Over the last four decades our knowledge of British landed society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been immeasurably increased. We have learned a great deal about the economics of estate management, the role of the large landowner in the evolution of the landscape, the changing functions of the country house and the mores of the landed aristocracy.Footnote ¹ Over a similar period there has been a growing literature on the working conditions, kinship networks and organisations of that once ‘secret’ people, the villagers and farm workers.Footnote ²

Looked at more closely, however, some parts of this large canvas have been painted in a little more sketchily than others. Studies of the rural ruling class have concentrated on the nobility and greater gentry, those with estates of three thousand acres and above. The lesser gentry, with estates of between one and three thousand acres, have received less attention.Footnote ³ They owned, it is true, only 12.4% of the cultivated acreage of England,Footnote ⁴ but they often had a greater impact on village and parish life than their grander county neighbours. At village level there have been attempts to sort settlements into types, most notably by emphasising the distinction between open and closed villages and parishes.Footnote ⁵ But such attempts need to be underpinned by a range of detailed local studies, without which generalisation can be dangerous. Although there have been a number of such studies, they have tended to concentrate on the larger and more open settlements.Footnote ⁶

This article looks at a small gentry estate of some 2,750 acres, that of Holton-le-Moor in north Lincolnshire. It examines in turn the estate as a whole, the (closed) parish of Holton that lay at its core, and the (equally closed) village of Holton that lay at the centre of the parish. In the early twentieth century Holton had an active and philanthropic squire, the Reverend Thomas George Dixon. In examining his vision for the estate, the parish and the village, and how successful he was in each of these spheres of activity, use is made of an unusually full collection of estate, personal and family papers.Footnote ⁷

In discussing rural society, whether from the point of view of the lord or from that of the peasant, historians have frequently utilised the terms of paternalism and deference.Footnote ⁸ This article will not ignore those concepts, but it will also look at the relations of squire and villagers in the context of the local community. As the sociologist Margaret Stacey wrote in 1969, ‘There are, broadly, those who use “community” for social relations in a defined geographical area, and those who stress the sense of belonging to a group which “community’’ is said to entail’.Footnote ⁹ It is primarily with the first and more straightforward use of the word community that this article is concerned, but it will also be necessary to engage with the concept of community in the second and more problematic sense.

But how far was Holton a typical small gentry estate, and how far was Dixon a typical small squire? To answer these questions it is necessary to begin by looking at his life before 1906, and at the property that he inherited in that year.

I

Dixon was born Thomas George Gibbons in 1854. He was the second son of Benjamin Gibbons, a beneficed clergyman but also a man of large private means, with a country house near Kidderminster and a town house in London. Thomas's mother was a daughter of George Skipworth, the owner of a large estate at South Kelsey in north Lincolnshire; and George Skipworth had married a daughter of William Dixon of Holton-le-Moor, a neighbour and another substantial landed proprietor. As a second son Thomas Gibbons followed his father into the Church, and settled in Essex, where in 1890 he married Ethel Sperling, from a well-established Essex gentry family. They had four children. At this point the couple's means were modest, no more than five hundred pounds a year in total. But Gibbons had expectations. He stood to inherit little from his father, but part of the Gibbons family fortune would come his way eventually should his eldest brother, who since 1880 had been squire of Boddington, near Cheltenham, have no male issue; and from 1893 he was also the eventual heir, through his mother, of the Holton estate.Footnote ¹⁰

All this might suggest that Tom Gibbons, though not yet landed himself, was a full member of the solid Victorian gentry class. The reality was not quite so clear-cut. The Gibbons family, although cultured, well educated and well-to-do, were not old gentry but from a long line of west Midlands coal and ironmasters. The Skipworths and Dixons represented north Lincolnshire farming dynasties, and had made their fortunes from the land, and, in the case of the Skipworths, from land speculation during the Napoleonic Wars. The Skipworth-Gibbons alliance had resulted not from encounters at country houses or during the London season but from the friendship of two high church Oxford undergraduates, Benjamin Gibbons and Marmaduke Skipworth, the brother of Benjamin's future wife.Footnote ¹¹

