Nostalgia: Farming featured highly in area

The articles not only gave insight into a specific topics, but also gave an overall picture of life at the time, including naming businesses and ‘colourful characters’ in the Market Rasen area

This article comes from 1979.

The traditional three-tier manorial system as it was seen in 19th century Lincolnshire was not well adapted to becoming the permanent set up for the county.

If we agree on this, we can also perhaps perceive that the market town industries set up rather fortuitously in our midst round about 150 years ago were not suited to long term development either.

What happened after the enclosures to which we have already referred was that the old Caistor Moor gradually disappeared, the moorland round Market Rasen was taken in and a whole large area on the Wolds which had previously been given over to rabbits was brought into cultivation.

The old cottagers, we will say on Linwood Warren, were in a manner of speaking dispossessed as new techniques of ploughing, sowing, reaping and threshing took on a different form and the effect of this, as also at Binbrook, was to produce a more centralised countryside grouping which provided a base not only for population growth but also for the encouragement of the new men, as you might call them, to start up new industries only one step removed from agriculture.

A good century ago as now Rasen had already acquired a multiplicity of industries whose scope and variety would astonish you.

The town possessed six corn millers, eight builders, three malsters, five oil and cake merchants, three ropemakers, four wheelwrights, three cattle dealers, and so on.

All these people, looking around them, were not only providing jobs for those who had moved inward from the commons but were confirming the standing of market towns like this as the true centres of the new countryside. In function, these centres had now a great work to do. Rasen, Caistor and Binbrook became minor centres of distribution of a kind never needed before. More than this, they became a sort of index of area progress and later, say from 1875 onward, of doubts as to whether the role of purely rural service centres could be maintained in the face of the competitive pressures from the larger centres.

Thus, the market towns in this sort of setting were to be seen as part of the expansionist move represented by enclosure. They were not so much urbanised projections but rather were part of the new system of farming, making use partly of displaced country workers and partly no doubt being unwilling participants in a system of change which in a localised area was seen as going too fast and to far from the point of view of some of those who participated in it.

Defoe, presumably looking at town and country from this sort of angle at the time when the enclosures were beginning, had written: “an estate is a pond but a town and trade are to be seen as a spring”. A change of attitudes and relationships was therefore being thrust upon us, upon those of us that is who had been brought up entirely in the country.

If you looked out upon the Rasen District, say a century ago as now, you saw not so much the new farms with their new houses and their newish tenants but rather the estates, large and small, the park gates, the manor houses, the divisions of the old manorial system.

But Defoe was seeing that industry, even localised industry, was something quite different and Defoe was putting his hand on something which was of very general and not just of localised significance.

Rasen, therefore, and Caistor too, grew up entirely independent in thought from estates which were fully as much symbols of prestige as they were of production. In such a system there was very much in common between those who were at the top and those who were lower down in the scale. But the central problem for all, high and low, was that we lived in a problem area while agriculture supplied us with little more than the bare elements of subsistence.

Consequently, if you follow this reasoning, the piers and balustrades at Brocklesby or the Palladian 18th century frontage at Willingham, were irrelevancies in the long term in a poor farming district. Today if you want to see one of the best of the Willingham cornices you should look at the rock garden beside West Torrington post office where you will see casually displayed to you the measureless gap which has now opened up in the country areas between the country gentleman of the olden time and our entirely different world of today.

Having said this, however, I am terribly fond personally of the crumbling Brocklesby balustrades or the shapely Willingham cornice which the postmaster has somehow managed to rescue.

But Defoe was in the right of it wasn’t he? The estates, casting their spell of eighteenth century glamour over the countryside, were to find the economics of quite a difficult situation to be too much for them and , partly because they didn’t fit in with the realities of an improved agriculture, they were to be numbered among the casualties of an era which had started for them so very promisingly.

It has to be admitted, however, that the little towns were very nearly casualties too.

Defoe had said in his day that we must separate the country towns and their industry from the villages with their estates. But in the early days Rasen grew up with centralised blacksmiths, wheelwrights and maltings together with a whole aura of minor urbanisation. This was all very well but with the coming of a minor degree of mechanisation and the fashion for farmers to go into Lincoln on a Friday there were some who asked whether it wasn’t better to do your farming business at Lincoln rather than Rasen.

Even the ladies were partly of the same mind. They thought you could get better blue ribbons at Mawer and Collinghams than you could in Queen Street, Market Rasen.

Therefore the reasoning which had brought Rasen into being, namely the need for having an adequate service centre near at hand, was brought into question as later developments proceeded in a widening context and you felt that the purely local sphere was n some way an inadequate one.

So great am authority as Gladstone was commenting in the 1860s that the squires were still doing their best to cling to the past. But at the little towns also, as from about the 1870s, there was still a strong tendency to model the present upon the past as well. Therefore, perhaps you had such unlikely partners as the squires and the country towns sighing in their hearts for what had gone before.

