Wheels and Stones
Radio 3
LIKE most British industries, farming is hardly thriving. Our country towns and villages are full of second home-owning city workers. Our modest crops are gathered by migrant labour. The Royal Show has gone down the tubes, as fans of The Archers will know. We have long ceased to live by what we could grow in this country and now import on a vast scale in order to keep supermarket prices down. We have lived through the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution and imperialism. We deliberately ran our industrial production down and put all our eggs into global finance trading. We live amid the ruins of advanced finance capitalism.
Yet we Brits still stubbornly cling to rural nostalgia. Traditional rural crafts are an attractive hobby for the middle classes. Appealing for a revival of our national spirit, in a speech at the Oxford Literary Festival, the Archbishop of York inevitably referred to “this green and pleasant
land”. Lark Rise to Candleford is to
have yet another series on television. Advertisements are full of the iconography of country life symbolising all that is good.
And Radio 3 devoted a programme to George Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop. Sturt, who in died 1927, was the son of a wheelwright in Farnham, Surrey. When his father died, he left his job as a schoolteacher and took over his father’s rural business. He also became quite a prolific writer.
Two of his books, The Wheelwright’s Shop and Change in the Village, earned a reputation, not so much for their literary merits, but because they accommodated themselves comfortably in a particularly English cultural ideology as evangelised by FR Leavis.
Leavis believed that that the perfect way of life was based on a rural economy where everything was governed by the seasons and people lived in organic communities in small towns and villages. This had been destroyed by the onset of industry and commerce in the 19th century, producing modern wealth by mass production and its accompanying mass culture.
What must that perfect society have been like? It must have been a state when we lived off the land, lived harmoniously together on a self-sufficient basis and shared a common culture.
Leavis described it for us, so we would know what we were aiming at. “What we have lost is the organic community with the living culture it embodied. Folk songs, folk dances, Cotswold cottages and handicraft products are signs and expressions of something more: an art of life, a way of living, ordered and patterned, involving social arts, codes of intercourse and a responsive adjustment, growing out of immemorial experience, to the natural environment and the rhythm of the year.”
Modern man lived an aimless, meaningless, godless life, denied his true humanity, head stuffed with nonsense by the media, endlessly searching for satisfaction. This was Leavis’ 20th century development of the “condition of England” question, explored by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Matthew Arnold in the 19th century.
Sturt’s beautifully evoked portrait of traditional rural craftsmanship serving the small rural community provides useful ammunition for Leavisite arguments.
Wheels and Stones was free from any preachifying luggage, and presented Sturt’s work for its finest qualities, particularly its plain and direct style. Robert Powell read beautifully selected passages from The Wheelwright’s Shop, illustrating the wheelwright’s craft, dealing with apprentices, problems with trade, injuries and the threat of mechanization.
This fine programme also included accounts from a modern stonemason who works in ecclesiastical and domestic buildings and a modern jeweller. Powell obviously enjoyed this brief respite from the tensions of working in Holby City. After the pressures of an NHS hospital, he deserved a break.
Robert Giddings
