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
2 - Rural society on the eve of war
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
[T]his House views with grave concern the large number of agricultural holdings with no supply of electricity from mains systems and the fact that 90 per cent of such holdings remain without electricity supply of any kind … thus accentuating the drift of the rural population from the land to the urban areas.
This chapter examines the main threads of stability and change as rural Britain entered total war. And in examining the rural societies within which the CWAECs were to operate, we encounter the perceptions of rurality held by different social groups, the tensions internal to rural areas, and the differing contemporary perspectives on farming and on countryside living.
Rural society in interwar Britain
Despite the increasing attention paid by government to the economic problems of farming, rural working families could reasonably consider themselves as second-class citizens on the outbreak of war. By 1939 80 per cent of the population of England and Wales was urban, compared with 50 per cent 90 years before, as farmworkers and their families had left the land to seek higher wages and better living conditions in urban industrial and service employment. Many ex-servicemen were disillusioned on their return to civilian countrysides after the Great War:
There was a lot left after the war. Them what had been soldiers if they could get out they did so. Anything that they could get was better than a farm. A lot of them went into towns like Norwich and them sort of places and got jobs.
National employment in agriculture and forestry fell from an average of one million in 1920–22 (6.3 per cent of total employment) producing 6.1 per cent of national income, to 735,000 (3.9 per cent) producing 3.5 per cent of national income by 1937–38. In Wales, only the counties of Carmarthen, Denbigh and Flint showed population growth between 1921 and 1931, and for places undergoing depopulation there was also the loss of rural trades and crafts, owing to the growing consumption of mass-produced goods. And alongside the departure of the younger members, ageing populations were left in the villages, where high streets were becoming residential rather than the location of shopkeepers and tradespeople.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Battle of the FieldsRural Community and Authority in Britain during the Second World War, pp. 34 - 53Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014