a trained lawyer. He was a member of the League for Taxation of Land Values, Liberal MP for East Denbighshire (1906–10) and North West Norfolk (1912–18), and Labour MP for Crewe (1922–4). 43 PRO 30/69/1157/57–9, MacDonald papers, Wedgwood to MacDonald, 12 June 1913. Catherine Ann Cline argues that land taxers’ defections were often ‘motivated by despair’ of the Liberal Party, rather than ‘positive agreement’ with Labour (Recruits to Labour. The British Labour Party 1914–1931 (Syracuse, NY, 1963), 49). 44 McGill University, Noel-Buxton papers, draft autobiography, Ch. 9, ‘Politics’, 121–2. 45 Kenneth Morgan and Jane Morgan, Portrait of a Progressive. The Political Career of Christopher, Viscount Addison (Oxford, 1980), 157.


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Labour MP for Swindon in 1929, by which time his policy interests had shifted from housing and health, to the topic of agriculture. Wedgwood, Buxton, and Addison were dominant figures in Labour’s agricultural policy making in the 1920s, and Addison remained so throughout the 1930s; yet some on the Left continued to regard them as Liberals whose influence was compromising the development of a socialist policy.46 Montague Fordham, Labour Party member and secretary of the non-party Rural Reconstruction Association, recalled how the party rejected a democratic rural policy in the 1920s ‘in favour of one influenced by converts coming from the Liberal Party’.47 Labour’s 1926 policy document was criticized at party conference for owing too much to ‘some of the old friends of Lloyd George who were now members of the Labour Party’, while the Liberals launched their own accusations that Labour had pinched their ideas.48 At a time when the new programme was competing against the Liberals’ latest rural report, The Land and the Nation, Labour’s difficulty in establishing a distinctive voice on agricultural matters was a particular concern.49 The prominence of these former Liberals can be explained in part by the relative lack of competition for the agricultural portfolio, making agriculture a potentially attractive specialism for the ambitious: a way to make a niche for oneself in the party. ‘Parliamentary Candidates anxious for seats’ were one of the categories of people Joseph Duncan wanted to exclude from membership of Labour’s rural policy committee.50 Christopher Addison seems to have calculated on agricultural policy to make his second political career.51 Within a decade of transferring to Labour and translating himself into an expert on agriculture, he had become the senior figure in formulating and presenting Labour’s agricultural policy. Addison had native advantages, through his family background in rural 46 E.g. Harold Laski, ‘Dr. Addison . . . the Bed-side Manner in Agriculture’, Daily Herald, 23 May 1931. 47 NMLH, LP/JSM/LAN/26, ‘To Rural Labour Candidates and Others’, 1943. Cf. in his entry to the 1927 Labour’s Who’s Who, Fordham identified himself with the ‘rural Soc[ia]l[ist] policy adopted by L[abour] P[arty] in 1926’ (p. 69). 48 26th Conference, 1926, 219; T. P. Conwill-Evans, ‘Panic in the Liberal Farmyard’, Labour Magazine (November 1926). 49 PRO 30/69/1171/I/636–7, MacDonald papers, Jesse Hawkes to MacDonald, 22 February 1926. The Daily Herald found that the only substantive difference between the two programmes was Labour’s greater emphasis on marketing (Daily Herald, 5, 6, and 7 August 1926). 50 NLS, Duncan papers, Acc. 5601/F2, Duncan to G. D. H. Cole, 4 September 1919. He also wanted to ban journalists and ‘sentimental back-to-the-landers’. 51 Morgan and Morgan, Portrait of a Progressive, 165.

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Lincolnshire: when he addressed the rural elector it was as ‘One Countryman to Another’.52 In 1939, even The Field acknowledged him as ‘an authority who commands deep respect on all questions of agriculture’.53 Other Labour spokesmen possessed less evident qualifications. For the former miner Tom Williams, agricultural policy was not an obvious area of interest, but became a specialist subject almost overnight with his appointment as Buxton’s Parliamentary Private Secretary in 1924; a year later, Buxton’s wife described Williams as one of the two men in the party who were most knowledgeable on agriculture.54 Although his constituency was partly agricultural, Williams had demonstrated no previous inclination to find out about the subject, reasoning that those Conservative opponents who drew attention to his ignorance knew even less about mining than he did about farming, and there were more miners than farmers in Don Valley.55 There were certainly many industrial and social topics of which Labour members had a first-hand knowledge unrivalled by most Conservatives or Liberals. Nor were individuals always well matched in their interests or areas of competence to the character of the constituency they represented, or the political office they held. Labour’s paucity of agricultural expertise only presented a problem in so far as the party acknowledged limitations on the ability of non-agriculturalists to understand agriculture at all. However, Labour put great store on acquiring a policy with the proper credentials: only people ‘who really know about the land’, it seemed, could draft ‘a real agricultural policy’.56 The party’s search for an agricultural policy became, in part, a search for its own experts. Traditional voices of the industry, from the NFU, Country Landowners’ Association, and the Royal Agricultural Society, tended to be suspicious of Labour’s intentions, but the party attracted a more sympathetic audience within the developing disciplines of agricultural science and agricultural economics. Labour claimed the support of the eminent agricultural scientist Sir Daniel Hall for a number of its proposals.57 Arthur Ashby, 52

‘From One Countryman to Another’, Daily Herald leaflet (1933). The Field, 25 February 1939. 54 The other was Ben Riley: PRO 30/69/1170/I/200, MacDonald papers, Lucy Buxton to Ramsay MacDonald, 20 April 1925. 55 Tom Williams, Digging for Britain (1965), 62–3. 56 NLS, Duncan papers, G. D. H. Cole to Joseph Duncan, 29 August 1919. 57 Labour Party and the Countryside (LP, 1921), 2–3. Daniel Hall (1864 –1942) was director of the experimental station at Rothamsted (from 1902), chief scientific advisor to the Ministry of Agriculture (1920–7), and director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution (1927–39). 53


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who held a chair at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, and later became director of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute in Oxford, had studied at Ruskin College, and in his subsequent career offered encouragement to agricultural trade unionists.58 John Maxton, younger brother to the Clydeside socialist James Maxton, studied at the Research Institute in Oxford, and became the first director of the Oxford Institute of Agrarian Affairs; he served on Labour’s agricultural policy committee in the 1930s, and is remembered for sharing with his brother ‘the same sympathy for the under-privileged’.59 The trade unionists Joseph Duncan and George Dallas were also prominent in this world of agricultural economics, giving papers and attending conferences at home and abroad.60 Despite concerns about the lack of sufficient expertise, Labour’s agricultural policy was in fact the subject of considerable controversy and internal dissent. G. T. Garratt observed that the party had suffered, ‘not so much by the absence of policy, as by the number of totally inconsistent theories advanced from Labour platforms’.61 The policy committees had a history of shifting membership and intractable arguments. The 1918 advisory committee on rural problems contained such ‘discordant elements’ that its convenor was soon unable even to get it to meet.62 Disagreements sometimes extended outside the committee room into a more public domain. One member of Labour’s policy committee in 1925, having failed to get his point across in that forum, published a wholesale condemnation of the party’s programme as A Magnificent Deception.63 Such dissension was happily seized on by the Conservatives, who quoted criticisms of the 1926 policy from J. C. Wedgwood and Joseph Duncan in their own propaganda.64

58 Edith Whetham, Agricultural Economists in Britain 1900–1940 (Oxford, 1981), 34 and 67. Ashby was a Liberal agent before the First World War. 59 Ibid. 75. 60 See Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of Agricultural Economists (Wisconsin, 1930), 440–8, 449–58; Proceedings of the 5th International Conference (Oxford, 1939), 205–14. Duncan published articles in JAE, 2/2 (1932); 4/3 (1936); and 6/1 (1940). 61 New Leader, 13 August 1926. 62 NMLH, LP/JSM/RUR/3, G. D. H. Cole to J. S. Middleton, 5 September 1919. 63 Jesse Hawkes, A Magnificent Deception—The Labour Party Policy on Agriculture. Its Failure to Provide for Liberation of the Worker—or Maximum Production of Food, by an Old Villager and One-Time Landworker (privately printed, November 1926). 64 Farming under Socialism. An examination of the Socialist Agricultural Programme, National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations [December 1926].

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One area of policy did appear to mark Labour out from its political competitors. In principle at least, land nationalization was a central feature of Labour’s agricultural programme as it evolved through the 1920s and 1930s. When Labour left the wartime coalition in 1918, its ‘call to the people’ included a section claiming ‘the land for the workers’, describing land nationalization as a ‘vital necessity’.65 It seemed almost a point of political definition that this socialist objective should present a fundamental distinction between Labour and the Liberals. ‘Liberals defend the private ownership of land’, explained Philip Snowden in 1922. ‘That is to say, that Liberals believe in class ownership and class control.’66 Even so, the Liberal approach to the land question acknowledged that property in land was of a different character from other forms of property. The 1925 Liberal ‘Green Book’ went further, arguing that ownership of cultivable land should be vested in the state. Although the Liberals avoided talking about nationalization, they outlined a new status of ‘cultivating tenure’, which would replace absolute ownership by the individual. Cultivating tenure could be inherited, and farmers would have security for life, subject to standards of good husbandry.67 ‘Land’ was not an exclusively rural issue. Its early significance for the Labour movement lay very largely in the implications for urban housing rents and for mineral rights, though the public tended to assume that the land question was about agriculture—an identification strengthened by early twentieth-century crusades to revive rural Britain, and the fact that several prominent British land reformers had particular interests in agriculture. In 1918, nationalization was being advocated as Labour’s policy for all types of land, and as the key to solving problems of housing provision.68 But by the late 1920s, Labour had developed separate policies for urban and rural land: its nationalization policy applied only to agricultural land. E. F. Wise pointed out to the 1928 party conference that Labour’s policy ‘in regard to Agricultural land is, definitely and solely, Nationalisation. The policy with regard to urban land—an entirely different problem, is, for the present, the Taxation of Land Values.’69 65 66 67 69

‘Labour’s Call to the People’, LP leaflet (1918), Suffolk RO (Ipswich), GK40/1/5/1. What is the Labour Party?—A Reply to Liberal Misrepresentations (LP, 1922). 68 Land and the Nation (1925), 275–313, 460. 17th Conference, 1918, p. i. 28th Conference, 1928, 233.


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Although public ownership of land was inherently an ideological goal, it was presented in terms of pragmatism. According to this argument, agriculture, in its time of crisis, needed investment which only the state could give—and the nation could not be expected to provide doles which would end up in the hands of private landowners. ‘[T]he nation will not and should not put money into land that is privately owned,’ declared Henry Harben. ‘The nationalisation of the land . . . thus becomes an immediate practical necessity of Agricultural Reform.’70 On the grounds that modern landlords had supposedly abandoned all their historic responsibilities, and now merely collected rent, their role in restocking and conditioning agricultural land must be taken on by another agency: the state would become the nation’s landlord.71 This focus on the state’s responsibility as a landlord caused the former Liberal Josiah Wedgwood much disquiet: he wanted to get rid of landlordism altogether, not replace private landlords by the state.72 Wedgwood threatened to leave the party in 1926 if it declared for land nationalization, but he was clearly defending a minority position. During the 1920s, the Land Nationalisation Federation was studded with leading Labour figures,73 and bills to abolish private property in land had already been presented by Walter Smith (in 1921 and 1922), and by Philip Snowden (in 1923). The more controversial issue was how the land was to be acquired, and what compensation should be given. Some were prepared to speak up in favour of confiscation, whilst observing that it was not a question of confiscation ‘to restore to the people of the country their God-given rights which had been stolen from them in the past.’74 Support for land nationalization in fact rested on various different grounds. As fundamental justifications, nationalizers claimed natural justice, or cited the historical case of dispossession. In addition, there were Georgeite arguments that the value of land was conferred by the community, and thus fell outside the scope of normal private property. This portfolio of justifications could produce divergent visions of what land nationalization should actually achieve. For many land reformers, the primary issue was the relationship of landlord and tenant, rather than questions of private or public ownership. Within the Labour Party, 70

Henry Harben, Labour and the Land. An Agricultural Policy (1921), 12. E.g. Christopher Addison, Labour’s Policy for our Countryside (LP, 1937), 9. 72 26th Conference, 1926, 218–19. 73 Officials included Snowden, E. N. Bennett, Noel Buxton, Tom Williams, and F. O. Roberts. 74 26th Conference, 1926, 220. 71

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Wedgwood was the most vocal spokesman for suspicions about the ‘greater landlordism’ which state ownership might represent; others were prepared to make the goal of state landlordism a central part of land reform, vital to the prospects for reviving agricultural efficiency and prosperity. Land nationalization made ritual appearances in policy discussions and in propaganda, where it tended to be styled as ‘public ownership’. Its status as a practical policy was less clear. Before the First World War, the possibility of nationalization seemed so far off that it did not appear to merit close examination.75 In the early 1920s, Labour politicians talked as if it might happen, though they began to get a taste of the challenge which would face anyone who tried to legislate for it. The furore unleashed by attempts in 1931 to extend powers of compulsory purchase showed how difficult it would be to canvass support for bringing land into state ownership.76 As the Labour MP J. H. Alpass commented, ‘we have the greatest trouble in getting a small bit nationalised, and I don’t know what will happen if we try to nationalise the lot.’77 Even as committees looked into the practicalities, the sheer cost of compensation conspired to make any scheme essentially utopian.78 Much of Labour’s programme was in fact concerned with the question of how to make capitalist agriculture work more effectively, rather than reconstituting it on socialist principles. Even the Communist voice of the Country Standard declared in 1938 that land nationalization was ‘a question of secondary importance only’, and that in the immediate future it would be more useful to concentrate on matters such as guaranteed prices, control of imports, marketing, and workers’ conditions.79 THE ‘PROSPEROUS COUNTRYSIDE’ Nationalization was supposed to be the cornerstone of agricultural policy on the Left, but the more pressing commitment for many was to improve working conditions on the land. The welfare of the agricultural workforce was a primary obligation for the Labour Party; indeed, in 75

E.g. comments in Henry Harben, The Rural Problem (1913). Labour Research, June 1931, 133. 77 HCDeb, 255, cols. 1855–8, 24 July 1931. 78 A Land Nationalisation Committee met from May 1932, consisting of Hugh Dalton, F. W. Pethick-Lawrence, Christopher Addison, Stafford Cripps, George Dallas, and Walter Smith, most of whom were also members of the Agricultural Policy Committee. 79 Country Standard, December 1938. 76


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the early years, its agricultural policy did not extend very far beyond this. Labour’s 1914 agricultural report was motivated by the need to give ‘greater attention . . . to the conditions of the agricultural labourer’, and to workers’ housing in particular, reflecting a general climate of concern about the state of the rural population.80 In the late nineteenth century, ruralist sentiments amongst socialists had been encouraged by the belief that life in the countryside was a healthy and happy contrast with that in the towns.81 However, a spate of publications in the early twentieth century by authors such as George Bourne, Seebohm Rowntree, and F. E. Green exposed the poverty and unhealthiness of workers in the villages: the country as well as the town had its slums.82 Concern about the conditions of the agricultural workforce was not entirely altruistic. If country life could be made ‘brighter and better’ this might check migration to the towns and reduce the pressure of surplus labour.83 Moreover, the advantages of a revived, and possibly expanded, agricultural industry could extend beyond the maintenance of the existing rural population, offering possibilities for mitigating urban unemployment. ‘Back to the land’ drew on ideas about the social benefits of having a native peasantry, and on beliefs about the positive opportunities for individual workers who returned to the soil. It was also regarded as a practical employment policy, bringing together ‘idle men’ and ‘idle land’.84 Some of Labour’s earliest discussions about the land were based on this idea of settlement, whilst hopes of creating additional employment underlay lasting enthusiasms for schemes of land drainage and afforestation.85 There were practical experiments. George Lansbury was involved in establishing farm colonies in Essex, and later Suffolk, backed by finance from the American soap manufacturer Joseph Fels.86 Lansbury’s enthusiasm for ‘colonising our own land’ outlasted this unsuccessful attempt to settle London’s poor into a new way of life.87 As he told Noel Buxton in 1924, ‘all my life home land cultivation has been my remedy for unemployment’.88

80

13th Conference, 1913, 40; Labour Party and the Agricultural Problem (1914). Peter C. Gould, Early Green Politics (Brighton, 1988), 15 et passim. 82 Cf. Labour’s Plan to Abolish the Slums (LP, 1930). 83 13th Conference, 1913, 72. 84 See W. B. Taylor’s comments, HCDeb, 244, col. 13, 28 October 1930. 85 8th Conference, 1909, 94. 86 Jan Marsh, Back to the Land. The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England from 1880 to 1914 (1982), 130–5. 87 C.P.334(29), CAB 24/207, memo by Lansbury, 22 July 1929. 88 Quoted in Mosa Anderson, Noel Buxton. A Life (1952), 120. 81

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The notion that agriculture might boost employment through an expansion of its labour force tended to run counter to processes of modernization: Joseph Duncan pointed out that technological developments and greater efficiencies required fewer workers on the land, not more.89 The perceived scope for agricultural expansion revolved mainly around a multiplication of smallholdings. The party’s 1929 prescription for ‘How to Conquer Unemployment’ envisaged extensive schemes for drainage, land reclamation, and afforestation to create ‘healthy’ employment in rural areas, with increases in market gardening and home production of fruit, poultry, and bacon, all of which could be managed as small-scale enterprises.90 MacDonald enthused about ‘planting’ men where they could ‘root’, in the face of considerable scepticism about whether agriculture in its current state could absorb any more workers.91 In 1929 the economist and political theorist G. D. H. Cole dismissed any prospect of sending a major section of the unemployed ‘back to the land’ as ‘obviously chimerical’.92 Yet throughout the 1930s, the Labour Party continued to discuss the scope for land settlement, predicting that as many as 500,000 additional jobs could be created in agriculture.93 Even in 1938, Addison talked of a reinvigorated agriculture reducing unemployment by thousands.94 Perhaps as surprising as the scale of the numbers being discussed was the fact that politicians in the late 1930s were still talking about people going ‘back’ to the land at all. The hope accompanying these ambitious schemes was that this more populous countryside could be a happier and more economically buoyant environment in which to live and work. The notion of a ‘prosperous countryside’ became one of the dominant, stated aims of agricultural policy. The ‘prosperous countryside’ conjured up many images. It was, in part, a vision of revived village communities. When campaign leaflets from the 1933 rural drive set out Labour’s view of ‘What Rural England Wants’, electors were asked if they wanted ‘Prosperous Farms and wellpaid Agricultural Workers’, thriving shops, proper water supplies, public 89

Forward, 24 January 1931. How to Conquer Unemployment—Labour’s Reply to Lloyd George (LP, 1929). 91 30th Conference, 1930, 183–4; CAB 24/207, C.P.334(29). 92 G. D. H. Cole, The Next Ten Years in British Social and Economic Policy (1929), 38. His criticism here was aimed at Lloyd George’s land schemes. 93 How Labour Will Save Agriculture (LP, 1934); also The Claim of the Unemployed (Socialist League, 1934). 94 Bodleian, Addison papers, 130/166, 1932 Friday group; Your Britain, no. 3 (1938). Addison was an executive for the Land Settlement Association, a partly publicly funded body, providing smallholdings for the unemployed. 90


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transport, electricity, better housing, unemployment insurance, better education, and peace? If the answers were yes, they should ‘Vote Labour for a Prosperous Countryside’.95 These prospects for prosperity rested above all on the achievement of a profitable agricultural industry: a countryside in which farming would ‘pay’. This vocabulary was by no means unique to the Labour Party, and was also used extensively by the NFU. Nonetheless it is interesting that ‘prosperity’ became such a prominent feature in Labour’s agricultural and rural policy literature. ‘A Prosperous Countryside’ was the title chosen for the pamphlet to promote Labour’s 1926 programme and the subsequent rural campaigns.96 In one pamphlet from 1934, the words ‘prosperous’ and ‘prosperity’ recur eleven times.97 The point of emphasizing a commitment to creating a vibrant, productive, and affluent rural economy was that the countryside in the interwar period seemed anything but prosperous. Recent research tends to revise the picture of unmitigated rural depression during the 1920s and 1930s. Whilst some sectors were struggling to survive in the climate of post-war decontrol and in the face of foreign competition, other forms of agriculture were profitable: market gardening, pig farming, poultry, and dairying grew substantially.98 However, the agricultural lobby at the time publicized the crisis in arable farming, drawing attention to the unemployment and bankruptcies resulting from the removal of state support for cereal cultivation in 1921. Relatively few politicians disputed the existence of an agricultural depression. Low wage levels, farmers and labourers leaving the land, and a visible deterioration in standards of cultivation were cited as illustrations of profound economic problems. These problems raised questions about the importance of the rural sector within the nation as a whole. The traditional connection—namely that the countryside provided food to feed the towns—was no longer an obvious assumption in a nation which was largely dependent on imported food. For much of the interwar period, the British Left seemed almost as concerned with the economic health of the countryside as a market for urban industry.99 95

Leaflet no. 13, ‘What Rural England Wants’ ( July 1933), MERL, NUAW, DII/7. A Prosperous Countryside (LP, 1927). See discussion and illustration in Chapter 3. 97 How Labour Will Save Agriculture (1934). The goal of ‘prosperity’ featured in Labour’s propaganda materials more broadly; cf. plans for a prosperous Britain in A Nation without Poverty (LP, 1935). 98 See, for example, Paul Brassley et al. (eds.), The English Countryside between the Wars: Regeneration or Decline? (Woodbridge, 2006). 99 How Labour Will Save Agriculture (1934), 6. 96

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The Labour Party tried on the whole to eschew sentimental or strategic arguments for maintaining a large and non-specialized agricultural sector. R. B. Walker outlined what he saw as the ‘true Socialist position’ that a ‘natural farming country’ like Britain should produce ‘what is economically sound to produce; that, and no more and no less’.100 Attlee argued in the 1930s that there was nothing wrong with importing foods which might be grown more easily elsewhere, so long as they could be paid for: the idea of a self-contained Britain was ‘absurd’.101 However, underproduction in agriculture had long been a target for criticism from the Left. ‘England should feed her own people’ was one of the slogans on Walter Crane’s ‘Garland for May Day’ in 1895.102 Robert Blatchford devoted a chapter of Merrie England to the subject of self-sufficiency in wheat and the prospect that ‘we might grow our corn more cheaply than we could buy it’.103 Such optimism about promoting the interests of domestic consumers by boosting home production continued in some quarters into the twentieth century.104 There were even occasional calls for autarky, such as John Morgan’s contribution to the 1932 party conference, arguing that the reliance on imported food was the most vulnerable side of Socialist development, and that Labour should stimulate domestic food production ‘to entrench us against the attack of capitalism from overseas’.105 On principle, the Left preferred not to argue for increased production on grounds of national defence. Joseph Duncan suggested in 1918 that Labour’s international perspective gave it a ‘fundamentally different’ approach to agricultural policy: rather than being concerned with safeguarding supplies against the eventuality of war, it should be the ‘social policy’ of a nation ‘living in peace with its neighbours’.106 As the prospect of a second world war grew more threatening, there was a revival of interest in how agricultural policy might contribute to the maintenance of peace. Even the home cultivation of sugar beet (which had been encouraged by the first Labour government) came under criticism for representing a commitment to increase Britain’s self-sufficiency as part of preparedness for war.107 100

R. B. Walker, Speed the Plough (ILP, 1924). C. R. Attlee, Labour’s Aims (LP, September 1937). 102 Reproduced in Marsh, Back to the Land, 25. 103 Robert Blatchford, Merrie England (1893; 1976), 11–14. 104 E.g. discussion at 24th Conference, 1924, 172. 105 32nd Conference, 1932, 241–2. 106 Joseph Duncan, Memorandum on Immediate Steps in Agricultural Reconstruction (1918). 107 Country Worker, January 1935. 101


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L ABOUR IN GOVERNMENT Labour was in government twice during the interwar period, in 1924 and from 1929 to 1931, with the prospect of putting its developing programme into action. On both occasions its scope of operation was limited, with the party’s minority position in the Commons making it dependent on support from the Liberals, and sometimes even from the Conservatives. Nonetheless, there were some agricultural achievements from these periods in office. The first Labour government re-established wage regulation in agriculture and introduced the subsidy for sugar beet cultivation. The 1929–31 administration was responsible for ambitious pieces of agricultural legislation: the Agricultural Land (Utilisation) Act of 1931, and the Agricultural Marketing Act of the same year, setting the foundation for the creation of marketing boards for various commodities during the 1930s. As a party pamphlet from 1939 put it, ‘not a bad record for a Party which is supposed, quite wrongly of course, to take little interest in the welfare of the agricultural community.’108 Although he represented a rural constituency, Noel Buxton assumed the position of Minister of Agriculture with some reluctance in 1924.109 He did not consider himself an obvious choice for the job, and felt ‘rather like a fish out of water in being regarded as an expert on agriculture’.110 Foreign affairs were always his primary interest. When he looked back on the first Labour government, he was pleased with what he had achieved in ‘liberating’ the farm labourers, but took greater pride in his share in MacDonald’s ‘unique contribution to international peace’.111 A lack of confidence over his brief contributed to Buxton’s hesitant approach as minister, while the minority position of the administration imposed its own constraints. The non-party review, Time and Tide, observed that Buxton’s agricultural programme seemed ‘strikingly familiar’: ‘Who, by its complexion alone, could tell whether Mr MacDonald or Mr Baldwin smiled on this offspring?’112 108

Socialism for the Villages (LP, 1939), 16 –17. MacDonald appointed Walter Smith and Tom Williams to assist Buxton at the Ministry, and formed a committee on agricultural policy, made up of Buxton, Lord Parmoor, Sydney Olivier, and William Adamson, Secretary of State for Scotland. 110 McGill University, Noel-Buxton papers, draft autobiography, Ch. 9, ‘Politics’, 124. 111 PRO 30/69/746/16, MacDonald papers, Buxton to MacDonald, 9 November 1924. 112 Time and Tide, 11 April 1924, 347. 109

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Buxton recognized from the outset a need to choose between ‘a feasible policy and a true Labour policy’.113 As he recalled in an unpublished memoir, he might have used the opportunity ‘to make the country more acquainted with [our] policy for agriculture, through State control of the land’; however, his immediate task was ‘to get through my bill on wage regulation, and therefore to avoid antagonizing people as much as possible’.114 The main priority in 1924 was the reinstatement of the Agricultural Wages Board, and Buxton attracted considerable criticism for his readiness to compromise to get it through parliament.115 Yet even with its limitations, the Agricultural Wages Act was greeted as a real achievement, boosting Labour’s political credibility amongst agricultural workers. The 1923 general election had been a popular rejection of tariff policy, and it was a basic premise for the first Labour government that agriculture ‘must be conducted on an economic basis without artificial supports from the public purse’.116 However, this position was relaxed with regard to the relatively new enterprise of sugar beet cultivation.117 Earlier attempts to grow and process sugar in Britain had never lasted more than a few years, though there were hopes that it might revive arable cultivation and expand rural employment, both on the land and in the refining factories.118 The government subsidy which Labour introduced to help develop the industry was cited for several years afterwards as a symbol of the party’s good faith towards agriculture.119 Buxton summed up the first Labour government’s work for agriculture as ‘if not sensational . . . solid and lasting’.120 The NUAW’s president, William Holmes, gave a more enthusiastic verdict, acknowledging the sympathy and support which 113

PRO 30/69/668/11, MacDonald papers, Buxton to MacDonald, 2 February 1924. McGill University, Noel-Buxton papers, draft autobiography, Ch. 9, ‘Politics’, 125. 115 Ibid. draft ‘On Holding Office’, written for his children [c.1924]; CAB 24/166, C.P.217(24), 26 March 1924; 24th Conference, 1924, 139. Buxton had to broker a deal with the Conservatives to get the measure passed in both Houses of Parliament: see account in his draft autobiography, 126–9 (McGill University, Noel-Buxton papers). 116 CAB 23/47, 8 February 1924, C.P.81(24). 117 CAB 23/48, 9 and 30 July 1924. 118 Edith H. Whetham, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, viii: 1914 –39 (Cambridge, 1978), 166. 119 G. T. Garratt, The Farmer and the Labour Party (LP, 1928), 6. The subsidy has since been highlighted as a major turning point, opening up a new era of economic support and state intervention, though this was scarcely Buxton’s intention (E. A. Attwood, ‘The Origins of State Support for British Agriculture’, The Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies, 31 (1963), 145). 120 Labour Looking after Agriculture—Better Farming: Better Business: Better Living (LP, 1924). 114


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Labour had shown rural workers—even though they had voted at the 1923 election as if they believed it to be a party for townspeople.121 When Labour returned to office in 1929, Buxton was once more given the agricultural portfolio, despite expressing a preference for the Admiralty or the Colonial Office.122 Although he and MacDonald had been personal friends for several years, their relationship at this point was fraught. Buxton had been diagnosed with a heart condition and hoped that a move to the Lords would allow him to carry on as minister, avoid late hours, and give more energy to his work.123 MacDonald’s primary reservation about this plan was that it would precipitate a by-election, which he feared Labour could lose.124 Buxton’s personal anxieties were amplified by the difficulties facing the new administration. Hoping to make the most of unobjectionable, almost apolitical measures, his proposed programme for 1929 read more like a list of the administrative functions of the ministry.125 The difficulty in 1929, even more than in 1924, was a complete uncertainty about what the government should be doing. The 1926 programme gave the impression that Labour had a thorough and detailed policy in place, but MacDonald recognized that these were ‘ideas rather than thought-out schemes’.126 ‘We have been talking so many generalities and have been producing such grandiloquent promises, none of which have really been worked out in detail,’ he commented privately to Buxton.127 Buxton was also conscious that Labour’s rural members were ‘restive’, and needed proposals to campaign on.128 The 1926 programme was re-issued with updated figures in 1928. By 1930 it was out of print, and Head Office was fielding requests for literature detailing current party policy.129 121

MERL, NUAW, BVI/3, address to NUAW conference, 20 June 1924. PRO 30/69/1439/I/178–9, MacDonald papers, Buxton to MacDonald, 3 June [1929]; PRO 30/69/672/I/78–9, Henry Nevinson to MacDonald, 4 June 1929, and reply 7 June 1929. 123 PRO 30/69/676/203 and 209, MacDonald papers, Buxton to MacDonald, ?25 April 1930 and 16 May 1930 respectively. 124 PRO 30/69/676/210–12, MacDonald papers, Buxton to MacDonald, 28 May 1930; PRO 30/69/1753/4, MacDonald to Buxton, 30 May 1930. Buxton’s wife retained North Norfolk for Labour, though only very narrowly. 125 PRO 30/69/244/234–5 and 672/III/196–8, MacDonald papers, Buxton to MacDonald, 1 August 1929 and 18 December 1929; HCDeb, 233, col. 958, 16 December 1929. 126 PRO 30/69/243, MacDonald papers, notes by MacDonald, c.May 1930. 127 PRO 30/69/672/III/199–200, MacDonald papers, MacDonald to Buxton, 19 December 1929. 128 PRO 30/69/244/666–7, MacDonald papers, Buxton to MacDonald, 24 January 1930. 129 NEC, 27 March 1930. 122

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Much of Labour’s second period in office was spent debating what should, or could be done, and Buxton felt ‘gagged’, unable to make any announcements in the House while the government’s intentions remained so undecided.130 He became a subject of ridicule, as wags in the Commons called for measures to address the waterlogged state of the Ministry of Agriculture.131 Baldwin raised the stakes by announcing a new Conservative policy to give price guarantees for wheat; yet MacDonald refused to be bounced into offering a formal outline of the government’s programme.132 A White Paper on agriculture had been promised, and a text of sorts was in place by April 1930, though it was regarded as unsatisfactory by many of those who read it. Parliament had to wait until 1 August 1930, fourteen months after Labour came into office, for an official statement on the government’s agricultural policy: in place of the White Paper, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, gave an address to the Commons. In the meantime, MacDonald had hoped to construct a consensual policy through a series of conferences involving representatives of the workers’, farmers’, and landowners’ organizations, beginning in January 1930. The participants were remarkably cooperative at first, despite having to deal with ministers who refused to be drawn on the government’s intentions. By March, the mood had changed. Having learned that MacDonald had appointed an expert committee on agriculture, the conferences grew suspicious that their deliberations were being sidelined. The greater sticking point though was on the question of free trade, since the farmers’ main priority was clearly to press for financial assistance for the industry.133 There was scope in this policy desert for a minister to take the initiative—as Buxton’s successor was prepared, indeed eager to do. Christopher Addison took over from Buxton in June 1930, informing the Labour Party conference that ‘this great town party’ would place the ‘restoration of the countryside’ at the forefront of its agenda.134 As Buxton retired in ill health, Addison seemed to represent a younger generation, 130

McGill University, Noel-Buxton papers, draft autobiography, Ch. 9, ‘Politics’, 132. HCDeb, 233, cols. 958–9, 16 December 1929. 132 PRO 30/69/244/207–8, MacDonald papers, Buxton to MacDonald, 29 November 1929, with annotations by MacDonald, 30 November. 133 PRO 30/69/244/106, 108–10, 111–12, 132–3, 137, 149–51, 154, 162 – 4, 178, 184, 195, 197–8, 488–9, and PRO 30/69/676/191–2, correspondence and papers in MacDonald papers. 134 30th Conference, 1930, 204. 131


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more energetic and less wedded to old orthodoxies. In fact the two men were almost exactly the same age. As a former Cabinet minister under Lloyd George, Addison had expected nothing less than Cabinet rank from MacDonald, and was very put out at being appointed merely to a junior post at the Ministry of Agriculture in 1929: he insisted that MacDonald announce his position as ‘Deputy Minister’, and took the job only on the understanding that he would be promoted when the ministry became vacant in the near future.135 The 1929 King’s speech had promised schemes for the improvement of ‘the condition of agriculture’ and ‘facilities for the marketing of farm and fishery outputs’.136 The new parliamentary session opened in October 1930, with a few more hints about what these measures might involve.137 W. B. Taylor predicted that the coming parliament ‘may well prove to be largely an agricultural Session’, and the remaining months of the Labour government certainly saw much more intense discussion of the subject.138 Addison oversaw three major pieces of legislation, the first of which had been drafted while Buxton was still minister: the Land Drainage Act, 1930, designed to bring additional land into cultivation by spreading the burden of drainage costs and increasing the grant for afforestation projects, and billed as a ‘first class employment scheme’.139 Based on the findings of a Royal Commission, and introduced in the House of Lords, there were no party issues here. Nor was land drainage a topic to capture public imagination, though the Act was highlighted as one of the achievements of Addison’s ministry.140 The other two pieces of legislation were more controversial. The Agricultural Land (Utilisation) Act of 1931, ‘to promote the better utilisation of agricultural land in Great Britain and the settlement of unemployed persons thereon’, gave the Minister of Agriculture powers to provide smallholdings for the unemployed, where a local authority was failing in its obligations, setting some precedent for central direction over the use of cultivable land.141 The original Bill went much further. A doomed first schedule had envisaged the creation of a state corporation, vested with its own land, for the purpose of conducting experiments into 135

PRO 30/69/1174/160–2, MacDonald papers, Addison to MacDonald, 9 June 1929. HCDeb, 229, cols. 47–9, 2 July 1929. 138 Ibid. 244, col. 6, 28 October 1930. Ibid. col. 14, 28 October 1930. 139 30th Conference, 1930, 82 and 156. 140 What the Labour Government Has Done—First Session’s Record (LP, 1930); Williams, Digging for Britain, 115–16. 141 Public General Acts . . . (1930–1), Ch. 41. 136 137

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large-scale farming. This proposal was lost in its entirety, after the measure was wrecked in the Lords; Addison had to deny rumours in the press that he would have to resign.142 Even in its abbreviated form, the Act was described by Labour as the ‘greatest land reform measure of modern times’.143 The remaining piece of legislation was arguably one of the most significant reforms introduced by the second Labour government, and certainly its most lasting contribution to agricultural policy. The Agricultural Marketing Act of 1931 promoted the formation of producers’ organizations to guarantee quality and control prices, a development which soon began to transform the fortunes of sectors of the farming economy. MacDonald had been encouraging Buxton to ‘hurry on some simple, but useful marketing scheme’ since the end of 1929, and the Ministry oversaw a successful initiative to boost sales of British beef in early 1930.144 Addison was convinced that improvements in marketing could be the key to agricultural recovery: the vital defect in agriculture is not the ability to produce good stuff, but to market it and to sell it to advantage. Notably with regard to potatoes, surplus milk, milk products such as butter and cheese, cereals and many more, the producers are completely helpless at present and increasingly in the hands of middlemen, who, by the way, do not spare the consumer.145

He used his period as minister-in-waiting to work on plans for legislation, assisted by Clement Attlee,146 designing a framework which focused on grading produce, to make it a more attractive and reliable prospect for consumers, whilst giving producers a more predictable market and stabilized price structures.147 The 1931 Act established the principle 142 Daily Herald, 1 June 1931; also PRO 30/69/1176, MacDonald papers, MacDonald to Addison, 23 May 1931, re report in Daily Express. 143 Two Years of Labour Rule (LP, 1931); P.P. (1930–1), I, Bill 38, 165, and V, 22, Report and Proceedings of Standing Committee B on the Agricultural Land (Utilisation) Bill. 144 PRO 30/69/672/III/187–8, MacDonald papers, MacDonald to Buxton, 24 December 1929; PRO 30/69/676/3–5, correspondence between Addison and MacDonald, 8 and 9 April 1930; Morgan and Morgan, Portrait of a Progressive, 184. As early as 1926, E. F. Wise had claimed that marketing was ‘the kernel and centre’ of Labour’s agricultural programme (26th Conference, 1926, 230). 145 PRO 30/69/676/6–9, MacDonald papers, Addison, private letter to MacDonald, 17 April 1930. 146 Attlee had replaced Mosley as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in May 1930 (Kenneth Harris, Attlee (1995), 87–9). 147 Similar approaches had proved successful for some of Britain’s overseas competitors, notably Denmark. Agricultural prosperity in New Zealand was later attributed to marketing legislation introduced by its Labour government: New Zealand’s Progress under Socialism (LP, 1937).


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that producers of commodities might, in certain circumstances, force a dissenting minority to cooperate in a marketing board to set quality and price controls.148 The intention was to enhance profit margins for farmers, reducing the spread between the price received and what the consumer paid. By promoting the possibilities offered by reforms in marketing, Addison was contradicting the pessimism so common in discussions of agricultural policy at the time. Nonetheless, the voices of doom were difficult to ignore. In its final months, the Labour government found itself embroiled in debates about the survival of British farming which struck at the heart of what had become established as a basic shibboleth for the political Left and Centre: free trade. PRODUCERS VS CONSUMERS The prognoses for British agriculture were depressing. The proportion of domestic consumption met by home-grown produce was in perpetual decline, as farmers lost out to overseas competition, even in commodities for which they had natural advantages, like dairy products and eggs. The focus of most concern, however, was wheat. Unlike countries such as Denmark, Britain had proved reluctant to switch the focus of its cultivation, despite devastating competition from cheap, hard wheat imports from Russia and North America. When it seemed inescapable that cereal growing was no longer an economic enterprise, farmers often took drastic rather than constructive action, resorting to ‘lazy farming’, by laying land down to pasture.149 The impact of the decline in wheat cultivation was felt most severely in traditionally prosperous agricultural areas, particularly in East Anglia, and reduced employment on the land, as farmers switched to less intensive cultivation or as land simply fell into disuse. Wheat also had a more symbolic significance. Although it was becoming a crop of largely local importance,150 wheat continued to be regarded as the most crucial indicator of the state of national agriculture. The annual reduction in the ploughed acreage was taken by many contemporaries as an index of the condition of the industry as a whole.151

148 149 150 151

See account in Morgan and Morgan, Portrait of a Progressive, 179, 182– 4, 199 –201. Your Britain, no. 3: Food and Farming (LP, 1938). See comments in Manchester Guardian, 17 April 1930. E.g. the opening indictment in A Prosperous Countryside (LP, 1927).

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The crisis in wheat farming came to a head in early 1930. On 1 March, a high-profile, non-party demonstration was held at Parker’s Piece in Cambridge, bringing representatives of the different interests within the industry together on a common platform, to demand government intervention to protect employment and guarantee a future for British agriculture. Although the NUAW was unenthusiastic about the protest, the TGWU was well represented, with George Dallas taking a prominent role. The Agricultural Labour Group of MPs, for which the farmer W. B. Taylor acted as spokesman, lent its support, calling on the government to make good its commitment at the 1929 general election to ‘Make Farming Pay’.152 Many in the government were impressed by agriculturalists’ gloomy forecasts for the sector’s immediate future. Moreover, the electoral implications of disappointing rural England were never far from the government’s deliberations.153 When Buxton composed a memo on arable farming for the prime minister, he highlighted ‘political considerations’ as the most important ones they had to face. If Labour was to win enough rural seats to secure a majority, the party must have ‘an active policy and not passively look on while economic forces have full play’.154 The arable crisis put a premium on immediate solutions. As a result, the Labour Party often found itself hawking two policies: one offering short-term palliatives, and the other outlining more fundamental restructuring, to be attempted at some unspecified time when agriculture might have regained economic stability.155 When Labour tried to style itself as a saviour of British agriculture, one of the major challenges it faced was over the future of free trade, illustrating all too clearly the difficulties of reconciling the interests of producers and consumers.156 Aside from its fervent adherents, amongst whom 152 PRO 30/69/244/437, MacDonald papers, W. B. Taylor to MacDonald, 25 March 1930; NFU Record, June 1929, 216. 153 E.g. PRO 30/69/1175/191, MacDonald papers, letters to MacDonald from W. B. Taylor, 7 May 1930; 243/403–4, from Arthur Henderson, 28 May 1930; and 243/ 146 – 8, from William Adamson, 8 July 1930. The specific question about support for wheat production applied more directly to England than to other parts of the Union; the strain of defining an agricultural policy to meet the needs of the whole of Britain had been a stumbling block to producing the much-delayed White Paper. For an account of the government’s response to the crisis, see David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (1977), 557–61. 154 PRO 30/69/243, MacDonald papers, memo, 17 April 1930. 155 PRO 30/69/244/139–44, MacDonald papers, statement to Prime Minister, 10 March 1930. 156 On Labour’s stance on free trade, see Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997), 284–6.


