We Danced All Night by Martin Pugh

Author:Martin Pugh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448162741
Publisher: Random House

13

‘Cider With Rosie’: The Countryside Between the Wars

IN MANY WAYS the countryside of interwar Britain looked much as it had done for centuries. The South, Midlands and West were dominated by small fields divided by miles of hedgerows punctuated at intervals by tall, stately elms, the most distinctive trees of lowland England. This network of hedges, combined with the availability of arable fields that retained stubble and fallen grain through the winter, sustained large populations of birds, especially yellow hammers, skylarks, partridges, linnets, corncrakes and song thrushes that were to become scarce when farming practice changed after the Second World War.

Two post-war innovations, however, began to alter the landscape. In 1919 the Forestry Commission was established with a view to redressing the acute shortage of timber Britain had suffered during the war. Taking advantage of cheap, infertile upland areas, it had acquired a million acres by 1939, mostly in the North, Wales and Scotland; there its huge plantations effected a lasting alteration by blanketing the countryside with Sitka spruce, Norway spruce and Scots pine. The Forestry Commission was quick to recognise the threat posed to its plantations by another invader, the grey squirrel, or ‘tree rat’ as its critics described it; spreading rapidly after being introduced at Henbury Park in Cheshire, the grey was officially pronounced a pest in 1930. In 1932 the commission offered a bounty of 2½d. for every squirrel tail brought in; this created some extra income but the scheme was dropped during the war, reintroduced in the 1950s and abandoned again in 1957.

Another controversial intrusion into the rural picture came from water companies who were, in effect, local authorities at this time. In the autumn of 1930 Manchester Corporation began work on thirty miles of tunnels and eighty-seven miles of aqueducts designed to enable water to flow the sixty-seven miles from Haweswater in the eastern Lake District to Manchester. This involved flooding the village of Mardale Green and expanding the existing lake from two to ten miles in length.1 ‘Mardale is still a noble valley. But man works with such clumsy hands!’ wrote the hillwalker, Alfred Wainwright, some years later. ‘Gone for ever are the quiet wooded bays and shingly shores that nature had fashioned so sweetly in the Haweswater of old; how aggressively ugly is the tidemark of the new Haweswater!’ Wainwright fixed his sights on Manchester again when criticising the social effects of converting another Lakeland valley, Thirlmere, into a reservoir: ‘Hidden away in the depths of the Thirlmere plantations are many reminders of the community life here before Manchester condemned the area to a slow death and an everlasting silence.’2

With these exceptions, however, the appearance of rural Britain displayed more continuity than change between the two world wars. Most farmers continued to practise mixed agriculture, though with a bias towards arable cultivation in the drier eastern counties and a concentration on livestock in the wetter pastures of the West. Farm animals reflected many more regional variations than today. Traditional pig breeds were still

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