When Farmers Grumble

In 1930, Labour was in office, and British farming was in trouble. The prices of farm produce had collapsed, land was going out of cultivation, the numbers employed in agriculture were declining, and many farmers faced bankruptcy. In this climate of crisis, the two groups in the industry whose interests seemed more usually to be at odds – the farmers and the farm workers – made rare common cause, coming together in a mass meeting to call on the government for emergency action to save agriculture. An estimated 20,000 gathered at Parker’s Piece in Cambridge on March 1st, 1930, in what was reported as the largest meeting of its kind ever held. Their message to the government was uncompromising:

This mass meeting, representing all sections of the agricultural industry, views with the utmost concern the present position in agriculture [and] desires to place before his Majesty’s Government its unanimous opinion that measures should be taken to assure to farmers a remunerative price for cereals ...unless effective steps are at once taken to meet the situation nothing but calamity faces the industry.

As calamity again faces many of Britain’s farmers in the late 1990s, comparisons are often drawn, by farmers and commentators alike, with the experience of the 1930s. During the Thirties themselves, some farmers had found parallels for their plight by looking back to another depression in farming in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

Farmers have long had a reputation for complaining – for always being ‘on the point of ruin’ even when appearances seem to suggest the contrary – but they have often set their complaints within a historical framework, identifying ways of measuring the level of their distress by looking to the past, whilst lighting on memories and myths of more prosperous times in forming their vision of what agriculture could once more become.

In the 1930s, most people were agreed that farming was not what it had been. Some worried about the appearance of neglect which was coming over the countryside, as fields were left uncultivated and abandoned to dandelions and thistles. Others were concerned about the potential ill-effects for Britain as a whole, as fewer and fewer people were employed on the land – traditionally viewed as a positive influence on both health and national character. Some also warned against the foolhardiness of relying too much on supplies of imported food. But there was also nostalgia for a way of life that appeared to be under threat – and was perhaps already lost beyond recovery.

One of the most influential expressions of such sentiments was in the books written by the Wiltshire farmer A.G. Street. In 1932 he published Farmer’s Glory, which told the story of the changes that he had witnessed during a quarter of a century in farming. Street looked back to the ‘spacious days’ of English agriculture, and lamented the passing of a world before the First World War where tenant farmers played golf and joined in tennis parties, and where there was a satisfying pleasure to be found in farming itself. By the 1930s, fortunes had changed; farming was becoming a ‘business’, but an unprofitable one, and Street had been forced to abandon most of the methods his father had employed in running the farm. Street hesitated to refer to this lost world as the ‘good old days’, but nonetheless he saw ‘farmer’s glory’ as a thing of the past. By 1938 his book was a set text on school syllabuses.

In some ways, the problems which farmers faced in the 1930s were of more extended ancestry than Street described, and many obituaries had already been pronounced on British agriculture by the time he started working on his father’s farm in 1906. Farming had never wholly recovered from the depression which had taken hold of agriculture in the late 1870s, rooted in changes in the international market when farmers in Europe found themselves increasingly unable to compete with cheap imports from other parts of the world, notably wheat from the United States, and also from Russia. Whilst governments on the Continent responded to this threat by protecting their domestic producers through applying tariffs, Britain was almost alone in clinging to the principle of free trade, neither restricting foreign access to her markets, nor offering financial assistance to help farmers stay in business. Thus the problem for British farmers became compounded. They faced unequal competition not only from across the Atlantic but also from European neighbours who benefited from economic support from their governments, and who were thus able to unload produce on the open British market at prices unrelated to the costs of production.

Many British farmers had bowed to the inevitable and put their unprofitable wheat fields down to grass, drastically reducing their workforces in the process. In England, the area under permanent pasture increased by nearly four million acres between 1875 and 1914. This often seemed the easiest solution: if land was not returning a profit there seemed little point in incurring high labour costs to keep it in cultivation. Others chose more positive and less short-term responses, moving into new forms of production such as market gardening and poultry keeping. But, perversely, wheat growing retained its reputation as the finest and most important element in national agriculture, and remained the ready measure for the fortunes of farming as a whole.