Tom Gibbons had not been brought up on a large country estate. He had little knowledge of land management, and no interest in country sports. He was never at home with the ‘high aristocracy’, and developed the tastes of an intelligent country clergyman, becoming a keen antiquary and naturalist. But his ministry came first, and he was devoted to his parish work. Although naturally conservative he had an independent cast of mind, and his experiences in Essex during the agricultural depression led him to a close study of the ‘rural problem’. He was a strong advocate of better working-class housing, a firm supporter of rural education, an opponent of the harsher aspects of the Poor Law, and a proponent of village activities as part of the regeneration of rural life.Footnote ¹²

As rector of Wickham Bishops, near Witham, from 1899 he was influenced by a neighbour with similar but more developed views. Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851–1942) had been a pioneer of the Arts and Crafts movement and an influential London architect before retiring to Essex to devote himself to his social thought and writing. In the early 1880s he had discussed regional communities with Patrick Geddes, the pioneer of town planning, and had adumbrated the idea that communities should be expressed by their buildings, with, in the case of rural parishes, the church as a religious focus and a village hall as a secular centre.Footnote ¹³ Gibbons, too, was interested in building, and could be said to have had it in the blood. His father had spent a not so small fortune providing a new church for the river town of Stourport in his parish. At Wickham Mackmurdo and Gibbons were keen to build a village hall, but failed to obtain a site.Footnote ¹⁴ Gibbons, however, would return to the idea when he moved to Lincolnshire.

In 1906 his cousin, Mrs Jameson Dixon, died at Holton. The estate passed to Mrs Gibbons, Tom's mother, but she and her husband declined it, and so at the age of fifty-two Gibbons found himself squire of Holton as well as rector of Wickham. As a condition of the inheritance he had to take the name and arms of Dixon in lieu of those of Gibbons. He hoped at first that he would not have to give up his parish, but he rapidly found that it did not answer to be a non-resident squire, and in the spring of 1907 he resigned his living and made the move to Lincolnshire.

A few years later he told the assembled inhabitants of Holton that he had only reluctantly, and from a sense of duty, turned himself from a parish clergyman into a landlord.Footnote ¹⁵ But in truth being squire of Holton was a not unattractive proposition. The estate was not large by Lincolnshire standards but it was fairly compact, lying mainly in Holton itself, where he was virtually the sole proprietor, and the neighbouring parish of Nettleton. The house was more like a large gentleman farmer's house (which is what it originally was) than a fashionable mansion, but that did not bother him. The estate was on indifferent soil, and low-rented, but the rents were paid on time, there were no encumbrances, and the estate had the additional advantage of a trust fund, giving Dixon a total net income of about two thousand pounds a year, or four times what he and his growing family had received at Wickham Bishops.

But with these advantages came peculiarities and drawbacks with regard to both estate administration and local society. The history of Holton as a conventional estate was short. In the mid-nineteenth century it had been a single large farming enterprise, and a substantial quantity of land had remained in hand even in the early 1890s. By 1906 the home farm was under one hundred acres, but there had been little time to build up the kind of landlord-tenant relations usual on an estate of this size and type. Moreover, the transition to a tenanted estate had taken place under the least favourable of economic circumstances, the agricultural depression from which Lincolnshire arable farming was only just emerging in 1906. During the bad times farming tenants had been hard to obtain and hard to keep, and they had been less susceptible to landlord influence.Footnote ¹⁶ Holton's largest tenant in 1906, John Hargrave, had survived by low farming: Dixon was to find his attitude far from deferential.Footnote ¹⁷

The second factor shaping Dixon's inheritance as a landlord was the recent history of the Dixon family. Thomas John Dixon, a formidable and successful farmer and businessman, had died in 1871. He had been succeeded, very briefly, by his son, and then by his two daughters, Ann and Amelia Margaretta (Mrs Jameson Dixon). Ann Dixon, though not enjoying good health, had been known for her charitable works. She had built cottages, and had supplied the village with fresh water and a drainage system, not items of expenditure that had been a priority for her father. Mrs Jameson Dixon, however, had been an eccentric recluse, and the estate had been virtually run for her by her trustees, solicitors and agents. She had no children and in her widowhood she was looked after by a close-knit group of servants and minders, several of whom were related to one another, and a further group of ageing farm and estate workers, one or two of whom went back to T.J. Dixon's time.Footnote ¹⁸ All this resulted in a rather stifling atmosphere of inertia and heavy overheads.

