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THE alternative designations
of the county, which in this season of harvest now spreads before us its
undulating carpet of radiant patchwork between the broad, blue waters of the
Firth and the Iong swell of the Lammermoors, is a trifle bewildering to the
outsider. It makes for further haziness in regard to such of Scotland as is
neither within the orbit of the tourist nor the grouse moor market, and I
have, of course, only the benighted Southerner in mind. It is from no lack
of respect for his Northern neighbours that the average Englishman
cultivates this ingenuous innocence, geographical and etymological, for of
that I will venture to say the most prickly Scot could never complain. He is
quite catholic in these matters, and is almost as foggy, and quite as
content to remain so, regarding such parts of his own country as lie outside
his orbit. There is no reason to suppose that the well-to-do men and women
of Scotland are qualified to fling stones across the Border on this account.
"I am afraid very few of us know much of our own country" is a platitude of
which the present writer, for reasons not inscrutable, is the humble and
constant recipient, and there is nothing for it but an unreserved acceptance
of the obvious. There is a familiar, but happily now rare type of
politician, only known in Britain, whose motto is "every country but my
own." In the more venial sense of the phrase now under discussion,
irreproachably patriotic -persons by the thousand might. as justly be
branded with it.
The convertible terms of
Haddingtonshire and East Lothian are undeniably confusing to aliens in view
of this general fogginess. If the burning of a country house or an election
meeting from this quarter are reported in the London dailies, they will have
occurred in "Haddingtonshire." In the agricultural column on the next page
the root crops of "East Lothian" will be described as in a flourishing
condition. The writer of agricultural knowledge, that is to say, has an
unconscious respect for tradition. East Lothian will have a certain classic
ring in his ear, and if he has a sense of style as well, the cadence of the
term, as opposed to the preposterous ill-accentuated mouthful of the
alternative, would settle the question. The writer concerned with reporting
politics or thunderstorms or motor trials very wisely uses the hideous
official designation of Haddingtonshire, just as if it were any ordinary
county. I never heard a farmer in or out of it use any term but East
Lothian, and I fancy the folk of Linlithgow follow the same time-honoured
and admirable practice. Midlothian has no alternative, though on official
documents, I believe, the -County of Edinburgh" is the correct form. Even a
Saxon tongue, with its awkward and tiresome predilection for the first
syllable at the expense of the rest, would boggle at "Edinburghshire." Many
score southern golfers, of course, visit the classic links upon the East
Lothian coast; but very few of them, I imagine, know what county they are
in, and care less, which is characteristic. "Where am I?" said a gorgeous
but polite motorist to me one day upon the road just east of Cockburnspath.
He was entrenched within the body of a great and powerful car by stacks of
golf clubs, fishing rods, and gun cases. He had come from the far north and
was on his return south. In reply to my query he said he had a road map; but
it was nothing more. "Am I still in Scotland?" I told him he was still in
Scotland, and in East Lothian —a gratuitous crumb of information which did
not seem to convey anything definite—and furthermore, that he had the whole
county of Berwick yet to traverse.
"I thought Berwick was a
town; I had a half mind to try the Iinks there."
"That is North Berwick," I
replied, "and it lies over yonder behind you. But there's a town of Berwick,
and county too, which you will be in immediately."
He was very grateful for this
elementary piece of information, and asked me the best route to York,
concerning which I laid him under further obligations for half the distance.
"Now," he said, "I wish you
would let me tow you there." For I should have said that a bicycle was
Ieaning up against the wall, and I had been sitting on a gate looking at
some men beginning to lead a magnificent crop of barley, and wondering how
many quarters an acre it would run to.
I thanked him cordially, and
said I did not want to go to York, as I was, in fact, going out to lunch a
mile or two down the road.
