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.

Far From the Madding Crowd, 1967

This is an original poster for the film of Hardy's first successful novel, published in 1874, and set in his own 'partly real, partly dream country' of Wessex. The strip taped along the top referring to Thursday June 20th connects it with a 1968 showing.

At the time this was the most authentic big screen adaptation of a Hardy work. It was directed by John Schlesinger, scripted by Frederic Raphael, photography was by Nicolas Roeg and the folk-based musical score was by Richard Rodney Bennett. Julie Christie starred as Bathsheba Everdene, Alan Bates as Gabriel Oak, Peter Finch as William Boldwood and Terence Stamp as Sergeant Troy. Cinematically, Schlesinger subsequently regretted following the novel too closely, making for an over-long film and pedestrian plotline with lots of epsiodes (the story was originally written in serialised form). Doubts were expressed at the time about Julie Christie in the main role and the implied addition of a 1960s style feminist agenda.

Shot on location at more than 20 sites around Dorset and Wiltshire, one of the film's strong points is its powerful portrayal of Hardy's Wessex through Roeg's cinematography. David Shipman in his two volume 'The Story Of Cinema' (1982) declared that there had never been a better film about the British countryside.

Ercol chair, 1960s

Ercol furniture is unquestionably one of the great style success stories of the twentieth century. It’s a survivor, never quite sinking out of fashion before a new retro wave brings it bobbing back up again. It also has a rural connection, which is why this Goldsmith rocking chair from the 1960s (design number 435) has been added to the collection.


The firm is rooted in the traditional craft of chairmaking centred on the Buckinghamshire Chilterns. For hundreds of years, generations of bodgers worked away in the extensive woods of the area turning legs and spindles from the native beech which they supplied to the chair makers in and around High Wycombe for onward distribution to London and beyond in their thousands. These chairs, with their adzed elm seats, came in many different variants but have been generically known since the eighteenth century as Windsor chairs.


Lucian Ercolani, a young Italian designer, started making furniture in High Wycombe in 1920. His big break came in 1944 when he won an order from the Board of Trade for 100,000 low-cost chairs which he met by re-working the basic Windsor form into a chair that could be mass-produced. He went on to exhibit at the Britain Can Make It exhibition in 1946 and the Festival of Britain in 1951 where the light, simple but modern feel of his new-look Windsor furniture was a hit with cash-strapped post-War home makers.


Many of the classic Ercol lines are still produced today, along with more contemporary styles, at the firm’s purpose-built factory now located in Princes Risborough.

Yattendon jug, c.1900

Its connection to the village arts and crafts movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, together with a local link, has brought this item into the project collection.


It comes from the Berkshire village of Yattendon where a metal-working evening class for young men was organised for more than twenty years until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 by Elizabeth Waterhouse (1834-1918). She and her husband Alfred, the distinguished late Victorian architect, moved to Yattendon in 1881 from nearby Reading, having purchased the estate and begun building a new country house for it a few years earlier. (Their previous home, Foxhill, is now part of the University of Reading and the Museum of English Rural Life is housed in another Waterhouse building which was originally designed for biscuit manufacturer, Alfred Palmer).

Elizabeth Waterhouse deployed her literary and artistic skills to play an active part in the life of the local community. The idea for the evening class came from the same root as the Keswick School of Industrial Arts (see earlier post) and other initiatives around the country. It was affiliated to the Home Arts and Industries Association which came together in 1884 with philanthropic aims to stimulate handicrafts in rural districts, give young people something useful and wholesome to do in their spare time, and create avenues of communication between the educated and labouring classes.


The Yattendon class made a wide range of repoussé copper and brass items for domestic use, often to designs by Elizabeth Waterhouse herself, which grew in reputation with the help of awards won at the Association’s annual show at the Albert Hall. Over 5,000 pieces were made in total and sold through a shop in the village, at Liberty’s in London and other outlets.

