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Urban Dreams and Rural Reality: Land and Landscape in English Culture, 1920–45

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Simon Miller
Simon Miller
Affiliation:
Centre for Rural Research and Policy, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
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Extract

On May 12th, 1926 Stanley Baldwin announced the end of the General Strike in a radio broadcast to the nation. The announcement was followed by a choir singing Parry's now familiar Jerusalem with its resounding climactic affirmation of ‘England's green and pleasant Land’.1 It is hard to resist the speculation that this was Baldwin's choice as much as Reith's, since the Conservative Prime Minister had from the outset of his political career been identified as an ordinary man rooted deeply in the English countryside.2 Baldwin's private correspondence demonstrates that his attachment to ‘our eternal hills’ was entirely genuine, but there can be little doubt that this was also an image that he consciously cultivated, and which – via his mastery of the new instruments of mass communication – he was able to convey to a wide and popular audience. To this extent he might be thought of as a Tory populist: as J.C. Squire noted in the Observer review of Baldwin's 1926 collection of his speeches, entitled On England (released just before the General Strike), ‘this is the work of a thoroughly representative Englishman: not the common man, but one expressing what the common man feels and cannot say for himself’. These ‘common’ themes and sentiments ranged across a number of issues from Shakespeare to the topical ‘Peace in Industry’, but pride of place in the volume was granted to his definitive statement on national identity, given in May 1924 ‘to celebrate our country and our Patron Saint’ at the Annual Dinner of the Royal Society of St. George, and entitled plainly and unambiguously ‘England’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , April 1995 , pp. 89 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

Notes

1. It is possible that it was this occasion that begun the association of this hymn with the national identity; it was adopted by the Women's Institute thereafter, and of course reached an apotheosis in Malcolm Sargent's climax to the Last Night of the Proms in the 1950s and 1960s.

2. A month after the General Strike Baldwin's ‘national portrait’ was summarised by the American journalist based in London as of ‘someone in baggy clothes, smoking his inevitable pipe and wearing that look of detachment which is interpreted as meaning that he would prefer being a drowsy country squire in Worcester tending to pigs’, cited in Baldwin, A.W.My Father, the True Story (1955), p. 140.Google Scholar

3. Baldwin, ibid. p. 149.

4. Baldwin, S.On England (1926).Google Scholar Squire was a dominant figure in literary journalism at the time, a friend of Arnold Bennett's, senior book critic on the Observer, creator of the London Mercury, and the focus of Georgian ruralism in poetry.

5. Baldwin, , On England, p. 16.Google Scholar

6. Lowerson, John, ‘Battles for the Countryside’ in Gloversmith, F. (ed.) Class, Culture and Social Change (1980), p. 259.Google Scholar

7. Cited in Mongomery, John, The Twenties (1957) p. 54.Google Scholar It is worth noting here, as shall be developed below, the way in which Baldwin's emphasis is on the aesthetic legacy of the past and the implied responsibilities such an inheritance carried.

8. Baldwin, , On England, p. 16.Google Scholar

9. Baldwin, ibid., where ‘works’ means factories.

10. Baldwin, ibid., p. 17.

11. Williams, R., The Country and the City (1973)Google Scholar; Orwell, G., Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1968) vol. IGoogle Scholar; Weiner, M., English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1890 (1981)Google Scholar; Thomas, K., Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (1983)Google Scholar; Howkins, A., ‘The discovery of rural England’, in Colls, R. and Dodd, P. (eds.), Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (1986)Google Scholar; Daniels, S., Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (1993)Google Scholar; Short, J.R., Imagined Country: Society, Culture and Environment (1991)Google Scholar; Gervais, D., Literary Englands: Versions of ‘Englishness’ in Modern Writing (1993).Google Scholar

12. Howkins, A., ‘The discovery’, p. 62.Google Scholar

13. Mark Pegg in Broadcasting and Society 1918–1939 (1983) notes the way in which radio created a ‘sense of national community’ and cites the Spectator comment that ‘radio is community news: a united gesture of a society listening at the same time’, pp. 147, 153. Although it is clear that dialects of region and class persisted, sufficient evidence was gathered by H. Jennings and W. Gill in Broadcasting in Everyday Life: A Study of the Social Effects of the Coming of Broadcasting, to conclude that radio was ‘an equalising and unifying factor in national life’ (cited by Pegg, p. 149).