The ecclesiastical parish of Holton, which Tom Dixon would have appraised with a sharper eye than the estate, also had its problems. Holton had no separate living, and was a chapelry of Caistor. Curates came out from Caistor to take services at the little church, which Dixon thought looked ‘very bare and cold’ on one of his few pre-1906 visits. Much of the work that would have been done by a resident incumbent, such as visiting the sick, appeared to be neglected. There was a small Church of England day school, but this too struck Dixon as ‘mean and poor’. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that Holton lacked a vigorous social life. The Caistor clergy and the village schoolmistress could not make up for the absence of leadership from the Hall, and the parish had no middle-class resident of independent means. There was no public house in the village, no shop,Footnote ¹⁹ and, somewhat unusually for north Lincolnshire, no Methodist chapel, although a small congregation met in one of the cottages. There is said to have been a pig club, but no friendly society was based in the village. There were annual school treats, and Mrs Jameson Dixon gave her workers the occasional outing, but harvest suppers seem to have died out in her time.

The total population of the parish (only 163 in 1901) was not, however, all gathered in the village. About a mile away across the park was a small subsidiary settlement that had grown up on the main road to Caistor near the railway station. It included a public house (the Hope Tavern), a coal merchant's business (run by the publican, who also had a small farm) and a brickyard. The area was less under the direct eye of the big house than the village, and it may be significant that when the schoolmistress left under a cloud in 1882 she was given refuge at the Tavern.Footnote ²⁰ Then there were the outlying farms, overlapping the parish boundary in at least one case, and supporting their own mini-communities. The farmers had little occasion to go regularly into the village, and the rent dinners were held at the Tavern, as being the most convenient place for the estate as a whole. The farm cottages tended to be under the control of the farmers, and their labourers were a rather transitory lot, the young men in particular changing their places from year to year.

II

In showing how Dixon rose to these challenges as squire of Holton, I shall examine his work with regard first to the estate and then to the parish and the village community, although it is difficult for the historian, as it was for Dixon himself, to keep them rigidly separate.

In estate matters he found the limitations on his actions, as tenant for life rather than outright owner, very irksome. In a moment of exasperation he told his solicitor that he hoped ‘to live long enough for the Radical Government or Conservative to abolish the law of entail’.Footnote ²¹ Nevertheless he patiently set about modifying the system where he could. One of his earliest decisions was in fact conservative rather than radical, and preserved to some extent one of the few socially cohesive features of the previous regime. Against the advice of his agent he kept on most of the outdoor workers, and continued the small home farm. ‘I should be very sorry’, he wrote, ‘to turn off men who belong to the place [my italics] and whose labour is needed. I wish to act kindly to all.’Footnote ²² In 1910 his employer's liability return detailed a coachman, a gardener, a gamekeeper, a bricklayer and a carpenter, most if not all of whom played or were to play their part in the Holton community, as well as six farm workers.Footnote ²³ He had been particularly pleased to retain young George Saunby, the estate carpenter (and church organist), and in 1908 he engaged as a builder-cum-bricklayer Jonathan Mills, a former Dixon employee who had wanted to return to Holton.

Also in 1908 the elderly sub-agent at Holton (formerly T.J. Dixon's accountant) died, and Tom Dixon took over the job of paying the men, telling them however that he ‘expected them to work without supervision’.Footnote ²⁴ In 1910 the agent himself bowed out, probably happy enough to devote more time to his grand East Riding clients, and Dixon replaced him by a down-to-earth local man called James Nettleship, an auctioneer and valuer familiar with many of the local farming families. Most important of all, Dixon was able to tilt the composition of the trustees in his favour. Of the three whom he had inherited, two had been very cautious and conservative, and in particular resistant to the expenditure of money on cottages. But one died in 1907 and the other retired in 1913, enabling Dixon to suggest two more congenial successors, one of them his own brother J.S. Gibbons of Boddington.Footnote ²⁵

One of Nettleship's first tasks was to negotiate the departure of John Hargrave, the largest but from Dixon's point of view the least satisfactory of his tenants. Having asked him to be ‘particular about the persons he introduced into Holton’, he was annoyed to find that Hargrave had placed a labourer, his pregnant wife and six children in a two-bedroomed cottage.Footnote ²⁶ Hargrave's departure, not without acrimony, in 1912 enabled Dixon to let his farm, reduced in size, to a more suitable tenant (found by Nettleship), and to promote three smaller tenants, all local, whom he had already begun to help up the farming ladder. One was a farm worker, the son of the old Dixon shepherd, another was the estate brickmaker, and the third was the landlord of the Hope Tavern, formerly the Holton gamekeeper.

