Julie Moore - final PhD submission.pdf - University of Hertfordshire ...

The period 1880-1914 saw no shortage of people willing to tell farmers just what
they were doing wrong. Rider Haggard complained in 1902 of the parochial attitude
of farmers who, ‘look too much to their intimate and private interests, and allow their
views to be hedged in too closely by the conditions of their immediate
neighbourhood’, 56 while Daniel Hall wrote in 1913 of the ‘low mental calibre of many
of the men occupying the land.’ 57 Here was a view of farmers as authors of their own
misfortune, backward looking and unable to respond to a changing market. Arthur
Smith, editor of the Herts Illustrated Review, bemoaned the reluctance of farmers to
undertake anything new even when faced with falling prices and changing demand,
writing that, ‘prejudice and a great dislike of change in any direction are amongst the
causes of losses in the past’; 58 he called on them to introduce new techniques and
reduce production costs if they wished to make any profit. Daniel Hall called for
farmers to become more businesslike, scientific and flexible in their approach to
cropping patterns and the use of labour. Farmers should be using more machines
and looking to employ fewer, but better paid men, arguing that ‘it is less, not more,
labour we want on most of our farms.’ 59
This theme of farmers who did not know how to farm reappeared throughout this
period; seemingly the profits which had been made in the years prior to depression
were the result of simply sitting back and letting the coffers fill. More recently, Hunt
and Pam in their re-appraisal of the approaches adopted in Essex have argued that
modern accounts continue to criticise ‘low’ farming, seeing it as evidence of failure;
yet when it came to implementing change, local knowledge was vital and ‘cereal
farmers on the boulder clay and medium Essex soils would have been far more
aware of such developments than their late twentieth-century critics.’ 60 Low farming
could make perfect economic sense for the man with poor access to the railway and
his capital depleted by a run of poor harvests.
56
Rider Haggard, Rural England, Introduction p.xiii.
57
Hall, Pilgrimage, p.335.
58
A. Smith, ‘Agricultural Notes and Comments’, HIR Vol.1, (January 1893), pp.56-60, pp.56,
130.
59 Hall, Pilgrimage, p.53.
60 Hunt and Pam, ‘Managerial Failure’, p.260.
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