ABSTRACT
The end of the Second World War saw British farming standing high in public opinion. The enormous changes in production made by wartime agriculture, and discussed in the last chapter, were widely believed to have saved Britain from starvation. This was clear, as we saw, as early as 1942 when the replies to a MassObservation directive on ‘post-war problems’ strongly supported the farming industry, often seeing a continuation of government support as fair payment for wartime sacrifices. Strikingly, support for agriculture came more strongly and less critically from urban areas than from rural. For example, a social worker from Chiswick wrote: ‘Our agriculture must never again be allowed to decline to the pre-war level;’1 or the suburban housewife quoted in the last chapter who wrote that ‘the farmers have done their damdest for the country, it should be seen [sic] that they are not allowed to go back to penury and difficulty.’2 In contrast, Muriel Green, who was born in the country and who we met in the last chapter working on the land, was keen to stress the hardness of rural life: ‘Agricultural workers, particularly the women, work far longer hours and for less pay (than the factory workers). . . . The work is skilled, and any fool cannot do it.’3
Edward MacKenna, working on the land in Buckinghamshire, also stressed the hard work and, drawing on his own experiences, suggested that the wartime reforms of agriculture had not gone far enough, arguing that, ‘the ploughing up policy is still too half-hearted and will have to be developed much more swiftly after the war’, and that ‘the workers ought to be allowed to have a say about how the farm’s to be run.’4