Dixon's principal concern as a landlord, however, was the cottage accommodation of the estate and the village. He wanted the farm workers to be better housed, and he also wanted those employed locally on the railway or the roads or by the Post Office to have less far to walk to work. He wished to attract young people to Holton, and to enable them to stay there when they got married. He was particularly concerned that his cottages should have adequate bedroom space as well as a pleasing external appearance, and made a study of contemporary model designs.Footnote ²⁷ In Holton he made a start by building a substantial house for Mills in 1908, and followed it in 1912 by a house for Saunby, who would otherwise have had to leave the village on his marriage. In 1913 the trustees agreed to a larger building programme, to be a charge on the estate instead of, as previously, on Dixon's private purse. Cottages were built near the station as well as in the village, and the latter acquired its first purpose-built shop as well as new premises for the post office.

Holton's housing policy also benefited from the almshouses that were erected in 1909–10 under Mrs Jameson Dixon's will. They allowed retired and elderly couples or single people to vacate cottages needed for working families, without obliging them to leave the village altogether. Dixon took a close interest in the building, which was undertaken by his estate works team of Mills and Saunby. He also paid for additional bedrooms to enable visiting relatives to stay overnight.Footnote ²⁸

This expansionist phase of estate policy came to a halt during the First World War. Dixon was hit by war-time inflation, whilst receiving little compensation in increased rents,Footnote ²⁹ and the Holton brickmaker, with his two sons called up, had to close his yard. By 1918, after four years of work and worry, Dixon was running out of steam as well as money. There was a small revival in the estate's finances in the early 1920s, when he made his last major additions to the housing stock of the village by forming a Public Utility Society, affiliated to the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, and building two bungalows. A third, for a local family that had been left in difficult circumstances, followed in 1925.Footnote ³⁰ Then, in 1929, came the onset of a deep depression, during which the estate kept afloat only with the aid of bank loans and the family at the Hall had difficulty in making ends meet. By 1936, of the ten larger farming tenants, only one had survived from before 1914, and that was William Pike at the Hope Tavern, the only one to derive part of his livelihood from non-agricultural sources. Among the failures were tenants whom Dixon had known and nurtured for years, and in two cases he had the particularly distressing task of distraining for rent, thus precipitating their bankruptcies.Footnote ³¹ The new tenants struggled to keep going, and had little time or money for local affairs. The rent dinners continued, but the harvest suppers that he had revived in 1909 appear to have been a casualty of this period. Dixon's small and elderly workforce dwindled in the 1920s. In 1929 he ceased to be personally responsible for paying the men, and in 1933 he handed over the home farm to his son George.

No agricultural landlord, however wealthy, could have survived unscathed from the slump of the inter-war period. But from the start Dixon had had trouble with the outlying parts of the Holton estate. Nettleton, although next door to Holton and containing several Dixon farms, received much less attention than Holton in the way of investment and support. The farther-flung outliers, dispensable even in 1906, were finally sold off during the brief revival in land prices at the end of the First World War.Footnote ³² As already noted, the harvest suppers appear not to have continued after the War. Yet even in their heyday before the War they were not consistently attended by people from the outlying farms. The exception was the supper of 1913, attended by 238 people from all over the estate, but that event was combined with a celebration of the coming of age of George Gibbons, the son and heir. Even on well-capitalised estates it was usual for the influence of the owner to diminish the farther one got from the core village or parish.Footnote ³³ In Holton's case, however, the personal choice of the owner also played a part. What money he had he wished to spend on Holton itself, and it is to his schemes for the parish and the village that I must now turn.