He was very pressing,
however, that I should change my plans, and attach myself to the rear of his
forty horse-power car. He had carried a young man thus-wise, he said, at
thirty miles an hour the day before, for some prodigious distance, to his
infinite satisfaction, without a catastrophe. I retorted as nicely as I
could—for I have never met so grateful or so philanthropic a motorist in the
guise of a stranger on any highway—that I wasn't a young roan, and did not
in the least want to go to York or even Newcastle, and most certainly not at
thirty miles an hour—above all, on a bicycle of nameless brand that I had
hired for the day in Dunbar. This last pretext seemed to have some sense in
it, and we parted friends. I took the opportunity of advising him, however,
to refrain from attaching even the young and the reckless to his car over
the North road beyond the Tweed. For every hundred yards or so, upon the
Northumbrian section of that famous highway there is, without fail, a large
fragment of loose whinstone, more or less in the middle. What would happen
to the man in tow when he blindly struck the first of these may be left to
the imagination.
About a couple of miles from
Cockburnspath, a sequestered village, lying amid the bare cultivated
foothills of the Lammermoors and just in East Lothian, is occasionally
visited by antiquarian societies. This is Oldhamstocks, a typically Saxon
name in this very Saxon country, Auld-ham being obvious, and Stoc, I
believe, also indicating a place or home. The point of interest is a little
thirteenth-century chancel, long disused but structurally intact, and in
strange conjunction with an uncompromising type of the eighteenth-century
Scotch kirk. The scarcity of pre-Reformation survivals gives local interest
to fragments that in the happier hunting-grounds of the south would attract
slight notice. But the mere fact of such rarity, and the mere distinction of
having survived the far more relentless forces of destruction, English and
Scottish, that operated here, lends a certain pathetic interest to a monkish
ivy-covered chancel, leaning up against a friendly, tolerant, but frankly
hideous design of the bald days of Presbyterianism. As a matter of fact, the
little chancel, with its decorated window tracery still complete, had some
further interest in not being monkish in so far that the church and advowson
never was the property of a monastery, but appertained for all traceable
times to the Lord of the Manor or Barony. Oldham- stocks, too, infringes the
usual Saxon custom just alluded to, in that the accent is here thrown on the
penultimate.
I journeyed out one day to
this village, which is a marked exception to the usual East Lothian type.
For it lies aloof from the world, and between high hills which tillage has
furrowed nearly to their summits, leaving green rounded crests of sheep
pasture. The village itself stands picturesquely along a green, with the
church and manse at one end of it in southern fashion, and looks like a
place that has nourished hardy hinds and stout prejudices. I wasn't thinking
of that, however, when I left the churchyard to retrace my steps and fell
into company on the highway with a man who was certainly the former and
deeply imbued with the latter. He was advanced in years and rather low in
stature, but bore upon one shoulder with apparent indifference a log of
portentous dimensions. On my remark that it looked like a wet night, with
some further commonplace regarding the old part of the church, the following
dialogue ensued
"Aye, it's a thousan' year
auld they say; just yin o' that auld monkish buildings."
"It is between six and seven
hundred years old," I replied.
"Deed, then, an' how do ye
ken that?"
"I can tell it for a
certainty by the window for one by thing."
"Ye can ken how mony hun'erd
year old it is by looking at the windy? Mon, that's wonderfu'. I've heard
tell there's the marks of anither auld buildin' on the top o' yon brae."
"What sort of building was
it?"
"Oh, jist some o' thae auld
papish nonsense; and as to that, I'm thinkin' we'll a' be Romans agin sune."
For the moment it only
crossed my mind that some vague echoes of advancing ritualistic practices
across the Border might have reached Oldhamstocks through the weekly paper.
"Well, you're safe enough in
old Scotland at any rate."
"Safe in auld Scotland!" the
little man shouted with a voice quivering either with excitement or the
weight of the weaver's beam, to use a metaphor appropriate to the occasion,
under which he was labouring. "Safe in auld Scotland! Auld Scotland's
ganging to Rome jist as fast as any of 'em."
"At least," I said, "there's
nothing of that up here in Oldhamstocks."
"Naethin' o' that up here!
Lord save us, we're jes fu' o't every Sabbath."
This was getting a little
uncanny, for there was no stained glass window in Oldhamstocks kirk, nor, I
think, had it been reseated in the Anglican fashion, and the pulpit shifted,
as has been done in some country churches; while the edifice itself was
absolutely above reproach from this staunch Covenanter's point of view.
"What is the name of the
minister?" I asked.
