Skewbald and other pony stories of the 1920s/30s

Orlando the Marmalade Cat's creator Kathleen Hale was taught fine art at Reading by Professor Allen William Seaby (1867-1953). He was a painter and woodcut artist who delighted in wildlife subjects. He also wrote and illustrated a very popular series of pony stories for children, beginning with Skewbald The New Forest Pony in 1927.


It's more than a story about a pony, it's an introduction to the ecology and the life of the Forest itself. It was followed by Exmoor Lass and Other Pony Stories the following year. The University collection has a signed copy of the sequel Sons of Skewbald which first appeared in 1937.


In the Notes at the beginning, Seaby details some of the changes that have occurred in the Forest since the first Skewbald book a decade earlier. The fate of the ponies was dependent now not so much on their use in the coal mines, or as meat on the continent, but on their rising popularity as riding horses for children. The motor car represented a new threat because of the number of ponies killed and injured on the Forest roads. Seaby also railed against plant robbers who were causing the disappearance of many of the Forest's rarer species.


Jenny Kendrick of Roehampton University will be talking about the wider significance of Seaby and his pony stories at the Collecting 20th Century Rural Culture conference at the Museum of English Rural Life on November 4th. More details of the conference can be found on the Museum's website.

Orlando The Marmalade Cat

This is opening up a new theme of children's literature and its cultural influence on perceptions of the countryside. To maintain a tenuous motoring link from the previous post, I have included the illustration below from Kathleen Hale's story Orlando Buys a Farm, orignally published in 1942.


On the right, just below the horse's head, Orlando the Marmalade Cat can be seen driving his car with a hay sweep attached to the front. The use of cars in the hay meadow was quite a common sight in the 1930s. These were old, big-engined cars that still had life left in them but little second hand value at the time and could be bought very cheaply. With a hay rake or sweep bolted to the front, they were ideal for trundling the finished hay across a field to where the stack was being built. The picture is full of other accurate detailing: the individual components of the horse gear used for driving the elevator; the elevator itself; and the rolled up temporary canvas tilt, supported by poles and guy ropes, that kept the stack dry, should it rain whilst under construction. In her autobiography, Kathleen Hale (1898-2000) recalled how she used to sneak into agriculture lectures and spend lots of time at the College farm whilst an art student at Reading during the First World War - in fact her student residence was St Andrew's Hall, which now is home to the Museum of English Rural Life.


Hale's first Orlando book was A Camping Holiday of 1938, from which the illustration above is taken. The Orlando character emerged from stories that she made up to amuse her own two sons and in this case drew heavily upon her love of the countryside and childhood memories of camping holidays. Further published adventures followed as Orlando became a big hit with children in the 1940s and 50s. There were radio spin-offs and even an Orlando ballet at the 1951 Festival of Britain.


Orlando's Country Peepshow was a pop-up book that appeared in 1950 and gave more opportunity for Hale to display her sound working grasp of farming practice with a scene for each of the seasons.


This copy, along with the other examples of Hale's work, are from the Children's Collection - part of the University's Special Collections held alongside the Museum.

The Country Picnic

This is an ‘En Route’ tea-making basket produced by Drew & Co of London probably around 1905. (The design number on the little stove shows that it was registered in 1900, and some of the other components were registered a few years earlier). Originally, a device like this was associated with railway travel, and even the horse drawn carriage. But by the Edwardian era, it was increasingly about the relationship between the motor car and the countryside – going for an afternoon jaunt into the country and having a nice cup of tea in a secluded scenic spot before returning to the clamour of the town. It became an enduring tradition, spreading as the century progressed to a wider and wider sector of the urban populace as the price of cars dropped and their availability grew.


By 1912, when this catalogue was produced, Arthur Gamage's department store in London had large motoring and cycle sections, and a big mail order business. The picnic paraphenalia continued to grow in sophistication and ingenuity.


The Morris dealer in Oxford created a country picnic scene in his front window to advertise the 1925 Bullnose. Morris was selling more than 50,000 cars a year by this time and prices of standard models were dropping dramatically.

Glastonbury Festival

That a dairy farm in Somerset should have emerged in the late twentieth century as a pilgrimage site for celebrations of music, performing arts and alternative lifestyles, drawing thousands from around the country to rough it for a few days in the open air whatever the weather might throw at them, is reason enough for examples of its memorabilia to be included in this project.


