Harvest Girl, by Charles Wilson, 1904

This was our first acquisition of 2010. Charles Edward Wilson (1854-1941) was born in Whitwell, Derbyshire, the son of the village schoolmaster, and studied at Sheffield School of Art. He developed a specialism in rustic scenes, some of which can still be seen on greetings cards today, and exhibited a total of 17 works at the Royal Academy.

The watercolour here of a harvest girl leaning on her wooden hay rake owes something to George Stubbs' famous painting, The Haymakers, of 1785 in which a comparable pose is struck. But this is 1904 and a genre of sentimentalised rural art that was a hangover from the late Victorian period. These gentle rustic scenes of wholesome innocence characterised the way that a predominantly urban and industrial society liked to think of its countryside and its country women. But things were beginning to change fast; and demure portraits of country maidens would no longer be appropriate to the era of the First World War and beyond.


A new breed of women farmers was now making the news, like these two, Miss Andrews and Miss Spencer, who trained at Reading University and the Midland Agricultural College respectively, and in the 1920s took a Sussex farm in partnership to build up a successful dairying and poultry enterprise.

Agricultural Workers Union badges, 1910s and 1960s

Periodic name changes to the union representing farm workers eases the task of dating associated material. In this case, the membership lapel badge has its title as the National Agricultural Labourers' & Rural Workers' Union which places it between 1912 and 1919. It was made by Fattorini & Sons, a family dynasty of jewellers and medal makers in Birmingham and the north of England with a pedigree running from the nineteenth century through to the present day.

The NALRWU was the successor body to the Eastern Counties Agricultural Labourers' and Small Holders' Union which was founded in Norfolk in 1906 with the great George Edwards (1850-1933) as its secretary. Going national in 1912 prompted the name change.

Widely scattered in small units, and with accommodation often tied to the job, farm workers have never found it easy to put effective pressure on their employers to improve pay and conditions. A national strike in 1923, following the scrapping of minimum wage agreements, eventually petered out amidst recrimination and little tangible gain. Still, today, an Agricultural Wages Board, with representatives from both sides sets on an annual basis the minimum rates of pay for the six defined grades of farm worker.


The other badge is for the National Union of Agricultural Workers, the name the union adopted in 1919 until 1968 when it became the National Union of Agricultural and Allied Workers. It was produced by the famous badge makers, Frank Cobb & Co of Sheffield, and has the look and feel of the 1960s.

Union membership rose dramatically during and immediately following the Second World War, peaking at a little over 179,000 in 1948. Thereafter, it fell into a steady decline and by 1962 was down to 131,000. The marked shrinkage of the farm labour force, as increased mechanisation took hold, is a defining feature of the countryside in the second half of the century. It meant that a free standing union was less viable, to the point where today it operates as the rural and agriculture element of Unite.

Corgi Toys Farm Set, early 1960s

Corgi Major was a range of commercial/industrial die-cast vehicles that the company introduced from 1957. The combine harvester here first appeared in 1961 and this Gift Set No.8, with tractor and trailer added, a year or two later. These were solid, chunky toys with moving parts for little hands to twiddle and with much of their attraction due to the remarkable level of detailing.


The combine harvester was modelled on the Massey-Ferguson 780 which was built at the firm's Kilmarnock factory from 1953 to 1962. This was the machine that most characterised the new agricultural revolution of the post-War era - a time of settled development for farming following the 1947 Agriculture Act, when the number of combine harvesters in England & Wales rose from 10,000 in 1950 to 50,000 in 1960.


The Massey-Ferguson name came about with the merger of two agricultural machinery manufacturers, Massey-Harris of Canada and Harry Ferguson Ltd of London in 1953. At first, it was Massey-Harris-Ferguson but was shortened in 1958 to Massey-Ferguson in a re-brand that produced also the iconic red and grey colour scheme and the triple triangle logo. At this time the firm accounted for 90% of all self-propelled combines used in the country.


Here are two 780 combines at work on a crop of barley in Gloucestershire in August 1962. The one at the rear is about to discharge its load of grain into the trailer alongside. The combine was the last stage in a long process of mechanisation of the grain harvest that stretched back to the early nineteenth century. Instead of the army of workers formerly needed to cut and gather the crop for threshing at a later stage, now it was harvested and processed in a single operation in the field.


