By HILARY GAVIN
I CAN’T speak for you, but I’ve been a fan of Thomas Hardy’s novels since studying them for my English Literature A-level in the late Seventies and early Eighties.
As you know Hardy, himself, was most prolific as an author in late 19th-century Victorian Britain, however, for me, his rich descriptive prose perfectly conjures up a rural idyll of England in the 1840s pre-Agricultural Revolution.
As a teenager, I confess that I got swept away by the romance of John Schlesinger’s 1967 movie adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel Far from The Madding Crowd, starring Julie Christie as the headstrong heroine Bathsheba Everdene, Alan Bates as the dependable shepherd Gabriel Oates and Terence Stamp as the dashing, but dangerous-to-know, Sergeant Frank Troy.
And, of course, how can one forget the late Aussie actor Peter Finch’s sensitive portrayal of Wessex landowner William Boldwood who fell so head-over-heels in love with Bathsheba that he (spoiler alert) shot her estranged husband Sgt Troy.
There’s little doubt in my mind that Hardy, who was born in 1840, yearned for a bygone England when rural labourers tended the fields en masse before farmers began truly maximising their yields by deploying new-fangled machinery.
You might beg to differ with me, but my all-time favourite Hardy novel is The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886, which forensically examines the demise of rural England and the birth of a brave new world of agricultural intensification.
In the novel, Hardy challenges his readers to evaluate Michael Henchard’s haphazard “rule o thumb” approach to farming and small town politics, as the incumbent Mayor of Casterbridge, with the state-of-the art practices embraced by the young and debonair Scotsman Donald Farfrae.
As a schoolgirl in the late Seventies, I have to admit that I was, at first, rather taken with Donald Farfrae’s “enlightened” character in the novel as a good-natured businessman of sound intellect. Wiltshire man Michael Henchard, on the other hand, harboured a dark secret as he had once auctioned off his wife and baby girl as a drunken 21-year-old hay trusser at a country fair.
It’s many years since I’ve read The Mayor of Casterbridge but I would argue that Thomas Hardy masterfully toys with his readers, who – if they are anything like me – continually sway between siding with Farfrae’s exacting approach to producing good quality grain on a large scale and Henchard’s “inferior” natural methods.
Of course, Farfrae didn’t treat his crops with harmful modern pesticides, but Britain’s population was growing in the mid-1800s following the advent of the Industrial Revolution and urban towns and cities had to be fed.
In a nutshell, industrial workers were becoming increasingly divorced from agricultural food production so I can only imagine that they, like the majority of Twentieth-first Century consumers, would have preferred to buy straight, and not wonky, vegetables from street sellers or their corner green grocers.
Nowadays, we know that most busy mums and dads living in and around Chichester get into their car to drive to supermarkets on the A27 for their weekly big shop, and I think most of us would agree that very few people would consider walking along public footpaths with a trolley to stock up at nearby nurseries.
I’m lucky here in Hunston on the Manhood Peninsula because I will be able to walk across the fields near my home to buy freshly cut fruit and veg, and local hen eggs too, over the summer months and I know my produce will taste delicious.
At this point, I should tell you that I decided to write this blog post about Thomas Hardy’s novels after giving a young Bulgarian farm labourer a lift in my car when I spotting him risking his life walking along the busy B2145 Chichester to Selsey road south of Hunston whilst the “Mad Hatter” local traffic raced past him.
Shamefully, I realised I was woefully ignorant of the local history in Hunston, West Sussex, after dropping him off locally, so I spent some hours over the past weekend genning up on the village’s history, principally by reading our parish council’s website.
Of course, it’s going to take me time to understand the lay of the land in the village, so to speak, but I’ve got have a better idea of it now than I had last week. Saying that, my recently acquired knowledge has raised a few questions.
According to the parish website, Hunston only had a smattering of houses as a village before the Twentieth Century and these, of course, included Hunston Mill, which was the home of the local miller Mr Hudson and his wife.
If you’ve read my blog, you’ll see that our parish clerk Carol Smith spoke about Kipson House at the Chichester District Council planning committee meeting on March 28th, 2024, but I cannot seem to find anything else online about the history of this Grade II-listed building. Can anyone tell me more about it?
And I’m also intrigued as a history graduate to know why common land at Hunston was enclosed in 1871, because it seems very late for this kind of thing to happen in an English village to me, and I’d love to get in contact with a local researcher who can tell me more.
I realise not everyone reading my blog loves history, but I do, although I’m by no means an expert on 18th and 19th century field enclosures, the Corn Laws, favoured by protectionist Tory landowners, and Free Trade, laissez-faire economics championed by radical Whig politician Richard Cobden.
For those of you who haven’t heard of Richard Cobden, you might like to visit Midhurst Museum to learn more about the Anti-Corn Laws campaigner and his birthplace in Dunford near Bex Mill in Heyshott village. Fascinating.
Of course, Richard Cobden was a radical politician who opposed greedy Tory protectionism, which inflated grain prices for the masses, and favoured minimal government intervention to allow Free Trade to prosper in Britain and elsewhere.
However, both Cobden and his fellow Whigs were so wedded to, and I would argue blinded by, laissez-faire ideology that he, and they, refused to intervene in the Potato Famine in Ireland in the mid to late 1840s, by supplying grain to the native population, thereby exacerbating the crisis and suffering across the Irish Sea.
On balance, I would argue that – if he were alive today – Richard Cobden would most probably class himself as a neo-liberal and he would be cheering on Big Tech and Elon Musk and his ilk in Silicon Valley in the U-S-of-A.
On paper, I can see how it sounds oh-so virtuous to align oneself to the freedom-loving “live-and-let-live” hippy mantra of the progressive Sixties in our Western society where your business is yours alone and no one else’s.
In reality, however, I would contend that – left unchecked – Free Trade and laissez-faire economics often results in a Darwinesque, dog-eat-dog dystopia where the rich and privileged thrive and the poor and needy fall by the wayside.
Of course, I admit to being a bit of a numpty politically, but I’ve been trying hard over the past TWO YEARS to get my local councillors to listen to me on a number of local issues, including road safety on the B2145.
I must say that I’ve found Chichester MP Jess Brown-Fuller, and her parliamentary staff, responsive and helpful, but I’ve no idea where the city’s Lib Dem HQ is nowadays because no one is ever at its old offices at Richard Cobden House in Lion Street.
I, for one, hope this isn’t a prime example of minimal government involvement in our increasingly unaccountable globalised world! Heavens forbid!
By HLARY GAVIN
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