'He's a mon they ca-----'
Now, in the south this would
merely indicate that the parson was a stranger recently inducted, and that
the spokesman took his name on hearsay, as having somewhat less than no
interest in the newcomer. But this frequent idiom of the common folk in
Scotland, "they ea' him," in answer to such a query as the above one of
mine, and in reference to a man they have perhaps known all their lives, has
surely an element of humour in it. It would be straining a point perhaps to
say that it was the proverbial reluctance of the Scot to commit himself
definitely, and that without the knowledge of a man's genealogy there could
be no positive certainty there had not been some remote hanky-panky with his
patronymic. The respected, and, I believe, entirely orthodox divine in
question had, it transpired, been thirty or forty years in charge. To cut
our discussion short—which is more than my log-bearing friend did, for he
kept it up all through the village, and for some distance beyond, as our
respective ways coincided—it seems that he scented some taint of
"justification by works" in the parish pulpit—an appalling doctrine to his
thinking. how this amiable tolerance savoured of the scarlet woman, I cannot
imagine. But then I am not equipped to fathom the controversial depths of
the old-fashioned Scottish theologian. One may appreciate the piquancy he
has (riven to Scottish history, and feel that he has, at any rate, made
nearly two centuries of what otherwise a Scotsman will admit with certain
notable exceptions to be a rather wearisomely turbulent chronicle, a very
interesting one. All this may be gratefully realised without being competent
to enter the lists with a village Cameronian, even though weighted down by
half a tree. however, my Covenanter was not so dour as might be gathered
from this brief narration. For he laughed quite immoderately at some
trifling passage we had, as our ways diverged, and we parted friends, though
I suspect he took me for a "Roman."
The rolling plain of East
Lothian begins at Pease Pass and Cockburnspath in a narrow strip between the
sea and the hills, and gradually expands in fanlike shape as you travel
westward in the direction of Edinburgh. This is a country with a character
entirely of its own. It is unlike any other in Scotland, and still more
unlike, it would be superfluous to add, any region of England. It might be
likened to a vast garden lying between a rocky, broken coastline and a wild
waste of moor. Not a garden country in the sense of Kent or the Isle of
Wight, to quote familiar illustrations of a hackneyed term; nothing in
atmosphere, traditions, or surface, could be more utterly different. 'There
are no lush hedgerows, no flowery lanes, no
picturesque, unkempt
orchards, no crooked lines. It is a garden of twenty- or thirty=acre fields
geometrically laid out and divided by well-built stone walls or low clipped
thorn fences, upon either side of which no foot of space is given to the
unprofitable or the picturesque in nature. Turnips, barley, seeds, oats,
potatoes, wheat, as the old rhythmical mernoria technica of the East Lothian
six-course shift had it, may be roughly taken as indicating the composition
of the rich-coloured patchwork that lays along the levels and climbs the low
hills.
At intervals stand the great
farm steadings, bearing to one another a certain family likeness not common
in the south, and giving an appearance of formality which is strengthened by
the tall unlovely chimneys of the stationary engines, though somewhat
ameliorated on the other hand by the warm red sandstone walls and red-tiled
roofs of the out-buildings and cottages. Here and there—and this bird's-eye
view of the country comes natural, for the sufficient reason that you can
see nearly all over it from almost any slight elevation—are the great
country seats, which are on a scale proportionate to the high-rented,
scientifically-cultivated farms belonging to them, entrenched within
luxuriant woodlands and green parks that are virtually the only permanent
grass in the country. The Merse is a fat and opulent region; but this is a
step higher, and cast, moreover, in a different setting. What sort of appeal
it would make to a stranger turned suddenly loose into it, and conducted at
a leisurely pace from Cockburnspath to Dunbar, and on to Haddington or North
Berwick, it would be difficult to say. He would be a cockney indeed,
however, who did not recognise the fact that he was looking over a type of
rural landscape, the like of which he had assuredly never seen before. A
farmer from Norfolk, Lincolnshire, or the best of Yorkshire, would become
conscious at once that his standards of excellence were shattered and
required readjustment.
