The First World War both energised voluntarism and stimulated the development of state sponsored social services. After the war, this raised new questions about the relationship between government and the voluntary sector.Footnote 1 These questions were perhaps especially acute in the English countryside, where public provision had historically been underdeveloped. The leading actor in the mediation of English rural state and society relationships between the wars was the Rural Community Council movement, which sought to develop and organise rural voluntarism in a way that would complement rather than duplicate or impede the work of local government. This paper looks at the two way relationship that developed, involving a particular conception of the countryside, community and voluntary effort that appears to have had lasting and contentious consequences for the social character of the English countryside.Footnote 2 The Rural Community Councils originated immediately after the First World War. The immediate prompt for these, and the central issue with which they were concerned, was the proliferation of new rural leisure organisations during and after the war, and the need to link these to the much enhanced role of the state, and especially of local government. These subjects will be the main focus of this article. In the background were a range of other issues, amongst them continuing concerns about agricultural depression and rural depopulation, the rise of adult education in the context of the perceived need to educate the new generation of voters admitted to the franchise under the 1918 Representation of the People Act, and the increasing influence and assertiveness of public sector professionals, particularly civil servants and academics.Footnote 3
The first rural community council was Oxfordshire Rural Community Council, formed in 1920 as an offshoot of Barnett House in Oxford. Barnett House had been established in 1914 as a memorial to Canon Barnett of Toynbee Hall. The original intention had been to create a social studies library and provide training in social service. However, after the war priorities changed and Professor W. G. S. Adams, chair of the National Council of Social Service and the most active member of Barnett House's governing council, redirected it towards the promotion of adult education and coordination of voluntary work in the countryside.Footnote 4 To this end he secured the appointment of the literary scholar and countrywoman, Grace Hadow, as secretary. Initially, Barnett House functioned principally as an advisory service and lending library for village librarians but Hadow, an energetic, determined and far-sighted woman, realised that there was a larger role for it to play in coordinating the work of the numerous voluntary agencies promoting adult education in the countryside at this time. Accordingly she called a conference on 8th October 1920 to which local representatives of the Young Men's Christian Association, the Village Clubs Association, the Workers’ Educational Association and the Women's Institute were invited. A liaison committee was established, to which representatives of local statutory authorities were soon added and which took the name Oxfordshire Rural Community Council.Footnote 5
Not long after this, similar developments took place in the East Midlands and in Kent. The driving force in the East Midlands was Professor Robert Peers of University College Nottingham. Peers was deeply involved in extramural work. He was the author of a report on ‘The Educational Possibilities of Village Clubs’, arising from a committee established to investigate this by the Department of Adult Education at University College in response to a request by the North Midland Division of the Young Men's Christian Association. The report recommended the establishment of rural community councils. These were to consist of representatives of statutory and voluntary bodies concerned with rural welfare and of university bodies concerned with educational development in the area.Footnote 6 Peers presented the report to a conference on rural adult education, held on 14th July 1923. This committee was chaired by Sir Henry Hadow, Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University, and brother of Grace. Representatives of local voluntary organisations were present at this meeting and it was unanimously agreed that Rural Community Councils should be brought into existence in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Lindsey and Kesteven, although in the event the proposed Lincolnshire Rural Community Council did not materialise.Footnote 7 It would seem, then, that developments in the East Midlands were set in train quite independently of the Oxfordshire Rural Community Council but that a link was made before the councils were actually formalised.
The Kent Rural Community Council also seems to have begun independently. Mrs Granville Streatfield, the vice-chair, claimed that the movement had begun in Kent.Footnote 8 Since Kent Rural Community Council was formed in 1923, three years after Oxfordshire, this is not correct, but it does suggest that the initiative in Kent was spontaneous. The leading figure here was Ernest Salter Davies, Director of Education in the county, and a Carnegie trustee. As in Oxfordshire and the East Midlands, the Kent Rural Community Council was formed from a conference of rural voluntary organisations, convened by Salter Davies and including representatives of the Women's Institute, Working Men's Clubs, the Adult School Union, the Workers’ Educational Association, the Young Men's Christian Association, the Young Women's Christian Association, the English Folk Dance Society, the county library and the National Council of Social Service.Footnote 9
Leadership: individuals and institutions
The leaders of the rural community movement were linked together through membership of a network of statutory and voluntary bodies. Chief amongst these, apart from the Rural Community Councils and National Council of Social Service, were the Development Commission and the Carnegie UK Trust, which between the two of them provided virtually all the finance for the movement in its early days. The Development Commission, established by Lloyd George in 1909, had a remit to promote the social infrastructure of the countryside. Through the Rural Industries Bureau and the Rural Community Councils, it provided financial support for ‘traditional’ rural crafts. Subsequently it also supported the provision of village halls. The Carnegie UK Trust also financed village halls, but through grants, not loans. Furthermore, the Carnegie UK Trust funded the Rural Community Councils directly, although the value of this support was purposely scaled down over time in order to encourage the Rural Community Councils to establish themselves on an independent financial basis. Sir Horace Plunkett was a Carnegie Trustee, as were Ernest Salter Davies (1924–55) and Lord Bledisloe (President of the National Council of Social Service between 1935 and 1938).Footnote 10 Plunkett and Adams worked closely with Vaughan Nash, a one time resident of Toynbee Hall who became vice-chairman of the Development Commission in 1912. Adams was a Development Commissioner (1923–49) as well as chairman of the National Council of Social Service (1920–49) and president of the National Federation of Young Farmers’ Clubs.Footnote 11 Hadow, apart from being secretary of Barnett House, was vice-chair of the National Federation of Women's Institutes and a member of the executive committee of the National Council of Social Service.Footnote 12 Sir Arthur Richmond, the deputy secretary of the National Council of Social Service, had previously worked under Salter Davies as assistant director of the Kent Education Committee, and became chairman of the Horace Plunkett Foundation.Footnote 13 What we have here, then, is a small group of powerful individuals, closely linked through shared membership of a network of statutory and voluntary organisations concerned with rural development.
One of the founding texts of the rural community movement was the Report of the Adult Education Committee (1918). This committee had been chaired by A. L. Lindsay, the Master of Balliol (Adams's old college), a man who stood in the tradition of Benjamin Jowett, Toynbee and Barnett and who shared their commitment to taking the university to the people. Oxford provided a uniquely important input into the rural community movement, in terms of leadership and ideas. But other universities played a part too. University College Nottingham provided a meeting place for the East Midlands Joint Rural Community Council, whilst the universities of Sheffield and Manchester subsidised courses provided by the individual East Midlands rural community councils.