Wars tend to be good times for agriculturists, and the First World War transformed prospects for agriculture, finally lifting it out of the depression that had reached its worst levels in 1894-95, but was still showing no signs of ending by 1914. The need to raise domestic production during the war re-affirmed farming’s vital national importance, and from 1917 the government paid farmers to increase their cereal production, guaranteeing the price of grain in a scheme which continued into peacetime. The years following the war were a boom-time for agriculture. By 1921, however, the costs of government support had become too great, and, alongside a range of other cuts in public spending, farmers lost their subsidy.

To many farmers it was this governmental retrenchment sprung upon them without warning, and contrary to official assurances, which lay at the root of their troubles in the 1930s. They remembered 1921 as the ‘great betrayal’, and the emphasis given to it was of great significance in influencing the ways that farming’s problems were perceived, and also the kinds of remedies that were looked for. On the assumption that state support for production was a more natural policy than its wartime origins implied, the farming community’s overwhelming demand throughout the 1930s was for government intervention to save farming from the realities of the market. A precedent had been set, and was now used as a model for future policy.

References to the regime of support established during the First World War tended to portray the (mis)fortunes of wheat growers as representing the fortunes of farming as a whole. Protesters flocked to the demonstration at Parker’s Piece from all over England to call for action to save wheat farming from imminent collapse. In reality, however, wheat was by then a crop of only regional significance: the location of the protest meeting in Cambridge was appropriate, since most grain cultivation on any scale was to be found in East Anglia. On most of the less suitable soils, farmers had abandoned it by the beginning of the twentieth century. Some observers by 1930, including the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, believed there was no economic future for wheat growing anywhere in Britain.

The simplification of taking the plight of the wheat farmers as a barometer for the industry as a whole is pointed up by the fact that the fall in the price of grain during 1929 was welcomed by some farmers, who benefitted from a reduction in the cost of animal feed. Livestock producers and dairy farmers by no means escaped the depression of the 1930s, and prices in this sector collapsed during 1932. In scenes similar to those seen in livestock markets recently, much produce could not be sold at all. Nonetheless, arable farming suffered more heavily across the decade, and the result was a shift in the geography of agricultural prosperity. Small-scale mixed and stock farming in the west tended to weather the storm better than the traditionally more wealthy arable regions in the east.

A.G. Street, who had himself chosen to move out of arable farming to build up a dairy business, argued against the folly of basing an agricultural policy around wheat as the centre point of British farming. But wheat was not simply ‘another crop’. It had economic and emotional significance attached to it. It was part of a farming system which could maintain a large workforce on the land, even given the gradual impact of mechanisation. By contrast, much livestock farming was carried out in family-run enterprises, with little, if any, hired labour. It was still an important crop for some of the most vocal sections within agriculture, particularly among members of the National Farmers’ Union, so that when the claims of farming were placed before government, wheat had an inescapable prominence. Beyond these factors, wheat carried a range of associations which guaranteed it a special position for politicians. It implied that land was in full cultivation, and being cultivated to its proper potential, and it was thought of as a basic component in national defence. Alarmists worried that, once land had been turned from grain-growing to other uses, the country would find itself exposed to interruption to the grain supply from abroad, notably in wartime.

For various reasons, then, the pressing demand of the farming community in 1930 was for financial support from the government, and specifically for this to be aimed at the suffering of wheat farmers. Even those politicians who were resistant to the prospect of transgressing against the inter-linked principles of free trade and cheap food felt that this might be a special case. The Labour cabinet was torn between scepticism about agriculture’s habit of declaring itself in terminal depression and an anxiety to show sensitivity towards an industry where it hoped in due course to attract political support. The response was a fudge: a proposed quota system, obliging British millers to include a given proportion of home-grown wheat in all flour. No-one could really believe that this would be compatible with free trade, though many tried to argue that it was. Representatives of other industries, and indeed many civil servants, observed that there was no obvious reason why agriculture should be given special treatment while other sectors of the economy were also in serious difficulty: if one was favoured, then all industries should be eligible for state support. More seriously perhaps, some, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, argued that, contrary to the agriculturists’ claims that assistance (however temporary) was vital to maintaining meaningful agricultural industry in Britain, support of this kind would be detrimental to economic development – providing no incentive for restructuring and diversification into new and more profitable uses for the land.