The shock of surprise, for
the term is no whit too strong, would be modified something, to be sure, by
an approach through the Merse, but there is no reason to consider unlikely
suppositions. It has been my occasional lot to be in the company of visitors
of this type, undergoing this altogether new experience, and still oftener
to hear it recalled by such in distant counties as the experience of their
lives. The farmer of Norfolk or Lincolnshire, who, speaking broadly,
represented the most enlightened type of English agriculturist when skill
and capital worked in fearless and secure combination, occasionally visited
this country. But the Norfolk or Lincolnshire farmer threw up the sponge at
once at the very first glance at East Lothian, and frankly recognised that a
gap divided it from the best that he could show or had ever seen. The simple
fact that men of skill, substance, and capital were paying four and five
pounds an acre rent, while he was paying two and three for the best land,
with about the same profits in either case, would alone have given the crack
farmer from the south something to think about. Yet in the eighteenth
century the Lothian lairds were importing English bailiffs, under no little
opposition, to show their reluctant and comparatively backward tenantry how
to farm! As already remarked, a professional equipment is quite unnecessary
for a general appreciation of these conditions. A layman with eyes in his
head and an ordinary acquaintance with country life would recognise at once
an unwonted spectacle, and would surely be compelled to some measure of
admiration. For if the breed who made the country have mostly left the soil,
and their places know them no more, their successors nobly cherish their
great traditions. The economic world has been turned upside down since their
day. The financial readjustment which enables the man of the present to
withstand the altered conditions does not for the moment concern us. It is
enough that East Lothian displays the same wonderful face as of old. The
superficial changes are insignificant. Even the drop in these high rents is
as nothing to the slump that has overtaken the far lower ones in some of the
crack counties of England.
The normal reader will have
probably made up his mind by this time that East Lothian, for the normal
visitor, must be an intolerably dull county; and in a nation such as we are
now, it would be futile to expect many people to find compensation in the
highest triumphs of agriculture, or to appreciate the unique exhibition of
them that are here displayed. But as a matter of fact, this perfection of
neatness and abundance doesn't altogether make for the monotony which would
he inevitable in many countries. The layman, oblivious to all these things,
could not forbear, if he had a soul within him, from recognising a country
that in other ways, too, was of an uncommon quality. Stand almost where you
will, the eye ranges far away over the rich clean patchwork of the plains,
with their intervals of stately woodland, to blue stretches of sea, bounded
by long billowy coastlines, rising at times almost to the height of
mountains. And again, if the formal opulence of the foregrounds offend an
aesthetic sense not capable —speaking without offence—of feeling their
significance, the continuous presence of the unbroken wall of lonely
moorland, that for the entire length of the county upon the inland side
waves along the near skyline, from its very contrast must make a further
appeal.
Once over the deep woody
deans of Cockburnspath, everything that is wild, bosky, or rugged in nature
forges away with the Lammermoors, and you are at once into the narrow
eastern wedge of East Lothian, which widens gradually as you approach
Dunbar. This is the cream of the country—probably the cream of the earth.
For some fifteen miles approximately, extending lengthwise to the course of
the Tyne, and in width from the edge of the red cliffs or sandy dunes which
succeed them, to the foothills of the Lammermoors, lie the famous "Dunbar
red lands." Brilliant to the eye in hue, and brilliant in the rich colouring
of the crops they carry, these red barns are supposed to combine a maximum
of fertility with friable, easy-working qualities in greater perfection than
any other soil in Great Britain. Upon the top of this, they have been
subjected to the lavish and liberal treatment of the Lothian tradition,
which was not due to natural advantages, but has handled this whole country,
whatever its varying soil qualities, which are many, with the same skill.
But the red land country of Dunbar, associated for obvious geographical
reasons with that ancient town, is from an agricultural point of view the
most interesting portion of the county. I think it is otherwise the most
picturesque. For the colouring of itself is so rich, the woodlands of
country seats so abundant, the sea so near upon the one hand, the rising
ridges of the Lammermoors foothills so reasonably close upon the other.