The tractor in the Corgi set is a Massey-Ferguson 65, a 50 horse power model introduced in 1958. The Mark II appeared in 1960 and altogether a little over 50,000 of these tractors were built.

Cold Comfort Farm poster, 1995

This is the BBC/Thames TV production of Stella Gibbons' 1932 classic comic novel. It was directed by John Schlesinger, screenplay was by Malcolm Bradbury, and its stars included Kate Beckinsale as Flora Poste, Joanna Lumley as Mrs Smiling, Ian McLellen as Amos Starkadder, Rufus Sewell as Seth Starkadder and Stephen Fry as Mybug. The main location for filming was Brightling in East Sussex, with Brickwall House in Northiam standing in as 'Howchiker' Hall.

Stella Gibbons (1902-1989) was born in London and trained as a journalist. Cold Comfort Farm was her first novel and overshadows everything else that she wrote. Through the magnified stereotyping of its characters, it parodies the whole rural novel genre from Mary Webb to D.H.Lawrence and from Thomas Hardy to the Bronte sisters. The story of the visiting urban relative, Flora Poste, solving all the personal issues of the rural, dysfunctional Starkadders has stayed fresh and in print continuously through the intervening decades. It was also adapted for the stage by Paul Doust and was first performed at the The Watermill Theatre, Newbury in June 1991.

Here are some book covers from the 1930s to the 1990s:

The Archers board game, 1960

This item goes back to the start of an era when practically every popular programme on the radio or, increasingly, on the TV, merited its own spin-off game. They were mostly formulaic in nature with specific elements grafted on to reflect, however thinly, the context and storyline of the programme concerned. In the case of The Archers, the players are farmers who move around the board, incurring expenses and picking up income as they go, and attend auctions where they acquire stock and equipment. The first one to complete the fitting-out of their farm wins.


It is the kind of game that was probably bought as a Christmas present for a parent or aged relative, was very rarely played once the festivities were over, and consequently will very often survive intact and in almost unused condition at the back of a cupboard. What's important here is that the game owes its existence to the fact that by 1960 The Archers had become an integral part of the cultural establishment with a daily audience of millions across town and country alike.

The Archers began as a series of five pilot programmes that were broadcast regionally from Birmingham at the end of May 1950 and went national on a daily basis at the beginning of January the following year. It was the creation of Godfrey Baseley (1904-97) who was involved in agricultural programme-making for the BBC and wanted to find a more entertaining way of engaging with a farming audience on the subject of farm modernisation and improvement. It soon became much more than that, 'an everyday story of country folk', impacting upon the way that an urban society thought and felt about the countryside. Within six months of its launch The Archers was pulling in four million listeners a night.

The Museum of English Rural Life was also launched in 1951 to record the old countryside that was disappearing in the face of post-war change. Here is Godfrey Baseley (left) with John Higgs, the Museum's first Curator, making a live television broadcast from the Museum in 1954.


Amongst the Museum's collections are the extensive papers of broadcaster and journalist Anthony Parkin (1926-2007) who was agricultural story editor for The Archers for 25 years from 1972. He managed and ran the four main fictional farms of Ambridge, keeping detailed records of what was going on and what was changing, in order to provide a steady stream of topical subjects for the scriptwriters. Below is the first page of a paper that he prepared in 1976 on the subject of agricultural content in The Archers.

Frank Newbould poster, 1940s

This poster neatly captures the economic importance of the railway network to the rural community in the period either side of the Second World War. And it was the railway's country lorry service that completed the link - for goods in or out - between the nearest station and the village shop, farm or cottage.

Although the poster design almost certainly originates pre-War, I have put a 1940s date on it because I think it has been overprinted with the words 'British Railways' (on the lorry's canvas top) at or around the time of nationalisation in 1948. The initials at the bottom represent the four geographically-based units into which the myriad of smaller railway companies were grouped following the Railways Act of 1921: the Great Western Railway; the London, Midland & Scottish Railway; the London & North Eastern Railway; and the Southern Railway. The poster was printed by the Baynard Press of London, leading colour lithographic printers of the day, who printed many other posters for clients such as London Transport and also The School Prints (see earlier post).