14. Mowat, C.L., Britain between the Wars 1918–1940 (1955), p. 187.Google Scholar

15. Coles, G.M., The Flower of Light: A Biography of Mary Webb (1978), p.303.Google Scholar

16. Coles, ibid., p. 323.

17. Webb, M., Precious Bane (1937), pp. 114, 216,Google Scholar and A Mary Webb Anthology (1939), p. 38.

18. This English tendency to focus on the Past and to filter out the ‘reality’ in countryside depictions has been noted by Keith, W.J., The Rural Tradition (1974) p. 255Google Scholar; the point will be developed later.

19. J. Buchan, introduction to Webb, M., Gone To Earth (1928) p. 7.Google Scholar

20. Buchan, ibid., p. 8. Italics in the original.

21. Webb, M., Precious Bane (1928), p. 120.Google Scholar

22. The Georgians preceded Mary Webb by only a few years. They had emerged as a loose group just before the 1914 War and shared a popular patriotic sentiment best remembered today in the words of one of their number, Rupert Brooke. As James Reeves explains in the introduction to Georgian Poetry (1962), the principal aim of the group was ‘the celebration of England’, and particularly rural England. ‘ Poems about country cottages, old furniture, moss-covered barns, and rose-scented lanes, apple and cherry orchards, village inns, and village cricket expressed the nostalgia of the soldier on active service and the threat to country life which educated readers feared from the growth of urbanism’ (p. xv). It is worth emphasising that this was poetry which was easily understood, appealed to a wide audience, and in reaction to the war generated a popular following. Counted within its number were Walter de la Mare, who introduced one of Mary Webb's books, and Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman as ‘spiritual fathers’ – both firmaments in Baldwin's literary pantheon. All the faults of the school, ‘easy sentiment, an indifferent eye on the object, languor, and studied homeliness of expression’ as noted by one of its own, Edmund Blunden, worked directly towards a simplistic and sentimentalised depiction of the countryside as a uniquely English idyll.

23. Oral evidence, Nick Bomford, Worcestershire farmer in the period.

24. Cooper, A. F., British Agricultural Policy, 1912–36: A study in Conservative Politics (1989), p. 65.Google Scholar

25. Cooper, ibid, p. 67.

26. Bledisloe papers (1925), cited in Cooper, ibid., p. 71.

27. Many sources might be cited to demonstrate this pervasive rhetoric, including Baldwin and the Scott Report of 1942, and the point will be developed below.

28. Shropshire Chamber of Agriculture (1925) doc. 5533/2, p. 2.

29. Crompton, Richmal, William and the Brains Trust (1945), 1989 edition, pp. 6–7, 10, 13 and 16.Google Scholar

30. Lowe, P., ‘The Rural Idyll Defended: From Preservation to Conservation’ in Mingay, G.E. (ed), The Rural Idyll (1989).Google Scholar

31. Potts, A., “ ‘Constable country’ between the wars” in Samuel, R. (ed), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, Vol. III National Fictions (1989), p. 168.Google Scholar

32. Ford, C.B., The English Countryside in Colour (1938), p. 61.Google Scholar

33. Ford, ibid., pp. 5–7.

34. Street, A.G., Farmer's Glory (1932).Google Scholar

35. Report on Land Utilization in Rural Areas (1943), Mininstry of Works and Planning, HMSO Cmd. 6378, p. iv.

36. ibid., p. vi.

37. ibid., p. 57.

38. ibid., p. v.

39. ibid., p. 69.

40. ibid., p. 71.

41. ibid., p. 71, my emphases.

42. ibid., p. 71.

43. Wood, Ellen Meiksins, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, (1991), p. 110.Google Scholar

44. The Times, 2.7.1945., p. 5.

45. Association of Agriculture, Minutes, 29.5.1945.

46. Lowe, P. and Buller, H., ‘The Historical and Cultural Contexts’, in Lowe, P. and Bodiguel, M. (eds), Rural Studies in Britain and France (1990), p. 16.Google Scholar

47. Ford, , The English Countryside, p. 5.Google Scholar

48. Priestley, J.B., English Journey (1934), pp. 37–8.Google Scholar

49. Priestley, ibid., p. 9.

50. Priestley, ibid., pp. 22–3.

51. Priestley, ibid., p. 11 (my emphases).

52. HMSO, Report on Land Utilization, p. v.

53. Brogan, D., The English People (1943), p. 236–7.Google Scholar