Hunting print, 1912

This is one in a set of signed prints, Twelve Hunting Countries, produced in 1912 by the acclaimed animal artist, Cecil Aldin (1870-1935). It has the title 'VWH Cricklade. Into the Vale from Blunsdon', referring to the Vale of the White Horse Hunt with its kennels in Cricklade, Wiltshire and the village of Blunsdon which has since been all but swallowed up by the expansion of modern Swindon. The Hunt is shown in full cry hurtling across the road, over the neatly laid boundary hedge, past the bare pollarded trees, and on into the open winter landscape of subdued colours and small enclosed fields. Hunting was in its heyday and heroic scenes of the chase, popular amongst supporters and followers, were supplied to the market by a coterie of specialist artists including Charles "Snaffles" Johnson Payne (1884-1967) and Lionel Edwards (1878-1966) as well as Aldin himself.

Cecil Aldin, from a wealthy property developing family, trained at what is now the Royal College of Art and then at Midhurst in Sussex, under the animal artist Frank Calderon (1865-1943). From the 1890s, he enjoyed a successful and varied commercial career, designing posters, illustrating books and magazines, and creating stage sets. In his youth he developed an ongoing and consuming passion for hunting that saw him become Master of the South Berks Hunt in 1914 and for twenty years the Hunt's headquarters at Purley near Pangbourne became his base. He is pictured in his studio at the kennels below.


Aldin's book work included a series of illustrations for a 1912 edition of Anna Sewell's Black Beauty.


Aldin's art was empathetic, a visual expression of the relationship between man and beast, and he fixed in the public mind an enduring image of light and life in a horse-drawn countryside.

Farmyard alarm clock, 1950s

This is a child's pictorial alarm clock, one of a range made by Smiths English Clocks Ltd in the early 1950s. Smiths had been making clocks for the domestic market since 1931 and stopped in 1979. The trade name on this one Smith Alarm was in use from 1952-5. It was made at the factory in Wishaw near Glasgow.

The cock crowing at the start of a new day is an appropriate visual theme for an alarm clock and there is a typically rustic scene complete with timber-framed thatched cottage in the background. It's a playful, relaxing image to nod you off to sleep and for good measure the pecking hen on the left rocks backwards and forwards in synchrony with the tricking.

Ruby Smith's diary, 1927

Ruby Elizabeth Smith was 18 when she started keeping this diary at the beginning of 1927 and she stuck to the task consistently over the course of the year. The diary itself bears the stamp of Liverpool-based livestock feed merchants Calthrop Bros Ltd, and is of the type that would have been issued to regular customers at Chrstmas in the hope of continuing business in the year to come. Ruby lived with her parents and younger brother and sister, Eric and Violet, on a small farm at Licks Head, Ramshorn, in Staffordshire - west of Ashbourne and north of Uttoxeter. The brief but regular diary entries provide a window into the life of this young woman.


She spent her time helping with the milking and other farming tasks, with housework and making her own clothes. There was usually a piano lesson once a week and attendance at both church and chapel every Sunday, presumably to provide musical accompaniment for the singing. Her father often goes to Uttoxeter or Leek on a Wednesday, to sell eggs and buy little necessities - in this case it's a new pair of wellingtons for Ruby, (an early reference to this kind of footwear) perhaps to make up for the ringworm that she's complaining of on the Monday.


There are entertainments too: a frequent flow of visits from neighbouring relatives, the occasional party or dance, and on Easter Monday they all go off to nearby Alton Towers - the ancestral home of the Earls of Shrewsbury, with its fine house and gardens, was taken over by a consortium of local businessmen in 1920 and opened as a tourist attraction four years later.


On the 29th June, she gets up early to experience the total eclipse of the sun, and then much of July and into August is spent dodging the showers and downpours and trying to make some decent hay.


There is a new round of haymaking in late September before the diary entry for 5th October underlines in relief the words Finished the Hay . Then it's on to collecting damsons and other fruits for sale.


In December, there is a flurry of chicken and produce selling, and playing for a local performance of Aladdin before things wind down to a white Christmas.

Marc cartoon, 1978

As it's election time, here's the original pen and ink version of a political cartoon that appeared in The Times on June 14th 1978. The cartoonist was Marc aka Mark Boxer (1931-1988).

The glammed-up rider on the horse with a Vote Tory rosette towers over a rather more prosaic and head-scarfed woman holding a newspaper headline Labour to Ban Hunting. This relates to moves within parts of the governing Labour Party of the day to adopt a more hostile approach to hunting. Tony Benn, chair of the Home Policy Committee, was trying to get a commitment to ban fox hunting into the Party's manifesto for the forthcoming General Election. A policy pamphlet published in July, Living without Cruelty: Labour's Charter for Animal Protection did indeed recommend a ban but when it came to the 1979 manifesto only hare coursing and deer hunting were included, not fox hunting.