The artist was Frank Newbould (1887-1951) who trained at Bradford College of Art and who was responsible for some of the most iconic travel and transport posters of the 1920s and 30s. For part of the Second World War, he was a poster artist for the War Office, working under Abram Games (see separate post), and produced amongst other things four posters in the series Your Britain Fight for it Now. One is a captivating portrait of the Downs which completely equates a pastoral English landscape with national pride and identity:


Another is intended to conjure up happy memories - real or imagined - of the travelling fair on the village green with a church tower, symbolising tradition and virtue down the centuries, rising in the background:

Rural Nostalgia and collectors' plates, 1980s/90s

We've acquired a number of examples of this genre recently, all very much of their time. This one has the title The Farm-Yard and is the July plate in a twelve-month series called The Farm Year which was produced by Wedgwood for the Danbury Mint. The artist, Michael Herring, specialised in gentle rural scenes like this set in the earlier part of the twentieth century which were commissioned for a range of products from jigsaws to coasters.

This one is The Farm Cottage, dated 1988 and the sixth in Colin Newman's Country Panorama series for Wedgwood depicting a 360 degree panoramic view of the countryside.


The Sunday colour magazines of the 1980s and early 90s often featured full-page advertisements for decorative plates, usually issued in a series of eight or more, and often on a nostalgic rural theme. Indeed, I recall the Museum of English Rural Life entering into a commercial arrangement to endorse one such series. Readers were invited to sign up for a whole series in advance by mail order and would then receive each successive plate on a periodic basis, often accompanied by a elaborate certificate of authenticity. The sales pitch was that these plates were limited editions that would effortlessly become the antiques of tomorrow. Whilst looking good in the sitting room cabinet, so the argument went, they would also be appreciating in value.

The reality has proved to be rather different. Plenty of these plates, from so many series, are available today on Ebay and elsewhere at prices below what they originally sold for twenty or thirty years ago. If nothing else, it shows that the marketing at the time paid off and brought in the buyers in their droves.


Here is Haymaking, dated 1989 and the third in the Life on the Farm series, with artwork by Lancashire-based John L.Chapman (1946-).


So who were the buyers? I think it is safe to assume that this was not a market aimed at young people. The appeal was to an older generation, retirees with a comfortable pension and money to spend, who were beguiled by images that matched the fading recollections of their youth and prey to a sales patter offering instant heirlooms to be treasured by the family after they had gone.


So often, the subjects are syrupy rural scenes, based in some indeterminate pre-1950s era and covering all the standard nostalgia bases. They are for people who had taken to looking back wistfully from a changed world in which they were not entirely at home.

The plate above is Early Morning Milk in the 1991 series Country Days. The Worcestershire artist, Chris Howells (1947-), is not untypical of those who received these commissions. After art college and experience in the commercial world, he became a freelance artist specialising in rural scenes for the popular market.

Ogden's 'Picturesque Villages' cigarette card set, 1936

This is the first in Ogden's fifty card series of Picturesque Villages. They run in alphabetical order of county, though the subject here, Coleshill, is now administratively part of Wiltshire rather than Berkshire.

There may or may not be deeper significance in the uneven spread of subjects across the country. Dorset, Gloucestershire and Yorkshire, for example, have three cards each whereas Sussex, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire have none, and the north west is hardly represented at all.

Looking at them all, a composite picture of the 1930s picturesque village would include plenty of cottages in the local vernacular style, the church, a village green or perhaps a market square, and a riverside scene with bridge. And almost no traffic.