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Philip Snowden was the most notable, free trade by the late 1920s was essentially a pragmatic policy for many in the Labour Party: the strongest argument against subsidies for agriculture was that these would raise the price of food and damage Labour’s traditional support in urban areas. The radical ideal of the free breakfast table had a lingering resonance,157 and ‘dear food’ was still being mobilized as an electoral slogan after the First World War.158 Meanwhile, British consumers were benefiting from the agricultural protection practised by other countries, which flooded the market with artificially cheap food. Tariffs and subsidies were specifically ruled out of discussions at the conferences of agricultural interests convened by the government in 1930; yet, Buxton noted that participants kept returning to the subject of protection, with support even amongst some Labour members: he advised MacDonald that ‘a sharp reminder that we are Free Traders would be very salutary.’159 This illustrated an important difference of approach between Labour’s Ministers of Agriculture. Addison was far less wedded to free trade principles. He denounced Buxton’s 1930 draft White Paper as ‘worthy of the relics of the laissez-faire Manchester Free Trader, but not of the Labour Party’.160 Addison was not ashamed of supporting an industry in difficulty. Later, responding to criticisms from Herbert Samuel about the scale of the sugar beet subsidy, Addison replied, ‘The point was whether the farmers were going to plough the fields for beet or not . . . I had to do the best I could in the interests of agriculture in those desperate circumstances.’161 Even whilst resisting calls for protection during 1930, Labour still assumed that it should aim to stabilize, and indeed bolster, farm incomes. Interest had begun to focus on the possibilities offered by reforms in marketing and distribution as a way to help farmers whilst preserving free trade. The ILP had endorsed proposals in 1924 for a state monopoly 157 E.g. Philip Snowden’s Budget Speech (LP, 1924), 14; Your Britain, no. 3: Food and Farming observed that the restriction of imports had removed bacon from ‘breakfast tables of the poor’. 158 The NFU declared the issue obsolete at the 1921 Taunton by-election (MERL, NFU News Sheets, 23 March 1921 and 13 April 1921), though it was a factor during the 1923 general election. In 1930, some still hoped that Labour could fight an antiprotection campaign at the next general election: PRO 30/69/243/403, MacDonald papers, David Freeman (candidate for King’s Lynn) to Arthur Henderson, 15 May 1930. 159 PRO 30/69/244/488–9, MacDonald papers, Buxton to MacDonald, 4 February 1930. Cf. letter of invitation, 25 October 1929, copy at PRO 30/69/244/219 –22. 160 PRO 30/69/243/35–40, MacDonald papers, Addison to MacDonald, 30 April 1930. 161 HCDeb, 255, cols. 2675–6, 31 July 1931.

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to import and store staple foods, eliminating the middleman and stabilizing prices so that farmers might plan their production more effectively.162 The Labour Party’s 1926 programme gave vague support to the idea of state control of wheat imports to guarantee a market for home producers.163 The one caveat of such schemes was that they should not fix a price for wheat which would bring the cost of bread above the lowest average price possible in an unrestricted system. Labour candidates in some rural seats believed that the idea of an import board could prove attractive: it would achieve what farmers wanted, whilst actually lowering the price of food.164 Yet the Labour leadership chose to sideline this policy in favour of a different expedient. In February 1930, MacDonald quietly canvassed opinion about the possibilities of imposing a registration fee on imported grain as a temporary measure for generating revenue to subsidize home production of wheat.165 This idea was rejected in favour of proposals for a ‘quota’: a legal requirement for millers to include a certain proportion of home-grown wheat in British-milled flour.166 Whilst guaranteeing a market, this would not, in a technical sense, guarantee prices for the farmers’ wheat. Addison believed that there would be a ‘vigorous demand’ for such an approach, and that Labour might make use of this to ‘give us a non-party atmosphere in the House of Commons’.167 Buxton had misgivings. ‘The scheme jars upon Free Trade traditions,’ he commented to MacDonald, though he did agree to support it, seeing this as the only way to prevent widespread rural unemployment.168 Others in the party were even less 162 Report of ILP agricultural committee, endorsed by National Administrative Committee, 23 January 1924, printed, Congress House, HD 595; F. Seymour Cocks, Socialism and Agriculture (ILP, [1925]), 11–13. 163 Labour’s Policy on Agriculture (LP, 1926). One model available was the highly successful wheat pool in Canada: see MacDonald’s notes in his diary for 15 September 1927: PRO 30/69/1753/1, MacDonald papers, p. 250. 164 PRO 30/69/243/403, MacDonald papers, copy of extracts from David Freeman to Arthur Henderson, 13 May 1930, on the views of candidates in King’s Lynn and East Dorset. 165 PRO 30/69/244/527–8, MacDonald papers, ‘Most Confidential’ memorandum by MacDonald, circulated to Chancellor, President of Board of Trade, Minister of Agriculture and Secretary of State for Scotland, 24 February 1930. 166 MacDonald appointed a committee of the Cabinet on 11 March, chaired by Tom Shaw, Secretary of State for War, to look into these options (CAB24/210, C.P.99 (30), Shaw to MacDonald, 17 March 1930). 167 PRO 30/69/676/6–9, MacDonald papers, Addison to MacDonald (marked ‘private’), 17 April 1930. 168 PRO 30/69/243/179–179B and 244/89–90, MacDonald papers, Buxton to MacDonald, 5 and 17 April 1930.


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convinced. When the idea of a quota scheme was laid out in the draft White Paper in April 1930, Snowden declared himself strongly opposed on the grounds that it was unlikely to work, would raise the price of the loaf, and was objectionable in principle.169 By the end of the year, there was no consensus within the government on the issue, though Addison was discussing the quota as if it were agreed policy.170 Many of the arguments being advanced in support of the quota were undermined by a committee of the Economic Advisory Council, which advised the government that assistance for wheat growing was contrary to agriculture’s interests: like other industries, farming should rationalize itself to develop more efficient and profitable forms of production. Of the committee’s members, only John Beard, from the agricultural section of the TGWU, objected to this analysis, insisting that the Depression demanded immediate assistance for arable farming, even if that meant ‘a departure from our traditional economic policy’.171 A government committee on agricultural development, set up in late 1930, also failed to reach agreement over the quota. Two of its seven members, A. V. Alexander and F. W. Pethick-Lawrence, refused to subscribe to the majority report endorsing the policy as an emergency measure; they argued that the quota would establish a precedent for assistance to other branches of agriculture, and would mean abandoning free trade.172 Addison was puzzled by this reaction, regarding the quota as a perfectly reasonable implementation of established party policy on ‘the deliberate and purposeful regulation and development of home industries’.173 When these deliberations came before the Cabinet in March 1931, Snowden was recovering from an operation. His absence delayed any decision, despite the perceived urgency of the issue. ‘Agricultural policy’ 169

PRO 30/69/243/266–70, MacDonald papers, memo for Cabinet, [April 1930]. PRO 30/69/1753/1, MacDonald papers, diary entry for 12 November 1930. MacDonald found that Addison was ‘given to going his own way’ (see diary entry, 26 August 1930). Snowden got into the habit of writing to him to complain about Addison’s political dealings and public statements, e.g. PRO 30/69/676/25, MacDonald papers, Snowden to MacDonald, 17 December 1930 (Addison ignoring Cabinet decisions), and 673/I/160, 15 July 1931 (Addison’s discussions with the Liberal Party). 171 CAB 24/213, C.P.244(30); CAB 24/214, C.P.272(30). Cf. Conservative ideas that protection could assist the process of rationalization (Philip Williamson, National Crisis and National Government (Cambridge, 1992), 508). 172 CAB 24/220, C.P.52(31). Snowden had asked for Pethick-Lawrence to be included on the committee, to watch over the financial aspects of the subject and keep him informed (Snowden to MacDonald, 19 December 1930, MacDonald papers, PRO 30/69/244/ 404 – 6). 173 Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 129/165, Memorandum on the Wheat Quota, n.d. 170

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(which by now meant discussion of the quota) was placed on the Cabinet agenda week after week, pending his return.174 From his convalescence, Snowden vehemently attacked the quota as ‘the crudest of all possible subsidies . . . Protection without the one benefit of Protection, in that it brings no revenue to the Exchequer’. He argued that the scheme would ‘put millions in the pockets of the wheat trade at the expense of consumers’, identify Labour with the Conservative programme, meet strong opposition from the Liberals, and split the party from top to bottom: ‘political suicide’.175 Confronted with this furious defence of free trade, counterbalanced by Addison’s insistence on the need to alleviate agricultural distress, the Cabinet on 15 April was split in a discussion which took up most of the day. MacDonald finally sent them away to study an excerpt from Labour and the Nation, and ‘refresh their memory as to Labour’s Policy on Agriculture’.176 Snowden returned to discuss the Budget on 24 April, but there was no further consideration of the quota in Cabinet until 6 May. On 4 June it was concluded that the Cabinet and the government’s supporters in Parliament were too divided over the measure for it to go ahead. There was nothing to put in its place, and the Cabinet was reluctant to spend any more time on a subject on which agreement seemed so unlikely. By the summer of 1931, the government’s agenda had in any case moved on to concerns yet more pressing than the crisis in arable farming. Much of the opposition to the quota arose from the inescapable association of the policy with a tax on bread, with all the ideological and political objections which that raised. However, the arguments also focused on the distorting effects of protection upon economic development. In 1931, Snowden was one of the few members of the Labour Cabinet prepared to defy the wheat lobby’s rhetoric completely and insist that most farmers must give up the idea of growing wheat: Sooner or later these farmers will have to turn their land to other uses . . . A little wheat growing will remain, where as at present, owing to special circumstances it can be done profitably. The encouragement of dairy farming, flowers and bulbs in the Eastern Counties is the right policy.177

174

175 CAB 23/66, 11 March 1931. CAB 24/220, C.P.89(31). CAB 23/66, 15 April 1931. 177 PRO 30/69/244/317–18, MacDonald papers, note to MacDonald, [c.7 May 1931]. This attitude fitted in with Snowden’s wider views on industrial efficiency; cf. PRO 30/69/243/264–5, Snowden to MacDonald, 28 April 1930. 176


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Later, in opposition to the National Government, Labour was able to devise plans for such rationalization and restructuring with a better conscience, and this interest in developing more specialized production became the dominant voice within the party. Freed from demands for immediate expedients to save arable farming, socialists asked openly why Britain should grow wheat at all. Before 1931, this had been difficult to do. In 1932 Attlee chose to justify assistance for wheat production as a temporary measure to alleviate hardship in a depressed community, whilst insisting that it should be accompanied by measures to shift production to other forms of farming. Protection was acceptable only where it was clear that an industry would be run efficiently, in the interests of consumers and producers, with control ‘by the community in the interests of the community’.178 Attitudes towards wheat cultivation proved to be an important touchstone. Until 1931, the most vocal sections of the rural Labour movement subscribed to a belief in the sanctity of arable which crossed political boundaries, and the debate over wheat forced a definite shift in Labour’s policy away from free trade. During the 1930s, wheat became less of an issue, and Labour was able increasingly to free itself from the obligation to maintain particular sectors of production on social, rather than economic grounds. It became more common to refer to agriculture as an ‘industry’, though this classification was complicated by resilient ideas about agriculture’s peculiar significance. In discussions during 1932 about the potential structure of a future Labour government, Attlee inclined to the view that, ‘logically’, farming should be regarded as merely one of a number of economic activities represented in a new, slimline Cabinet through a Minister for Economic Planning. Yet he acknowledged, with some reluctance, that agriculture was a special case, and would still require a voice of its own.179 FOOD AND FARMING In 1932, the National Government abandoned free trade, with the introduction of the Import Duties Act and trade restrictions negotiated under 178

HCDeb, 262, cols. 1134–9, 2 March 1932. Bodleian Library, Addison papers 130/166. In a version of this memo printed in Harris, Attlee, Attlee concedes only a temporary place for agriculture in the Cabinet (p. 592). 179

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the Ottawa agreements. For the first time since the ‘great betrayal’ of 1921, British wheat producers enjoyed guaranteed prices, though, in contrast to the earlier scheme, deficiency payments under the 1932 Wheat Act were funded by a levy on flour, rather than from general taxation.180 Labour MPs expressed dissatisfaction at a measure which was concerned solely with securing the market for wheat producers, offering no provision for rational development of the industry, no protection for consumers, and nothing to strengthen the system of wage regulation.181 In opposition, Labour could criticize the Wheat Act as ‘a stomach tax with a vengeance’, and Lansbury brought up references to the ‘Hungry Forties’.182 But Snowden pointed out at the 1931 general election that Labour itself was no longer a free trade party.183 Without any overt conversion, Labour’s free trade stance on agriculture had become no more than a case of special pleading. Attacks on government policy after 1931 were largely concerned with abuses of the good principles behind marketing controls and the failure to represent the interests of consumers: Labour offered a policy of socialist control over imports and domestic marketing, to stabilize prices for producer and consumer alike. Addison saw it as unavoidable that ‘a Labour Government will have to maintain a considerable amount of agricultural protection or suffer heavily politically for any removal or threat of removal.’ The most Labour could hope for was to make protection dependent on increased efficiency and expanded production.184 The nature of that production assumed an increasingly prominent place in Labour’s discussions about agriculture. Alongside more established themes, Labour was discovering new roles for agricultural policy in the 1920s and 1930s, with an emphasis on nutrition and the nation’s health. Production and consumption were revealed as two sides of the same programme: the same policies were presented in 1938 under the titles ‘Farming and Food’ or ‘Food and Farming’, according to where publicity material was being distributed. ‘Britain’s People need much 180 Whetham, Agrarian History, 243–6. Much Labour opinion continued to favour the funding of protection for wheat production through general taxation rather than a charge on bread; see Socialism and our Standard of Living (LP, 1938), 35. 181 32nd Conference, 1932, 90. 182 Alfred Salter, The Bread Tax (LP, 1932); George Lansbury, The Futility of the National Government (LP, [1933]). 183 General election broadcast, 17 October 1931, text in Philip Snowden, An Autobiography, 2 vols. (1934), ii. 1062. 184 Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 130/168, notes on topics for conferences, n.d. [c.1938].


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more fresh food. Britain’s Land could grow much more fresh food’ was the campaign message.185 Socialist approaches favouring abundant production were contrasted with capitalist manipulation of the food supply for profit. There was condemnation of the policies of the American New Deal, designed to protect farm incomes by destroying surpluses and deliberately reducing production: illustrations of ‘capitalism as a destroyer’.186 Britain provided its own examples of the destruction of food supplies. The Milk Marketing Board, established in 1933, was criticized for choosing to throw milk away, rather than reduce the liquid price; Labour’s prescription was to make the dairy industry profitable by expanding its market, rather than by artificial restrictions of the supply.187 The foods which were being promoted by nutritionists—notably fruit, vegetables, and milk—were precisely those which offered British farmers the best chance of competing against imports.188 ‘Labour’s Policy of Food for All’, as proclaimed in a leaflet from September 1937, argued that agriculture’s ‘primary purpose’ should be to provide people with a good diet at a reasonable price. Agricultural policy might even aim to subsidize consumption in the interests of national health.189 Labour insisted that farmers should focus on providing a greater supply of high-grade ‘health foods’, including eggs and meat, to improve the quality of life of Britain’s population at peace, rather than endorsing warmongering proposals to increase home production of cereals.190 The ‘Food and Farming’ campaign was a belated attempt to integrate rural policy into Labour’s broader national programme. For much of the interwar period, the party had treated agriculture as a specialized area of policy making, closely allied to efforts to win over a specific, and essentially unfamiliar, electorate. Whilst the details of policy remained in the hands of a small group with particular interests in the subject, the party’s agricultural programme could often seem independent of other areas of policy. Yet throughout this time Labour faced the problem of reconciling its ‘two voices’. It might seem self-evident that agriculture was primarily about food production; yet the two were not automatically combined in 185 Title of LP leaflet no. 75, June 1938. The theme of ‘food and farming’ was taken up as the subject for the third of four magazine-style pictorial publications, Your Britain (1937– 8), issued to popularize Labour’s Immediate Programme. 186 Labour Research, September 1933. 187 Stafford Cripps, Economic Planning of Agriculture (LP, 1934); John Cripps, The Distribution of Milk (Oxford, 1938). 188 189 Labour Research, September 1938. Labour, December 1936. 190 Nutrition and Food Supplies (LP, September 1936).

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political appeals. G. D. H. Cole complained in 1938 that Labour’s food policy had always been drawn up from the agricultural rather than the consumer’s end.191 In fact there were signs that this was already changing. The Labour Research Department’s approach to agricultural policy by the late 1930s was informed almost exclusively from the viewpoint of the consumer, and was essentially a food policy approach, incorporating campaigns against high food prices and the huge conglomerates, like Tate and Lyle and United Dairies. The politics of the national food supply offered a way to link the self-interest of the urban and rural electorates: farmers would find their best market ‘in the stomachs of the poor’, whilst consumers might be ‘enlisted’ to support policies to eliminate profiteering and reduce prices.192 Local party secretaries were encouraged to educate urban consumers about the ways in which their interests were bound up with the welfare of the rural worker.193 In the 1930s, Labour presented itself as a party which would ‘make farming pay’ and make agriculture responsive to the nation’s nutritional needs. But how could agriculture become profitable except at the expense of consumers? In the attempt to secure support for an agricultural policy which seemed in danger of driving up food costs, one of Labour’s central arguments was about the savings to be made within the system of distribution.194 Even when Labour appeared conciliatory to almost every other sector in the industry, marketing middlemen remained the one group whose profit-making could not be tolerated. ‘Labour’s Policy will cut out the Useless Profiteering Middleman’, it promised.195 Middlemen were identified as an obstacle to achieving better conditions for the rural workforce and a decent income for farmers, as Labour’s version of a harvest hymn made clear: We plough the fields and scatter the good seed for a job, And we receive in wages a lousy thirty bob. The men who run the markets reap profits from the seeds, And we get thirty shillings to satisfy our needs.

191 BLPES, Fabian Society papers, J16/8, report of New Fabian Research Bureau conference on food policy, January 1938. 192 Labour’s Policy of Food for All (LP, September 1937); Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 129/165, typed draft, ‘Labour’s Land Policy’, 19 December 1933. 193 NMLH, LP/AG/30/104, circular, June 1938. 194 Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 129/165, typed draft, ‘Labour’s Land Policy’, 19 December 1933. 195 Title of a leaflet for the launch of Labour’s 1926 agricultural policy.


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. . . . . . . You housewives out at Stepney, you working men in Bow. Pay threepence for a cabbage, where does the money go? Not to the country farmer, not to the man who digs, But to the market twisters, the state-protected pigs.196

The much inflated market prices of vegetables became a popular illustration of an exploitation which damaged working-class consumers and agricultural producers alike. Emil Davies pointed to Covent Garden as one of the most glaring examples of private monopoly: a market where parsnips could be sold at a 331 per cent profit.197 A policy connecting food and farming had much to commend it. It seemed at last to promise a uniting of the interests of town and country. It was also a reflection of the mood of the late 1930s, picking up on themes and anxieties which were by no means unique to the Labour Party. When the New Statesman reviewed Addison’s A Policy for British Agriculture in February 1939, the reviewer noted a shift in Labour’s approach to the subject of agriculture: ‘Proposals for agrarian reform used mostly to begin with an exposure of the abuses of landlordism: now they begin most often either with the facts of malnutrition or with the problem of the food supply in time of war.’198 Before the year was out, that latter issue had overtaken all others, changing the parameters of agricultural policy in Britain for decades to come. A ‘NATIONAL’ POLICY Even while Labour worked to present policies to promote the interests of both producers and consumers, and to reach out to a variety of electorates in the process, it remained difficult to produce a programme which could satisfy the diverse strands already embraced by the Labour movement. These problems become clear when looking at two particular interest groups—agricultural trade unionism and the Co-operative Movement— which one might expect to have had a significant voice in the development of Labour’s agricultural policy. 196 ‘Song for a Choir of Agricultural Workers to Sing at Covent Garden’, William T. Nettleford, from Poetry and the People, and reprinted in Country Standard, April 1939. 197 Emil Davies, ‘Protecting the Consumer’, in H. Tracey (ed.), The Book of the Labour Party. Its History, Growth, Policy, and Leaders, 3 vols. (1925), ii. 53–4. 198 New Statesman and Nation, 4 February 1939.

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Agricultural trade unions had surprisingly little influence on policy making, feeding disillusionment amongst what was probably the largest single grouping within Labour’s rural membership. When the NUAW’s former president Walter Smith returned to address the conference in his new capacity as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture in 1924, he had a cautionary message for union members: a government had to consider its responsibilities ‘from the standpoint of the interests of the whole’.199 The idea that a decent living for the labourer should be the ‘first charge’200 on the industry had become a commonplace, but the Labour Party grew so anxious to take a broad perspective on its task that it seemed in danger of losing sight of the interests of agricultural workers. The NUAW expressed regret that Addison made no reference to the conditions of the workforce in his speech to the party conference in 1930, and clashed with him over his refusal to use his position as minister in a Labour government to ensure that trade unionists were represented amongst the appointed members on agricultural wages committees.201 The agricultural workers’ issue which Labour took most seriously was wage regulation, and on this at least the party’s record was glowing: the NUAW declared itself ‘eternally grateful’ to the first Labour government for reintroducing the wages board.202 Even this was not quite what had been hoped for. No figure was inserted for a national minimum wage, and the central wages board under the new legislation had hardly any powers, functioning as little more than a rubber stamp for decisions made at county level. Despite this, Labour’s role in re-establishing wage regulation was considered a vital part of its subsequent appeal to the agricultural workers: ‘Deeds count, not words. Remember the Buxton Act and Vote for the Labour Party—The Farm Worker’s Friend.’203 The history of agricultural workers and unemployment insurance was much more complicated. Their absence from the 1911 legislation only really became an issue in the later 1920s, and even then it was far from 199

MERL, NUAW, BVI/3. The phrase was common within agricultural trade unionism, and was often used in Labour Party literature, even in the later 1930s; see Labour and the Land (LP, 1935); Attlee, Labour’s Aims; and Labour’s Immediate Programme (LP, 1937). 201 MERL, NUAW, EC, 17 October and 19 December 1930; ‘Open Letter to Dr. Addison’, Land Worker, November 1930. The committees’ appointed members effectively held the casting vote on wage orders, and tended to side with the farmers. 202 NUAW 1930 conference, MERL, NUAW, BVI/5. Labour first introduced a Bill on the subject in 1913. 203 LP leaflet 197, April 1927. Also ‘Labour keeps its promises to the Farm Worker’, LP leaflet 102, September 1924. 200


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universally accepted by the unions that agricultural workers would benefit from inclusion.204 The first Labour government had promised to devise a scheme205; yet early in the second Labour administration it was decided not to include agricultural workers in a new Unemployment Insurance Bill. The NUAW made its discontent known in a statement issued to the press, and there was even talk of withholding its party affiliation fees.206 William Holmes observed ‘a growing feeling of bitterness on the countryside’.207 When agricultural workers were finally included in unemployment insurance in 1936, the NUAW was still angry about the Labour government’s missed opportunity.208 The Co-operative Movement also had an uneasy relationship with Labour and its agricultural policy. Co-operation in Britain was primarily a consumers’ movement, and exemplified many of the problems which Labour faced in considering national food production. Although the Co-op eschewed the argument of cheapness which underlay most importation of food, it took a clearly international perspective on the provenance of what it retailed. In the 1930s, it was quite happily advertising Swedish butter, while Labour was preaching the importance of bolstering the domestic dairy industry: the significant consideration was that it was Co-operative butter, not that it was British, Swedish, or Danish. As wholesaler and retailer, the Co-op had a significant stake in the national food supply, but it was largely disappointed in its hopes to influence party discussions on the wheat quota and on marketing legislation.209 It was made plain to the agricultural unions and the Co-operative Movement that they should expect no favours from Labour in government. Indeed Labour seems at times to have deliberately turned its back on its own special interest groups in order to prove its receptiveness to the needs of the agricultural community as a whole. This eagerness to take advice from the industry encouraged an engagement with the idea 204 On the problems of devising a suitable scheme see PRO, MAF 47/15; Whetham, Agrarian History, 157, 235–7. 205 CAB 23/47, 17 March 1924. 206 NUAW press statement, MERL, NUAW, EC, 21 November 1930; EC, 16 January 1931. 207 NEC, 24 February 1931. 208 C. H. Chandler at 1936 NUAW conference, report at MERL, NUAW, BVI/7. 209 Percy Redfern, The New History of the C.W.S. (1938), 462. The system introduced by Addison’s Marketing Act appeared to encourage cooperation amongst producers, though it has been pointed out that it offends against the ‘Rochdale principles’ of voluntary membership and independence from the State: Jack Dunman, Agriculture: Capitalist and Socialist (1975), 59.

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of non-party solutions for agriculture’s problems: a so-called ‘national’ policy. In the 1920s and 1930s, non-party agricultural pressure groups flourished, and many people contemplated the advantages of taking agriculture out of politics, or the politics out of agriculture.210 Some of these organizations had Labour politicians amongst their membership, like the non-party Rural Reconstruction Association of the mid-1920s, whose council included an assembly of active Labour figures: Geoffrey Garratt, Leigh Aman, George Dallas, Morgan Philips Price, and Mrs Pethick-Lawrence. Labour attempted to harness such sentiments, presenting its own lack of tradition in this field of policy as an opportunity to be truly responsive to agriculture’s needs. In its 1921 programme, the party was already talking about the case for a ‘national’ policy for agriculture: ‘It is not any sectional interest or local advantage that should determine the policy of the nation.’211 As Minister of Agriculture, Addison observed that political controversies had ‘long stood in the way of a constructive agricultural policy’, and that they must take agricultural problems outside the sphere of party politics.212 Part of the argument for a ‘national’ policy was about removing instability. The experience of the Corn Production Act and its repeal had showed the vulnerability of farming prosperity to shifts of policy, and most people agreed that what British agriculture really needed was a climate of certainty, within which farmers could plan their production and invest for the future. Discussions in pursuit of an agreed agricultural policy were actively pursued under the second Labour government, long before the question of a broader ‘National’ platform arose. The conferences which MacDonald had convened in spring 1930, involving the CLA, NFU, NUAW, and TGWU, were intended to arrive at ‘the main features of an agreed and stable policy for agriculture’.213 W. B. Taylor, one of the chief advocates of a common platform to unite the different interests within agriculture, talked in October 1930 about a movement towards ‘classless justice’ for the whole agricultural industry.214 In such an approach, 210 E.g. sentiments expressed in NFU News Sheets, 14 November 1921, 4 June 1923; MERL, NFU Parliamentary, Press and Publicity Committee, 24 October 1922; PRO 30/69/672/III/184–5, MacDonald papers, Buxton to MacDonald, 6 December [1929], on Lloyd George’s views. 211 The Labour Party and the Countryside (LP, 1921). 212 PRO 30/69/562, MacDonald papers, 29 July 1931. 213 PRO 30/69/244/219–22, MacDonald papers. 214 HCDeb, 244, col. 12, 28 October 1930.


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questions of class and special interests within agriculture faded beside the needs of the sector as a whole. Labour’s notion of a national policy for agriculture was thus rather different from the rhetoric of national interest, as discussed by Philip Williamson, where groups ‘presumed an identity between their own higher interests and those of the nation’.215 In Labour’s case, the assumption of a ‘national’ policy actually overrode normal presumptions of ideology or of the party’s natural identification with the interests of employees within an industry. Instead, the ‘national’ platform for agriculture postulated the virtues of setting party politics aside, looking for consensual measures which could further the interests of agriculture as a sector, rather than the fortunes of any particular group. Labour’s sensitivity to the wishes of the rural electorate came to be almost synonymous with an ideologically cautious approach to policy. When Hugh Dalton encouraged Labour to ‘cherish its growing agricultural contingent, and take their guidance on emphasis and priorities’, he was counselling reticence in the treatment and advertisement of contentious subjects like the nationalization of land, and prospects for large-scale farming.216 Nowhere was this reticence more necessary than in Labour’s appeal to the farmers themselves. 215 216

Williamson, National Crisis, 17. Hugh Dalton, Practical Socialism for Britain (1935), 158.

8 Labour and the Farmers The farmers have often been in the habit of thinking that the Labour Party is hostile to them, but they are mistaken. The Labour Party is hostile to no one who renders a useful social service. Ramsay MacDonald, A Prosperous Countryside (1927)

One of the most remarkable aspects of Labour’s attempts to engage with the needs of the countryside and promote agricultural prosperity was a shift in the party’s attitude towards farmers. Despite a tradition of leftwing hostility towards the farming community, Labour attached increasing importance to attracting farmers’ support, offering reassurances that its agricultural policy would not attempt to supplant them or damage their interests. By the 1930s, Labour was addressing farmers directly, and presenting itself as the party which best understood their problems. ‘We have the right to the farmer’s vote,’ claimed a delegate from Chichester at the 1939 party conference, ‘because we are the only people with a really suitable and solid programme for agriculture.’1 The debates surrounding the role of the farmer within this ‘solid programme’ serve to illustrate the pragmatism and the ideological limitations of Labour’s agricultural policy, as well as the clear relationship between that policy and the perceived electoral imperative. FARMING AND THE L ABOUR MOVEMENT For Labour, farming was usually something done by other people. The NUAW kept a rigid divide between farm work and farming, and always rejected suggestions that it should invest some of its funds in land and demonstrate that it could manage farms successfully: farming was not 1

38th Conference, 1939, 316.

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the union’s job, nor was it something which it tended to encourage as an ambition for its members.2 There were a few instances of practical farming within the Labour movement. The TGWU ran two small farms, amounting to just 34 acres, supplying food for its convalescent home at Littleport.3 The Co-operative Wholesale Farms offered a more impressive example of ‘farming by the people’.4 CWS bought its first farming land in Shropshire in 1896; in 1929, it was farming 65,000 acres in Britain.5 CWS farms were managed along conventional, commercial lines, rather than as genuinely cooperative enterprises, though their business ethos seemed to promise employment conditions better than those on most private farms: they were credited with leading the way in providing annual holidays with pay, and trade unionism was technically compulsory for employees.6 Even so, the NUAW uncovered cases of nonunionization and payment below the minimum wage. Farmers in general occupied a special place in socialist demonology. They were characterized as complaining capitalists, doctrinaire individualists, bad employers, and inefficient producers—wasteful of national resources, and yet always expecting to be subsidized.7 Attitudes had mellowed somewhat from the late nineteenth century—when one Socialist pamphlet described farmers as ‘very often mentally and morally illbalanced’8—but it seemed that there was still much to criticize. ‘Taking the farming class as a whole,’ claimed one delegate at the 1928 Labour Party conference, ‘their political history is probably more rotten than that of any other class.’9 Farmers’ tendency to vote Conservative, and the National Farmers’ Union’s dismissive attitude towards Labour policy, did nothing to enhance their reputation in the eyes of the Left. In the Land Worker’s cartoons, farmers were consistently portrayed as arrogant and greedy. The unions accused farmers of taking every opportunity to cheat

2

E.g. comments at 1922 NUAW conference, MERL, NUAW/BVI/3. Record, July 1933. 4 See Land Worker, October 1921, caption to cover photograph. 5 Percy Redfern, The New History of the C.W.S. (1938), 180, 357; G. Walworth, Farm and Store: New Hope for the Land (Co-operative Union, 1929). Noel Buxton noted that the Co-op had had to close down practically all its farming operations, because of financial losses (CAB24/207, CP334(29), memo, 24 October 1929). 6 J. [sic] Pointing, in G. D. H. Cole, British Trade Unionism To-day (1939), 440; Redfern, New History of the C.W.S., 205. 7 E.g. Harold Laski writing in the Daily Herald, 23 May 1931. 8 Arthur Hickmott, Socialism and Agriculture (1897), 7. 9 A. V. Bond, 28th Conference, 1928, 251. 3

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workers out of the wages they were entitled to, and even frustrating workers’ attempts to find alternative employment away from the farm.10 Labour’s immediate priority on the countryside in the early twentieth century was to help those employed on the farms.11 ‘Labour must not be afraid to offend some of the farmers,’ declared Edwin Gooch, president of the NUAW: ‘whatever we say to the farmers . . . they will not listen to us, and when the General Election comes around there will not be one farmer in a hundred who will vote Labour. Let Labour remain the Workers’ Party’.12 In attempts at a class analysis of rural society, farm labourers were always identified with the working class, while farmers were generally excluded from it.13 Despite the many farms in Britain which were centrally dependent on the labour of the farmer and his family, farmers were only occasionally classed as ‘workers’.14 The role of championing the agricultural worker placed organized Labour in a position of direct opposition to the farmers. When representatives of the agricultural unions met their counterparts in the farmers’ union, it was normally in a context of institutionalized confrontation, on the county committees responsible for establishing wage rates. The two sides argued their cases along different lines. Whilst farmers persisted in defending low wages on the grounds that this was all the industry could afford, Labour defined the minimum wage in terms of the basic requirement to ‘promote efficiency and to enable a man in the ordinary case to maintain himself and his family in accordance with such standard of comfort as may be reasonable in relation to his occupation’, denying any necessary link between wages and farm prices, such as had been implied by the provisions of the 1917 Corn Production Act.15 The NUAW refused to accept that wages should be related to farmers’ ability to pay. By extension, this attitude made it unsympathetic to complaints about the state of the industry as a whole. On the contentious issue of tithe payment, which was the subject of violent protest in many arable areas in the final years before the Redemption Act of 1936, George Edwards told

10

E.g. reports in Record, September 1936 and January 1937. E.g. J. C. Wedgwood, Labour and the Farm Worker (LP, 1925). 12 33rd Conference, 1933, 212. 13 E.g. H. B. Pointing and Emile Burns, Agriculture (1927), 52. 14 E.g. ‘landworkers—farmer and labourer alike’, Daily Herald, 6 January 1927; ‘the producer, i.e. the farmer and the labourer’, Tom Williams, Labour’s Way to Use the Land (1935); ‘the agricultural worker, whether labourer or farmer’, C. R. Attlee, Labour’s Aims (LP, 1937). 15 Agricultural Wages (Regulation) Act, 1924, §2(4). 11


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union members that ‘It was not their question; it was the farmers’ and the landlords’ question.’16 In any case, many were suspicious about farmers’ supposed impoverishment. Farmers seemed to enjoy a style of living which contradicted their complaints. They were pictured as fat and well dressed, their thick coats and motor cars contrasted with the hardships endured by their workforce. MacDonald criticized farmers who spent their days running to hounds and then claimed that they could not afford to increase their labourers’ wages.17 To undermine protestations of financial difficulty, the NUAW’s journal carried a regular column publishing details of farmers’ wills—such a popular item with members that there were complaints when pressure on space occasionally led to its being omitted.18 The message of these representations was that, although farmers might complain loudly, it was really only the labourer who suffered. The TGWU concluded that farmers who were unable to pay a living wage to their labourers were ‘either mean or incompetent’.19 It was difficult for many people to accept evidence about the impact of agricultural depression, because farmers had such a bad reputation for moaning.20 In 1924, Labour’s advisory committee on agriculture reminded the party that talk of agricultural depression had become a matter of ‘tradition’, and that it was important to bear this in mind ‘to enable us to keep a sense of proportion in dealing with the complaints of farmers at the present time’. During the crisis of the early 1930s, farmers’ grievances were still regarded with some scepticism. Tom Shaw contradicted calls for agricultural support, urging Ramsay MacDonald that ‘it is useless to expect us to do for the farmers what the farmers ought to do

16 MERL, NUAW, BVI/6, 1932 conference. The survival of this ancient church tax on productive land became a prominent issue in the interwar period, as farmers protested that the levels of the tax were crippling their businesses. For an account of the protests see Carol Twinch, Tithe War 1918–1939. The Countryside in Revolt (Norwich, 2001). The Labour party insisted that there was no solution to the tithe question other than the nationalization of land, though it did produce a statement on tithe in 1935, proposing redemption over 15 years (rather than the 60-year period of the 1936 settlement) and an immediate reduction of the annual payments (Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 126/160.2, memo by J. S. Middleton, ‘The Tithe Question’, 29 October 1935, and Report and Recommendations of the Agricultural Sub-Committee on the Tithe Question, research memo no. 310, by Christopher Addison, May 1936). 17 Labour’s Policy versus Protection (LP, November 1923). 18 E.g. MERL, NUAW Organisation and Political Sub-Committee, 18 August 1938. 19 20 Record, March 1936. 34th Conference, 1934, 205.

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for themselves’.21 The Daily Herald told farmers that they must be ‘up and doing’.22 ‘BET TER FARMING’ The inefficiency of farmers was a popular theme. In 1925, the NFU took Philip Snowden to task for commenting in Parliament that Britain was the worst-farmed country in the world.23 MacDonald could also be outspoken on the subject, though the extent to which he actually blamed the farmers for the problems of agriculture is debatable.24 In part, he saw them as victims of county society: ‘servility and false ideals’ had destroyed the farmer, so that he had ceased to be ‘an energetic and mentally able cultivator’.25 While opening Labour’s agricultural campaign in December 1926, MacDonald pondered the question of who was to blame when land went out of cultivation, and came up with the answer, ‘no one in particular’; the problem was not the individuals involved, but the basic system of the private ownership of land.26 Others implicated farmers more directly in explanations for the troubled state of the industry. Joseph Duncan argued that the existing system encouraged complacent farming, since competition did not weed out inefficient operators in agriculture as it did in other industries.27 Noel Buxton echoed these concerns, identifying ‘bad farming’ as one of the chief obstacles to development.28 The ‘farming problem’, concluded R. B. Walker, was not so much a problem of farming, as of farmers.29 The technical improvement of farming became one of Labour’s stated goals. ‘Better Farming, Better Business, Better Living’ was a phrase used by the Irish reformer Sir Horace Plunkett, and Labour was happy to 21 PRO 30/69/244/456–7, MacDonald papers, Thomas Shaw to MacDonald, 1 July 1930; cf. PRO 30/60/10, Memorandum on the Position of Agriculture, January 1924. 22 Daily Herald, 20 April 1931, editorial. 23 NFU News Sheet, 30 March 1925. 24 He linked low wages to incompetent farming; see Socialist Review, May 1923, 201; also comments reported in NFU Record, March 1921, 137 and NFU Yearbook, 1931, 448. 25 Ramsay MacDonald, Socialism: Critical and Constructive (1921), 168. 26 Daily Herald, 19 December 1926. 27 Joseph Duncan, Memorandum on Immediate Steps in Agricultural Reconstruction (1918), 3; idem, Agriculture and the Community (1921), 116. 28 Herbert Tracey (ed.), The Book of the Labour Party. Its History, Growth, Policy, and Leaders, 3 vols. (1925), ii: 34–5. 29 R. B. Walker, Speed the Plough—A New Policy for Farming (March 1924), 3. See also Joseph Duncan, Socialist Review, February 1923; Pointing and Burns, Agriculture, 63.


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adopt it as ‘an excellent slogan’.30 However, some began to recognize that farmers themselves had much ground for legitimate complaint. When mediating in the 1923 strike in Norfolk, the Labour MP Harry Gosling found that he was being asked to divide ‘a bone with no meat on it’; wages on the farms were clearly too low, but it was hard to see how farmers could afford wage increases.31 Even putting aside the troubles of the agricultural market, farmers were trapped in a situation which severely limited their ability to make farming a paying concern. Many tenants had been virtually forced to purchase their farms in the climate of high prices immediately after the First World War, and were left saddled with heavy mortgages, the repayments on which allowed little opportunity for investing capital in agricultural improvements, machinery, or diversification.32 ‘Some writers are inclined to put the blame for a large proportion of the present decline [in agriculture] upon the quality of the individual farmer,’ observed Addison in 1938, Often enough, no doubt this charge is well founded. They have been slow to make use of increased knowledge, to study or adopt new methods, and far too apt, through their representatives, to hold out their hand to the Government . . . For all that, speaking generally, I think they have been more sinned against than sinning.33

Labour’s agricultural programme aimed to address problems of underinvestment, with the provision of adequate credit facilities.34 Land nationalization was also presented as a means to achieve a productive and flourishing agricultural sector: a system of state tenancy would lead to more efficient farming practice, as the state shouldered the responsibility for equipping the land, allowing farmers to take advantage of modern methods and equipment.35 In a country where increasing numbers of farmers had graduated from tenancy to owner-occupancy, Labour’s central agricultural policy of land nationalization lacked obvious appeal. 30 Labour Looking after Agriculture—Better Farming, Better Business, Better Living (LP, 1924). 31 Interview in Land Worker, May 1923, and quoted with approval in the NFU News Sheets for 10 and 15 May 1923. 32 The Land and the National Planning of Agriculture (LP, November 1932), 5; Williams, Labour’s Way to use the Land (1935), 5. 33 Christopher Addison, A Policy for British Agriculture (1939), 229. 34 There was a growing cross-party consensus on this issue: see Pointing and Burns, Agriculture, 62. 35 Christopher Addison, ‘Essentials of Farming Policy’, Farmer and Stockbreeder (6 September 1938).

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Yet it was promoted as a development which might actually be welcomed by overburdened owner-occupiers, who would benefit from the chance to free the capital they had tied up in purchasing their holdings.36 The public ownership of land offered further possibilities for improving the quality of British agriculture. Colin Clark, himself a farmer, described one vision of the future under socialism: The land would be administered by honest and disinterested Civil Servants. A clean sweep would be made of all farmers who were incompetent, neglectful or who let their land go down, and we would put an end, once, and for all, to the tyranny of land owner, Church and farmer alike.37

Such prospects combined old radical ideals (about the freeing up of land and the remodelling of rural society) with more technocratic goals. The new agriculture could represent not only a fairer system as evaluated in social terms, but also a more effective economic enterprise. Yet the Labour Party was far more ready to reform the basis on which land was held and controlled, than to interfere in the process of cultivation. Many regarded land nationalization as the key to reviving rural Britain; others focused on pragmatic reforms of marketing as a way to make capitalist agriculture profitable, whilst waiting for a socialist reconstruction of the industry. But the practice of farming remained a difficult subject for Labour. Daniel Hall, though generally supportive of its efforts to build an agricultural programme, commented that the party was ‘not sufficiently appreciative of the technical points at issue, of the land and of farming itself as distinct from their social repercussions’.38 Opposition propaganda emphasized the damaging ways in which Labour planned to transform agriculture, warning that Labour’s policy represented bureaucracy, ‘farming by committee’, and, as the ultimate goal of national ownership, collectivization. In fact, the concept of a ‘socialist agriculture’ remained highly ambiguous. Socialist methods were cited as enabling a wide range of agricultural practice, allowing for the extension of small-scale farming, 36 Cf. Resolution of Advisory Committee on Agricultural and Rural Problems, NEC, 4 October 1922. This point was also made in the 1925 Liberal land report, which found that owner-occupied farms were frequently the worst farmed holdings in an area (The Land and the Nation (1925), 101–2). At least 147,000 holdings were farmed by their owners in 1927, as against 56,000 in 1909 (Edith H. Whetham, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, viii: 1914–39 (Cambridge, 1978), 160). 37 35th Conference, 1935, 217. 38 Comments from Daniel Hall, Reconstruction and the Land (1941), cited in F. W. Bateson, Towards a Socialist Agriculture (1946), p. viii.


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even smallholding, as much as highly mechanized farming over large acreages.39 The scale of cultivation was the subject of continuing debate. ‘Whether the future lies with small holdings, with the present middlesized farms, or with highly capitalized production on much larger farms, no one can at present foresee,’ the 1921 policy statement noted.40 Eighteen years later, the agricultural future seemed to present a similarly mixed picture. Addison placed a premium on large farms as the scale for the future in his vision of the industry, though, alongside these, he still allowed a place for smallholding, which might retain an economic viability in some parts of the country, and for which there was still a considerable demand.41 L ARGE-SCALE CULTIVATION Some influences certainly tended to encourage the adoption of large-scale farming as the socialist ideal. When Labour considered agriculture as an ‘industry’, it could not quite escape from expectations of what an industry should be like. ‘It is very probable that agriculture will in future tend to become more and more an “industry” similar to the mechanical industries of the present day,’ speculated a party pamphlet in 1924. ‘The farms themselves may be larger than at present, and mechanical power will be applied much more extensively.’42 The economies of scale experienced in most manufacturing sectors might also apply to farming, the one industry where there had not yet been an application of capital and organization on a large scale.43 Capitalist demonstrations of large-scale cultivation were admired, and seemed to show the way agriculture must develop; the communist Maurice Cornforth thought such enterprises pointed an unwitting moral that ‘the road to prosperity is along the Socialist lines of nationalisation of the land, and the institution of large-scale co-operative farms.’44

39 I discuss this in ‘“Red Tape Farm”? Visions of a Socialist Agriculture in 1920s and 1930s Britain’, in J. R. Wordie (ed.), Agriculture and Politics in Britain, 1815–1939 (2000), 199–241. 40 The Labour Party and the Countryside—A Statement of Policy with Regard to Agriculture and Rural Life (LP, 1921), 7. 41 Addison, Policy for British Agriculture, 243–54. 42 The Waste of Capitalism (LP, [1924] ). 43 HCDeb, 244, col. 1894, 13 November 1930. 44 Country Standard, June 1936.

