If Nicola Chester had written a straightforward biography of Julia White, it would have been a good book by any measure. White's life was remarkable. Her entry into the male world of farming, her farming life at a pivotal moment in British history during a time when British agriculture was being transformed is fascinating in and of itself.
But Chester has gone much further than that. By comparing her own life in rural Britain she has used a "distant mirror" to explore the world we live in today. From climate change to gender, from LGBT+ issues to horses versus industrial farming Chester covers some big questions. In studying the past, Chester does not romanticise. True there is fun; laughter, jokes, food and drink and happiness. But rural Britain in the 1940s and 1950s, as in the 21st century, also had poverty, tied cottages, low pay and greedy landlords. There was also the risk that the roof would fall in because the previous owner hadn't done any repairs for years.
This then, is a book about change and continuity. In his wonderful history of the Second World War, A People's War, historian Angus Calder noted that the 56,000 tractors on British farms in 1939 mushroomed to 230,000 by January 1946. Milking machines increased by 60 percent between 19424 and 1946. Calder wrote:
Agriculture was dragged... into the 20th century, the ploughman servicing hist rtractor and the farmer calculating his needs for fertilisers drew closer in spirit and attitudes to the engineers and manger who made, among other things, the new farm machinery.
Chester's account of White's period running Manor Farm shows the human reality of that change. We have the beloved older farm worker who has built, and decorated, his last haystack, the horses that are not no longer needed and the flocks of birds and clouds of insects that will disappear out as industrial agriculture sweeps across the land. As Chester says, with pain born of personal insight:
The horses vanish so quickly from the countryside, in justa few short years ,it is astonishing. And with them, so much else - wildflower meadows, clouds of butterflies, blooms of insectrs, works from the soil, birds from the sky, and people and their voices from the land. Singing. Mechanisation saves people, it feeds them; it allows ease to those punishing hard jobs and lives and covers the yawning gaps in labour.
Chester imagines herself travelling in time to talk to Misses White, Beaumont and Mason. She thinks about how they would react to books like Silent Spring. Would they be horrified? She's sure they would. White clearly loved the natural world. But would they do something different? Here Chester is less sure. Modern farming, and White's role in Manor Farm, was to maximise food production and profit. That meant getting the tractors and the combines and, sometimes, seeing the workers go into retirement.
The question of gender is, perhaps, the most central of the issues raised by Chester's book. White stood out as a female farmer. But she was part of a small number of women who entered that "realm of men". But she also wasn't that unusual. The war, writes Chester,
broke further the leather harness and traces of those social restriants already broken, kicked over or weakened by the First World War, a still-fresh and reignited memory; the fields and farms and relationships depleted of men.
Chester gives us a rural echo of that fascinating process which saw women brought into the workforce in enormous numbers, rapidly transforming them and society and one which was impossible to reverse when peace came in 1945. With work, and money, came independence. Or at least more independence than women had ever had. It shook the system. It opened new vistas and began a slow process that would explode again in the 1960s. That said I can't help but wonder about class here. It is possible (Chester is careful not to say for definite) that White was gay. Marguerite and Doris certainly were. Chester wonders at how that was seen by the other villagers. Was their sexuality tolerated more because they were women? Or because they were from a higher class with all the protection that money can bring? Or did no one care?
Chester points out that "we can be blind to what kind of acceptance or awareness of sexuality and gender relationships existed then on a day-to-day, getting-on-with-it attitude in a rural community." But we can't also forget that things are always shaped by the prisms of class and wealth. I like to think that there was acceptance of these women, and not just because they were the masters, but because I like to think that people are generally nice.
But no doubt everyone went through a process that saw their ideas change. Just as the locals became more accepting of women farmers in the male "realm" of farming when the saw them doing the traditionally male jobs. Perhaps this was also easier in rural communities too. After all women very much worked on farms. There's an amusing moment when a group of women collecting fruit from hedges stop to peer at White working. "Have you never seen a woman work before" shouts out one of White's (male) workers to the onlookers?
So why was it that by the 1980s Chester herself could not live her own dream? Despite her experience and knowledge, she was not able to become a farmer. While they couldn't put women back entirely in the home, there had been a rolling back of the gains of the 1960s. Margaret Thatcher might have been a female PM, but she, and her government, made things much harder for women. Chester's first book On Gallows Down covered some of those battles and defeats. But it remains clear that what had been missing in rural Britain was the sort of struggle that could have defended and extended the rights of women and the LGBT+ community. Indeed after 1945 the British countryside saw few working class struggles, and still less the trade unionism that could have led that fight - another consequence of the atomisation of industrial farming.
The past, we are told, is another country. But we can, occasionally, visit it - even if we never get the full picture. Ghosts of the Farm tells us a very real story of people striving to live the lives they want to. It also tells us much about how we have got here, and in particular, how we have arrived in a situation where the food we eat comes at the expense of the environment we rely on to produce it. Nicola Chester has not written political polemic. Instead she's produced a beautiful engagement with the people and places of the past to enable us to look around us with fresh eyes. You'll love it. I did.
Related Reviews
Chester - On Gallows Down: Enclosure, Defiance & the Cuckoo's Return
Calder - A People's War