Myths, mysticism and the Arthurian legend have swirled around Glastonbury for centuries giving it a magnetic sense of mystery and fascination particularly for those with a pantheistic world view seeking harmony with Nature and the passage of the seasons. There were earlier festivals of music and drama in the town during and immediately following the First World War that drew many of these elements together, so that what has subsequently become known as the Glastonbury Festival is not entirely without precedent.

Dairy farmer Michael Eavis organised his first festival at Worthy Farm, Pilton (near Glastonbury) in September 1970. He had been inspired by a visit to the second Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music in June that year - held on the Showground in Shepton Mallet of the Bath & West of England Agricultural Society - and wanted to mix a musical event with the concept of the traditional country fair. It was deliberately low key and laid back, with the audience of 2,000 or so getting free milk from the farm's herd included in the £1 ticket.

It was followed by the free Glastonbury Fayre during the summer solstice the following year, where a pyramid-shaped stage made its first appearance, and by occasional ad hoc happenings thereafter - often sparked by the arrival of New Age travellers from Stonehenge - until the first commercial festival event in 1979. CND were actively involved as co-organisers and beneficiaries from 1981, when a new pyramid stage that doubled as a winter cow shed was constructed.

By 1989, when our copy of Glastonbury Global - the Festival's own newsheet - was produced, attendance had risen to over 60,000 and £100,000 was raised for CND.


Our twentieth anniversary programme of 1990 shows that it was now called the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts to reflect the great range of non-musical activity. The Green Field, an area of the site first introduced in 1984 to highlight eco issues, was expanded to 60 acres.


The New Musical Express started sponsoring the Festival in 1989. Our badge is from 1992 and was given away at the NME stage. Showing how campaign concerns had moved on, this was the year that Greenpeace and Oxfam rather than CND became major recipients of Festival profits.


In 1994, the pyramid stage burned down shortly before the Festival start. A Greenpeace wind turbine was installed to generate power for part of the site.



As the poster shows, 1995 was the 25th anniversary of the first Festival. It was just like the old days of Woodstock and the Isle of Wight when part of the perimeter fencing was pulled down in an effort to make a free festival. Nevertheless, £400,000 was still raised for the charities.


Worthy Farm was rested in 1996. The Festival returned in 1997 but to a sea of mud due to bad weather. The whole site now stretched to 800 acres and attendance hit 95,000.


Mud Festival again in 1998. Bob Dylan is on the bill. Greenpeace, Oxfam and Water Aid share £500,000.


In 1999, sponsorship from The Guardian, Orange, and the BBC, shows how far up the establishment ladder the Festival has climbed.

'Oi! Get orf moy laand!'

Following a suggestion made at the recent Social History Curators Group conference, we are happy to oblige with these two new acquisitions relating to the Viz character Farmer Palmer. The first is a mug dating from 1993 complete with its original box.


Farmer Palmer first appeared at the start of the 1990s, the creation of cartoonist Simon Thorp (1965-) who was behind a gallery of some of the comic's other stalwart characters including Eight Ace, Finbarr Saunders and Student Grant. He had been producing work for Viz since the mid-1980s, shortly before it hit the bigtime. From small beginnings in 1979, a cottage industry run from a suburban bedroom in Newcastle, Viz was selling more than 1 million copies per issue by 1990, putting it in the same league as The Radio Times and Reader's Digest and turning it into an anarchic institution in its own right. It thrived on original humorous content that was outrageously crude, puerile and offensive and in so doing developed a readership profile far wider than might have been predicted.


Dog shooting ('Ee wuz wurryin moy sheep') Farmer Palmer and his dim-witted son Jethro are way over the top caricatures of just about every anti-farming stereotype that our culture can come up with - that's why they're funny and important for this project.


Our second item is a piece of original Simon Thorp artwork from the end of the century featuring Farmer Palmer and Jethro getting enthusiastically involved in a demonstration. This was the era of the Countryside March of 1998 that brought 250,000 people noisily to the streets of London to protest against an amalgam of grievances - including anti-hunt legislation - affecting the rural community.

Farmer Palmer is still going strong today, athough Viz circulation has long since retreated from its earlier highs. His notoriety has been put to good commercial use by some other farming Palmers - see below.