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However, one of the reasons for Labour’s uncertainty about pronouncing on the scale of cultivation was that the question of efficiency had not been resolved. Labour stressed the need for state-sponsored ‘experiments’ with different sorts of farm, in order to ascertain ‘the most economic unit of production’.45 The second Labour government organized conferences on the subject of large-scale farming and demonstration farms in July and September 1930, with participants including the academics Daniel Hall and C. S. Orwin, and the businessman Ernest Debenham (who had been carrying out his own trials in this area).46 But at the same time there was also interest in studies on the productivity of smallholdings, which seemed to offer a particularly good use of land in a heavily urbanized country.47 The most notable example of large-scale farming in action during the interwar period was in Russia, and Labour was often accused of taking its agricultural policy from Moscow.48 The Soviet Union’s socialist transformation of farming appeared more far-reaching and successful to many western observers on their guided tours than it was in reality. Yet even for these sympathetic tourists, the significance of the Russian experiment rested largely in its social rather than its economic effects. The most common observations related to the transformation of village life: the spread of literacy, improved living standards, and the provision of recreation. Foreign visitors marvelled at the once-primitive communities, now enlivened with cinema shows and concerts, the parameters of life transformed by the introduction of electric light, which was still no more than an aspiration for much of the rural population in Britain.49 Less was said about experiments in cultivation, though technological developments in Russian agriculture attracted admiration: false teeth for cows and the pride of Russian tractor drivers in their vehicles tended to receive more

45 Joseph Duncan, 22nd Conference, 1922, 229. Part of the intention of the doomed clauses in the 1931 Land Utilisation Bill had been to enable governments to engage in such experiments: Addison, Policy for British Agriculture, 231; comments by J. H. Alpass, HCDeb, 255, cols. 1855–8, 24 July 1931. 46 Bodleian Library, Addison papers, box 35, reports of proceedings, 29 July and 16 September 1930. The general opinion of the conferences was in favour of the idea. 47 See PRO 30/69/243/552–3, MacDonald papers, correspondence with Prime Minister’s office, 20 and 22 September 1930. 48 E.g. the extraordinary identification of smallholders as Labour’s ‘kulaks’ by W. E. Guinness, Conservative MP for Bury St. Edmunds (HCDeb, 244, col. 198, 13 November 1930). 49 For example, mains electricity only reached Abbey Cwmhir in Radnorshire on St. David’s Day, 1960.


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comment than changes to the organization of farming.50 Indeed agriculturalists were sometimes very disappointed by their visits to Soviet Russia. John Morgan travelled there in 1933 with the Fabian Research Bureau, and was unimpressed by what he discovered. The huge farms near Stalingrad raised his hopes, but the yields per acre were very low, and he was surprised to find camel teams more in evidence than tractors.51 A more positive view was expressed by the first recipient of the Co-operative Movement’s Acland travel scholarship, Paul Winterton,52 who used the award to study agricultural cooperation in Russia, spending nine months there during 1928. Even Winterton’s enthusiastic verdict was based primarily on the social benefits of the commune, which he saw as a ‘centre of culture’, capable of transforming rough peasants used to living in mud huts.53 These views were shared by Joan Beauchamp, one of the great enthusiasts for the Soviet agricultural project.54 Once again, what particularly impressed Beauchamp about developments in the new Russia was their impact in creating a ‘new and wider life’ in the countryside: ‘the workers on these farms are better fed, happier and freer than farm labourers in our own country’.55 The USSR’s agricultural policies were often discussed at speaker meetings and in the Labour press,56 whilst Eisenstein’s The General Line, portraying and promoting collectivization, was screened on over one hundred occasions by the London Workers’ Film Society.57 Despite evidence of serious food shortages in Russia, the regime’s agricultural policies were generally reported as a success, and the Russian experiment became the inspirational case most frequently cited on the British Left 50

Country Standard, December 1939, report on visit to Agricultural Exhibition in Russia. John Morgan, ‘Agriculture’, in Margaret Cole (ed.), Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia (1933), 107–21. 52 Winterton had recently graduated in economics when he travelled to Russia. He went on to contest Canterbury for Labour at the 1931 general election, and Mitcham, Surrey, in 1935. He later became involved with Communist groups, including the Friends of the Soviet Union. 53 Paul Winterton, A Student in Russia (Manchester, 1931), 69. See also his article, ‘Nine Months in a Socialist Community’, Labour Magazine (September 1929). 54 H. R. Knickerbocker et al., The New Russia (1931), 120. 55 Joan Beauchamp, Agriculture in Soviet Russia (1931), 125, and eadem ‘The Soviet Farm-Worker’, Labour Monthly (December 1930), 725–32. 56 The Country Standard had an agricultural correspondent in Russia from December 1936, and features by a variety of authors were common, e.g. February 1937, June 1937, March 1938, and November 1938. In 1939, Maurice Cornforth organized a trip for readers to visit collective and state farms and the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. 57 Alan Burton, The People’s Cinema. Film and the Co-operative Movement, National Film Theatre, dossier 12 (1994), 42. 51

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during the 1930s, as Irish and Danish agriculture had been in an earlier period.58 Yet, overt borrowings from this example were unusual. There were occasional suggestions for a British ‘five-year plan’; one, drafted in 1932, envisaged an annual extension of state farming until 60,000 acres were under such cultivation.59 But Labour would not adopt a commitment to fundamental changes in the conduct of agriculture. Even in the fantasy world of the 1932 ‘five-year plan’, state farms were to be balanced by a huge programme of land settlement, establishing 20,000 smallholders in group cooperatives. The general lack of enthusiasm for agricultural collectivization reflected a deep ambivalence within the Labour movement towards large-scale farming. One attraction of large-scale cultivation was the potential for a more highly mechanized, scientific form of agriculture. However, it is interesting to note that Labour’s vision of farming tended to be very traditional. Horse teams predominated amongst the illustrations in the party’s 1938 publication Food and Farming. The only distinctively modern elements of the agriculture on display in its pages were an electric milking shed and the scarcely innovative spectacle of a steam thresher. It might be said, in mitigation of this, that tractors were still relatively few in number in British fields—hence, in part, the excitement over their rumoured abundance in Russia.60 However, these were photographs celebrating the possibility of a brighter future for agriculture, not simply documenting its present state. There also appears to have been some aesthetic judgement being made. One might compare the iconography of the NUAW, whose enduring symbol of the plough team was adopted in 1920.61 When the union commissioned a certificate for its award of merit in the early 1930s, the original draft of the design was altered to replace a picture of a tractor with one of cows grazing.62 The union’s images of its members’ work remained surprisingly old-fashioned. 58 E.g. Andrew J. Williams, Labour and Russia. The Attitude of the Labour Party to the U.S.S.R., 1924–34 (Manchester, 1989), 138–9; Ethel Snowden, Through Bolshevik Russia (1920), 169, 178; Joan Beauchamp, ‘Agricultural Development in the Soviet Union’, Labour Research (October 1930), 228–30; R. Bishop and N. Buchwald, From Peasant to Collective Farmer (1933); Tom Williams, Digging for Britain (1965), 103, reflecting on visit to Russia in 1936; Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Soviet Communism— A New Civilisation, 2nd edn (1937), 1171–83. 59 Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 129, file 165, typed note by [?]John Dugdale, 6 May 1932. 60 In 1937 there were 46,500 tractors on farms in England and Wales, compared with 549,000 horse teams (Jonathan Brown, Farm Machinery 1750–1945 (1985), 79). 61 Even in 1961, the NUAW was defending its use of the image on the grounds that these were still sometimes to be seen in action (Land Worker, May 1961). 62 NUAW, EC minutes, 20 January 1933.


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8. Cows, rather than tractors. Images of agriculture on the NUAW’s award of merit. [© Norfolk Record Office, from their collections, reference MC 450/5, 746x9]

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Debates about the scale of cultivation were partly concerned with identifying the most promising scope for economic development, but there were also ideological positions involved. ‘Some Socialists imagine food production on the grand scale,’ Josiah Wedgwood lamented, the league-long furrow with State ploughs and State servants. Capitalism seems to be developing on those lines, and therefore, as they think, Socialism must follow in capital’s wake—maximum production, though for the good of all. But that is bureaucracy: real Socialism puts freedom above ease and utility. Better to be a man, with God and a crust, rather than a well-greased cog in the food factory.63

In fact, there was much suspicion of ‘big farms’, and some believed, like Wedgwood, that the life of the farm worker would be improved as he gained more direct control in the farming process: it was ‘not more big fields, but more little fields’ that were needed.64 One of the early hopes for land nationalization was that it would act against the trend in capitalist agriculture towards large farms, facilitating their break-up into smaller units.65 Wedgwood’s rural perspective on the land question was firmly in the Jesse Collings mould: that the farm worker’s salvation would come through ‘three acres and a cow’. He advocated smallholdings at low rent, with cheap state credit and cooperative associations, and insisted that this was the only way to interest farm workers in Labour’s political programme, since they found discussions about the highly capitalized and mechanized prospects for state or county council farming incomprehensible or unconvincing. The introductory prefaces to a 1925 pamphlet in which Wedgwood laid out these ideas show that these views were only one version of Labour thinking at the time. In one preface, Charles Duncan, Labour MP and general secretary of the Workers’ Union, agreed with Wedgwood that the future for the farm worker was as a ‘direct occupier and user of the land’. The other preface, by R. B. Walker, put forward a very different case. 63

Labour Leader, 11 May 1922. Charles Duncan, foreword to J. C. Wedgwood, Labour and the Farm Worker (LP, 1925). 65 Evidence from R. L. Outhwaite and Joseph Hyder to Labour Party Advisory Committee on Land Policy, NMLH, LP/LPAC, minutes, 18 and 25 June 1923. 64


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Walker acknowledged that he did not see the rural problem ‘quite from the same angle’ as Wedgwood, claiming that the real craving of the agricultural worker was for higher wages, not land.66 This guarded, public criticism only hinted at the real divergence of perspective, revealed in an original draft of Walker’s text. ‘I am not at all enthused with the idea of backing the worker in a struggle to snatch the land from its existing holders so that he can work it for himself,’ he wrote, ‘I want him to work for the community.’67 Walker’s hostility to smallholding was based partly on socialist arguments, condemning the apparent desire to own land as a superficial sentiment which could be ‘obliterated by propaganda’. In Walker’s opinion, farming on a small scale was neither useful to the economy as a whole nor viable for the individuals involved, leading to a life of poverty and drudge. ‘People talk about the bold peasantry of France and Denmark, and of the production under these conditions and ask why we can’t do the same,’ he commented. ‘We don’t want to do the same. We want to do something better, for our land, and above all for our people.’68 In the 1920s, Walker imposed his vehemence on the official pronouncements of the NUAW, giving the impression of a more united position within the union than was in fact the case. The union found itself balancing published condemnation of smallholding, with practical support for members who were trying to acquire smallholdings. In 1920, one article in the Land Worker managed to argue that smallholdings were not an efficient use of land, whilst at the same time complaining on behalf of union members who had been waiting for one for years.69 Conference resolutions continued to call for cottages to be built with half an acre of land, for growing vegetables and rearing pigs and poultry. Smallholding had a special significance for many progressives, because of the independence which, historically, it had offered to working men. Part of the original programme of the 1906 agricultural union was a commitment to assist labourers in obtaining allotments and smallholdings, providing ‘a better distribution of the land’.70 Richard Winfrey, Liberal MP and treasurer for the agricultural labourers’ union, saw smallholding as the issue which would make all other issues redundant: when the labourers had the land there would be no more disputes over 66

Wedgwood, Labour and the Farm Worker. MERL, NUAW, DII/5, typed draft, 20 February 1925. 68 Interview with R. B. Suther, Clarion, 2 October 1925. 69 Land Worker, October 1920. 70 George Edwards, From Crow-Scaring to Westminster (1922), 101; MERL, 2NUAW, CI/1, 1906 rule-book. 67

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wages.71 This simple faith in ‘back to the land’—even for those already working in agriculture—began to lose favour as the labourers’ union displaced its benign Liberal dictatorship and grew more radical. Yet smallholding was part of the history and mythology of agricultural trade unionism. In the early years of the Norfolk union, it offered a refuge from victimization for activists like George Hewitt, who took it up after being boycotted by employers for his part in the strike at St. Faith’s. Resolutions at the NUAW’s 1922 conference still suggested a need for smallholdings to ensure a group of free and independent men, who could assist union work without fear of victimization.72 Smallholdings presented a practical defence against reprisals by employers; allotments could provide supplementary food whilst in work, and a fall-back during strikes or other disputes. ‘The peasant who has even three acres of land, a well-filled pigsty, a cow’s grass on the common, and a cottage which is his to use and hold so long as he pays the rent, is to all intents and purposes a free man,’ insisted Keir Hardie.73 A class of smallholders might even provide a defence against capitalism more widely: S. J. Gee argued that if agricultural workers had been smallholders at the time of the 1921 mining lockout, they could have taken in the miners’ families, thus strengthening the workers in their dispute.74 The virtues of the peasant proprietor—that famous bulwark against revolution—are usually associated with the political Right, but they often met with a sympathetic audience on the Left as well. Ramsay MacDonald suggested that even the theoretical objections to peasant proprietorship could be overcome if Labour regarded the peasant owner as a producer within a cooperative system.75 Concerns about smallholding generally focused less on questions of ideological approval, and more on the basic problem of whether smallholders could make a decent living for themselves and their families. Smallholdings could only be justified where they proved a ‘satisfactory’ way of using the land, allowing ‘a standard of living for the occupiers not less favourable than . . . for wage earners’.76 Otherwise, the ‘emancipation’ offered by smallholding might only be ‘a new slavery of daylight to

71 Alun Howkins, ‘Edwardian Liberalism and Industrial Unrest: A Class View of the Decline of Liberalism’, History Workshop, 4 (autumn 1977), 146. 72 MERL, NUAW, BVI/3. 73 Foreword to Anne Cobden-Sanderson, Richard Cobden and the Land of the People (ILP, 1909). 74 75 21st Conference, 1921, 202. MacDonald, Socialism, 167 and 169. 76 H. B. Lees-Smith, (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of the Labour Movement ( [1928] ), 9.


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dark devotion’.77 Addison, however, believed that freedom from exploitation by an employer made all the difference: ‘Although there might be some criticism . . . on the grounds that small holdings condemned the men and their families to 16 hours a day slavery’, the more important consideration was that ‘the small holder is working for himself and not for an employer’.78 For all those, like George Hewitt, who were forced into smallholding to escape victimization, there were many more who chose it as a positive career move: a means of ‘getting on’.79 Election addresses praised the potential for smallholdings to allow ‘enterprising and industrious labourers’ to become their own masters and escape from ‘wage slavery’.80 In reality, many smallholders found themselves with an even lower standard of living than the hired hands, and almost certainly longer working hours; smallholding was often an illusory ‘ladder’ into farming. Whatever the ideological and economic questions associated with smallholding, there were other issues which made many people on the Left unsympathetic towards the place of small-scale production within a modern agriculture. Some found the life of the ‘small grubber’ offensive in itself. ‘Peasants’ were commonly associated with ‘drudge’ and penury.81 There seems to have been a significant shift in the way that the term was used, from the positive implications of the ‘peasantry’ in Keir Hardie’s vocabulary, to the dismissive tone of a later generation. A notable contrast developed between attitudes towards historical villagers before enclosure and the views expressed about contemporary peasants in other countries. Russian peasants were often described with great distaste.82 Even whilst acknowledging that there were disturbing aspects to the Soviet political system, John Morgan’s main criticisms were reserved for the Russian peasantry, whose recalcitrance and cunning he considered a serious obstacle to agricultural improvement.83 Attlee drew a sharp contrast between people in Britain and Russia, observing that the British ‘are not ignorant peasants’.84 Thus, alongside his supposedly miserable socio-economic condition, the character of the peasant was also poorly regarded. 77 PRO 30/69/1173/575–80, MacDonald papers, Jesse Hawkes to Ramsay MacDonald, 17 October 1928. 78 Bodleian Library, Addison papers, box 35, notes on office conference, 19 June 1930. 79 MERL, NUAW, BVI/6, 1932 conference report. 80 Sidney Box, The Good Old Days: Then and Now (1955), 76. 81 E.g. Fred Henderson, Planning or Chaos (LP, [?1935]). 82 E.g. Winterton, A Student in Russia, 61, 69–70. 83 Cole, Twelve Studies, 114 and 121. 84 C. R. Attlee, Local Government and the Socialist Plan (Socialist League, 1934).

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Selfishness was an attribute often applied to peasant proprietors.85 Joseph Duncan argued that, under competitive conditions, the smallholder must always be too self-centred to become ‘a good citizen’, or to form ‘the stuff from which a healthy rural community can be created’.86 In contrast to both the poor employment conditions of the agricultural labourer and the self-imposed exploitation and drudge of smallholding, some hoped that large-scale cultivation, making full use of scientific and technological developments, might at last provide workers on the land with decent conditions, analogous to those of the modern industrial workforce. On large state farms, a worker might be paid a wage comparable with a skilled worker in the towns.87 In such circumstances, according to Walker, it would be possible to make the life of the rural labourer ‘worth living’.88 ‘A PUBLIC SERVICE’ In the face of these debates about the virtues of farming on a small or a large scale, it became increasingly evident that many elements of cultivation would remain essentially unchanged under Labour’s agricultural proposals. A programme for implementing a new agriculture was laid out for the first time in 1926: the nation’s land would be managed by committees, to plan development and enforce good husbandry. These committees would also be empowered to farm for themselves, though it was stressed that ‘such public farming will not entirely supersede tenant farming, which will for long continue to be the normal method of tenure and cultivation.’89 G. T. Garratt insisted that the party’s programme did not advocate state farming. ‘All serious political opinion’, Garratt suggested, was ‘in favour of modifying rather than replacing the existing organisation of English farming, based on the medium sized mixed farm.’90 In 1932, the ambition of direct, public farming, ‘and other forms of collective co-operative farming for large tracts of land’, was stated more strongly, this being the apogee of collectivist ideas. Yet it was still recognized that 85

E.g. F. E. Green, A New Agricultural Policy (1921). Duncan, Agriculture and the Community, 54–5. 87 NLS, Duncan papers, Acc. 5601/F2, A. P. Grenfell, memo for LP Advisory Committee, [1918]. 88 89 Clarion, 2 October 1925. Labour’s Policy on Agriculture ( LP, 1926). 90 G. T. Garratt, Agriculture and the Labour Party, Fabian tract 228 (April 1929). The 1924 party conference had passed a resolution in favour of large-scale state farming on land already in government hands, or which had been allowed to go out of cultivation (24th Conference, 1924, 173). 86


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the majority of agricultural production would rest with individual farmers.91 By the late 1930s, the commitment to public farming had become far less definite. Addison observed, ‘Although there ought to be, and doubtless will be, a great extension of large-scale farming operations, the bulk of the cultivation, so far as the present plan can estimate, will be through the farmer, who . . . would be the tenant of State-owned land.’92 In 1936, one Labour farmer’s wife felt a need to remind readers of the Country Standard that ‘There will still be farmers, even when the land is State-owned; there has to be a directive brain, with local knowledge, to run a farm.’93 Labour’s vision of how farmers might nonetheless have a different role in the new countryside focused around two ideas in particular. Firstly, farmers under an improved system would be individuals with genuine talents and suitability for their job.94 The old system of a largely hereditary farming class would be broken down, as bad farmers were deprived of their tenancies. Once farming was an open profession to which anyone might aspire, Labour believed that it could offer the prospect of a career for the talented farm worker, whose limited scope for promotion within the existing system was recognized as contributing to poor morale within the workforce. Many labourers reached their highest level of earnings at an early point in their working lives, and the common method of self-advancement was to leave the industry altogether. Labour hoped to make the position of ‘farmer’ part of a competitive career structure, in which ‘farmers’ and ‘labourers’ were not two distinct classes, but two grades of a single occupation.95 A second element of the new role for farmers was that farming itself would take on a new ethos. The essence of this was ‘public service’. The ideal of public service was central to much of Ramsay MacDonald’s thinking as a general aim for the new society.96 In its application to agriculture, MacDonald talked of farmers ‘doing their duty’, and introducing ‘a higher motive’ into the industry.97 The success of Labour’s new plans 91 The Land and the National Planning of Agriculture (LP, November 1932); For Socialism and Peace (LP, December 1934). 92 Addison, Policy, 228–9. 93 Doreen Rash, Country Standard (November 1936), 6. She also wrote for the Country Standard as Doreen Wallace, the name under which she produced a string of rural novels. 94 Noel Buxton, ‘Agriculture’, in Tracey (ed.), Book of the Labour Party, ii. 39. 95 Henry D. Harben, Labour and the Land. An Agricultural Policy (1921), 13. 96 E.g. MacDonald, Socialism, 279, and 282–3. 97 Ramsay MacDonald, A Prosperous Countryside (1927), 8. MacDonald’s concept of a new role for the farmer may have been influenced by reading Arthur Hickmott’s Socialism and Agriculture (1897), which described the future of the farmer as a ‘public servant’ (p. 15).

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for agriculture would rest ultimately with the cultivators, ‘in whom it is hoped there will be pride of calling and public spirit’.98 The ambition was to transform agriculture into ‘a great social service’,99 though some found this a disturbing prospect. The fictional farmer in Winifred Holtby’s Political Dialogues of 1929 is shocked when informed by a canvasser for the Labour Party that farming is to be reorganized as a ‘social service’. A friend has to explain it to him: ‘I expect you think social services mean things like health visiting . . . But I believe that the Labour Party means by social service some industry organized for the good of the whole Community, rather than for a few individuals.’100 The idea of agriculture as a ‘public’, ‘national’, or ‘social service’ (the terms were essentially interchangeable) implied that agriculturalists should not be allowed simply to follow their own private interests: as an ILP pamphlet put it in the mid-1920s, agriculture could not be left ‘to the whims of individuals’.101 Noel Buxton explained that farming must be regarded as more than merely a business, partly because it depends on the use of land, which is limited in amount, and of a peculiar economic and social value; partly because of the great importance of the produce of the soil to the life of the people; and partly because of its social effects and the value to the State of a flourishing rural population.102

But if agriculture was of such unique significance and national importance, what was the role of the individual within it? Jesse Hawkes put forward an uncompromising vision of the farmer’s future as ‘a unit in the organised public service’, receiving a salary ‘based upon acreage and past efficiency’.103 When the justification of farming lay in the extent to which it served the interests of the community, this raised issues of how the community could ensure that its interests were being best served. It seemed to spell an end to farmers’ autonomy of action. In presenting these ideas, the Labour Party emphasized that changes in farmers’ responsibilities would be accompanied by greater obligations 98

Labour’s Policy on Agriculture, 8. E. H. Hunter of the ILP, at 24th Conference, 1924, 173; J. H. Alpass, HCDeb, 255, col. 1858, 24 July 1931. 100 Winifred Holtby, A New Voter’s Guide to Party Programmes. Political Dialogues (1929), 51. 101 F. Seymour Cocks, Socialism and Agriculture (ILP, [1925]). 102 Labour Looking after Agriculture, 2. 103 Jesse Hawkes, A Magnificent Deception (1926). Hawkes later linked this specifically into the notion of stabilisation: ‘[the farmer’s] prosperity will be stabilised by socialising his function.’ (Memo for New Fabian Research Bureau, ‘Some General Considerations on Socialised Agriculture in Great Britain’, 19 December 1933, BLPES, J23/1/10). 99


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on the part of the nation towards agriculture. Farmers would have the security of being ‘tenants of the nation’.104 As ‘public servants’, they would enjoy ‘an honourable position plus a decent living’.105 Cripps hoped that farmers would be prepared to give up ‘some of their individualist traditions’, in return for security and a fair standard of living.106 When the nation had a proper stake in the land, the industry’s problems could be ignored no longer. ‘The tenant needs a good landlord. The State will be that landlord,’ the Labour Party told farmers during its 1926 campaign.107 The failings of contemporary private landlords offered Labour a somewhat ingenious argument for the nationalization of agricultural land—not that ‘nationalization’ was a word generally used in approaches to the farming community. Rather than describing the policy as being about ownership, the focus was on the services which should be provided by the landlord for his tenant: the nation should become the farmer’s landlord, ‘so that the producers of our food may get the help towards good farming which private landlords no longer give.’108 FARMERS AND THEIR POLITICS In these circumstances, private landlords could become the main focus of Labour’s antipathy. Farmers were not as wealthy as landlords, nor were they as idle; as the manager of his farm, the farmer, unlike the landlord, was acknowledged to do at least ‘some useful work’.109 By 1937, Labour was lumping tenant farmers and agricultural workers together, on the grounds that both were suffering at the hands of the landlords.110 There were revelations, too, that it was not only labourers in tied cottages who might experience unpleasant consequences as a result of supporting Labour. A tenant farmer who revealed his Labour sympathies could face victimization from his bank manager, as well as from the stock dealers, auctioneers, corn merchants, and butchers with whom he had dealings.111 104

Your Britain, no. 3: Food and Farming (LP, 1938). PRO 30/69/1171/I/636–7, MacDonald papers, Jesse Hawkes to MacDonald, 22 February 1926. 106 Stafford Cripps, The Economic Planning of Agriculture (LP, 1934). 107 The Labour Party and the Farmer, leaflet 198 (April 1927; re-issued April 1929). 108 Britain’s People Need Much More Fresh Food/Britain’s Land Could Grow Much More Fresh Food, LP leaflet 75 (June 1938; ‘Food and Farming’ campaign). 109 C. A. Pease, Socialism in the Village (ILP, 1920), 3. 110 Christopher Addison, Labour’s Policy for our Countryside (LP, 1937), 5. 111 ‘Victimisation—from an Angle we Overlook’, Labour Organiser (December 1929). 105

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It began to seem more feasible that farmers might form part of Labour’s constituency in the countryside: farmers as well as labourers had problems which Labour could address, and to which no solutions were forthcoming from their traditional allies, the Conservatives. In the 1920s, the Conservative Party in government seemed to feel at liberty to ignore the demands of its agricultural supporters. In 1927, Baldwin’s speeches on agriculture were greeted with disappointment, and increasing amazement, amongst the farming community.112 A farmer from Billericay wrote to MacDonald early in 1929, saying that many like himself were breaking with their lifelong Conservatism and intending to vote Liberal or Labour, if only a good agricultural programme were put forward.113 The final straw for many came in July 1938, when Neville Chamberlain made an infamous speech at Kettering, ruling out any commitment to expand agricultural production.114 Farmers took some slight consolation in the reflection that although the Government might intend to import everything else, at least they could not import votes.115 The National Farmers’ Union remained optimistic about the significance of the farmers’ vote and its potential to force political parties to take agriculture seriously: it looked back to the 1923 general election, when the Conservatives lost 80 predominantly agricultural seats—and of course the election as a whole—and delighted in by-elections where it could claim that farmers’ dissatisfaction had a bearing on the result.116 However, the Labour Party rarely benefited directly from farmers’ revolts in the 1920s. Farmers remained suspicious of Labour. Pragmatic rhetoric about the electoral imperatives in the countryside laid the party open to charges of cynical electioneering, and farmers accused Labour of regarding the depressed state of agriculture as a ‘golden chance of votecatching’.117 The NFU was already speculating in 1923 that Labour would adapt its programme entirely according to what was likely to succeed with the rural voters, suggesting that land nationalization would be dropped because it was ‘wholly unattractive’ in the countryside.118 During the party’s agricultural campaign in 1927, the NFU ascribed 112

E.g. NFU Record, August 1927, 259. PRO 30/69/1439/III/2081–3, MacDonald papers, W. E. Thorn to MacDonald, 20 February 1929. 114 Whetham, Agrarian History, 328. 115 Reader’s letter, Farmer and Stockbreeder, 1 August 1939. 116 Farmers’ Weekly, 16 April 1937; reports in NFU News Sheets on Canterbury (1927), St. Ives (1928), Eddisbury (1929). 117 118 NFU News Sheet, 26 July 1937. Ibid. 27 September 1923. 113


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national speakers’ reticence in addressing agricultural issues to a realization that Labour’s policies were ‘deeply unpopular with rural audiences’: the major party figures would ‘reserve their agricultural heroics for urban consumption’.119 Officially, the NFU had no politics other than the politics of agriculture; it was not part of its role to tell members how to vote.120 Members were balloted on the issue of a political fund in 1921 and came out overwhelmingly in favour, but the point of this initiative was to ensure the presence of ‘practical farmers’ in the Commons, rather than to lend support to any particular party.121 In practice, the NFU tended to align with the Conservatives.122 For the 1929 general election, it abandoned its earlier approach of producing a single questionnaire for members to put to their parliamentary candidates, and instead prepared a separate series of questions for each party. The questionnaire for Labour candidates was the longest and most detailed of the three, reflecting anxieties that Labour’s policies were opposed to farmers’ interests and that these prospective MPs were the most likely to dispute the idea that ‘the great basic industry of agriculture should be not merely preserved but restored to a more prosperous condition’.123 Labour’s plans for reorganizing agriculture provided easy targets for Conservative propaganda, on precisely those issues most likely to excite farmers’ concern. Bureaucracy, warned Joseph Duncan, is the one word you never mention to agriculturalists. Labour’s policies were riddled with references to controls and committees. The NFU warned that Labour’s programme would introduce ‘farming by committee’, and ‘complete bureaucratic control’, organizing agriculture along factory lines.124 Baldwin promised to protect farmers from such ‘Socialistic and bureaucratic tyranny’.125 According to the Conservatives, farmers under a Labour government would be merely agents for carrying out Socialist agricultural policy, subject to a vast army of officials, and liable to have their land 119

120 NFU Record, February 1927, 101. E.g. NFU Yearbook (1930), 428. NFU News Sheet, 13 April, and 4 May 1921. 122 Four NFU members were elected to Parliament in 1922, all as Conservatives ( Jonathan Brown, ‘Agricultural Policy and the National Farmers’ Union, 1908–1939’, in Wordie (ed.), Agriculture and Politics, 178–98). Herbert J. Storing found that the NFU became increasingly Conservative in its leadership and in its local activities during the 1920s (Peter Self and Herbert J. Storing, The State and the Farmer (1971), 44 – 5). 123 NFU Record, June 1929, 218. 124 NFU News Sheet, 17 January 1927 and 24 April 1924; NFU Record, February 1927, 109. 125 Quoted in NFU News Sheet, 15 September 1927. 121

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taken from them if they failed to obey orders.126 In short, Labour would create ‘“Red Tape” Farm’, an image deployed by the Conservatives in a film cartoon with that title. The animation portrays a farcical visit by Mr Nosey Parker from the Ministry, who announces to the farmer that he has come to inspect his farm: ‘and if I find you are not running it properly you will be turned out!’ In his ludicrous townie garb of top hat and spats, he proceeds to milk the cow by working her tail, read the riot act to the cockerels, sing The Red Flag to a bull, and exercise the fat pigs until they are skin and bones. The message of the film was that progressive politicians would interfere with the work of farmers, employing ‘hundreds of officials’, and ‘meddling’ in daily life.127 The other implication, of course, was that Labour understood nothing at all about farming. The NFU’s central criticism of Labour through the 1920s and early 1930s was that it was an urban party, with no expertise to speak on agriculture.128 Where certain individuals had an undeniable knowledge of the subject, this was pointed out as wholly uncharacteristic of Labour as a whole: for example, the farmer and NFU member W. B. Taylor was credited with ‘an insight into the existing economic position of Agriculture not often evidenced amongst his Party’.129 Even Tom Williams (later to become perhaps the most popular Minister of Agriculture ever amongst the farming community) was criticized in 1935 for writing a book which presented a picture of British agriculture that was ‘grotesque’ to anyone with practical knowledge of the industry.130 It was only in the late 1930s that the NFU began to develop greater confidence in Labour’s ability to put forward sensible proposals. In a debate on the Livestock Bill in 1937, Labour’s contribution seemed, to the NFU, to show a great step forward from its ‘old, sterile approach’; there was praise for Tom Williams, and even for A. V. Alexander, who, as a cooperator, rarely had a good press from British farmers.131 Farmers were faced with a real dilemma in making electoral protests against Conservative policy, or the lack of it. For many, the idea of voting Labour seemed impossible. When Farmers’ Weekly ran a feature in 1937

126 Farming under Socialism—An Examination of the Socialist Agricultural Programme (National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, 1926). 127 ‘Red Tape’ Farm, 1927, National Film Archive. 128 E.g. calls for Labour to provide a list of ‘practical agriculturists’ involved in compiling the party’s 1921 agricultural programme (NFU News Sheet, 1 December 1921). 129 130 Ibid. 16 February 1922. Ibid. 30 September 1935. 131 Ibid. 10 May 1937.


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on how agriculturalists should vote at the next general election, none of its published correspondents advocated voting Labour, and two commented specifically on the danger of ‘letting in Socialists’. The only constructive suggestions on offer to those who wanted to use their vote as a protest were the formation of an agricultural party and the support of independent candidates.132 Some farmers appeared to be turning to fascism in the mid- and late 1930s, and the British Union of Fascists was actively seeking to take advantage of farmers’ discontent. Blackshirts turned up on several farms during tithe disputes to ‘protect’ the farmers.133 THE FARMER’S FRIEND Against this rather unpromising background, Labour attempted to win support from the farming community. From as early as 1921, the party claimed to have a large membership amongst agriculturalists, including a growing number of farmers.134 It began to appeal directly to farmers, targeting them with special literature in 1924, and encouraging them to attend its rural conferences; titles of leaflets promised ‘Better Times for the Farmer’, and ‘Labour Brings Help for the Farmer’.135 Farmers were reported to be openly supporting Labour in the Chelmsford by-election in 1926, whilst, in Howdenshire, in the East Riding, Labour found an area teeming with supposedly excellent targets for its campaigning: ‘tied cottages, ill-paid workers, and discontented farmers’.136 In 1928, the party produced a pamphlet aimed specifically at farmers, and written by a farmer: G. T. Garratt.137 This political approach lay open to accusations about a compromise of loyalties. At the 1924 party conference, a delegate from Banbury Labour Party was already complaining that there was too much ‘pandering’ to the farmers.138 When the party produced its first major policy statement on agriculture in 1926, it attracted much criticism for appeasing farmers at 132 ‘Forum for Farmers’, Farmers’ Weekly, 23 April 1937, 12–13. An Independent Conservative did stand in the 1939 Holderness by-election with local NFU backing. 133 ‘A Warning to Farmers’, Daily Herald leaflet (1933); Memo on fascism in Britain (March 1934), NEC. 134 135 The Labour Party and the Countryside, 1. LP leaflets issued in 1924. 136 Daily Herald, 22 and 23 November 1926 (my italics). 137 G. T. Garratt, The Farmer and the Labour Party—Fair Reward for All (LP, 1928). 138 A. E. Monks, who was also involved in the NUAW, 24th Conference, 1924, 173.

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the expense of workers’ interests. Duncan regretted that the whole policy was ‘coloured by the farmers’ outlook on the industry’, and argued that such an electioneering approach must end in failure, by pleasing neither side: although the programme had been framed with care ‘not to hurt [farmers’] sensitive souls’, it contained things which were ‘hateful’ to them. The farmers would not be grateful, Duncan concluded, while the agricultural worker could only be puzzled at the Labour Party’s anxiety ‘to help the farmer to make money’.139 Even Labour’s efforts to reassure farmers of its good intentions had a certain edge to them. Those ‘with the energy and capital to work a farm to the full’ were told that they need not fear ‘interference’.140 Farmers who ‘did their work’ would be left alone, and a Labour government would interfere only so much as the ‘national efficiency of the industry’ demanded.141 When MacDonald told farmers that Labour was hostile to no one who rendered a ‘useful social service’, this still implied that there might be farmers who did not render such a service.142 Furthermore, Labour was already committed to policies which promised to invite farmers’ continued opposition. The commitment to enforcing a minimum wage in agriculture was deeply unpopular with farmers, as the wages bill came to account for an increased proportion of their costs in the 1920s. On the issue of protection, Labour’s initial position was also completely opposed to the remedies being called for by farmers: the NFU believed that agricultural output and employment levels could only be maintained by ‘a method of protection’.143 Labour argued that subsidies were not in the farmers’ best interests, whilst also recognizing how difficult it would be to satisfy the different sectors of the industry: reductions in grain imports would encourage higher prices for cereal farming, but impose higher costs for stock rearers. These factors had geographical consequences: policies of benefit to farmers in East Anglia might be no help at all to farmers in Scotland.144

139 Joseph Duncan, ‘Has Labour an Agricultural Policy?’, Socialist Review (September 1926). 140 The Farmer and the Labour Party, 7. 141 Addison, Labour’s Policy for Our Countryside (LP, 1937), 9; Land and the National Planning of Agriculture, 12. 142 MacDonald, A Prosperous Countryside, 5. 143 MERL, NFU 33, Parliamentary, Press and Publicity Committee, minutes, 18 March 1930. 144 PRO 30/69/1175/74–5, MacDonald papers, MacDonald to Dallas, 4 June 1930.


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One problem which faced all farmers was the lack of certainty in the markets for farm produce. Farming was a gamble.145 Farmers might plan production on the basis of current farm prices, but there was no way of predicting what those prices would be by the time the crops were harvested. The result was waste and unadventurous farming, with farmers unwilling to experiment with new crops or methods.146 Labour’s answer was that the government should intervene to even out fluctuations in prices.147 In the 1920s, this policy was referred to as ‘stabilization’; in the later 1930s, Labour often talked about ‘guaranteed prices’ for farm produce. The NFU’s first positive response to Labour’s programme focused on these proposals for ‘stabilization’. The main ambition of organized farmers in the 1920s was to restore the confidence which had prevailed before the 1921 ‘great betrayal’. In the autumn of 1927, as Labour speakers took the agricultural campaign around the country, the NFU called for clarification of what was meant by ‘stabilization’; over a year later, the issue was still ‘wrapped in mystery’.148 When the second Labour government took office in 1929, it was particularly worried about offending the farming community. Buxton advised MacDonald to tone down passages in the proposed White Paper ‘which appear to lecture the farmers too harshly’, and legislation and the presentation of agricultural policy was often considered in the light of how it might be viewed by farmers.149 Despite all this care, farmers formed an almost entirely negative opinion of the party following this period in government. The NFU decried the ‘complete failure of the Government to make any attempt to redeem their pledges to bring assistance to the industry’, and an ‘attitude of indifference’.150 It was also taking time for more accommodating attitudes to spread through the Labour movement, with the persistence of a common view that farmers could look after themselves, and that sympathy was wasted on them. Even in 1936, Stafford Cripps maintained that farmers were solidly 145 Joseph Duncan was especially fond of the gambling metaphor, e.g. Moray and Nairn Labour Elector, April 1929; Forward, 17 August 1929. The notion of farming as a ‘gamble’, with the dice loaded against the British producer, also appeared in Labour and the Nation (LP, 1928), 28. 146 E.g. Your Britain, no. 3: Food and Farming. 147 ‘Open Letter to Farmers’, Agricultural Sub-Committee, 19 August 1938. 148 NFU News Sheet, 5 September 1927 and 8 October 1928. 149 PRO 30/69/244/662–4, and 243/227–9, MacDonald papers, Buxton to MacDonald, 28 January and 24 April 1930; PRO 30/69/1175/210 –11, Christopher Turnor to MacDonald, 19 December 1930. 150 NFU Yearbook (1931), 444.

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opposed to Labour, and that Labour’s potential support lay amongst agricultural workers.151 However, Labour’s approach to the rural electorate in the 1930s generally reflected assumptions that the party could and should appeal to farmers, and that constructive policies for the countryside might unite the interests of farmers and farm workers. Rather than being treated as two distinct constituencies, they were re-cast as fellow sufferers under the Conservatives’ neglect of agriculture. This holistic attitude to the agricultural industry was not easily shared by the agricultural workers’ organizations. Within the NUAW, it carried associations of disloyalty: the most significant split in the union’s history occurred in 1922, when a handful of officials defected to form a short-lived Landworkers’ Union, under the auspices of the National Agricultural Party. Holmes explained that ‘They did not look upon it as a sin for a man to be a member of the Farmers’ Union’, but the two organizations were ‘diametrically opposed to each other in their interests’.152 It was in the nature of the trade unions that they could not welcome farmers into their membership as the Labour Party could, at least while farmers’ status as ‘agricultural workers’ remained dubious. The NUAW found itself unable to support Sidney Dye when he stood as a Labour candidate for the Norfolk County Council, because of his membership of the NFU; when F. J. Wise applied for membership of the NUAW in 1939, he was turned down ‘as a farmer and an employer’, though the union wished him every success in his Labour candidature at King’s Lynn.153 Nonetheless, there were signs of greater cooperation. Edwin Gooch, mellowing from the radical who had shocked moderates in the early 1920s with his ‘class hatred’, talked of hopes for a more positive spirit within the industry, commenting that there had always been ‘the best of good feeling’ between the NUAW’s executive and the official heads of the NFU.154 By the 1930s, it was becoming less exceptional for NUAW organizers to speak at NFU gatherings, or for either side to attend dinners hosted by the other. Elsewhere in the Labour movement, the idea of a ‘national’ policy for agriculture had developed more easily into the promotion of the common interests of farmers and farm workers. George Dallas took to the platform

151

Country Standard, June 1936, 6. Report of 1934 NUAW conference, MERL, NUAW, BVI/7 (vote to bar NFU members from taking office). 153 MERL, NUAW Organising and Political Sub-Committee, 2 February 1934 and 24 August 1939. On F. J. Wise, see below. 154 MERL, NUAW/BVI/5, Biennial conference of the NUAW, May 1930. 152


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alongside farmers in calling for urgent assistance for the industry at Parker’s Piece in 1930.155 Maurice Cornforth, writing in the Country Standard in 1936, told farmers that it was necessary to have unity on the land in order to work out agriculture’s salvation, though he insisted that the foundation of that unity must be a recognition of the rights of the agricultural worker.156 The Country Standard, with its connections to the Communist Party, might seem an unlikely organ to celebrate common interests with the NFU. Nonetheless, in the late 1930s it was advocating joint campaigns between the Labour movement and the farmers, believing that they might find areas of agreement focusing on ‘concrete benefits’, including field drainage and guaranteed prices.157 Even within this vision of farmers and farm workers united, distinctions were made over the types of farmer who might have a place within the Labour movement. When Ormskirk Labour Party described its success in winning the seat in 1929 and commented on local farmers’ rejection of Conservative agricultural policy, it also emphasized the advanced nature of farming practice in South-West Lancashire: these new converts to Labour were ‘industrious and thoroughly up-to-date in their methods’.158 The divergence of experience between different scales of farming enterprise was also regularly cited. The ILP had a message for ‘working farmers’, and the Country Standard pressed the claims of ‘ordinary rank-and-file farmers’ and small producers.159 The point was sometimes made that the interests of such men were neglected by the NFU. G. T. Garratt thought there must be many farmers, like himself, frustrated by a situation in which ‘the small farmers are suffering from the policy of the larger ones’.160 A NEW CONSTITUENCY? However unlikely they had once appeared, the Labour Party’s ambitions to win the support of the farming community began to meet with some success. By the 1930s there were farmers active in Labour organization. A Cambridgeshire farmer, A. M. McGregor, spoke at meetings during 155

See also Jack Shingfield, speaking for the TGWU at Sudbury, Record, August 1938. 157 Country Standard, November 1936, 10. Ibid. November 1938. 158 PRO 30/69/672/I/63–4, MacDonald papers, Ormskirk LP to Ramsay MacDonald, 4 June 1929. 159 E.g. Labour Leader, 20 July 1922; Country Standard, September 1938. 160 Garratt, The Farmer and the Labour Party, 4. 156

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Labour’s 1934 rural drive.161 In the Stafford by-election in 1938, the Labour candidate had farmers working for his campaign, and an increasing number of farmers in the constituency said they would be voting Labour for the first time.162 A few farmers even stood as parliamentary candidates for Labour. H. J. Sharman, Labour’s candidate for Camborne in 1929, was a former farmer; in the same year, another farmer, E. J. Fawcett, was being considered for the Labour candidature in Hereford.163 Edward Porter, the candidate for Shrewsbury in 1931, introduced himself to the party conference as ‘a practical farmer’, a description also applied to the prospective candidate for Basingstoke in 1939.164 F. J. Wise, who farmed near Banbury, was a Labour candidate from 1929, fighting Harborough and Lowestoft, before becoming the first Labour MP for King’s Lynn in 1945. For its 1936 rural campaign, Labour was able to call on the services of at least seven prospective candidates—Wise amongst them—who were farmers by profession.165 Some of Labour’s farmers had been drawn to politics, and to the Labour Party in particular, because of the problems facing agriculture. Sidney Dye declared that he had only accepted nomination as a parliamentary candidate because ‘I want to see our industry saved from the rapid decline into which it has been driven . . . I deem it my duty as a practical farmer’.166 G. T. Garratt, who stood unsuccessfully for Labour at five elections in three different constituencies between 1924 and 1937, is said to have been attracted to Labour by its agricultural policy. Most of Labour’s farmer candidates appear to have been tenant farmers, but they

161 The Bedford Record, 22 February 1938, in Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 130/169. 162 Daily Herald, 25 May 1938. 163 PRO 30/69/1439/III/2081–3; Sharman was also the prospective candidate for Rutland and Stamford in 1930. 164 32nd Conference, 1932, 242; Country Standard, March 1939. 165 The others were Colin Clark (a dairy farmer from Devon, and lecturer in statistics at Cambridge, who had previously been candidate for North Dorset and the Liverpool constituency of Wavertree) for South Norfolk, Sidney Dye for South-West Norfolk, A. Gray (a poultry farmer) for Rutland and Stamford, W. J. Jenkins for Pembrokeshire, T. Robins (a former candidate for West Dorset), and W. E. Warder (farmer and barrister) for Evesham. G. T. Garratt, the candidate for the Wrekin, also appears on the list of speakers, though not there described as a ‘farmer’ (NMLH, LP/AG/30/99, 25 March 1936). 166 MERL, NUAW, DII/9, Dye’s New Year’s Message for 1939: ‘To the Farmers, Small Holders, Farm Workers and All Dependent upon Agriculture in South West Norfolk Parliamentary Division’. On Dye, see R. W. Johnson, ‘The Nationalisation of English Rural Politics: Norfolk South West 1945–1970’, Parliamentary Affairs, 26/1 (winter 1972–3), 24–5.