Other than the universities, the most significant institutional support for the Rural Community Councils came from local authorities. The need to coordinate statutory and voluntary effort was the primary raison d’être of the Rural Community Councils and, not surprisingly, there were close ties at many levels. Hadow described the relationship that the leaders of the Rural Community Council movement envisaged:
After the war a number of societies became seriously concerned with problems of village life. They realised that new interests had been aroused, new stirrings were making themselves felt, new methods were needed, and they set about the task in various ways. All, however, found certain initial difficulties, and chief among them lack of transport, of village halls, and want of co-ordination and co-operation between village and village. County councils were in many cases offering facilities of which villages were not availing themselves; villages were needing just the things offered, but did not realise how to obtain them. . .
In some cases voluntary societies were being assisted by the county council; in others not. In some cases societies were working in harmony; in some they were ignorant of each other's existence; in a few they were antagonistic. In no case was the ground even approximately covered.
In several different counties there arose independently and almost simultaneously the idea that it might save time, energy and money, and prevent misunderstandings, if representatives of the statutory and voluntary bodies could be induced to meet each other at regular intervals and discuss the problems in which they were interested.Footnote 14
This, of course, left open the question of exactly what the respective roles of the Rural Community Councils and the local authorities were. The Carnegie Trustees considered this question carefully and came to a judicious conclusion that probably reflected the opinion of most of those involved in the Rural Community Council movement:
There is no doubt. . . that many of these councils are doing useful work, and their recognition by such expert bodies as the Development Commission, local education authorities, the National Federation of Women's Institutes, and others gives ground for confidence that they have, in some counties at all events, a useful part to play – supplementary to, though not in competition with or isolation from, those of the statutory bodies and the individual organisations which they represent. Whether their part is a permanent one, and whether they are needed or can flourish only in particular types of county, is a question for practical experience. . .. In general, it would be easier to judge what is likely to be the answer to these questions if all local authorities were equally progressive. In a backward county a rural community council may quite properly undertake work which in a progressive county is part of the official programme. Even in the most progressive counties, however, it may ultimately be shown that there is room for cooperation with a well-organized and representative voluntary council.Footnote 15
Central government also played an important role in promoting and sustaining the Rural Community Councils, principally through the Development Fund and to a lesser extent the Ministry of Agriculture and the Adult Education Committee of the Board of Education. All three sent representatives to a major conference convened by the National Council of Social Service in Oxford in 1921 to consider the relationship between voluntary and statutory organisations.Footnote 16 Thereafter, central government took a back seat, leaving the National Council of Social Service, the Carnegie Trust and local government to coordinate, fund and guide the development of the Rural Community Councils. The main exception was in relation to rural industries, for which the Ministry of Agriculture had a responsibility through the Rural Industries Bureau but lacked adequate local outreach structures to communicate with rural craftsmen ‘on the ground’. The Rural Community Councils, with their interest in rural industries, were very useful to the Ministry in this respect, and the Ministry gave the stamp of official approval to their rural industries work in a circular of 6th January 1926, offering the prospect of Development Commission funding.Footnote 17 The Rural Community Councils were not slow to take up the offer: eight applied to the Development Commission for financial aid to organise rural industries in 1926–7, and by 1936–7 the Development Commission was paying the Rural Community Councils £7,136 for their rural industries work.Footnote 18 The Development Commission also channelled funds to the Rural Community Councils for their village halls work, via the rural department of the National Council of Social Service.
Lastly, mention should be made of the Carnegie UK Trust, by far the most important source of funding for the movement in its early days. Without the support of the Carnegie Trustees, several of whom, as we have seen, were directly involved in the rural community movement, the Rural Community Councils would never have got off the ground. Following the success of its initial funding of Oxfordshire, the Trust agreed to support the movement on a broader basis and allocated £46,000 for the development of fifteen councils.Footnote 19 It was always intended that the Rural Community Councils should become self-supporting in due course and their ability to become so was seen as an essential test of their usefulness. In consequence, the Carnegie Trustees progressively reduced their outlay on Rural Community Councils once established, so that by 1935 they were remitting only £3,800 to the Rural Community Councils.Footnote 20 The policies of the Carnegie Trustees had an effect on the geographical distribution of the Rural Community Councils, because Carnegie funding was conditional on the relevant county authority having adopted the Libraries Act. This was why the proposed Rural Community Councils in Lindsey and Kesteven were abandoned and may account for the absence of Rural Community Councils in a number of other counties too.Footnote 21 Over and above its direct support for the Rural Community Councils, the Carnegie Trust provided work for them through its village hall grants, administered by the Rural Community Councils in counties where they existed.
Aims and ideology
Perhaps the most succinct summary of the movement's aims was Christopher Turnor's assertion that ‘the main object of the Rural Community Council movement is to stir that community spirit, which must be the main source of all practical development of the countryside’.Footnote 22 Bound up with the aim of deepening the sense of community and rural identity in the countryside was the hope of turning country men and women into citizens. The Rural Community Councils welcomed the advent of democracy in the countryside, and even took a certain amount of pleasure in the demise of the estate system. According to the National Council of Social Service's Monthly Bulletin for December 1921, the ‘main problem’ of the countryside was that ‘for generations English village life has been based on the feudal system’:
The tendency has been on the one hand to give the village what was considered good for it, and on the other, to turn to someone else for help on all occasions. The essence of the country problem is to find means to enable country men and women to help themselves, and to bring together all classes in co-operation for the common good.Footnote 23
If villagers were to become responsible and effective citizens, the prerequisite was education, and especially, in the first instance, adult education. Salter Davies quoted Dickens's definition of education as ‘the helping of boys and girls to become useful and happy citizens’.Footnote 24 Education was an end in itself for most of the leaders of the movement, but it was also valued as a means of enabling rural voters to exercise their rights in an informed and discriminating way, sometimes for quite specific political purposes. For Christopher Turnor, the Rural Community Councils would be:
The means of spreading education in rural districts, of bringing it to the door of the cottager, and stirring the cottager to open wide his door. Organisation depends upon the degree of education; the uneducated cannot organise.
This mattered because:
If the rural minority is to keep its end up, it is essential that it should be highly organized. It is only by organized pressure that our townsmen can be compelled to take an interest in land and the agricultural question.
The Rural Community Council then stands for the creation of the community spirit, for the development of education, and the organisation of the people in the country – three inseparable parts of the whole problem.