The full list of subjects is:
1. Coleshill, Berks
2. Chenies, Bucks
3. Pampisford, Cambs
4. Morfa Nevin, Carn.
5. Mousehole, Cornwall
6. Polperro, Cornwall
7. Castleton, Derbys
8. Broad Hembury, Devon
9. Clovelly, Devon
10. Cerne Abbas, Dorset
11. Corde Castle, Dorset
12. Milton Abbas, Dorset
13. Finchingfield, Essex
14. Bourton-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire
15. Frampton-upon-Severn, Gloucestershire
16. Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire
17. Nether Wallop, Hampshire
18. Wherwell, Hants
19. Godshill, IOW
20. Weobley, Herefordshire
21. Aldbury, Herts
22. Westmill, Herts
23. Hemingford Grey, Huntingdonshire
24. Chilham, Kent
25. Otford, Kent
26. Norning, Norfolk
27. Upwell, Cambs & Norfolk
28. Collyweston, Northamptonshire
29. Wicken, Northants
30. Bamburgh, Northumberland
31. Blanchland, Northumberland
32. Wroxton, Oxon
33. Empingham, Rutland
34. Dunster, Somerset
35. Selworthy, Som
36. Cavendish, Suffolk
37. Kersey, Suffolk
38. Shere, Surrey
39. Marlcliff, Warwicks
40. Lowther, Westmorland
41. Ashton Keynes, Wiltshire
42. Castle Combe, Wiltshire
43. Lacock, Wilts
44. Steeple Ashton, Wilts
45. Broadway, Worcs
46. Elmley Castle, Worcs
47. Bishop Burton, Yorks
48. Runswick Bay, Yorkshire
49. Staithes, Yorks
50. West Tanfield, Yorkshire

Ogden's 'By the Roadside' cigarette card set, 1932

The link here with Frank Patterson's drawing of Ribchester in the previous post is that No.35 in Ogden's 'By the Roadside' set of cigarette cards is of the Norman chapel at Stidd, just outside Ribchester. The other forty nine cards in the series depict features of historical or natural interest in the countryside and ancient market towns - primarily of England, with just two of the subjects being from Scotland. On the reverse of each card is a brief description of the site and its history.


Every card incorporates a little circular map above the primary image showing its location and the main routes for getting there from principal centres up to ten miles away. The implication is that this was a suitable destination for a trip out by bike or by car.


UK tobacco companies began including illustrated cards in packs of cigarettes, initially as stiffeners, in the 1880s. By the 1930s the practice was at its peak and had developed its full marketing potential. Ogden's, part of the Imperial Tobacco Company, had joined in by the 1890s. Thousands of sets on popular subjects of the day were issued and avidly collected, and not only by small boys.

The sites chosen for this series give a glimpse into the manner in which heritage, the countryside, and leisure were being bracketed together in mainstream culture at the time. The full list of subjects is:
1. Shodfriars Hall, Boston, Lincs
2. Market Cross & stocks, Bottesford, Leics
3. The Bowder Stone, Borrowdale, Cumberland
4. Old Bridge and Chapel, Bradford-on-Avon, Wilts
5. Bronze Tables, Corn Street, Bristol
6. Market Cross, Castle Combe, Wilts
7. The Cross, Chester
8. All Saints, Chesterfield, Derbyshire
9. Wool Market, Chipping Campden, Gloucs
10. Triangular Bridge, Crowland, Lincolnshire
11. The Butter Market, Dartmouth, Devonshire
12. Yarn Market, Dunster, Somersetshire
13. Buttress, All Saints’ Church, Dunwich, Suffolk
14. Old Canongate Tollbooth, Edinburgh
15. Queen Eleanor Cross, Geddington, Northants
16. The Abbot’s Kitchen, Glastonbury, Som
17. Saxon Church, Greensted, nr Chipping Ongar, Essex
18. Hadrian’s Wall, near Hexham, Northumberland
19. Old Windmill, Hemingford grey, Huntingdonshire
20. The ‘Old House’, Hereford
21. The Guildhall, King’s Lynn, Norfolk
22. Saxon ‘King’s Stone’, Kingston-Upon-Thames
23. Lamarsh Church, Essex
24. Market Hall, Ledbury, Herefordshire
25. Market Cross, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire
26. The ‘Jews House’, Lincoln
27. Maiden Castle, near Dorchester
28. Old Grammar School, Market Harborough, Leics
29. The Old Cross, Meriden, Warwicks
30. Iron Cresset, Monken Hadley Church, near Barnet
31. Monkwearmouth Church, Sunderland
32. Butter Cross and Stocks, Oakham, Rutland
33. Old Cottages, pembridge, Herefordshire
34. Smithy, Penshurst, Kent
35. Stidd Chapel, Ribchester, Lancashire
36. Nuns’ House, Rochester, Kent
37. Rufus Stone, near Lyndhurst, Hampshire
38. A quaint street, St Ives, Cornwall
39. Old Bridge, St Ives, Huntingdonshire
40. 9th century crosses, Sandbach, Cheshire
41. Sompting Church, Sussex
42. Sundial and Lock-up, Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire
43. Beheading Stone, Stirling
44. Stokesay Castle, Shropshire
45. Harvard House, Stratford-upon-Avon
46. Turton Tower, Turton, Lancs
47. Waltham Abbey, Essex
48. Butter Cross, Witney, Oxfordshire
49. Market Cross, Wymondham, Norfolk
50. Clifford’s Tower, York

