Urban bias could be seen as an antidote to parochialism. But, like parochialism, urban bias can be bad thing as well as good. Urban bias takes many forms. I will describe how I see it and examine some past accusations of urban bias to illustrate how the accusation can be false as well as a genuine concern. Urban bias is, in my opinion, a block to progress and development of the Fenland area. But then, of course, my bias tends to be rural in its nature.
As a child my mother read to me the various Beatrix Potter stories that I eventually learned to read myself. One of these was “The Tale of Johnny Town Mouse” that was based upon an old Aesop fable. In the tale the country mouse Timmy Willie accidently travels to the town and encounters a busy world with loud noises, mouse-traps and a selection of rich food introduced to him by Johnny Town Mouse and his friends. Timmy Willie pines for home and starts to fall ill so returns back to the country to be visited eventually by Johnny Town Mouse. Johnny finds country life dull, the cattle scary and dislikes the sound of the mower. So Johnny returns to the town . The moral of the story being that one place suits one person and another place suits another.
Nowadays Timmy Willie would arrive in the city scared shitless armed with pepper spray and a face mask having read the Daily Mail, watched TV and have all sorts of preconceptions about the evils of the city. Equally Johnny Town Mouse would arrive having seen Kate Humble, Matt Baker or some other respected TV presenter extoll a rural idyll only to be disappointed by the dust of harvesting, the smell of chicken shit, the noise of tractors, and the seasonal bangs of the local shoot.
These preconceptions and biases both ways are reinforced by the use of both the internet and social media. Social media bands people together who agree and supresses proper discourse. Even internet search engines increasingly have a bias dependent upon your search activity with the world and much information prior to 1998[i] is disregarded unless some kind soul has transcribed and tagged it to the internet.
Thus we have people’s expectations of a place not meeting reality until they actually go there with an open mind without fear or prejudice.
In my experience people that migrate to urban areas tend to adapt to its life, its rhythms, its pains and its pleasures. This is rewarded with greater facilities, experiences and opportunities. This is particularly noticeable to people from the more ‘remote’ rural areas such as the Fens, the West Country and Northumbria – the areas that were historically and socially the most remote from London. Such remoteness is not necessarily physical remoteness, but rather social, economic and temporal remoteness. One obvious example is access to the arts and theatre that understandably focuses on urban locations.
When people migrate from urban areas to rural, such as the Fens, they tend not to adapt in the same way. Indeed, they often keep their social and economic links to urban life. They commute to work, retain social circles in the city and retain their mobility between the two. Rather than adapt they seek to reform and mould the countryside to their views and needs. Indeed, they often seek to protect rural areas from many aspects of rural life with perhaps the most obvious targets being farming and shooting. This is made harder by ignorance of rural life and economics and can result in a severe conflict of interests, desires and aspirations.
If we go back in time the earliest allegations of urban bias I have found has been the alleged urban bias of education. From the 1890’s onwards we see a repeated allegation that the education system had an urban bias that encouraged young boys to migrate to the City. There was very little protection for child workers in rural areas in the nineteenth century and the 1833 Factory Act favoured protection of children in the City with no matching protection in the countryside. As such the Act had an urban bias.