In matters material the
potato is here king. That invaluable but prosaic root suggests to most of us
a host of little market gardeners covering the countryside with mean
dwellings and makeshift out-buildings. The potato of the Dunbar country is a
magnificent creature of quite aristocratic associations, and is something of
a gamble to big farmers, just as hops are to the farmers of Kent. It doesn't
condescend to the two- or three-acre strips or patches with which it is
hopelessly associated in the popular eye. It follows oats (generally) in the
ordinary farming shift, and, stimulated by powerful doses of fertiliser,
barn-yard and artificial, spreads a level sea of lusty shaws and flowery
tops in summer-time from fence to fence, to make way in autumn for a crop of
wheat that I have known myself go to eight quarters an acre. And a crop like
that was worth something in Haddington when the price was from fifty to
sixty shillings a quarter! Even at the present miserable prices, the normal
expectation of six quarters which East Lothian looks for in a fair year must
leave a margin.
Just after the beautifully
clean stubbles had been cleared of their crop in this particular year, I
took the trouble to count the freshly-erected grain stacks in three
consecutive homesteads, all within easy sight, near the road between Dunbar
and Cockburnspath. In one there were just a hundred, and in the two others
between sixty and seventy apiece. The swedes and turnips, which as of old,
in the six-course system, generally follow wheat, are a goodly sight, clean
as a garden, and the roots, when matured, seeming at times almost to jostle
one another out of the drills. This is a dry climate, in spite of the hills
and mountains that are visible near and far from these Lothian fields. To an
eye accustomed to noting the crops in many counties year after year, it
seemed strange to find in mid-July the farmers of the Merse and Lothian
crying for rain after weeks of drought, yet their swedes and earlier-sown
turnips flickering strong and lusty in the wind over the large fields, and
much fitter, indeed, to hold birds than many a southern root field in early
September. No waste ground is here—neither open ditches, nor rambling
fences, nor tousely corners, nor ragged headlands, and, generally speaking,
no hedgerow timber to draw the land and obstruct the sunshine. The crop
pushes stiff and level up to the stone wall or trim thorn fence, which in
the growing and maturing season subside into thin faint lines hardly
discernible amid the lush abundance. But potatoes throughout East Lothian,
and above all in these Dunbar red lands, as already related, were and are
the most attractive crop to the farmer. Other products have their limitation
in market price, being forced to compete with the cheaply grown stuff from
the virgin soils of three other continents. It may be worth reminding some
readers, too, that the good average and profitable yield of a Manitoba farm
would be accounted a dead failure in East Lothian, and scarcely profitable
in Wiltshire or Suffolk, while the average yield per acre in Australia or
the United States would be ploughed under ruthlessly either in England or
Scotland.
But potatoes cannot he
carried about the world so readily, nor grown wholesale with a trifling
expenditure of labour. For they need a great deal, and it might be set down
as against the Lothian and Berwickshire farmer that the price of labour has
gone up enormously since the last generation tilled these generous
fields—that of men about 40 per cent., and of women twice as much. Forty
years ago, too, the "Dunbar regent," the favourite of that day, held the
London eating-houses and supper-rooms in the hollow of its hand, and fetched
double, or nearly double, the price of any other late potatoes grown in
Great Britain. There are still none in the market comparable to the delicate
mealy product of this red loam belt of East Lothian. But the old exclusive
prices and the particular demand which created them have passed away, and it
only tops the market by some 10 or 15 per cent. But the average under
potatoes is fully as large as ever, while wheat has given way greatly to
oats and barley. The profits in a good year, unlike grain, still mean money
in the cornmercial, not the agricultural sense of the word. Potatoes are, of
course, something of a gamble, for potential disease always hovers over the
crop like a destroying angel. When dreary wet days follow one another in
August, the ominous, pungent odour as surely begins to scent the air,
telling of mischief that will spread apace if the elements remain perverse,
and of thousands of pounds sinking surely into the soil, which has been
manured and fertilised with a lavishness that would make a Devonshire farmer
gape with amazement. I mention the Devonshire farmer, not because he also
ploughs the red sandstone, on the little fields wedged in between his
portentous bank fences, but because—what no one would be altogether
surprised at who knew the county—he foots the list of English shires in the
official returns of grain per acre.
