Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 1 (2016), p. 126

I am not sure what I expected from this book but, be assured, it came as a surprise. This is not so much history as an excellent example of investigative journalism. Andrew Connell was a teacher of History at Appleby Grammar School but it was subsequent to that, as he became involved in local politics, that he started to look more closely at the Fair and finished up researching its history. It may be said that, the more he looked, the less certain were his findings – but, that is not to say he failed to find a story.

The first five pages are taken up by telling us what we think we know and broadly, the rest of the book dismantles our ideas before handing us a fresh and more nuanced narrative. The chapter describing the fair’s early history is followed some general comparisons with the great fairs such as those at Horncastle in Lincolnshire and Stourbridge in Cambridgeshire. Connell then gets into gear to discuss the Fair’s evolution since the eighteenth century. Much of this is painstakingly built up from reports in local newspapers dating as far back as they go (c.1812) together with excellent use of the records of (the former) Appleby Borough, North Westmorland Rural District and County of Westmorland.

Appleby Horse Fair is in a continuous state of flux and (as historians we know this) the current situation is largely regarded as ‘the way it has always been’. In reality, even the date has moved. Traditionally, the Fair started on the second Wednesday in June but, in this century it has migrated so that, in 2013 the fair ‘began on the preceding Thursday … and by Monday 10 June, two days before its putative climax, it was effectively over’.

Then there follows a series of chapters which lay out the story in exemplary style as ‘Mythology: the Phantom Charter’ leads into ‘The Origins of Appleby Fair’, ‘Evolution: the Horse Fair’ and ‘Evolution: the Gypsy/Traveller Fair’. These short and effective narratives (all either six or eight pages in length) bring us to 1939, after which a number of things changed. Two factors were possibly of most significance in terms of the Fair: the slow replacement of working horses by motorized vehicles and the rapid imposition of limitations on movement triggered by security concerns during wartime.

From 1945 there seems to have been a lot of infighting, with some members of local society finding good reasons to abolish the Fair whilst others found equally good reasons to support its continuance. It is interesting to note that the split was not along simple social lines for there seems to have been a tradition of support by the Lowther family with an earlier earl of Lonsdale attending and buying ‘the best dog they had shown him’ (though we might note that the Fair was not being held on his land, but on that owned by the descendants of Lady Anne Clifford.). One factor in the Fair’s continuance is that people just arrived, and in doing so created practical problems relating to the caravans, the horses or motor vehicles that drew them, the basic needs of people and livestock together with the various kinds of waste they generated.

Chapters 12 and 13 address ‘The Late Twentieth- Century Media Fair’ and ‘Managing the Modern Fair’, giving discussions of aspects of contemporary society which are clearly going to have a continuing impact upon who attends the Fair and what their expectations might be. The book finishes with four short (two-page) appendices that present us with an interesting summary of the evidence for ‘St Lawrence’s Fair’ as published from about 1750 together with the voices of three individuals. The first was a child in Appleby in the 1930s and gives insight into the post-1939 changes whilst another gives a gypsy/traveller perspective. The middle narrative in the sequence takes the form of a poem, written in 1945, and which brought back to the reviewer the charms of the books of her childhood written by ‘Romany’ (George Bramwell Evens) and ‘Nomad’ (Norman F. Ellison).

This is a good book and particularly relevant to those with an interest in fairs or livestock trading. It is an exemplar for those who are trying to research and write up a complex topic.