I love it in the shed

‘I love it in the shed . . . I tiptoed my way in, past a couple of big sash windows from a skip and a fine semicircular stained-glass window, and eased along to the far end. A legless Windsor smoker’s bow chair: a lovely thing but in need of a set of legs. Another project for my nineties.’ This is Roger Deakin, author and environmentalist who died 20 years ago today, writing in a notebook he kept during the last years of his life. 

Deakin was born in Watford in 1943 in Watford, Hertfordshire, the only child of railway clerk Cyril Deakin and his wife Doris. His father died when he was 17. Deakin was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School and then at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read English. After graduating, he worked as a teacher and then in advertising, while also making films and radio programmes. In 1968 he bought Walnut Tree Farm at Mellis in Suffolk, a timber-framed farmhouse surrounded by meadows and a moat, which he restored and where he lived for the rest of his life.

Deakin became closely involved in environmental campaigning and was one of the founders, in 1983, of Common Ground, an organisation concerned with local landscape, culture and environmental distinctiveness. He continued to work in advertising, broadcasting and documentary production, making programmes for the BBC and other organisations. His first book, Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain, appeared in 1999, following a journey inspired by John Cheever’s short story The Swimmer. Deakin travelled around Britain swimming in rivers, lakes, canals, lidos, the sea and other stretches of open water.

After Waterlog, Deakin began travelling and researching a book about trees and wood, visiting places including France, Greece, Australia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as well as many parts of Britain. He completed Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees shortly before his death. Diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2006, he died at Walnut Tree Farm on 19 August that year, aged 63. Wikipedia, The Outdoor Swimming Society, The Guardian, and University of East Anglia. 

During the last six years of his life, Deakin also kept a detailed record of his daily life, work, thoughts and memories. He filled 45 lined exercise books in his distinctive handwriting, numbering and paginating each one and putting a table of contents on its cover. The entries included observations of the countryside around Walnut Tree Farm, accounts of everyday activities and encounters, memories, travel notes and material gathered for his books and radio programmes.

After his death, extracts from the notebooks were edited by his partner Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker and published by Hamish Hamilton in 2008 as Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (which can be sampled at Googlebooks).. Rather than reproducing the notebooks chronologically, the editors selected entries from different years and arranged them month by month to create a single composite year. Abbreviations were expanded, but otherwise the published extracts retained Deakin’s words. The following three entries are taken from that volume (though none can be dated to a particular year).

9 January

‘A wild, windy night and a bright, clear windy day. I walk out along Cowpasture Lane and up the hill to the pollard hornbeam, definitely a trasmocho tree with its unusually wide bolling. On the way I stand leaning on the little wooden bridge over the stream at the ford, watching the running water. Then a long trudge into the wind to reach the badger sett, still very active and well trodden, with claw marks in the mud everywhere. The wood is creaking, and a sound like a squeaky hinge sings out where two birches are rubbing against each other. From the mud hill-fort of the badger sett, beaten paths radiate into the wood and out across a plank bridge into the weedy set-aside field beyond the wood. In the long shadows of the late white sun it is easy to make them out and to follow one over the field to a ditch crossing and all the way to a gap in the wire fence of the railway embankment, where the badgers scratch themselves against the wire and leave little clumps of their shaving-brush hair on the grass. I walk to the lane in the shadow and shelter of the tall embankment and scuttle home, glad of the shelter of the lane’s hedges.’

15 February

Saturday morning I wake up in London and walk over to the Festival Hall after a hearty bacon and mushroom breakfast. Over Waterloo Bridge, and see a long queue of people eddying and dropping down the narrow well of stairs to the Embankment below like water going down a bath plug.

Amazing forest of placards on pine sticks provided by the Mirror. I found myself marching behind banners I couldn’t read held by a bunch of women, with one reading, as I later discovered after being photographed by the press, ‘Cunt-lovers Against the War’.

There were quite a few dogs on leads, ‘Dogs of War’, as one placard called them, and several poodles, including one led by a priest in full cassock with a banner behind it that read ‘Poodle, Bite your Master’s Leg’.

There were also several beautifully made huge swans, which flapped their diaphanous wings and seemed to fly above the crowd, a striking image in the park. Mike [Hodges] and I spoke up for the daffodils in Hyde Park that were getting trodden down and crushed, and a man climbed up into a plane tree in St James’s Park to watch the march.

There were placards like ‘Pagan Queers for Peace’ and ‘Cold? Wrap Yourself Up in a Woolly Liberal’. Richard discovered long-lost friends like the Berkhamsted CND and the Woodcraft Folk.