As a result, the Rural Community Council will more and more become ‘A determining factor in securing the election to county, district and parish councils (and Parliament, too) of men who put the development of the countryside above party politics, and above sectional interests.’Footnote 25
It is doubtful whether Turnor's ambitions to create, in effect, a countryside party were widely shared within the movement, but his expectation that education would lead rural people to rise ‘above sectional interests’ and subscribe to a shared countryside identity certainly were. Wyndham Deedes, vice-chairman of the National Council of Social Service in the late 1930s, praised the educational work of the Rural Community Councils for stimulating ‘the study of local history and folklore, which, in turn, leads to a greater pride in the village itself and a spirit of citizenship.’Footnote 26 It was also felt that education in the villages would lead to more enlightened values, and influence policy makers. Hadow observed that ‘Nothing is more striking in the Rural Community Movement than the fact that in several cases the immediate result of a Council's formation has been the conversion of the county council to the Carnegie Rural Libraries Scheme.’Footnote 27 The good influence did not need to stop with libraries. The preponderance of academics and local government officials among the most energetic figures in the Rural Community Council movement was reflected in a belief that voters should be more willing to pay for enhanced rural services. Hadow bemoaned the parsimony of rural voters and opined:
There is one way, and one way only, to remedy this: to educate people to understand their powers and responsibilities as citizens; to make them realize that you can get nothing without paying for it; and to induce them to consider public budgets as carefully as private.Footnote 28
Salter Davies made a similar point more crisply: ‘People are much alive to the expenditure upon education. . . I wish the imagination of the community was sufficiently alive to see the expenditure which is due to the lack of education.’Footnote 29
Community, citizenship, education and a revived sense of rural identity could come together to create what was perhaps the most cherished hope for many of the leaders of the rural community council, which was nothing less than the creation of a ‘new rural civilization’.Footnote 30 The countryside, it was felt, offered special possibilities for the creation, experience and enjoyment of beauty and culture. One of Turnor's principal hopes for the Rural Community Councils was that they would be:
The means of bringing added interest and pleasure to those who live in the country. We have indeed a goodly heritage, but how little do we realise it. Surrounded by beauty, too often our eyes are blind and we fail to see it.Footnote 31
This might be done, according to the handbook of the Joint East Midlands Rural Community Councils, by encouraging:
The development of artistic appreciation and enjoyment by means of concert and dramatic tours, and the fostering of local talent through village exhibitions and pageants and inter-village competitions and festivals, particularly in those arts which are traditional in the countryside, e.g., folk songs and dancing.Footnote 32
The aim was ‘to assist rural communities to secure the fullest and freest life for all their members.’Footnote 33
Music and drama were seen as especially valuable as means of fostering this new rural civilisation. In Kent, a music and drama sub-committee was formed under Mrs Granville-Streatfield and emphasised high standards and classical performance. As The Times correspondent reported:
The Kent Rural Community Council's ‘One day drama school’ at the Corn Exchange, Maidstone. . . was most successful. . ..
Mrs Granville-Streatfield made an appeal for higher standards in the choice of plays, and for the study of character and the English language as factors, not only in recreation, but also in social development. She pointed out that there was no need to ‘play down’ to village audiences, giving as an instance the appreciation shown by rural audiences of the great Greek plays. The help of producers, with a knowledge of dramatic literature and a certain amount of stage technique, was, however, necessary.Footnote 34
Granville-Streatfield, like Adams, Hadow and Salter-Davies, took an active, proselytising role in carrying the message to counties where the movement was less well developed. She spoke in similar terms to a conference on ‘Drama in the Village’ organised by the Hertfordshire Rural Community Council in 1927:
Drama was a most potent instrument for moral, intellectual and artistic progress, and she suggested that it should be used more and more as a means of creating interest in country and village life. She emphasized the importance of a high standard in the choice of plays, and recommended the production of older plays, such as those of Shakespeare.Footnote 35
To what extent did more down to earth, self interested political drives lie behind the high ideals of the rural community movement? One obvious interpretation would be to see the Rural Community Councils as a kind of social wing of the agricultural interest. Some of those involved with the movement were certainly supporters of, or spokesmen for, farming. Sir Henry Rew, chair of the rural department of the National Council of Social Service in the early 1920s, is the best example. He was appointed secretary of the Central Chamber of Agriculture in 1890, served as an Assistant Commissioner for the Royal Commission on Agriculture in the mid-1890s, joined the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries in 1898, and became president of the Agricultural Club and chairman of the Farmers’ Club in 1918 and 1921 respectively.Footnote 36 Christopher Turnor, apart from farming on a large scale himself, wrote extensively on agricultural problems, arguing the case for a larger and better supported agricultural sector in works such as Land Problems and the National Welfare, Our Food Supply, The Land and the Empire and Yeoman Calling.
Then there is, of course, Plunkett himself, ‘that great champion of agriculture’ as he was described by Lord de la Warr, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture, at a Rural Community Council conference in Cambridge in 1931.Footnote 37 Yet Plunkett is a less straightforward case. He was a champion not so much of agriculture per se, as of agricultural cooperation. In contrast to orthodox representatives of the landed interest like Bledisloe or Winchilsea, Plunkett was in many respects an egalitarian. He was at home in the less socially stratified social environment of Wyoming cattle ranching and his vision of rural society was based on a community of small producers, fused together through cooperative production and marketing, as opposed to the hierarchical traditions of English landed society.
Likewise, Turnor cannot be seen as a simple defender of agricultural privilege. He was perhaps best known for his support for the Workers’ Educational Association, opening his great mansion of Stoke Rochford to Workers’ Educational Association classes and summer schools on an extensive scale. Like Plunkett his landowning origins were tempered by experience of North America. He was born in Canada and brought up there and in Florida. Indeed, on closer inspection, few of the leading figures in the movement can be categorised as out and out defenders of the landed interest. Hadow, Morris, Peers, Salter Davies and Shoeten Sack had no direct connections with agriculture. Adams, hobby farmer and instigator of the Young Farmers’ Clubs though he was, kept his distance from the agricultural interest. Equally significant, few of the leading agriculturalists took part in the rural community movement. Not a single one of the National Farmers Union's presidents between the wars appears to have been an officer of a Rural Community Council, and the Central Landowners’ Association had little more involvement.Footnote 38 National experts on agriculture like Daniel Hall and C. S. Orwin played no part in the movement either.
