Annals of the Village
"The camera looks at things with a fixed stare and can give all the documentary evidence—the pattern cf the wall-paper, the orna- ments on the mantelpiece, the position of the furniture—but it cannot give the background conversation, the broken fragmentary impressions gathered by a roving human eye."
THIS is a passage from a strange book about Luccumbe, the village or rather hamlet hidden among the moorland combes south of Porlock, the data for which have been compiled by " the co- ordinating work of a group of specialists in a concerted plan." I say " strange " because the collaboration between a writer of the strongly individual stamp of W. J. Turner and an impersonal docu- mentary is decidedly odd, if not ironical ; the passage quoted exactly reveals the incompatibility. Before I opened the book, I wondered how a science of observation could possibly come to grips with something so utterly unscientific as an English village community. After reading it—as I did with much interest, since it contains valu- able information—I felt that the method adopted was about as illu- minating as to approach a sonnet of Shakespeare in quantitative assessment of the number of beats per line, the regularity or other- wise of the caesuras and the etymological derivations of the words.
"There are eleven dogs in the village, two ponies, one donkey, one nannie-goat and one canary." "Mrs. Tame heats water and cooks breakfast with the aid of a methylated spirit stove." We also get a most circumstantial account of what Mr. Tame, the carter, eats and drinks, what time he gets up in the morning, what he puts on, where he goes, how far he has to go a•nd how he prefers his tea, hot or cold. In this kind of statistical infantilism we get about as much notion of what MT. and Mrs. Tame are like (not to mention the horses and Mr. Tame's relations with them), as if they were dressing, cooking and walking machines. Think or rather don't think of what Hudson's A Shepherd's Life would have been like under the grinding tyranny of such a technique! All is external ; there is no significance because there is no selection, and the automatic effect is the more deadening from the close-ups of the coloured photographs—and the less said about them the better. Yet, as I say, I read the book with profit, but simply because this absurd technocracy breaks down. Towards the end, " Mass- Observation " becomes quite a person, and even romantic in his (I mean its) regrets at leaving so charming a spot. In fact, the whole value of the book (as it was bound to be) consists in the personal commentary not of Observation but of a particular observer who prefers to remains anonymous—unless indeed he (or it) is W. J. Turner himself (certainly not itself). These comments are sensible and even wise ones, especially about the excellent influence of the village school in keeping the farmers' sons on the land. Feeling and judgement (like Lamb's happiness) are always breaking in.
Curiously enough, Colonel Ponsonby's exhaustive and very well documented chronicle of his viliage, Wootton, is rather more on the lines of Mass-Observation than that abstraction is itself. Or rather the suggestion is that he is voicing a mass-opinion that belongs to a particular phase of rural history, that of the nineteenth century. In the earlier part of the book, at any rate, there is a somewhat uncritical acceptance of the stock ideas of Seebohm's The Village Community, that Victorian manual of our prehistory. This is im- portant, for Seebohm popularised the progressive idea as applied to rural economy, and this theory simply does not fit the facts. It is not true that the Roman agricultural system was " not dissimilar " from the prehistoric, nor that there was " continuity " between the Roman villa and the Saxon ham. On the contrary, the Roman economy of export was a flat contradiction and so an intrusion upon the local self-sufficiency of the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages, an intrusion wholly erased by the Saxons who killed the Roman system by ignoring it and restored the essentials of the village com- munity as a self-supporting and semi-independent unit. Our agri- cultural history (and Wootton in the sheep-and-barley country of the oolite limestone belt has always been a purely agricultural village) has been the arena of the struggle betweerr these opposing principles, a struggle that came to an end in the last century with the total victory of the Roman principle, a catastrophic one for our agri- culture as a whole. I find it impossible to apply the progressive formula to this struggle ; technical advances there have been, of course, but they are only incidental to this primary and continuous clash between two systems that reversed each other. With this ex- ception, and it is a serious one, Colonel Ponsonby's book is a model
of how to handle and co-ordinate village documents. Just one other point which is of general interest. Colonel Ponsonby tells us that the organ of Wootton Church was installed in 1876. The abolition of the village choir was, I think, the final act in the estrangement between village and Church and a tragic one for both.
H. J. MRSSINGHAM.
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