The 1833 Factory Act prohibited workers aged 8 or below from working in factories, restricted child labour between 5.30am and 8.30pm, introduced an hour long lunch break and required elementary schooling of under 13’s for at least two hours a day. Scotland was far advanced on England putting similar restrictions in place and compulsory education in place in the 17th century. Most importantly of all in England the 1833 Act provided a system of inspection and effective enforcement of the legislation. In contrast Agricultural child labour had little protection until the 1880 Education Act made schooling compulsory for 5 to 10 year olds. However, there was an element of rural bias perceived against education for to “keep them ignorant” ensured a supply of labour for Fenland farmers. Edward Stanhope touches upon this in his report to the Royal Commission of Employment of Children, Young Persons and Women of 1867:
“It is a common charge, brought against farmers as a class, that they care little for education and are rather disposed to discourage it. Now in many cases it cannot be denied that education is materially interfering with labour, because the object of the labouring class in seeking it is not to make their children better agricultural labourers, but to enable them to rise to a higher sphere of life. ‘ If I could only get him to be a scholar,’ said one woman, ‘he should never be a farm labourer.’ ‘If I were a scholar I shouldn’t be here', said a labourer, ‘ and that’s the reason why the farmers hold against this ‘ere scholarship.’ One cannot therefore be surprised that farmers should wish to direct education as to prevent its having this effect as far as possible. ‘Their view is that more than a little is very much too much; they are afraid that labourers will be spoiled for field work.”[ii]
The allegation of urban bias in education was being alleged in the 1920’s, but it is clear that the competition of labour and living conditions was considerable as seen in the following words from 1925:
“Vast numbers of the last three generations of country-bred workers have gravitated to the urban and industrial centres in quest of employment. They have, for the most part, left their native villages not, as farmers have so frequently asserted, because they have been educated on the wrong lines, but because the countryside has had nothing to offer them in the way of social improvement and advancement. Their hearts have remained in their birthplaces. There has never been any ‘urban bias’ in their minds. They had no real liking for the occupations they have taken up, farm work is more varied, and generally more pleasant, than industrial work. No young man would, for instance, prefer the occupation of a coal-miner to that of a farm labourer, at equal rates of pay, or that of a street-scavenger[iii] to that of a shepherd or garthman[iv].There is vastly more monotony in urban or industrial than in rural employments. And it is absurd to suppose or suggest that home life in a back street is more to the liking of a country bred man than home life in an average rural village.”[v]
To put some context we need to consider that the peak arable farm acreage is considered as being in 1870’s Great Britain was deemed to be 7.2million hectares, reducing consistently to 4.6 million hectares by 1936 with a brief respite in World War 1. By 1946 arable acreage had nearly jumped to the 7.2 million hectares of the 1870’s and by 2018 reduced to a little over 6 million hectares nationally.[vi] At the same time consider in 1851 there were 1.7million agricultural workers (1,460,896 in England and Wales) – and even then there was deemed a shortage, especially in the Fen area. In 1881 the number of agricultural workers in England and Wales was 223,943 – a massive decline. In 2012 the total agricultural work force in the UK was 182,900. Allowing for the different boundaries of the various figures this is a huge drop in work force. At the same time Agriculture slowly became more efficient with greater yield and greater productivity per person, but this did not take off until greater mechanisation was adopted in the second half of the twentieth century with yield increase on some crops more than doubling in the same period. By the 2010’s I was talking to farmer’s in the Fens that were having to consider greater storage to cope with record yields. Fewer people producing more has been the great success of the Fenland farmer as elsewhere in the country. Yet throughout this growth shortage of labour has been an ongoing issue. It should be considered that agriculture now shares the labour pool in the Fens with a vast array of food processing, packing and distribution employers.
In the 1920’s the educationalist Alfred Daniel Hall argued that rural education was “urban in outlook and calculated to turn aside children from the land.” [vii] This view was echoed in subsequent decades. However, I sometimes feel that agriculturists were sometimes victims of their own narrow thinking as I will explain here:
As they looked to extend the school leaving age from 14 to 15 the National Farmers Union opposed this in many regions for fear of shortage of labour. However, in anticipation of this happening they also made an argument for agricultural training in schools with the following quote by Mr. Hodson of Buckinghamshire NFU from 1936 being one of several I have found around this argument, “All over the country you have technical schools whereby anyone interested in trades can derive education, technical education, which will be of benefit to them in the future. You have not any such system whereby the children of agriculturists can get any education for their benefit and future education unless they attend a farm institute.”
This quote by Mr Hodson illustrates a narrow form of thinking that makes two assumptions;
- The future “agriculturists” can only come from existing agriculture.
- Agricultural and horticultural training cannot be urban based.
The urban bias argument of education may have been true, but the remedy is where there are more children to tap into the education of future agriculturists. I would argue that this viewpoint may still be a weakness in the twenty-first century.