III

Looking back in old age, Dixon must have felt that economic circumstances had been against him. But at least God had been on his side, although even in religious matters there had been defeats and frustrations. His great aim had been to get Holton made a separate living, and for the parish to have a resident incumbent. First he tried, unsuccessfully, to prove that Holton had anciently had its own benefice, of which it had been deprived at some later period. Then he persistently badgered the ecclesiastical authorities to create a new benefice, with an equal lack of success. In early twentieth-century Lincolnshire it was becoming more usual to amalgamate small rural livings than establish new ones. About one such case he wrote in 1911 that ‘It is one of the objects of thoughtful men to attract people to villages, and it is not an advantage to deprive a village of a resident incumbent.’Footnote ³⁴

He did not give up easily, and it was the early 1920s before he admitted defeat. Nor did he let the vicar of Caistor off the hook, writing to him regularly to complain of the poor quality of his curates. But meanwhile he had evolved a practical, if partial, solution by becoming Holton's unofficial resident curate and gradually organising the religious life of the parish along his own lines. As a licensed preacher in the diocese he could take regular services at Holton, and even the occasional wedding or funeral, with the vicar of Caistor's agreement. He fostered the Sunday school, prepared candidates for confirmation, started a branch of the Mothers’ Union and visited the sick. Mrs Dixon slipped back into her vicar's-wifely role, and the girls, once confirmed, taught in the Sunday school.

Holton responded to this ministry. The number of communicants rose, and by 1914 the church was full to overflowing at festivals.Footnote ³⁵ But although Dixon improved the appearance of the church and its heating arrangements in the pre-War years, it was not until 1925–6 that he was able to enlarge the building. Even then there was not enough money to carry out his plans in full, and the church retains an unfinished appearance to this day.

In church matters, however, the Holton of the mid-1920s differed institutionally as well as spiritually from the parish of twenty years before. In Mrs Jameson Dixon's day the annual vestry had appointed the churchwardens, clerk and sexton, and had levied a small rate to cover any church expenses not met by the owner of the estate. Tom Dixon replaced this system by voluntary fund-raising through collections at services. But the major change came in 1920, when the vestry was superseded in financial matters by the parochial church council. From 1923 the Holton P.C.C. was an elected body of fifteen members, six of them women, and it was this body that had formal responsibility for the church building campaign, although in the usual way of local things Dixon provided the bulk of the money. As will be seen, this widening of responsibility to the congregation as a whole had its counterpart in the secular life of the village.Footnote ³⁶

As a church school Holton's day school was part of the parochial establishment, although it took pupils from outside the parish (and indeed from outside the estate). As with the church, Dixon had clear aims for the development of the school, and, just as with the church, he had to do battle with bureaucratic ‘outside bodies’, in this case the county education committee and, behind that, the all-controlling Board of Education in Whitehall. He took on the role of Correspondent, on behalf of the Holton school managers, and after five years’ struggle he got what he wanted, a handsome new school building, capable of taking eighty pupils, and presided over by a male head teacher. But his success came at a personal price: he had to foot the bill of over £1,750 himself, the estate trustees having drawn the line at educational expenditure.Footnote ³⁷

Dixon's achievements on a parochial level, therefore, were considerable. Although failing to separate the parish from Caistor, he gave it a semi-independent religious life that survived into the next generation. In fostering the school he was also reinforcing the Anglican character of the parish. But the limitations of this achievement should be noted. Not all his parishioners were Church of England. He knew precisely who were ‘not Church’, and although they were not discriminated against they must have felt marginalised. It did not help when Dixon failed to keep his spiritual and secular roles apart, as for instance when he addressed a harvest supper gathering intending not to mention religion and then almost inevitably did so. His dealings with the Holton Methodists are also revealing. When they asked him if they could hire the new village hall (for which see below) for their Sunday services he congratulated himself on his broad-mindedness in agreeing to their request. But they soon decided that they would prefer to walk to the nearest chapel instead. The reason given was their inability to pay the weekly charge of one shilling for heat, light and cleaning, but one suspects that that may not have been the whole story.Footnote ³⁸