Isle of Wight Festival, 1970

An important strand that will be developed as this project progresses is one that links popular music with the countryside and brings in such factors as alternative lifestyles, youth culture, social protest and environmentalism. The music festival embodies them all. In the modern era, the journey began with the Beaulieu jazz festivals on Lord Montague's estate in Hampshire 1956-61, where opposing followers of modern and trad jazz knocked spots off each other, and ended the century with the counter culture pillar of the establishment that Glastonbury ultimately became. The three Isle of Wight festivals of 1968-70 are landmarks along that road so we have acquired a poster from the last of them because it represents a watershed moment in music festival history.


This is not connected with the organisers' promotional artwork that was done by David Fairbrother-Roe but part of a range of printed material produced unofficially in the encampment on site and sold to festival goers.

With opposition from local authorities and residents mounting following the previous year's event, the 1970 festival was hard pressed to find a venue on the island and was ultimately obliged to make do with a farmland site at Afton Down. This was bound to cause problems because the main arena was overlooked by a great hillside, beyond the perimeter fence, where fans could and did camp out and watch the proceedings for nothing. So it was that at least half a million people turned up - more than to any other comparable event since - on a gloriously sunny bank holiday weekend to witness a glittering line-up of acts, including Jimi Hendrix giving his last public performance, amid a mix of chaos, confusion and recrimination that roused a nation and ensured that nothing quite like it would ever happen again.

Darling Buds of May

We have now added these two items of costume as worn by Pop and Ma Larkin (David Jason and Pam Ferris) in the 1991-3 Yorkshire TV series Darling Buds of May. Running to 18 episodes and two specials, it was immensely popular with the first season of programmes breaking viewing records when all six episodes reached number 1 in the ratings.


Shot on location in the Kent village of Pluckley, it presents a Chaucerian vision of a lush and bountiful countryside of the 1950s presided over by Pop, a smallholder and chancer, with an enormous family and a heart of gold. As the Television Heaven review puts it 'The combination of good writing, excellent acting and the inherent "feel good factor" of the series proved to be the perfect antidote to a televisual dramatic universe dominated by cold, hard-hearted cynicism. Darling Buds of May proved to be a delightfully unexpected oasis of golden summer sunshine in a wasteland of post-modern grimness'.


The series was based on the 1958 novel of the same name, and its four successors, by H.E.Bates (1905-1974). He and his wife Madge had made their home since the early 1930s in a formerly derelict cart shed and granary in Little Chart, close to Pluckley in Kent. In his second volume of autobiography, The World in Ripeness (1972), Bates describes how the idea for the Larkins developed:

I had long been fascinated by a rural junk-yard I used to pass two or three times a week. Its crazy mess of old iron, rusting implements, pigs, horses, geese, turkeys, haystacks and useless junk of every kind sat incongruously next to the most beautiful of bluebell woods, the junk mocking the beauty, the bluebells mocking the junk. Here, it seemed to me, was something that had to be written about.

And then:

One early summer evening Madge and I were driving through a Kentish village twenty-five miles east of us, in apple orchard country, when she suddenly had reason to stop and make a few purchases at the village shop. As I sat waiting for her in the car I noticed, outside the shop, a ramshackle lorry that had been recently painted a violent electric blue. Two or three minutes later there came out of the shop, in high spirits, a remarkable family: father a perky, sprightly character with dark side-burnings, Ma a youngish handsome woman of enormous girth, wearing a bright salmon jumper and shaking with laughter like a jelly, and six children, the eldest of them a beautiful dark-haired girl of twenty or so. All were sucking at colossal multi-coloured ice creams and at the same time crunching potato crisps. As they piled into the lorry there was an air of gay and uninhibited abandon about it all. Wild laughter rang through the village street and the whole scene might have come out of Merrie England.

And so the Larkins took shape:

The entire family is gargantuan of appetite, unenslaved by conventions, blissfully happy. Pop is further revealed as a passionate lover of the countryside, as ardent a worshipper at the bluebell shrine and its nightingales as he is of Ma's seductive, voluptuous bosoms. He yields to no man in his warm, proud love of England. All is 'perfick'.

'Mouseman' stool, c.1920s

The distinctive carved mouse on the edge of the seat shows this oak stool to be from the workshops of Robert 'Mouseman' Thompson (1876-1955) in Kilburn, North Yorkshire.