The argument of urban bias was being made rather than looking where the interests of different people in different locations overlap. The following quote from a Mr Hawkins of the NFU from 1936 again chimes today as I see more education based on land and farm management than practical skills: “….. pointing to the dearth of boys learning to work on the farms, there might occasionally be boys learning to run a farm, but not to work on a farm. In fact, so far from there being any rural bias in rural schools it seemed to him the whole of the bias was urban bias.”[viii]
The simple fact that Mr. Hawkins reveals here is that most going into agricultural/horticultural training were the sons of farmers, landowners and tenants. If you look at the Fenland areas in 1936 the housing conditions were poor and often some distance from farmwork with little or no transport system, longer hours, uncertain seasonal work with layoffs in winter and exhaustion in summer. In the urban areas pay was greater, you could live closer to work, or benefit from transport as well as be closer to the entertainments of urban life. If you lodged in a Fenland farm you could be several miles from the nearest shop, shop or town with little to do other than work. So even if the urban bias argument was valid, the pull away from the countryside was also great.
Post World War 2 the accusation of urban bias of schools continued as country children were taken from village schools that were becoming increasingly depopulated and closing. There was much anxiety that country children taken from village schools to urban schools were becoming urbanised and throughout the late 1940’s through to the early 1970’s the bias of education in favour of industrial as opposed to land work was repeatedly voiced by NFU branches. But, of course, they were primarily speaking for farmers and growers.
The post War growth of the food processing, packing and distribution in the Fens meant that the school-leaver had increasing choice of employment relatively close to home. Here we see a split/bias caused by the nature of the Grammar School system prevalent in the local towns that meant the eleven-plus selection of school often determined who went where after education. Broadly speaking for my generation and just before those attending Secondary Modern Schools were steered to work in the food industry such as Geest, George Adams, Smedleys etc. and those attending Grammar Schools were steered towards University with the service industries lying between these two avenues.
In the Grammar school I saw appalling bias with some teachers saying to farmer’s sons and those whose parents were self-employed, “Oh, you’ll not go to University as you will have a job.” I even experienced this from one teacher with whom as a fourteen year old I had a blazing row with only to have him, to his credit, apologise to me the following day and admit I was right.
I believe that the urban bias in modern education is actually worse in the twenty-first century and applies to a bias against the wider food industry and not just farming based upon what I have seen firsthand. I sat dumbfounded in a local Secondary Modern School in the audience as a newly appointed head teacher criticised local parents and children as having no aspirations other than to work in the local food industry. This is absolutely staggering when you consider that many of those parents had moved countries to work in the Spalding area in the food parents and other parents had multiple generations in the industry. They then went on to encourage children only to look at University as a first choice. In the case of my son this was not what he intended to do as he became an Agricultural Engineer, but whilst some teachers “got it” too many did not understand this ambition and had a clear urban bias. Indeed increasingly I heard staff and management of the school criticise working in the food and farming industries despite the fact that the School was sat in the geographical centre of that industry. I know from talking to parents and clients that this bias was repeated in other schools in the Fenland area.
However, I turn the argument around and touch upon the need for the farming and food industry to reach into schools and this was recognised by farm leaders as early as 1936 even if the words may come across today as having a patronising tone:
“You get these boys; they are under an urban teacher who has no idea of the land at all – not the slightest idea; they never think of recommending anything in that way. And all their wishes and thoughts and everything else are turned into urban pursuits. I am quite certain that if we could get something done on these lines, get some of these teachers who are country-bred, who know something about the land, who would approach certain up-to-date farmers and say, ‘Now instead of morning school can I bring my class around and have a look at the methods employed.’ – with young stock pigs and anything like that and get the kids I am certain it would make a great difference……… the only way to get the little beggars around when they are quite small…..It would be the greatest benefit not to us personally alone, but to benefit agriculture in general, the good health of the country and everything else.”[ix]
When Mr Rowland said these words in 1936 he was forward thinking for his time. This was to become more important an issue as the 1970’s saw the development of supermarkets as the primary source of food supply to most families totally divorcing the countryside and farming from the food experience for many people. This is not healthy for consumers or farmers as it decreases understanding and empathy both ways. Seventy year later in 2006 LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) started national Open Farm Sundays that welcomed over 2.7million people onto farms for one Sunday each year. This was and is heavily supported by many Fenland farmers, with some taking measures to expand this activity at their own considerable expense as they invest in their community and the industry.
