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| John Atkinson Grimshaw - Stapleton Park. Grimshaw, he even has the name for these dark miserable mornings in Yorkshire, or maybe it is Lancashire because Tod sits on the boundary? He hasn't captured the wet shiny pavements that can often be seen in his other paintings. The light fall of misty rain or fret as it is called down here.(and it does make you fretful!) The photos below are taken from Dorothy Hartley's book - The Countryman's England, 1935 and is probably a perfect time capsule from the 1930s to capture a beautiful England that would soon disappear into two World Wars and forever more be changed by the relentless march of progress. I know many people think of these times as golden, but they weren't. Poor housing, cold and damp, limited food and illnesses still waiting for the cure that would banish them. Somehow all this talk about warfare has brought these books to mind. Yes Hartley wrote another book Food in England, perhaps we may need it in the future as we learn how to go back to the land and learn how to use the apples of our orchards and the vegetables from the fields.    |
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| Washing spring onions in the stream |
The 1930s was a fascinating time in our history, the painters, poets and theatre actors represented their country, no silly tv programmes and constant news from all corners of the world, just a simple life style captured by the authors of that time.
Funnily enough one of my favourite poems captures the ending of one way of life to the life we now experience (sometimes with great reluctance). The Horses by Edwin Muir...... Make of it what you will for there is plenty of discussion as to its message.
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.
A couple of other books.
H.J.Massingham - The English Countryside. Also English Downland. Massingham wrote a famous book call Prophecy of Famine but it never happened ;)
The pre war 1930s was a time of economic depression, in England but even worse here in Australia. My parents were born then, and my mother's parents who were market gardeners dealt to and fro in the black market trade for basics to survive.
ReplyDeleteThe photos you showed are truly bright and wonderful.
Well I contrasted the photos a little more but they do capture a way of life Andrew. I remember in the 1950s there was still shortage of food and ration books were used up to 1954. My father went shooting and fishing in Wales to stock up our larder.
DeleteI had never read "The Horses" by Edwin Muir before. There is an eeriness and a prescience about it and it makes me think of today's cyberworld issues and an American "diplomat" sucking up to Putin as much as the lumbering carthorses in the English countryside of yore. As for "Hand-Hoeing Sugar Beet in Essex" - what had those people done wrong? By the end of that day their backs must have been breaking. Oh, those good old days!
ReplyDeleteYes the human race has escaped a lot Neil, unfortunately, unable to learn, we create more problems into the future. It is a good poem, it strikes you quiet for a moment and if you love horses as I do it is rather sad.
DeleteColin used to get home from school and have to go and help his Dad on the farm with the 'singling' - that was hoeing out some of the young sugar beet plants to give the rest room to grow, although they would have been standing up with a long handled hoe so I'm not sure why the Essex farm workers are kneeling.
ReplyDeleteMum never talked much about growing up through the 30's but as she was second oldest of 6 children it must have been tough.
Well it could have some other reason Sue. Long handled hoes were too expensive, or perhaps it is better to be nearer the weeds. It looks hard work though.
DeleteLooks like an exhausting life.
ReplyDeleteManual labour is exhausting Ellen.
ReplyDeleteWhat amazing photographs - and more so for being only 90 to 100 years ago. I know people who will have seen and lived those times. When I think back on my life I realise that aside from technology, much is actually quite similar to my childhood - of course, we have moved on, but for example, planes are still recognisable as such from the Sixties, cars and trains the same, sanitation and medical treatments (anti-biotics for example) too. But for my grandfather, say, who was born on 1906 and died in 1980 - when he was child there we no planes at all and yet by the time he was my age we'd been to the moon! Much the same for phones, cars, TV, radio, warfare... The world would have been unrecognisable to his young eyes.
ReplyDeleteIt is a funny experience for us to look back at these old photos and realise how sharply they had figured in the lives before us Mark. Dorothy Hartley's photos gives a good insight to how 'Old England' functioned then. Also to remember the power of the camera was fairly new. Fox Talbot in the 1840's was already designing the various tasks and methods to produce photographs.
ReplyDeleteIt's easy to romanticize the past, but as you said, there were lots of challenges. So many people seem drawn to the mythology, but I doubt they'd appreciate the reality.
ReplyDeleteThere is many a painting of roses round the front door, Helen Allingham's paintings subscribe to the cottage garden of old but I bet the cottage went with a leaky thatched roof Steve.
ReplyDelete