Withnail and I, 1986

An earlier comment to this blog suggested that the way that the countryside is depicted in films, TV programmes etc is an important area for this project to address. Film posters are a way of representing that so here’s one that was picked up at a recent Christie’s sale. This is an original poster dating from the first release of the film in 1986 and with artwork by Ralph Steadman.

Withnail and I was written and directed by Bruce Robinson, starred Richard E.Grant and Paul McGann and was financed by Handmade Films – George Harrison is in the credits as a producer. It has achieved the status of a cult classic in spite of being only moderately successful initially at the box office. There are websites devoted to the film and numerous clips are to be found on Youtube. Sleddale Hall near Shap in Cumbria, the farmhouse where much of the shooting was done, became a pilgrimage site for fans and was sold in its derelict state in early 2009 amid huge publicity.

The film is set in the 1960s and follows two out of work and heavy drinking actors who seek escape from the squalor of their London flat for a sojourn at uncle Monty’s cottage in the country. Its grim and darkly funny portrait of the countryside features a gallery of sinister rural caricatures. In popular culture we seem to want the countryside to be either pastoral and idyllic or strange and menacing. It is a common theme to set out expecting one, only to find the other.

1950s Design

It is not uncommon for great designers to derive inspiration from the natural world or the countryside. Here are two parts of a dinner service - a vegetable dish and a salad plate - from a design called Nature Study. It was produced by Midwinter and designed in 1955 by Terence Conran.


Midwinter Pottery was founded by William Robinson Midwinter in Stoke in 1910, started making dinner ware in the 1930s, and twenty years later was employing over 600 people. Its reputation was in traditional lines until the founder's son, Roy Midwinter, influenced by modern styling he had seen in America, launched the new Stylecraft range of tableware in 1953. The contemporary design and lively patterns - many by the firm's renowned designer Jessie Tait - were a great success in a market slowly emerging from post-war restrictions on consumer goods.

The new shapes, including the television screen-shaped plates quickly became 50s style icons.

A new version, the Fashion range, was added to Stylecraft in 1955 and amongst the first of its designs was Conran's Nature Study.


Then aged 24, this was one of Conran's early appearances on the design scene in his own right. After leaving St Martins College of Art and Design to do some work for the 1951 Festival of Britain, it was some fabric designs and an interest in Italian black and white styling that brought him to the attention of Roy Midwinter.

Conran produced other designs for Midwinter, including Saladware (below) and re-designed the firm's showroom in 1956. His own design practice was then under way, concentrating initially on furniture, and he opened his first Habitat shop in Chelsea in 1964.


Midwinter Potteries continued through to the 1980s. Their styles of the 50s and 60s have become modern classics and are now highly collectable.

Thatched cottage biscuit barrel, 1930s

Here’s something that I picked up recently at Alfie’s Antique Market in Marylebone, where you can immerse yourself in decades of twentieth century design. It’s a piece of Carlton Ware, (pattern no.806) part of a set known as cottage ware which included a honey pot, cheese dish, milk jug etc along with the biscuit barrel.


Carlton Ware was originally a trade name of the pottery firm Wiltshaw and Robinson which was founded in Stoke on Trent in 1890 and subsequently changed its name to Carlton Ware Ltd in 1958. Between the two World Wars, supplementing their high end output, the firm found a good deal of success with novelty and other ranges of bright and cheerful tableware aimed at the popular end of the market. The registered design number on the biscuit barrel (778973) puts it to 1932.

There can be few more iconic symbols of the English countryside than the thatched cottage and its associations with the rural picturesque that go back beyond the nineteenth century. In truth, it was a humble, poor man’s dwelling but yet an object of desire when viewed from an urban perspective. The reality of the countryside in the early 1930s, deep in agricultural depression, was that many thatched cottages were falling into ruin but yet the cosy symbolism remained.

