When my friend Sophie first told me about this book she said ‘Someone has written a book of the show!’
This is a brilliant overview of the last thousand years and what it lacks in a catchy title, it makes up for in compelling prose.
You can download the book from our website as it seems to have dissapeared from the website which previously hosted it.
Ewan MacColl was on the first Kinder Scout trespass and wrote this amazingly catchy tune inspired by the experience.
From http://www.kindertrespass.com/
In April 1932 over 400 people participated in a mass trespass onto Kinder Scout, a bleak moorland plateau, the highest terrain in the Peak District.
The event was organised by the Manchester branch of the British Workers Sports Federation. They chose to notify the local press in advance, and as a result, Derbyshire Constabulary turned out in force. A smaller group of ramblers from Sheffield set off from Edale and met up with the main party on the Kinder edge path.
Five men from Manchester, including the leader, Benny Rothman, were subsequently jailed.
75 years later the trespass was described as: “the most successful direct action in British history” by Lord Roy Hattersley.
April 2012 saw the 80th Anniversary of the mass trespass of Kinder Scout celebrated by a week of walks, talks, and exhibitions, with a launch ceremony featuring Mike Harding, Stuart Maconie, and the leaders of major agencies involved in access to countryside. A new book was published, and commemorative posters are on sale.
The trespass is widely credited with leading to:
The trespass was controversial at the time, being seen as a working class struggle for the right to roam versus the rights of the wealthy to have exclusive use of moorlands for grouse shooting.
The Manchester Rambler by Ewan MacColl
I’ve been over Snowdon, I’ve slept upon Crowdon
I’ve camped by the Waynestones as well
I’ve sunbathed on Kinder, been burned to a cinder
And many more things I can tell
My rucksack has oft been me pillow the heather has oft been me bed
And sooner than part from the mountains,
I think I would rather be dead
I’m a rambler, I’m a rambler from Manchester way
I get all me pleasure the hard moorland way
I may be a wageslave on Monday but I have my freedom on Sunday
The day was just ending and I was descending
Down Grinesbrook just by Upper Tor
When a voice cried “Hey you” in the way keepers do.
He’d the worst face that ever I saw
The things that he said were unpleasant, in the teeth of his fury I said
“Sooner than part from the mountains, I think I would rather be dead”
He called me a louse and said “Think of the grouse”,
Well i thought, but I still couldn’t see
Why all Kinder Scout and the moors roundabout
Couldn’t take both the poor grouse and me
He said “All this land is my master’s”, at that I stood shaking my head
No man has the right to own mountains any more than the deep ocean bed
So I’ll walk where I will over mountain and hill
And I’ll lie where the bracken is deep
I belong to the mountains, the clear running fountains,
Where the grey rocks rise ragged & steep
I’ve seen the white hare in the gullys and the curlew fly high overhead
And sooner than part from the mountains, I think I would rather be dead.
In this BBC Archive On Four, historian Alan Dein celebrates the centenary of his mentor George Ewart Evans, collector of Suffolk farming tales. Evans began by chatting to his neighbours over the fireside in the 1950’s and transcribing stories about poaching, shepherding, smuggling and ditching.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rv8yk
The talk was of a hardscrabble life, of leaky roofs and meals of pea soup and pollard dumplings and beef only at Christmas with occasional festivities like the Whitsun fair.
Evans came from a Welsh mining village and he sympathised with the labourers’ stories about the tyranny of the trinity of the parson, squire and farmer. He was a sympathetic listener who asked allowed his community to speak for itself and he captured the stories of people whose traditions had been unbroken for generations, who worked on the land before mechanisation and who believed in magic and folk wisdom and had intuitive understanding of working with animals.
Evans’ eleven books about the working lives and folk stories of Blaxhall are a portrait of every facet of his village and paved the way for books and programmes, both fiction and not fiction, about British agricultural life.
Short documentary about EU farming subisidies (CAP payments) and how they are being abused by large companies to force small farmers out of business.
The website is an amazing resource – http://farmsubsidy.openspending.org/
Fields of Gold: Lifting the Veil on Europe’s Farm Subsidies from farmsubsidy.org on Vimeo.
Owning The Earth
By Andro Linklater
I’m only a little way into this book but am already enjoying it thoroughly. Highly readable and informative.