These struggles to find an acceptable policy for farming were overshadowed by the 1931 financial crash and the fatal split in the government over where to make cuts in state spending. The new National Government, however, lost little time in introducing a Wheat Act in 1932 guaranteeing minimum prices to be met through a charge levied on the price of flour. Once this symbolic point had been passed, political approaches to agriculture changed. Before 1932, agriculture was in receipt of no state assistance, bar preferential rating on agricultural land and a scheme of support for sugar beet cultivation to encourage the development of a domestic sugar industry. Between 1932 and 1939, by contrast, the government intervened to pay subsidies on a range of farm produce, restrict levels of imports, and impose duty on foodstuffs coming from abroad.

There were also developments in the marketing of farm produce, building on legislation introduced by Christopher Addison, Labour’s minister of agriculture in 1931. This seemed a more constructive approach, based on the premise that farmers were not enjoying their rightful share of the home market, and that this could be remedied by improving and standardising the quality of what they sold, and marketing it effectively. In the 1930s marketing boards were set up for hops, milk, potatoes and bacon. They were, however, monopoly organisations, run by producers for producers, without any consumer representation; raising questions of whether a revival of agricultural fortunes was necessarily in the interests of the wider public. Consumer preference was often quite clearly expressed in favour of imported food. One of the best examples of this was Danish bacon. Denmark had taken a very different approach from Britain following the collapse of grain prices in the late nineteenth century, and had transformed its agriculture to focus on dairying and pig keeping, with great success. When the Pig Marketing Board was set up in Britain in 1933, it was able to force restrictions on imports of bacon, hoping thereby to raise prices and demand for the home product. In fact consumers continued to choose Danish bacon rather than British, even though there was less of it available and prices rose.

Farmers continued to complain. The acreage under wheat increased sharply following the introduction of price support, but this revival in arable farming proved short-lived. The rates of government subsidy were too low to return farming to its former levels of prosperity, and marketing boards succeeded only to a limited extent in ironing out price fluctuations and offering producers some security. The cost of food, particularly fruit, vegetables and milk, remained too high in the eyes of those who wanted these ‘healthy foods’ to play a larger part in the national diet. But farmers were rarely the direct beneficiaries of high retail prices: there was often a gross mismatch between the price paid by the housewife for her cabbage, and the price the farmer received for growing it. Once more it took a war to bring about a real revival in agriculture – and indeed in the public image of farmers, who were transformed from moaners demanding state hand-outs, into national heroes of the home front. This time the recovery proved more enduring, and the 1940s inaugurated a period of extraordinary support for agriculture, accompanied by a massive increase in production. All this was unimagined in the 1930s when predictions about farming were largely pessimistic, assuming further declines in the acreage under cultivation and even entertaining the possibility that agriculture would simply not survive as a meaningful sector, other than for the production of foodstuffs such as milk for which the home market faced little foreign competition.

In important ways, the position of farming in the 1930s was far removed from that of the period after 1945. In the 1930s farmers hoped that the introduction of financial subsidies by government could ‘make farming pay’ and keep a substantial workforce employed in the industry. In the 1990s farmers suffer despite levels of subsidy which have for decades obscured the real costs of production and the economic basis of European farming. Behind these differences lies the deeper question brought to prominence at times of agricultural crisis – what agriculture means to the nation, and how far, and to what purpose, the community is prepared to bear the cost of keeping farmers farming.

• Clare Griffiths is the Thompson Junior Research Fellow in Modern History at Wadham College, Oxford. Her book Labour and the Countryside is being published by OUP.