However, the desire of encouraging young people into the industry expresses by Mr. Rowland in 1936 is nowadays but a small part of the Open Farm Sunday and associated activities. A significant part of Open Farm Sunday has been to educate and inform the public about what farmers do to produce food and manage the countryside. Whilst this is laudable it is not necessarily reaching deep into urban centres of population, rather it reaches those on urban edges and those that have migrated to rural areas.
In my opinion, what has been even more successful is the East of England Agricultural Society’s Kids Country. Kids Country was established in 2012 and I was a keen supporter of this in the Peterborough area. They had annual events that brought children to the Showground to show them a wide range of food, farming and rural activities. Possibly more importantly it reached out to children by visiting them in schools and various activities such as breakfasts, where they would go to a school and look at all the potential ingredients of a breakfast and where it originates from. In such a way they were repairing some of the damage done by the supermarket system that is divorced from the origins of food and its ingredients. Other events include growing produce, potatoes, beekeeping and pollination, seasonal summer fruits, to name but a few. In addition a local Cambridgeshire farmer, Farmer Luke produces short and simple social media videos educating both children and adults about all aspects of farming and the countryside. All this has been groundbreaking and inspired other projects.
The East of England has a considerable advantage in that key urban areas such as Peterborough, Norwich, Cambridge and Lincoln all have the benefit of their city centres being relatively close to countryside. However, I fear that these activities, whilst bridging a gap of knowledge and understanding, are often aimed at primary education and the pressures of secondary education sees them subsequently lost as there is a reversion to an urban bias that is dominant.
However, I do have an issue with a certain trait of rural bias that I repeatedly see and hear especially on television programs, that is, “farming is not a job it is a way of life.” This was described by Mr Rowland in 1936, “…..nothing will send them on a farm except a real personal love of it, love for animals and that sort of thing.” This viewpoint is in danger of reinforcing a rural idyll which is damaging to the industry and helps reinforce poor conditions, poor pay, and repeated personal sacrifice beyond the reasonable. I have repeatedly seen farm workers doing jobs that do not provide a viable living for the love of the work. I have seen employers both intentionally and unintentionally exploit this[x] in a workplace that has not been widely unionised since the late 1930’s. Worse still I have seen multiple farmers in Fenland and beyond endure bad working and living conditions, repeated financial losses and ultimate failure, breakdown or even death because of “love of the work” and their entwined identity and attachment to farm life. There appears to be an emotional countryside for of rural bias that prevents the need for many working on and owning farms to live on more than love of the job.
To counter “urban bias” in education there needs to be greater development of pathways to rural development and employment. In the past land-based colleges have provided this, many of them with their own farms and horticultural units. However, the gap between what is primarily achieved by volunteers and charities such as Kids Country in primary schools and the accessing of further education at land based colleges is large. Yet these very land based colleges have had their very natures watered down by urban bias that sees other courses bolted onto what was a rural model, such as sport, uniformed services, art and design and childcare. It also concerns me that most of the people attending traditional rural courses at land based colleges are from rural areas, or have parents in rural employment. Thus within a system that carries increasing urban bias we see a rural bias. Thus town mice and country mice appear to be determined by birthplace. That this should happen in such a geographically small country as the UK in the modern era is a failing.