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were not exclusively so. Garratt owned his farm, though he emphasized that its hundred acres made him a ‘small’ farmer.167 ‘I am a member of the landowning class,’ admitted H. Norman Smith, Labour candidate for Faversham in 1935, ‘I own a farm in the constituency for which I am a Labour candidate.’168 Nor did Labour always keep such men as rural candidates: this self-confessed owner–occupier was returned for Nottingham South in 1945. Between the wars, Labour had at least five MPs who were farmers: W. B. Taylor, S. T. Rosbotham, M. Philips Price, John Morgan, and W. F. Jackson.169 W. B. Taylor, who farmed over 400 acres in the Thetford and Watton districts of Norfolk, contested South-West Norfolk for Labour in each general election from 1922 to 1931, though he was returned only once, in 1929; he had been a Liberal until the First World War, and campaigned in East Norfolk in 1918 as an ‘Agricultural’ candidate, nominated by the NFU.170 S. T. Rosbotham, chairman of the Lancashire Farmers’ Association, first chairman of the Ormskirk branch of the NFU, and one-time prominent Conservative in Lancashire, joined the Labour Party in the early 1920s, was a prospective Labour candidate for Rutland in 1925, and became MP for Ormskirk in 1929; he made contributions in the Commons ‘speaking as a farmer’.171 Philips Price, described as a ‘practical farmer’,172 was a candidate in Gloucester in 1924, was returned for Whitehaven in Cumberland in 1929, and was Labour MP for the Forest of Dean from 1935. John Morgan, the Daily Herald’s agricultural columnist, began his agricultural career as a farm labourer in Essex, but

167

G. T. Garratt, Hundred Acre Farm (1928), pp. ix and xiv. 35th Conference, 1935, 216. 169 Other Labour MPs had farming connections, such as David Kirkwood, the Member for Dumbarton, whose son had a poultry farm north of Glasgow (Daily Herald, 27 May 1931). Stafford Cripps referred to himself as having been a ‘farmer’, though this was clearly a styling rather than a profession (PRO, MAF47/164). 170 Taylor once enjoyed close connections with the agricultural workers’ union and was the NUAW county secretary for Norfolk in 1923, but his relationship with the union deteriorated rapidly around the time of the great strike, and in June 1924 he was asked to resign, being ‘no longer a fit and proper person to be a member of the Union’ (MERL, NUAW, EC, 19 June 1924). 171 PRO 30/69/672/I/65, MacDonald papers, notes by Ormskirk election agent (1929), and PRO 30/69/1170/II/580–1, R. B. Walker to Ramsay MacDonald, 13 March 1925; HCDeb, 255, col. 56, 13 July 1931. Rosbotham had been a tenant farmer all his life, winning many prizes for scientific agriculture. He also ran a threshing machine company, and was chairman of the Skelmersdale Collieries and a senior partner in Skelmersdale Straw Rope Works. He sat as a National Labour MP from 1931 until 1939. 172 Cambridgeshire RO, 416/0.22, Cambridgeshire DLP circular, 18 March 1940. 168

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was farming in his own right when he began contesting seats for Labour; in 1938 he was returned as Labour MP for Doncaster.173 William Jackson, who ran a successful fruit farm in Herefordshire and had been chairman of his local NFU branch, was brought onto Labour’s agricultural campaign committee in the late 1930s, and was elected as MP for Brecon and Radnor in 1939.174 By the late 1930s, it looked as though Labour might be able to make a serious appeal for the farmers’ vote. In March 1939, the Labour Research Department noted that farmers were ‘on the warpath’, revolting against the neglect of their interests by government; it saw this as ‘a political development of great importance for Labour’.175 The work of two decades in wooing this largely sceptical constituency seemed to be coming to fruition, though perhaps more through farmers’ disenchantment with other political parties than any positive attraction to Labour. The party took this as an opportunity to win votes on the basis of its agricultural programme alone, rather than attempting to convert farmers to socialism. One farmer was reported to remark during the 1935 Victory for Socialism campaign, ‘I believe a lot in what the Labour do say, but I cannot follow this there Socialism they got.’176 The possibility of shaping agricultural policy as an element almost free-standing from the rest of Labour’s programme offered one route to capturing a new electorate in the countryside, and remained an important strategy, even at a time when the party was increasingly drawing connections between production and consumption. Labour’s virtues seemed to lie precisely in its humility over prescribing a policy for the countryside, and its willingness to take advice and echo farmers’ concerns. As Self and Storing have commented, the Labour Party seemed almost to become ‘hypnotised’ by the NFU.177 Agricultural policy was often compromised by fears about how it would be received by the farmers, placing real limitations on the degree to which it could address the needs of the nation as a whole. A few people objected to the apparent immunity which farmers were to enjoy from the socialist approaches which Labour might apply elsewhere across the economy. Joseph Duncan, predictably, was one of the most vociferous. ‘The policy of guaranteeing profits to farmers is no more defensible than guaranteeing profits to any other capitalists,’ he wrote in 1932, ‘It is the 173 174 175 177

Daily Herald, 6 December 1940. See the discussion of this by-election, pp. 316–19. 176 Labour Research, March 1939. Labour Campaigner, August 1935. Self and Storing, State and the Farmer, 203–4.


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old Tory policy, and why it should be supported by Socialists is beyond me.’178 Duncan was also unusual amongst Labour’s agricultural experts in undermining the whole premise which underlay this reluctance to offer the countryside a genuinely socialist programme. Why should Labour campaign for the farmer’s vote? He described the policy makers as being obsessed with a ‘common delusion’ ‘that the farmers are the one class of capitalists who can be got to support Labour’.179 Farmers were not a numerically significant element in the electorate, and even factoring in the supposed benefits of capturing the support of key figures in local rural communities, it was difficult to see that Labour had much to gain from designing its policy around their concerns. However, its reception amongst the farming community was an important test of whether Labour had learned to speak with a convincing rural accent. As a group with a history of hostility towards anything they identified as socialism, farmers were the ultimate challenge for a party which hoped to take on a new identity as a voice for the countryside. Labour propagandists went to considerable lengths to please this audience. They were careful to avoid dwelling overmuch on unpalatable policies like nationalization. The notion of agriculture’s accountability was dressed up as ‘public service’, with the promise of rewards under a new system in which the government would encourage production with investment and guaranteed prices. The risks of offending potential supporters made Labour quick to disavow those elements of its policy which might play on farmers’ worst fears. In 1933, the party’s opponents were apparently hawking ‘Three Kinds of Bogies’ around the countryside to deter farmers from voting Labour: that Labour would farm from Whitehall, that it was out for ‘Control’, and that it wanted to nationalize agriculture. Labour’s response was intended to be reassuring: nervous farmers could be confident that Labour only wanted them to get on with farming.180 This reassurance that Labour would not interfere with the basic practice of farming was not the whole truth. There were alternative visions on the Left of how agriculture might be remodelled, to allow for a rational planning of production and more direct involvement by the state.

178

Forward, 9 January 1932. Joseph Duncan, ‘Has Labour an Agricultural Policy?’, Socialist Review (September 1926). 180 Three Kinds of Bogies, LP leaflet 15 (August 1933), at MERL, NUAW, DII/6, cuttings and publicity book. 179

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Priority might have been given to achieving a more favourable position for the agricultural worker, to imposing central control over production, or to settling the question of land ownership. In fact policy was directed more and more towards re-establishing the prosperity of British agriculture, leaving the fundamental structure of the industry untouched. Why did Labour find it so difficult to envisage agriculture as a socialized industry? George Dallas informed the party faithful that, although Labour wanted the nationalization of land, the nationalization of agriculture was simply impractical; instead, they should aim to turn agriculture into ‘a National service’.181 The inapplicability of socialist mechanisms in the special case of agriculture was a prevalent myth, which John Dugdale argued against in a memorandum for the Fabian Research Bureau in the early 1930s: ‘If . . . it is proposed to take over coal mines and factories there would seem to be no inherent reason against taking over gradually every private farm in the country,’ he observed, though even he was prepared to make an exception for farms ‘belonging to genuine peasant-farmers employing no labour’.182 Arguments which denied the ‘special status’ of agriculture were rare. Two factors seemed particularly important in influencing Labour towards this reformist approach. Firstly, many of those most centrally involved in formulating policy belonged to a clearly identifiable subgroup within the party, motivated by the need to shape a programme which could revive the economic fortunes of British agriculture and restore the industry’s prosperity. The other inescapable influence was of course Labour’s campaign to win rural support. It was this priority which accounted for the developing emphasis on rural policy through the 1920s and 1930s. A programme which ran the danger of alienating the rural audience would have defeated the whole object. 181

28th Conference, 1928, 251. BLPES, Fabian papers, J23/2, item 11, memo on ‘Workers’ Control in Agriculture’, n.d. [c.1934]. 182

9 A Land for the People Labour in power with a vigorous Socialist policy could certainly transform the countryside in Britain and the green and pleasant land would no longer be a phrase, but a reality. Bucks Labour News, August–September 19381

In the early twentieth century it was hard to conceive of a political programme for the countryside which would not have agriculture at its centre. The achievement of the ‘prosperous countryside’, with all the economic, social, and cultural benefits which that implied, was dependent on a revival in the great primary industry. ‘We want to bring back light into the villages, the field, and the farms’, MacDonald enthused, ‘and to make men feel that agriculture is not a drudgery and a derelict process.’2 Agricultural policy was also seen as the central element in Labour’s appeal to rural voters. But rural policy was never solely about agriculture. From the early 1920s, Labour politicians talked about a policy for ‘the countryside’, looking at the needs of rural communities in the round, addressing issues of social provision, housing, education, opportunity, and the enrichment of cultural life. By the 1930s, the Left was also increasingly interested in rural policy as a topic of concern for the nation as a whole: in policies for the countryside, but also about the countryside. Proposals for practical improvements to the quality of life in rural areas were accompanied by discussions about land use and the preservation of rural amenity, which could appeal to an urban, as much as a rural audience. It became increasingly difficult to separate out these various elements. In one of the leaflets for its 1936 campaign, Labour presented a ‘Plan To Make the Countryside a Glorious Picture’, illustrated with an image of horse teams at work in the fields at harvest time. The leaflet was aimed at the agricultural worker, focusing on the subject of agricultural wages, but, 1 2

Buckinghamshire RO, Mid-Buckinghamshire DLP papers, D/X 782. Ramsay MacDonald, A Prosperous Countryside (LP, 1927).

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as with much political literature about rural issues, it is shot through with images which reveal aesthetic, as well as economic concerns. Labour’s countryside should be not only ‘prosperous’, but ‘a joy to live in’.3 Moreover, the commitment to make the countryside a ‘glorious picture’ reflected close connections between the economic prosperity of agriculture and the visual appearance of the countryside: a rural Britain which was not only a joy to live in, but a joy to visit. THE NEW MODEL VILL AGE The nature of contemporary rural society was one of the perceived stumbling blocks to the development of the Labour movement in the countryside, and it is unsurprising that Labour’s plans for rural Britain included ideas about how this might change. Improvements to the standard of living in rural Britain were also an obvious topic to engage the new electorates which Labour hoped to capture there. The most pressing issue was to remedy inequalities between town and country. One of the stated objectives of the 1926 agricultural programme was to create a rural society enjoying the opportunities and facilities which were ‘the moral right of a nation’s citizens’, to re-establish the village as a community ‘with its own vigorous life, unattracted by the meretricious glare of the nearest town’.4 Labour’s vision assumed that the countryside should be populous, as well as prosperous, and to achieve this it was necessary not only to revive agriculture, but to provide proper facilities and accommodation for the rural population.5 ‘Our villages and country towns should be alert, prosperous places,’ wrote Addison in 1937, ‘full of industry and happy life.’6 A mission to transform the quality and character of village life was a well-established element in rural programmes on the Left. Denunciations of contemporary rural society in the early years of the twentieth century had come most readily from the ILP, eager to strike blows against the clergy who kept children educated for the fields only, and the upper classes who ‘poisoned’ social life in the villages with their ‘kindly patronage’. Social conservatism seemed to foster political conservatism, and the ILP hoped to eliminate both by encouraging the rural worker to question the traditional order and overcome resilient notions of class distinctions. 3 5 6

4 LP leaflet no. 56 (July 1936). Labour’s Policy on Agriculture (LP, 1926), 4. Clement Attlee, Local Government and the Socialist Plan (Socialist League, 1934). Christopher Addison, Labour’s Policy for Our Countryside (LP, 1937).

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It saw ‘worker control’, or the introduction of guild structures into agriculture, as a way to combat the damaging social hierarchies and reconstruct village society.7 The Labour Party’s own provisions for improving rural life tended to be more practical, almost mundane, with transport, electricity, and improved welfare systems amongst the prescriptions commonly on offer. The social policies in Labour’s rural programme were not particularly exciting or controversial. These were largely consensual reforms, and the main political capital to be gained from them lay in convincing the public that they would be given priority under Labour, and not treated as eternal good intentions. They were in fact an important part of Labour’s appeal to the rural electorate: campaigners on the rural drives of the late 1930s were encouraged to emphasize proposals for reversing depopulation and improving social life in the countryside. ‘A bus service for every village’ was recommended as a popular slogan.8 Despite Labour’s emphasis on developing a distinctive agricultural policy, there was always the risk that important parts of that programme, such as land nationalization, controls on cultivation, and the possibilities of public farming, would leave the rural audience cold. New housing, the advance of the national grid, and mains water supplies, on the other hand, were relatively uncontentious and attractive policies in the countryside. Cultural life, as much as social and economic well-being, had a role to play in the reinvigoration of the countryside. When Stafford Cripps addressed the trade union rally at Filkins in June 1938, he offered an elegy on the loss of ‘the old culture of the countryside with its music and dancing, with its feasts, fairs and shows’, and emphasized the need to revive life in the villages, to maintain a young and ‘vigorous’ population.9 The problem was not always presented in quite such romantic terms, but Labour did propose a variety of practical measures to develop a sense of active community and encourage broader cultural horizons. Arthur Henderson 7 Tom Mackley, Towards the Dawn—The Revolution in Rural England—An Appeal to Land Workers (ILP, 1919); C. A. Pease, Socialism in the Village (ILP, 1920). 8 ‘Notes on topics for conferences’, Addison papers, 130/168, n.d. (c.1938). Public transport could also connect villagers to established Labour cultures in more built-up areas, lessening the rural/urban divide. In the 1930s, the Ipswich Industrial Co-operative Society was targeting the rural population in Suffolk, encouraging (?bribing) them to become active cooperative consumers: ‘If you live in the villages—remember the Ipswich Industrial Co-operative Society PAYS 3d. of your Bus Fare for each 5/- you spend in the Central Drapery, Outfitting, Hardware, Furnishing, Boot and Shoe Departments’ (Suffolk RO, S2/6/3.4, advert in programme for Suffolk Labour Day, 1933). 9 Daily Herald, 6 June 1938.

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promised that Labour would ‘brighten’ the lives of the rural population, with public libraries and reading rooms, social clubs and institutes, lectures, tutorial classes, and musical entertainment.10 The inadequacies of community in the countryside continued to be highlighted as a major cause for concern. Public meeting places were in short supply, as Labour organizations discovered when they tried to arrange functions or find accommodation for committees and speaker meetings: it was estimated that only one in three parishes had a parish hall.11 Moreover the problems of fostering an active associational culture were multiplied in areas of more dispersed settlement patterns. Where new houses were built, the Labour Party was convinced that these should not replicate old patterns of isolation: they should be sited in villages, and not dotted in ones and twos.12 By adhering to such principles, the planning of publicly funded housing might contribute to (literally) building community.13 Rural housing was an important issue throughout the period. Much accommodation in the countryside was in very poor condition, and was blamed for contributing to the physical and mental decline of the rural population.14 ‘In many an old-world cottage, with its pretty thatched roof and roses round the door, lurk rheumatism and consumption’, commented Edwin Gooch.15 The contrast between the picturesque appearance of the cottages to urban eyes and the reality of life inside provided a rare point of conflict between practical policies and the conventional rural idyll: no passing motorist, expressing admiration for the ‘quaint’ dwellings, could see what the tenant saw.16 Good housing in the countryside, by contrast, came in for enthusiastic praise. Gooch pointed to the four ‘Wheatley’ cottages in his parish as an illustration of the solid achievements of the first Labour government, and a taste of what would have happened throughout the country if Labour had remained in office.17 One of the showcase examples of rural housing in the interwar period was the row of memorial cottages at Tolpuddle which the TUC built in 1934 to commemorate the centenary of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. These cottages for retired stalwarts were admired throughout the Labour 10

The Labour Party and Agriculture (LP, 1922). 12 Labour’s Policy on Agriculture, 15. Ibid., 14. 13 The Land and the National Planning of Agriculture (LP, 1932). 14 MERL, NUAW, BVI/7, report of 1934 biennial conference of the NUAW. 15 Ibid. BVI/5, report of 1930 biennial conference of the NUAW. 16 Cf. 37th Conference, 1937, 177. Also report of 1938 biennial conference of the NUAW, MERL, NUAW, BVI/7. 17 Ibid., report of 1934 biennial conference of the NUAW. 11


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9. Model housing. Cottages built by the TUC at Tolpuddle, 1934. [© Trades Union Congress]

movement for their modern design and facilities.18 At night the cottages were floodlit for two hours, so that no one travelling along the main road to Dorchester could fail to be impressed by the standard which trade unionism had set for agricultural housing.19 The problem with rural housing was not simply its quality. Farm workers needed ‘good and independent houses’.20 When the agricultural labourers’ union made its debut at the TUC in 1909, its first representation was on the evils of the tied cottage and the constraints on freedom which it produced.21 Between 1919 and 1930, the NUAW’s solicitors dealt with over a thousand cases concerning tied cottages, representing more than one-sixth of all the union’s legal cases.22 At the level of local government, union representatives were able to do some positive work in preventing further housing being converted to tied tenancies.23 But calls for abolition of the system remained one of the most unchanging of all demands by agricultural trade unionists in England.24 18

Dorset Daily Echo, 31 August 1934; Daily Herald, 1 September 1934. MERL, NUAW, DII/7, Labour News Service, November 1934. 20 MacDonald, A Prosperous Countryside; my italics. 21 Proceedings of the 42nd Annual TUC, 1909, 152–3. 22 MERL, NUAW, BVI/5, report of 1930 biennial conference of the NUAW. 23 Ibid. BVI/5 and 7, reports of 1926 and 1934 biennial conferences of the NUAW. 24 E.g. ibid. BVI/3, 5 and 7, reports of 1924, 1930, and 1934 biennial conferences of the NUAW; The Autobiography of Joseph Arch, with a Preface by Frances Countess of Warwick (1966), 134. Renée Danziger took tied housing as a case study for the NUAW’s continued powerlessness to influence the Labour Party after the Second World War: Renée Danziger Political Powerlessness: Agricultural Workers in Post-War England (1988), Ch. 5. Tied housing was not seen as so much of a problem in rural Scotland (see discussion on p. 201). 19

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The Labour Party generally took a less fundamentalist approach, tending to concentrate on the prospects for expanding housing provision in the countryside, to give farm workers more choice over where to live. In campaign literature, the party declared that the ‘scandal’ of the tied cottage must go—‘If you want to feel secure in your home, Vote Labour’— and continued to talk about abolishing the tied cottage, describing the system as incompatible with personal freedom.25 But promises of abolition were not quite what they seemed. The 1926 agricultural programme discussed the pragmatic solution of providing alternative accommodation to ‘mitigate’ the evils of tied housing, publicizing Labour’s recent efforts to encourage the development of good quality local authority housing in villages. The ‘Wheatley’ cottages, of which Gooch was so proud, were a legacy of the 1924 Housing (Financial Provisions) Act, characterized as an attack on ‘town and country slums’.26 The new grants for house building were higher in agricultural parishes than elsewhere, and county councils were under obligation to make an annual contribution over a 40-year period towards the costs incurred by a rural district council in building new houses, ‘specifically for agricultural workers or people of substantially the same economic class’.27 The second Labour government also addressed the problem of rural slum accommodation. If the 1931 scheme for a large building programme had not been halted by the National Government, Labour’s record on rural housing might have seemed more impressive. As it was, of the 40,000 new houses planned for rural areas, only 2,000 were built. Tied cottages were just one manifestation of the ‘tyranny’ which was said to exist in rural Britain, the roots of which Labour identified in the social and economic inequalities of the countryside. Another powerful image of this was the country house. Left-wing animus against the country house as symbol of expropriation and exploitation reached a peak in Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City (1973),28 but clearly had its origins before the Second World War and the National Trust’s elevation of the cult of the stately home. Country houses were seen as an illustration of the dispossession of the land worker, showing all too clearly how the fortunes of different classes in the countryside had diverged. There was little remorse that these grand houses might soon be at the disposal of the 25 26 27 28

LP leaflet 188 (November 1926); For Socialism and Peace (LP, 1934). What the Labour Government has Done—First Session’s Record (LP, 1930). Labour’s Plan to Abolish the Slums (LP, 1930). See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1985), 105 –6.


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people, as their present owners found themselves unable to maintain them. Some even envisaged their physical ruin, as in the apocalyptic vision offered by one socialist during the Second World War: The manor houses gutted, hollyhocks Self-sown upon the guilty staircases29

Country houses were the symbol of a class which had outlived its usefulness, and Labour hoped to hasten the process already begun by the First World War and taxation.30 It was anticipated that many might be bought up at a low price by public bodies and associations when the land was nationalized.31 MacDonald suggested that ‘private parks and mansions existing by virtue of land monopoly’ should be scheduled to preserve them for public purposes.32 Addison considered the possibility of dividing country houses into flats, and turning the surrounding land into smallholdings for the new tenants.33 The Workers’ Travel Association in the 1920s was already acquiring, or at least renting for the summer, ‘many of the great houses that were built by workers of other generations who were never fortunate enough to find even a night’s shelter within their walls’. ‘Thus’, they observed with satisfaction, ‘does Time (with the help of the WTA) bring in his generous revenges.’34 Some individuals felt moved to atone for their inherited privilege by setting their stately homes to social uses. After restoring it to its sixteenthcentury timbered glory, Noel Buxton handed Paycockes in Essex over to the National Trust in 1920.35 Charles Trevelyan inherited the 13,000acre estate of Wallington in Northumberland in 1928, and announced to his tenants that he did not regard himself as the owner of the hall, ‘but as a trustee of property which under wiser and humaner laws would belong to the community’. The hall and gardens were opened to visitors free 29 F. W. Bateson, ‘Lines on the Buckinghamshire Parish Machinery Pools’, New Statesman and Nation, and reprinted in F. W. Bateson (ed.), Towards a Socialist Agriculture (Left Book Club, 1946). 30 How Labour Will Save Agriculture (LP, 1934), 3. The Countess of Warwick thought that people would one day look at stately homes as they now looked at the Egyptian pyramids (Frances Evelyn Greville, countess of Warwick, Afterthoughts, (1931), 247). 31 C. A. Pease, Socialism in the Village (ILP, 1920). 32 Ramsay MacDonald, Socialism: Critical and Constructive (1921), 171. 33 Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 35, notes on discussion at Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, 19 June 1930. 34 The 1929 Annual Reunions, WTA (1929), 12, at Rhodes House, Oxford, MSS. Brit. Emp. s.332/3/1. 35 Buxton had purchased the house before the First World War, partly because of its connections with his family; see Mosa Anderson, Noel Buxton. A Life (1952), 52– 4.

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of charge at weekends and public holidays, and were used as a centre for adult education and workers’ theatre; Trevelyan gave Wallington to the National Trust in 1941.36 As Lord Faringdon, Gavin Henderson made Buscot Park available for Fabian conferences and weekend schools. The Countess of Warwick had hoped to turn Easton Lodge into a permanent Labour college: her ambition was disappointed in the aftermath of the general strike, when the TUC was in no position to take on the challenge of running a country house.37 Individual trade unions converted manor houses into convalescent homes, setting an example which Attlee thought might be followed more widely ‘when the revolution came’.38 The Co-operative Wholesale Society had turned a small country house at Roden, near Shrewsbury, into a convalescent and holiday home, which opened in 1901.39 Other suggestions of useful roles for the country house included schools and hospitals, functions which a number of former family seats were already fulfilling in practice in the interwar years.40 Radical rhetoric about alternative, and socially valuable uses for the country house went back at least to Chartist designs, but in the 1920s and 1930s there were actual models for how this transformation could work, both through the sale of houses by impoverished owners in Britain, and through the use of dachas and palaces in Russia. Many visitors to the Soviet Union were impressed by the conversion of its country houses into convalescent homes and hotels for the workers.41 NEW L ANDSCAPES Country houses were an embodiment of class inequalities in rural Britain, but they also seemed to offer an indictment of attitudes towards the land: an illustration of parasitic landlordism, where agricultural profits had been spent in display, rather than ploughed back into improved agricultural enterprise. The grandeur of the stately homes of England was cited in some explanations for the troubled state of contemporary cultivation, 36

A. J. A. Morris, C. P. Trevelyan 1870–1958 (Belfast, 1977), 171–3, 192–3. Frances Evelyn Greville, countess of Warwick, Life’s Ebb and Flow (1929), 268 –9; Margaret Cole (ed.), Life of G. D. H. Cole (1971), 147–51. 38 Record, September 1932. 39 Percy Redfern, New History of the C. W. S. (1938), 54. 40 MacDonald, Socialism, 167–8. 41 Record, August 1925; Land Worker, September 1926. 37


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though analyses of the neglect of agricultural investment often preferred to focus on the failings of recent decades, whilst acknowledging that landlords in earlier generations had actually achieved a great deal in shaping the character and quality of the landscape. The argument for public ownership offered a return to such good old days of capital investment in the land, as the state took over obligations which modern landowners were no longer prepared or able to discharge. Whenever the decline had set in, the contemporary landscape fell short of Labour’s ideals. In a party pamphlet from 1923, MacDonald shared some of his impressions on walking through the modern countryside: I found evidence of ploughshares under the heather, foundations of ruined houses masked by broom and whin; villages where thousands of decent men of grand physique and magnificent character had been brought up, and which now are deserted—only a few cows and sheep, and beyond them silence . . . I went into Dorset, and found more rabbits and pheasants than ears of wheat.

These observations include common condemnations of the world that was no longer ‘Merrie England’: this was a landscape marked by emptiness, and by the ghosts of the fine, strapping lads who had once been reared there. But there was also a specific economic and aesthetic critique of the contemporary landscape. The fields that MacDonald saw were not cultivated as they should be: the ploughs had been abandoned, and the land given over to game, when it might have been producing wheat. MacDonald’s response was to present an alternative prospect, in language which almost suggested biblical prophecy: ‘We are going to develop our own country,’ he promised, ‘. . . and we are going to make the land blossom like a rose’.42 A decade later, another Labour pamphlet began its prescription for agriculture with ‘a picture of our countryside’. Its striking images of a land in decline are worth quoting at length: No keen observer can travel far through the once pleasant and prosperous countryside of Britain without realising that there is something very badly wrong with agriculture and the conditions of country life to-day. Even from the window of a railway carriage the listlessness of slow decay is everywhere apparent. Fields that were cultivated are going back to poor grass. Farms that were bustling and prosperous are silent. Sadly lacking over vast stretches of land is any sign of active,

42 Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s Policy versus Protection—The Real Issues of the General Election (LP, November 1923). The theme of ‘developing our own country’ was picked up in election posters, NEC, 15 November 1923.

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energetic cultivation, that obvious eagerness to make the fullest use of every halfacre of soil—the visible proof of a prosperous husbandry. Empty, untilled fields: miserable cottages: farmhouses in bad repair.43

The pamphlet went on to decry the effects of ribbon development in the countryside: ‘Innumerable and intolerable villas . . . stretching far out into the fields—spoiling the countryside, but contributing little to it— bringing ugliness without prosperity.’44 Aspects of this critique were characteristic of common interwar anxieties, with references to uncontrolled building development and inappropriate and intrusive urban behaviour in the countryside: this pamphlet was the source of the quotation in Chapter 3 about the outrageous noise pollution of the inconsiderate day-tripper’s radio.45 But concerns about undercultivation drew on more established themes. ‘Does the idea appeal to anyone’, asked a socialist author in 1915, ‘. . . of British acres devoted to sport, landscape painters, and weeds just because we are able from time to time to purchase cheap wheat and mutton from abroad?’46 Underproduction and non-intensive forms of farming meant that fewer people could be employed on the land, and the problem also touched aesthetic and moral sensibilities. The ‘scandal’ of Britain’s countryside was that much of it was so clearly unproductive: fields of weeds, acres undrained.47 These arguments about the neglect of the land could easily be related to proposals for revised priorities towards the countryside and changes in land ownership. Labour’s policies offered possibilities for restoring the aesthetic qualities of two contrasting landscape ideals: the cultivated landscape and the wilderness. The one suffered from current failures to exploit fully its productive capacities, while the other was threatened by uncontrolled development and the inability to safeguard it in the public interest. Public ownership offered the most direct route to remedy such abuses and restore the landscape. The 1926 policy statement on agriculture, expressing concern at what it defined as the misuse of land in Scotland, argued that deer forests should be acquired immediately as public property and handed over to the Scottish Board of Agriculture to 43

44 How Labour Will Save Agriculture, 3. Ibid. 46 See p. 97. George Radford, The State as Farmer (1915), 100. 47 Cf. Alex Potts on how the dominant image of the English landscape as a ‘cultivated garden’ in this period ‘[ran] against the common political perception of the countryside . . . as suffering from economic decline’ (‘ “Constable Country” between the Wars’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, iii: National Fictions (1989), 167). 45


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oversee their future development, ‘whether for cultivation, afforestation, water-power, residence or as a holiday ground, taking care that from henceforth no citizen is deprived of the enjoyment of the vision and acquaintance of this priceless national heritage’.48 Visions of the future of the landscape were thus bound up with economic well-being, with national investment, and with public control, and informed by assumptions about what the landscape should look like, and the social roles it might perform. The emphases were sometimes slightly different from those in much of the general debate about landscape at the time. The interwar years were an important period in the development of preservationist rhetorics and interest groups: attempts to prevent the desecration of the countryside by the encroachments of suburban housing development, the worst excesses of domestic tourism, and the deleterious impact of modern communications, transport, and advertising. But left-wing discussions occasionally went beyond an undertaking to protect the landscape as it was. Too much damage had already been done: the legacy of a long history of industrialization and capitalist individualism. When Dick Mitchison wrote about planning and the countryside in 1934, he advocated a ‘recreation’ of the landscape, distinguishing this from what he regarded as well-intentioned, but less ambitious attempts to ‘preserve’ it. Mitchison believed that socialists should aim to get rid of unsightly industrial districts, restoring areas such as the Black Country and the South Wales valleys to resemble the ‘natural country’.49 A similar vision of an English landscape restored to former glory appears in the Clarion Cyclist, in a futuristic serial about a social revolution against the car, one of the outcomes of which would be a stop to road development. The story ends with villages regaining their ‘old-world charm’, as the change in policy reveals ‘great tracts of leafy countryside that had once been hidden by the foul smoke-pall of Birmingham and the Black Country’.50 THE L AND QUESTION REVISITED Anxieties about the character of contemporary landscapes were a reflection of ongoing re-evaluations of the relationship between town and 48 49 50

26th Conference, 1926, appendix XII, 342. G. R. Mitchison, The First Workers’ Government (1934), 389. Clarion Cyclist, September 1936.

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country. In the early years of the twentieth century, most interest had centred on the power of the towns to draw young people away from rural life and employment, with the accompanying deleterious effects on village life. But during the interwar period another basis was developing for a critique of the impact of the town on the country, with a concentration on the impact of urban and urban-related development on the landscape itself. These concerns about the balance between agriculture and industry, and between the rural landscape and urban development, provided a different context for an issue which had occupied an important place in radical politics for many years—the land question. Although the preoccupation with the issue of ‘land’ is most readily associated with the late nineteenth century and the period before the First World War, the Labour Party continued to talk about ‘the land question’ and its far-reaching effects on economic and social problems.51 Land value taxation, as the prescription from Henry George, still inspired supporters in the 1920s and 1930s, with its promise to return to the community some of the economic benefit created by social factors rather than individual enterprise. It could also serve to reduce market values of land and boost state revenues, making it easier for the nation to acquire land by purchase in the future. For this reason, it was often discussed in parallel with land nationalization, despite the fact that the two policies seemed to offer quite different approaches to addressing the community’s claim on this fundamental resource. Land value taxation had a large body of political support, and came close to being implemented on a number of occasions: Lloyd George got as far as providing for a valuation scheme in 1909. The policy was most closely linked with the Liberal Party, though Labour also endorsed it from an early stage. In 1909, Philip Snowden was outlining its value as a means to attack unearned increments, open up access to land, stimulate building development, and provide employment.52 Despite anxieties that land valuation taxation might be adopted as a ‘soft’ alternative to national ownership of land, it became part of Labour’s programme. Labour and the New Social Order (1918) included the proposal that the rising increment on urban land and mineral extraction should be brought into the public exchequer through a tax on land values, though the report treated agricultural land differently, where the policy was for government to ‘resume’ direct control of the land. This approach of distinguishing

51 52

E.g. Susan Lawrence, 30th Conference, 1930, 156. 9th Conference, 1909, 106, special session on taxation.


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between agricultural and other sorts of land was not pursued consistently, and Labour continued to promote land value taxation in its appeal to the rural electorate, presenting it as a way to stimulate agricultural development.53 The first serious attempt to establish a definitive land policy for Labour came with the formation of the advisory committee in May 1923, ‘to consider and report upon what system of land ownership, taxation, and rating would secure to the community the maximum benefits from the land’. Wedgwood was a member, and an important influence behind the establishment of the committee itself, whilst the inclusion of both R. B. Walker and George Dallas suggests that the links between land reform and the interests of the agricultural worker were still regarded as a central aspect of the debate. The committee was split between land taxers and supporters of land nationalization, though efforts were made to reconcile these positions into what Hugh Dalton described as an ‘immediate practical policy’.54 This produced a repeat of the compromise endorsing the principle that all land should be in public ownership, while land value taxation would be used to collect the economic rent, deflate land values, promote the best use of land, and facilitate its acquisition by public authorities. In the end, the committee’s report was never officially adopted by the party, though it was used to brief speakers at the 1923 general election campaign.55 Snowden maintained that the 1924 Labour government would have introduced land value taxation if it had survived to present a second Budget, and that only a shortage of time prevented him from reactivating the scheme for a land valuation.56 MPs expected him to go ahead with a scheme at an early stage when Labour was re-elected in 1929: 165 Labour and Liberal MPs petitioned him in December 1929 to include land value taxation in his next budget, and the Chancellor received numerous requests from local authorities, who wanted powers to levy rates on the basis of site values.57 In fact the issue of whether land 53 E.g. The Labour Party and Agriculture (LP, 1922)—text of a speech by Arthur Henderson at Cromer. 54 Memo, July 1923, LP archives, LPAC/15; Hugh Dalton, Call Back Yesterday (1953), 197. 55 The party also published a pamphlet by Wedgwood on The Land Question— Taxation and the Rating of Land Values, in 1925. This called for a national land valuation, and advocated both a flat rate land tax and a local rate payable on unimproved site value. 56 25th Conference, 1925, 269. 57 Roy Douglas, Land, People and Politics. A History of the Land Question in the United Kingdom 1878–1952 (New York, 1976), 200; HCDeb, 234, col. 30, 21 January 1930, and 237, col. 2679, 14 April 1930.

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values should be taxed by local or central government remained unresolved, even when the subject was finally included in the Budget in 1931.58 For an administration with a minority in the Commons, land value taxation looked an attractive policy to encourage Liberal support for the government’s programme: Baldwin remarked on the ‘tremendous cheers’ in the House at the mention of land values during the King’s speech in October 1930.59 Snowden secured the go-ahead for a land valuation by presenting the proposal as a section of the Finance Bill, thus avoiding the hostile reception which it would otherwise have received in the Lords. One of the notable features of the valuation was that agricultural land was exempt. Snowden hoped that the process would be complete within two years, at which point it would be possible to begin levying the tax. Unfortunately for the ill-fated project of land value taxation, legislative approval coincided with the final phase of the Labour government. The valuation scheme was quickly suspended, as one of the National Government’s economy measures, and land value taxation itself was officially repealed in 1934.60 Snowden regarded land value taxation as ‘a potent instrument of social reform’, not just a fiscal measure.61 He described it as the main feature of his 1931 Budget, and as ‘a landmark on the road of social and economic progress, as one further stage towards the emancipation of the people from the tyranny and the injustice of private land monopoly’.62 The younger generation within the party tended to favour other approaches to establish a system of land holding which would promote social interests. In 1933, Dalton observed that the taxation of land values was ‘out of date and a waste of effort’: land nationalization was the right policy, and ministers should be empowered to take over any land required for socially important purposes, including the location of new industries.63 It was not enough to return value to the community. The people should have the land itself, or at least the opportunity to make use of it and to ensure that it was always used in accordance with the needs of the community. The land question was being reconfigured within the debate about planning. 58 When Labour gained control of the London County Council after 1934, it revisited the issue of basing rates on site values; see Douglas, Land, People and Politics, 209 –10. 59 HCDeb, 244, cols. 20–1, 28 October 1930. 60 Douglas, Land, People and Politics, 206–8. 61 HCDeb, 237, col. 2680, 14 April 1930. 62 Ibid. 251, col. 1411, 27 April 1931. 63 Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 128/172, memo, March 1933.


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PL ANNING Not all planners were socialists, but planning and socialism enjoyed a natural affinity. When J. R. Clynes urged a reaffirming of socialist commitment at the Labour Party conference in the autumn of 1931, he used the notion of planning to define the contrast between socialism and capitalism: ‘Socialism is an ordered plan for social well-being. Capitalism is an accident; it is a thing which happened . . . an ugly and ruinous phase’.64 The problems which needed to be addressed by physical planning, and particularly the challenge of protecting the landscape, seemed to function almost as a metaphor for such ideas. ‘[L]aissez faire has let us down’, declared Hugh Dalton. ‘The fantastic and unhealthy growth of London and other large cities, ribbon development, the depressed areas and the depopulated countryside are some of the fruits of this.’65 The proper use of land was a central aspect of socialist planning. Land was one of the four vital elements in Labour’s ‘Immediate Programme’ for reconstruction, set out in 1937.66 It was argued that the combination of public ownership of agricultural land and control over development in the public interest would, for the first time, make it possible to achieve a rational allocation of limited resources. A survey of agricultural land would indicate how every part of it should be farmed: ‘whether . . . intensive cultivation, smallholdings, allotments, large-scale State farms, moderate-sized farms, or in any other way.’67 Moreover these plans went far beyond the reorganization of agriculture, covering, problems relating to the best grouping of communities with reference to economic needs and opportunities and the provision of transport, social services and amenities; the preservation of natural beauty; the provision of national parks and facilities for recreation; and, indeed, a whole range of problems affecting the efficiency of the nation, the conservation of our resources and the well-being of the people.68

Definitions of land use in the interests of the community did not necessarily emphasize a division between town and country to be maintained 64

31st Conference, 1931, 177. Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 128/172, memo by Hugh Dalton, ‘Finance and Trade Policy’, no. 117, section XIII, March 1933, for Labour Party Finance and Trade Committee. 66 Labour’s Immediate Programme (LP, 1937). The other three components were finance, transport, and coal and power. 67 68 Labour and the Land (LP, 1935). For Socialism and Peace (LP, 1934). 65

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through planning. Many of Labour’s plans for the land in fact involved bringing the two together, conferring on each sector the advantages of the other. As was clear from discussions about the problems of modern village life, those advantages were by no means all to be found on the rural side. The expansion of controlled development in the countryside promised considerable benefits, in bringing employment, enhanced social amenities, and a fuller involvement in political and cultural life to rural communities which were judged to be deficient in all these areas. In the same way that the best prospects for agricultural work seemed to lie in making it more akin to industrial employment, so the best guarantee for the future of rural life lay in the introduction of features of urban experience: to bring the advantages of the town into the village. Despite concern about the inferior nature of contemporary rural life, ideas about the value of the rural environment itself remained potent. Much of Labour’s interest in national planning was motivated by a desire for decentralization. With improved transport and the development of the national grid, older ideals about garden cities and the relocation of industry to rural surroundings emerged as more practical possibilities.69 Labour looked to a future in which industries could transfer ‘from the overcrowded towns into the healthier country’.70 The 1926 policy for agriculture included proposals to build factories in agricultural areas, citing examples of this approach in other countries, such as Czechoslovakia.71 Town and country planning has come to be associated with restrictions on building and the notion of protecting parts of the country from unsuitable development, but ideas about decentralization and the diversification of local economies often emphasized the prospects for further development, and the importance of state direction to encourage the full use of the land. Alongside these ideas, Labour also engaged with town and country planning in a more conventional sense: that is, with controlling, rather than encouraging development. The second Labour government promised proposals for ‘modification and extension of the Law relating to town planning and to the preservation of rural amenities’.72 In March 1931, Arthur Greenwood, as Minister of Health, introduced a Town and Country Planning Bill, outlining additional powers for local authorities 69 70 71 72

How to Conquer Unemployment—Labour’s Reply to Lloyd George (LP, 1929). Labour’s Great Record (LP, 1924). 26th Conference, 1926, appendix XII, 366. King’s speech, 28 October 1930, HCDeb, 244, col. 6.


