John and Margaret Hartley, 1968
16 May…
Having arrived in the Wychwood villages, I need to get to know some people, fast, in order to fulfil all those glib promises I made to the Churchill Trust. I have just 5 weeks. Nth generation farmers are my quarry. I can’t see anyone working in the fields. No-one in gumboots clodding into the petrol station or co-op, no one in utes with dogs on the back. No milk tankers. The pub carpark is full of Audi convertibles with clean tyres. Whatever farming takes place here must happen in the dead of night. And where on Earth are the animals? The crops seem to grow without human intervention. But then I see a breach in the hedge on the road to upper Milton, and huge tyre marks making a deep depression. I stoop to examine them, like an aboriginal hunter – the tracks disappear under the waist-high wheat. Three weeks later, the apparition I most feared – a combine harvester as large as a church coming relentlessly towards me along a one lane road. I don’t think he’s going to stop to talk…
I drag my friends, who’ve come for the weekend, to the 11am service at St Mary the Virgin in Shipton to see if I can find some farmers there. They’ll be resorting to prayer by now, with commodity prices so low. But not even God is allowed to interfere with the free market.
It was Trinity Sunday apparently, one of the vicar’s “favourite events on the Church calendar”. What is Trinity Sunday, he asks? I do not put up my hand, having no idea, despite attending Church with my mother for the first 16 years of my life. He makes a theatrical attempt at Holy Trinity for Dummies using three unlikely proxies from the congregation. I enjoyed singing the hymns and the choir was top notch. Unfortunately it was the Sunday they decided summer had begun, which was not unreasonable one month out from the solstice, and so had turned off the heating.
Jenny, well rugged up in the pew in front of us, graciously introduced herself and when I told her my mission she immediately pointed out a couple in the back pews – John and Margaret Hartley. I introduced myself after the service and we made arrangements to meet the next day. Job done.
John and Margaret moved from Coldstone Farm – John’s home for 50 years – to a new place down the lane. I scanned the large kitchen with its honey flagstones, wooden subcontinent and Aga stove that would just about do for Downton Abbey. But John and Margaret are not showy people, and it wasn’t till I was virtually out the door that I discovered some amazing things about them. I happened to drop into the conversation (which I did whenever possible) that I was going to Stockholm the next day to see New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr receive the Crafoord Prize from the King of Sweden. Margaret kindly insisted on giving me a lift to Charlbury Station, and mentioned that she had studied maths at Cambridge in the late 50s. Back then, women had only just been allowed in, and very few would have been doing maths; she must have been truly exceptional. Margaret credits her high school teacher, of course, though certainly not the director of studies she had at Newnham, who was “useless”. The lack of support quite put her off. She came to prefer economics and the applied maths that went with it. Whatever academic expectations were disappointed, her social life exceeded her hopes. This was the heyday of Footlights and Beyond the Fringe.
John was offered a place at Oxford, but as the only son was needed at home to run the farm. He shrugs off the suggestion of personal sacrifice. I did manage to extract a dry little confession that he had regretted missing out on the chance of a cricket blue (I nodded sympathetically, though understanding as little of an Oxford blue as Trinity Sunday). God bless Google. I later read in a village history book how outstanding both John and his father were at sports – and much else besides which John and Margaret had modestly declined to mention.
His mother and father, Phyllis and Frank Hartley, retreated to the village in 1944 in the wake of a great tragedy. John’s older brother Roger, aged 8, was accidentally run over and killed by an army truck, ironically in the place they had been sent to for safety during the London bombings. John was told how the driver sat at the road’s edge crying inconsolably. Frank Hartley had been helping people in the city who were bombed out, and before then, running the Eton Manor Boys’ Club for a wealthy associate. He had three years playing professional football for Tottenham Hotspurs.
Phyllis was a mannequin in London. I visualise tweed skirts and jackets with nipped in waists. Perish the thought of fitted tweed jackets nipped into today’s waistlines.
Frank was born in 1896, and had the ”ill-fortune to reach maturity in time for WW1,” says John. He was one of the elite Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, D Brigade. He patrolled on horseback behind the French lines and from this elevation saw more than he wanted of trench warfare horrors.