It is equally difficult to generalise about the party political colour of the Rural Community Councils. The university lecturers and local civil servants who dominated the movement, including Adams, Hadow, Peers and Salter-Davies, committed as they were to an ethos of public service and the common good, eschewed party politics at least in public, although in the non party sense there is no mistaking their deeply held liberal values. Some of the less central figures did get involved intermittently in politics. Although principally a career civil servant, Sir Henry Rew unsuccessfully contested South Oxfordshire as a Liberal in 1922 and 1923. In contrast, Rear Admiral Tufton Beamish, a leading figure in Sussex Rural Community Council, was Conservative Member of Parliament for Lewes between 1924 and 1931 and again from 1936 to 1945. No Labour Members of Parliament or parliamentary candidates were prominently associated with the movement but this is hardly surprising given the weakness of the Labour Party in the countryside between the wars.Footnote 39
Both the Conservative and Labour parties were willing to endorse the rural community movement, and to participate in its conferences and meetings when it suited them to do so. The Conservatives Lord Bledisloe and Sir George Courthope MP both spoke at Rural Community Council conferences, but so did the Labour politicians Lord de la Warr and Noel Buxton MP.Footnote 40 One of the leading speakers at the National Council of Social Service conference in Oxford in 1920 was Clement Attlee, arguing for the need to move beyond a ‘pre-war’ outlook in terms of unemployment relief.Footnote 41 But politicians of different parties tended to emphasise different aspects of the Rural Community Councils’ work. Bledisloe emphasised the voluntarist aspect of the rural community movement, controversially traducing its ambition to promote and extend local public services:
If they wanted a vigorous and self-reliant rural population, they must not look to the Government for the initiative, but from the ‘live wires’ of rural districts. The time was coming when the system of sops, subsidies and doles would cease, and then there would be far greater chance of developing that self-reliance and resourcefulness without which there could be no real vitality in the life of the villages.Footnote 42
In contrast, when Buxton attended the 1929 Rural Community Council conference, he emphasised the ‘keen interest taken by the Labour Party in the amenities of rural life’ and the scope for the Rural Community Council movement to identify and highlight social problems in the countryside, with a view to more rather than less government assistance:
He had long realized the vital contribution made by the Community Council Movement, and had learned the practical advantage which resulted from providing a survey and co-ordination of rural activities. If village life had the advantage of an inquiry such as town life had from the efforts of Charles Booth and his followers, a vast gain would result. We were behind the United States in the organized study of rural life. Of the many important activities of the Council, he felt that the provision of village halls and playgrounds was perhaps of greatest significance.Footnote 43
The number and distribution of Rural Community Councils
The rural community movement had a loose structure. Each Rural Community Council was self-governing, and the only national body was the rural department of the National Council of Social Service, which had a merely advisory and grant supplying role. As a result, the Rural Community Councils spread in a haphazard and patchy way, dependent on local initiative. By 1928, there were eighteen in existence, twenty by 1932 and it would seem twenty-six by 1939, by which time the Rural Community Councils were fairly well distributed across England, and rather more patchily in Wales. There were none in Scotland. Most of the early Rural Community Councils were in the south and Midlands: Oxfordshire (1920), Kent (1923), the three East Midlands counties (1924–6), Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire and Herefordshire (all by 1925) and Cambridgeshire (1925). The first northern Rural Community Council appears to have been the West Riding (1930), and the first in Wales was Anglesey or Montgomeryshire (by 1929).Footnote 44 The most obvious explanation for this distribution is the link with the university extension movement and with progressive county directors of education. This accounts for Oxfordshire, Kent, the East Midlands and Cambridgeshire. Hertfordshire may have been influenced by the Garden City movement. Sir Ebenezer Howard attended the 1927 conference of Hertfordshire Rural Community Council and a conference on ‘Drama in the Village’ also organised by the Hertfordshire Rural Community Council was addressed by C. B. Purdom of the Welwyn Garden City Theatre Society.Footnote 45 The progressive character of the Rural Community Council is suggested by the fact that its chair was James Dudley, warden of Avoncroft Residential College for Rural Workers.Footnote 46 Gloucestershire was Hadow's home county and she was actively involved in the Rural Community Council there. There may have been some local influence in the early spread of the Rural Community Councils. Four distinct clusters of adjacent councils can be identified: Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire; Kent, Sussex and Hampshire; Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire; Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire.
There was a tension within the rural community movement between its core aims of fostering spontaneous, community life ‘from below’ in the countryside, and its commitment to class inclusivity. In practice this tended to mean that the most prestigious positions in the Rural Community Councils were held by large landowners. We know the names of six interwar Rural Community Council presidents: all but one were large landowners, and the exception was a leading banker.Footnote 47 At least twelve of seventeen Rural Community Council chairmen were substantial landowners too.Footnote 48 Whether this could be merely a manifestation of what David Cannadine has termed ‘ornamentalism’, the inclination of organisations to appoint aristocrats to honorary positions to recruit the glamour of their names, must depend partly on how actively involved in the day to day running of the Rural Community Councils these dignitaries were. In many Rural Community Councils it appears to have been the secretary who did most of the work. Here the picture is quite different: none of the nineteen interwar Rural Community Council secretaries whose names we know was titled, and only one appears to have been a large landowner, although two of the others were Majors, one was a Lieutenant Commander and one a Captain.
However, whilst presidents rarely took much part in the actual work of the Rural Community Council, in some counties like Kent the chairman played a more active role than the secretary. The impression is that Rural Community Councils where university lecturers or county directors of education were heavily involved had a more professionalised, democratic flavour, whereas in more ‘provincial’ counties the aristocratic influence was stronger.Footnote 49 It may also have been the case that the movement's democratic ethos was more pronounced in the heady days just after the First World War, when it still seemed as if a kind of rural revolution might be underway, than it was by the late 1930s, when nearly two decades of job losses had taken their toll on farm workers and the old elite had resumed control in many parts of rural England. Certainly by the late 1930s many Rural Community Councils had an unmistakably aristocratic flavour. Cheshire had a landowning president, chair and secretary by 1935, and in Suffolk there were three lords who were founder members in 1937.
Activities
The Rural Community Councils became involved in a diverse, not to say miscellaneous, array of activities. One of their principal roles was to coordinate and inform. An article on the work of the Kent Rural Community Council gives a good picture of work done by the councils in this regard:
The extent to which the council's office is being used as a general information bureau for villages is steadily increasing. The following are typical inquiries actually received at the office:
- ‘We want to build a village hall. Can you send me some specimen plans and estimates and advise us about the trust deed?
- ‘Can you tell me where I can find a camping ground for 12 girls?’
- ‘Can you help us with advice about starting a boys’ club in this village?’
- ‘Can you help us with specimen schedules for our flower show?’