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to acquire land, whether by agreement or compulsorily, and including proposals to allow for garden city development, to place preservation orders on buildings of historical or architectural importance, to combat ribbon development, to protect rural amenity, and to authorize planning schemes for any area of land.73 Some of these measures survived into the statute passed under the National Government in 1932, though the landlord lobby succeeded in removing many of the original prescriptions, including most notably the power of local authorities to put plans in place for agricultural land. The 1932 Act was criticized as an excessively complex piece of legislation, which failed to meet the need for planning in the countryside.74 Even in the original scheme, landscape preservation received relatively limited emphasis, and there was little concern about the protection of land for agricultural use, which was to become such a priority for the Scott report on land use during the Second World War. The focus in this version of town and country planning was mainly on the ‘town’ aspect. In presenting the Bill for its second reading in April 1931, Greenwood contextualized it within a history of housing and town planning, looking back to John Burns’ work in London in the early years of the century. He acknowledged that the problems which present-day planning measures must address were not the same as in the past: they had entered another stage, where the dangers of unchecked development threatened ‘desecration’ for the countryside as well as the town. Greenwood’s speech was peppered with words like ‘hideous’ and ‘ugly’, implying moral and aesthetic condemnation of the impact of recent unplanned development. However, it should be noted that his disapproval of recent development in rural areas was mitigated in ways which set it apart from some of the more fundamentalist views of rural preservationists at the time. ‘In a way, one cannot complain that this building has taken place,’ he remarked, ‘because it has undoubtedly taken a large number of people out of the overcrowded towns to healthier surroundings’.75 Greenwood insisted that there was still a need for more housing, and it was preferable that this should be sited in healthy surroundings. At the same time, this positive social development had ‘done something to destroy the beauty of the English countryside’, whilst also placing great burdens on local authorities, 73

31st Conference (1931), 92. Hugh Dalton, Practical Socialism for Britain (1935), Ch. 26; G. M. Young, Country and Town (1943), 49; 32nd Conference, 1932, 88–9. 75 HCDeb, 251, col. 197, 15 April 1931. 74

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which were struggling to provide appropriate services to the ratepayers scattered in these irrational residential developments. Indeed the problems faced by local government were given almost as much emphasis as the issue of rural amenity in introducing the legislation.76 The foundation of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (1926), and the publication of Clough Williams-Ellis’ preservationist classic, England and the Octopus (1928), had marked a new phase in the dialectic of town and country. Labour’s Town and Country Planning Bill of 1931 was rooted in an earlier set of concerns. But during the 1930s, the urgency of preservationist appeals served to provide an evermore powerful case for national control over land use, and to establish the maintenance of rural amenity as an appropriate political concern. The priorities within this rhetoric related to the defence of the distinctively rural character of the countryside, by safeguarding agricultural land use, and protecting the aesthetic qualities of the landscape. There was concern about the industrialization of agricultural areas in the south of England, while existing social capital in the depressed regions of the country was going to waste.77 Labour began to incorporate preservationist goals into its political appeals. ‘The beauty of our countryside must be preserved,’ insisted the ‘Immediate Programme’ in 1937. In presenting the agricultural case for the national ownership of land in the late 1930s, Addison also added arguments on the grounds of preservation. ‘Under the present system,’ he explained, ‘. . . we cannot prevent the continuous disfigurement of the countryside or preserve its beauties for leisure and enjoyment.’78 The growth of public debate about preservation, and about the destructive effects of suburban expansion and road schemes, gave increasing prominence to questions about the role of the state in controlling development. By the end of the 1930s, this was seen as a useful subject to be taken up by local parties, which were encouraged to foster civic sentiments, and become involved in campaigns for open spaces and to preserve local beauty spots.79 As well as offering an opportunity for public education, there was probably an element of calculation about the 76 Cf. the vivid picture of the problems of amenities and welfare services in makeshift rural developments in Winifred Holtby’s novel South Riding (1936). 77 C. R. Attlee, Labour’s Aims (LP, 1937). This may be compared with the views of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population, established in 1937, and reporting in 1940 (‘Barlow Report’, Cmd. 6153). Ernest Bevin was a member of the commission for its first year, but resigned, citing pressure of work. 78 Addison, Labour’s Policy for Our Countryside. 79 Harold Croft, Party Organisation (LP, 1939), 39–40.


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potential of such issues to mobilize support. Organizations like CPRE and the National Trust still had fairly small memberships before the Second World War, but the causes which they represented seemed to attract levels of enthusiasm of which political parties might well be envious. A party which was dedicated to an expansion of production and infrastructure could not escape some conflicts of interest. Far from wanting to discourage development on what would now be called ‘green field’ sites, many in the Labour Party hoped that an expanding economy would allow for a full realization of their economic potential. One of the arguments in favour of land value taxation had been that it would force owners to bring land into use, enabling further development, and particularly house building. Hugh Dalton observed in the mid-1930s that such approaches could no longer be viewed as acceptable, since they contradicted the priorities of geographical planning.80 However, Labour’s position on the subject of suburban sprawl was not beyond suspicion. When the time came to nationalize the land, it was envisaged that compulsory purchase might not be restricted purely to agricultural areas, but could include land ‘on the outskirts of growing towns’, so that the rising values of such land for development might help to fund the redemption of land bonds.81 A L ANDSCAPE FOR LEISURE Labour’s arguments for maintaining or enhancing the beauty of the natural landscape were always closely associated with a belief that the countryside should be a national amenity, accessible to all. Despite the pledge to create a ‘prosperous countryside’ where people lived and worked, there was a growing tendency to treat the rural landscape, particularly in its most scenic forms, as a setting for urban recreation. A protected rural Britain would be a resource for the wider life which the working class might enjoy. Hugh Dalton even brought such sentiments onto the agenda of the party’s finance and trade committee, telling members in 1933 that,

80

Dalton, Practical Socialism, 154. Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 126/160.2, LP Advisory Committee on Finance and Commerce, draft memo by Hugh Dalton and F. W. Pethick Lawrence on ‘The Acquisition of Land,’ March 1928; Christopher Addison, A Policy for British Agriculture (1939), 103–4. 81

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It is an uncivilised community in which every inhabitant cannot, at the end of a moderate bus or tram ride from his home or place of work, reach open country, or, at the end of a short walk, reach a public space. Our urban conurbations have grown so vast that it will be a long job fully to re-civilise this community. But we should make a bold start soon.82

A right to enjoy the countryside fitted into notions of the people’s claim on the wealth of the community in its broadest sense; under socialism, Labour promised, ‘there would be the leisure to enjoy Britain’s beauties, which Labour would preserve for the enjoyment of all the people.’83 Natural beauty was a national asset and a ‘rightful heritage’: Labour stood for ‘beauty for all, not merely beauty for a few.’84 The example of afforestation illustrates some of the ways in which these ideas could be accommodated alongside Labour’s other priorities for the use of land. Afforestation was one of Labour’s great enthusiasms. It was frequently discussed as an employment policy, and appealed to ambitions for public enterprise to put idle land to use. Plantations could cut Britain’s future dependence on imports of timber and make uncultivated land, including game preserves, productive. In the late 1920s, Walter Smith outlined a drastic proposal to turn all waste land and poor pasture over to forest.85 Yet, from an early stage, afforestation was also valued for its potential to extend opportunities for leisure in a rural environment—in contrast to the old deer forests, which were often singled out as one of the scandals of contemporary land use, depriving citizens of the enjoyment of their heritage.86 The new plantations would function as ‘public breathing spaces’ for the urban populations in their vicinity, as well as providing jobs and a valuable economic crop for the future.87 The most obvious connection between the management of the countryside and the provision of public access was found in the policy to 82 Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 128, memo, March 1933, 8, LP Finance and Trade Committee. 83 Attlee, Labour’s Aims, 6. 84 A Nation without Poverty (LP, 1935); Suffolk RO, GK 400/1/5/1, leaflet, ‘The Labour Candidate stands for the People’s Interest’, n.d. 85 Walter Smith, Afforestation—The Need for National Enterprise (LP, 1927). 86 Labour’s Policy on Agriculture (LP, 1926), 10. 87 A. H. Unwin, Labour and Afforestation (LP, ?1920). Unwin had anxieties about the forests becoming too popular: ‘Naturally, it would destroy the sense of rest and peacefulness if all our woods, plantations, and hill sides, were overrun with people,’ he observed, and this was a good reason to have forestry projects in as many places as possible. Something of how he envisaged people’s potential enjoyment of these resources is conveyed by his comparison of the ‘woodland hill stations’ to seaside resorts.


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create national parks. In 1918, while moving a party conference resolution on the greater productivity and efficiency of a socialist system, Ramsay MacDonald broke into an enthusiastic discourse on the subject of the landscape as a national resource in a crowded island. His observations on the virtues of common rights in the land expressed aspirations for this as a good in itself, but also functioned as a simile for the benefits of social ownership, in which each individual could enjoy advantages far greater than any simple mathematical division of the aggregate of resources would allow. Go to the mountain tops. Those areas still unfenced by the great hands of private landlordism. Was their share a square foot? That was the area which was the product of the whole area divided by the number of people in the country. It might be true that the proportion for each was a small thing, but when all was put together there was a great social reserve . . . and the larger area gave to the community natural beauty, natural health, and natural joy.88

National parks were not a party political issue, though they did have particular resonance with socialist views about the role of the countryside.89 Wordsworth was sometimes cited as a home-grown advocate, having once described the Lake District as ‘a sort of national property, in which every man has a natural right and interest’,90 but inspiration for the movement came mainly from abroad, and above all from the United States. The cause was taken up in Britain by the CPRE, and the geographer Vaughan Cornish championed the potential of national parks to reacquaint the urban population with scenic beauty, and thus raise the spiritual tone of the nation as a whole.91 As Labour prime minister in 1929, MacDonald appointed a committee on national parks, chaired by Christopher Addison, with the remit,

88

18th Conference, 1918, 45. See correspondence on background to the 1929 committee, Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 35. 90 Quoted in David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (1998), 251. On the National Park movement see Ann and Malcolm MacEwen, National Parks: Conservation or Cosmetics? (1982); and Peter Coates, In Nature’s Defence. Americans and Conservation (1993). As Marion Shoard points out (This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for Britain’s Countryside (1997, cf. 1987), 386), the form of national park adopted in Britain differs significantly from models in other countries (including the United States), where it usually denotes an area of wild scenery in public ownership, and where any development or exploitation of the land is prohibited. 91 See discussion in Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 84–6. 89

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to consider and report if it is desirable and feasible to establish one or more National Parks in Great Britain with a view to the preservation of national characteristics including flora and fauna, and to the improvement of recreational facilities for the people; and to advise generally and in particular as to the areas, if any, that are most suitable for the purpose.92

When the committee reported in April 1931, its proposals were, as Addison put it, ‘eclipsed’ by the economic crisis.93 It recommended the establishment of national reserves and nature sanctuaries, its main concern being about the ability of local bodies to provide appropriate protection for sites which were of national significance. The report envisaged National Authorities (one for England and Wales, and another for Scotland), with powers to designate selected areas as National Reserves, each of which would then be placed under a specific planning authority. Addison did not think that all national parks would need planning schemes from the outset: some of the areas had been preserved to date ‘because of their relative inaccessibility’, though it was likely that plans to oversee development would be necessary in the future, as the new parks were made more accessible to visitors. The National Authority would signpost footpaths and determine bye-laws to regulate the use of the national reserves.94 The Labour Party continued to promote the establishment of national parks through the 1930s, to protect ‘magnificent scenery’ from ‘haphazard and ugly exploitation by private interests’, and to create ‘a splendid heritage for the people’.95 Issues of public and private were an inherent part of the debate on national parks, and it is unsurprising that they should fit easily into the rhetoric of a party which was so concerned with enhancing the public sphere. MacDonald had lavished praise on the policies adopted in Canada, where vast areas of land had been withdrawn 92 Bodleian Library, Addison papers, 35, minute of appointment, 26 September 1929. Much of the public’s interest focused on which areas of the country would be identified as suitable for national park status. The Lake District was a favourite prediction, though the government resisted naming potential locations ahead of designation, for fear of prompting speculative land sales. In 1938, the Labour Party was prepared to name a few of the ‘lovelier places’ which it believed should become national parks: the Lake District, Snowdonia, and the Highlands (Your Britain, [no. 1]: Home Policy (LP, 1937), photo caption). 93 MacEwen, National Parks, 7; Kenneth Morgan and Jane Morgan, Portrait of a Progressive. The Political Career of Christopher, Viscount Addison (Oxford, 1980), 186; Addison, A Policy for British Agriculture, 275. 94 Addison, A Policy for British Agriculture, 275–6. 95 Central Scotland. Report of Labour Party’s Commission of Enquiry into the Distressed Areas (LP, 1937), 19.


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from ‘private exploitation’, and made into public parks, ‘to preserve the beauties, the flora and the fauna of the country, all of which are being sacrificed under private control’.96 But questions remained about how to negotiate the essential distinction between the cross-party ethos of ‘planning’ and the specific economic ambitions of socialism: the competing routes of public control and public ownership. Addison believed that the whole process of securing this scenic heritage would be much easier if land were in national ownership.97 Indeed the damage which was being done to the rural landscape through inappropriate development seemed to provide a further argument in favour of the national ownership of land. As one party leaflet explained in 1935, private ownership could not be allowed to continue ‘as an obstacle to efficient agriculture, to hamper town planning and housing, nor to deprive the people of their rightful heritage of natural beauty and of national parks wherein may be preserved the unspoilt loveliness of our country.’98 Addison argued that the state had obvious advantages when it came to pursuing long-term schemes like afforestation, with its dual benefits of job creation and landscape management: it could take a long view in planning the use of land.99 Within the Labour Party, there was also considerable support for the work of the National Trust as a custodian of land in the public interest: Dalton described it as an example of ‘practical Socialism in action’.100 Powers already existed to accept death duties in the form of land: one of Dalton’s indictments of Snowden’s time as Chancellor was that he could have acquired Loch Lomond for the nation in 1931, and chose not to do so.101 Addison was also critical of the Treasury’s failure to take transfers of land in lieu of death duties, though the case he made was different: the payment of the taxes in cash served to further impoverish capital investment on landed estates.102

96

Prefatory note for the 1929 re-issue of Socialism: Critical and Constructive. Addison, A Policy for British Agriculture, 275. 98 A Nation without Poverty (LP, 1935). 99 Addison, A Policy for British Agriculture, 273. 100 Dalton, Practical Socialism, 292. MacDonald was also an enthusiast for the role of the National Trust: see correspondence regarding the future of Knole, August 1929–May 1930, MacDonald papers, PRO 30/69/560. 101 Dalton, Practical Socialism, 341. As Chancellor himself after the war, Dalton put his proposals into action with the creation of the National Land Fund, enabling the state to receive land in payment of death duties, to be held for the nation in perpetuity; see Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the English Stately Home (1997), 335, and Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power (Oxford, 1985), 339. 102 Addison, A Policy for British Agriculture, 59. 97

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The links which were drawn between landscape and recreation illustrate the framework for Labour’s approach to policies of preservation. The proximity of ‘unspoilt’ countryside to centres of population provided a strong case for measures to protect its beauty and make it accessible. It was fitting that the Peak District should be the first area to receive national park designation in 1951, since its geography made it the pre-eminent illustration of the value of open landscape as an amenity for neighbouring industrial populations: open-air enthusiasts from the Midlands, Sheffield, and the Manchester conurbation were drawn to its hills and moorlands which, for many of them, were only a short tram or train journey away. The Daily Herald commented that the ideal location for a national park would be not too distant from big cities—yet far enough away to prevent it from becoming a ‘glorified Hyde Park’.103 Leisure also offered prospects for regeneration in parts of the country blighted by economic depression. The ‘Distressed Areas’ were often set in areas of outstanding natural landscape, and Labour highlighted the possibilities of opening up regions such as central Scotland, the northern Dales, Pembrokeshire, and the Gower to ‘democratic holiday traffic’.104 Alongside these exciting visions of opportunities open to the community as a whole, there was concern about whether individuals would treat their environment with respect and appropriate decorum. Such doubts, and a rather condescending attitude towards the tastes and behaviour of the majority of the population, made their way into the wartime and post-war debates which resulted in the legislation on National Parks in 1949, and received yet stronger expression in the later policy on the creation of ‘country parks’ as a focus for urban leisure.105 But in the 1930s, Addison hoped that pride in the public ownership of the landscape would have a positive effect on the conduct of visitors in the countryside: It is clear to me also that we can never expect to obtain the hearty public cooperation that ought to be secured in checking the depredations of the barbarians who strew lovely places with sardine tins, banana skins, broken bottles and the like, unless it can be made plain that the preservation of these beautiful places is the duty of us all and that in participating in their preservation we are safeguarding our own possessions.106

103

Daily Herald, 21 April 1931. Durham and the North East Coast (LP, 1937), 23; South Wales (LP, 1937), 26 –7; Forward, 24 August 1929. 105 See Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 249–51; Shoard, This Land, 319 –22. 106 Addison, A Policy for British Agriculture, 277. 104


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In other words, people would respect a landscape which belonged to them. In these visions of a land for the people, the ideal of Merrie England lived on. Hugh Dalton envisaged ‘a Merrie England in which every Englishman will live within reasonable distance of green fields instead of in the heart of the slums’.107 In Walter Crane’s socialist commonwealth, the workers had climbed out of the smoky valleys of their former lives into the healthy hills of the new socialist world; its interwar counterparts were the playing fields and airy classrooms of out-of-town schools, and new spacious housing developments, achieved by Labour councils.108 And in the new Merrie England, as in the old, people would enjoy access to the land. As Labour’s publication Your Britain explained in 1937, Instead of ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted’, notices on the borders of Moors and Downs in your Britain will say ‘Holidaymakers will be welcomed.’ The Land should belong to the people, and its beauty must be preserved.109 107

Daily Herald, 24 July 1933. See Margaret McMillan, Ch. 9, ‘Citizens of To-morrow’, in Herbert Tracey (ed.), Book of the Labour Party. Its History, Growth, Policy, and Leaders, 3 vols. (1925), ii. 165; Voice of the People (1939), Co-operative Film Archive. 109 Your Britain, [no. 1]. 108

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Ground? All over the country—at cottage doors, on village greens, in quiet inns, in the fields among the sprouting crops and under hedges when the rain comes slanting down, landworkers in increasing numbers are beginning to ask what socialism is and what it would do to help them. At long last, after centuries of hardships and intimidations, political betrayals and shattered expectations, a new hope is being born in the hearts of the men and women whose livelihood is on the land. Socialism for the Villages (1939)

BRECON AND RADNOR, AUGUST 1939 In the summer of 1939, the Honourable Ivor Guest, Conservative MP for the mid-Wales constituency of Brecon and Radnor, succeeded to the peerage as Viscount Wimborne, and relinquished his seat in the House of Commons. A by-election was called for 1 August. Brecon and Radnor has a history as one of the most marginal seats in Britain. Labour had held it from 1929 to 1931 on a majority of just 187 votes. Even by the standards of county divisions, this was a huge constituency, covering around 2000 square miles.1 It fell roughly into two regions, characterized by an agricultural economy in the north, and coal mining in the south. Labour’s organization was concentrated in the southern, industrial area. The hill farming practised in Radnorshire led to relatively small, hired workforces, closely linked to their employers’ households, and producing unfavourable territory for unionization. Trade unionists from outside agriculture even had to be drafted in to represent workers’ interests on Brecon and Radnor’s agricultural wages committee.2 From its foundation in 1919, the Brecon and Radnor Divisional Labour Party had gained most of its support from the mining communities, and from the railwaymen who were almost Labour’s only 1 In 1936, the Labour Organiser described the average size of county divisions as nearly 300 square miles. 2 PRO, MAF64/97, minutes of Brecon and Radnor Agricultural Wages Committee.

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Ground?

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representatives in rural areas of the constituency. When the surviving DLP minutes open in October 1925, they reveal a position which was to be a frequent characteristic of the party’s life: debt. In 1928, however, through the generosity of a new prospective candidate—businessman and international tennis player, Peter Freeman—the party graduated to having a full-time organizing secretary. They made a fortunate appointment in Tudor Watkins, enthusiastic, dedicated, and a meticulous record keeper, who went on to serve as the local MP from 1945 until his retirement in 1970.3 Watkins was outspoken about the problems of organizing Brecon and Radnor. ‘What use is a hundred per cent Labour vote around the coal mine’, he asked, ‘if it is swamped by agricultural voters who have never had the chance to hear our case because of the poverty of the Divisional Party?’4 At the time of the 1939 by-election, Brecon and Radnor presented an interesting testing ground for Labour’s credentials as a party operating in the rural environment. The divisional party had recently selected a new prospective candidate: William Frederick Jackson, a farmer, introduced to the electorate as ‘particularly qualified to act as MP for an agricultural division’.5 Jackson had been chairman of his local NFU branch for three years, and the NFU Record offered congratulations on his selection.6 For once, it seemed that Labour could make a better claim to understanding agriculture than the Conservatives, whose candidate Hanning Philipps admitted at his adoption meeting that he knew nothing about farming.7 Armed with his impeccable agricultural background as a ‘successful practical farmer’, Jackson set out to win the farmers’ votes.8 The 1939 byelection stands out as the only clear instance of Labour devoting the main thrust of its campaigning to presenting itself as the party of the farming interest. It shows how far Labour’s relations with the farmers had developed from the earlier position of mutual suspicion and thinly disguised enmity. ‘Give a vote to Jackson, boys, for he’s the farmer’s friend’ 3 Watkins had worked in the mines in the southern part of the constituency for nine years before taking a course in economics, sociology, and industrial history at Coleg Harlech. His ability to speak Welsh and ownership of a motorcycle were important qualifications in his favour (NLW, Lord Watkins papers, 9th Bulletin of Brecon and Radnor DLP, October 1928). 4 NLW, Brecon and Radnor DLP papers, Labour Campaigner, May 1935. 5 Ibid., ‘Introducing . . . Mr. Jackson’, pamphlet (1939). Jackson ran a large fruit plantation near Ross-on-Wye, employing up to 200 people during the peak season. 6 7 Ibid., 43, handbill ([1939]). Ibid., LP handbill ([1939] ). 8 Ibid., 43, handbill; also by-election leaflet in Lord Watkins papers.

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ran one by-election song, explaining that ‘The landlords and the dealers have raked in the subsidy’, while ‘Fair prices for the farmer chaps will do the trick you’ll see.’9 Jackson concentrated his campaign on the promising policy for guaranteed prices, but it was probably his agricultural background which did most to guarantee him a good reception. He was a ‘farmer amongst farmers’, and an appropriate rallying point for protests against the government. Many of Labour’s leading agricultural speakers, including Frank Knowles, George Dallas, Lord Faringdon, and John Morgan, descended on Brecon and Radnor, as a projected rural campaign in the constituency metamorphosed into a by-election contest. In keeping with the main focus of his campaign, Jackson spent the day of the by-election itself touring the Radnorshire polling stations, leaving his wife to put in appearances in the more industrial areas of the constituency. The mining vote was virtually taken for granted. Members of the South Wales Miners’ Federation were reminded that it was just as important to elect Labour members for agricultural constituencies as it was to elect Federation MPs for mining divisions.10 There were some last-minute anxieties that votes might be lost in the industrial areas, though the Daily Herald ’s special election correspondent thought it inconceivable that miners would desert the farmer candidate, ‘who has brought to their aid new battalions from the countryside’. ‘The revolt of the countryside against the Chamberlain Government is clearly shown in this historic by-election,’ he wrote. ‘At long last the man with the hoe is awakening from tradition and serfdom.’11 Jackson won the by-election with a majority of 2,636, taking 53 per cent of the vote.12 How much of that victory was due to support from the farmers, or indeed from the agricultural community more broadly, is debatable. The Farmer and Stockbreeder reported that Jackson attributed his success in large part to dissatisfaction with the government’s 9 Ibid., 42. See discussion in Chapter 2, p. 69. There are a few other references to Labour as ‘the farmers’ friend’, e.g., Daily Herald, 8 May 1931, discussing Addison’s dealings with the NFU. 10 NLW, Brecon and Radnor papers, 43, address from Oliver Harris to members of South Wales Miners’ Federation re by-election (designed for distribution in mining areas only). 11 NLW, Lord Watkins papers, cuttings scrapbook, clippings from Daily Herald, ( [July 1939] ). 12 The final declaration was Labour 20,679, Conservative 18,043, on a turnout of 79.9%.


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agricultural policy, and there were cases of individual farmers who broke publicly with their long Conservative allegiance.13 The result can be interpreted in other ways. The absence of a Liberal candidate (none had stood in Brecon and Radnor since 1929) provided opportunities for those who favoured a popular front: Reynolds News argued that the contest showed the value of a united opposition.14 The notion of a Liberal vote certainly remained strong in the constituency and was actively canvassed on Jackson’s behalf by the Council of Action for Peace and Reconstruction, which called upon the electorate to ‘put policy before party’.15 Jackson’s background fitted well with Council of Action concerns: he was chairman of the Ross-on-Wye branch of the League of Nations Union, and came from a radical, nonconformist family. Labour lost Brecon and Radnor in 1931 when much of the Liberal vote turned to the National Government; in 1939, Liberals were strongly advising the faithful to vote Labour.16 The mobilization of radical nonconformity in mid-Wales undoubtedly had a bearing on what happened at the 1939 by-election. Nevertheless, one of the notable features of the by-election was that Labour felt able and willing to present itself as a voice for the discontent of the farmers. In many respects, Brecon and Radnor encapsulated Labour’s changing relationship with rural Britain: the attempts to harmonize a traditional Labour community—that of the South Wales coalfield—with Labour’s new field of involvement in the countryside; the appeal to the whole agricultural community, without drawing class lines; the struggles to maintain a local organization. These were all features of Labour’s developing commitment in the rural constituencies. In Brecon and Radnor in 1939, with a farmer candidate and a portfolio of agricultural policies, there was little defensiveness in Labour’s approach to the rural electorate. At a time when the Conservatives were exhausting the patience of their erstwhile supporters, Labour put forward proposals which were essentially what the farmers wanted to hear. It seemed that

13

Farmer and Stockbreeder, 1 August 1939. NLW, Lord Watkins papers, 15, cuttings scrapbook. Brecon and Radnor DLP had endorsed the United Front and supported Stafford Cripps (NLW, Brecon and Radnor DLP, minutes, 6 June 1936 and 11 February 1939). 15 NLW, Brecon and Radnor papers, 43, handbill; NEC, elections subcommittee, 20 July 1939. The Council of Action had also called on ‘Free Church and Liberal electors’ to vote Labour in 1935 (Lord Watkins papers, leaflet published in Llandrindod Wells). 16 E.g. letter in South Wales Voice, 24 July 1939. 14

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Labour could achieve success in the countryside by treating it on its own terms, by adopting a classless platform, and by promoting an attractive agricultural policy. This was, of course, a by-election, and generalizations from those events are only to be made with caution. Even so, the episode serves to illustrate how much Labour’s attitudes to the political countryside had changed since the early 1920s, and how the party, or at least sections within it, had come to embrace agriculture as an interest which Labour had a right, even a duty, to represent. SOCIALISM IN THE VILL AGES? It is tempting to take Labour’s contrasting experiences in Ludlow in 1923 and in Brecon and Radnor in 1939 as offering a narrative of political change: a clear development over time, from a position where the Labour Party could barely run a campaign in a rural constituency, to the point when it could win the agricultural vote and style itself as the party of the farmer. The details make things more complicated. Labour could not have won Ludlow in a 1939 by-election, any more than it could in 1923. In Brecon and Radnor, on the other hand, the party had been a respectable force of opposition since 1922, winning the seat for the first time in 1929. In any case, this was a more mixed constituency than Ludlow, containing a substantial mining vote. The story of Labour and the countryside between the wars does not lend itself to a simple chronological account, beginning with exclusion and ignorance, and ending in electoral success and a thorough engagement with rural issues. Yet the party’s rhetoric in the late 1930s suggested that a breakthrough was taking place, as the villages were awakened to a new, more advanced political awareness. In its pamphlet Socialism for the Villages, published in June 1939, the Labour Party offered a very positive impression of its progress in rural Britain: the countryside was changing, and Labour too had changed. By its own verdict at least, Labour was no longer a town party. Moving away from its early apologetic approach to agricultural policy, it presented itself as the natural vehicle to represent agricultural interests, and indeed as the only political force ready to listen to the rural electorate and take strong action to address its needs. There was some evidence to support this optimistic assessment. By 1939, almost all constituencies had some form of Labour political organization, in marked contrast to the position in 1918. The Labour Party had detailed rural policies in place, which seemed to appeal to a wide cross


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section of the rural electorate in some constituencies. Agricultural trade unionism had demonstrated at last that it was possible to cultivate a permanent organization of land workers. Although most of the power, influence, and funding within the Labour movement was still urban and industrial, the importance of rural areas in Labour’s strategy, and the significance of agricultural policy in its national political programme, had become clearly established. There are caveats. This side of Labour’s activity probably meant more to some of those in Head Office than to the urban rank and file in most local parties. Much political literature continued to ignore the rural dimension, or touched on agriculture only in the context of the food supply for the cities. Many of the ‘advanced’ industrial workers looked on the ‘backward’ villagers with condescension, if they thought of them at all. The rural idyll was one aspect of national culture in the early twentieth century, but other ideals often held greater immediacy: the domestic comfort of suburbia, the entertainment of the cinema, the landscape of the department store. For the unemployed in many derelict areas in the 1930s, a vision of revived and thriving industry had much more to offer than the preservation of the countryside, agricultural prosperity, or a reprise of ‘back to the land’. There were, in fact, significant limitations on Labour’s rural activity, which serve as a reminder that not all those in the movement shared the enthusiasms of figures like George Dallas, Joseph Duncan, and Josiah Wedgwood. Allocations of money, time, and personnel were often very restricted; the rural campaigns, as discussed in Chapter 4, were never allowed to become a major cost to the Labour movement as a whole, their main priority being always to encourage rural areas to develop selfsustaining organizations. Success here can be measured in the growth of political and industrial organization in the countryside, often accompanied, in a way not generally foreseen, by the development of a distinctive rural Labour culture. The Labour interest within the countryside was often a popular front, either self-styled or by association, drawing on radical Liberal sympathies, socialist beliefs, trade union organization, Communist activism, and general frustration at the neglect of the countryside in contemporary Conservative policy. Rural opposition to Conservative administrations and the National Government was sometimes focused into single-issue politics, through agricultural party formations, but increasingly it seems to have looked to Labour as the vehicle for its protests. In addition to being ideologically heterogeneous, the rural Labour movement was often socially diverse. Across the country as a whole, the

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Labour Party’s class identity was undergoing obvious redefinition in this period, as enthusiasts like Herbert Morrison hoped to make Labour the party of the middle, as much as the working class. Labour’s definition as a party of the working class was clearly being stretched at constituency level in most rural areas, where attempts to identify a natural Labour vote, in the form of an organized working class, proved problematic. Labour’s greatest electoral success in agricultural constituencies tended to come in precisely those areas of the country which had the nearest approximation to a working class on the land: in East Anglia, for example, with large farm workforces, sufficiently distanced from the farmers and landowners. Elsewhere, Labour was often disappointed in its efforts to mobilize agricultural workers, and local parties drew support from groups throughout rural society. Indeed the Labour Party recognized that it must court support more widely in order to stand any chance of winning votes or even organizing parties in these areas. In the process, it ran the danger of compromising older loyalties and weakening the Labour movement’s social and political coherence: attempts to attract groups like the farmers did not always sit easily alongside commitments to the interests of trade unionists in the countryside. By the late 1930s, the Labour Party was taking pride in its ability to attract and represent the countryside as a specific constituency. In part, it regarded this as a sign of its progress as an organization: as a mouthpiece of urban interests which had now developed to embrace rural concerns. It carved out a remarkable platform, and one which would have seemed almost inconceivable before the First World War, as the one party which took rural issues seriously. By taking advice from the industry, Labour began to enjoy the respect and attention of many agriculturalists. How far this approach translated into votes is less clear. There were some encouraging signs. In 1938, Christopher Addison asserted that Labour was obtaining a ‘steadily increasing vote’ in rural areas.17 In July 1939, the parliamentary correspondent of the Daily Express warned the Conservative Party that Labour could sweep the rural vote in a general election, on policies promising to raise the agricultural wage. Transport House publicized his prediction in the form of a leaflet: ‘Tories no longer safe in Rural Seats? A Candid Tory Indicts His Party’.18

17

Labour, July 1938. ‘Tories No Longer Safe in Rural Seats? A Candid Tory Indicts His Party’, LP leaflet (1939). 18


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THE ELECTORAL RECORD At the outbreak of war in 1939, Labour held 18 seats which could be considered rural, according to the criteria used in this study. Brigg, Wrexham, Carmarthen, Gower, Whitehaven, Mansfield, Bassetlaw, Penistone, Pontefract, Barnard Castle, Bishop Auckland, Sedgefield, Southern Ayr, West Stirling, and Western Isles were victories from the 1935 general election, and Dumbarton, Lichfield, and Brecon and Radnor fell to Labour as a result of subsequent by-elections. To this list, one might add Bridgwater, won in the 1938 by-election on a Popular Front platform by an Independent Progressive backed by the local Labour Party.19 Of these constituencies, Bridgwater, Brigg, Carmarthen, Bassetlaw, Western Isles, and Brecon and Radnor had significant levels of employment in agriculture, though Carmarthen, Bassetlaw, and Brecon also had large coal mining sectors, from which Labour might be expected to derive trade union support. Other divisions on the list were Labour strongholds, like Gower (Labour solidly from 1906), and the mining seats of Mansfield, Bishop Auckland, and Sedgefield; most of the 18 were, in practice, mining seats. Perhaps only the victories at Brigg and at the 1939 by-election in Brecon and Radnor were direct tributes to Labour’s efforts to target the countryside. Even at the 1923 general election, sixteen years earlier, when Labour’s interest in rural divisions had been scarcely articulated, the party had managed to take 30 rural seats, 6 of which had a population with over 20 per cent employment in agriculture.20 On the basis of these results, it appears that Labour was actually able to win constituencies with some rural element from a fairly early stage. Anxieties about Labour’s showing at elections in rural areas during the 1920s and 1930s implied that the countryside was untested territory for the party; yet, there were areas where Labour had proved itself capable of attracting a substantial vote, and indeed winning seats, even before 1923. Electoral statistics, of course, tend to gloss over anomalous results and unusual circumstances, and may exaggerate Labour’s early rural strength. The 1923 general election was the last occasion when Labour could rely on the MP William Royce’s 19 As a further victory for the Left, if not for Labour, West Fife was won by the Communists, who stood against Labour in 1935, and retained the seat in 1945. 20 It is notable that 11 of the 30 were in Scotland. Kettering was won by a candidate sponsored by the Labour Party and the Co-op.

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personal reputation in his constituency to win the deeply rural seat of Holland with Boston, with over half its working population employed in agriculture. The personal standing of George Edwards also turned South Norfolk Labour in 1923, for the final time before the 1945 general election. Many of the other ‘rural’ seats which contributed to the 1923 result were only marginally rural, and the party’s own discussions following the experience of its resulting minority government imply that these results were not considered to represent any real impact on rural Britain. Looking at the electoral picture following the 1929 general election gives a rather more positive impression of Labour’s rural support, despite the fact that this was prior to the concentrated rural campaigns of the 1930s, and at a point when Labour was appealing to the countryside on the basis of the rather vague 1926 agricultural programme. At the 1929 general election, Labour won 40 rural seats, 10 of which appear in Kinnear’s list of agricultural constituencies, including the predominantly agricultural North Norfolk and South-West Norfolk, as well as Peterborough and Ormskirk. More mixed divisions in the list of victories included Frome and Belper, where Labour was clearly benefiting from the mining interest, and South Derbyshire, where the local party had struggled to find any agricultural workforce to recruit.21 With the exception of Western Isles, all the rural seats which Labour won in 1935 had also been Labour in 1929. None of this represented what Labour was hoping to achieve in the countryside: after the 1935 general election, it was still possible for Labour supporters to conclude that ‘no Labour candidate succeeded in winning a purely rural constituency.’22 This electoral record serves to illustrate the serious weaknesses of Labour within the rural nation, and how far it fell short of realizing its ambitions. Nonetheless, the story is rather more complicated than is often presented. Before the Second World War, Labour or other leftwing candidates (such as ILPers and progressives) had in fact been returned, at one time or another, for a total of fifty of the seats which the party defined as rural, or which conform to other definitions of rurality. Labour increased its share of the vote across the 203 rural constituencies, from 23.2 per cent at the 1922 general election to 30.7 per cent in 1935. These figures were below its average performance nationally, which secured it 29.5 per cent of all votes cast in 1922, and 37.8 per cent in 1935.23 However, the category of rural seats encompassed very different 21

22 See Chapter 5, p. 158. Record, December 1935. The national figures are taken from David Butler and Gareth Butler, TwentiethCentury British Political Facts 1900–2000 (2000), 234–5. 23


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experiences. For the most obviously agricultural seats (the 141 constituencies defined by Kinnear), the party’s performance was at a level lower than that for the broader category of rural constituencies, whilst still revealing growth over the period: 1922 1929 1935

17.0% 20.4% 25.0%

When we look at the remaining constituencies in the list, which were selected for Labour’s rural campaigns but had less than a fifth of their working population in agriculture, the corresponding figures are much higher, and, indeed, are above the percentage vote for Labour across the country as a whole: 1922 1929 1935

34.3% 36.7% 40.5%

These latter divisions were by no means all easy prospects for Labour: they included Aldershot, which Kinnear defined as the most middle-class constituency in Britain,24 and other difficult constituencies like Windsor, Tonbridge, and the Isle of Wight. They also included mixed constituencies, where Labour was clearly looking to supplement its core industrial or mining vote. Whether through intelligent prediction, or as a result of deliberate effort, this sample of constituencies proved capable of delivering a sizeable Labour vote. At the 1935 general election, the 203 rural constituencies as a group contributed just over a quarter of Labour’s total vote: 2,098,499 of the 8,325,491 votes cast for Labour. Of this total, 1,073,545 votes were cast in the 141 agricultural constituencies, as identified by Kinnear: a considerable advance on the corresponding figure of 453,318 at the 1922 general election. The electorate had expanded in the meantime, with the introduction of new women voters after the 1928 equalization of the franchise. But while the total electorate had grown by 50 per cent, Labour’s support in the rural seats had increased beyond this, more than doubling in the period. Clearly, progress was being made in establishing the Labour interest in these constituencies. In a first-past-the-post political system, what matters is the number of seats won. But the count of Labour-held constituencies during the interwar years can provide only a crude measure of the support which the 24 Michael Kinnear, The British Voter—An Atlas and Survey since 1885 (2nd edn, Ithaca, NY, 1981), 122.

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Labour cause was building in some rural areas. The more one looks at the individual circumstances operating in any given constituency, the more sceptical one becomes about over-generalization on the basis of seats won, or even the aggregate of votes polled. Labour’s impact on rural seats showed tremendous variation around the country, and it is worth looking in closer detail at a few examples, which reveal some of the problems of drawing too many conclusions from the bald facts of the final declaration. An obvious place to begin is Norfolk, with its reputation as the most fruitful territory for Labour in the countryside. George Edwards’ constituency of South Norfolk and Noel Buxton’s seat in North Norfolk were two of the most indisputably agricultural areas which the party represented in the early 1920s, and the successful mobilization of the agricultural workers’ vote in these seats seemed to proffer a pattern for success elsewhere. The fact that Norfolk was winnable territory for Labour was given resounding endorsement by the achievement in 1945, when the party swept four of the five county seats. But Labour’s record in Norfolk was a broken one. From 1920 to 1931, Labour always held one, and sometimes two of the county divisions. At the beginning of the 1930s, however, the party was losing ground in local government elections, and it failed to win a single parliamentary seat in the county at the 1931 general election. From 1931 until 1945, there were no Labour MPs in Norfolk. In Norfolk, as in so much of Britain, Labour’s fortunes were heavily dependent on what happened to the Liberal Party. The county’s radical Liberal traditions presented a promising inheritance for Labour. The pre-1918 constituency of North-West Norfolk had been represented in the late nineteenth century by the great farmworkers’ leader, Joseph Arch, sitting as a Lib–Lab MP; in 1918, the secretary of the modern farmworkers’ union took almost half the vote in the new division of King’s Lynn, when no Liberal candidate stood. But Labour could not match this strength again until 1945, beaten into third place in three-party contests. Where the Liberals stood consistently, in East Norfolk, Labour likewise made no real impression on the electorate. Meanwhile, the remaining county constituencies became two-party contests in the early 1920s. In North Norfolk, this worked to Labour’s advantage, as Noel Buxton, the former Liberal MP, took the Liberal vote with him; elsewhere, the Conservatives took the upper hand. Liberal interventions in South Norfolk in 1920 and South-West Norfolk in 1929 split the poll to give the victory to Labour. For much of the time, however, Labour recorded around 40 per cent of the vote, without seriously threatening the


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Conservatives. When Labour’s share of the vote rose to just over 50 per cent in 1945, this was sufficient to give Sidney Dye a whisker-thin majority of 53 in South-West Norfolk, and to provide a more substantial majority in South Norfolk, where an Independent split the Tory vote. The neighbouring county of Suffolk had a less uniform political tradition than Liberal Norfolk, with most of the seats oscillating between the Liberals and Conservatives. With the exception of Eye, which retained its Liberal allegiance, Suffolk became solidly Conservative from 1918. Labour won none of the Suffolk seats before 1945, but its experiences told a variety of stories about the party’s appeal to rural England. Bury St. Edmunds was out of bounds to Labour between the wars: the party stood there just once, losing its deposit at the same election where the party nationally won a second spell in government. In Sudbury, its record was scarcely more impressive, coming a clear third in the two elections in which it participated. Despite this, Labour managed to win Sudbury in 1945. Lowestoft was another first-time win in 1945, though the party there had polled respectably from its first campaign in 1922, pushing the Liberals into third place in 1924; by the 1930s, in straight contests with the Conservatives, Labour could attract 40 per cent of the vote. Political fortunes were inverted in Woodbridge: H. D. Harben took an impressive 46.8 per cent of the vote against the Conservatives in a 1920 by-election, but Labour floundered in two-party contests during the 1930s. To the other side of Norfolk, in the dominantly agricultural county of Lincolnshire, Labour had very little electoral success. It gained early, idiosyncratic victories in Holland with Boston, and won Brigg in 1929 and 1935. In the other five constituencies, Labour could not win, even in 1945. Once again, these outcomes conceal interesting variations. In Louth and Horncastle, Labour stood only spasmodically and never offered much challenge to the Conservatives, whilst the party in Grantham began very weakly, yet increased its poll consistently across the period, achieving over 40 per cent of the vote in 1935. In Rutland and Stamford, Labour polled an amazing 46 per cent in a straight contest with the Conservatives in 1918, and though its vote collapsed on the return of the Liberals, it became a respectable challenger once again by the late 1930s. Labour’s total vote in the Lincolnshire county seats doubled between 1924 and 1935.25 As the electorate increased between the 1924 and 1929 general elections, Labour benefited more than the Tories, and when

25

From 42,228 to 83,947.

