I am a descendant of two of the thousands of rural dwellers who exited Britain in the 1870s, when plunging grain prices led to a deep depression in the countryside. The European markets were suddenly swamped with grain from America as the spreading network of railroads opened up trans-Atlantic trade. The British government did little or nothing to protect its farmers, preferring to make cheaper bread available to the growing battalions of industrial workers and unemployed. Things did not really improve for farm workers in the UK until after WWII.
Here I am, a temporary resident in the Wychwood villages my great grandparents left, listening to the almost continuous arguments (on BBC4 radio) for and against leaving the European Union – a question of some moment for farmers especially. Britain’s decision to join the common market forty years ago was a crisis for New Zealand. No country is an island economically. I am here to compare the fortunes of the farming community in this small region of Oxfordshire, with southern Hawke’s Bay, where many of the villagers settled in the 1870s.
The EU Referendum (23 June) comes at a time when milk, wool, meat and grain prices have all gone through the floor. It is rare for all agricultural commodities to bottom out at the same time, says Henry Astor of Bruern Estate, a landowner you’ll hear more about later.
There is scarcely any dairy around this area now. I’ve seen a few decorative cows in picture-perfect Swinbrook, just 3 miles from here, the burial place of four of the six Mitford sisters. I discovered this week that a New Zealand economist owns the farm in Swinbrook that you cut across to see their former manor house at Asthall. I’m hoping to meet him as this project was partly conceived last year when I walked in wonder along the same field beside the Windrush River. I also found out that this same waterway, now only about a babbling half a metre deep, ran right through the Swan Inn nearby in the 1/200 year flood of 2007.
There are a few sheep here and there – West Oxfordshire used to be a major wool-growing area – but it’s mainly arable now, with stunning patchwork fields of oil seed rape, in full flower when I arrived – that intense bitter yellow. Henry tells me that NZ lamb lands here at 60% of the price of UK lamb, and that’s despite us having to transport it 13,000 miles and raise it without government subsidies. Mike Hartley in Upper Milton, one of very few 3rd or more generation farmers left in the Wychwoods, has 150 breeding sows, but there’s no money in pigs either.
This is no longer really a farming community says his second cousin, retired farmer John Hartley – there are no farmers actually living in the village. John and his wife Margaret are the backbone and heart of Shipton under Wychwood I am reliably informed – another chapter yet to be written. Blenheim (home of the Spencer-Churchills) and Cornbury Estates, east of here – 20,000 and 5,000 acres respectively – are managed by commercial farm agents. Sowing and reaping are carried out by independent contractors to spread the cost of the giant combine harvesters and other machinery. Farmers pulled out many of the hedgerows in the 60s and 70s to make larger fields that these machines can negotiate. Hope not to meet them in the narrow lanes. I’m glad Thomas Hardy never lived to see one.
About 40% of the EU budget goes on farm subsidies. It used to be a lot more. Farmers get c100 pounds sterling an acre for meeting certain basic requirements, though the form-filling to prove it would drive you to drink. That’s about $NZ65,000 for a 300acre farm; $NZ1.05M for 5000 acres. The EU bureaucrats are paid (well) to make one size fits all rules to govern countries as different as Greece and Scotland. Unfortunately they forget to remove the old ones from the rule book, says John Hartley, drily. They dictate by remote control from Brussels what you can plant, in what order, how many times the vet should visit your pigs… Many farmers around here – and “around here” is a very wealthy area indeed – could well be in the “vote leave” camp, as they have plenty of capital to ride out the slump in prices and an EU subsidy void, and have highly desirable farm-worker cottages and $NZ20,000-35,000/acre land to sell. Farmers are by nature independent, self reliant types. I wouldn’t dream of asking them which way they will vote, of course.
The market for country get-aways is red hot as we know from all those popular UK television programmes like Escape to the Country and Location, Location, Location. And who wouldn’t want to live in this cow parsley and lime tree, wisteria-draped, stone-walled paradise. Local residents include Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elizabeth, who bought Burford Priory (what better symbol of the modern age than media money buying out the Church), Rebekah Brooks, Jeremy Clarkson, Hugh Grant, Jeanette Winterson (one of my favourite authors), Prime Minister David Cameron – well actually, (nr) Chipping Norton is his real home as well as part of his Witney electorate. Jeremy Clarkson must feel very at home here. Every time I glance nervously in the rear vision mirror, there’s a Porsche, BMW, yet another Audi convertible, Mercedes, or black Range Rover looming. They drive insanely fast around here, even on the one-lane roads. The two Americans in the cottage next door, Ann and Annie, arrived looking traumatized and were reluctant to leave the safety of my driveway.
I have narrowly avoided becoming exotic road-kill more than once on my “country walks” – Jeremy out on the wrong side of the bed again? It would be a soft landing in the cow parsley bordering every lane, its profuse, delicate white flowers offsetting the spring green and dry stone walls. Surely God is a landscape architect, based here.
Many London professionals commute from this area. They glide into Charlbury Railway Station in assorted fabulous vehicles, from thence a short train ride to Oxford and the very fast train to London. Not only is it just 2 hours from central London, but it is also pretty much the centre of the country. I would not, however, advise you to drive to Cambridge from here. Fifty-two roundabouts my sister recorded – that represents about 1000 gear changes on the return journey. Don’t ask me why the rental firms all seem to stock manual drives.