Thatched roofing today scores highly on status value, the more so as interest in sustainable materials has increased. It is also high maintenance and not without controversy as owners, conservationists, planners and thatchers argue about the ethics of using cheaper and more convenient imported materials, instead of the home grown and ‘traditional’.

The School Prints II, 1947

Our other School Print, this one from the second series of 1947, is Harvesting by John Nash (1893-1977). It is a bright golden scene that typifies Nash’s finely observed but lighthearted sense of landscape and rural life. He was a natural, down to earth artist with no formal training behind him (unlike his brother Paul) and one who expressed himself through a charming romanticism and good humour in spite of serving as War Artist in both world wars.


Here, a field of corn is being cut and tied into sheaves by a horse drawn reaper binder. As the machine goes round in ever tighter circles, the rabbits trapped in what remains of the standing crop are obliged to make a run for it. Distracted from their task of collecting the sheaves into stooks, the other figures are trying to bag a rabbit or two for the pot, without too much success it seems.

There are so many neat touches in the picture: the glorious variety of trees that skirt the field; the ramshackle farm workers’ bikes propped in the hedge; the yappy dogs; and the curious geometric pattern of the remaining corn that can indeed result when starting at the outer edge and working inwards. In a very few years this kind of scene would be rare as the combine harvester replaced the binder, and shorter-strawed varieties of corn began to dominate.

The twenty-four School Prints were produced by a process known as auto-lithography in which the artists themselves applied their designs directly to the stone block. It was this that enabled the company, somewhat controversially, to term them as ‘original’ lithographs. They sold in large numbers to both schools and the general public and captured a mood in those early post-War years.

The School Prints, 1940s

The latest two acquisitions relate to the post-War, moving forward and new beginning, aspect of the 1940s. They are two original lithographs from the School Prints series of 1946 and 1947. This one, No.3 in the first series of twelve issued in 1946, is titled Tractor and was by the artist Kenneth Rowntree (1915-1997).


School Prints Ltd was an idealistic enterprise set up originally in the 1930s with the aim of making available to schools, and particularly those children who would probably never visit a gallery, reproductions of great paintings. It was the brainchild of Derek Rawnsley, grandson of Canon Rawnsley of The National Trust fame (see earlier post). In 1941, now serving as an RAF pilot, he married the equally well connected Brenda Hugh-Jones and it was she who was to keep the School Prints project going after his death two years later and once her own distinguished war service was over.

With the idea now to commission artists to produce 'original' lithographs for sale to primary schools, Brenda Rawnsley put a team of experts and advisors together. It was headed by Herbert Read who has been described as the leading spokesman for the arts of his generation, an anarchist and a visionary who believed that art should be the basis of all learning. 'Education through Art', he wrote, 'is education for peace'.

Kenneth Rowntree a Quaker and conscientious objector, had been one of the artists commissioned during the war by The Pilgrim Trust for its Recording Britain project with the purpose of distilling aspects of heritage, landscape and the British way of life that might not survive the hostilities. In 'Tractor', he provides a soothing image of pastoral peace and calm to heal a young generation scarred by war.

In the tractor and plough, Rowntree's distinctive style of the very flat but highly detailed image is evident. He may well have taken the similar type of views to be found in manufacturers' catalogues of the day as his guide. The tractor depicted is clearly a Standard Fordson, in the harvest gold livery that was first used in 1937.


And the plough? A Ransomes No.12 two furrow self-lift - a common tractor plough of the period made by the famous Ipswich manufacturer.

Grow Your Own Food poster, 1942

Any consideration of the countryside in the 1940s will tend to fall into two parts. On the one hand there is the War, and on the other there is what happened – in the way of a new beginning - immediately following. To represent the Second World War, we have purchased an original signed poster dating from 1942 by Abram Games (1914-1996).

Games was one of the most influential graphic designers of the twentieth century with a gallery of iconic images, including the emblem for the 1951 Festival of Britain, to his credit. He was officially appointed War Office Poster Designer and came up with 100 designs, among them a couple of Grow Your Own Food examples. Posters and slogans were a vital means of communication and encouragement at the time.