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two-party contests became the norm in the 1930s, the old Liberal vote seems to have dispersed predominantly to Labour’s advantage. In 1935, Labour had 37.0 per cent of the vote in Lincolnshire: a rather stronger presence than the fact of its single parliamentary representative would imply, considerably better than its performance across the rural constituencies as a whole, and not far below Labour’s total share of the national vote (37.8 per cent). The levels of support which Labour could register at elections in rural constituencies often paint a more positive picture of its presence in the countryside than one would gain from a straightforward tally of seats won and lost. The rural divisions in the West Midlands, for example, appeared entirely beyond Labour’s reach, furnishing easy illustrations of political exclusion. Even more depressing than Labour’s 1923 experience in Ludlow were the party’s adventures in the heart of Baldwin-land, at Bewdley, where the party stood only twice in the interwar years, losing its deposit on both occasions, while in Leominster, Labour failed to stand at all. Most of Herefordshire, Worcestershire, and Shropshire register as blanks in Labour’s electoral record. However, the polling figures in these constituencies reveal some surprising early achievements, which run contrary to a basic narrative about Labour’s developing presence in rural areas through the 1920s and 1930s. Labour lost its deposit at Shrewsbury in three elections in a row from 1924; yet in 1918 it had been capable of winning 36 per cent of the vote. At Oswestry in 1918, it took just over 40 per cent of the vote, although subsequently it struggled to attract even a quarter of the vote in the constituency. Perhaps most impressive was a 40 per cent share of the vote in Evesham in 1922. In all these cases, the significant factor was the absence of Liberal candidates. On the basis of these examples, it appears to have been far easier for Labour to take over the Liberal vote at the beginning of the period than it was further into the 1920s and 1930s. This made it possible for the party to poll very respectably in constituencies which later seemed almost inaccessible to it. After all Labour’s rural campaigning, it was impossible to envisage a Labour vote of 40 per cent in a seat like Evesham in the late 1930s. In most of rural England, the big question for Labour was what happened to the old Liberal vote. In Wales and much of Scotland, however, political Liberalism remained strong, and Labour sometimes found itself as the main challenger to a dominant Liberal party.26 Of Wales’ 24 county 26 E.g. in Carmarthen, where Labour replaced the Conservatives as the main opposition, defeating the Liberals in 1929 and 1935.


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seats, 13 feature in the list of rural constituencies, and they make a relatively high contribution to the sum of Labour’s rural victories. Two of the seats, Gower and Wrexham, were success stories for the party; both were basically mining seats, but clearly had sufficient rural hinterland to justify their inclusion in agricultural campaigns. In addition, Labour had isolated wins in a further five constituencies. Its most consolidated success came at the 1929 general election, when it took five rural Welsh seats (including Gower and Wrexham), a figure which it could only equal in 1945. Beyond these reasonably impressive results, Labour’s presence in rural Wales seemed much more marginal. Early successes in Anglesey and Caernarvonshire (in 1918 and 1922) owed something to the confused state of Liberalism during the post-war government, when Labour could be viewed as the true bearer of the radical mantle.27 Labour made steady progress from 1929 onwards in Llandaff and Monmouth, where, unusually for Wales, the Conservatives were the dominant political factor, but the party presented little real threat, even when a young Michael Foot made his first bid for parliament in Monmouth in 1935. Across most of the principality, Liberalism remained a viable force. Anglesey and Pembrokeshire were part of the virtuous remnant of Lloyd George’s Liberal Party in the 1930s. Where the Liberal Party was most firmly entrenched, Labour often failed to contest elections at all. It put forward no candidate in Cardigan during the 1920s, and contested Denbigh only in 1918 and 1935. Montgomery, meanwhile, was one of the dying breed of constituencies where uncontested returns were the norm.28 The continued vitality of Liberalism also proved a clear limitation on Labour’s development in many Scottish rural seats, and geography magnified the difficulties which Labour encountered elsewhere in rural Britain. Scotland was given a low priority in rural campaigning, though its thirty rural divisions provided a number of electoral successes in 1923 and 1929. Twelve rural seats in Scotland were won on least one occasion between 1918 and 1939, and Labour fared badly in 1945 in only securing nine of these. The seats which Labour was capable of winning tended to have a substantial mining component, and were concentrated in a band across the southern part of the country. With the exception of

27 Kinnear, British Voter, 137; David A. Pretty, The Rural Revolt That Failed. Farm Workers’ Trade Unions in Wales 1889–1950 (Cardiff, 1989), 112–15. 28 It helped to be called Davies in Montgomery. The constituency was represented from 1906 to 1929 by D. Davies, and from 1929 onwards, by E. C. Davies. Labour made a desperate attempt to wrest the division from the Liberals in 1924, with A. Davies of its own.

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Western Isles, Labour could not win north of Fife. Although it was an area of relative strength for the Scottish Farm Servants’ Union, the Aberdeenshire seats were beyond Labour’s grasp, in contrast with the generally fruitful relationship between trade unionism and party support in East Anglia. Like many other parts of Scotland, Aberdeenshire’s Liberal heritage was being converted to Conservative successes in the early 1920s, and Labour’s interventions varied wildly. In Central Aberdeenshire, it made a strong debut at a 1919 by-election, with Joseph Duncan as the candidate, but was unable to achieve such a high share of the vote again until 1945; in Eastern Aberdeenshire, Labour polled strongly from 1924 onwards, while in Western Aberdeen, it failed to stand at all. The strongest bastions of Scottish Liberalism in the 1920s and 1930s were in the north-west, in Inverness, Caithness, and Ross and Cromarty. Labour could not win there, though it tended to provide such intermittent opposition as there was. Despite a little more experience of threeparty contests, Western Isles also seemed committed to its political heritage; yet it was this seat which Labour was able to wrest from the Liberals in 1935, to establish a new, and rather surprising tradition. The lesson of Western Isles seemed to be that there were no lessons to be learned about how Labour might win in rural Scotland. This was a constituency where the agricultural union recognized that there was no point in trying to establish permanent structures of organization, and where the Divisional Labour Party could not even raise a minimum membership. Yet a young Labour candidate won the seat, and held it for thirty-five years. Such varied case histories demonstrate the impossibility of telling the story of Labour’s achievements in the countryside by taking a case study and extrapolating from it. For all the party’s rhetoric about the importance of its new political battleground, there was no such thing as ‘The Countryside’ to be won over—no stereotypical landscape, where a model electorate might respond to a magic formula. Instead, there were many distinctive economies and social geographies, where political traditions and contemporary priorities could produce varied electoral outcomes. Labour’s problems were not the same throughout rural Britain, and matters such as the personalities of candidates and the efficiency of local parties of all persuasions could produce disparate political histories, even for neighbouring constituencies which seemed otherwise to have much in common. Any focus on local detail destroys much confidence in the lessons we might derive from the aggregate of electoral experience across the country. Nevertheless, Labour did define rural Britain as a political,


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and specifically an electoral, problem. By glossing over the differences amongst the wide range of constituencies which could be grouped together as ‘the countryside’, the party created a scapegoat for the electoral limitations which it experienced across the nation as a whole before the Second World War. It was simply not the case that all rural areas were as foreign to the Labour interest as the 1923 by-election in Ludlow seemed to suggest. But it was sometimes convenient to claim that they were. If there are problems in generalizing about Labour’s achievements in rural Britain, there are also obvious problems in trying to assess the success of attempts to establish Labour’s credibility and presence within the rural nation. There was no general election at the end of the 1930s, which might have measured the electoral impact of the most concentrated phase of rural campaigning in the late 1930s. In the autumn of 1937, George Dallas was blithely suggesting that, with another two years’ work, the party could win between 40 and 60 rural seats, and secure itself a Commons majority.29 War intervened, and created a new set of influences and priorities. Movements of population affected the divisions between rural and urban communities, and the dictates of the war economy decisively altered the parameters of agricultural and food policy. The prominence given to physical planning seemed to endorse many of the economic arguments which the Labour Party had been developing through the 1930s. Labour argued in its election leaflets that the measures it had campaigned for in peacetime had proved their worth, and helped to win the war.30 THE COUNTRY ROAD TO 1945 The Labour Party defined its electoral task in the countryside in relation to achieving a parliamentary majority, so it is appropriate to examine the role of the rural vote in the election of Labour’s first majority government in 1945. Arthur Greenwood claimed that Labour had now shown itself to be ‘a really national Party’: ‘We are a cross-section of the national life, and this is something that has never happened before.’31 One notable feature of the 1945 result was that Labour’s historic weakness in the English 29

37th Conference, 1937, 229. E.g. ‘Keep the Countryside Prosperous’, 1945 LP election leaflet, Suffolk RO, Ipswich, GK400/1/3/1. 31 Quoted in Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (1975), 268–9. 30

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county seats—which had caused Egerton Wake so much concern in 1924—seemed to have been redressed. At the 1924 general election, Labour had secured only 38 of these constituencies; in 1945, it won 110 to the Conservatives’ 113. Labour dominated in the Welsh county seats, with 15 MPs to the Conservatives’ 3 and the Liberals’ 6, and in Scotland it held 17, two fewer than the Conservatives.32 Many of these county seats included rural districts. Herbert Morrison’s comment on the 1945 result was that Labour now had ‘a substantial number of MPs from the rural divisions’—though he did not elaborate on what he meant by either ‘substantial’ or ‘rural’.33 From the list of the 203 rural constituencies, Labour won 69 in 1945.34 Twenty-four of these results were first-time victories for Labour. Of the others, West Derbyshire, one-time bastion of ‘feudalism’, was a very recent Labour trophy, having been won for the first time in a wartime by-election.35 Many of the new seats were remarkable gains for Labour, bearing in mind their recent political histories. With relatively slim majorities, Labour became the parliamentary representative for former Conservative constituencies in the Home Counties: Bedford, Buckingham, Hitchin, St. Albans, and Wycombe. It won Chislehurst and Faversham in Kent, and Winchester in Hampshire. In the Midlands, it took Kidderminster, Stafford, Harborough, Bosworth, and Rushcliffe. 32 See breakdown in R. B. McCallum and Alison Readman, The British General Election of 1945 (Oxford, 1947), 259. 33 45th Conference, 1946, 113–14. The journalist J. E. D. Hall observed that ‘One of the most surprising features of the [1945] General Election was the large number of rural constituencies, where Labour had long been inarticulate, which returned a Socialist candidate’ (Labour’s First Year (1947), 154). 34 These figures include Peterborough, where the candidate stood as Labour/Cooperative. It is tempting, and perhaps reasonable, to add Chelmsford to the total: the only victory by a Common Wealth candidate in the 1945 general election. Common Wealth represented a challenge to Conservatism during the Second World War, when the established parties were bound to observe the electoral truce. Its candidates cannot be automatically equated with Labour, though they normally had the backing of local Labour organizations (see Addison, Road to 1945, 159–60, 225, 249; and McCallum and Readman, British General Election of 1945, 66–7, 109). Chelmsford’s MP transferred to Labour in April 1946. 35 The refusal of the main parties to condone or participate in by-election contests during the electoral truce created an artificial poll: see Addison, Road to 1945, 251. However, by-elections have been seen as a barometer of growing radicalism in the electorate from 1942 onwards: D. L. Prynn, ‘Common Wealth: A Third Party of the 1940s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 7 (1971), 169–81; Paul Addison, ‘By-elections in the Second World War’, in Chris Cook and John Ramsden (eds.), By-elections in British Politics (1973), 165–90; Steven Fielding, ‘The Second World War and Popular Radicalism: The Significance of the “Movement Away from Party”’, History, 80 (1995), 38–58.


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The county seats in Oxfordshire and Berkshire remained unattainable, but in Gloucestershire it won Thornbury and Stroud. It made rare inroads in the South-West, gaining Taunton and Penryn and Falmouth. Some of the most striking achievements were in East Anglia. Labour won King’s Lynn, to add to an assembled portfolio of Norfolk constituencies. It took Colchester and Lowestoft, and Sudbury, where there was almost no Labour history on which to build. The narrowest victory of all was also one of the most impressive for the Labour Party in the countryside: after dogged efforts, innovations in local party organization, and much commitment and dedication on the part of candidates and party officials over more than a quarter of a century, Labour won Cambridgeshire by just 44 votes. For some Labour stalwarts, it had been a very long campaign. When the local party secretary in the Cambridgeshire village of Histon called on a housebound 80-year-old to tell her the news of Alfred Stubbs’ victory, her response was ‘At last!’.36 In their study of the 1945 election, McCallum and Readman made no specific observations on Labour’s fortunes in the rural constituencies. They did conclude that the Conservatives had held on to non-industrialized areas ‘fairly well’, and that ‘[t]he most marked feature [of the results was] the severe Conservative defeat in London and in the English boroughs. In the more traditional rural county areas they held more firmly’.37 There may be room for a rather different emphasis. Of those ‘rural’ constituencies which had returned Labour MPs at any point in the interwar years, Labour won all but six in 1945.38 Thus one feature of the 1945 result was that the isolated rural victories between the wars came together to make a contribution to Labour’s majority. In 1945, the 203 rural constituencies registered a total Labour vote of 3,217,719,39 representing just under 27 per cent of all Labour votes cast; 15 per cent of the party’s total came from the agricultural seats more narrowly defined. The scale of the rural contribution to Labour’s total poll had grown (though not dramatically so) from the position in the early 1920s, thanks largely to the development of support in the agricultural constituencies on Kinnear’s list. The group of the other 62 seats merely 36 Cambridgeshire RO, Cambridgeshire DLP, 416/0.39, letter from S. C. Wordingham to Helen Pease, 10 August 1945. 37 McCallum and Readman, British General Election of 1945, 259, 262. 38 These were Holland with Boston, Anglesey, Carmarthen, North Midlothian, East Renfrew, and West Fife. 39 If the votes for Common Wealth candidates are included, this figure rises to 3,287,362.

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kept pace with Labour’s general growth, accounting for roughly 12 per cent of the total Labour vote from 1922 through to 1945. By contrast, the agricultural constituencies made a minor, but increasing contribution to Labour’s national vote: 1922 1929 1935 1945

10.7% 11.0% 12.9% 15.0%.

The 1945 general election is remembered as a decisive moment: a radical expression of the popular mood at the end of the ‘people’s war’. Parts of rural Britain clearly shared in a powerful national swing in Labour’s favour, the force of which has tended to overshadow discussions of constituency peculiarities, making it hard to judge how the history of organization and propaganda in particular divisions before the war may have affected results at the general election. So much had changed. In the extraordinary circumstances in which the election took place, it is

10. Campaigning on the farm in 1945: the Labour candidate talking to potato pickers in the Grantham constituency.[© Science and Society Picture Library]


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difficult to know how much significance one can reasonably assign to Labour’s victories in rural seats. Winchester, Taunton, Sudbury, and even the hard-won prize of Cambridgeshire proved short-lived triumphs, their histories as Labour seats brought to an abrupt end in 1950. Stroud and St. Albans were also lost in 1950, only to return to Labour in the landslide of the 1997 general election. North Norfolk remained Labour until 1970, and the party retained some footholds in other parts of East Anglia during the 1950s and 1960s. Elsewhere, there was little solid evidence of a lasting political conversion in the countryside. Yet, the fact that Labour was able to make a successful appeal in the countryside at all in 1945 must to some extent reflect its earlier work in campaigning and building organization. In his observations on the general election, the party secretary, Morgan Phillips, noted, ‘The response of Rural Constituencies justifies all the special efforts that have been put forth in recent years.’40 And so we return to the question with which we started: why was Labour so concerned to extend its appeal to rural Britain and win seats in the countryside? At first glance, the assumption that the rural constituencies were the ‘key’ to a Commons majority looks inherently misguided. However, the rhetoric about this electoral challenge depended on a highly impressionistic notion of what made a constituency ‘rural’. Alongside divisions which were readily defined by their agricultural sector, Labour also applied the label to those with much more mixed economies and patterns of settlement. Statements about the importance of the rural vote seem often to have been swayed by an exaggeration based on the undeniable observation that most of the land mass of Britain was, of course, rural, but there were also more sensitive political calculations at work. Labour strategists had identified the county seats as the most significant area of Labour’s under-performance in the early 1920s, and were convinced that, by making deliberate efforts to target the rural electorate, the party could begin to redress this. As an attempt to maximize the Labour vote, this was not as strange as it might appear. The mid-1920s, when the need to win the rural seats began to be articulated, was the height of the battle between the three main political parties, with many seats being actively contested by the Liberals, Conservatives, and Labour. In these circumstances, a poll of just over a third of the vote could often secure victory, meaning that it might be worth boosting an existing base within the electorate (such as the 40

NMLH, LP/GS, report on ‘Party Development’, [26 September 1945].

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miners’ vote, or a cluster of industrial workers), by looking to attract new sources of support. Such calculations needed to be reformulated from 1931 onwards. In the 1920s, the number of official Liberal candidates was always over 300, returning to pre-1914 levels in 1929, when 513 were nominated. By the 1930s, those figures had collapsed: in 1931, there were just 119 Liberal candidates across Britain as a whole (including seven Lloyd George Liberals), and 161 in 1935.41 As the number of two-party contests increased, there were still more dramatic incentives to broaden the scope of Labour support. Hopes of winning a mixed constituency on the basis of a specific enclave of Labour voters became much less tenable in cases where the party now needed to secure over half the vote. Although it presented a reasonably credible political strategy, the focus on the electoral significance of the rural seats may also have offered a convenient scapegoat: a distraction from the party’s problems in other constituencies, where the demographics and employment patterns suggested that Labour should be able to win consistently on the basis of its fundamental identity as the party of the working class and trade unionism. By the early 1920s, there were already some areas which constituted a Labour heartland, defining archetypes for the seats which Labour was ‘naturally’ designed to represent: ‘safe’ Labour seats were still few in number, but included places like the Rhondda and Merthyr; Poplar; parts of Glasgow; the Durham coalfield; Clay Cross and the Nottinghamshire mining seats of Mansfield and Broxtowe; and parts of the West Riding. A surprising number of the early safe seats were actually county constituencies, rather than boroughs, many of them clearly mining constituencies. Across much of London and in many industrial cities, Labour’s hold was less sure, and some of the northern cities where it was to establish a solid record in the post-1945 period were less certain prospects in the 1920s and 1930s: in 1931, Labour lost in every seat in Sheffield and Manchester. There are grounds for arguing that it was actually in the cities, rather than the countryside, that Labour was failing to make its proper impact in the years before the Second World War. On paper, Labour should have been well equipped to win these constituencies, with organization and targeted policies in place. The failings in its appeal were not necessarily obvious. The advantage of focusing on the problem of the rural seats, on the other hand, was that these were readily assumed to represent a new political environment for Labour, calling for special initiatives in policy and propaganda: a challenge which Labour could take definite steps to meet. 41

In 1931, 41 candidates also stood as National Liberals.


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Even so, Labour’s rhetoric about a new venture was not as straightforward as it appeared. Indeed one might say that the party’s presence in rural Britain looked much more impressive in the years immediately following the First World War (from 1918 until around 1922), than it did for many years afterwards. In 1921, the party was able to claim an affiliated membership of 300,000 ‘men and women actually engaged in agriculture—a far greater registered membership among agriculturists than any other political party—including not only every kind of manual worker on the land, but also a large and steadily growing number of farmers, small and great, in nearly every rural county.’42 At that point, trade unionism was buoyant, during the artificial boom created by the Corn Protection Acts. With the Liberals in disarray, Labour candidates were picking up the pieces in a number of rural constituencies: never again was the Liberal vote so readily transferred to Labour candidates in rural seats. The fate of the Liberal Party at a local level did more than almost anything else to determine Labour’s fortunes in many of the rural seats. In the single-member constituencies of the counties, Lib–Lab arrangements were less evident than in urban seats, but Liberalism in the countryside was sometimes very amenable to the developing Labour cause. Common ground between Labour and the Liberals, through their interests in the land question and social conditions in the villages, was one of the elements which made it relatively painless for people to move across from one party to the other. Labour’s earliest, and most solid electoral support in agricultural constituencies came in areas where trade unionism was strong and where a former Liberal allegiance could be transferred to Labour: Norfolk seemed the model environment though, as we have seen, Labour was struggling even there by the 1930s. One of the surprising things about Labour’s experience in the countryside was that it often cut across assumptions about the relationship between trade unionism and political affiliation. There were seats where the links were quite clear, and where trade unionists were the main figures in the local party organization, but, to Labour’s frustration, there were also areas where trade unionism did not foster the creation of an equally effective political presence. Even more interesting for Labour’s development over the longer term, there were parts of the countryside where it proved impossible to establish trade union membership, yet where the Labour Party itself attracted growing levels of support. 42 The Labour Party and the Countryside—A Statement of Policy with Regard to Agriculture and Rural Life (LP, 1921), 1.

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The diversity of Labour’s base of support across rural Britain both reflected and encouraged the particular character of the policies which it promoted as part of its effort to win rural seats. One would expect the concerns of the agricultural labour force to lie at the centre of a Labour programme—and so they did, at least in the early years. Appeals continued be addressed to the land worker, but the development of both political organization and policy began to move in a different direction. There was a growing mismatch between the new rhetorics (about Labour as a party committed to the interests of agriculture) and traditional commitments (where the primary focus was on representing the interests of the agricultural worker). The agricultural workers’ unions—for a long time, Labour’s main source of expertise on rural issues—largely lost control over the development of policy. In part, again, there was pragmatism at work. Agricultural trade unionism represented a relatively limited audience, already largely sympathetic to Labour, and there were not that many constituencies where it was sufficiently significant to swing the vote. Meanwhile, the effort to establish a broader political appeal was predicated on the belief that Labour had a genuine chance of winning support from groups in the countryside who might not seem, on the surface, to be natural supporters of the party: disenchanted with other parties’ neglect of rural issues, these voters might be won over by Labour’s policies for the countryside. There is some evidence that this was in fact happening by the late 1930s, though it was often associated with making a specific political protest, rather than conversion to the full ramifications of a socialist programme. There is little doubt that Labour hoped to take advantage of agricultural discontents to win support on specific policy issues: its relationship with British farmers was one clear example. But the ambition to define a rural policy which met with approval across a broad audience within the countryside was not just about ‘grabbing votes’. Labour’s policy was developed by a relatively small group of people who sensed a real opportunity to address the social, economic, and cultural problems of the rural sector. At the same time, it was endorsed by a party most of whose activists were all too conscious of their ignorance of agriculture and rural issues. In their anxiety to show that Labour was sympathetic to the countryside, they were more eager than one might have expected to promote a programme which emphasized the needs of the rural sector as a whole, rather than certain classes within it. This brings us to a final, important aspect of Labour’s ambition to win the rural vote. In the early 1920s, the Labour Party was conscious of the


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narrowness and specific nature of its political base. The countryside presented a powerful symbol of the party’s exclusion from certain parts of national life. The campaigns to win votes and recruit members in rural areas were as much about establishing a presence across the country as a whole, as they were about building electoral victory. They helped to bolster Labour’s aspirations to be a mature political party, which represented more than sectional interests, and would be well equipped to deal with the full range of national policy, when called upon to form a majority government. The electoral record provides an important perspective on Labour’s relationship with rural Britain, but Labour’s success—or lack of it—in rural constituencies was only one element in the story of Labour and the countryside as it developed in the period between the wars. The electoral problem, as defined by the party’s Head Office, gave a focus and urgency to attempts to engage with the rural population and to formulate policies for the countryside. The place of the countryside in its policies and activities serves to illustrate some of the confusions of ideology which Labour represented. Alongside socialist policies of land nationalization and controls, Labour promoted an inclusive ‘national’ policy, specifically designed to articulate the needs of the whole agricultural community. The concerns of ‘industry’, rather than the sectional interests within it, were becoming increasingly prominent in Labour’s political rhetoric more generally, and attitudes towards agriculture seem to have been in the vanguard of this development. It was partly because Labour had so few early interests within agriculture that it was prompted to develop such an inclusive, non-partisan approach. Labour never quite escaped from a view of the countryside as a foreign land which had to be approached on its own terms. The story of Labour and the countryside is riddled with contradictions between new and old, innovation and tradition, continuity and novelty, familiarity and unfamiliarity. Rural Britain was a part of Labour’s heritage and cultural traditions; yet it was also a new start, a place to build from scratch, and requiring new approaches to do so. The rural electorate, and the agricultural workforce in particular, were regarded as groups ripe to be absorbed into the Labour fold, alongside other voters and trade unionists; and yet they were also recognized as different, subject to peculiar constraints, and unresponsive to the appeals which Labour used elsewhere. The Left cherished its own interpretations of rural history and rural aesthetics, and in many respects attempted a political appropriation to counter established associations of the countryside with the Right. Yet it was often

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inclined to treat rural Britain as something essentially outside, and even beyond politics. This attitude was a product of Labour’s disappointments. Why did Labour find it so difficult to attract support in the countryside? One response is to dispute the premise of the question itself. Contrary to the common assumption that the history of ‘Labour and the countryside’ is a story of absence, Labour did in fact succeed in winning votes and building political and industrial membership in some rural areas. But undoubtedly it remains the case that the British Left has had enduring problems in its relationship with much of the rural nation. Following a determinist model, one could speculate about the peculiarities of class identities within agriculture, and about the tendency for the population in many rural areas to contain concentrations of social groups with pronounced Tory sympathies. Taking a cultural approach, it may be possible to argue that Labour was unable, after all, to overcome the obstacle of its image as the ‘party of the town’, and that it continued to be seen as irrelevant, and even antagonistic to rural interests. This book is a study of responses to a problem: of Labour’s perceptions of the challenges it faced and how it might best overcome them. There remains the more elusive subject of why people voted as they did, and what deterred them from supporting Labour. When Tom Williams reflected on the difficulties he experienced in trying to generate interest for the Labour cause amongst voters in the rural areas of Don Valley in the 1920s, he could find no answer: ‘How far it was the result of sheer apathy and lack of political education, and how far the result of explicit or implied intimidation by employers, I shall never know.’43 Labour remained a predominantly urban movement before, and indeed after, the Second World War, and organizational and cultural barriers continued to obstruct its ambitions to represent the rural nation. Yet this relative failure does not seem to have tarnished its view of the countryside. The radical ruralism of the late nineteenth century had been a product of exclusion when the Left had little experience of, or support in, the countryside which it celebrated. By the 1930s, the Labour movement had developed a presence in rural Britain. Ruralist impulses were accompanied by an acquaintance with the rural electorate and serious engagement with the challenges of making agricultural policy. Christopher Addison, proving his case for the economic possibilities of developing British agriculture in 1938, could not suppress a far more

43

Tom Williams, Digging for Britain (1965), 49.


341

emotional view of the countryside in which he had grown up, and where he still spent much of his time: [W]here in all the world shall we find a place in which life might be so pleasant and so full as in this British countryside? It behoves us, with all the wisdom and courage we can command, to make a better use of our advantages so that a fuller and a happier life may be enjoyed by more of our fellow-citizens. This is the great and final purpose of it all.44

AN EPILOGUE: LUDLOW, JUNE 2001 During the final weekend of the 2001 general election campaign, I happened to be in Ludlow, the setting for that 1923 by-election with which this book began. At the Buttercross, in the centre of the town, amidst the shoppers and the tourists, the Conservatives were campaigning in force, saving the pound, and promising ‘Common Sense for Farming’. They were the only political activists in evidence, though posters on display in the windows pointed to a greater diversity of affiliation amongst the residents of Ludlow at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Liberal Democrats had included the constituency on their national tour: a local newsagent told me that their leader had come into her shop a few days earlier, though she didn’t recognize who he was at the time and, in telling the story, couldn’t remember his name. As one looked down on Ludlow from the top of the tower of St. Laurence’s, a huge Labour poster, on the side of a building out towards the railway line, made its own contribution to the panorama. I left the town on a glorious Sunday evening, driving north through Corve Dale. The road crosses the open expanse of a golf course, and then the hedges return, closing in, thick green, and lined with cow parsley in full bloom. And there, on either side of the road as it wound away from Ludlow, was a crop of blue Conservative flags dotted along the tops of the hedges. It could almost have been a reconstruction of a scene from the 1920s: that quintessential image of the political countryside between the wars, with the Conservatives’ colours growing out of the hedgerows, like a natural feature of the landscape. Further up the road, the blue gave way to the orange-yellow of the ‘new model’ Liberals, on course for a stealth victory in this once impregnable Tory constituency. There were still no Labour flags. 44

Christopher Addison, A Policy for British Agriculture (1939), 21.

APPENDIX A

Labour’s ‘Rural’ Constituencies ENGLAND Bedfordshire: Berkshire:

Buckinghamshire:

Cambridgeshire Cheshire:

Cornwall:

Cumberland:

Derbyshire:

Devon:

Bedford Mid-Bedfordshire Abingdon Newbury Windsor Aylesbury Buckingham Wycombe Altrincham Chester Crewe Eddisbury Knutsford Macclesfield Northwich Wirral Bodmin Camborne Northern Cornwall Penryn and Falmouth St. Ives Northern Cumberland Penrith and Cockermouth Whitehaven Belper High Peak South Derbyshire West Derbyshire Barnstaple Honiton South Molton

Appendix A Tavistock Tiverton Totnes Dorset:

East Dorset North Dorset West Dorset

Durham:

Barnard Castle Bishop Auckland Sedgefield

Essex:

Chelmsford Colchester Harwich Maldon Saffron Walden South-Eastern Essex

Gloucestershire:

Cirencester and Tewkesbury Stroud Thornbury

Hampshire:

Aldershot Basingstoke New Forest and Christchurch Petersfield Winchester

Herefordshire:

Hereford Leominster

Hertfordshire:

Hemel Hempstead Hertford Hitchin St. Albans

Huntingdonshire Isle of Ely Isle of Wight Kent:

Ashford Canterbury Chislehurst Faversham Gravesend Maidstone Sevenoaks Tonbridge

343

344 Lancashire:

Leicestershire:

Lincolnshire:

Norfolk:

Northamptonshire:

Northumberland: Nottinghamshire:

Oxfordshire:

Appendix A Chorley Clitheroe Darwen Fylde Lancaster Lonsdale Ormskirk Bosworth Harborough Loughborough Melton Brigg Gainsborough Grantham Holland with Boston Horncastle Louth Rutland and Stamford East Norfolk King’s Lynn North Norfolk South Norfolk South-West Norfolk Daventry Kettering Peterborough Wellingborough Berwick-upon-Tweed Hexham Bassetlaw Mansfield Newark Rushcliffe Banbury Henley

Shropshire:

Ludlow Oswestry Shrewsbury Wrekin

Somerset:

Bridgwater Frome

Appendix A Taunton Wells Weston-super-Mare Yeovil Staffordshire:

Burton Lichfield Stafford Stone

Suffolk (East):

Eye Lowestoft Woodbridge

Suffolk (West):

Bury St. Edmunds Sudbury

Surrey:

East Surrey Guildford Mitcham Reigate

Sussex (East):

East Grinstead Lewes Rye

Sussex (West):

Chichester Horsham and Worthing

Warwickshire:

Rugby Tamworth Warwick and Leamington

Westmorland Wiltshire:

Chippenham Devizes Salisbury Swindon Westbury

Worcestershire:

Bewdley Evesham Kidderminster

Yorkshire (East):

Buckrose Holderness Howdenshire

Yorkshire (North):

Cleveland Richmond

345

346

Yorkshire (West):

Appendix A Scarborough and Whitby Thirsk and Malton Barkston Ash Penistone Pontefract Ripon Skipton Sowerby WALES

Anglesey Brecon and Radnor Caernarvonshire Cardiganshire Carmarthen Denbigh: Glamorgan:

Denbigh Wrexham Gower Llandaff and Barry

Merioneth Monmouth Montgomery Pembrokeshire SCOTLAND Aberdeenshire:

Central Aberdeen East Aberdeen Kincardine and Western Aberdeen

Argyll Ayrshire:

Banff Berwick and Haddington Caithness and Sutherland

Bute and Northern Ayr Kilmarnock South Ayrshire

Appendix A Dumbartonshire Dumfriesshire Fife: Forfar Galloway Inverness:

Lanark Midlothian: Moray and Nairn Orkney and Shetland Perthshire: Renfrewshire: Roxburgh and Selkirk West Stirling

East Fife West Fife

Inverness Ross and Cromarty Western Isles Northern Midlothian Peebles and Southern Midlothian

Kinross and Western Perthshire Perth East Renfrew West Renfrew

347

APPENDIX B

The Rural Campaigns This table lists the constituencies which were included in Labour’s rural campaigns between 1926 and 1939. In some cases it is difficult to determine with certainty where campaigning actually took place, as opposed to where it was planned for by the central committee. Inaccuracies in the central lists often only become clear through references in local records or the press. ‘C’ indicates where Clarion campaigns were held. 1926 –8

1931

1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

1938

1939

England Abingdon Aldershot Altrincham Aylesbury Banbury Barkston Ash Barnstaple Bassetlaw Bedford Mid-Bedfordshire Belper Berwick-uponTweed Bishop Auckland Bodmin Bosworth Bridgwater Brigg Buckingham Buckrose Burton Bury St. Edmunds Camborne Cambridgeshire Canterbury Chelmsford Chester Chichester Chippenham Chorley Clitheroe Colchester N. Cornwall

1937C 1928 1928 1927 1927

1937C 1939 1936

1937

1938

1937

1938 1938

1927 1934 1927 1927 1931 1927 1927 1927 1927 & 1928 1926 1927 1928 1928 1927 1927 1927 1928 1927 1927 1927 1928 1927 1927 1928

1938 1933

1934

1931

1931 1931 1931 1931

1934 1934

1935 1935

1936

1938

1937 1937

1938 1938

1939

1937C

1936 1931

1937 1936

1938C 1938 1938

1939

Appendix B 1926 –8 Crewe N. Cumberland Darwen Daventry S. Derbyshire W. Derbyshire E. Dorset W. Dorset Eddisbury SE. Essex Evesham Eye Faversham Frome Fylde Gainsborough Grantham Gravesend Guildford Harborough Hereford Hertford Hexham Hitchin Holland with Boston Honiton Horncastle Howden Huntingdonshire Isle of Ely Isle of Wight Kettering Kidderminster King’s Lynn Knutsford Lancaster Lewes Lichfield Lonsdale Loughborough Louth Lowestoft Ludlow Macclesfield Maidstone Maldon Mansfield Melton Mowbray Mitcham Newark E. Norfolk N. Norfolk

1931

1933

1934

349 1935

1936

1937

1938

1939

1927 1938 1938C 1927 1927 1927 1927 & 1928

1935

1939

1931 1938 1938

1927 1928 1928 1927 1927

1938 1938 1938C

1936 1938 1931 1933 1933

1934 1934

1936 1935

1934

1935 1936

1937

1938 1938C

1937

1938

1934 1927 1935 1927 & 1928 1927 1928 1927

1938

1939

1936

1931

1935

1936

1937

1938

1936

1937C

1938

1937

1938 1938

1936 1928 1934 1928

1937C

1933

1938 1935

1927 1927

1931 1931

1927 & 1928 1927 & 1928 1927 1928 1927 1927 1927 1928 1928 1927 1927 & 1928 1928

1938 1933

1934

1935

1936

1939

1937 1938 1938C 1938

1935

1931 1935

1939 1937 1937

1938C 1938 1938

1936

1937

1938 1938

1936

1937 1937 1937

1936 1936

1931 1934

1939 1939

1931 1927 1935 1936

1938 1938

1939

350

Appendix B 1926 –8

S. Norfolk SW. Norfolk Northwich Ormskirk Oswestry Penistone Penrith and Cockermouth Penryn and Falmouth Peterborough Petersfield Pontefract Ripon Rugby Rutland and Stamford Rye Saffron Walden St. Albans St. Ives Salisbury Shrewsbury Skipton South Molton Stafford Stone Stroud Sudbury Swindon Tamworth Taunton Tavistock Thornbury Tonbridge Totnes Wellingborough Wells Westbury Westmorland Weston-superMare Whitehaven Winchester Windsor Wirral Woodbridge Wrekin Wycombe Yeovil

1927 1927 1928 1927

1931

1931

1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

1938

1933 1933

1934 1934

1935 1935

1936 1936

1937 1937

1938 1938

1934

1938C

1935 1927

1931

1934

1927

1938C 1936

1935 1935

1934

1939

1935

1937

1938

1937

1936

1937

1939 1938 1938 1938 1938 1938

1928 1927 & 1928 1931 1927 1927 1927

1927 & 1928 1927 1927 1927

1938C 1938C 1931 1931

1935 1936 1936

1938 1938C

1939 1939

1938 1938

1935 1935 1931 1931

1928 1928 1927 1928

1938

1938

1927 1927

1934

1935

1937

1934

1935

1937 1937C

1938C 1938

1937 1937

1938 1938

1928 1927 1927 1927

1937

1939

1931 1938 1937C

1927 1927

1931 1934

1928 1928

1931

1939 1935

1938

Appendix B 1933

1934

351

1926 –8

1931

1935

1936

Anglesey Brecon and Radnor Caernarvonshire Cardigan Carmarthen Denbigh Gower Merioneth Monmouth Montgomery Pembroke Wrexham

1927 1927

1931 1935

1936

E. Aberdeen Bute and N. Ayr S. Ayrshire Banff Berwick and Haddington Dumbartonshire Dumfriesshire East Fife West Fife Inverness Kilmarnock Lanark N. Midlothian Midlothian, Peebles Moray and Nairn Perth E. Renfrew W. Renfrew Ross and Cromarty Roxburgh and Selkirk W. Stirlingshire Western Isles

1927

1936

1927

1936

1937

1938

1939

Wales 1934

1927 1927 1928 1928 1928 1927 1927 1927

1938 1938

1936 1936 1931 1931

1939

1934 1938 1936 1936

1931

1937

1939 1938 1938 1938

Scotland

Number involved in each campaign

1937

1938 1938 1938 1938 1938

1937 1938 1938 1938 1938

1931 1931 1931

1938 1938 1938 1938

1927

1937 1938 1938 1938

1927

1931

1938

1931

1938 1935

101

34

7

21

26

30

37

86

17

APPENDIX C

Labour Victories in Rural Seats, 1918–1945 Majorities are shown in parentheses. *denotes first-time win. Results in square brackets show victories by candidates who stood under another party label, but whose showing represented, at least in part, a Labour vote. 1918 GENERAL ELECTION Anglesey* (Independent Labour, 140); Barnard Castle (1,631); Bishop Auckland* (2,643); Clitheroe (1,159); Gower (1,756); Holland with Boston* (1,070); Mansfield* (2,279); Ormskirk* (465); South Ayrshire* (863); Wellingborough* (977); West Fife (6,644). [In addition, Kettering* was won by a Co-op candidate who sat as Labour/ Co-op.]

By-elections 27 July 1920: South Norfolk* (2,118); 5 March 1921: Penistone* (576); 20 July 1922: Gower (3,455). 1922 GENERAL ELECTION Anglesey (Independent Labour, 1,862); Bishop Auckland (1,927); Caernarvonshire* (1,609); Crewe* (555); East Renfrew* (550); Gower (2,086); Holland with Boston (591); North Norfolk* (1,029); Peebles* (402); Pontefract* (626); Sedgefield* (689); South Ayrshire (2,331); West Fife (unopposed); West Renfrew* (1,736); West Stirling* (815); Whitehaven* (1,979); Wrexham* (1,098).

By-election 3 March 1923: Mitcham* (833).

Appendix C

353

1923 GENERAL ELECTION Barnard Castle (1,689); Berwick and Haddington* (68); Bishop Auckland (6,642); Crewe (5,894); Dumbarton* (1,903); East Renfrew (508); Frome* (2,596); Gower (4,552); Gravesend* (119); Holland with Boston (2,366); Kettering (Labour/Co-op, 2,506); Kilmarnock* (2,807); Lanark* (230); Lichfield* (2,019); Maldon* (49); Mansfield (5,056); North Norfolk (3,256); Northern Midlothian* (1,839); Peebles (1,679); Pontefract (2,262); South Ayrshire (2,362); South-Eastern Essex* (1,600); South Norfolk (861); Wellingborough (2,537); West Fife (5,745); West Renfrew (3,302); West Stirling (3,060); Whitehaven (1,390); Wrekin* (1,383); Wrexham (1,881). 1924 GENERAL ELECTION Bishop Auckland (2,918); Gower (3,858); Mansfield (5,906); North Norfolk (2,004); Peebles (1,074); Penistone (1,279); South Ayrshire (177); Wellingborough (2,481); West Fife (8,670).

By-elections 29 January 1929: Northern Midlothian (952); 7 February 1929: Bishop Auckland (7,072).

1929 GENERAL ELECTION Barnard Castle (875); Bassetlaw* (7,011); Belper* (2,955); Berwick and Haddington (326); Bishop Auckland (8,203); Brecon and Radnor* (187); Brigg* (3,611); Carmarthen* (653); Cleveland* (1,683); Crewe (9,216); Dumbarton (1,577); Frome (2,146); Gower (9,609); Kettering (Labour/Co-op, 2,784); Kilmarnock (6,429); Lanark (2,402); Lichfield (3,454); Llandaff and Barry* (2,669); Loughborough* (2,644); Mansfield (17,899); North Norfolk (1,883); Ormskirk (2,589); Peebles (3,425); Penistone (6,646); Peterborough* (525); Pontefract (7,295); Sedgefield (2,706); South Ayrshire (4,741); South Derbyshire* (7,298); South-Eastern Essex (626); South-West Norfolk* (770); Sowerby* (2,166); Swindon* (2,161); Wellingborough (4,045); West Fife (11,628); West Renfrew (2,236); West Stirling (3,590); Whitehaven (1,652); Wrekin (2,862); Wrexham (6,587).

By-elections 27 November 1929: Kilmarnock (5,195); 9 July 1930: North Norfolk (179).

354

Appendix C 1931 GENERAL ELECTION

Gower (2,806); Mansfield (5,562).

By-election 25 October 1934: Swindon (2,649). 1935 GENERAL ELECTION Barnard Castle (1,320); Bassetlaw (1,139); Bishop Auckland (8,086); Brigg (203); Carmarthen (5,235); Gower (13,393); Mansfield (16,841); Penistone (3,086); Pontefract (2,526); Sedgefield (1,771); South Ayrshire (4,804); West Stirling (2,962); Western Isles* (1,345); Whitehaven (352); Wrexham (5,283).