Thompson was part of that rural craft revival which was evident in the opening decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he joined his father in the family joinery business - having already completed an engineering apprenticeship - and continued to live in the cottage that had been his childhood home in Kilburn for the rest of his life. He was inspired by examples of medieval craftsmanship in oak to be found in the region's ancient churches and jumped at the opportunity to develop his own expertise that was provided by commissions from Ampleforth College at the end of the First World War. The carved mouse, both a signature and a proof of pure craftsmanship, began to appear on his work soon after.


Over the following thirty years Thompson was responsible for a stream of screens, pulpits, altars, pews and stalls in churches great and small around the land and chairs, tables and panelling for both domestic and institutional settings. The business continues as Robert Thompson's Craftsmen Ltd in Kilburn today. A number of former Thompson apprentices went on to make their own name as furniture makers in Yorkshire and with their own signature carving devices: for example, Wilf 'Squirrelman' Hutchinson, Peter 'Rabbitman' Heap and Martin 'Lizardman' Dutton.


(Robert Thompson, from Mouseman by Patricia Lennon and David Joy, 2008)

Rowley Gallery inlaid wood panels, c.1912

These panels were purchased at auction in the West Midlands recently. Both present the hard physical nature of farm labour at harvest time rather in the manner of the nineteenth century - Millet's The Gleaners of 1857 and Sir George Clausen's The Mowers of 1892 come particularly to mind. The first panel is called Reaping - although the tool being used is a scythe not a sickle so technically the title should be Mowing - and the other Binding. By the time they were created both these operations of cutting the crop and tying it into sheaves had largely been mechanised. But the purpose here is the noble depiction of rustic labour for a metropolitan audience.


Albert James Rowley (1877-1944) set up his picture framing and gilding business in Kensington in 1898. He was an artist/craftsman himself in the Arts and Crafts tradition and moved in the artistic circles of both London and Ditchling in Sussex (which included Frank Brangwyn and Eric Gill) where he subsequently had a house.


In the years leading up to the First World War, the Rowley Gallery began to produce inlaid wood panels like these, some designed and made by Rowley himself as here, and others by invited artists including his friend William Chase (1878-1944). The distinctive Pan label on the reverse of the panels, to a design by Chase, was introduced in 1912.



The Gallery's output expanded through the 1920s and 30s, particularly with the addition of Albert's son Laurence to the business, from panels into decorative mirrors and items of furniture. The Rowley Gallery still trades in Kensington today, although the family is no longer involved.

Thelwell watercolour, 1960

The caption on this illustration when it appeared in Punch in 1960 was 'The Age-Old Custom of Beating the Balm Cake at Abbots Dawdling'. It is a classic comment on the peddling of rural myth and bogus tradition. Surprising perhaps that half a century ago this was already a matter for wry amusement. When the original watercolour came up for sale in a recent exhibition in London of Thelwell's work, it seemed only right to make a rural museum its new home.

Norman Thelwell (1923-2004) is best known for his eponymous pony cartoon books, beginning in 1957 with Angels on Horseback, that have been major sellers worldwide. But for more than 25 years he provided a regular stream of cartoons on rural subjects, often topical, for Punch and the national press as well as other published compilations such as The Effluent Society (1971) and Some Damn Fool's Signed the Rubens Again (1982) - following the ups and downs of country house owners opening their doors to the visiting public.


Thelwell was born in Tranmere but his love of the country was ignited by childhood holidays on a farm in North Wales. After War service, during which the military made some use of his natural artistic abilities, Thelwell studied art at Liverpool. This was followed by a short spell in teaching before a new career in freelance cartoon humour began to take off in the early 1950s and enabled him to live the rest of his life in the country, mostly Hampshire. Underlying the light-hearted aspect of his work, was often his own commentary on the changes going on around him.

In his autobiography (Wrestling with a Pencil, 1986) he wrote 'Although my object as a cartoonist was mainly to earn my living by amusing readers, it was also quite possible to express my own feelings on subjects, situations and events about which I felt strongly. Politics I have always found very boring and there was no way in which I could have become a political cartoonist. My interest lies in the minutiae of the human dilemma, the day to day problems of life and the way we are all swept along by events or developments which we feel helpless to influence. I seem to have touched at one time or another on almost every subject under the sun from combine harvesters to computers, rockets to ramblers, paraffin to pigs. But the predominant thread which has always run through my work is my love of and fascination with the countryside: the flesh and bones of these islands'.