1942 was a critical year in the War for food supplies. The Battle of the Atlantic in the spring threatened to throttle imports with 275 merchant ships being lost in March alone. The national food production strategy demanded that a further 1.75 million acres of land be ploughed to help make up the shortfall whilst in the same year conscription of farm workers was lowered to the age of 18 and drained a further 100,000 men from the land. Recruitment of Land Girls was accelerated and the nation at large was enjoined to do its bit.

Games’ poster, with its bottom line of ‘supply your own cookhouse’ was directed at the military as an encouragement for service personnel to turn available parts of their bases into allotments for food production.

Eric Newton, writing about posters in the journal Art and Industry in July 1943 said: 'Suddenly with the outbreak of war, the poster trebled its importance. From being a commercial luxury it became a national necessity. Yesterday it was a frivolous temptation. Today it is a weapon to be reckoned with.'

Farming Toys

This subject will crop up more than once over the course of the project because of the enduring way that toys both shape and reflect notions of farming and the countryside from an early age.


I’m starting with a tractor because it is one of those instantly recognisable objects, like the steam train, that children are drawn to almost intuitively, whatever their background. This is the Fordson Major die-cast toy tractor, No.128F, that was made over the period 1948-1958 by W.Britain Ltd.



This was the first new tractor to be made by Britains post-War. Until the 1970s, they made only Ford and Massey Ferguson tractors but thereafter added many other manufacturers and machines to the list. The older examples like this one are no longer toys as they have become highly collectable and fetch prices way beyond pocket money levels - particularly if the original box is intact.


Britains was founded by William Britain senior (1828-1906) and specialised initially in toy soldiers. But after the First World War, market demand for less militaristic toys saw it branch out into the Home Farm Series of animals, implements and other paraphernalia of the farm. It became a household name and the brand still exists although the firm was bought out by Ertl, another famous die-cast toy maker, in 1997.

The Fordson Major E27N tractor was launched from the Dagenham factory in 1945. It was a step up from the smaller pre-War type of Fordson and was available with hydraulic three-point linkage and a range of mounted implements. By 1951, 200,000 had been built for use in Britain and overseas.

The Laura Ashley dress, 1970s

After the loud brashness of the 1960s, one branch of womens fashion in the early/mid 70s saw a return to quieter pastoral themes rooted in popular rural nostalgia of the day. The name most associated with this trend is Laura Ashley so, in the month that has seen the death of co-founder Bernard Ashley, this seems the appropriate opportunity to reveal the two latest acquisitions.

We have a smock top from the 1970s, evidence of a renewed enthusiasm at the time for a style traditionally associated with the countryside.



And a folk or ‘prairie’ dress of simple lines, definitely not of the city, with that almost home-made look.



The firm began as a small husband and wife operation in the early 1950s but reached its zenith in the 70s when the trademark floral designs and pastel colours were applied to dresses of a cottage style and make that harked back to a mythical past of uncomplicated home loving country life. Ironically, on the back of this success, the Ashleys enjoyed all the trappings of a mega rich lifestyle before Laura’s premature death in 1985 was followed by a stockmarket flotation and, ultimately, corporate shake down.


Laura Ashley production started in London in the early 1950s, moved to Kent in 1955 and then to Carno in Powys, Wales, in 1961.

This was the look that characterised campus parties and formals in the mid 1970s.

The Barbour Jacket

A classic Barbour waxed jacket has now been acquired as part of this project. It dates from the 1980s when the Barbour made that cultural breakthrough from looking good in the field to being part of urban chic. In the punk and post-punk world of anti-establishment anti fashion, it was seized upon by the metropolitan elite, and its aspirants, as a counter symbol of an unchanging order and of the solid and practical virtues often associated with the countryside.