Frank grew up in the imposing three storey house in the centre of the village, next to the Shaven Crown Inn, where fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and Diana Mosley (nee Mitford) were interned in WWII. Phyllis told John and Margaret that she had seen the six Mitford girls on horse and cart going to Church. Their eyes were a pale icy blue, no doubt partly responsible for transfixing the men they so determinedly set their sights on. Unity Mitford’s obsession with Hitler led her to attempt suicide when Britain declared war on Germany. She was left brain damaged. Unity died in 1948, long before her sisters, three of whom are buried beside her in nearby Swinbrook. Until her death, Pam Mitford lived in the house opposite the Swan Inn, on the edge of Stephen Jennings’ farm (see blogpost 11,510 miles to Waitara).
John met Margaret at a farmers’ dance in Shropshire, where he studied agriculture at Harper Adams College. Margaret was still at school. They had known each other 10 years when a serious foot and mouth outbreak in Shropshire and Cheshire precipitated their marriage. They were afraid of being separated from each other in the lock down. Margaret recalls the air being thick with smoke from the burning herds of cattle. Despite the grief of having to slaughter the herds they had built up over time, the farms that were infected actually did better financially than those who did not contract the disease as they were well compensated.
New bride Margaret came to Coldstone Farm in 1968. Frank had died of cancer three years earlier. John nursed him and took over the running of the farm at the same time.
The two generations of Hartleys threw themselves into the village community. Frank and John were successive church wardens of the aforementioned St Mary the Virgin from 1944 to 1980, they established the Shipton-under-Wychwood Cricket Club and John and Margaret led the huge fundraising effort to build the New Beaconsfield Hall – now the well-appointed meeting place for nearly all village community groups. I was Margaret’s guest at a Women’s Institute meeting there – a warm and welcoming experience. Margaret was formerly WI President. I could write at least another three paragraphs on all the other things they’ve been involved in.
John and Margaret got in and out of farming – dairy in particular – at just the right time. At most, they had 100 cows. Those were the good old days when the Milk Marketing Board fine-tuned supply and demand through a trade-able quota system. They were very successful and still own quite a lot of land, which is now worth 10-15 thousand pounds per acre! Those prices make it impossible for young people to buy into farming.
Like other farmers I spoke to, Margaret and John are very irritated by EU over-regulation. The 23 June plebiscite revealed the true extent of the nation’s irritation. No-one here seems too worried about the loss of EU subsidies, which account for 40% of the EU budget. I politely refrained from asking anyone which way they were going to vote in the Referendum.
Some of John and Margaret’s land is farmed by their second cousins, who are also mainstays of the village. Brothers Mike and Richard Hartley have 1300 acres in Upper Milton – you need that much land now to support two families. Mike looks after the pigs, currently about 150 breeding sows, down from a maximum of 250. Prices for pig meat have crashed, too. They sell their produce to Morrison’s, a supermarket chain up north.
Mike’s wife Anne is one of the vicars who conducts services at St Mary’s and other churches hereabouts on a rotational basis. She is also a mathematician, and spent 36 years tutoring village children one to one. Mike and Anne met at Durham University, where Anne did maths and psychology, and Mike studied history, politics and economics. The land they farm has other university connections. Their father bought it from Brasenose College, Oxford. He’d been going to emigrate before this opportunity came along. And Mike was intending to do something more academic, but the family needed him to manage the pig enterprise.
Anne and Mike Hartley
Like Mike, Anne is calm and grounded and obviously has the patience of a saint. Both of them have been very involved with St Mary’s from the time they got married there almost 40 years ago – much longer in Mike’s case. He is continuing the Hartley dynasty of Church Wardens, but at another Church in the district. It was suggested to Anne that she become a vicar under a new scheme – bottom line, you don’t get paid and have to do the study in your own time. Sounds like something a woman would go for. The qualification is not portable – you are ordained only for the area you are assigned to.
Although originally an outsider from the tough streets of Wolverhampton, Anne is now very much of this place, and knows just about everyone she gets to marry or conduct funeral services for. I guestimate that there are four funerals to every wedding. I see a fresh burial plot in the Church cemetery and another being dug. It takes so long I decide that I will definitely be cremated – not that the young man was digging it for me, you understand.
The reality of being a country vicar is not quite the Vicar of Dibley experience, where everyone except the local lord of the manor is a dolt. Though I bet some of the Parish meetings are just as long (my surmise, nothing Anne said). There are so many finely differentiated layers of society in these incredibly wealthy villages. I cannot resolve them on my coarse, flat antipodean scale. I expect it’s quite an art to negotiate them all. Just as well diplomacy is Anne’s long suit.
Anne says she didn’t feel in any sense a pioneer – a male parishioner told her, “I don’t approve of a woman in the church but you’re OK.”
PS I awake to the news that Britain has a new Prime Minister. Good luck to her.