John Makepeace chair, 1981

This is one of a set of dining chairs from the workshops of John Makepeace (1939-), a furniture designer and educator of international standing who has described his own career as an adventure in wood. For 25 years from 1976, Makepeace lived and worked at Parnham House, a 15th century Grade 1 listed country house on the edge of Beaminster in Dorset. Here he combined his own business with running the School for Craftsmen in Wood, thereby passing on his ideas and philosophy to a new generation of makers, and the Parnham Trust which had wider aims of tying modern craftsmanship into the revitalisation of indigenous woodland.


In 1983, with the sustainability of English woodland becoming an issue of increasing concern, the Trust purchased the 350 acre Hooke Park Wood a few miles away to become a centre for research and teaching. This led on in 1989 to the Hooke Park School for Advanced Manufacturing in Wood with the purpose of generating a network of manufacturing businesses utilising sustainable indigenous timber, particularly thinnings, in the production of quality products and buildings. Courses took a holistic approach all the way from forest management through design and manufacture to marketing and business. The project attracted considerable support and funding in the early years but then ran into difficulties in the 1990s relating to its own sustainability and management. The site has since been transferred to the Architectural Association which is developing a long term strategy for its research and academic activity.


John Makepeace now lives in Beaminster itself and continues to practice fine furniture craftsmanship in wood (www.johnmakepeacefurniture.com).

Straw Dogs, 1971

Coming only a year after The Go-Between, this is a very different film that paints a very different picture of the countryside. A mild-mannered American mathematician retreats from the urban jungle and seeks solace with his English wife in a quiet Cornish farmhouse. But he finds an even greater primordial menace within this sleepy village which ultimately brings out terrifying violence in himself. Dustin Hoffman and Susan George star along with a full line-up of sinister yokels. Directed by Sam Peckinpah and shot in the St Buryan area of Cornwall, it has been described as a West Country horror western. It attracted notoriety both at the time and since for its scenes of sexual and physical violence. Few films can have featured a man trap - that staple of the rural museum collection - quite so dramatically.

The Go-Between, 1970

Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of L.P.Hartley's 1953 novel The Go-Between with the classic opening line: 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'. The film was directed by Joseph Losey and starred Julie Christie and Alan Bates amongst others. It won the Grand Prix at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival and in 1999 was included in the British Film Institute's list of 100 best British films.

The poster artist was Arnaldo Putzu, one of a number of young Italians brought over by Eric Pulford and the Downton film publicity agency from the later 1950s. Get Carter was another of Putzu's well known film posters.

In addition to the poster, we also have a set of front of house cards - photographic stills from the film that would be displayed behind glass at the cinema entrance or in the foyer to attract custom.


Set in a hot languid summer of the early 1900s, the beguiling scenery and mannered behaviour masks a harsher reality of emotional turmoil beneath. The countryside is used here both as a metaphor for lost youth and innocence and as the physical embodiment of a stifling class system. It was shot in and around the empty and semi-derelict seventeenth century Melton Constable Hall in North Norfolk, former home of Lord Hastings and an appropriate setting for this story of the grandeur of a past age.

The Railway Children, 1970

This is an original poster for the film version of Edith Nesbit's 1906 novel of the same name which premiered at Christmas 1970 and has been a holiday favourite ever since. The story is of a middle class family fallen on hard times - when the father is wrongly imprisoned - and obliged to leave the comfort of their suburban villa for life in the country where the nearby railway becomes the focus of the children's world. The countryside and its people, however humble, are projected as a metaphor for purity of mind and generosity of spirit that more than make up for the loss of the material benefits of the town.

Lionel Jefferies wrote the screenplay and directed. Jenny Agutter starred as Bobby, Dinah Sheridan as the mother and Bernard Cribbins as Perks the station master. The film was shot on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway, a preserved steam line. It followed a BBC TV serial of 1968, shot on the same railway and also starring Jenny Agutter but the film version overshadows everything else including the book itself.

It is a deliberately nostalgic film set in the Edwardian era and with the Bronte country of the West Riding of Yorkshire also taking a starring role.