IV

Before 1907 Holton's social calendar, such as it was, had revolved around the church and the school. But, keen though he was to foster both, Dixon did not believe in a village life confined to those with church connections.Footnote ³⁹ At Wickham Bishops he had revived the social club, and had started a rifle club in the aftermath of the Boer War. Soon after he came to Holton he got a social club going in an unoccupied cottage, founded a rifle club, presumably on Wickham lines, and also, with the help of his family, launched a musical society. But a suitable meeting place was lacking, not only for these bodies but for school treats and harvest suppers. His thoughts soon turned to the erection of a village hall, of the kind that he had vainly hoped for in Essex. Mills and Saunby had first to finish the almshouses, but early in 1910 they were able to make a start, Dixon having purchased the site from the estate trustees. He was his own architect, in the sense of sketching out his intentions and then getting Saunby to prepare the detailed drawings: Mackmurdo's role seems to have been confined to encouragement and technical advice. Completed (more or less – neither Dixon nor Saunby were good at finishing things) later that year, the hall provided a large room capable of seating two hundred people, a gallery that doubled as a shooting gallery for the rifle club, and a room for the social club with its own external entrance. (Earlier, more ambitious plans had included a music room and even a subterranean swimming pool).Footnote ⁴⁰ As Miss Joan Gibbons recalled in 1974, the hall ‘immediately became the centre of village activities’.Footnote ⁴¹ The first patriotic celebration to use it, and Dixon was nothing if not a patriot, was to mark the coronation of George V in 1911, when 126 adults sat down to a meat tea and the children were fed in the gallery.

Dixon was pleased when the hall was hired for the occasional private function. But his more ambitious plans for new clubs and societies, and for the hall to become the focus of a flourishing village democracy, did not fully materialise.Footnote ⁴² He called it the Moot Hall, a name it still bears, because he saw it as the seat of the tun moot, or town meeting, a village council on the Anglo-Saxon model.Footnote ⁴³ But Holton's parish meeting, the nearest modern equivalent, was an unrepresentative body (the parish being too small to have an elected council), and had no official connection with the hall.Footnote ⁴⁴ Dixon had provided the building, but had not provided a body to administer it. In the early years he dealt with the lettings himself, and called ad hoc meetings to discuss the seasonal entertainments that were put on to enliven the winter evenings.

All this changed towards the end of the War. From 1918 regular committee meetings were held, and in November 1919 the committee was reconstituted to include representatives of the chief user groups.Footnote ⁴⁵ Two of these, the social club and the rifle club, went back to pre-war days, but three were new: the tennis club, the horticultural society, with its responsibility for the allotments and an annual flower show, and the Women's Institute. Dixon no doubt approved of these bodies, but in each case the initiative had come from elsewhere: the tennis club was probably started by his daughters and their friends, the horticultural society was finally got off the ground, so to speak, by Dixon's gardener and the village schoolmaster, and it was Mrs Dixon who had taken the lead locally in the Women's Institute movement.Footnote ⁴⁶

The War and its associated social changes had a lot to do with these developments.Footnote ⁴⁷ Twenty-six men had gone from Holton to serve in the conflict, of whom seven had not returned. Those left at home, men and women, took on many extra burdens and responsibilities, but the village appears to have been surprisingly resilient.Footnote ⁴⁸ Both the horticultural society and the Women's Institute were responses to the drive to produce more locally grown food. The former may have been largely a male affair, but the Women's Institute exemplified the way in which women were now prepared to take a front seat in local affairs. In 1920 Mrs Dixon thankfully retired from the chair, her eldest daughter Mary taking over what she wryly called the presidency of the ‘republic’, and her sister Dora the secretaryship. But the schoolmaster's wife became treasurer, and village women joined the entertainments committee. ‘I hope’, commented George, ‘that the new people (apart from the family) will take their share of the work’.Footnote ⁴⁹

It was also noted, at the time and since, that the men who did return from the War were generally less willing than before to leave all the decisions to the squire.Footnote ⁵⁰ In Holton the schoolmaster George Weatherill was among those returning, although it must be said that his behaviour had not been markedly deferential even before his departure for active service.Footnote ⁵¹ An energetic and tactless young Yorkshireman, he liked to get on with things, and Dixon was relieved when he finally left for another post in 1924. He sent him on his way with a testimonial praising his ‘great interest in all that concerns the welfare of the village in social and progressive matters’ and his work as ‘a leading spirit in clubs of all kinds and Horticulture’.Footnote ⁵²

