Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 2 (2022), p. 323

The appearance of a festschrift for one of the leading practitioners of our discipline and a prominent member of our Society is a noteworthy occasion. John Beckett’s contribution to Nottinghamshire history is celebrated in a volume published by the Thoroton Society, whose chairman he was from 1992 to 2020, in itself perhaps a record.

The book is a collection of essays on the county’s history, all decent and contributing something fresh to its history. Every reader will have their favourites and there is not room here to discuss them all or even list all thirteen. To mention a few, David Crook shows how Nottingham traded on its reputation as the home town of Robin Hood in the mid-seventeenth century. Stanley Chapman discusses ‘Newark as a coaching centre, c.1600–1850’ although much of the essay is actually concerned with roads, and Dorothy Johnston the development of Welbeck Park by the third Duke of Portland. Ken Brand discusses the way in which enclosure allowed the development of a new suburb in Nottingham and discusses the architectural forms it took.

For the two of much greater than county interest, I nominate Adrian Henstock who discusses Ashbourne and Bingham and shows how these small towns were reformed and polished, particularly in the second quarter of the nineteenth century – I suspect a common enough experience but curiously under researched. And in what may be the most important essay in the book, Philip Riden uses correspondence at Chatsworth to rescue postal history from the postal historians, and show how the developing postal network in the late seventeenth century allowed for the freer and faster circulation of information – and, one might say, instructions. There is a bibliography of Beckett’s publications.

The volume calls for some reflections on the contribution that universities make (or ought to make) to the local community through their sponsorship of local history. The appearance is that Nottingham never set out to have a figure so active in the history of the county but by appointing a man brought up in Nottingham they planted the seed. I suspect – no, I know – that no History department would do it today. Of course, given university special funding or a bequest, they would do so: but a straight choice between a local historian (or a historian with local interests) and someone who could teach what would today be regarded as core syllabus – Polish history say, or Catholic missionaries in the early modern Philippines and Japan – there is no contest. The MA Beckett ran in Local and Regional History died in 2005 on his secondment to London, and yet the book offers testimony to its success in drawing people into the discipline and offering them training. It will be interesting to see what Beckett’s legacy in the university turns out to be.

There is much on Beckett the man, and yet curiously little. In a long biographical essay, we learn that he made a sledge in the winter of 1962–63 (with ‘metal runners and countersunk screws’ – important details) and that he married: and that is all it says about his family life. Given the energy he displayed, perhaps he was never at home. A section headed ‘private life’ is about his enthusiasm for cricket and football and it appears here that he is, or was, a church organist and one time choirmaster. There are vignettes of the old university – snooker with Michael Jones in the staff club after lunch on a Thursday. The book ends with a gallery of pictures of Beckett at public events which proves he is both photogenic and much photographed. This surely sets a record for the number of pictures of the honorand in a book of this sort.

And yet whilst the book gives thanks for Beckett and his contribution to Nottinghamshire history, it also serves to diminish the man. The younger Beckett in particular had ambitions to work on a much wider field, as is seen in his early books and the mid-career work with Michael Turner and Bethanie Afton. And see too his contribution to the Agrarian History of England and Wales. More recently he has looked at the processes by which towns achieved city status. All is detailed in the bibliography the book provides and yet, except for a contribution by Michael Turner, it has no resonance in the volume.

Neither were his ambitions limited to Nottingham: he was interviewed alongside me for the Directorship of the Rural History Centre at Reading in 2000. He had a secondment to run the Victoria County History in 2005 to 2010 and I always supposed that he wished it to turn into something permanent. Of course, with its Nottinghamshire focus, the book says nothing about how he presided over VCH in what was surely its Indian summer.

So whilst the book is a worthy and affectionate gift from his Nottinghamshire friends to their colleague, there could have been a different one which would have said much more about his contribution to economic history and agricultural and rural history: even to local history as a discipline. Perhaps we await it?