Urban bias in politics – In the past the political bias was towards land-owning men as they controlled the voter – in 1866 all voters had to be male property owners over 21. This biased voting to land owners and favoured the interests of rural estates as less than 5% of the population had the vote. The growth of democratic political influence in 1867 saw the vote extended to occupiers, those renting in boroughs, seeing a slightly increasing voter influence from some of the newer towns of England and Scotland. In 1884 this right extended beyond boroughs into counties. However, land occupation could give multiple votes swaying democratic bias to the land owners of the countryside. The 1918 Representation of the people Act and the subsequent act of 1928 gave all men and women over 21 the vote. In 2024 at least 60% of voters live in cities with many more living in urban areas and towns. The urban voter is typically served by an urban focused Member of Parliament, and quite right that this is so. But, it means that people with an urban view and bias are making both policy and legislation that affects rural communities based upon that bias. The challenge for the predominantly rural Member of Parliament is to be an advocate for their rural constituents and influence his urban colleagues across parties of all political colour. The rural lobbyist needs to reach out to say the MP for the London Borough of Hackney North and Stoke Newington to get their point across and counter their natural urban bias. From a simple mathematical reality more urban constituents than rural ones means a bias of representation towards the urban. This is only ever likely to increase as urban populations are growing at a greater rate than rural ones. The urban-biased MP needs to understand the effect of their choices upon the rural. However, I do concede that the view of an outsider to the countryside can often be of as great or even more value than the biased view of a Fenman.
In the 1970’s it was a common view extolled by local politicians that legislation and policy impinged on the rural economy, food production and farming – such as abolition of succession tenancies, capital taxation and the green pound. Local accusations of democratic deficit in favour of the urban increased in view of the East Midlands European Parliamentary constituency that lumped the Fens with the urban and industrial Midlands. Perception was that the Fens would have sat more comfortably in the East of England constituency. The irony of this perception cannot be lost when you read the former South Holland MP, Sir Richard Body’s arguments that agriculture had seen a huge transfer of capital towards it at the expense of industry due to the European Common Agricultural Policy.
I perceive that the Fens are afflicted by a new form of urban bias in local government and the pressure groups and activists that influence them. In January 2022 the Radio 4 program “Any Questions” was broadcast from Gedney Hill village hall and I was in the audience. In the warm up to the live broadcast the audience are invited to ask possible questions as part of the warm up process. I said, “I would ask whether the panel deemed it acceptable that more and more larger houses outside the budgets of local people were being built in villages like Gedney Hill?” There was a groan and a mild heckle to this in the audience. Indeed, despite being married in the village and only living in Spalding, the heckler viewed me as an outsider! Whilst my question was not chosen, it does reveal a significant issue that relates to the political bias I describe that reaches into planning. The simple fact is that a home in the country is what a city person hopes to buy and farmer hopes to sell.
The problem is that there is an influx of people into rural areas on higher incomes. These people often forma combination of second homes, dormitory homes, or retirement. This causes a vast inequality in that despite a rising of average incomes those ‘locals’ that are poorer are often worse off as the social and economic structures adjust to a mobile affluent incomer to the detriment of the existing local poorer population, which is effectively short-changed. Primary schools, public transport, local shops, mobile libraries, doctors, pharmacies all become increasingly focused on the urban areas and two cars become a necessity to struggling households.
There is also an urban bias in favour of the urban. The local democratic bias works in two ways:
Firstly, the urban incomers have more time and money to become active in local government. This has meant that the dominance of local businessmen, landowners, farmers and long-standing residents that Fenland areas have seen in the past are prone to be eroded by increasing numbers of urban people that have moved to the rural areas. This is illustrated by a severe difference in outlook as I will illustrate with a current example relating to the 1930’s. In the 1930’s when local councillors objected to new electricity pylons the focus was on the loss of crops and the impact upon agriculture. In the 2020’s when local councillors object to new electric pylons the focus is on aesthetic appearances and an understandable desire for people not to see pylons from their homes. This in the 2020’s is all the more relevant when you consider certain horticultural and business capacities have been curtailed by the lack of electric grid capacity. Furthermore, some councillors have expressed a preference for underground cable that actually see greater cost to the public and greater disturbance of agricultural activity. In the 1930’s there was a far more pragmatic approach based on local need of people connected to the local economy and not local pressure.