Attitudes to hunting raised tensions within the Labour Party throughout the twentieth century. Some supporters were close to the anti-blood sports Humanitarian League in the early 1900s and some helped set up the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports in 1925. Private members' bills on the subject were periodically raised, without success, in Parliament. On a more pragmatic level, the Party hierarchy was obliged to recognise the level of attachment in rural areas across the social classes to hunting and other field sports if it wasn't to be perceived as solely an urban political force.

Mark Boxer's cartoons were first seen in the late 1960s, first in The Listener, later in The Times and finally The Guardian. He was also editor variously of the Sunday Times colour supplement and Tatler.

Golf & the countryside, 1960s

The Ford Consul Cortina Mark 1 was introduced in 1962, with the 1500 super estate version - complete with American-style mock wood panelling - following in March of the following year. This was an appropriate vehicle for Mr Middle Manager to be seen driving to his local golf club at the weekends.

The craze for golf spread to the middle classes in England at the end of the nineteenth century and a flurry of courses began to appear alongside the new suburban villas close to larger towns and cities. Some subsequently disappeared beneath further inexorable housing development but the second half of the twentieth century brought widening popularity to the game and the creation of hundreds of new courses in rural or semi-rural locations. The Dunham Forest Club, for example, is within 30 minutes drive of both Manchester and Liverpool city centres and was formed in 1960 out of wooded parkland that had formerly been part of the Earl of Stamford's estate. It was a process of suburbanising the countryside that still continues.


This is a Hole-in-One golf cup (the top should be cradling the ball) that was awarded to Albert Goodsell for a hole in one at the 190 yard sixth hole of the Chesterfield Golf Club on 6th July 1969. The club's history is not untypical. It was founded in 1897 and moved to its present site on the outskirts of Chesterfield in 1906. It was then only nine holes but in the later 1920s the neighbouring Yew Tree Farm was acquired and a further nine holes added. Selling farmland for conversion to golfing fairways was one possible option for beleaguered estate owners during the inter-war agricultural depression.

Farm sale poster, 1931

Since the piece below was written in 2010, more information has come to light about what happened at Manor Farm in 1931 via the descendants of Mr Ayre. The rather gloomy inference I drew from the stark detail of the poster is misplaced, notwithstanding the very difficult conditions for farming at the time. The sale of livestock and equipment marked not an end but rather a new beginning because ownership of the farm itself passed that same year into the hands of Mr Ayre's daughter and son-in-law, and the family have continued to farm there to the present day.

The key feature here is the date, 1931, because this is the story of a farm broken by the terrible agricultural depresssion of the inter-war years. The place is Manor Farm Redbourne, between Brigg and Lincoln, and we're told that Mr E.Owen Ayre's lease has expired, thus necessitating the coming sale of everything - stock and equipment - off the farm on April 1st. From that we can probably assume that the lease ran out on the previous quarter day which would have been 25th March, or Lady Day.

Mr Ayre can't be moving to another farm, because he's selling all he has, nor is he handing over to a son, because the lease is not being renewed. I suspect that he is getting on in years, and is a traditional type of farmer, perhaps a little old fashioned, who is unable or unwilling to carry on in the very severe economic conditions prevailing at the time. Why old fashioned? Well, it's a 370 acre mixed farm worked entirely with horses. There are six prime plough horses here - Prince, Daisy, Short, Duke, Turpin and Captain - together with some younger ones being brought on and for lighter work. Clearly, Mr Ayre was not dabbling with those new-fangled tractors and the list of implements for sale shows nothing that might be considered modern or forward-looking at the time.

Tough conditions in farming lasted through the 1920s but plumbed new depths in the period 1929-32, and the grain growing areas on the eastern side of the country were most severely affected. World markets were glutted with cereals and there was no money in trying to grow them at home. By the beginning of 1930, prices were below the level of 1914 and in the coming year fell by another third. The overall agricultural price index, which included all farming commodities, stood at 292 in 1920 but was down to 120 in 1931 and still falling. It was reckoned that the average cost of growing wheat was £8 per acre and the average return to the farmer no more than £3 or £4. No wonder that Mr Ayre decided that he couldn't carry on. He wasn't alone, for others also were cutting their losses and selling up. Landowners, often unable to let vacant farms even at a knock-down price, were left with little choice but to abandon them until conditions improved.

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