From Milton under Wychwood
Glenda Lewis has a 2016 Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship to compare the farming communities of the Wychwood villages in Oxfordshire, UK, and southern Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand. Her great grandparents were among the cohorts of assisted migrants from Oxfordshire, motivated by the rural depression of the 1870s. She will use this comparison as a personal illustration of the big trends in agriculture, and to think about the implications of what is happening in rural New Zealand now for individuals and communities.
Glenda is an independent science communications adviser, who specializes in public science education through public talks, events, and the media. Her mission is to understand more about the science of farming, sustainable farming practices, the restoration of our land and water to health, and to share what she learns with her fellow New Zealanders.
In 1874, my maternal great grandmother Jane Watts (aged 18) left the hamlet of Lyneham in Oxfordshire on a one-way voyage to Waipawa, Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand. Her husband to be, Joseph Pratley, had left six weeks earlier from the neighbouring village of Milton-under-Wychwood – one of 140 villagers to emigrate to the new colony at that time. The golden age of agriculture in England was over, and a surplus of labour meant choosing between staying put on bare subsistence wages, going “into service”, seeking work in London or one of the factories up north, or emigration to the colonies and leaving home and family forever. At a candle-lit meeting on a field near Milton-under-Wychwood, New Zealand agent C R Carter, described it to the 500 or more villagers as “one continued march down a hill with the workhouse at the bottom”.*
Their 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 oak 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 child.
When I visited that most beautiful area over 130 years later and learnt about these dramatic events, I started to wonder. Did Jane and her descendants realise their hopes of land ownership, independence, and meat on the table? What happened to the villagers who stayed behind? Who owns and works the land there now? And many questions arise about the current situation here in New Zealand. What has happened to inter-generational family farming in New Zealand? What is it like to live the roller coaster of commodity prices and how have the small rural communities of southern Hawke’s Bay changed in the lifetimes of Jane’s descendants? Farms and mortgages get bigger, margins tighter, and 86% of New Zealanders now live in cities – land, or even home ownership, far beyond the reach of many younger people. Far fewer people have the family connections with the country that I enjoyed as a child.
“It is well acknowledged,” says Michelle Thompson of the Rural Health Alliance, “that rural communities have higher rates of anxiety, depression and suicide and poorer health outcomes generally than the rest of the population. We know, for example, that more farmers are dying from suicide than from occupational deaths.”
The purchase of farmland in New Zealand by foreigners is causing much disquiet, and we are now dependant on people from the Philippines and the Pacific Islands coming in on temporary visas to work our dairy farms and pick our fruit crops for minimum wages. Our land and water have been seriously polluted in less than 200 years of European settlement, overwhelmed by introduced pests and weeds, and will require a mammoth effort to restore. There are disturbing issues around the welfare of our farm animals – a recent Sunday programme (TV1, 29 November) showed the serious mistreatment of calves going to the abattoir, secretly filmed by the animal welfare group, SAFE. The import of large quantities of palm oil kernel as supplementary feed for our cattle is perceived to be endangering the future of orangutans and other animals in Indonesia and elsewhere. Consumers are increasingly aware of the contribution of agriculture to greenhouse gas emissions. The consumption of beef is now being discouraged.
Yet, we recognise just how important agriculture is to our national economy, and that New Zealand leads the world in many agricultural practices, including animal welfare, and the quality and relatively low carbon footprint of its production compared to other countries.
Jane and Joseph’s family story will illustrate the vicissitudes of the agricultural sector, and personalize what these current and historical trends mean for individuals and their communities. Now that humans have spread to every landmass on the globe, New Zealand being the very last stop, there is no place to ship out to… we have to find a sustainable way of living off the land here, and understand enough to share in political decisions about land and water ownership, use and care. I want to use this grant to increase my own understanding of the problems and potential solutions, and share what I learn as widely as possible.
For more information, contact Glenda Lewis, glendajanelewis@gmail.com 027 210 0997
* (The Farthest Promised Land, by Rollo Arnold, Victoria University Press, 1981, pg 125)