Mike, Sarah Martin and Carol [Law] escaped from the park, meeting Caroline Soper and Hanif Kureishi on the way, picked up a free bottle or two of Mecca Cola, and squeezed through a narrow iron gateway with thousands of others to reach Marble Arch and the warmth of a café, then adjourned later to Cigala for a dinner of Caldeirada and rabbit paella, washed down with several bottles of an excellent Ribera del Duero wine called Martin Berdugo. Sarah Martin says she knows of a cork oak forest, where black pigs graze in the woods in the west of Andalusia near Murcia; and the hotel is owned by some people called Chesterton.

Drove home at 1 a.m., arriving at Mellis at 3 a.m., e-mails to Australia (big 500,000 march in Sydney), bed at 4 a.m.’

18 February

‘I had to fiddle about putting the car on the battery charger, then went up the field to rummage about in one of my sheds looking for an architrave. I love it in the shed. Half the tin roof has rusted through and caved in, but, instead of mending it, which would have meant cutting down some brambles to get round the back, I simply moved all the wooden architraves and mouldings into another part of the shed away from the drips.

The whole floor of the shed is under attack from the rabbits whose warren it is, so all the contents are constantly subsiding into the earth. It is a shed with subsidence.

I tiptoed my way in, past a couple of big sash windows from a skip and a fine semicircular stained-glass window, and eased along to the far end. A legless Windsor smoker’s bow chair: a lovely thing but in need of a set of legs. Another project for my nineties.

Removing several sections of stove pipe, I came across the canvas bed that would have been used to convey the grain and chaff to the threshing drum. I moved this and uncovered the pile of architraves and mouldings. All beautiful but all too short, and not a single one matching. I never knew it was possible to plane wood in so many different ways.

None of the pieces was right. A man called David Bill at Shepperton Studios had given them to me years ago, leftovers from commercial sets. Mock-dado rails. Spoof Edwardiana. And now here they were, a palace for spiders, a dust museum, a nuisance for the rabbits. In the end I drove to Diss and bought a new architrave from Jewson’s.’

The concept of decadence

‘[In] literary articles in journals edited by marxists the concept of decadence is appearing more and more frequently of late. i discover that decadence includes me. this is naturally of great interest to me. a marxist actually needs the concept of decline. it serves to identify the decline of the ruling class in the political and economic spheres.’ This is from the diary of Bertolt Brecht, one of Germany’s most important 20th century playwrights who died 60 years ago today.

Eugen Berthold Brecht was born in 1898 in Augsburg, Bavaria, into a mixed Catholic/Protestant family. He was educated at Königliches Realgymnasium, and then avoided the army by enrolling as a medical student at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, where he also studied theatre. He never finished training as a doctor but did do some military service as a medical orderly. During the war, though, he had begun to write newspaper articles, under the name Bert Brecht, and he wrote his first play, Baal, in 1918, but it was not produced until 1923. He became increasingly involved in the theatre and cabaret world, being much influenced by the Munich comedian Karl Valentin. Brecht’s first produced play - Drums in the Night - was premiered in 1922 to rave reviews.

In 1917, Brecht had begun an affair with Paula Banholzer, who had a child, Frank, by him. In 1922, he married the actress Marianne Zoff, and they had a daughter, Hanne, though that relationship soon broke down, and, in 1924, he had a son, Stefan, with Helene Weigel. Five years later, he married Weigel, and they had a second child, Barbara, who would eventually inherit the copyright to all of Brecht’s literary works.

In 1919, Brecht became associated with the Independent Social Democratic Party, and become friends with the writer Lion Feuchtwanger. By 1924, they had collaborated on an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II - the first of many classic texts Brecht would adapt. The same year, he went to work at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin - then one of the world’s leading theatres. He produced many well-received plays, not least The Threepenny Opera, adapted from The Beggar’s Opera with the composer Kurt Weill. Around this time, Brecht also published his first book of poems. In the early 1920s, Brecht started using the first name Bertolt, to rhyme with that of his collaborator, the playwright Arnolt Bronnen.

Brecht had long been a student of Marxism, but, by the mid-1920s this interest was leading him to write political dramas such as Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogony, also with Weill. After Hitler came to power, Brecht fled Germany in 1933, first to Scandinavia, settling on the Danish island of Funen, then, in 1941, to California, writing poems and plays (such as Galileo and Mother Courage and Her Children) all the while. After the war, in 1947, he was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, but left the following day to return to Europe.

After staying in Switzerland to begin with, Brecht settled in East Berlin, where he launched the celebrated Berliner Ensemble, but he wrote few plays in his last years, focusing more on directing and teaching young directors and playwrights. In 1955, he received the Stalin Peace Prize, and, the following year, he died on 14 August. Further information is available from Wikipedia or Encyclopædia Britannica.