Frank Patterson, cycling artist, 1920s

Staying with the theme of cycling and the countryside, here is an orignal pen and ink drawing from 1929 by the most renowned of all cycling artists, Frank Patterson (1871-1952). For more than half a century from 1893, he provided a constant flow of distinctive illustrations for Cycling magazine. And from 1925 he was doing the same for the Cyclists' Touring Club Gazette. Ribchester, the subject here on the left, is a village of Roman origin that sits in a curve of the river Ribble. Roughly midway between Preston and Clitheroe, it is in ideal weekend cycling country.


Through thousands of drawings, all in this finely observed style, Patterson captured the essence of the early twentieth century countryside and the joy of exploring it on two wheels in such a way that associating cycling with the rural landscape became fixed in the cultural memory.


Patterson himself was a keen cyclist in his younger days until a knee injury forced him to give up at the age of 35. After completing his studies at Portsmouth Art School, he moved to London in search of work as a jobbing artist and for recreation took to cycling in rural parts south of the capital.


From 1898, Patterson lived and worked deep in the countryside at Pear Tree Farm near Billingshurst, West Sussex. Initially, it was rented at 9d a year and then in 1902 purchased for £5 (in 2008 it was on the market for £1.45 million). Here he lived a dual life, working his land and engaging in country pursuits in the morning whilst afternoons were spent in the study, fulfilling his contract of ten drawings a week for the magazine publishers Temple Press.



A second Patterson drawing we have acquired for the project, this one dated 1924.

Cyclists' Touring Club sign, 1930s

These signs were once a common feature of the countryside, (and some are still to be found) attached to the front walls of selected hotels, bed and breakfast establishments, and tea shops where the Cyclists' Touring Club member would receive a preferential rate. This enamel type appeared in the 1930s, replacing a larger shield-shaped cast iron version that had been used hitherto. The wheel and wings emblem was adopted in 1886, eight years after the Club's foundation to promote the interests of serious 'cycle tourists'. Improvements to cycle technology, including the introduction of the Rover Safety bicycle in 1885 and of pneumatic tyres in 1888, made it a popular form of leisure transport for exploring the countryside and by 1900 the Club had over 60,000 members. Thereafter, it waned somewhat as the early motor car started to attract attention but then came back strongly after the First World War. In the 1930s, the Club enjoyed royal patronage from both George V and George VI.


The Club's Annual Guide listed thousands of cyclist friendly establishments by county with their current charges. Each county had a local club representative, known as the Chief Consul.


On request, the Club would draw up recommended excursion routes for members to follow for a cycling holiday. In 1955, the first in a series of special cycle-rail day trips was organised with the participants being delivered out of London to a rural spot from where local members would guide them on a circular tour.

