Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Writing food security in the mid-twentieth century
- 1 Prelude: The 1930s and the origins and purpose of state intervention in farming
- 2 Rural society on the eve of war
- 3 The arrival of the county committees and their structures
- 4 The membership of the county committees and their role in farm surveillance
- 5 Networking the rural community
- 6 Dispossessing farmers in England and Wales during and after the war
- 7 Power and tragedy: The sad case of Ray Walden
- 8 Reclamation: Environmental and landscape transformation, 1939–45
- 9 Reclamation: The Fenland and coastal marshes
- 10 Wartime farming and state control in Scotland and Northern Ireland
- 11 Representation, memory and fiction
- 12 1945 and postwar continuities
- 13 Contradictions in a countryside at war
- Bibliography
- Index
12 - 1945 and postwar continuities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Writing food security in the mid-twentieth century
- 1 Prelude: The 1930s and the origins and purpose of state intervention in farming
- 2 Rural society on the eve of war
- 3 The arrival of the county committees and their structures
- 4 The membership of the county committees and their role in farm surveillance
- 5 Networking the rural community
- 6 Dispossessing farmers in England and Wales during and after the war
- 7 Power and tragedy: The sad case of Ray Walden
- 8 Reclamation: Environmental and landscape transformation, 1939–45
- 9 Reclamation: The Fenland and coastal marshes
- 10 Wartime farming and state control in Scotland and Northern Ireland
- 11 Representation, memory and fiction
- 12 1945 and postwar continuities
- 13 Contradictions in a countryside at war
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I’m fed up to the teeth with those people who bleat about farming being such a charming way of life and of farmers and their employees being such good fellows, don’t you know, so unspoilt … take it from me that as long as farming here is treated politically as a charming way of life it will remain a hopeless way of misery … if you think those chaps in the Eighth Army are coming back to splash about in the dark up to their knees in muck with an oil lantern and for a low wage I don’t.
Amidst the cheering of VE celebrations in May 1945 the unremarked farming routines of the countryside continued. Street’s apposite comments above relate to perceptions of the countryside fostered by the media and by many middle-class and urban people. The reality of postwar rural life was different.
From as early as 1942 Whitehall officials had pondered how their administrative structures, established to ensure continuing food supplies in wartime, might be adapted to possible postwar outcomes. The end of the war in Europe brought its own tensions for farming but the period immediately after 1945 saw an ongoing level of governmental support for agriculture on an unprecedented scale. The fate of the CWAECs was included in many discussions, but as yet little has been published on the postwar committees, although voluminous files at the National Archives cover the period of their postwar existence.
As the fortunes of war had turned in favour of the Allies in 1944 the initial impetus to produce more food from British soil slackened. Yields of cereals and milk were now falling after years of intensive farming and some return to grassland was to be expected. The war had taken its toll on agriculture, as on every aspect of life in Europe. Although farmers now felt valued, and in many cases had made decent money from their wartime operations, their capital had in fact depreciated in the sense that soil fertility had declined and general building and maintenance now required attention. Many commons were now suffering from overstocking, management was sporadic and shepherding in the hills often negligible. Many saw that wartime farming had been unsustainable, especially in more difficult environments.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Battle of the FieldsRural Community and Authority in Britain during the Second World War, pp. 369 - 400Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014