The EU decision may be agonising the whole country right now (the Queen’s birthday celebrations and the European football tournament will be a welcome distraction for the PM this weekend), but in the Wychwood villages people are “taking to the streets” over another issue closer to home. Until Tuesday, about half the village homes had a roadside protest poster mounted on a high wooden pole (being Britain, the poster was very small and tasteful, and angled in satisfying parallel with its neighbours) objecting to the plans to build 70 (now down to 62) new houses. They were there this time last year when I did a quick survey of this area. I gather the houses will not be architectural prize-winners. The stated arguments against them are the already over-strained infrastructure, especially roads, and the repellent idea of concreting over the countryside in an area of “outstanding natural beauty”. The protest posters came down overnight after the Council hearing, and pending a decision about the same time as the Brexit Referendum. Could be a double shock for some. This is not the singular action of a particularly stroppy lot of villagers. Quiet and thoughtful Elizabeth Cleary, whom I visited yesterday (she is a direct descendant of one of the Ascott Martyrs*, Fanny Honeybone) , was moved to join a public demonstration against a similar-scale housing development in North Leigh, a village outside Witney. “ Go away Gladman” say the placards there, in reference to property developer, David Gladman. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2876845/Despoiling-England-ruthless-no-win-no-fee-developers-exploiting-new-planning-rules-threaten-historic-countryside.html
The population pressure is becoming unbearable for many.
Over the road from my rented cottage on the outskirts of the village, a veritable mansion is under construction. You can see it from miles away on the Charlbury Rd. It is sympathetically built in the warm hokey-pokey coloured stone that characterises the Cotswolds – in fact, it is a limestone aggregate of fossil shellfish that once populated a warm, shallow tropical sea. Oolite they call it. The sea floor drifted north and wedged itself tight in the middle of Britain. I digress. Certainly the local building and landscape contractors are doing well out of the new Blenheim. I am listening to the background hum of earthmovers as I write – but here come The Archers to drown them out. Some things never change.
Newcomers were never much welcome anywhere. The British Hunter Gatherers had their freedom of movement terminated when continental farmers arrived here 6000 years ago. From that time on, until very recently, the majority became enslaved on the land. Each hierarchy ultimately fell to another: Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans. Then successive waves of immigrants replaced each other on the lowest labour rungs to do the work no one else wanted to do: West Indians, Pakistanis, and Poles. And everyone, including the latecomers, wants to shut the door behind them. Now, the Syrians are swarming at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. What they wouldn’t give to get a toe-hold on that bottom rung.
About 10% of rural workers in the UK – a continually diminishing work category – are EU ”free-rangers”. In New Zealand, Filipinos come in on temporary resident permits to work on our dairy farms and we rely on Pacific Islanders to pick our apple crop.
The desperately poor British immigrants of the 19th century (the largest contingents came from Oxfordshire and Cornwall) displaced Maori and changed their way of being forever. Now Maori and European alike murmur darkly about the Chinese, or anyone else recognisably Asian, legally buying properties in Auckland that our children can no longer afford to buy. We are less reactive, rather flattered, when pop stars, film makers and American investment bankers purchase iconic headlands and sheep stations as occasional retreats. They splash out on the best scientific advice and landscape contractors to restore the land to something approaching its former glory, though the public don’t necessarily get to see the results. Some of these people could buy and sell our Department of Conservation that has to curate 30% of our 29M hectares on a miniscule budget that barely keeps our possums in 1080. Likewise the newly-wealthy landowners here can afford to repair the stone walls, keep heritage buildings in mint condition, plant fields of wildflowers, and protect the hedgerows. They serve on restoration initiatives like the Wychwood Forest Project. They build mighty houses and gardens for us to gaze upon. They create jobs. Like most people, they want to do good.
The bottom end new housing here can be truly horrible, though it would be Blenheim Palace to refugees and most third world dwellers. On our drives around the UK, we now have a “spoiler alert” to warn passengers to avert their eyes. I have no right to an opinion about housing policy in the UK, having been here 5 minutes, and would hate to adjudicate these decisions. As a mere tourist, of course, I want nothing to ruin the rural aesthetic. I only know that the question of our time remains: where will the displaced and the 2 or more billion new human beings shortly arriving on the planet live?
Ends
* The rural workers’ desperate situation had come to a head in the Wychwood villages in 1873, when 16 local women were imprisoned and sentenced to hard labour for trying to dissuade two men from working on the Hambidge’s farm, replacing their own menfolk – members of the new National Agricultural Labourers’ Union – who were striking for higher wages. A riot erupted outside the jail in Chipping Norton, and 3000 gathered the following day to protest the harsh sentences. The incident came to national attention in Parliament and The Times. Queen Victoria eventually intervened, though they had served their sentences by the time her warrant to remit them was received. The fact that two of the women had been imprisoned with young babies added to public outrage. A seat encircling the chestnut tree on the village green of Ascott under Wychwood commemorates the “Ascott Martyrs”, as they became known. At least four of the women and their families emigrated to New Zealand in 1874, including Mary Pratley who had been imprisoned with her ten week old baby. Fanny Honeybone was the youngest of the Ascott Martyrs.
