Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 1 (2003), p. 127

Writing on the history of the English farmworker and his politics has concentrated overwhelmingly on the nineteenth century and particularly on the period between 1870 and 1914. The reasons for this are obvious enough. Especially for the historian of organized labour or of working class radicalism, this was the heroic period when the rural poor apparently threw off their bondage in the revolt of the field. For the same reasons, contemporary observers suddenly became interested in the newlyliberated Hodge and produced a mass of material, which makes the period one of the best documented in the labourer’s history.

This concentration on the period of Arch’s union is made even narrower by a concentration on the cereal-growing areas. Even where studies have moved outside the south and east of Britain they have, as with Caunce on Yorkshire and Carter or Devine on Scotland, remained focused on the larger farm units usually associated with arable farming. Again the reasons for this are clear enough. Nineteenth-century studies of the rural poor frequently have worked within a paradigm which saw a movement from a ‘pre-class’ social situation dominated by tiny producers and farm servants to a ‘class’ society dominated by landless ‘proletarians’ with nothing to sell but their labour power and no relationship between them and their employers but the cash nexus. It was on the large farms of the arable areas, especially those of the eastern side of Britain, that this was most obvious.

However, this version of the farmworkers history looks increasingly unlikely when we move away from these areas and this period – which is what Mansfield has done in this fine, illuminating, and very useful book. Born in and shaped by East Anglia, Mansfield is Salopian by adoption, and although he frequently glances over his shoulder at Norfolk, and especially at his Cambridge city family, it is Shropshire which lies at the core of this work. Here is a country, which, in most respects, is completely different from those studied by most historians of the farmworker and especially of farmworkers’ trades unions. Yet, as Mansfield shows, in the early twentieth century Shropshire was the strongest union area in Britain after Norfolk. However, this was a different kind of unionism. Substantial numbers of rural workers were organized not into the farmworkers’ union, the National Union of Agricultural Workers, but in the general labourers’ union, the Workers’ Union, which was dominated, even in Shropshire, by industrial or semi–industrial workers. As a result, even in periods of sympathetic local leadership, the interests and concerns of the farm labourer were all too often secondary to those of the more powerful 128 the agricultural industrial sections. Further, the Workers’ Union and the National were, in pre-Bridlington days, constantly at odds over recruitment and joint actions, with the Workers’ Union often taking a much less progressive path despite its radical history.

Although the Great War saw union growth, as elsewhere in the rural districts, the division between the NUAW and the WU hampered a unified campaign. Further, the roots of radicalism in the co-ops and the new Labour Party were much shallower then elsewhere. As a result, the radicalizing effect of the war was short lived, especially in the face of falling wages after 1920 and the end of the Wages Board in 1920. The NUAW, with a much stronger local village base than the WU, fared better, but even here losses in membership were dramatic.

Most important of all, Mansfield sees the 1920s as a period in which older paternalist institutions were either revived or found their way into ‘new’ social organizations and rituals like the village hall or Armistice Day. It was here that ‘local patriotism’ – a sense of supra-class allegiance based upon the village – found its strongest expression. By the end of the 1920s, the county-wide celebration of Armistice Day brought into even the smallest village a ‘new national occasion’ and ‘new village institutions’ which were ‘profoundly conservative’ (p.184).

In the 1920s and the 1930s, Shropshire, like most of rural England, returned Conservative MPs. Despite prewar Union strength, Labour was only victorious once, and that was in the semi–industrialized Wrekin constituency in 1929. Local patriotism was at the base of this success, but on it was built a powerful Tory political organization, which managed to capture (or perhaps recapture) the local patriotism of rural districts for its own political ends. Despite the War and trades unionism’s effects on the county, in Shropshire, as in most of rural Britain, the farmworker saw his political home within Conservatism rather than within Socialism, even in the diluted form offered by the Labour Party.

This is a complicated and interesting book. Its central argument, that local patriotism and the organizations associated with it before and, crucially, after the Great War shaped the social and political behaviour of Shropshire farmworkers, is well made and challenges many assumptions. What we need now is more local and national studies of this forgotten workforce in the twentieth century to see if Mansfield’s findings are replicated elsewhere.