Other inquirers have asked for the address of the nearest blacksmith who could make a weathervane to a special design, for advice as to the layout of a playing field, for help in preserving a threatened beauty spot, for reference to authoritative books on village history, and for information as to liability to pay entertainment tax.Footnote 50
This aspect of the Rural Community Councils’ work was particularly welcomed by civil servants keen to increase the uptake of often newly available public services. Vaughan Nash, the leading Development Commissioner, praised the Rural Community Councils for providing:
An informal, but accessible and responsive, inquiry office. Questions arise in these days which not even the schoolmaster can answer, and the villager suffers bewilderment and real inconvenience from his ignorance of the workings of authority and of his own opportunities and powers.Footnote 51
In order to fulfil this advisory role effectively, the Rural Community Councils had themselves to be well informed, and most Rural Community Councils undertook surveys of rural educational and service provision in their counties. In 1935, Adams believed that following on from the successful establishment of Rural Community Councils in most counties, the next step should be for each to make a systematic survey of the social services in their respective counties.Footnote 52
A second core role was the promotion of adult education. It was especially prominent in the East Midlands, where it was agreed to appoint two organising lecturers, and that each constituent Rural Community Council should set up a panel of qualified lecturers to be paid on an ad hoc basis, making full use of books provided under the County Rural Library Schemes.Footnote 53 As early as 31st March 1926, 186 single lectures, sixty-seven lecture courses and twenty-four handicraft courses had been arranged.Footnote 54 Outside the East Midlands, Oxfordshire was probably the leading Rural Community Council in developing adult education. Grace Hadow, countering the charge that ‘no labourer wants anything beyond the simplest animal comforts, tempered perhaps by an occasional whist drive or concert of inferior comic songs’, reported proudly that:
In the purely agricultural county of Oxfordshire – a county with a long tradition of low wages, with all that implies – during last winter twenty-five regular courses of lectures on humane subjects were given, with an average attendance varying from ten to over thirty: and considering that attendance frequently means a walk of one to two miles or more on a wet winter's night after a day's work, and that some of the centres have a population of under 300, this speaks volumes. The subjects ranged from European history to the romance of exploration; from English literature to how England is governed; and the audiences contained men and women from every class in the village, from the vicar to the charwoman, from the squire to the smith. Moreover, Oxfordshire – which once refused to adopt the Public Libraries Act – has now no fewer than eighty-eight rural libraries under the county council.Footnote 55
There were differences of approach between the Rural Community Councils in their adult education work. In Nottinghamshire, single lectures were prioritised, whereas Somerset, which had a resident tutor, and Gloucestershire focussed on tutorial classes.Footnote 56 In Gloucestershire, courses extending over twenty-four weeks had been held in five villages by 1927; five years later, classes organised by the Rural Community Council attracted 1,300 students.Footnote 57
Closely allied with adult education was the drama, musical and local history work of the Rural Community Councils. Here, Kent and Hertfordshire were to the fore. Kent Rural Community Council's dramatic and musical subcommittee organised a drama school in Maidstone that attracted more than two hundred people from seventy-five towns and villages in 1926. This paved the way for a fortnight long drama school in Folkestone the following year, at which ‘in addition to lectures by eminent speakers, the students will rehearse two plays and receive instruction in gesture, speech, properties and stage equipment, and in dance and movement. This is the first school of its kind to be held in Kent’.Footnote 58 During the 1927–8 season, 143 concerts with an aggregate attendance of over 19,000 were organised under the auspices of Kent Rural Community Council.Footnote 59 Probably under the direct influence of Kent, a drama school was held at Hitchin in Hertfordshire in 1927, at which lecture courses on scenery and costume, and on production and stagecraft were to be given, as well as demonstration plays.Footnote 60 Hertfordshire had formed drama and music subcommittees by 1928.Footnote 61
Most other Rural Community Councils were active in music and drama to some extent. Herefordshire Rural Community Council, for example, organised the first music festival ever held in the county, allegedly creating such interest in the villages that the serious study of music was greatly advanced and the Local Education Authority recommended to that County Council that it should make a grant to the Rural Community Council to support its work. Herefordshire also had a strong drama committee, which cooperated with the county Federation of Women's Institutes to organise drama schools and a county festival.Footnote 62 Elsewhere, eighty-six concerts had been arranged by the Rural Community Councils in the East Midlands in 1925–6, while Sussex Rural Community Council had established a music school, drama league and annual drama festival by 1938.Footnote 63
Local history was, on the whole, a less prominent aspect of the work of the councils. Kent was perhaps the leading county, prompted by the decision to start working the Kent coalfield in the late 1920s, which, it was feared, would obliterate many traces of the county's past. Guy Ewing, chair of Kent Rural Community Council, described the pattern of activities, emphasising the close collaboration with other county organisations:
In the Sevenoaks district an association has been formed for the collection and preservation of village records; the County Education Committee is encouraging the study of local history, and has issued an excellent syllabus on the subject; the Kent Rural Community Council is advising village councils to undertake the study of their own parishes; and the Kent branch of the Historical Association has also given encouragement to the subject. These are in addition to the admirable work of the Kent Archaeological Society and its offspring the Kent Records Branch.
Encouraging local history was especially important, Ewing believed, because ‘the parish is the unit of patriotism’.Footnote 64 The Rural Community Council set itself the ambitious target of coordinating a ‘New Domesday Survey of Kent’, under the auspices of its subcommittee for the preservation of rural Kent, which:
Has recently inaugurated a movement for stimulating village communities in Kent to undertake a systematic collection of information as to their past history and present-day conditions. A series of suggestions is being prepared by a group of experts, so that there may be some uniformity as to the type of information collected and the method of recording and mapping. An advisory board of experts is being set up to whom villages can refer any cases of doubt; and, through an editorial board, help will be given in publishing local village histories. . .
