Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 2 (2004), p. 220

Born in a stable by Dorothy Calcutt is a prequel to her 1999 book The salt of the earth, which detailed the poverty-stricken life of an Oxfordshire family at the turn of the twentieth century. Here Calcutt looks back at the family’s preceding history to tell us the ‘true story’ of John Ashton, an illegitimate son of a northern landowner and Emma, a teenage barmaid working at the coaching inn at Long Hanborough. This is an enjoyable yarn of disparate lives, involving exploitation, illegitimacy, secrecy, adversity and salvation. Yet the utility of this account, especially for an academic audience, is questionable. John’s story is factual and we learn much about the lives of the rural labouring poor: the ravages of poverty and illness, the unremitting work of women, the self-help ethos engendered by involvement in the village chapel. However, this appealing material is juxtaposed against the tale of his father, Leo, which, we are told at the beginning, is ‘mostly fiction’. The author paints Leo as a formidable patriarch, disappointed in the succession of daughters produced by his long-suffering wife Mary. The aim of his liaison with the young barmaid was solely to satisfy his desire for a male heir (Leo and Emma also produce a daughter, Georgina, but she is never recognized by her father). Leo is a generous benefactor but John cannot inherit his father’s fortune. The success of this mechanism is debatable: whilst it allows the author to avoid exposing potentially sensitive details about a landed family, ultimately it weakens the power of the account.

George Pickard’s reminiscences of his Bedfordshire childhood in the 1870s and 1880s offer a more lively and authentic portrayal of rural life in the late nineteenth century. His original idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation have been left untouched but the author comes across as literate, knowledgeable and humorous. This small volume is packed with information on rural customs and beliefs, work patterns, the household economy and survival strategies. Many aspects of his account suggest village life was traditional, unaltered from previous times. Belief in superstition is still prominent and villagers exact their own style of rough music against transgressors (‘If there was any undue virtue going and villagers got annoyed about it, they would collect in the street with old buckets or anything to bang and march too and fro’, pp.30–1). Yet the changes taking place in the countryside really come to the fore in Pickard’s writing: the impact of Methodism, the influence of Arch’s union, the fight to secure the labourers’ newly-won vote (‘the primrose league dames were busy in the village’, p.27) and the role of transport – bicycles (‘What fun we had when wheels came to the poor’, p.60) and railways (which provided work). George himself left farm work ‘and went into factory life’ (p.72). This account will appeal to the general reader with an interest in local and rural history, and like all good reminiscences, also includes a good deal of material of use to historians of the late nineteenth-century countryside.