The old farming families have
for the most part left East Lothian. They have not, dear readers, gone to
Canada, though I have no doubt the labourers have done their share in
swelling the prodigious army of fit and unfit that have crowded the Atlantic
steamers for the last dozen years. The East Lothian farmer years was not the
type of person who would look upon a half-section in the north-west, and a
"shack" or even a four-roomed frame house, combined with twelve or fourteen
hours a day manual labour, as a fine opening. He was a gentleman who dealt,
as his successors doubtless do, in thousands—to his profit in former days,
if to his loss in the 'eighties and early 'nineties. He frequently paid a
rent of £2000 a year. He did not, as his successors doubtless do not, enter
upon a farm, and would not have been accepted in the competition of those
days, without a capital of many thousand pounds. He often put two or three
sons into farms requiring five or six thousand pounds (£12 an acre was about
the minimum estimate) for the stocking thereof. There was a great debacle
amongst this admirable race of men in the 'eighties and earlier 'nineties,
the stock whose forbears had made this country a world's spectacle—the
agricultural world, that is—and who in their own persons were farming
nobly., The long leases at high rents hitherto equitable, caught many in the
great slump. Nobody foresaw it, though they ought to have. Neither
landlords, lawyers, agents, nor farmers in Scotland or in England could see
the writing on the wall that was plain almost to a schoolboy who knew North
America—the first and most powerful source of attack in the 'seventies. That
British land would be worth so much an acre till kingdom come, was almost a
religion among the shrewdest men in both kingdoms. The present generation,
whom a bitter experience has utterly divorced from the creed of their
fathers, cannot imagine the pride and confidence in British real estate that
was ingrained in the very blood. The shrewdest lawyers bought land, or
invested their clients' money in it, with infinitely more confidence than
they would buy Consols to-day, which is not, perhaps, saying very much. Here
is a trifling but pertinent incident: its unavoidable egotism I may be
forgiven. I was paying a flying visit towards the end of the 'seventies to
an old friend, son of a famous farming family, then sitting himself on a
superb farm of Dunbar red land at five pounds an acre. I was then farming
myself in one of the old states of America, where the spectre of the
rapidly-opening West, and its virgin grainfields, was already beginning to
flap its wings, and to depreciate land, and to depress the rural communities
with the certain promise of worse things to come. The agricultural situation
of the two countries, the old long-established regions of the United States,
and of Canada too for that matter, on one side of the ocean, and Great
Britain on the other, was practically identical. Their farmers, too, had had
their day, and being always owners, their pride of land, so far as the sense
of its security, is implied. But the first whiff of the impending storm,
from which they have never to this day recovered, had already begun to
ruffle the calm of the yeomen landowners from Maine to Maryland, and to
depress the incipient, but sanguine efforts to restore the fertility of the
worn-out plantations of the slave states. It was only a question of more
railroads and more steamers, which were both making ready response to the
awakening of the Virgin West. Any one nearer to the quarter whence the storm
was coming could see it—man, woman, or child. Indeed they were feeling it.
The agriculturist sowing grain on his well-equipped farm in New York or
Pennsylvania worth £30 an acre, as sound value hitherto as a staple
investment, and as profitable to work as a farm in Essex, had already cause
to be anxious. But Great Britain, despite the warnings of occasional
newspaper correspondents, seemed absolutely unconscious of any impending
calamity. People were bewailing one or two ruinously inclement seasons, as
if that were all! On the occasion the memory of which has provoked the
parenthesis, I ventured prophetic utterance merely to what was obvious to
any one then living within the mutterings of the brewing storm. My friend is
now kind enough to say that it stuck in his mind, and was recalled when the
crash came. At the time, I think, he relit his pipe and smiled grimly across
the hearth. Seven or eight years later, farms known to me in Essex and
Lincolnshire with a former rental of 30s. to £2 an acre, were selling or
being vainly offered at £10 to £15 an acre in fee simple, and hundreds
throughout England were derelict.
It is needless to recall that
in spite of slow and partial recovery, and in places through changed
conditions, complete recuperation, the blow was final. For better or for
worse, that is to say, rural England and Scotland have never been what they
were before. That chapter, with its pride, its security, its traditions, one
might almost say its arrogance, was definitely closed. This is, of course, a
mere truism. But it is pleasant to remember those old days all the same.
