Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 108

Here we have a book whose title indicates that its primary concern is with the experience of British agriculture during the Second World War, but behind that lies an interest in the way that the wartime contribution of farming has been portrayed. The contributors therefore regularly address the various stereotypes that have arisen from both the obvious importance of food production in total warfare and the substantial official histories of agriculture written in the immediate aftermath of hostilities. The volumes by Keith Murray, R.J.Hammond and Laurie Lee are, of course, now very elderly, and inevitably rather celebratory, and to modern thinking their sponsorship by the government and their production so soon after the events they covered may count as intrinsic reasons to doubt their reliability. The tone here is certainly predominantly critical. An aspect of the book that is not so obvious is the special attention paid by many contributors to the war as the setting of what the editors call, in the title of the first chapter, a ‘state-led agricultural revolution’, which served as a foundation for agriculture’s transformation by mechanization, science and state support during the post-war years.

The book’s impact is rather weakened by being a loosely organized collection of independent essays which are very different in approach, while the final two contributions, on the use of the National Farm Survey data to study post-war changes, are tangential to the main theme. Some treatments are analytical, notably the chapter by Brassley, but others concentrate on a simple narrative treatment of their chosen theme, most notably that on the Women’s Land Army by Clarke which offers few new insights. This can work well, however, as with Sheail’s illuminating demonstration of the impact that scientific and determined rodent control could have on wastage after harvest. Others most resemble commentaries on existing views in selected, often very specialized areas, rather than definitive treatments in their own right. There are common themes that appear regularly, but they often do so in a repetitive and overlapping manner, and the lack of overall unity is symbolized by the separate abstracts that preface each contribution. Readers would have been better served by a substantial extension of the Preface to gather together explicitly the major themes as an overall agenda, which contributors could then have worked around. The unevenness and fragmentation militates against the completion of the large tasks the book sets itself, and it mostly lays out a new agenda for research rather than in any sense replacing the existing official histories.

Thus, it may well be that wartime achievements were less spectacular than has generally been believed, but this is never comprehensively demonstrated, and the use of statistics in the analytical chapters do not prove the matter beyond peradventure. Paul Brassley estimates a modest increase of output by volume of about eight per cent between the pre-war and later war years and a thirty per cent decline in total factor productivity over the same period. He attributes the latter to diminishing returns to increased inputs of labour, capital and management. Non-statistically inclined historians may wonder about some of the ‘heroic assumptions’ (p.38) required by the econometric approach that produced these estimates, especially given the author’s prefatory reflections on the difficulties of measuring changes that were both quantitative and qualitative. The editorial team do not doubt the heavy reliance on imported food in the inter-war years, or the actual improvement in nutrition seen among the mass of the population and achieved despite virtual siege conditions (p.6). Self-evidently, the United Kingdom was alone among European belligerents in avoiding a real and lethal wartime food crisis even though it had been the least self-sufficient, certainly among the major nations. To achieve this when this collection shows that large areas of good arable land were taken by the government for defence purposes, that other areas were severely hindered, in the early years at least, by the direct overspill from urban bombing and indirect impact of refugees, while many skilled workers disappeared into the services, still seems remarkable. It must have formed a major contribution to keeping the war going, if not directly to winning it.

The evolution of the new attitude to agriculture’s importance and methods of production is often handled as a purely technical exercise, and at times the context of a war on a scale and intensity never seen before somehow seems to fade. Thus, although the urgency and explicit short-term-ism seen when defeat seemed closest is deprecated, what else could have been done? (pp.31–4). Sticking to a tried and tested tractor design that many farmers knew how to use, rather than seeking to innovate, may seem an incorrect decision with hindsight, but in a time of crisis it surely had a great deal to recommend it (p.99). The revisionist case actually seems to defeat itself in the reconsideration of the effectiveness of the management of agricultural production in some of the most thoroughly evidence-based analyses, from Waymark, Short and Rawding. These show that while wartime expedients certainly created some victims, most obviously through dispossessions set in train by the WAECs, these were few in number, and in some notorious headline cases at least, those involved largely brought disaster on themselves. Under the conditions of the time, these committees mostly come over as sensible and keen to create a consensus, and no credible proof of routine and inappropriate authoritarianism emerges here.

The chapter on organic farming by Conford is less about farming in wartime than about the impetus through reaction that the wartime drive to maximize output gave the fledgling organic movement. Conford shows that the organicists’ proselytizing worried the manufacturers of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and prompted them to mount a counter-attack. While this is interesting, it also serves to draw attention to the volume’s biggest lacuna: a direct study of the forces, individuals and firms who created the sense of inevitability about the productivist vision of the future based upon chemicals. Then we might have learned not only about the specific contributions of the agro-chemical industries to the wartime productivity drive but also why so few limits were placed on these industries for so long, and so few doubts expressed effectively until very recently.

Reading the book, one sometimes has the sense that some of its contributors see the agriculture of the second half of the century as essentially predetermined by what had been put in place by 1945. The material they present is perhaps more conducive to the view that the changes of wartime were a kind of preparation for a future revolution of an indeterminate kind. By 1945, it was generally accepted that the nation could not risk a return to food production regime of the 1930s and that farmers simply deserved better. There was also a strong resolve not to repeat the mistakes of the years after victory in 1918. Implementation of productivist policy was reinforced for several years by the chronic lack of both trade partners and foreign exchange, and then by the rapid transformation of the options for mechanization of mixed British farms in the 1950s, especially after the tractor and three-point linkage implement system pioneered by Ferguson had been refined and universally copied. This long-term, peacetime new deal after 1945 was intensified after Britain’s accession to the European common market, despite there being plenty of food available elsewhere by that time. It was indeed the war years that set the nation firmly on the road to productivism, but that first step of a renewed interest in agriculture was all that had been established firmly by 1945 – and the experience of the aftermath of the First World War shows that even this could have been abandoned in the 1950s if costs and problems had mounted up in embarrassing ways.

Overall, then, there is plenty of interest here on particular topics, but taken as a whole the book cannot be counted a definitive reassessment of farming in Britain during the Second World War.