‘Frating was a rich and stimulating environment’ Potato sorting at Frating Hall, Photo: courtesy Ken Worpole
In the 1940s many conscientious objectors went ‘back to the land’. Ken Worpole wrote a book on it
‘At the heart of the tale was a small group of pioneers, radicalised by their religious beliefs and their pacifism.’
In 2019 I gave a talk at the Essex Book Festival. It was an account of various self-sufficiency settlements in Essex in the twentieth century. The festival prospectus listed some of these communities, one of which was Frating Hall Farm. At the time I knew little about it, but in the audience were two women, Barbara Thomas and her daughter-in-law Tessa, from the farm itself. Barbara lived at Frating for more than fifty years with her husband, Martyn.
Between 1943 and 1954, Frating Hall had been a pacifist community, one of a number established before or during the second world war by those who refused to take up arms. Many of those who went ‘back to the land’ were Quakers, as was Martyn’s stepfather, Derek Crosfield. I was invited to visit the farm, and to meet people who had grown up in this community. One by one I recorded their stories.
At the heart of the Frating tale was a small group of pioneers, radicalised by their religious beliefs and their pacifism. On ‘Lady Day’, March 1943, they took possession of a vacant farm on the Tendring peninsula. In time there were more than fifty people living at Frating, including refugees and several former prisoners-of-war. Though the settlement was based on the idea of productive self-sufficiency and stewardship of the land, members continued to subscribe to the larger ideal of ‘the New Life’, a term then used to describe a mix of ‘back to the land’ sentiments, simpler lifestyles, and human fellowship.
I was so captivated by this story that I decided to write a book about it. Its title, No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen, is taken from the opening paragraph of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a work full of references to the new life: ‘Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or rather scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.’ I wanted to offer a history of the community during its eleven-year occupation, as well as recording the passionate religious and political ideals of the back-to-the-land movement in wartime and post-war Britain.
It needs to be remembered that the 1930s was a time of considerable intellectual and political turmoil, and the carnage of the first world war had inspired a growing pacifist movement. The Peace Pledge Union (PPU), formed in 1934, had nearly 100,000 members by the end of the decade, each member signing the following pledge: ‘War is a crime against humanity. I renounce war, and am therefore determined not to support any kind of war. I am also determined to work for the removal of all causes of war.’
Among those involved in the PPU was the poet Max Plowman. Born in 1883, Plowman had fought in the first world war and been badly wounded. Appalled by the horrors he saw, he refused to return to duties on being discharged from treatment. He was tried as a conscientious objector, acquitted and dismissed from the army. Plowman had been involved in the setting up of the PPU in 1936, where he established the ‘Forethought Committee’, one of whose principal objectives was advocating farm work and humanitarian aid as an alternative to military conscription. The overlap between pacifism and agrarianism was not only promulgated by the PPU. In addition to Plowman’s enthusiasm for agricultural communes, PPU member, Henry Carter had started to organise the Christian Pacifist Forestry and Land Units.
Elsewhere in Essex other pacifists and conscientious objectors were also choosing to go back to the land. In a moving collection of short memoirs of conscientious objectors during the second world war, published by the Friends of Colchester and Coggeshall Monthly Meeting, two contributors reflect on their experiences. Hugh Clunes recalls that a Chelmsford Quaker and businessman, on declaration of war, promptly sold his family home and bought a 150-acre farm nearby where ‘He would employ as many COs as possible and the group would live together as a community with free board and lodging and a little pocket money.’ The farm was soon able to provide work and shelter for eight adults and three children.
Bill Skinner, then a Methodist, ‘Decided to follow my ancestors onto the land and went to a small community farm at Clavering in Essex run by War Resisters International’. Not all COs faced public disapproval all of the time. Hospital worker Albert Pike tells a remarkable story. ‘One memory sticks out: the number of men who came up to shake my hand when I registered as a CO at Romford Labour Exchange in 1940. All eyes were on me when I walked forward to answer the clerk’s shout of “Where’s that CO?” I’m sure he was as surprised as I was at the reception I got from the crowd.’
Of those who went to Frating only two had previous farming experience. One was Hugh Barrett who, like his brother and fellow Frating participant, the artist Roderic Barrett, was a son of a Quaker who had been imprisoned as a conscientious objector in the first world war. Hugh later farmed professionally for several decades before going on to work in international development and education, eventually writing two evocative memoirs about traditional farming in Suffolk.
In 1946, Derek Crosfield joined the group at Frating. Born in 1915, and educated at Leighton Park School (and then Cambridge), he spent some time in the 1930s working at a Quaker settlement in the Rhondda Valley, which provided relief and support for unemployed miners. He also spent a year as acting warden at an educational settlement in the Rhymney Valley. Coming from a Quaker business family, he had experience of management and finance, but for most of the war he was working at an agricultural community in Hampshire. Crosfield was part of the small group who bought out Frating Hall Farm when the co-operative arrangement came to an end in 1954. Crosfield’s stepson Martyn owns and manages the farm today.
Despite the insularity experienced by some members at times, Frating was a rich and stimulating environment for its children. This may well have caused envy among their school-friends. All Frating children attended the local primary school in Great Bentley, and several went to one of the Colchester grammar schools or to Quaker schools at Saffron Walden or Reading. All took with them experiences of their farm life – and a diversity of adult friends and familiars – which few of their generation could match. In their many and varied ways, the children who grew up at Frating went on to pursue lives of vocation, whether in the fields of artistic, educational or humanitarian causes and endeavours.
All those I interviewed had been children when they lived on the farm. All recalled growing up with an extraordinary sense of freedom and happiness, coming and going into each other’s houses to eat or sleep, wandering the fields and woods when not at school, playing in the barn, feeding the animals, going on trips to the seaside on the back of a lorry, and much else. The young Shirley Williams, who sadly died earlier this year, had, on leaving school, taken up the job of second cow-herder at Frating: her mother, Vera Brittain, was a keen supporter. It was only in adult life that those I spoke to realised how difficult it had been for their parents at times, yet all remembered the community with pride in what had been attempted and, for a while, achieved.
Ken’s No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen: Back to the land in wartime Britain is published by Little Toller.