Woodcraft Folk badge, 1951

It is not uncommon for the countryside to assume importance in our culture as a kind of polar opposite to the city. If the countryside might be seen as embodying health, beauty and goodness then it follows that the city represents the reverse: disease, ugliness and evil. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was concern in some quarters that the growing urban mass of population in the towns and cities was itself being imbued with these qualities. How could the nation continue to manage and control a far-flung empire if the regenerative capacity of its people were subject to moral and physical corruption? The result was a rash of uniformed, semi-militaristic youth organisations aimed at easing the urban adolescent’s turbulent passage into civilised adulthood by teaching the virtues of loyalty, self-discipline and exercise. The most successful of these was Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouting movement of 1908, based in no small degree on a youth group called the Woodcraft Indians that was founded in the US by Ernest Thompson Seton in 1902. Seton’s group raised to a heroic ideal the outdoor life, the bush skills of self-reliance, and the communal life of camping as practiced by the native American Indian.

After the First World War, some looked to continue these interests in the character-building pursuit of outdoor life but without the quasi-military overtones of national chauvinism. Out of this came The Woodcraft Folk movement, which was instigated by Leslie Paul and first appeared in Lewisham, south London, in 1925. Adopting its tribal training philosophy from Seton, it placed camping and open air activities like hiking, together with pageantry, at the heart of its programme. Unlike scouting, it was an avowedly working class organisation, open to girls as well as boys from the start, and aligned with the international cooperative and socialist movements.

The Woodcraft Folk never had mass appeal at the time - 5,000 members by 1939 - and was variously criticised in some quarters for supposed pacifist or communist sympathies. Its connections with international childrens' organisations and its international camps - the badge above is from the 1951 camp held in connection with the Festival of Britain - remain a vital component of its work. In the last quarter of the century, the movement enjoyed a revival as its positive environmental credentials received wider recognition.

Emmerdale Farm poster, 1977

How does TV affect cultural perceptions of the countryside? Does it reflect them or does it shape them - or perhaps a bit of both? Certainly, over the last quarter of the century there was plenty of material, with Yorkshire featuring particularly strongly. Last of the Summer Wine, for example, the world's longest running sitcom, first appeared on the BBC in 1973 and continues to be filmed in and around Holmfirth. Thirsk was the setting for All Creatures Great and Small based on James Herriot's vet stories and first screened over the period 1978-90. Always in ITV's top five performing shows since 1992 has been Heartbeat, a gently nostalgic rural police drama set in the 1960s and filmed around Goathland on the North Yorkshire moors. In each case the programmes have spawned lasting local tourist industry initiatives - Visit Herriot Country etc.

And then there is Emmerdale Farm. Conceived as a kind of televisual Archers, it was first screened in October 1972 with the Sugden family and their farm providing the core storyline. Arncliffe in north Yorkshire was the location for the early shooting, followed by Esholt near Bradford from the mid 1970s. Since 1989, the programme has been known simply as Emmerdale to indicate its transition to a general purpose early evening rural soap. It remains at No.3 in the TV soap rankings. Shooting now takes place at a purpose-built village set on the Harewood estate near Leeds.

I have dated the poster to 1977 because this is the year that Hugh Manning, the Vicar in the picture, first appeared. Trident Television, listed at the bottom, had ceased by 1982. No doubt Emmerdale aficionados will correct me if I'm wrong!

The Pony Club, 1929

This recently acquired sign relates to one of those key communities of interest in the twentieth century countryside - the Pony Club. The arrival of riding as an organised leisure and sporting activity for children owes much to the rise of an affluent middle class with rural connections in the decades either side of mid-century.

The Institute of the Horse inaugurated its junior branch, the Pony Club, on November 1st 1929 with the aim of 'interesting young people in riding and sport and at the same time offering the opportunity of higher instruction in this direction than many of them can obtain individually'. A nationwide network of district committees was set up, closely allied to the territory and organisation of local Hunts. By 1931, there were 59 Pony Club Branches, with a total membership of just over 4,400. In 1958, membership stood at over 25,000.

An enduring favourite, the Pony Club camp, made its first appearance in 1931 and the sign above is evidence of efforts at the time to create riding-friendly establishments around the countryside.


In 1934, the Institute of the Horse and Pony Club merged with the National Horse Association of Great Britain to form the British Horse Society, with the Pony Club as one of its constituent parts.

The Pony Club now has over 110,000 members spread through 18 countries and celebrated its 80th year in 2009 with the opening of new offices at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire, and the announcement of a new President, Lady Lloyd-Webber.