There was a something not easy to describe in country life that has never
returned. It crumbled away in the 'eighties; and what must have struck, and
did strike many at the time, was the difficulty with which a kind of
superstition that land must represent so much an acre died even in the face
of facts. This was obviously due to the long divorcement of landlords, in
Great Britain more than in almost any other country, from a sensitive
partnership in the soil, and a practical knowledge of and interest in
agriculture. Large estates and a capitalist tenantry had everywhere relieved
them from such practical intimacy with their own acres. After all, a love of
country life as represented largely by sport, has little really to do with
practical agriculture, though it is often conventionally associated with it.
To landlords, agents, and solicitors, land had been so long merely
represented by a money rent, and the fee simple value at so many years'
purchase of the same, that the original partnership idea had been lost sight
of. The revolution was too sudden for breaking an ingrained attitude. It was
not only that they did not foresee it, which they ought to have done : but
after it had come they were even still inclined to discuss rental figures as
based on old practice, instead of facing the fact of the world's movements
and markets. It is perhaps not surprising that a decade was hardly
sufficient to break an immemorial belief that the soil of Great Britain was
almost sacred, and that a temporary 10 per cent, reduction was sufficient to
stem a cataclysm.
The splendid condition of
Lothian agriculture, its long leases and high rents, cut both ways. Whatever
befell the sitting tenants, the old farming families, the capitalists of
those days, there were sanguine people ready to take their places at rents
not seriously reduced, on farms so well equipped and in such beautiful
condition. No derelict farms ever marred the landscape of East Lothian. On
the contrary, whatever hearts or pockets were breaking, the country kept a
smiling face. It is no place here, even were I competent to do so, to touch
upon the tale of loss and trouble that must for years have depressed the
farmhouses of East Lothian. That most of these old families vanished in the
process need not of necessity indicate financial ruin. Their sons were
well-educated, practical men. Farming had been a pleasant and reasonably
profitable business at 8 or 10 per cent. The big farmer was a man widely
envied in those days. There was even something of a social glamour about it.
But it became a very different matter when the woes of the farmer and the
landowner became a chronic national refrain, and the position dropped from
one of profitable and otherwise enviable ease to an anxious struggle to make
both ends meet. It would have been strange indeed if the young men who saw
this struggle at close quarters elected, with the world before them, to
continue in so unpromising a career, and it is not surprising that commerce
and the professions drew away from East Lothian and its neighbours—but I
think particularly from East Lothian—most of the names with which its rise
to fame is associated.
These are days of totally
different standards, days of readjustment, and incidentally, too, of
faddists innumerable—days too, let us hope, of more cheering prospects,
though the proud old times of agriculture and of landowning too, as such,
have utterly vanished. East Lothian, save for this departed glamour, goes on
almost precisely as of yore. The rents are now only down about 15 per cent.
The rents of some arable counties are down from 50 to 200 per cent.
Away from the hills East
Lothian had, in my youth, not a single field but the laird's parks in
permanent pasture. At least so it was said, and I certainly never saw one.
It has even now so little meadow as to be unworthy of notice. It is still,
as I have said, beautifully farmed, and presents a perfect picture. Though
showing considerable variety of soil, nature has intended it for an arable
country, just as she has intended others to be mainly grazing countries, not
because they are poor, but because they are richer in the value of their
beef and mutton than they ever could be in grain. In former days there was
tremendous competition for East Lothian farms. Speaking generally, there was
no sentiment attaching to the particular homesteads as in most parts of
England then. The farming families took a commercial view of the situation,
and put their capital, when a lease was up, wherever the best opportunity
offered, and not infrequently into more than one farm. The mutual attitude
of landlord and tenant, again, struck a southerner in those days as almost
wholly lacking in what might be called the quasi-feudal flavour, traditional
in England, and, no doubt, in some other parts of Scotland. The tie was of a
merely commercial nature—a nineteen-year hard-and-fast lease, and there was
an end of it. The Lothian landlords may well have been proud of their
tenantry. But the mutual feeling, though generally friendly, was not in the
least feudal, to use a convenient term, and in no sense intimate. I don't
think home farms had any appreciable existence. At any rate, one never heard
of them as counting for anything. It would have needed an exceptional
indifference to income to play with three hundred acres, which would
otherwise represent a clear thousand and odd pounds; while the notion of
setting a good example, admirable perhaps in more backward countries, would
have been, of course, ridiculous in East Lothian.