Many villages have already expressed a desire to undertake this work. . . courses of lectures are organized in conjunction with the Kent Education Committee with a view to instructing potential leaders as to the methods by which the work can best be done. One of these courses, recently held at Sevenoaks, was attended by 87 students coming from 12 different towns and villages. In the village of Smarden (population 992) a course was attended by 32 students from eight local villages. Similar courses have also been held at Dartford, West Wickham, and Cranbrook. By this means an instructed body of leaders will, it is hoped, soon cover the entire county.Footnote 65
Perhaps the principal constraint on adult education, drama, music and indeed most other educational and leisure activities in rural areas was the lack of suitable venues. It was generally agreed that village halls, still uncommon in the early 1920s, were the answer and the Rural Community Councils devoted much time and energy to promoting them and assisting local communities in trying to build them. Here, however, the most important role of the Rural Community Councils was to act as an intermediary between on the one hand the Development Commission's Village Halls Loan Fund and the Carnegie Trust, which offered grants for hall building, and villages on the other. The number of village halls rose rapidly during the 1920s and 1930s, partly because of these efforts. By 1939, 1,126 village halls were registered with the Performing Right Society. As there were thought to be rather over 10,000 villages in Britain at this date, this gives a lower-bound figure of about ten per cent of villages having halls. From the very limited evidence, it seems that counties with active Rural Community Councils may have been rather better provided with halls than those without by the late 1930s. A survey of thirty-seven villages by Oxfordshire Rural Community Council in 1937 found that twenty-four (sixty-five per cent) had halls. In the same year, the newly established Warwickshire Rural Community Council found that only thirty-five per cent of 172 villages in the county had village halls. This proportion is similar to the thirty-eight per cent of parishes that had village halls by 1939 in Berkshire, a county that did not form a Rural Community Council until after the Second World War.Footnote 66
The most important remaining branch of the Rural Community Councils' work was the attempt to sustain rural industries. This was something that all of them were involved in to some extent, although the leaders were perhaps Somerset, as well as Kent and Oxfordshire, both of which appointed full time organisers.Footnote 67 Again, the Rural Community Councils were working closely in tandem with the central government agencies here. The Development Commission provided financial guarantees, grants and loans for rural industries work; the Ministry of Agriculture gave political support; the Rural Industries Bureau supplied advice and the county education committees, in a few cases, offered organisational assistance with training courses. For example, the Development Commission provided a guarantee of £500 in 1926 to the Kent Rural Industries Cooperative Society Limited, an offshoot of Kent Rural Community Council, and a grant of £325 to Hampshire Rural Community Council to develop rural industries in 1927. By the late 1930s the value of Development Commission funding to Rural Community Councils for rural industries work was nearly twice that of the dwindling receipts from the Carnegie Trust.Footnote 68 The Ministry of Agriculture lent Kent Rural Community Council a blacksmith's demonstration van, which toured the county under the direction of the Kent Education Committee.Footnote 69
Rural industries, by which the rural community movement always meant the ‘traditional’, craft based industries of the countryside, faced severe problems in the period after the First World War. The accelerating replacement of draught and agricultural horses by lorries and tractors put great pressure on blacksmiths, wheelwrights and saddlers, while rural producer industries were badly affected by factory and foreign competition. An important initial step was to map out the scale of the problem. Kent Rural Community Council found in 1924 that the number of master smiths in the county had almost halved to 386 since 1882. Total employment in Kentish rural smithies had fallen from 1,260 in 1901 to 841 in 1921.Footnote 70 A subsequent survey of 300 craftsmen visited by the Rural Community Council showed that ‘while the smith's general business from agricultural sources has shown a general and steady decline. . . those smiths who have taken up wrought iron work have in many cases been able to make up the loss on agricultural work’.Footnote 71 Another important survey, in this case of the willow basket industry, was carried out by Somerset Rural Community Council. Over 3,000 acres in the county were cropped with willow in 1928, of an English total of 5,000 acres, but the price of willow bolts plummeted from twenty shillings during the war to as little as five shillings by 1928, while labour costs increased.Footnote 72 The East Midlands Rural Community Councils also appear to have conducted a survey of rural industries.Footnote 73
The most obvious response to the travails of the craft industries was to assist with marketing, and most Rural Community Councils did this, through acting as middlemen, providing showrooms, or arranging exhibitions of rural craft products. Sussex Rural Community Council successfully revived the county's traditional trug basket industry by means of an advertising campaign, and published an illustrated list of 120 Sussex craftsmen and their products featuring, amongst others, weavers, potters, wheelwrights and blacksmiths.Footnote 74 Kent issued a booklet with specimens of wrought iron work made by Kentish smiths, and organised a stand of wrought iron work at the Bath and West Show in 1925, purportedly the first such show in the country.Footnote 75 Subsequent exhibits of work were organised at Sevenoaks (1927), Folkestone (1928), Tunbridge Wells (1927 and 1928) and several smaller shows.Footnote 76 Oxfordshire arranged a display of exhibits, ‘many of which have been awarded certificates of merit by the Rural Industries Bureau’, at the Royal Agricultural Society's Wolverhampton show in 1937.Footnote 77 Herefordshire was particularly active in marketing the products of the county's rural industries, renting a house in a central location in Hereford for use as a craft showroom and Rural Community Council offices and inducing the Town Council to place a very large order for 4,000 fruit baskets to the value of £450.Footnote 78
The Rural Industries Bureau and the National Council of Social Service, however, both wanted the Rural Community Councils to concentrate on long term work to address the underlying needs of rural industries, rather than simply to act as sales agents, and Herefordshire Rural Community Council incurred much criticism for its pains. Although it was acknowledged that ‘a great deal of work was put in for rural industries in the early days’, ‘the criterion seems to have been sale of work rather than raising of standards and workmanship on modern lines’. By 1932 the Rural Industries Bureau acknowledged that some progress had been made but wanted the secretary to do more visiting. Lieutenant Colonel Swayne, the Rural Community Council's chair, attempted to propitiate the Bureau by explaining that given the Rural Community Council's parlous financial position, the treasurer insisted on economy, and that in any case ‘Herefordshire villages don't like strangers’.Footnote 79
Other counties were more willing to engage in the kind of design improvement and product development work that the Bureau recommended. Following the results of its 1925 survey, Kent invested a great deal of effort in encouraging smiths to move into high quality wrought iron work, with some success. Shoeten Sack reported in 1930 that each year there had been ‘a most encouraging improvement, both in the artistic merit and technique of the wrought iron work produced in the smithies and in the business methods of the craftsmen’.Footnote 80 Oxfordshire followed Kent's lead, offering rural tradesmen technical instruction and guidance in the production of designs in association with the Rural Industries Bureau. As well as wrought iron, Oxfordshire Rural Community Council sought to promote a range of other rural craft products for sale to non agricultural markets, such as household and garden furniture, stained glass and hand woven rugs.Footnote 81
Design improvement, product innovation and diversification to new consumer markets were one way of helping rural craftsmen weather the decline of their primary agricultural markets. Another was modernisation of equipment, techniques and business methods. In several counties, including Kent and Sussex, the Rural Community Councils helped to establish loan funds to allow rural craftsmen to obtain modern plant and tools on favourable hire purchase terms.Footnote 82 Training in oxy-acetylene welding was seen as a promising way forward, as it would enable blacksmiths to repair motor vehicles and tractors.Footnote 83 But perhaps the most significant contribution of the Rural Community Councils in this respect was the forming of rural artisans and craftsmen into cooperatives. Kent lost little time in establishing the Kent Rural Industries Cooperative Society Limited, with a Development Commission guarantee of £500 to assist smiths, wheelwrights and other craftsmen who became members of the society to purchase plant and tools on favourable terms.Footnote 84 The cooperative had over 160 members by 1930.Footnote 85 Cambridgeshire Rural Community Council formed a cooperative consisting of a wheelwright, a carpenter and four agricultural workers at Babraham in 1925–6, lending them their start up capital of ten pounds and providing monthly credit for materials. This was apparently a great success: in a little over three months goods worth nearly sixty pounds were sold, including ‘corn bins, pig crates, feeding troughs, chicken houses, wheelbarrows and meat safes’.Footnote 86 In Hampshire the Rural Community Council, in consultation with the Rural Industries Bureau, formed a guild of craftsmen to assist with marketing and act as a conduit for loans from the Development Fund for the provision of modern plant, tools and equipment. A similar arrangement was made by Sussex Rural Community Council.Footnote 87