These immediate post-war developments were followed by a period of consolidation rather than further innovation in Holton, but some new organisations were created, catering especially for the younger people of the village. A scout troop was formed in 1921, and a girl guide troop, led by Mary and Dora Gibbons, in 1923. Dancing classes were started at the Moot Hall, and a Locarno Room was added to it in 1925, serving partly as a changing room for the football club. The period 1929–34 was one of great difficulty for all local organisations, and the Moot Hall could hardly pay its caretaker. Nonetheless an appetite for social activity survived, and in 1935 the King's jubilee was celebrated in much the same way as his coronation had been in 1911, the chief differences being that the Women's Institute was fully involved on the latter occasion and that the vicar of Caistor took the lead in place of the now aged and less active Dixon.Footnote ⁵³

One body that failed to flourish between the Wars was the parish meeting. During the 1920s it continued to discuss local issues, but local government changes, especially rating reform and the end of the office of overseer, reduced its role, and after 1928 it entered a decline from which it was to emerge only in the 1960s.Footnote ⁵⁴ The parish meeting apart, however, the village institutions encouraged and strengthened by Tom Dixon proved remarkably resilient. In the longer term his most important contribution was his investment in the school, ensuring its survival at the heart of village life into the twenty-first century.Footnote ⁵⁵ But his more pioneering achievement was the provision of the Moot Hall. Before 1914 true village halls, as distinct from parish halls or workingmen's institutes, were a rarity,Footnote ⁵⁶ and it is not surprising that at first the Moot Hall was not properly keyed into the institutional structure of the parish. But when, at the end of the First World War, that structure matured, the ground had already been laid and the building put in place.

It was a structure that had begun to assume its characteristic shape even before Dixon arrived in the parish, with the creation of school managers and a Correspondent under the Education Act of 1902. By the early 1920s Holton, despite its small population,Footnote ⁵⁷ had not only school managers and a parish meeting but a parochial church council, almshouse trustees and a village hall committee, not to mention voluntary bodies with their own organisations such as the Women's Institute. To join one of these bodies put one at risk of being nominated to represent it on another, with the result that individuals ended up with multiple roles.

Dixon could not sit above this system, whatever his personal inclinations. In order to pursue his aims he found it necessary to become a churchwarden, chairman of the parish meeting, school Correspondent, an almshouse trustee (representing the district council, of which he eventually became chairman) and later Moot Hall chairman and P.C.C. secretary. At a lower but still vital level his coachman Charles Welch served as parish clerk and sexton, took his turn as constable, sat on various committees, and latterly acted as Moot Hall treasurer and member of the P.C.C. A steady churchman, and connected by marriage to local Holton families, he was described by the local newspaper when he died in 1924 as ‘one of the best known men in the district’. As the years passed it became more difficult to justify his retention as coachman, but he was ‘too important’ to get rid of, and it was only after his death that the family at the Hall acquired their first, very modest, motor car.Footnote ⁵⁸

The fact, therefore, that Dixon began to run out of steam after 1914 did not put into reverse all the social progress that Holton had already made. By 1918–19, despite or because of the War, there were more people in the village ready to put themselves forward, including the schoolmaster, the shopkeeper, some of the women and members of Dixon's own family. His declining energies allowed more room for the energies of others. What he had done was as much to facilitate change as to initiate it.

V

Holton-le-Moor in the early twentieth century had its peculiarities, but it lay within a more general category, a small village and parish in single ownership, almost entirely reliant on agriculture and under the influence of a resident squire. One might expect to find such a place a stronghold of paternalism and deference.

To some extent it is possible to describe Dixon as a paternalist. The miniature welfare state that he established in Holton assumed both a government to supply the welfare and grateful inhabitants to receive it. As a clergyman, a strong advocate of family values and a devoted family man himself, he not unsurprisingly wished the people of Holton to ‘band together as one family’, with himself, presumably, as the paterfamilias.Footnote ⁵⁹ It could even be suggested that he, like other members of a traditional elite in a period of social change, was shoring up his role of local leader by redefining it in terms of service rather than authority.Footnote ⁶⁰ But, although probably accorded the traditional respect of country people for a social ‘superior’, he never seems to have exacted deference as a quid pro quo for benefits. Not one to stand on his dignity, he would roll up his sleeves to help a cottager lay a garden path, and in his earlier years at Holton enjoyed a snowball fight with the schoolchildren. Later, when too old to retaliate, he would carry an umbrella to ward off the missiles.Footnote ⁶¹