By-elections1 18 March 1936: Dumbarton (984); 5 May 1938: Lichfield (826); [17 November 1938: Bridgwater*—won by Independent Progressive, supported by local Labour Party]; 20 April 1939: South Ayrshire (4,922); 1 August 1939: Brecon and Radnor (2,636); 27 February 1941: Dumbarton (18,038)2; 26 March 1941: Carmarthen (unopposed); 9 April 1941: Mansfield (unopposed); 24 July 1941: Pontefract (unopposed); 25 June 1942: Maldon (Independent Labour, 5,993); [7 April 1943: Eddisbury*—won by Common Wealth candidate (486), subsequently Independent Labour, and then Labour]; 17 February 1944: West Derbyshire* (4,561); [26 April 1945: Chelmsford*—won by Common Wealth candidate (6,431)]. 1945 GENERAL ELECTION Barnard Berwick (5,297); Burton*

Castle (3,424); Bassetlaw (12,377); Bedford* (288); Belper (8,881); and Haddington (3,157); Bishop Auckland (8,860); Bosworth* Brecon and Radnor (5,636); Brigg (8,104); Buckingham* (3,845); (760); Caernarvonshire (6,406); Cambridgeshire* (44); Chislehurst*

1 W. D. Kendall, who won Grantham in March 1942 on an Independent platform, claimed to be a Labour Party member, but his victory is not included here. The local Labour Party withdrew from his campaign in 1942, and subsequently stood against him at the 1945 general election. 2 This majority (in comparison with the figure for the by-election in 1936) should be put in the context of the fact that the Conservatives did not stand; the only other candidate was a Communist, and turnout was very low.

Appendix C

355

(6,279); Chorley* (2,955); Cleveland (7,921); Clitheroe (2,647); Colchester* (2,464); Crewe (9,948); Dumbarton (747); Faversham* (2,465); Frome (5,507); Gower (16,561); Gravesend (7,056); Harborough* (204); Hitchin* (346); Kettering (6,444); Kidderminster* (7,174); Kilmarnock (7,537); King’s Lynn* (3,274); Lanark (1,884); Lichfield (16,571); Llandaff and Barry (6,598); Loughborough (8,751); Lowestoft* (1,763); Maldon (7,727); Mansfield (28,811); North Norfolk (5,246); Ormskirk (7,022); Peebles (6,496); Penistone (19,311); Penryn and Falmouth* (2,793); Peterborough (Labour/Co-op, 571); Pontefract (8,642); Rushcliffe* (6,759); St. Albans* (1,879); Sedgefield (11,691); South Ayrshire (7,853); South Derbyshire (22,950); South-Eastern Essex (3,591); South Norfolk (5,963); South-West Norfolk (53); Sowerby (6,933); Stafford* (1,423); Stroud* (949); Sudbury* (247); Swindon (10,904); Taunton* (2,118); Thornbury* (9,437); Wellingborough (5,990); West Derbyshire (156); West Renfrew (1,214); West Stirling (2,577); Western Isles (1,637); Whitehaven (6,747); Winchester* (3,031); Wrekin (5,031); Wrexham (13,140); Wycombe* (2,536). [Chelmsford (2,080) was won by a Common Wealth candidate, who later took the Labour whip.]

APPENDIX D

Biographies A, C (1869–1951) Born into a farming family in Lincolnshire; trained as a medical doctor, and became a distinguished anatomist; developed interests in politics through concern with public health and living conditions; elected as Liberal MP for Hoxton (Shoreditch), January 1910; worked on National Insurance Bill; held ministerial office under Liberal and Coalition administrations; first Minister of Health (1919 –21); introduced 1919 Housing Act to encourage development of council housing; resigned from government, 1921; lost his seat at 1922 general election; joined ILP, 1924; campaigned for Labour in 1920s, and involved in developing agricultural and food policies; won Swindon for Labour, 1929; parliamentary secretary to Ministry of Agriculture; took over as Minister, June 1930; responsible for planning and introducing the 1931 Agricultural Marketing Act; lost his seat at the 1931 general election, briefly regaining it at 1934 by-election; accepted a peerage in 1937; Labour leader in House of Lords, 1940–51. B, N (1869 –1948) Born into privileged and wealthy family background; educated at Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge; travelled extensively, developing particular interest in the Balkans; worked for the family brewery in Spitalfields and took up social work in the East End; contributed to radical Liberal debates on social questions and foreign policy; Liberal MP for North Norfolk, 1910–18; joined Labour Party at the age of fifty; re-gained seat as a Labour MP, 1922; Minister of Agriculture in first Labour government; returned as minister 1929; retired June 1930, taking a peerage, as first Baron Noel-Buxton of Aylsham; focus in later years on philanthropic work, through family foundation and Save the Children; fervent critic of Versailles settlement, and campaigner for appeasement of Germany. C, S (1889–1952) The ‘Red Squire of Filkins’; nephew of Beatrice Webb; father (created Lord Parmoor) a Conservative MP who later held office in 1924 and 1929–31 Labour governments; attended Winchester College, and studied chemistry at University of London, before reading for the Bar; became the youngest KC in 1927; Solicitor General, 1930; elected Labour MP for Bristol East, January 1931; involved in setting up the Socialist League; helped finance the left-wing weekly,

Appendix D

357

Tribune; in great demand as a speaker in rural areas, and held rural conferences at his country estate in Gloucestershire; expelled from Labour Party, January 1939, for promotion of Popular Front; Chancellor of the Exchequer (1947–50) in the post-war Labour government; son, John, took part in Clarion Youth Movement’s rural campaigns, and later became editor of The Countryman. D, G (1878–1961) Born in Glasgow; worked in a coal mine on leaving school, though later studied at London School of Economics; ran a men’s outfitting shop in Motherwell; organizing secretary for ILP in Scotland (1908–12); moved to London in 1912 as chief organizer for National Federation of Women Workers; appointed as organizer for Workers’ Union in London and the Home Counties, 1913; particularly involved in the organization of agricultural workers; workers’ representative on the Agricultural Wages Board from 1917; member of 1919 Royal Commission on Agriculture, and a signatory to its minority report; sat on the Council of Agriculture for England, which he chaired from 1933; chaired Labour Party’s Advisory Committee on Agricultural and Rural Problems from 1922; member of Labour’s International Sub-Committee, 1930s; member of Labour’s NEC 1930 – 44, becoming vice chairman 1936–7, and chairman 1937–9; served on executive committee of Agricultural Economics Society, 1930–7; one of first residents of Welwyn Garden City, where he became a JP; helped found rural community council for Northamptonshire; stood for Parliament in Maldon (1918 and 1922), and Roxburgh and Selkirk (1923); Labour MP for Wellingborough (1929 –31); died in Bishop’s Stortford. D, H (1876–1960) Born in Gloucester; worked as journalist in the North-West; joined ILP, 1899; first employed by Labour Party in 1918, as part-time organizer in West Midlands, working three days a week; full-time regional organizer for the Midlands (‘District C’), 1920–38; general secretary of National Union of Labour Organisers, 1920 – 44; established Adjustments Board to negotiate salaries; founded The Labour Organiser in 1920, editing (and largely writing) it single-handed, until 1944. D, J (1905 –65) Son of a Tory farmer; educated at Wellington College, and Christ Church, Oxford; member of the University Strike Committee in support of 1926 General Strike; private secretary to Clement Attlee, 1931–9; sat on London County Council, 1934 – 41; unsuccessfully contested a number of parliamentary seats for Labour in 1930s; Labour MP for West Bromwich, 1941 until his death; Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty in 1945; Minister for Colonial Affairs, 1950 –1.

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Appendix D

D, J (1879–1964) Born in Banffshire; left school at fifteen; worked as a clerk, and helped on father’s smallholding; appointed as general secretary for the small Scottish Steam Vessels Enginemen’s and Firemen’s Union, 1904; involved in Aberdeen Trades Council, becoming its chair in 1911; helped with organization amongst dockers, and recruited for fishing union in Yarmouth and Lowestoft; became organizer for the ILP, 1906, working on east coast of Scotland; responded to appeal for help in launching trade union for farm workers in Aberdeen area, 1912, and became the union’s vice president; accepted full-time post as general secretary and treasurer for Scottish Farm Servants’ Union, 1918; edited The Scottish Farm Servant (1924 –31); frequent contributor to the Scottish socialist weekly, Forward; wrote Agriculture and the Community (1921); served on the Royal Commissions on Housing in Scotland (1912–17), and on Agriculture (1919–21); member of Agricultural Research Council (1930–8 and 1946–52) and chair of Scottish Agricultural Improvement Council (1951–60); president of International Landworkers’ Federation (1924–50), and of Scottish TUC (1926); president of Agricultural Economics Society (1939–46); candidate in three parliamentary elections (Central Aberdeenshire, 1919, Moray and Nairn, 1929, and Aberdeen South, 1935), but declined the opportunity to stand in safe Labour seats. D, S (1900 –58) Born in Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk, son of a smallholder; went to work on the land at age of 13; joined agricultural workers’ union at 16; became branch secretary and secretary of local Labour Party, 1920; won the Buxton Memorial Scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, and gained diploma in economics and political science; attended International People’s College at Elsinore in Denmark; visited a number of countries to study their agriculture; Labour agent in Dover in 1924, and agent for Cambridgeshire DLP (1926–31); from 1932, farmed at Swaffham, first as tenant, but purchased the farm during Second World War; county councillor in Norfolk from 1934; member of NFU; elected MP for South-West Norfolk in 1945; Methodist lay preacher, and founder member of the Parliamentary Socialist Christian Group; died in road accident on his way to the Commons. E, G (1850–1933) The most famous agricultural trade unionist since Joseph Arch; born in Marsham, Norfolk; taken into the workhouse at age of five, after his father was arrested for stealing turnips; started work at the age of six, scaring crows; a Primitive Methodist, who became a lay reader; learned to read only after his marriage, and later gave up smoking to save money to buy books; worked as an agricultural labourer, and a brickmaker; member of the agricultural trade unions formed in 1872 and 1889, and a paid official in the 1890s; worked as speaker for

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the Liberal Party, 1903–6; a driving spirit behind the formation of the Eastern Counties Agricultural Labourers’ and Small Holders’ Union in 1906, which later became the National Union of Agricultural Workers; general secretary of the union until 1913; chairman of local parish council, and member of District Council and Board of Guardians; elected to County Council in 1908, as an independent Labour representative; Labour MP for South Norfolk, 1920–2, and 1923– 4; published his memoirs, From Crow-Scaring to Westminster (1922); knighted in 1930. G, G (1888–1942) Son of rector of Little Tew in Oxfordshire; educated at Rugby School, and gained a First at Oxford; joined Indian Civil Service, rising to become under-secretary in Bombay; captain in Indian Cavalry Regiment during First World War; retired early from civil service to devote himself to public work and writing; joined Labour Party’s advisory committee on agriculture and became honorary secretary of Labour Agricultural Group; stood, unsuccessfully, as Labour parliamentary candidate for Cambridgeshire, 1924, 1929, and 1931; took a farm in the constituency, at Barrington, and experimented with grassland, writing about the experience in Hundred Acre Farm (1928); after 1931 election, returned to India and published a major study of British rule; temporarily struck off list of party candidates after critical comments on party leadership in The Mugwumps and the Labour Party (1932); went on to contest Wrekin (1935), and Plymouth Drake (1937); died while demonstrating explosives to an army class at Pembroke Dock. G, E (1889 –1964) Lived all his life in Wymondham, Norfolk; son of a blacksmith; worked in a print shop, before becoming a journalist; chaired Norwich branch of National Union of Journalists; George Edwards’ election agent, and honorary secretary of South Norfolk DLP; parish, district and county councillor in Norfolk; served on NUAW executive committee from 1926, becoming president of the union in 1928; elected to parliament for North Norfolk, 1945. H, W (1873–1962) Came from radical Norfolk stock: his father a trade unionist, his grandfather a Chartist; left school at twelve to work on the land, later getting a job at the Colman’s mustard factory outside Norwich; joined Norfolk and Norwich Amalgamated Labourers’ Union, 1890; one of early wave of ILP cyclists in Norfolk countryside, later becoming a paid organizer; elected to Norwich city council, 1905; appointed National Organiser for Labour Party, 1913; helped George Edwards set up agricultural union in 1906, served on its Executive from 1911, and was NUAW president 1923–8; left post in Labour Party to become

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general secretary of NUAW, from 1928 until retirement in 1944; member of General Council of the TUC 1928–45, and president 1939–40; honoured with CBE, 1941. M, J (1892 –1940) Brought up in a London orphanage; began work as a labourer in Essex; became manager of a farm in Yorkshire, and later farmed in Sussex and Essex; travelled in the Commonwealth and Scandinavia, studying agricultural practice; visited Russia in 1932, with group from the Fabian Society; gave radio lectures, starting the BBC talks ‘For Farmers Only’ in 1933; as ‘John Sussex’, wrote a ‘Countryman’s Log’ in Daily Herald, and was the paper’s agricultural correspondent; contested a number of seats for Labour, winning Doncaster in a 1938 by-election. S, W R. (1872–1942) Born in Norwich; held many offices in the city, serving as president of the trades council (1904 –17), on board of guardians (1904–19), as city councillor (1906 –19), and as a JP from 1909; became national organizer for National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, 1916; president of agricultural workers’ union and first president of the International Landworkers’ Federation, formed in 1920; Labour MP for Wellingborough 1918–22, and for Norwich 1923–4 and 1929 –31; parliamentary secretary to Minister of Agriculture in 1924. T, W. B. (W B) (1875–1932) Born in Thetford, Norfolk; farmer and Congregationalist lay preacher; JP and county councillor in Norfolk; set up a Small Holdings Association; first secretary of Norfolk branch of the NFU; contested East Norfolk as a nominee of NFU, 1918; supporter of agricultural workers’ union, and county chairman in Norfolk during great strike of 1923; Liberal until First World War; joined Labour Party, 1918; stood as Labour candidate in South-West Norfolk from 1922, winning the seat in 1929; formed the first Parliamentary Labour Agricultural Group, 1930; lost his seat at 1931 general election. W, R. B. (R B) (1878–1961) Born in Lanarkshire; son of a ploughman; went to work on the railways, and moved to England; served in Boer War; began organizing for agricultural workers’ union in the Midlands, before joining its head office; member of Parliamentary Committee of TUC from 1917; president of TUC, 1921; stood as a Labour Party candidate in King’s Lynn (1918 and 1922) and Ormskirk (1923 and 1924); general secretary of NUAW, 1912–28, leaving under a cloud; emigrated to Australia.

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W, J. C. ( J C) (1872–1943) Born in Barlaston; descendant of Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the famous pottery; fought in Boer War, remaining in South Africa for two years as magistrate; elected Liberal MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, 1906; gained DSO at Gallipoli; after First World War, joined ILP, and then the Labour Party, 1919; enduring political enthusiasm for Henry George’s policy of land value taxation; Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster in first Labour government; created first Baron Wedgwood, 1942. W, T (1888 –1967) A Yorkshire man, son of a coal miner; left school at eleven and went to work down the pit; joined Doncaster Board of Guardians, 1918; became a district councillor, 1919; won Don Valley for Labour, 1922; parliamentary private secretary to Noel Buxton at Ministry of Agriculture, 1924, and to Margaret Bondfield at Ministry of Labour during the second Labour government; brought into Parliamentary Labour Committee, as survivor of 1931 general election, and given charge of agricultural matters; best known for his role in the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign during the Second World War, and as Minister of Agriculture in post-war Attlee government; took a peerage as Lord Williams of Barnburgh in 1961—commemorating the name of the mine where he had worked.

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Index The index does not include listings of constituencies from the appendices. Italic numbers denote reference to illustrations. Abbey Cwmhir 266 n. 49 Aberdeenshire 330 Aberffraw 206 Abraham, W. J. 163 access 40, 89–90, 95–7, 309–15 Access to the Mountains Bills 89, 95, 97 Acland, A. H. D. 42 Adamson, William 237 n. 109 Addison, Christopher 69, 96, 97, 135, 136, 226–8, 246, 253, 263, 273, 292, 297, 314, 322, 340–1, 356 A Policy for British Agriculture 253 and committee on national parks 311–13 as minister of agriculture 226, 240–3, 245, 247–8, 254, 256 career in Liberal Party 226, 241 involvement in policy making 220, 224, 227, 232 n. 78 joining the Labour Party 68, 226–7 on the beauty of the countryside 308 on the future on agriculture 234, 242–3, 250, 265, 275 Adjustments Board 171 adoption of rural areas 127–8 afforestation 233, 234, 241, 301, 310, 313 agents, Labour Party 129, 142, 158, 165, 168, 169–74 part-time 170, 172–3 salary 171–2 see also election agents; Labour Party organizers agitators 185 agricultural community, interests of 244, 257, 284, 338–9; see also ‘national’ policy for agriculture agricultural depression 5–6, 235, 247, 261, 299–300 agricultural economics 6, 198, 228–9 Agricultural Economics Research Institute, Oxford 229 agricultural history 29–33, 40

Agricultural Labour Group (of MPs) 244 agricultural labourers, see agricultural workers agricultural land 302, 305, 307 Agricultural Land (Utilisation) Act (1931) 232, 237, 241–2, 266 n. 45 Agricultural Marketing Act (1931) 237, 242–3 agricultural policy, Labour Party: and agricultural workers 56, 232–3, 254–5, 338 and the Co-operative Movement 255 comparisons with Liberal Party policy 226–7, 230 development of 18, 20, 219, 221–7, 290 electoral significance of 219–20, 244, 258, 290 interests of consumers 244 –5, 252 interests of town and country 217 role in rural campaigning 117–18, 219, 290 see also Labour Party agricultural revolution 32, 37 agricultural science 228, 274 agricultural trade unionism 19, 30, 33, 49, 64, 132, 150, 185, 211–13, 229, 240, 259, 338 achievements of 212–13 and nonconformity 63, 159 and the Liberal Party 72, 187, 271–2 in Austria and Germany 102 legal aid for members 203– 4 membership fees 203 nineteenth-century organizations 113, 180, 185–6, 204 organizers 132, 180, 182 payment of benefits 203 problems for 184, 186, 202–7, 213 relationship to types of farming 213, 316 rivalry between organizations 115–16, 190–3

384

Index

agricultural trade unionism (cont.): support for Labour Party 153, 156–8, 330 support from non-agriculturalists 76 –7, 104, 110, 180, 185, 205–7 weakness in collective bargaining 188–9, 200–1 agricultural wages 181, 188–90, 197–8, 200–1, 221, 222, 260, 271, 291 relation to farm prices 260, 263 agricultural wages board 188–90, 200–1, 210, 213, 237–8, 254 agricultural wages committees 209–10, 260 membership of 188, 191, 198, 207, 254, 316 Agricultural Wages Act (1924) 237, 238 agricultural workers: attitudes towards their employment 102, 104, 207–11 character, perceptions of 46, 54–5, 56, 57, 71 class identity of 71–2, 260 conditions of employment 56, 210–11, 223, 232–3, 259, 274 inarticulacy 56 leaving the industry 54–5 low wages of 115, 178–80, 184 political sympathies 46–7, 56, 60 reputation as blacklegs 110, 178–9, 209 skilled status 207 support for the Labour Party 56, 152, 326 suspicions of Labour Party 70–1 vulnerability to victimization 60, 63–4, 184, 187 agriculture: as an ‘industry’ 187, 249, 265 employment in 11, 17, 208, 210, 234 fortunes of 5–6, 14, 97, 243, 262, 299–300 government intervention in 13–14 idealisation of 104 justifications for maintenance of 222, 233, 235, 236, 249, 276 national importance 276 overseas competition 5–6, 235, 243, 245, 255 political significance of 6, 11, 21, 219, 249 Aldershot constituency 325 Alexander, A. V. 224, 247, 280

Alford, E. J. 173 Allen, Harry 153 Allen, Hugh 83 allotments 271–2, 194, 305 Alpass, J. H. 232 Altrincham constituency 52 n. 6 Altrincham Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 Aman, Dudley Leigh 155, 175, 256 American tourists 103 Anglesey 116, 191 Anglesey constituency 329 Anglo-Saxons, and the land question 29 anti-industrialism 14, 84 –7, 98 anti-urbanism 14, 84 –7 arable farming 6, 14, 71, 196, 243, 247–9 crisis in 235, 243–5, 247, 249, 299 Arch, Joseph 30, 47, 59 n. 46, 180, 185–6, 326 Argyll constituency 146 Ashby, A. W. 224, 228 –9 Ashman, Anna 175 Attlee, Clement 127– 8, 136, 224, 242, 249, 273, 298 Australian Labor Party 7 autarky 236 Aylesbury, parliamentary candidates for 156, 163 Aylesbury Divisional Labour Party 45– 6, 160 Ayrton-Gould, Barbara 120 ‘back to the land’ 227 n. 50, 233– 4, 272, 321 ‘backward areas’ 53, 68, 74 n. 131, 78, 114, 127, 132, 139, 165 concerns about use of the term 176 definitions of 53, 114 n. 26, 148 –9 bacon 234 Baden-Powell, Robert 99 Baldwin, Stanley 4, 81, 134 n. 131, 237, 240, 278, 279, 304, 328 Ball, John 44, 45, 46, 47, 48 Banbury Divisional Labour Party 281 banners 25 Barlow report 308 n.77 Barnard Castle constituency 323 Barnes, Alfred 224 Barnes, George Nicoll 224 Basingstoke constituency 150, 286 Bassetlaw constituency 171, 323 Bates, H. E. 155 Bateson, F. W. 297

Index bazaars 26, 160 Beard, John 180, 204, 207, 224, 247 Beauchamp, Joan 267 beauty spots 96, 308 Becontree 151 Bedford constituency 126, 332 Bedfordshire 191 beef, scheme to promote sales of 242 behaviour of visitors in the countryside 96 –7, 300, 314 Belloc, Hilaire 36 Belper constituency 121 n. 65, 126, 324 Bennett, E. N. 45, 57, 164, 222 n. 22 Bennett, William 136 Berkshire 333 ‘better farming’ 223, 262 Bevin, Ernest 115 n. 29, 182, 193 Bewdley constituency 328 Birmingham 10, 85, 86, 301 Bishop Auckland constituency 120, 323 Black, P. H. 163 Black Country 85, 301 blacklegs 110, 178–9, 209 blacksmiths 40, 153, 180 Blatchford, Robert 59 n. 46, 86, 88, 236 Merrie England 86, 236 Bletchley 151 Bondfield, Margaret 83 Bosworth constituency 160, 332 bothies 201 Bourne, George 42, 184, 233 Box, Sidney 28, 53 n. 13, 56, 61 Boxford 167 Bradford 148 Brailsford, H. N. 55, 102 n. 105 bread, price of 246, 247, 248 Brecon and Radnor 207 Brecon and Radnor constituency 121 n. 66, 151, 166, 171, 288, 316–20, 323 Brecon and Radnor Divisional Labour Party 126, 158, 166, 316–17 Bridgwater constituency 132, 145, 323 Bridgwater Divisional Labour Party 170 Brigg constituency 121 n. 66, 323, 327 Brighton 45 Bristol Propaganda Association 67, 129 British Union of Fascists 281 British Workers’ Sports Federation 90, 95 Brockhouse, H. 29 Bromley, John 222 n. 23, 224 Brooks, Harry 163

385

Buckingham constituency 60, 126, 151, 332 Buckingham Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 Buckinghamshire 45 Buckrose constituency 111, 120 Buckrose Divisional Labour Party 148 Builders’ Labourers and Construction Workers’ Union 195 bulbs 248 bureaucracy 264, 279– 80 Burns, John 307 Burston School Strike 27, 47, 62 Bury St. Edmunds 193 Bury St. Edmunds constituency 327 Buscot Park 46 n. 90, 123, 136, 298 buses 54, 88, 151, 293, 310 Bute and Northern Ayr constituency 16 n. 67 Bute and Northern Ayr Divisional Labour Party 157 butter 255 Butterworth, George 83 Buxton, Charles Roden 164, 226 Buxton, Lucy (Lady Noel-Buxton) 163–4, 228 Buxton, Noel 164, 226 –7, 233, 262, 276, 297, 326, 356 as minister of agriculture 189, 226, 228, 237–41, 242, 244, 245, 246, 283 elevation to the Lords 68 n. 103, 239 joining the Labour Party 68, 226 by-election fund 111 by-elections 2, 11, 111, 136, 168, 320, 332 Aylesbury (Mid-Buckinghamshire) (1938) 160 Brecon and Radnor (1939) 69, 288, 316–20, 323 Bridgwater (1938) 67, 323 Buckingham (North Buckinghamshire) (1937) 151 Buckrose (1926) 111 Carmarthen (1928) 119 Central Aberdeenshire (1919) 330 Chelmsford (1926) 281 Dudley (1921) 205 n. 135 Dumbartonshire (1936) 323 East Renfrew (1930) 152 Eastbourne (1925) 71 n. 114 Hitchin (1933) 60 n. 48, 136 Holland with Boston (1924) 73 n. 124

386

Index

by-elections (cont.): Horncastle (1920) 146 Howdenshire (1926) 77, 281 Lichfield (1938) 323 Louth (1921) 144 n. 7 Ludlow (1923) 1–3, 52, 114, 144, 320, 328, 331 North Norfolk (1930) 68 n. 103, 239 Rutherglen (1931) 129 Rutland and Stamford (1933) 34 n. 40, 138 Stafford (1938) 151, 286 Taunton (1921) 204 West Derbyshire (1938) 163; (1944) 163, 332 Woodbridge (1920) 327 Bywater, George 62 Cade, Jack 45, 47, 48 Caernarvonshire constituency 329 Caithness and Sutherland constituency 146, 330 Camborne constituency 163, 286 Camborne Divisional Labour Party 148 Cambridgeshire 186, 192, 213 Cambridgeshire constituency 12, 57, 72, 121 n. 66, 150, 161, 165, 176, 333, 335 Cambridgeshire Divisional Labour Party 61, 148, 149 n. 26, 150, 165, 166, 168, 170, 173 camels 267 campaign techniques 2, 61, 137–8 camping 82, 91–2, 100, 130, 131, 141 Canada 246 n. 163, 312 canvassing in rural areas 2, 60, 63, 125, 127, 128, 130, 133 capitalism 35, 36, 37, 84, 98, 251, 272, 305 capitalist agriculture 29, 33–4, 265, 270 Cardiganshire constituency 329 Carlyle, Thomas 34, 84 Carmarthen constituency 323, 328 n. 26 Carpenter, Edward 56 cars 96, 112, 127, 301 use at elections 2, 73 Castle, Barbara 83, 89 Castle Combe 100 casual workers on the land 208–9 Celts, and the land question 29 Central Aberdeenshire constituency 330 cereal cultivation 282; see also arable farming; wheat

Chamberlain, Neville 278 chapels 159–60 charabancs 90 n. 52, 96 cheap food 6, 7, 181, 218, 245; see also bread, price of Chelmsford constituency 52, 68, 150, 332 n. 34 Chequers estate 97 Cheshire 116, 131, 191 Chesterton, G. K. 36 Chichester Divisional Labour Party 156 children 98–100, 137 Chislehurst constituency 55, 332 Chislehurst Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 choirs 110, 137 Chorley Wood 90 Church of England 61–2 cinema 54, 266 cities, unpleasantness of 85, 86 Citrine, Walter 64 Clarion 88 Clarion Cyclist 86, 94, 301 Clarion cyclists, see also National Clarion Cycling Club 85, 86, 91, 93– 4, 95 Clarion movement 91, 92, 122, 129, 138, 140 Clarion rural campaigns 92, 122, 123, 129–31, 137–8 Clark, Colin 264, 286 n. 165 Clark, G. B. 198, 222 n. 22 class 71–2, 75, 87, 92– 4, 184, 260, 322 Cleckheaton 26 clergy 40, 44, 54, 59 n. 46, 61, 62–3, 155, 292 Cleveland Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 Clynes, J. R. 181 n. 19, 305 Coalition government (1916 –22) 14, 224, 226 Cobbett, William 31, 37, 48, 84 –5 cobblers 152, 153, 163 Codling, William 205 Colchester constituency 333 Cole, G. D. H. 31, 37, 39, 48, 89, 189, 212, 234, 252 Coleman, H. O. 127 n. 91 collectivization 38, 264, 267, 268, 274 Collingham 182, 206 Collings, Jesse 13, 270 common land 27, 29, 33, 37– 8, 42, 272 common ownership 29, 36, 99 Common Wealth 332 n. 34, 332 n. 35

Index communism, historical traditions of 29, 36 Communist Party of Great Britain 26, 35, 44, 68 n. 97, 98, 132 n. 115, 153 n. 52, 285, 321 community, ideas about 25–6, 29, 36, 38; see also village community commuters 150, 152 compulsory purchase 309 concert parties 137 concerts 137, 160, 266 conciliation committees 188 conferences, policy-making 223–4, 240, 245, 256 confiscation of land 28, 231 Conservative Party 65–8, 77, 217–19, 229, 284, 285, 322 agricultural policy 240, 278 and the local press 65 association with rural interests 4, 135, 217, 317 on Labour’s lack of rural expertise 217–18, 280 propaganda techniques 139 strength in rural areas 1, 8, 11, 12–13, 67, 77, 153, 278, 326, 327 support in rural areas 13, 60, 70, 153, 278, 319, 322 tactics 59, 66, 129 n. 103, 134–5 construction workers 151, 157, 178, 181, 183, 195 consumers 7, 196, 218, 236, 242, 243–5, 249–50, 252, 255 controls, in agriculture 279, 289 convalescent homes 259, 298 cooking 66, 196 cooperation 36, 48, 84, 98–9, 272 cooperation, agricultural 221, 265, 267, 268, 270 Co-operative Holiday Association 91 Co-operative Movement 19, 28, 48, 84, 98, 127, 255, 267, 293 n. 8, 323 n. 20 Co-operative Wholesale Society 255, 259, 298 Corn Laws 14 Corn Production Acts 14, 188, 260, 337 repeal of 188, 235, 256; see also ‘Great Betrayal’ Cornforth, Maurice 68 n. 97, 265, 285 Cornish, Vaughan 311 Cornwall 13, 70, 116, 131, 132, 161, 191, 192, 208

387

cottage meetings 158 cottages 100, 103, 271, 294, 295 council employees 181, 183, 195 n. 83 Council for the Preservation of Rural England 14, 82, 308, 309, 311 Council of Action for Peace and Reconstruction 319 country houses 39, 60, 296 – 8 converted to other uses 91, 298 Country Landowners Association 228, 240, 256 country sports 92 Country Folk 134 Country Standard 66, 68, 153, 154, 232, 275, 285 Country Worker 153, 155 countryside: and national identity 4, 103 and party politics 14, 81–2 appearance of 5, 299–300 as a market for urban industry 235 as a national amenity 309, 310, 311–12 as a place of escape 80 –1, 88 as a remnant of the past 2, 49, 53, 75–8, 100–1 as ‘another world’ 51, 52–3, 74, 339 association with political Right 4, 7, 53 associations with progressive politics 79, 81, 99 contemporary generalisations about 144, 330 cultural significance of 4 –5 development in 14, 85, 307–9 history of 25–7, 29–34, 36 – 40, 42, 44–50 impact of visitors on 96 –7 in proximity of built-up areas 85, 88, 310, 314 industrial enterprises within 183– 4, 306 influence on character 56 –7, 81, 88–9, 98–100 representations of 100, 101 sleepiness of 51, 53 urban influences on 54, 306 use of the term 4–5 viewed in historical terms 20, 49, 53, 76 county constituencies 15, 145, 331–2, 335, 336 Labour vote in 12 sub-categories of 15–16 county councils 161

388

Index

Covent Garden market 253 cows 100, 110, 266, 268, 269, 280 crafts 100, 184 Crane, Walter 25, 83, 104, 236, 315 Craven Arms 186 credit, provision in agriculture 263, 270 Creech Jones, Arthur 89 Crewe constituency 120, 171 Cripps, John 131, 357 Cripps, Stafford 61, 67, 123, 136, 225, 232 n. 78, 277, 283, 287 n. 169, 293, 356–7 Croft, Harry 53 n. 11, 143 crofters 39 cultivated landscape 299–300 cultural life in rural areas 293–4, 306 Cumberland 131 Curtler, W. R. 32 ‘Cutter, Jack’ (pseudonym) 73, 93 cycling 79, 86, 87, 90, 92–4, 94, 109–10, 129, 141, 182 conflicts with motorists 93–4 Cyclists’ Touring Club 93 Czechoslovakia 306 Daily Herald 11, 53, 57, 64, 77, 91, 100–1, 127, 136, 175, 209, 225, 262, 314, 318 League of Hikers 95 support for rural campaigns 69, 120, 122, 134 n. 127, 139 dairy farming 71, 195, 213, 235, 243, 248 dairy industry 251, 255 Dallas, George 10, 12, 60, 117 n. 44, 119, 135 n. 133, 138, 175, 180, 191, 212, 229, 232 n. 78, 256, 290, 303, 318, 321, 331, 357 and agricultural policy 219, 222 n. 22, 224 and Workers’ Union 180 at Parker’s Piece 244, 284–5 involvement in rural campaigns 119, 136 Dalton, Hugh 73, 89, 95, 136, 162, 176 n. 172, 224, 225, 232n.78, 257, 303, 304, 305, 309, 313, 315 dancing 26, 84, 160, 293 Dann, Alfred 190 Davies, Emil 253 Davies, Idris 87, 183 The Angry Summer 183 day trips 90, 96–7, 141, 300, 314 death duties 313

Debenham, Ernest 266 decentralization 306 deer forests and parks 39, 300, 310 deference 54, 56, 59, 64, 143 demonstration farms 266 Denbigh constituency 329 Denmark 221, 243, 268, 271 Derbyshire 56, 89, 90 derelict industry 86–7 Derwent Valley reservoir 151 destruction of produce 251 Deutscher Landarbeiter-Verband (German Landworkers’ Union) 102 Devizes Divisional Labour Party 148 Devon 70, 131, 132, 146, 205– 6, 208 Diggers, the 48 disinheritance 27, 32, 41, 231; see also ‘theft’ of the land Distressed Areas 308, 314 distributive workers 183 diversification 247–9 Divisional Labour Parties 142–3, 160 affiliation to national party 144, 145–9, 159 assumed dependence on union membership 156 –7 finances 146, 165–9, 171, 173, 176, 317 formation 128, 142–3, 145– 6, 150 grievances 144–5, 172–7 officials 152–3, 155, 156 selection of parliamentary candidates 161–6 sense of common identity amongst rural parties 144 –5, 174 –5 support for Popular Front 67 dock labour 179–80, 207 Dockers’ Union 180 Dollarbeg 136 domestic market for agricultural produce 235, 243, 252 domestic tourism 96, 301, 314 Don Valley constituency 16 n. 68, 228, 340 Dorchester 139, 178, 206 Dorking 86 Dorset 116, 156, 178, 191, 299 ‘men of Dorset’, see Tolpuddle Martyrs Dowlais 87 drainage, land 233, 234, 285, 300 see also Land Drainage Act Drinkwater, Herbert 1, 85, 113, 128, 135, 144, 157, 172, 174, 176, 357

Index Dugdale, John 77, 103, 225, 290, 357 Dumbartonshire constituency 121 n. 65, 171, 323 Duncan, Charles 193, 270 Duncan, Joseph 51, 53 n. 13, 76, 96, 150, 180, 181, 194, 206, 210, 225, 227, 229, 262, 274, 279, 282, 288–9, 321, 358 and Labour’s agricultural policy 220, 222 n. 22, 223, 234, 236, 288 and the Scottish Farm Servants’ Union 180, 198–203 as parliamentary candidate 330 on agricultural work 103 on rural organization 143 Dunman, Jack 68 n. 97, 153 n. 52 Durham 189, 191 Dye, Sidney 284, 286, 327, 358 East Aberdeenshire constituency 330 East Anglia 70, 192, 243, 282, 322, 333, 335 Eastern Counties 71, 120, 130, 248 Eastern Counties Agricultural Labourers’ and Small Holders’ Union 186, 187, 271, 295 East Dorset constituency 112, 131 East Lothian 199 East Norfolk constituency 163, 326 East Norfolk Divisional Labour Party 162 East Renfrew constituency 16 n. 67, 152 East Riding 145, 185, 201 Eastman, Arthur and Duncan 62, 155 Easton Lodge 59, 65, 298 Economic Advisory Council 247 Eddisbury Divisional Labour Party 147, 148 education 97–9, 222, 235, 291 Edwards, George 30, 63, 68, 164, 181, 186, 187, 194, 260, 269, 324, 326, 358–9 eggs 2, 243, 251 election agents 1, 111, 144, 169; see also agents, Labour Party election campaigns 52, 110–11, 160 elections, character of 57, 59 electricity, supplies in rural areas 135 n. 134, 235, 266, 293, 306 emigration 39 n. 61, 54, 201 employer-employee relationship 71, 184–5, 260, 322 employment on the land 6, 194–5, 233–4, 238, 241, 243, 300, 310

389

enclosure 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 37– 8, 40, 41, 42, 44, 49, 273 Engels, Friedrich 36 England: election results in county constituencies 12, 331–2 elections in rural seats 326 – 8 reputation for a ‘Tory’ countryside 8 n. 24, 12, 142 rural image of 4 specific agricultural interests of 244 n. 153 Epping constituency 127 Essex 192, 233 ethical socialism 82 Evesham constituency 167, 286 n. 165, 328 Evesham Divisional Labour Party 148, 173 eviction 63, 64 Eye constituency 327 Eye Divisional Labour Party 156 Fabian Society 11, 83, 90, 92, 221, 298 Fabian Research Bureau 225, 267, 290 Falmouth constituency 75 family farms 184, 196, 213, 260 Fareham Divisional Labour Party 155 Faringdon, Lord (Gavin Henderson, 3rd Baron) 46 n. 90, 123, 124, 136, 298, 318 farm servants 201–2, 210 farm workers, see agricultural workers Farmer and Stockbreeder 318 ‘farmer’s friend’ 317, 318 n. 9 farmers 54, 62, 71, 153, 183, 207, 211, 225, 258–64, 275– 89 as public servants 275–7 attitude towards the Labour Party 71, 278–81 bankruptcies 235 calls for protection 240, 246, 259 economic difficulties of 100, 261 image of 259–61, 277 influence on politics in locality 6, 155, 289 Labour MPs 287– 8 Labour Party’s appeal to 21, 116, 118, 257, 258, 277, 281, 288 –9, 317–18, 338 Labour Party candidates 286 –7 members of the Labour Party 62, 280, 281, 284, 317

390 farmers (cont.): political tendencies 259, 260, 278–9, 280–1 protests against Conservative government 278, 280, 288, 318 reputation for complaining 6, 259, 261 support for the ILP 114 support for the Labour party 62, 155, 285–8 farmers’ vote 258, 260, 278–81, 286, 288–9 Farmers’ Weekly 280 farming: as a career 274–5 future under Labour 222, 274–7 profitability of 235, 244, 252, 264, 282, 288, 290 within the Labour movement 259 fascism 93, 281 Faversham constituency 121 n. 65, 287, 332 Faversham Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 Fawcett, E. J. 286 ‘feather-bedding’ of farmers 219 Fels, Joseph 233 fêtes 126 ‘feudalism’ 2, 35, 39, 62, 75, 78, 181 Fields, Factories and Workshops 45 Fielding, W. T. 191 Filkins 61, 293 film propaganda 139 five-year plan 268 Flory, Catherine 196–7 flour 246, 250 flower shows 66, 160 flowers, cultivation of 195, 208, 248 ‘food and farming’ 250–1, 253 folk dancing 83–4, 100 folk song 82, 83–4 food policy 250–3 food prices 252–3 food processing industry 195, 196 food production 222 Foot, Michael 329 Fordham, Montague 227 Forfar Divisional Labour Party 157 Frampton Mansell 149–50 Franklin, Michael 165 free breakfast table 245 free trade 14, 240, 243–50

Index freedom 26, 27, 34, 54, 60, 63– 4, 75, 152, 181, 182, 184, 267, 270, 272–3, 295–6 Freeman, Peter 166, 317 Frome constituency 121 n. 66, 131, 138, 150, 160, 163, 324 Frome Divisional Labour Party 53, 126, 127, 128, 149 n. 26, 164 –5 fruit and vegetables 251 fruit growing 166, 208, 234, 288 fundraising 26, 117, 119, 124, 140 –1, 167–8 game preservation 92, 95, 299, 310 Gainsborough constituency 13, 125, 137 Gaitskell, Hugh 39 garden cities 306–7 garden parties 65 gardeners 194 gardening 102 Garratt, G. T. 55, 134 n. 131, 161, 165, 229, 256, 274, 281, 285, 286 –7, 359 Garsington 207 Gee, Stephen 133, 137, 152–3, 155, 164, 272 General and Municipal Workers’ Union 127, 195 general elections: (1906) 187 ( January 1910) 69, 75 n. 137 (1918) 145, 166 (1922) 1, 73, 166, 324 (1923) 13, 111, 238, 239, 278, 303, 323–4, 329 (1924) 12, 65, 80, 113, 327, 332 (1929) 13, 67, 81, 134 n. 131, 149, 163, 244, 279, 324, 327, 329 (1931) 119, 250, 336 (1935) 11, 144, 323, 324, 325 (1945) 8, 21, 174, 324, 327, 329, 331–5, 334 since 1945 335 general unions 187, 191, 193; see also TGWU; WU George, Henry 42–4, 69, 231, 302 Germany 7, 99, 102 Gill, Edward 112 Gladstone, W. E. 70 Glasgow 16 n. 67, 17 n. 70, 152 Gloucestershire 47, 62, 100, 129 golden ages 25–6, 29, 33–9

Index Gooch, Edwin 103, 104, 164, 180, 186, 260, 284, 294, 296, 359 Gosling, Harry 263 Gould, F. 163 Gower constituency 323, 329 Gower peninsula 314 grading of produce 242 Grantham constituency 327, 334 Grantham Divisional Labour Party 173 grants-in-aid 168–70 grass, reversion of fields to 243, 299–300 Gravesend constituency 121 n. 65 ‘Great Betrayal’ 188, 250, 283 Great Horwood 60 ‘great wen’ 85 Green, F. E. 56, 104, 233 Greenwood, Arthur 61, 66, 306–7, 331 Greenwood, Walter 90, 142 Grenfell, Arthur 225 n. 39 Griffith-Boscawen, Arthur 205 Grimsby 110 Groves, Reg 204 guaranteed prices 14, 232, 240, 250, 283, 285, 289, 318 guaranteed market 246 guilds 37 Guest, Ivor 316 Gipsey Bridge 206 Haden-Guest, Leslie 166 Hall, Daniel 228, 264, 266 Hammond, J. L. 36 Hammond, J. L. and Barbara 31–2, 37, 38, 46, 55 Hancock, Sardius 159 happiness 25–6 Harben, Henry 221, 231, 327 Harborough constituency 286, 332 Harborough Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 Hardie, James Keir 27, 272, 273 Hargrave, John 98 harvest 25, 132, 208 harvest festivals 160 harvest horkeys and harvest homes 160, 193, 211 harvest wage 208 Hasbach, Wilhelm 30, 32, 38 Hastings Labour Party 29 Hastings, John 46, 123 Hawkchurch 41