Brecht seems to have kept a diary in childhood, although only one journal - the so-called Diary 10 written in 1913 (but which refers to earlier diaries) - appears to have survived (for more on this see Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life by Stephen Parker at Googlebooks). He kept a diary in his early 20s: Bertolt Brecht Diaries 1920-1922, edited by Herta Ramthun, translated and annotated by John Willett, published by Eyre Methuen, 1979. And again he kept a diary from 1938 until the end of his life (though he recorded little in his last years): Bertolt Brecht Journals 1934-1956, translated by Hugh Rorrison, edited by John Willett, and published by Methuen, in 1993. A review in New Statesman and Society of the latter, quoted by the publisher, described the book as ‘a marvellous, motley collage of political ideas, domestic detail, artistic debate, poems, photographs and cuttings from newspapers and magazines’. Here are several extracts.

24 July 1938
‘there are concepts which are difficult to defend because they spread such boredom whenever they arise, like DÉCADENCE. there is naturally such a thing as the literature of the decline of a class, in it the class loses its serene certainty, its calm self-confidence, it conceals its difficulties, it gets bogged down in detail, it becomes parasitically culinary, etc. but the very works which identify its decline as a decline can scarcely be classed as decadent. but that is how the declining class views them, on the other hand the FEAST OF TRIMALCHIO exhibits all sorts of signs of formal decadence. and if ELECTIVE AFFINITIES is not decadent, WERTHER is.’

15 August 1938
‘FEAR AND MISERY OF THE THIRD REICH has NOW gone to press. lukács has already welcomed the spy as if i were a sinner returned to the bosom of the salvation army. here at last is something taken straight from life! he overlooks the montage of 27 scenes, and the fact that it is actually only a table of gests, the gest of keeping your mouth shut, the gest of looking about you, the gest of sudden fear etc. the pattern of gests in a dictatorship. now epic theatre can show that both ‘intérieurs’ and almost naturalistic elements are within its range, that they do not make the crucial difference. the actor will be well advised to study the STREET SCENE before playing one of the short scenes. the aforesaid gests are not to be performed in such a way that the audience wants to stop the scene, empathy is to be sedulously controlled, otherwise the whole thing is a dead loss. the montage, a process that has been so thoroughly condemned, arose here out of letters from dudow who needed something for his little proletarian theatre-group in paris. so the proletarian theatre in exile is keeping the theatre alive. while in moscow maxim vallentin, the one-time director of a berlin agitprop group, has gone over to bourgeois theatre and announced that in art an appeal has to be made to the emotions, which can only mean reason has to be switched off.’

18 August 1938
‘by offering only formal criteria for realism LUKÁCS, whose significance is that he writes from moscow, is in the final estimate handing readers who are avid to learn on a plate to those famous contemporary bourgeois novelists on whom he has bestowed great, if slightly embarrassed compliments, because they display the said formal features (even if they are not so ‘happy’, ‘pure’ and ‘creative’ as the old masters of the great early period). they become his realists (he allays any suspicion by contrasting them with a form of ‘decadence’, to which DOS passos and presumably i too belong), whose descriptions exclude the class struggle (‘do not not take sufficiently into account’, ‘do not yet fully encompass’), so that the reader himself then has to unravel the complicated reflections which the ‘decadents’ incorporate in their books, the very reflections which establish that the events depicted derive from the class struggle. they all display LUKÁCS’S hallmarks, HEINRICH MANN presents such a ‘tangle’ of different human fates in his HENRI QUATRE that nobody can find his way around in it, and doesn’t his brother THOMAS unfold the ‘whole life of the biblical joseph’ in all its ultimate fullness! in HAMSUN we have ‘very involved, very indirect relationships’ by the dozen, the class struggle is less in evidence in all three, but naturally we can add that for ourselves, for ‘in the last resort’ everything is class struggle, such obtuseness is monumental.’