In fact he saw himself more as a kind of trustee than as a father figure. In 1918 he sat down to review his financial situation and make his will. In doing so he summarised his attitude to the responsibilities that he had taken on as squire of Holton. ‘From the time that I came into possession of Holton’, he wrote, ‘I have looked upon my position as a trust for the inhabitants. Many persons would have saved up money for the family and I might have done so, but I consider the welfare of the place from which my income is chiefly derived as a first claim.’Footnote ⁶²

It is quite common for a landowner to regard his property as a trust for the future of the estate and those connected with it. He sees it as his duty to manage it in such a way that it can be handed on in good shape to his successors.Footnote ⁶³ Dixon did indeed do much to improve the Holton estate; in his care for the appearance of the village and the preservation of the woodlands he was as enlightened as any modern landlord. But his main emphasis was on the present rather than the future, on the welfare of the inhabitants rather than the future comfort of his family. His reflections had in fact been prompted by the uncomfortable knowledge that he could not charge the estate with any provision for his widow and daughters, and that the money he could have put by from current income had been spent on other things.

The role of a trustee does not normally include the day-to-day management of the property that is in trust, and Dixon had no wish to exercise a minute control over local affairs. Although perforce a great attender of meetings, he did not enjoy organising other people, and believed that it was not good for the place for one person to do everything. Having built the Moot Hall, for instance, he hoped that others would contribute the chairs. Although I have not detected him in the use of the word itself, he seems to have believed in something very like a village community. If, at least in the pre-war years, it did not function in practice quite as he had hoped, that was partly because he himself was not very practical or business-like, and also because there were so few others to take the weight off his own shoulders. The communitarian side of his personality may have sat rather awkwardly with his more old-fashioned Tory views, but it was the former that tended to win out. That is what Mackmurdo must have meant when he called him ‘a Tory in theory but an indulgent socialist in practice’.Footnote ⁶⁴

This brings us, finally, to a much more sparsely documented aspect of the story, the attitudes of Dixon's neighbours and dependents.Footnote ⁶⁵ Did they assume their various local roles simply to please the squire, as a kind of inverted noblesse oblige? Or did they genuinely see themselves as part of a community in Margaret Stacey's second meaning of the word, a community that to some extent at least embraced the squire and his family? These two attitudes are not mutually exclusive. In the early twentieth century deference was by no means in terminal decline in the English countryside; and just as there were elements of paternalism in Dixon's approach so there were probably elements of deference in the local response.Footnote ⁶⁶ But the foregoing account suggests that feelings of community were there from the start, and that they strengthened as Dixon's regime progressed. The village seems to have welcomed the revival of a social life that had been stagnating over the previous decades;Footnote ⁶⁷ to have had a shared pride in the visible signs of a newly flourishing settlement, the cottages, school and village hall; and, as we have seen, to have been willing later on to take a more active part in local organisations. Within the parish it is likely that the least community-minded people were the farm workers.Footnote ⁶⁸ But in the village most of the agricultural workforce came within the Dixon orbit.

This leads to the more general suggestion that community may be at least as useful a concept as deference when analysing the workings of rural society at parish and village level. Deference after all depends upon the preservation of physical as well as social distances, and on wealth as much as lineage. Small squires such as Tom Dixon did not live remote from their neighbours in huge mansions. They had limited means when it came to granting or withholding benefits, and their womenfolk did not habitually tour the estate in a carriage dispensing soup, blankets and ‘advice’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Dixon was not the only squire to have middle-class connections, nor the only parson to carry clerical ideas of service to the community into his later role of landowner.Footnote ⁷⁰

Dixon's time at Holton-le-Moor coincided with a period of considerable change in the English countryside.Footnote ⁷¹ Like his coachman he had lived half his life before 1900, and was firmly rooted in mid-, if not early, Victorian culture. It is not therefore very surprising that he retained many traditional attitudes. Yet in his individual and sometimes eccentric way he responded to progressive thinking on the rural question, and even anticipated post-First World War developments. Writing to his old friend in 1930, Mackmurdo told him ‘Your family always presents itself to my mind as a Rural Community Council in miniature, and a very effective one at that.’Footnote ⁷² As secretary by then of the Essex R.C.C. he knew what he was talking about.