I remember very well, and for
excellent reasons, an incident which made a great stir at the time
throughout Great Britain: but I find it quite forgotten, even in the
locality, or rather that there is scarcely any one left to remember it. Long
protracted tenure and its consequent local attachments were not entirely
wanting, though, as I have ventured to indicate, they were not
characteristic of the county in the 'seventies. But a distinguished farmer
in a case where these conditions did happen to exist in a very marked degree
was given notice to quit at the end of his lease for political reasons.
There was a tremendous row, not in any way promoted by the party most
concerned, who was of a proud and quiet disposition. But the press of the
United Kingdom, not then prone to sensationalism, took it up, and even that
of the Continent, whose agriculturists in those days, regarding Great
Britain as their model, and East Lothian as its apotheosis, echoed the
controversy.
The offending landlord was a
Tory with stout convictions of a kind not uncommon then, but which would
make the hair of the staunchest Conservative of to-day stand on end. The
tenant was a Liberal of the mild kind which then answered to the term, but
who, if he were alive to-day, would almost certainly be of the other faith.
His particular offence lay in having contested, though unsuccessfully, a
Scottish constituency. Even foreigners wrote indignant letters to the
British Press to the effect that Mr. A., the aggrieved party, and his farm
had a European reputation, whereas they had never even so much as heard of
Mr. B., his landlord. This was natural enough, though not quite to the
point, nor precisely in perspective, as the gentleman in question, an
otherwise just and upright man, had actually held office in a former
Government. However, it was a nine days' wonder, and stirred political
passions no little for the moment. Agricultural politics in those days
hinged mainly upon the law of hypothee and the extreme preservation of
hares. The former, abrogated in due course, gave the landlord certain
preferential rights over all other creditors, which were considered harsh
and otherwise disadvantageous to the tenant. The latter was really a great
scandal. The fields in some parts were literally covered with half-tame
hares. To say that on a fine autumn day
you could count thirty and
forty squatting about a clean stubble field of less than that number of
acres is the mere literal truth. The damage such a number did to the noble
fields of turnips by nibbling at the tubers and setting up decay, seemed in
common sense out of all proportion to the sorry sport afforded by a
multiplicity of ground game. East Lothian, like much of Scotland, was and is
a fine partridge country, but nothing can make a hare in a serious and
wholesale sense an exhilarating mark for the gun; while of all a gun's
victims poor puss suffers most from the tinker and the tailor, the
long-range blazer and the schoolboy.
A keeper in Shropshire I was
constantly out with many years ago, an admirable type of his class, served
his early terms on a famous shooting estate in Norfolk. He has often told me
that if the list of hares slain on a big day did not reach four figures,
there was a rating in store for the keepers. The modern shooting man, if he
does not live laborious days, is critical as to the class of shot offered
him, and may well wonder what his predecessors could have seen in this sort
of fun—at the cost, too, of so much justifiable ill-feeling. But it brought
on the Hares and Rabbits Bill, which has so thinned the former, save on the
Wiltshire Downs and a few other spots, that there are not much more than
enough of them for coursing and hunting, the proper metier, perhaps, of this
graceful, fleet, and timorous beast. But mingling in rather odd contrast
with the confiding game, both fur and feather, that swarmed on these fat
Lothian fields in autumn and winter, came the constant rush of the wilder
denizens of the air—the freer spirits from the moorland and the sea. Great
flocks of wild geese spent, and I believe still spend, every day for months
upon the young wheat or seeds, particularly appreciating the leavings of the
lifting ploughs on the cleared or re-sown potato-fields. Honking inland in
the morning and back again to the seashore at sunset, a big flock of wild
geese would be almost as continuously in evidence as the partridges or
hares, or the clouds of pigeons which, pouring out of the various "doo'cots"
in the neighbourhood, were another characteristic feature of the East
Lothian landscape. There, however, the similarity ended. For the genius with
which a hundred or so wild geese mingled daily in the bustling life of a
great farm, and yet kept themselves practically unapproachable by the most
crafty sportsman, was amazing. Golden plovers, too, seemed always on the
wing at dusk in these darker months with their plaintive whistle, while
there were more wood-pigeons in East Lothian in those days than in any
country I have ever seen, which is saying a good deal. |