In fact, the Barbour story itself is quite prosaic. John Barbour, from a farming background in Galloway, established a drapers shop in South Shields in 1894. Workwear was one of its specialities, including oilskins for the fishermen, shipbuilders, farmers and shepherds of the area. From 1908, mail order was an important part of the business, and in the 1930s a successful range of oiled cotton suits for motorcycle wear was introduced.


During the War years and after, its reputation for heavy duty weatherproof outdoor clothing for both civilian and military use grew and then it was in the early 1980s that a new range of light jackets - the Bedale, the Border and the Beaufort - was introduced for the wider leisure market with appeal to town and country alike.


How do you date a Barbour?
Look at the Royal Warrants. Barbour received Royal Warrants from the Duke of Edinburgh in 1974, Her Majesty the Queen in 1982 and the Prince of Wales in 1987. Our example has the first two warrants but not the third so dates from between 1982 and 1987.


Our example comes from Yorkshire. It has encountered barbed wire fences and has the patches to prove it. The closest many Barbours come to a flock of sheep now is the crowds at Shepherds Bush market. From the Sunday Sun, April 2008: 'They were once the preserve of royalty and farmers but now it appears Barbour jackets are becoming the latest fashion fad for trendy pop singers and celebrities.

Singer Lily Allen, actress Sadie Frost and socialite Peaches Geldof have all been spotted wearing the North-made traditional waxed garment, regularly worn by the Queen and Prince Charles.

The all-weather country jackets are usually worn during field sports or for working outdoors in the country. But it appears young urbanites don’t care about the brand’s former Sloaney connections and are turning it into a must-have style trend.

Sir Bob Geldof’s daughter Peaches wore hers with a pair of hot pants at Glastonbury, while Lily Allen even performs gigs in hers. The celebrity endorsement has sent tills ringing at the South Tyneside-based business, which employs 450 people at its offices in South Shields, and has seen turnover hit £65m'.

1960s motoring

My father first bought a car in 1961 - a Ford Popular, like the second vehicle from the left above - and as far as I am aware he never used public transport again. One pound would get you four gallons of petrol and the ritual Sunday afternoon excursions into the greener corners of Kent and Surrey - along with most of South London's population - are part of childhood memory. Summer holidays would see daring expeditions to unknown parts, the west country or North Wales perhaps, which in pre-motorway days might take 12 hours on the road and encounter major traffic bottlenecks at every market town along the way.

Aga Update

(See earlier post of 10th November 08)
In his column in The Guardian this week, George Monbiot launched his own one man campaign against the Aga. Railing against its carbon output, he stormed 'I've lost count of the number of aspirational middle-class greens I know who own one of these monsters and believe that they are somehow compatible (perhaps because they look good in a country kitchen) with a green lifestyle'. So the iconography remains as potent as ever.

Meanwhile Aga shares fell 10 per cent on news that the firm, having already cut 400 jobs, would be announcing appreciably lower profits for the second half of 2008.

The car and the countryside

The motor car’s impact on the countryside over the twentieth century was of course immense and will be explored at a number of points in this project. From the beginning, rural imagery has been deployed to sell cars and present them in a positive light. Prior to the First World War, motor cars were predominantly the preserve of the ruling elite and the rich enthusiast. It was in the inter-War period that cars moved into the realm of the middle class and began to exert a powerful influence on patterns of life and work and recreation. By the 1960s, the car had moved further to become a mass consumer item with all the resulting pressures and consequences that have continued to unfold since.

Two advertisement illustrations below, both from Country Life, relate to the earlier part of the story. The first, from Easter 1915, shows a couple taking what by implication looks like a proprietary spin around the estate in their large stately Daimler. The message is that the car is at one with the solid and traditional values of the rural landscape beyond and is also fit for a wounded hero to travel in, whilst perfectly capable of being handled by a woman.


The second is only a few years later, 1923, but the image is subtly different. The car is not just passing through the countryside but here is part of it and is a vehicle of work rather than purely leisure and with a farmer owner, albeit one of the more well-heeled variety.