Somerset Rural Community Council was particularly innovative and resolute in its campaign to defend the willow industry in the county. It held conferences with representatives of the willow growers and basket makers, listening to their suggestions, and acting on them. One complaint was that railway rates for the transport of willow bolts were too high. The Rural Community Council approached the railway companies and secured a reduction in rates estimated to be worth £1,000 a year to the industry in 1928. Not content with this, the Rural Community Council, in liaison with the Agricultural Department at the University of Bristol, the agricultural committee of Somerset County Council and the Ministry of Agriculture, planted trial plots at Stoke St Gregory and Drayton to ascertain what new varieties of willow could be grown and developed with advantage in the county.Footnote 88
Information, adult education, village halls and rural industries were core activities for the Rural Community Councils, although, as we have seen, the balance between these different activities varied considerably from county to county. However, there were a number of other areas of interest, such as rural preservation, that only some Rural Community Councils engaged in. The Rural Community Councils were responsible for the establishment of local branches of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England in a number of counties, and indeed some of these county branches were, administratively, subcommittees of the relevant Rural Community Council for a number of years. Examples are the Kent Rural Preservation Committee, a subcommittee of the Kent Rural Community Council formed in 1926; the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Council for the Preservation of Rural England, established at a conference convened by the Hampshire Rural Community Council and the Isle of Wight Architectural Association in 1930; and the East Sussex County Committee of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, formed as a subcommittee of the East Sussex Rural Community Council in 1931.Footnote 89
Another issue some Rural Community Councils concerned themselves with was health, particularly tuberculosis aftercare. In 1936, eight Rural Community Councils were engaged in health work. Kent, where 2,000 tuberculosis patients had been given aftercare, was again to the fore.Footnote 90 East Sussex was one of a number of Rural Community Councils that published a county directory of voluntary and statutory health services.Footnote 91 An interesting project undertaken by several Rural Community Councils was the attempt to establish what were in effect local branches in the villages, under the names ‘village community council’ or ‘village social council’. An article in The Times in 1925 describes the ideal village community council:
A village community council is an independent committee of men and women representing, as far as possible, every interest and every class in the village. Each existing voluntary society, club or institute nominates one or two representatives. The district council, the parish council, the religious bodies and the school are similarly represented; and other nominations include farmers, landowners, tradesmen, agricultural labourers, and smallholders. The purpose of the council is to bring together a thoroughly representative body of those living in the village to discuss matters affecting the welfare and happiness of the community when called for, to make arrangements for sports and amusements, and if possible to provide a hall and playing field.Footnote 92
There appears to have been a concerted drive by the leaders of the rural community movement in 1925–6 to create village community councils. Kent Rural Community Council convened a conference at Canterbury in 1925 to promote village community councils, which Kent County Council and Kent Education Committee supported. It was suggested that village community councils might be particularly useful in ‘dealing with’ young people between the school and adult period, in the aftercare of tuberculosis, in the care of the blind, and in providing clubs, playing fields and other social amenities for village communities.Footnote 93 Two years later, eighteen village community councils had been formed in the county, amongst them Stowting, Wye, Elham, Bidborough, Chislet Colliery, Cowden, Leysdown, Sellindge and Staple.Footnote 94 Other Rural Community Councils also made efforts to form village community councils. There appear to have been at least twenty-one in Nottinghamshire, twelve in Derbyshire and three in Leicestershire by 1926; and one at least in Cambridgeshire (Lode) and Oxfordshire (Wheatley).Footnote 95 Hertfordshire Rural Community Council's first annual report in 1927 considered, among other things, ‘the formation of village social councils to cooperate with the parish or rural district councils on matters of public health, housing, and the provision of recreation grounds etc.’Footnote 96
Hadow gave a detailed, and relentlessly positive, description of the work of a village community council in an unnamed village, probably in Oxfordshire:
At —— a men's club had been in existence for some years and showed a yearly deficit of around £100. A meeting of the whole village was called, and it was suggested that if all the organisations in the place pulled together and kept in close touch with each other, it should be possible to provide what was wanted with the minimum of expenditure of time and money and the maximum of utility. The result of this meeting was the formation of a village social council consisting of representatives of the men's club, the women's institute, the British Legion, the Mothers’ Union, the Infant Welfare Association, the Allotment Holders’ Association, the Cricket Club, the Football Club, the Girl Guides, the Song Club, the Slate Club, the School Managers, the Parochial Church Council. This council is recognized in the village as serving the whole community; it provides lectures, concerts, dramatic performances; it controls the village hall, and the deficit on the running of the hall under the old system has been turned into a profit. Overlapping and friction have been done away with. Each society retains its own independence; those affiliated to a county organisation find no change in their relationship to the parent body, but fixtures are arranged in consultation, lectures are made known to every organisation in the village; the village hall is held in trust for the whole community, and is not the property of any one body.
Similar councils exist in other villages, and more than one feud has been healed by their creation. The mere fact of being able to meet on equal terms representatives of other bodies in the village and to talk over proposals before they have had time to become grievances is itself much.Footnote 97
However, despite the enthusiasm of the leadership, village community councils remained rare, and do not appear to have lasted long. Certainly they left little mark in the historical record and I have not found references to them after 1930. Probably few villagers shared the leadership's conviction that village community councils were needed for ‘reviving and strengthening the community spirit of the inhabitants’ and to enable the village to ‘express itself as a community’.Footnote 98
One of the obvious questions raised by the rural community movement's advocacy of village community councils is what their relationship with the existing parish councils was. This was a subject that the rural community movement tended to skirt round in silence. Shoeten Sack's embarrassed claim that parish council's ‘did not quite meet the case’ typified the leadership's evasion of the question.Footnote 99 The problem was that parish councils threatened to give the lie to one of the basic premises of the rural community movement: that if they were only given the opportunity to do so, villagers would eagerly engage in collective community life. By the 1920s, many parish councils had lapsed into apathy and inactivity. It was wishful thinking to suppose that, by starting again with village community councils, a different outcome would ensue.
In the mid 1930s the National Council of Social Service appears to have had a change of heart about parish councils, perhaps because it had become apparent that the drive to supplant them with village community councils had failed.Footnote 100 The National Council of Social Service began issuing advice about the powers and administration of parish councils, in the hope of making them a more effective unit of local government.Footnote 101 Parish councillors increasingly sought advice from the Rural Community Councils and, by the late 1930s, this had become a valuable source of revenue for cash strapped Rural Community Councils such as Herefordshire.Footnote 102
It will be apparent from this review of the activities of the Rural Community Councils that there was a great deal of variation from one county to another, and that local issues had a marked effect on the character of the movement in some counties. Kent's concern with local history and rural preservation was driven by anxieties about the development of the Kent coalfield in what had previously been a predominantly agricultural landscape. Somerset's commitment to rural crafts reflected the crisis in the county's willow and basket making industries. The strong emphasis on adult education in the East Midlands is attributable to the presence of four major educational institutions actively engaged in extramural work in the area: Nottingham University College, Loughborough College, and the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester. Another important factor was finance. Most Rural Community Councils were chronically short of income, and where a local authority offered a grant in exchange for work of a particular kind, this was a strong inducement, especially in the straitened financial circumstances of the 1930s.