Secondly, is the power of pressure groups comprising often of urban newcomers to Fenland areas that have the time, ability and resources to organise. It should be considered as I state this that the late Tony Benn, upon retiring from Parliament, considered that pressure groups were where real politics was now being done. I have seen some horrendous behaviour by organised pressure groups against farmers largely orchestrated by urban incomers. The worst involved a farmer and his whole family suffering a hate campaign urging them to “Bring back the cows” despite the fact the farm had not had livestock for almost 15 years. What made this worse for the victim is that the plans for solar panels on his farm were being applied for by a third party over which he had no say or control. The poor farmer and his family were stuck in the middle of a ridiculous campaign orchestrated by urban newcomers that had only just moved to the area and did not have the decency to speak to him directly. The NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) and BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody) pressure groups are typically of urban origin, often recent arrivals, and have little interest in the rural economy other than their own selfish needs. In one Fenland area I could predict who was going to object to any local activity whether it be the temporary erection of a polytunnel, the building of a farm shed or a phone mast – this person was literally so much a pain in the arse as they sought to protect their selfish image of their rural idyll at all costs. The problem with such pressure groups, whilst they are an essential part of the democratic process, is that they shut down meaningful dialogue and in the twenty-first century this has become worse due to the polarisation of argument in social media, especially the dreaded village Facebook group. It appears that in a world where red is ‘stop’ and green is ‘go’, there is little room for amber.
However, it can be that a newcomer can fall foul of local wrath as I saw when a person newly arrived to a marshland village decided to start a petition to stop the RAF from using the local bombing range. The petitioner was subject to abuse and ostracization and left within two years of arriving.
Urban bias in the media – the Fenland area has been protected by a strong history of free, unfettered and at times fearless local press. Indeed the Lincolnshire Free Press was originally founded as The Lincolnshire Boston and Spalding Free Press to counter the “buying off” of criticism under threat of libel by politicians that were being held to account. As radio came to the fore in the 1930’s this was, by its very nature, biased towards national interests as the audience was national. However, within that was a growth of rural broadcasting about the countryside. Indeed when that “every day tale of country folk” The Archers was first broadcast nationally by the BBC in January 1951[xi] the aim of the show was to spread information to farmers on how they could increase productivity focusing upon three farmers that would sound familiar in some ways over seventy years later: the productive farmer that had very little money; the farmer with little money that was inefficient with virtually no resources; and the rich farmer making a loss to avoid paying tax.
Besides The Archers were a group of early rural broadcasters that shone a light on rural life and practises to the urban and country resident alike. Broadcasters such as Michael Bratby and Old Romany became popular. In the post War period this grew and we saw locally Peter Scott broadcasting about wildfowl including the marsh near Sutton Bridge and the washes at Welney. Yet local issues and news remained the confines of local printed press.
The floods of 1947 were a key event in getting coverage of what was a disaster along the East coast in both national press, radio and what was the fledgling post-War BBCTV, that had only a few viewers. 1959 saw the expansion of TV with the regional Anglia Television, a commercial station based in Norwich. Spalding was on the edge of its transmission range, but this channel proved popular in the area. Here was a TV station that catered for the masses, but was also capable of identifying with the Fens and its people in its news and programming. Regional TV was problematic in that it favoured larger centres of population. Thames TV was a weekday giant that served 4,270, 000 homes in 1971 [xii] and the case was being made to shrink commercial TV from fifteen down to the big five, of which Anglia Television and Yorkshire Television were two. All the TV channels were capable of producing programs of national quality and popularity, but London dominated in the form of London Weekend and Thames Television.
Anglia TV was capable of producing programs for the masses such as “Sale of the Century” but also produced excellent documentaries featuring such people as the Linehams at Fosdyke, Kenzie Thorpe at Sutton Bridge and Ernie James at Welney as well as various farming and conservation activities from the area. The Anglia TV Natural History Documentary Unit was headed by a countryman, writer and journalist, Colin Willock. As well as brilliant international wildlife documentaries he included local niche ones such as The Piper of Nacton – the only TV documentary known to me to fully demonstrate the workings of a decoy.
