Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 2 (2022), p. 321

The primary focus of this book is the impact on agricultural practices of fruit growing in the Cam Valley, located in the south of the county of Cambridgeshire. Having briefly set out the intended themes and perspectives as well as the historical sources used, Spain opens with a description of the development and demise of the Cambridge Gage – a variety of greengage. From its origins in France, he charts its progression from the private gardens of the gentry and aristocracy into full commercial production up until the 1970s. Thereafter, the demand for the Cambridge Gage (along with other greengages) declined rapidly, returning it once more to private gardens, yet with a rejuvenated low-level demand as a heritage fruit.

Chapter 2 looks at plum cultivation in the Cam Valley. For each variety of plum grown at Wimpole and Madingley, he relates the comments made on these varieties by a number of authors from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. He concludes that the nurserymen of the district displayed ingenuity in using a range of varieties to reduce the risk of crop failure through either weather or disease.

A similar approach is adopted to his analysis of the varieties of apples in the next chapter, noting that apples were of much older origin than plums or gages. Attention is given to both culinary and dessert varieties of apple before concluding that modern apples are ‘standardised snack food for the mass market’ (p. 84). The last chapter of part 1 examines the cultivation of cherries, pears and soft fruit, in particular, gooseberries.

Part 2 opens with a survey of the main fruit growing villages in the Cam Valley, eleven in all, with a useful hand-drawn map provided: however, a key explaining the shaded areas would have been helpful. Spain then examines the history of each village in terms of orchards attached to private dwellings and the development of larger commercial orchards: further hand-drawn maps are supplied for each village to enable an understanding of the placement of the orchards. From the mid-nineteenth century, fruit growing developed apace, being fully established in the area by the 1920s and 1930s and the next chapter goes on to present the impact of fruit farming on village life in the area.

The third and final part of the book comprises six chapters which provide a chronological development of fruit growing from c.1740 to the present day, along with its impact on the economic history of the Cam Valley, set within a regional and national context. This part of the book confirms the intent to focus on the East of England with its primary markets in London, supplied by East Anglian counties and Kent. Jonathan Spain describes the development of the railway and its effect on commercial fruit production: the inclusion of a map would have aided the reader’s understanding of the major rail routes in and out of the area.

In chapter 8, he notes the existence of strong local individualism amongst the Cambridgeshire fruit growers which conspired against the success of co-operative fruit grading and packing, despite such schemes running successfully elsewhere in the country. The following chapter continues to examine fruit farming between 1918 and 1939, building on the scientific and technical developments described in the previous chapter, to consider their impact on economic trends in this period. In addition to local newspaper reports, the author relies heavily on one trade journal source, The Fruit Grower: on pages 278–9, there are 15 consecutive footnotes, all drawn from this single source. It would have been interesting to see how original archive material supported his analysis.

Fruit growing in the district during the Second World War is examined in chapter 10, again with heavy reliance on The Fruit Grower, leading the reader to reflect on whether such a source presents an unbiased view of the situation: in particular, the emphasis given in the text to the alleged greater governmental support for agriculture, as opposed to horticulture at this time. One aspect which Spain attempts to address is the complexity of fruit price controls which he notes historians of food policy have neglected: whilst presenting the evidence for price control, he does not reach any overall conclusions. The final two chapters examine the post-war development of fruit growing in the district and the start of its decline by 1960, leading to the end of much commercial fruit growing in the area today.

In terms of presentation, the text occupies 454 pages of closely typed text on A4-sized pages, followed by a ‘select bibliography’ making up the remaining 28 pages. There are 16 quarter-page plates of fruit, excellently presented on glossy paper in chapter 4: these and the 12 hand-drawn maps provide the only breaks in the textual presentation. The book would be much improved in a number of ways: the use of the search function to eliminate obvious commonly occurring errors such as ‘desert’ rather than ‘dessert’ apples, and ‘spaying’ rather than ‘spraying’; the use of tables and graphs to present many of the statistics, in particular, the informative data extracted from the 1910 Land Valuation survey; and the inclusion of related photographs (historic and present-day) to illustrate points being made and to break up the text. Further, there are too many minor errors to enumerate, all of which could have been removed during a thorough proof-reading: the ‘Isle of White’ (p. 63) is but one example.

Overall, the reader gains the impression that fruit-growing was a gamble, with good and bad years, being the outcome of variable weather conditions and the prevalence of disease – no different to any other fruit-growing area of England. The regional and national contexts are primarily confined to the east of England and Kent, with little reference to other fruit-growing counties, such as Herefordshire and Worcestershire. This is a text densely-packed with information on a specialist subject, yet at times, the reader is left to wade through the content when they should have been assisted to digest the ‘fruits’ of the author’s labours.