Search:

FARMING IN LINCOLNSHIRE: 1850-1945 - Jonathan Brown

Review by Dr Joan Thirsk, Hadlow, Essex
in Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 41 (2006)

The hundred years of history surveyed by Jonathan Brown in this book expose dramatic contrasts of experience between Lincolnshire’s farming regions; the author, enjoying deep familiarity with his native county, tells an absorbing story of their varied fortunes. He begins with a veritable golden age for some farmers between 1850 and 1875, but it did not last. There followed grim years of depression for all between 1879 and 1914 then war which always puts sudden pressure on farmers to perform miracles; then came another depression, reaching its lowest point around 1929, and requiring another world war to bring any substantial revival. The story ends in 1945 when farmers with long memories were again filled with doubts about their future. As things have turned out, they were right to be apprehensive.

In their farming regimes, Lincolnshire’s regions adopted some very varied strategies between 1850 and 1945, and Jonathan Brown gives a clear explanation of each one, both from the farmers’ and the nation’s point of view. The first twenty-five years were called a ‘high farming’ phase, the strongest praise going to the Wolds, which developed its sheep/barley system, exploiting the long wool of its sheep, and growing barley that was often of malting quality. Farms grew larger, the most prosperous farmers could afford to re-plan and rationalise their farm buildings, and still drive to market in their carriages. On the Cliff and Heath, they also earned praise, by using a lot of artificial fertilisers to help their poor soils grow turnips, and feed oilcake to fatten cattle. High expenditure in both regions produced splendid results.

In other parts of the county, in the Fens and in Axholme, small farms set a quite different pattern. Farmers found potatoes to be an increasingly successful commercial crop, especially Axholme which had accessible towns like Sheffield with a growing industrial populations waiting to eat them. But then, in 1875, depression struck, starting with bad seasons and worsening when imported cereals and meat flowed in and cut the demand for home produce. The small farmers then showed their remarkable staying power. They could draw in their horns, live modestly, and rely on family labour to grow crops that required hand cultivation. They grew more and more vegetables, their agriculture coming to resemble horticulture, and showing great ingenuity and resourcefulness. Rider Haggard was so impressed in 1902 that he described Axholme, when deep depression ruled elsewhere, as ‘truly prosperous’.

The First World War transformed this mainly melancholy scene, when the work of farmers was recognised as being in the front line of home defence. They were paid fairer cereal prices, while meat production scraped along. Women, and children in harvest time, working in the fields, relieved the labour shortages. Yet that spell of prosperity for farmers was short-lived. The government did not take long after the war to remove the price guarantees that it had promised into the future, and depression returned. Sheep/corn farming in the Wolds, writes the author, was a disaster, though sugar beet, for which subsidy was offered in 1925, gave some relief; and in 1934 over 71,000 acres were growing in the county.

Through these years, the smallholders of the Fens and Axholme again held their heads above water more successfully than anyone else, focusing their efforts ever more purposefully on vegetables and a variety of alternative enterprises, including mustard, bulbs and flowers. Some few farmers elsewhere prospered on dairying, some on pigs and some on poultry. Niche markets represented an alternative agriculture that offered the best routes to salvation. It enabled woad-growing to survive as a dye crop, for example, though only until 1932 when Lincolnshire, the last of all the counties, abandoned it. It is a fascinating story of a specialist enterprise, though Jonathan Brown does not mention it. But, in the similarly precasious conditions of farming today, woad is again the object of current research, nurturing the hope of finding a brighter commercial future for it.

The Second World War subjected farmers to experiences similar to those of the First World War; women again worked the land, helped by children at harvest time and, interestingly, by some prisoners-of-war from Italy and some Russians, liberated from German prisoner-of-war camps by the British after D-Day in 1944. Meat production took a back seat and Lincolnshire as a county of cereals and potatoes came to the fore. Farmers’ incomes quadrupled. There the author ends his story, leaving his farmers in a sceptical and uncertain mood in 1945, apprehensively contemplating the future.

The author tells an absorbing story, illustrated with many examples of real people, naming and locating them on their farms. But the reviewer would have liked him to give more credit and attention to the small farmers. Lincolnshire was distinctive in having so many and they proved most flexible and ingenious in surviving long depressions. Like most historians, the author’s emphasis and examples relate to the large and notably successful farms; and, admittedly, it is difficult to avoid this tendency since they yield the most documents. Moreover, whenever a farming system proves successful, success is conventionally measured in the growing size of enterprises. Thus it happened in fenland agriculture. Yet it was the many valiant, small-scale farmers who first demonstrated the success of specialisation. I can remember meeting members of their families in the 1950s, whose oral history, I hope, will somewhere be recorded alongside the grand record of the farmers who became large growers. It may be some of the celery growers in Axholme survive as veterans to tell a personal story before the opportunity is totally lost.

A related topic missing from this book concerns the animated controversy on the practical and social merits of smallholding. A rich and lively debate developed around that subject from 1890 until 1910 and beyond. It is most sympathetically captured by Louisa Jebb, carrying out a three-year investigation into its fortunes, going round on a bicycle and, we are told, ‘showing a remarkable knack of talking to simple people and getting them to talk to her’. Her report was full of practical good sense in favour of small farms; and when she wrote a slim pamphlet about the merits of owner-versus-tenancy in 1909 Lord Carrington wrote the foreword; he, having rented out 650 acres of Lincolnshire land around 1904 to 200 smallholding tenants, became a loyal supporter of the Lincolnshire Small Holdings Association. The Ministry of Agriculture also lent a hand by setting up the Holbeach Farm Colony in 1917. What happened to all this? The author picks up only a fragment of the story by mentioning (p.41) how Guys Hospital in 1919 sold land at Sutton Bridge to the Ministry of Agriculture to help ex-servicemen find a career on small holdings after the war. Yet another project was set up in 1934 to give work to unemployed men working their own land. It acquired twenty sites for small holdings, including two in Lincolnshire – one at Dairy Farm, Lower Fulney in Spalding, and the other at Harrowby Hall. What happened to them? The author has missed the chance to tell us the end of these intriguing stories.

Such criticisms, however, should not detract from our warm appreciation for Jonathan Brown’s friendly and informative account. It is much enriched with photographs.