In 1974 a restructuring of commercial TV and transmitters saw Yorkshire Television take over transmission in Lincolnshire with most of South Lincolnshire losing Anglia TV. This was a disaster in many peoples’ eyes as they could identify with Anglia TV but not with Yorkshire Television, not the Midlands alternative of Central Television. “This decision could only have been made in London without any thought of regional identity”, was the cry from some objectors. I recall many of my father’s customers complaining, “ I don’t wish to listen to that Yorkshire twaddle” or complain of the Yorkshire accent. The reality is that the geography of the area meant that South Lincolnshire, the South Holland region, was between two transmitters and in a no-man’s land.
To a degree local radio established coverage of the Fenland area, initially with the aptly named Hereward Radio based in Peterborough and then BBC Radio Lincolnshire in 1980 and Lincs FM in 1992. I feel Radio Lincolnshire in particular took care to include the south of the county. I even found myself in a small studio cupboard at Spalding swimming pool giving an interview to the station about Spalding Wildfowlers. Coverage of rural matters was kept alive by the skill, passion and care of individual broadcasters. Most notably Alan Stennett at Radio Lincolnshire and subsequently Sean Dunderdale of both Lincs FM and later Radio Lincolnshire, and Steve Orchard at Lincs FM until recently. It also needs to be remembered that key democratic accountability and information is provided by these media, but sadly a centralisation and a move towards the internet has seen this severely eroded.
The coverage of the South Lincolnshire Fens by broadcast media is now very poor and the lack of local knowledge and perspective often shows, especially when compared with London. As to whether this is urban bias, I would possibly argue it is one of regional neglect.
As to content, the programs that do cover the countryside are, in my humble opinion, dominated by an urban gaze.
Urban bias within the Fens – real or imagined? – Acknowledging my obvious bias I believe it is real. Urban bias can exist in the minds of those within cities through lack of rural experience and ignorance. Urban bias exists in those that have relocated to the area who seek to create and preserve a rural idyll to suit their needs and wishes.
However, there is a worse aspect of urban bias that couples with an entitlement resulting in abhorrent behaviour such as the following examples from my notes:
- Person walking in front of combine harvester whilst it is harvesting deliberately stopping it because it was creating too much dust over their home.(2017)
- Repeated walking over middle of growing wheat field by near neighbour on both foot and horseback. There was no public right of way on this field and the farmer repeatedly remonstrated asking them to stick to the headlands where they would cause no damage.(2006)
- Blocking off a field entrance to prevent a sprayer accessing the field as the person did not approve of the spraying of crops. (2010)
- Organised double parking in a village to deliberately prevent farm traffic passing (2017)
These are individual examples and it has been disappointing to see a massive increase in this behaviour. The problem is one of belligerence and entitlement without consequence. In 1993 I saw similar behaviour in a village that resulted in the perpetrators being victimised. I helped them negotiate themselves out of the predicament they had put themselves in. Whilst two wrongs do not make a right this self-regulation in a small community is unlikely to happen nowadays as the structure and relationships in many places is now much diluted.
There is a danger of urban bias being seen as a sparring match between “townie" and “country bumpkin” – the later name being quite apt in the Fens considering the Dutch origin of the word “bumpkin”. However, the reality is that the countryside in the Fens and elsewhere has changed and those forming it today include those that use it as a dormitory, a second home, leisure, tourism, alongside the traditional economic activity and the need for a middle ground of reasonableness is vital.
[i] Google began in 1998 – the first search engine was Archie in 1990.
[ii] Report by Hon E Stanhope to Royal Commission on Employment of Children Young Persons and Women 1867
[iii] Street-scavanger is a street cleaner
[iv] Garthman was a yardsman or herdsman, in some estuary areas the word also described those fishing by traps
[v] By “a son of the soil” Guardian December 12th 1925
[vi] House of Commons Briefing Paper 3339 25th June 2019
[vii] The Nuneaton Chronicle and Midlands Farmers Gazette 7th November 1924
[viii] Bucks Herald 4th December 1936
[ix] Mr. R. Rowland of the NFU – Bucks Herald 4th December 1936
[x] Worst case was a farmer telling workers if they were not prepared to do 18 hour days there were plenty of “Johnny foreigners” who would.
[xi] Note BBC Midlands first broadcast it briefly in 1950.
[xii] Daily telegraph 27th Feb 1971
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