How successful were the Rural Community Councils?
The main determinants of the success of a Rural Community Council were the linked influences of effective leadership, institutional support and financial stability. Kent and Oxfordshire, perhaps the most obviously successful councils between the wars, benefitted from all three, and were able to develop an extensive and varied range of activities. Herefordshire, by contrast, was struggling to survive from its inception and was to a large extent at the mercy of circumstances. It is instructive to consider the reasons for its failure in a little more detail. Whilst the Rural Community Council did succeed in establishing a moderately successful relationship with Hereford Town Council, it failed to persuade the county council to provide regular financial aid, appears to have had few links with the university extension movement or the county education committee, suffered from inadequate leadership and, in consequence, became increasingly financially precarious. It suffered an early setback when its first secretary, Major John Colquhoun Walford, was accused of embezzling £150 from its funds, but even before then had been in financial difficulties, succeeding in raising only a pitiful four pounds in local receipts in 1927–8 to add to the £870 it received from the Carnegie Trust and the £100 from the Development Commission. Partly no doubt to supplement its income, the Rural Community Council accepted sponsorship from the Hereford Times to support an experimental concert tour. But this came at a price. The tour featured not only gramophone records of popular music, hardly consistent with the rural community movement's commitment to maintaining the cultural distinctiveness of the countryside, but worse still a lecture on the production of a modern newspaper. Not surprisingly, the Rural Community Council subsequently faced questions about the extent to which this constituted commercial propaganda. In July 1930 a fete and garden party was organised to raise funds, but resulted in a loss of five pounds. The expensive town centre premises hitherto used as a showroom for rural industries was given up in favour of cheaper premises. The Rural Community Council struggled on, husbanding its grant from the Carnegie Trustees carefully and making economies wherever it could. The Carnegie grant ran out in 1936 and the Rural Community Council was forced to reorient its efforts towards social work in Hereford city, so as to obtain support from the Town Council. But this proved less profitable than expected and by 1938 the chairman, Lieutenant Colonel Swayne, and the secretary, Percy Thompson, had come to the conclusion that the Rural Community Council would have to be disbanded as there was no prospect of bridging a £150 shortfall in income. The National Council of Social Service demurred but it was the outbreak of war that saved the Rural Community Council, leading the County Council to offer a grant of £250 to enable the Rural Community Council to assist with war work.Footnote 103
Whilst Herefordshire Rural Community Council was certainly operating in an adverse institutional and financial climate, it seems likely that ineffective leadership contributed to this. A report by an officer of the National Council of Social Service dated 15th March 1939 notes that although Percy Thompson had ‘in a quiet plodding way’ done many very valuable and solid pieces of work, he had suffered from his tendency to carry the burdens on his own.Footnote 104 It is also hard to escape the conclusion that a catalogue of bad financial decisions were made, beginning perhaps with the appointment of Walford as secretary, exacerbated by the renting of a city centre property and then compounded by the failure to turn social work in Hereford to good financial account.
Leaving aside the considerable contrasts between Rural Community Councils, what can we say about the overall achievements of the rural community movement between the wars? In practical terms perhaps the most tangible achievement, in partnership with the National Council of Social Service, the Development Commission and Carnegie Trustees, was the impressive number of village halls opened in these years. The upsurge in adult education lectures and classes and, especially, in drama and music in many rural areas between the wars also owed much to the Rural Community Councils. Here, as in other aspects of their work, the community councils were useful to local authorities in pioneering activities from which, their value and viability once demonstrated, they were gradually displaced by statutory provision. The Council for the Preservation of Rural England branches established in several southern counties were also an important legacy, although the rural community movement was not directly involved in the emergence of this organisation nationally. The record on rural industries was more mixed: while there were temporary achievements such as the revival of the trug industry and the reduction of railway rates for the carriage of willow bolts, in the long run it proved impossible to stem the decline of the rural craft industries. The most far sighted policies were the shift into high value craft work for a consumer market, exemplified by Kent and Oxfordshire's encouragement of wrought iron working, and the promotion of oxy-acetylene welding. Perhaps the only area where the Rural Community Councils failed almost completely was in the attempt to establish village community councils.
It is more difficult to assess the success of the rural community movement in achieving its wider objectives and ascertain whether the countryside was richer in community as a result of their efforts. Undoubtedly there were more community activities in rural areas than there would have been otherwise, but much more in depth local research will be required before we are in a position to say whether this outweighed influences such as continuing depopulation on the one hand, and the emergence of an increasingly national culture on the other. Many sociologists would, of course, argue that community is at best a symbolic construct rather than an objective, measurable attribute.Footnote 105 The answer to the question of whether the rural community movement helped in the construction of a new generation of informed and responsible rural citizens is probably not, given the apathy that continued to greet parish and district council elections and the ease with which the Conservative Party consolidated its grip on rural constituencies between the wars.Footnote 106 On the issue of how far the Rural Community Councils were effective in creating a ‘new rural civilization’, the response must be hardly at all, if by this is implied the development of a rural culture hermetically sealed from urban influences. Nevertheless, the idea that there were crucial differences between town and country life, that the latter was precious in many ways and that the two should be kept as separate as possible in order to protect the countryside from damaging urban influences, proved surprisingly compelling to many in the mid twentieth century. It found its way onto the statute book via the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, with notorious consequences.Footnote 107
Conclusion
The Rural Community Councils played an important role in mediating the relationship between the increasingly complex array of statutory and voluntary social services in the interwar countryside. They promoted a refurbished version of rural voluntarism, with a new emphasis on democracy, citizenship and inclusion. Their effectiveness varied: in some counties rural community councils were not established until after the Second World War; others were bedevilled with problems of finance and leadership. Nevertheless, Rural Community Councils existed in twenty-three counties by 1939 and in many, such as Oxfordshire, East Sussex and Kent, played a major role in building up social capital in the countryside and particularly village halls. More problematic, however, is their influence on the nature of rural social life in the long term. Whilst the academics and local government officers who created and provided much of the leadership for the movement had a broadly liberal and progressive outlook, the movement's financial weakness and commitment to a non partisan outlook in practice meant that it devolved increasingly on the traditional elite, who were strengthened by the re-legitimation provided by the Rural Community Councils. In the end, the Rural Community Councils had scarcely more success than parish councils in bringing about a new era of flourishing grassroots democracy in the countryside. The attempt to construct community in the countryside without confronting the profound and enduring structural inequalities on which the rural economy rested, was, in Raymond Williams’ words, ultimately perhaps just ‘one more in that series of attempts to evade the issues’.Footnote 108