391

Hawkes, Jesse 229, 276 A Magnificent Deception 229 health 21, 55, 88, 98 –9, 103, 222, 227, 233, 250–1, 294, 306, 307 Helions Bumpstead 104 Hemmerde, E. G. 226 Henderson, Arthur 111–12, 224, 293 Hereford constituency 286 Hereford Divisional Labour Party 148 Herefordshire 53 n. 13, 56, 116, 190, 192, 288, 328 Hertford Divisional Labour Party 175 Hewitt, George 272, 273 Hewlett, Maurice 222 n. 22 Hickmott, Arthur 259, 275 n. 97 Highland clearances 39 hiking 79, 87, 88, 89, 129, 141; see also rambling; walking hill farming 316 hiring fairs 201–2 Histon 333 history, uses of 26, 30 –2, 40 –2, 44 –50, 99 Hitchin constituency 332 Hitchin Divisional Labour Party 145, 171 Hoddesdon 91, 130 Hodges, Frank 219 holiday accommodation 298 holidays 26, 155, 301 Holland with Boston constituency 121 n. 66, 134, 162, 167, 324, 327 Holland with Boston Divisional Labour Party 155, 167 Holmes, William 12, 172, 180, 195, 224, 238–9, 255, 359– 60 and NUAW 113, 182, 204, 206, 212, 284 as Labour Party national organizer 113, 146 as parliamentary candidate 163 Holtby, Winifred 184 –5, 276 Anderby Wold 185 South Riding 308 n. 76 Home Counties 192, 332 hop picking 208 Hopkins, F. J. 113, 141 Horncastle constituency 13, 327 Horncastle Divisional Labour Party 146, 173 horse teams 100, 268, 291 horticultural workers 195, 207, 209 house building 309

392

Index

housing 43, 61, 103, 135 n. 134, 151, 221, 227, 230, 233, 235, 291, 293, 294, 307 Labour Party policy 222, 296 local authority provision for 294, 296, 315 poor quality of 100, 103, 294, 300 see also cottages; tied cottages Housing (Financial Provisions) Act (1924) 294, 296 Hull 110, 111, 179 ‘Hungry Forties’ 250 hunting 92, 261 Huntingdonshire Divisional Labour Party 173 import boards 222, 224, 245–6 import duties 249 imports 5, 236, 245, 278 controls on 232, 250 independence 153, 271–2 Independent candidates 161, 327 Independent Labour Party 1, 2, 28, 114, 127, 143, 226, 292–3 agricultural policy 114, 221, 245–6, 276 parliamentary candidates 1, 324 propaganda in rural areas 109–10, 114, 132 rural campaign, see Movement for the Backward Areas individualism 38, 85, 259, 274, 277, 301 industrial depression, impact of 87, 189, 207, 308, 321 industrial revolution 29, 37, 49 industrialisation, damage to the landscape by 85, 301, 308 industry in rural areas 3, 71, 183–4, 306 international affairs, discussion of 57, 64, 135 International Landworkers’ Federation 102, 199 intimidation 59–61, 63–4, 143 Inverness constituency 330 investment in agriculture 39, 231, 263, 289, 298–9, 313 Ipswich 184 Ireland 193, 221, 268 ironworkers 183 Isle of Ely Divisional Labour Party 173 Isle of Wight constituency 13, 325 Itteringham 152–3, 159

Jackson, William F. 69, 288, 317–19 Jefferies, Richard 134 Joad, C. E. M. 90, 95, 97 Kennedy, Tom 136 Kent 46, 207 Kett, Robert 44, 45, 47, 48 Kettering constituency 323 n. 20 Kettering speech 278 Kibbo Kift 98–9 Kidderminster constituency 332 Kidderminster Divisional Labour Party 148 Kimberley, 2nd Earl of 167 Kincardine and Western Aberdeen constituency 52 n. 7, 146, 330 Kincardine and Western Aberdeen Divisional Labour Party 148 Kinder Scout 88 King’s Lynn constituency 121 n. 66, 160, 284, 286, 326, 333 Kinnear, Michael 17, 325 Kinnear’s list of agricultural constituencies 17–18, 149, 324, 325 Kinross and Western Perthshire constituency 157 Knowles, Frank 136, 318 Knutsford constituency 161 Kropotkin, Peter 45 Labour Agricultural Group 144 –5, 175 Labour and the New Social Order 302 Labour governments: (1924) 9, 189, 226, 236, 237, 238, 254–5, 294, 303 (1929–31) 119, 237, 239– 49, 254 – 6, 266, 283, 303, 306 (1945) 4 Labour movement 19, 99 history and ancestry of 44 – 6, 48 –9, 180 prospects in the countryside 50, 76 –7 weakness in rural areas 50, 51 Labour Organiser 68, 85, 93, 113, 126, 128, 137, 138, 144, 148, 151, 158, 160, 172 Labour Party: Advisory Committee on Rural Problems 222, 229 affiliation to other organizations 91, 98 Agricultural and Rural Problems Committee 223 n. 28

Index Agricultural Campaign Committee (later, Sub-Committee) 120, 124, 125, 134, 136, 139, 288 Agricultural Policy Committee 224 ambitions to form majority government 8 –10, 12, 78, 331 and urban interests 4, 218, 279–80, 291 annual party conference 9–10, 11, 29, 45, 51, 53, 75, 111, 117, 155, 157, 168, 174, 175, 219, 223, 224, 225–6, 227, 254, 258, 259, 281, 305, 311 appeal to agricultural workers 158, 164, 254, 270, 279, 338 appeal to consumers 218, 245, 252 appeal to rural voters 74, 284, 303, 320 as a ‘town party’ 4, 70, 107, 240 as a voice for agriculture 256–7, 258, 321 attitudes towards agriculture 97, 218–19, 249 attitudes towards farmers 218–19, 258–62, 281–5 campaigns, see Labour Party campaigns in rural areas candidates 2, 12, 52, 55, 56, 134, 144, 160–6, 167, 175, 227, 246, 286, 317 character of rural parties 63, 67, 146–50, 152–3, 155, 156, 158–9, 166, 170–1, 174–6 class basis of support 3, 71–2, 152–5, 260, 321–2 comparisons with parties in other countries 7 contests in rural constituencies 52, 110–11, 144 cuts in expenditure 170 descriptions of rural constituencies 52–3; see also ‘backward areas’ electoral calculations 1, 8–10, 12, 78, 284, 331 electoral record in rural constituencies 121 n. 66, 318, 320, 323–35 explanations for difficulties in rural areas 52, 67, 340 foundation in trade union membership 156–8 funding 117, 124, 168–70, 321 funding for elections 111–12, 124, 168

393 hopes of winning support in the countryside 50, 67, 74 –5, 76 – 8, 114, 316, 322, 331 ideas about political evolution 11, 68–9, 76–8 identification of potential electorate 71, 151, 152, 260, 281–2, 284, 288 –9 individual membership 3, 125, 143, 145, 147–9, 159 inheritance from Liberalism 15, 19, 69–70, 326, 337 Joint Committee on Agricultural Problems 222 Land Nationalisation Committee 232 n. 78 land policy 302–4, 305 Liberal influence on policy 226 –7 literature for rural areas 57, 101, 133, 134, 144, 152, 158, 235 local and divisional parties 61, 67, 142–3, 145–6, 150 membership in rural areas 47, 147–50, 152–3, 223, 239, 337 middle-class support 155, 322 MPs for rural seats 175, 222, 286, 287, 323–4, 326–7, 329, 330, 332–3, 335 National Agent 2, 145, 170 national development of 3, 8, 10, 145, 149, 219, 339 national organizers 113, 146, 161, 169, 180 national propagandists 112–14, 120, 133, 137, 141 NEC 1, 2, 98, 112, 124, 148, 164, 165, 168, 169, 171, 175, 212, 222, 223 Organisation Sub-Committee 10, 120 organization 125, 142, 145, 169 organization in the countryside 18, 72, 125, 143–5, 169, 176 –7, 320, 321 organizers, divisional Labour party 128, 133, 137, 142, 144, 169–74, 317; see also agents; election agents policy committees 31, 145, 221–2, 223 n. 28, 224–5, 227, 229, 261 problems faced in the countryside 1–2, 70–4, 133, 149–51 professionalization 140, 169, 172 promotion of agricultural policy 101, 117–18, 119, 135, 235, 250 –1, 276–7 relationship with Liberal Party 15, 68–70, 77–8, 237, 337

394

Index

Labour Party (cont.): relationship with trade unions in rural areas 70, 72, 147, 150, 156–8, 337 role of agricultural policy in electoral strategy 219–20, 222–3, 244, 250, 258, 282, 288–90, 291, 293 rural expertise 6, 134–6, 217, 222 n. 23, 223–9, 280, 322 rural policy 291–6; see also agricultural policy rural traditions 14–15, 25 sensitivity to rural interests 257 significance attached to winning rural seats 1, 3, 8–9, 11–12, 18–19, 52, 75, 78, 110, 113, 124, 141, 324, 335, 336, 339 speakers on agricultural topics 134–6, 279, 318 Sub-Committee on Agricultural Policy 222 support amongst agriculturalists 151–3, 281, 285, 322, 337 support for organization in rural areas 111–13, 165, 168, 174, 176–7, 321 tensions between urban and rural interests 218, 245, 248, 251–2 urban character of 3–4, 6–7, 18–19, 70, 217, 239, 280, 320 weaknesses in rural areas 1–3, 7, 9, 48, 50, 51–2, 72, 217, 328 weaknesses in urban areas 10–11, 53, 148, 151, 336 women’s officer 159 The Labour Party and the Agricultural Problem 221, 233 The Labour Party and the Countryside 222–3, 256, 265 Labour Party campaigns in rural areas 16, 117, 175 (1926–8) 69, 117–19, 262, 277, 278–9, 283 (1930s) 100, 117, 119–24, 138–9, 234, 286, 293, 318, 324, 331 conferences 117–19 constituencies targeted 16–18, 117–18, 120, 121, 125, 131, 329; see also list in Appendix B demonstrations 117–19 expenditure on 118–19, 122, 125–6, 139 funding for 117, 119, 122–4, 126 meetings 122, 125, 126

role of local organizations 118, 121–2, 125–9, 131, 139 speakers 126, 131, 135– 6 Labour Representation Committees 142 Labour Research Department 252, 288 Labour vote in rural areas 67, 72, 239, 323–30, 333–4 Labour Woman 147 Labour’s Policy on Agriculture 117–18, 215, 219, 222, 224, 227, 239, 246, 248, 274, 281, 292, 296, 300, 306, 324 Labourer 76, 209 labourer, as a term 209–10 Lake District 131, 311, 312 n. 92 Lanark constituency 16 n. 67 Lancashire 131 The Land and the National Planning of Agriculture 222, 224 Land Drainage Act (1930) 241 Land Nationalisation Federation 231 land nationalization 28, 29, 44, 49, 109, 222 n. 22, 230–2, 257, 263– 4, 265, 270, 277, 278, 289, 290, 293, 297, 302, 303, 304, 308, 309, 313, 339 land ownership 27–8, 33, 42, 262, 313 by workers’ organisations 28 land question 13–15, 27– 8, 29, 41– 4, 95, 230, 337 land reclamation 234 land reform 27, 37–8, 41– 4, 109, 242 and urban land 230 land restoration 28, 109, 231 land settlement 50, 222 n. 22, 233– 4, 241, 268; see also ‘back to the land’ ‘The Land Song’ 69 land use, controls over 305, 308, 313 land valuation 302, 304 land value taxation 43, 226, 230, 302– 4, 309 Land Worker 29, 55, 58, 102–3, 192, 209, 211, 220, 259, 261, 271 landless workforce 33, 42, 44 landlordism 35, 253, 298 –9 landlords 28, 39, 42, 59, 60, 95, 223, 231, 277 landowners’ influence on local politics 59, 61 landscape: aesthetics 89, 101, 104 history of 40 idealisation of 79, 100 –1 images of 5, 101, 299–300

Index preservation 14, 96–7, 305, 308 restoration of 299, 300–1 Landworkers’ Union 284 Langan, T. H. 166 Lansbury, George 44, 54, 83, 85, 103, 233, 250 large-scale farming 242, 257, 265–8, 270, 274, 305 ‘last labourers’ revolt’ (1830) 31, 47 Lathan, George 224 Lawrence, D. H. 183 Lea Valley 195 League of Youth 11, 90, 91, 92, 94, 99–100, 129 Lee, Jennie 89 Leeds 111, 118 Left, the 14, 18–19, 31, 36, 47 Left Book Club 46, 96 Leicester 72, 128 Leicestershire 156, 192 Leighton, Clare 102 leisure 14, 21, 53, 79, 87, 90–1, 129, 141, 211, 310, 314 Lennard, Reginald 60 n. 52 Leominster constituency 17, 52 n. 7, 146, 328 Levellers, the 36 Lewes constituency 156 Lewes Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 Lib-Lab MPs 326 Lib-Lab pacts 15 n. 63, 226 Liberal converts to Labour 15, 19, 43, 45, 68, 226–7, 337 Liberal land campaigns: (pre 1914) 13, 41–2, 69 (1920s) 13, 118, 227 Liberal land enquiries 42, 221, 226, 227 Liberal Party 1, 15, 69, 95, 226–7, 302 agricultural policy 227, 230 and nonconformity 13, 63, 159 electoral fortunes in the countryside 12–13, 67–8, 70, 326–30, 332, 337 land policy 13, 15, 95, 230, 302 number of candidates 335–6 strength in rural areas 68, 70, 77–8, 328 support for Labour governments 237, 248 Liberal vote 13, 15, 63, 67–70, 72, 319, 326–30, 337 Liberalism 68, 70, 159, 226 Lichfield constituency 323

395

Lincolnshire 13, 110, 116, 205, 210, 213, 327–8 litter 314 Little Milton 100 Littleport 259 Liverpool 10, 17 n. 70 Llandaff and Barry constituency 329 Llandaff and Barry Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 Llandrindod Wells 319 n. 15 Lloyd George, David 81, 95, 118, 134 n. 131, 227, 234 n. 92, 302 Lloyd George Liberals 329, 336 local government 159, 161, 197, 205, 222 n. 22, 295– 6, 304, 306 – 8 elections 59, 62, 326 provision of services 308 see also county councils; parish councils local Labour parties 61, 146, 150, 151, 152–3, 156, 159, 308 Loch Lomond 313 Lode 160 London 85, 90, 139, 153, 165, 307 Labour Party in 148 Long Crendon 60 lost deposits 2, 77 n. 148, 111, 120, 176, 327, 328 scheme to insure against 111, 168 loudspeaker vans 118 –19, 122, 127, 138–9, 140 loudspeakers 127, 137, 138, 165 Louth constituency 13, 121 n. 66, 327 Lowestoft constituency 286, 327, 333 Ludlow constituency 1–3, 51, 120, 320, 328, 341 Ludlow Divisional Labour Party 173 Lunnon, James 163 McCallum, R. B. and Readman, Alison 333 MacDonald, Malcolm 143 n. 4, 164 n. 114 MacDonald, James Ramsay 2, 11, 28, 39–40, 70, 72, 78, 118, 127, 164, 217, 218, 222, 226, 234, 239, 261, 262, 272, 275–6, 278, 282, 283, 291, 297, 299, 311 and outdoor recreation 79, 80 –1, 91, 95, 96–7 as Prime Minister 9, 97 n. 85, 237, 240, 242, 246, 248 on the rural landscape 80 –2, 299 on socialism 81, 83

396

Index

Macdonell, A. G. 70 n. 110 McGregor, A. M. 285 Macmillan, Malcolm Kenneth 144 n. 5, 330 Mackay, Ronald 165 Mackley, Tom 54, 63 Macclesfield constituency 120 Maidstone constituency 73, 162 Maldon constituency 52, 112, 121 n. 66 Maldon Divisional Labour Party 137 Manchester 88, 314, 336 mangolds 134 Mann, Tom 110 Mansfield constituency 323, 336 marginal seats 12–13 market gardening 17 n. 70, 195, 234, 235 market towns 145, 151 marketing 223 n. 28, 232, 241, 242–3, 245, 250, 255 marketing boards 237, 243 Marks, Hugh 41 Marx, Karl 3 Marx Memorial Library 46 mass trespass 90, 95 mat weavers 184 Matlock 132 Maxton, John 224, 229 May Day 35, 82–3 maypoles 25, 83 meat 251 mechanization of agriculture 265, 268 medieval, use of term 34, 53, 76 medium-sized farms 274, 305 meetings 60–1, 114, 116, 137, 160 attendance at 61, 64, 133 distances travelled to attend 133, 137, 152, 182 publicity for 137 reluctance to attend 137, 138 size of audiences 133 venues for 61, 294 see also Labour Party campaigns; openair meetings; rural campaigns Melton Mowbray constituency 12 mental health 55, 294 Merrie England 25–7, 53, 82, 299, 315 Methodism 63, 113, 159 Mid-Bedfordshire constituency 61 Middle Ages, interpretations of 29, 33–5, 38 middlemen 242, 246, 252–3 milk 135 n. 134, 251 Milk Marketing Board 251

mineral rights 230, 302 miners 76–7, 119, 128, 180, 183, 207, 208, 272 in rural constituencies 3, 127, 128, 151, 183, 316–17, 323, 329 support for Labour Party 3, 75, 119, 128, 317–18, 336 Miners’ Federation of Great Britain 115 n. 32 minimum wage 14, 260; see also wage regulation mining 3, 65, 128, 165, 183 mining areas 127, 151, 158, 171, 181, 316, 329 mining seats 323, 329, 336 mining vote 318, 320, 324, 325, 336 Mitcham Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 Mitchison, G. R. 301 mixed constituencies 16, 171, 320, 324–5, 335, 336 Monks, A. E. 281 n. 138 Monmouth 192 Monmouth constituency 52 n. 6, 329 Monmouth Divisional Labour Party 175 Monsal Dale 86 Montgomery constituency 329 moorland 89, 95, 314 Moray and Nairn constituency 75, 121 n. 65 Morayshire 80 Morgan, John 74, 100, 136, 224, 225, 236, 267, 273, 318, 360 Morrell, Philip 207 Morris, William 25, 35, 36, 83, 86 Morris dancing 83 Morrison, Herbert 10, 130, 169, 322, 332 Morton, H. V. 85, 184 Morton, Max 153 n. 52 motoring 93–4, 95, 96 Movement for the Backward Areas 114 Munich crisis 127 music 61, 137 National Agricultural Labourers’ and Rural Workers’ Union (NALRWU) 47, 113, 115, 187, 193– 4, 199, 206, 209, 271–2 National Agricultural Labourers’ Union (NALU) 180, 185– 6, 197, 204, 206 National Agricultural Party 12 n. 51, 284

Index National Clarion Cycling Club (NCCC) 86, 93, 129 National Farmers’ Union (NFU) 228, 235, 256, 259, 262, 278–80, 283–5, 287, 288, 317 National Federation of Building Trades Operatives 157 national food supply 253 National government 249–50, 296, 304, 307, 319, 321 national heritage 301 national parks 305, 311–14 ‘national’ policy for agriculture 218, 240, 246, 255–7, 284–5, 322, 338 National Trust 82, 296, 298, 309, 313 National Union of Agricultural Workers (NUAW) 12, 30, 32, 34, 41, 63, 66, 102–3, 113, 115–16, 120, 150, 151, 156, 181, 182, 185–6, 187–98, 199, 201, 207, 208, 212, 244, 256, 258, 259, 260, 268, 284, 287 n. 170, 295 and Labour Party 254–5 and local Labour parties 150, 156–7, 158, 163–4 and smallholding 271–2 and wage regulation 188–90 as an industrial union 190, 192–3, 212 benevolent grants 197, 203 finances 204–5, 212 financial benefits of membership 203–4 geographical strength 156, 189, 191–2 legal work 190, 203–4, 295 membership of 187–9, 190, 193–8, 212 officials 103, 104, 113, 180, 190, 196–8, 205–6 organizers 63, 115, 132, 196, 197, 205 relations with NFU 284 self-image 102, 182, 186, 209, 211, 268, 269 National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives 115, 163, 165, 179, 184 National Union of Horticultural Workers 195 National Union of Labour Organisers and Election Agents 171–2 National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) 112, 115 n. 32, 123, 153, 194, 206, 208 natural beauty 305, 310, 313 nature study 98, 100 New Deal 251

397

New Forest and Christchurch constituency 176 New Leader 3, 7, 76, 114 Newark constituency 121 n. 66 Newark Divisional Labour Party 127, 148, 150 n. 33, 168 Newbury constituency 175– 6 Newbury Divisional Labour Party 60, 175 newsagents 64 newspapers 64–5, 139 Nicholls, George 187, 222 n. 22 Noel, Conrad 59 n. 46, 62, 83 Noel-Baker, Philip 95 Noel-Buxton, see Buxton nonconformity 13, 63, 70, 152, 159, 319 Norfolk 47, 72, 109, 116, 121 n. 65, 135, 158, 189, 191, 192, 213, 326–7, 333, 337 Norman Conquest 29, 34 North Dorset constituency 13, 163 North Dorset Divisional Labour Party 148 North Lanark Divisional Labour Party 157 North Norfolk constituency 68, 133, 137, 155, 156, 161, 163– 4, 324, 326, 335 North Norfolk Divisional Labour Party 148, 153, 164 North Riding 145 North Walsham 187 Northamptonshire 116, 155, 191 Northern Cornwall Constituency 120 Northern Midlothian Divisional Labour Party 157 Northwich constituency 120 Northumberland 92, 189 Norwich 109 Nottingham 35, 86 Nottinghamshire 116, 183, 191 nutrition 250–2, 253 Olde English villages 26, 100 Oldham 86 Olivier, Sydney 237 n. 109 open-air meetings 61, 64, 116, 123, 138 open spaces 308 organized outings 90, 91, 96 organizers, see agricultural trade unionism; Labour Party Orkney and Shetland constituency 17, 52 n. 7, 146

398

Index

Ormskirk constituency 285, 287, 324 Ormskirk Divisional Labour Party 285 Orwin, C. S. 266 Oswestry constituency 120, 328 Ottawa trade agreements 250 overtime 190, 201, 210 owner occupiers 263–4, 287 Oxford Institute of Agrarian Affairs 229 Oxfordshire 181, 197, 333 pageants 35, 45 Pain, Peter 131 parish councils 62, 161, 212 Parker, James 224 Parker’s Piece demonstration 244, 285 parliamentary candidates, see ILP; Labour Party Parmoor, Lord 237 n. 109 parsnips 253 party colours 59, 73 Paul, Leslie 98–9 Pay, E. J. 56, 162, 211 Paycockes 297 peace issue 135, 153 n. 52, 235, 236, 251, 319 Peak District 88, 90, 95, 314 peasants 27, 33–4, 35, 37–8, 48, 49, 233, 267, 271–4, 290 Peasants’ Revolt 34, 47, 48 Pease, Edward 42 n. 72, 186 Pease, Helen 166 Pease, Michael 166, 176 Peebles and Southern Midlothian Divisional Labour Party 157 Pembrokeshire 314 Pembrokeshire constituency 286 n. 165, 329 Penistone constituency 323 ‘penny a week’ schemes 167–8 Penryn and Falmouth constituency 64 n. 75, 121 n. 66, 159, 173, 333 Perth Divisional Labour Party 148 Petegorsky, David W. 46 Peterborough constituency 324, 332 n. 34 Petersfield constituency 112 Petersfield Divisional Labour Party 155 Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline 256 Pethick-Lawrence, F. W. 163, 232 n. 78, 247 Plunkett, Horace 262 Philipps, Hanning 317

Phillips, Morgan 16 n. 67, 335 pig farming 235, 271 pioneers, emulation of 129, 138, 140, 141, 182 planning 304–9, 313 plough teams 16 n. 67, 101, 102, 268 ploughing 40, 243, 299 poaching 40, 92 poetry 48, 103, 104 Pointing, H. B. 41, 66, 103, 188, 220 political education 41, 99 levels in rural areas 57, 64, 65, 143, 340 Pollard, P. F. 2, 114 polling cards 57 polling stations in rural areas 59, 73 Pontefract constituency 323 Poole 206, 211 Popular Front 67–8, 319, 321, 323 Porter, Edward 286 postal workers 153, 179, 186, 206 posters 60, 63 Potteries, the 85 poultry 234, 235, 271 preservation 14, 81–2, 96, 97, 105, 300, 301, 305, 306, 307, 312, 314 Price, M. Philips 92, 136, 224, 256, 287 Primrose League 134 Princes Risborough Labour Party 97, 160 private property 27– 8, 40, 42, 96 professionalization of party work 140, 144, 169–70, 172 Progress and Poverty 43 progressive vote 67–8; see also Popular Front proletariat, development of 27, 33, 34, 49 propaganda in rural areas 109, 112–13, 114, 128–34, 139, 141, 158 proportional representation 72 ‘prosperous countryside’ 25, 223, 234 –5, 279, 290, 291–2, 309 A Prosperous Countryside 101, 101 protection 14, 248, 249, 250, 282; see also tariffs public farming 222, 274 –5, 293; see also state farming public houses 53, 61, 135, 158, 162, 186 public ownership 28 –9, 221, 222, 231–2, 241, 264, 275, 299, 300, 303, 305, 313, 314 public service 40, 275–7, 289

Index Quibell, David 136, 224 quota scheme for wheat 224, 246–8, 255 radical traditions 14, 33, 38, 44–9, 70, 75, 163, 180, 298 radio 40, 54, 97, 300 Radnorshire 57 Railway Clerks’ Association 115 Railway Review 179 railwaymen 77, 128, 163, 171, 179, 181, 183, 198, 206, 207, 208, 316; see also National Union of Railwaymen support for rural Labour parties 152, 153 Ramblers’ Association 82, 89, 90 rambling 80–1, 88–91, 96; see also hiking; walking rates 303–4 Record 180, 192 recreation 87, 90–1, 95, 98, 305, 309–10, 314 non-political aspects of 91, 93, 95 Red Falcons 100 red squires 59, 61, 92 ‘Red Tape’ Farm 280 Reeves, Joseph 84 residential areas 17 residential population 116, 150, 151–2, 307 retired population 153, 155, 186 ribbon development 85, 300, 305, 307 Richards, T. F. 115 Ridley, George 153 rights of way 95 rights to the use of land 27–8, 29, 34, 42 roads 93–4, 301, 308 roadmen 153, 194, 195 Roberts, F. O. 204 Roberts, George 224 Robertson Scott, J. W. 196, 210, 212 Roden 298 Rogers, J. E. Thorold 30, 34 Romford, constituency 152 Rosbotham, S. T. 287 Ross and Cromarty constituency 143 n. 4, 330 Rothney, James 198 Rowntree, B. Seebohm 35, 181, 209 n. 160, 233 rough tactics 2, 61, 182 Royal Agricultural Society 228 Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society 98

399

Royce, W. S. 167, 222, 323– 4 Rugby Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 rural amenity 14, 21, 291, 306, 307– 8 rural campaigns 16, 18, 20, 92, 110, 112, 133, 321, 339 and summer holidays 130 –2, 141, 162 demonstrations and rallies 116, 117–19, 122 meetings 114, 116, 127, 128, 129, 130–3, 138 speakers 114, 116, 118, 135 what to wear 133 see also Clarion rural campaigns; Labour Party campaigns; Movement for the Backward Areas; Trades Union Congress rural constituencies: agricultural population 158, 335, 338 definitions of 15–18, 329, 335 descriptions of 16, 51, 52–3 electoral history since 1945 335 industrial areas within 128, 150 –1 industrial workforces within 71, 151, 158, 336 Labour Party’s prospects in 77– 8, 121 number of 9, 11–12, 16 –18 place in Labour Party’s electoral strategy 8–13, 52, 110, 124, 278, 335 political culture in 51–3, 57– 67, 68, 73–4, 76, 77, 79, 320 political significance of 12–13, 278 practical challenges of 2, 72, 133, 143, 149–50 scepticism about importance of 11 size of 51–2, 72, 316 n. 1 rural drives, see rural campaigns rural electorate 20, 71–2, 74 –5, 78, 135, 152, 153, 176 fears of displaying political allegiance 60, 63, 125, 138 ignorance of Labour Party 2, 64 interest in non-agricultural issues 135 rural exodus 7, 29–30, 33, 40, 44, 49, 54, 233, 299–300, 302 rural idylls 87, 100, 101, 103, 104 rural population: character of 5, 29, 35, 46 –7, 54 –7, 63, 75 concerns about inbreeding 55 contrasts with urban characteristics 57

400

Index

rural population (cont.): isolation experienced by 56 maintenance of 219, 222 political sympathies of 7–8, 35, 46–9, 67–8, 70 primary and secondary populations 17 n. 70 psychology of 53–4 Rural Reconstruction Association 227, 256 rural society 25–7, 36, 57, 68, 70–1, 75, 153, 154, 264, 289 social hierarchies in 39, 59–64, 65–6, 77, 78, 153–5, 211, 262, 292–3 ruralism 20, 79, 82, 86–7, 99, 105, 233, 340 Rushcliffe constituency 332 Ruskin, John 25, 34 Ruskin College 229 Russell, Dora 155 Russia 83, 243, 266–8, 273, 298 transformation of village life in 266 visitors to 266–7 Rutland 192 Rutland, pre-1918 constituency 72 Rutland and Stamford constituency 75–6, 121 n. 66, 174, 286 n. 163, 286 n. 165, 287, 327 Rutland and Stamford Divisional Labour Party 166, 174 Rye constituency 120 Rye Divisional Labour Party 148 ‘sacrifice’ 138, 140–1, 175 Saffron Walden constituency 170 St. Albans constituency 52 n. 6, 332, 335 St. Albans Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 St. Ives Divisional Labour Party 148, 155 Salisbury constituency 131 Samuel, Herbert 165, 245 Samuel, Raphael 89 scale of cultivation 71, 213 debates about 38, 265–74, 270–1, 274–5, 305 Scarborough 111 scare-stories 2, 51 school teachers 40, 44, 62, 153, 155, 206 schools 27, 44, 45, 61, 73, 137, 153, 204, 206, 298, 315 Scotland 282, 300, 329 agricultural employment 201–2 encouragement of tourism 96, 314

history of land ownership 39 Labour Party campaigns in 16 n. 67, 121, 139, 329 Labour Party organization in 143, 145, 171 Liberal strength in 13, 70, 328, 330 traditions of access to the land 40 Scott Report 307 The Scottish Farm Servant 198, 199 Scottish Farm Servants’ Union 198 –202, 203, 210, 213, 330 and wage regulation 200 –1 financial problems of 203 foundation 198 geographical base 157, 198 –9, 330 leadership 180 membership 198–9, 202 merger with TGWU 185, 198 –9 support for Labour parties 157 Scottish Steam Fishing Vessels Enginemen’s and Firemen’s Union 199 scout movement 98–9 seaside 132 n. 116 secret ballot 51, 57–9, 58 Sedgefield constituency 323 Self, Peter and Storing, Herbert J. 288 self-denial week 140–1 self-improvement 89 self-sufficiency, national 236 Selley, Ernest 64, 175 serfdom 35, 36, 181 Sevenoaks Divisional Labour Party 148 Sharman, H. J. 286 Sharp, Cecil 83–4 Shaw, George Bernard 83, 95 Shaw, Tom 222 n. 23, 261 sheep farming 34, 39, 71 Sheffield 85, 86, 88, 314, 336 Sheffield Clarion Ramblers 88 –9 Shingfield, Jack 179 shoemaking 184 shooting 92 shopkeepers 153–5 Shove, Gerald 207 Shrewsbury constituency 160, 286, 328 Shropshire 1–3, 76, 183, 191, 208, 328 Simpson, John 180 single tax, see land value taxation site values 303, 309 Sivier, R. M. 155 Skelmersdale 184

Index Skipton constituency 109, 121 n. 66, 131, 133 Sleaford 196 slums 29–30, 233, 296 small farmers 155, 285, 287 smallholders 37, 63, 152, 163, 180, 194, 271–4 and independence 63, 272–3 standard of living 271–3 smallholdings 38, 49, 196, 221, 222, 234, 241, 265, 266, 270–4, 297, 305 as a route into farming 273 Smith, H. Norman 287 Smith, Leonard 163 Smith, Walter 136, 156, 163, 187, 222, 224, 231, 232 n. 78, 237 n. 109, 254, 310, 360 Snowden, Philip 36, 54, 109–10, 219, 262 and free trade 247, 248, 250 and land reform 230, 231, 302, 303–4 as Chancellor of the Exchequer 240, 247–8, 303–4, 313 Social Democratic Federation 35, 56 social events 26, 65–6, 90, 126, 160, 168 ‘social service’, agriculture as a 276, 282 socialism: and agricultural policy 19, 227, 230, 232, 236, 251, 264–5, 270–1, 290 and planning 305 linked to rural recreation 79–81, 84, 91, 98–9, 105 nineteenth-century ruralist traditions 14, 82, 86, 138 socialist organisations in rural areas 7 Socialism for the Villages 316, 320 Socialist League 27, 40 Society of Labour Candidates 165 Somerset 70, 129, 132, 184 South Ayrshire constituency 16 n. 67, 323 South Derbyshire constituency 127, 324 South Derbyshire Divisional Labour Party 158, 173, 324 South Dorset constituency 112 South Downs 56 South Eastern Essex Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 South Norfolk constituency 121 n. 66, 164, 286 n. 165, 324, 326, 327

401

South Norfolk Divisional Labour Party 167 South Wales coalfield 319 South Wales Miners’ Federation 318 South Wales valleys 87, 183, 301 South West England 61, 70, 113, 131, 132, 333 South-West Norfolk constituency 121 n. 66, 286 n. 165, 287, 324, 326, 327 South-West Norfolk Divisional Labour Party 171 Soviet Union 266–8 food shortages in 267 The General Line 267 see also Russia Spalding 194, 195, 196 SPD (German Social Democratic Party) 7 speakers’ classes 136 speakers’ handbooks 135 Spen Valley Labour Party 26 squires 27, 51, 54, 59, 61–2, 64, 73, 75, 153, 167 n. 128; see also red squires stabilization 283 of farm incomes 222, 245 of prices 222, 242, 246, 250, 283 Stafford constituency 121 n. 65, 126, 332 standard of cultivation, criticism of 262, 298–300 Stanton 100 state as landlord 231–2, 263, 277 state farming 241–2, 268, 270, 274, 279, 289, 305 stately homes, see country houses Stirling 199 stock rearing 213, 282 straw rope manufacture 184 Street, A. G. 73 strikes 179, 185, 190, 199, 206 –7, 213, 272 General Strike (1926) 183, 298 ‘great’ Norfolk strike (1923) 190, 209, 263 St. Faith’s (1910) 187, 272 Stroud constituency 13, 333, 335 Stroud Divisional Labour Party 127 Stubbs, Alfred Ernest 12, 333 students 131 sublime, the 89 subsidies, agricultural 237, 245, 246, 251, 282

402

Index

suburbs 152 suburban as category of constituency 15 suburban development 151–2, 301, 308, 309 suburban vote 3, 8, 152 Sudbury constituency 112, 327, 333, 335 Sudbury Divisional Labour Party 62, 155, 167, 173 Suffolk 128, 172, 181, 192, 213, 233, 293 n. 8, 327 Suffolk Federation of Trades Councils and Labour Parties 128, 157 sugar beet 195, 236, 237–8 sugar processing industry 195, 238 sugar subsidy 224, 237, 238, 245 summer schools 83, 90, 123, 132 Sunday meetings 63, 152 Surrey 116, 191 ‘Sussex, John’ (pseudonym) 100, 225 Sussex, radical heritage of 45 Swadlincote 127 Swanbourne 60 swedes 134 Swindon Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 Talbot, Henry 173 tariffs 222, 238, 245 Taunton constituency 145, 163, 333, 335 Taunton Divisional Labour Party 65, 131, 156 Tavistock constituency 13 Tawney, R. H. 31, 32, 36 Taylor, W. B. 241, 244, 256, 280, 287, 360 tea parties 65 Temple, Frederick 163 tenant farmers 277, 286 tenant farming 274 Thaxted 62, 83 ‘theft’ of the land 27–8, 32, 37, 39, 40 –1, 44, 49, 231 Thirsk and Malton constituency 52 n. 7 Thornbury constituency 13, 55, 333 Thornbury Divisional Labour Party 149 three-party contests 67, 326, 335–6 tied cottages 60, 63–4, 163, 184, 201, 210, 277, 281, 295–6 Labour Party policy on 296 timber production 310 tithe 224, 260–1

tithe disputes 281 Tiverton constituency 13, 75 Tolpuddle 90 n. 52, 294, 295 Tolpuddle Martyrs 49, 185, 294 centenary commemoration of 49, 139, 163 n. 106, 178, 294 Tomlinson, G. A. W. 183 Tonbridge constituency 52, 325 tourists, encouragement of 96, 314; see also domestic tourism town and country 301–2, 305– 6 agricultural policy for 217, 218, 253 bringing together of 107, 293 n. 8, 306 inequalities 292 jealousies 71 town and country planning 306 –9 Town and Country Planning Bill (1931) 306–8 Town and Country Planning Act (1932) 307 town planning 306–7, 313 tractors 266–7, 268 trade unions 3, 72, 77, 185– 6, 194 and development of local political organization 156 – 8 and Liberalism 72 and nonconformity 159 attitudes towards rural history 47, 49 sense of responsibility for agricultural workers 180–1 support for Labour Party in rural areas 70, 72, 156–8, 322, 337 weakness in rural areas 1, 72, 178, 205–6 trades councils 128, 142, 180, 184 Trades Union Congress (TUC) 139, 145, 157, 178, 179, 187, 212, 298 attempts to promote rural organisation 114–17 rural campaigns 114 –17, 122, 134, 191–2 tradesmen 152 trams 310, 314 transition from agricultural to industrial economy 31, 37– 8 transport 72, 151, 235, 293, 305, 306 Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) 46, 139, 156, 181, 185, 186, 190, 193, 198 –9, 207, 244, 256, 259, 261 agricultural section 179, 190, 192, 193, 247

Index trespassing 23, 40, 92, 95, 96; see also mass trespass Trevelyan, C. P. 92, 95, 297–8 tribal culture 99 Tudor England, references to 2 Turriff 198 two-party contests 326, 327, 328, 336 Tyler, Wat 44, 45, 47, 48 ‘tyranny’ 54, 60, 63, 77, 264, 296, 304 ugliness of unplanned development 305, 307, 312 uncultivated land 299–300, 310 underproduction 236, 251, 299–300 unemployment: measures to tackle 195, 233–4, 241 rural unemployment 34, 235, 246 unemployment insurance for agricultural workers 210, 235, 254–5 United States 42, 251, 311 University College, Aberystwyth 229 University Labour Federation 91 unskilled workers 190, 207 urban environment, responses to 85, 86 Uzzell, Ruth 197 vans 25, 109, 118–19, 122, 125, 130, 130, 137, 138–9 victimization 57, 60, 62, 63–4, 186, 187, 194, 195, 201, 205, 272, 273, 277 Victory for Socialism campaign 288 village community 50, 234, 292–4, 305 idealisation of 29, 33, 36, 40 village greens 26, 27, 61, 83, 110, 131, 133 village halls 61, 137 n. 147, 294 ‘village Hampden’ 47 The Village Labourer 31–2, 33, 46; see also Hammond, J. L. and Barbara village life 66, 222, 294, 302, 306 impact of modernisation 54, 306 villages 76, 100, 103, 291–4 in the past 36, 37, 38, 40 Vinogradoff, Paul 31 voluntarism 129, 140, 169, 174, 182 wage levels in rural areas 115, 178–80, 181 wage regulation 14, 188, 190, 213, 238, 250, 254, 282; see also agricultural wages board; agricultural wages committees; Agricultural Wages Act (1924)

403

Wake, Egerton 2, 12, 15, 117 n. 44, 168, 332 ‘waking’ the countryside 53 Wales: agricultural trade unionism in 191–2, 193, 213 Labour party organization in 70, 145–6, 171 Labour Party’s electoral record in 328–9, 332 Liberal strength in 13, 70, 328 Walkden, A. G. 115 Walker, R. B. 55, 77, 107, 114, 205, 209, 212, 236, 262, 270 –1, 274, 303, 326, 360 walking 89, 91; see also hiking; rambling Wallace, Doreen 275 Wallington 297–8 Walsh, John 91 Ward, G. H. B. 88 Warwick and Leamington constituency 111 Warwick, Countess of (Frances Evelyn Greville) 59, 65, 89, 111, 297 n. 30, 298 water supply in rural areas 234, 293 Watkins, Tudor 317 Webb, Beatrice 33 Webb, Sidney 18, 30, 33, 38, 222, 223 Wedgwood, J. C. 43, 47, 68, 70, 95, 163, 166, 222, 226–7, 229, 231–2, 270–1, 303, 321, 361 weekend schools 298 Wellingborough constituency 121 n. 66, 129, 163 Wells constituency 163 Wells Divisional Labour Party 146 –7 Wells, H. G. 36 Welwyn Garden City 103 Wendover 90 West Country 131, 213 West Derbyshire constituency 75, 126, 146, 162, 332 West Derbyshire Divisional Labour Party 127, 132, 146, 147, 151, 166 West Dorset constituency 286 n. 165 West Fife constituency 323 n. 19 West Fife Divisional Labour Party 157 West Lothian Divisional Labour Party 157 West Midlands 328 West Renfrew constituency 16 n. 67 West Stirling constituency 16 n. 67, 323

404

Index

Western Isles constituency 75, 122, 143–4, 146, 323, 324, 330 Western Isles Divisional Labour Party 143–4, 148 Westmorland constituency 131 wheat 236, 240, 243, 246–50; see also quota scheme Wheat Act (1932) 249–50 ‘Wheatley’ cottages 294, 296 wheelwrights 184 whist drives 160, 168, 211 White, Charlie 163 White Paper on agriculture, draft (1930) 240, 245, 247, 283 Whitehaven constituency 171, 287, 323 Whitehaven Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 Whiteing, Richard 25, 30 n. 23, 109 Whittington 167–8 Widnes 86 wilderness 89, 300 Wilkinson, Ellen 95 Wilkinson, William 162 Williams, J. E. 28 Williams, Raymond 5, 296 Williams, Tom 4, 12, 16 n. 68, 136, 224, 228, 237 n. 109, 280, 340, 361 Williams-Ellis, Clough 308 Williamson, Philip 257 Willingham 150 Wiltshire 129, 135 Wimborne, Viscount 316 Winchester constituency 131, 332, 335 Winchester Divisional Labour Party 149 n. 26 Windsor constituency 325 Windsor-Clive, Ivor 1 Winfrey, Richard 271 Winslow 60 Winstanley, Gerrard 46 Winterton, Paul 267 wireless, see radio Wirral 120 Wise, E. F. 70, 230 Wise, F. J. 284, 286 Wolverhampton 148

Wolverton 151 women: and rural trade unionism 62, 116, 194, 195–8, 203 and the Labour Party 65, 127, 147, 148, 158–9 employment in agriculture 195– 6 propaganda aimed at 66 Women’s Institutes 65– 6, 197 Woodbridge constituency 112, 327 Woodbridge Divisional Labour Party 173 Woodcraft 97–9 Woodcraft Folk 92, 98 –9 Woolwich Labour Party 26 Worcestershire 191, 208, 328 Wordsworth, William 311 worker control 293 Workers’ Educational Association 84 Workers’ Travel Association 297 Workers’ Union, see also TGWU 56, 115–16, 136, 150, 180, 183, 184, 185, 190–3, 199, 207, 270 agricultural membership 190, 207, 213 geographical strength 190 –2 merger with TGWU 185, 190, 203 reputation for poaching members 192 ‘working’ farmers 153, 184, 285 working hours 104, 132, 137, 210 –11, 273 Wrekin constituency 121 n. 65, 286 n. 165 Wrexham constituency 323, 329 writers 40, 155 Wycombe constituency 332 The Yellow Van 25, 30 n. 23, 109 Yeovil constituency 131 Yeovil Divisional Labour Party 173 York 111, 118 Yorkshire 39, 208 Your Britain 315 youth hostels 91–2 Youth Hostels Association 91 youth movements 90, 91, 97–100

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