Their objectives were different but both thought fearfully of any forward move lest their position might be worsened.

Our friend Mr Hallgarth used to tell us how typical our old wind and watermills were of our old industry when he came to speak to us on the background of the Lincolnshire countryside. He told you no end of tales about how well they served both the farmers and the consumers.

But even the mills couldn’t be relied upon if you thought of them as being a means of keeping the new world at bay. Mr Hallgarth quoted these among the other lines to us:

The Shaky mill

Upon the hill,

Has seen it brightest days, The Flying sweeps,

Have stopped for ‘keeps’

The mill no longer pays.

What finished off the mills which had used stones as the basis of their grinding operations, was that somewhere about 1880, flour started to be ground by steel rollers which were driven by steam engines. Brewing also started to be done by the use of steam power. In these and other ways fundamental change began to show itself in technical advances which seemed to leave little towns like Rasen far behind.

All this was, however, quite a side issue considered from the wider aspect of health and prosperity of the countryside.

What was so badly wanted was a new system of farming and this was easier said than done. If you had told those who were farming between the wars that their children would live to see the farms from which they eked out so poor a living selling at £1,000 or more an acre they would have replied in the vernacular of the time something like ‘Oh yeah’. And if you had talked of specialisation so as to produce a greater margin over costs, they would have dismissed you at once as an opinionated know-all.

Yet the plain fact was that at the time, purely in terms of production, our agriculture was stagnant. We knew all the farmers personally and had the highest possible regard for them. But did you believe, really, that they were obtaining optimum production. Did you?

Lincolnshire’s output of cereals fell away very heavily compared with what it had been during the 1914-18 years. Production in 1938 was only about half of what it had been in 1916.

When he came to Hainton in 1927, as the guest of Lord Heneage, Stanley Baldwin admitted that British agriculture was hedged around with formidable difficulties. And he doubted very much, he said, whether fundamental factors affecting agriculture prosperity were under the control of any government at all.

“I know of no magic,” said Baldwin at Hainton, “which will transform the position of the farmer. You know how fully you have the sympathy of the government in your difficulties.

“It sounds a hard thing to say, but I believe that improvement must come from the work of the agriculturalists themselves. If you regard this as being largely a political problem, then I suggest to you that you will be side-tracked to a dead end.”

Taking the twentieth century as a whole, you can see how right Baldwin was. Partly, the remedy on the farms lay in greater streamlining of effort rather than ism. Did we really in the countryside have too many sacred cows?

What we were facing was a rural challenge of production which was similar in many ways to that which had been faced at the time of the enclosures. The enclosures, carried through with the squires at the top, were a triumph. But in the between the wars depression which hit us while the squires were seated right in the background the farmers quite seriously doubted whether they would make a go of their farming anymore.

Food, they said, was being over-produced. Wages were too high! Rents were too high! The remedy in part was to be mechanisation. But, more than mechanisation an outsider might think, new thinking was also needed.

The position was reached between the wars when the land itself was given a nil value. It had had this nil value right back in time before the enclosures were carried through. It was then just an agency of production, not something of much value in its own right.

Bad luck n connection with farming can be no more than bad luck, neither more nor less. But it can also be the result of failure to adapt to the changing needs of the time, to consider cropping more carefully on marginal farms and, in general, just to carry on as before.

What was wanted in other words was better management. Lacking his better management from a production point of view, then it followed that land would never rise up above its nil valuation, for if the land would produce nothing in the way of profit then intrinsically it was still worth nothing at all.

It is the great achievement of our present post-war period, quite unheralded and unsung, that we have managed to make the land pay. Don’t ask me how this has been done. It would be much too complicated a story to try and attempt it. For every farm is different. Every field is different. And I think we now know this in a way that our fathers perhaps did not.

All the same, I am not attempting to come along like some latter day oracle with the thought of apportioning blame. Just re-read what Baldwin said in 1927. What he was saying, acknowledging what difficulties there were was this: “I don’t know what the answer is.”

There were then, as there had been for a century and a half, three partners in the farming set-up. These were the squires, the tenant farmers, the workers. And by 1927, the position of the aristocracy in this very old partnership could be said to be doomed. They knew nothing, or next to nothing, about land potential and cropping for the future.

The farmers were little better placed, partly because they had so little money. But where the farmers scored was in the fact that time was on their side. They held what could be called the equity in the land. They held also what could be seen to be the reins of management and without knowing it, they profited from the fact that changes and adjustments which were likely to come would leave them happily in control.

The age which we were now entering was one of research and more scientific management. The farmer of old, just like the squire in his mansion, seriously questioned the usefulness of such things when applied to our oldest industry.

But in our quiet, out-of-the-way district, so it was to be appointed in the fullness of time. Inflation came and the over-production of food was seen to be but a phase. The miracle of £1,000-an-acre farming was on the way.