It brings a global perspective to the story and compares what happened in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland with other European countries and those further afield.
I will update when I’ve finished it.
The Making of the English Working Class
by E.P. Thompson
Considered a definitive text for many years this book is dense, academically rigorous and utterly superb.
I needed a dictionary, wikipedia and a notebook to get myself through the first quarter but once up to speed with the authors style and concepts, it was as compelling a read as I have ever had.
This book has the advantage of being widely respected across all academic and historical fields in a manner which some of the other books I have read are not.
The Painful Plough
by Roy Palmer
The full title is ‘The Painful Plough: A Portrait of the Agricultural Labourer in the Nineteenth Century from Folksongs and Ballads and Contemporary Accounts’ which pretty much does the job.
It tells the story of Joseph Arch, a farm labourer who went on to start one of the first agricultural labourers unions and eventually to become an MP.
A superb piece of work and a huge source of inspiration for the concept of the show ‘Three Acres And A Cow’.
A Ballad History of England
by Roy Palmer
Roy Palmer has spent much of the last thirty years hunting for ballads and using them to weave together a people’s history of England. He has mastered the art of this in a number of excellent books of which this is a great starting point.
This book is utterly superb and should be bought without hesitation. Each song has a melody and words, along with a page or two giving its historical context.
The Sound Of History
By Roy Palmer
This is an amazing book. Not specifically about land but it has a chapter on the topic.
I cannot stress enough what a legend this man and his writings are. This is not the first book of his you should read but it is certainly one you want on your reading list.
This Land Is Our Land
by Marion Shoard
The definitive book on land both past and present, although it has sadly not been updated since the 80’s.
It gets a bit heavy going in places but the first third, which is a history from Roman times to the present, is totally gripping and a must read for anyone interesting in land and land rights.
I had to take quite a few breaks whilst reading it as sections of it made me really angry and/or sad.
The Long Affray: The Poaching Wars in Britain
by Harry Hopkins
Published in 1985, this life changing book was given to me by Sam Lee.
“A beautiful telling of the age-old battle between peasant and landowner where for the price of a rabbit or a pheasant men were murdered, transported as convicts and executed.
This ancient struggle over game was not just about food for the poor poachers and their families, it was about social rank and the power of the landed gentry, the burgeoning class politics of the time and the harsh realities of rural life.”
A People’s History Of England
by A.L. Morton
A leading Marxist historian, book written in 1938. Recommended reading by Roy Palmer.
A.L. Morton’s wikipedia page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._L._Morton
An absolutely riveting, disturbing and fascinating read which turned my world view of history on its head. You can download a pdf of the book from https://libcom.org/files/England-part-1_0.pdf
Here are the books which Hazel Perry brought along to the workshops localising the show for Peterborough…
Free Thinkers and Troublemakers: Fenland Dissenters / Harry Jones / Published by the Wisbech Society & Preservation Trust / ISBN 0951922076
Peterborough: A Story of City and Country, People and Places / (Peterborough City Council, published by Pitkin) / ISBN 1-84165-050-1
From Punt to Plough: A History of the Fens / Rex Sly / The History Press / ISBN 978-0-7509-3398-8
Peterborough (Britain In Photographs) / Lisa Sargood / Budding Books / ISB 1-84015-247-8
Peterborough Through Time (A Second Selection) / June and Vernon Bull / ISBN 978-1-84868-990-9
The Lost Fens / England’s Greatest Ecological Disaster / Ian D Rotherham / ISBN 978-0-7524-8699-4
Peterborough / HF Tebbs / ISBN 0900891300
The blog Who Owns England? by Guy Shrubsole and Anna Powell Smith has been a near constant source of excellent original research into the state of land ownership in England for the last few years. It was happy news when the learnings from this project were augmented in summer 2019 with the arrival of an eponymous book written by Guy.
Now it would be amiss of me to state at this point that both Guy and Anna are good friends of mine and I was one of the people who read Guy’s draft and fed back into the book’s journey. Luckily, I genuinely thought and do think that this is a really great read which draws the reader through the important information Guy and Anna have uncovered, illustrated with insights, stories and more than enough linguistic colour to be really quite compelling.
You must be logged in to post a comment.