10 September 1938
‘in literary articles in journals edited by marxists the concept of decadence is appearing more and more frequently of late. i discover that decadence includes me. this is naturally of great interest to me. a marxist actually needs the concept of decline. it serves to identify the decline of the ruling class in the political and economic spheres. it would be stupid for him to refuse to recognise decline in the artistic sphere. eg literature cannot exclude the great shackling of productive capacity by the capitalist means of production. i am restricting myself in the first instance to my own production. my first book of poems, the DEVOTIONS FOR THE HOME, is undoubtedly branded with the decadence of the bourgeois class. under its wealth of feeling lies a confusion of feeling. under its originality of expression lie aspects of collapse. under the richness of its subject matter there is an element of aimlessness,. the powerful language is slack. etc etc. seen in this light the subsequent SVENDBORG POEMS represent both a withdrawal and an advance. from the bourgeois point of view there has been a staggering impoverishment. isn’t it all a great deal more one-sided, less ‘organic’, cooler, ‘more self-conscious’ (in a bad sense)? let’s hope my comrades-in-arms will not let that go by default, they will say the SVENDBORG POEMS are less decadent than DEVOTIONS FOR THE HOME. however i think it is important that they should realise what the advance, such as it is, has cost. capitalism has forced us to take up arms. it has laid waste our surroundings. i no longer go off ‘to commune with nature in the woods’, but accompanied by two policemen. there is still richness, a rich choice of battlefields. there is originality, originality of problems. no question about it: literature is not blooming. but we have to beware of thinking in terms of outdated images. this notion of bloom is too one-sided. you can’t harness ideas of value, definitions of power and greatness, to an idyllic conception of organic flowering; it would be ridiculous. withdrawal and advance are not separated according to dates in the calendar. they are threads which run through individuals and works.’

7 October 1938
‘the fall of Czechoslovakia is remarkable for the way it happened. eg people continue to speak about that country as if it were still the same, and for that reason some of its actions are surprising. people have understood that it has to hand over something to germany, but now it is handing over more, in fact everything as far as everybody is concerned. including the jews and refugees. people forget that this defeat has brought different class forces to the helm, so the state has become a different person in law, one can no longer speak of czechoslovakia. and how did this come about? ‘england’ could not enter into a war which its russian ally would have won. the russian ally could not enter into a war which the russian generals would have won. france could not enter into a war which the popular front would have won. and none of them, naturally, could lose a war.’

23 November 1938
‘finished LIFE OF GALILEO. it took three weeks. the only difficulties arose with the last scene. just as in the case of ST JOAN, i needed a neat stroke at the end to ensure that the audience had the necessary detachment. even somebody empathising without thinking must now feel the a-effect when he empathises with galileo. with rigidly epic presentation an acceptable empathy occurs.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 14 August 2016.

All sorts of absurdities

‘About 10 at night young George Dixon, clerk to our Union came to my house & gave me some particulars of a séance (Spiritual) he had attended on Tuesday night in Glover Street, & how he found out the “medium”, a late Liverpool sailor named Eades to be an imposter. This Spiritual business, in the shape of Spiritualism is over-riding common sense, & delivering people into all sorts of absurdities.’ This is from the diaries of Anthony Hewitson, a provincial journalist born 190 years ago today. His diaries - which are free to read online - are considered a rare first hand resource for studying journalism in mid-victorian Britain.

Hewitson was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, on 13 August 1836, and was brought up largely in Ingleton by his grandparents. In 1850, aged 14, he moved to Lancaster to begin a seven-year apprenticeship as a compositor on the Lancaster Gazette. He taught himself shorthand and, while still an apprentice, began reporting for the Gazette and sending material to other newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian. After completing his apprenticeship he worked briefly on newspapers in Kendal and Wolverhampton before moving to Preston. In September 1858 he married Margaret Wilson, the daughter of a Lancaster tailor and draper, with whom he was to have a large family.

Hewitson worked successively for several Preston newspapers, including the Preston Chronicle, the Preston Herald and the Preston Guardian, becoming chief reporter on the latter. He also supplemented his income with freelance reporting for newspapers outside the town. Dismissed by the Guardian in 1867, apparently because its proprietor believed he intended to establish a rival news agency, he returned to the Chronicle. In March 1868, aged 31, he bought the paper for £580 and became its proprietor and editor. He developed the Chronicle into a successful business and ran it for 22 years, selling it in 1890. He subsequently launched a newspaper in Lancaster and in 1896 acquired the Wakefield Herald, which was managed by his son Ethelbert.

Alongside journalism, Hewitson was a prolific writer on Preston and its history. His books included Our Churches and Chapels (1869), Preston Town Council (1870), Our Country Churches and Chapels (1872), and his substantial History of Preston (1883), to which he appended a detailed chronology of the town from 705 to 1883. He also edited historical diaries, including that of Thomas Tyldesley, and in later life continued writing historical and antiquarian articles. Semi-retired after selling the Chronicle, he lived at various times in Preston, Morecambe and Yorkshire, while retaining interests in newspapers and property. He died in 1912, aged 75. Further information is available online at Open Book Publishers.

Hewitson began keeping diaries as a young man, with the surviving sequence extending from the 1860s almost to his death. Seventeen manuscript diaries are known, now held by Lancashire Archives, although there are substantial gaps. The fullest surviving run begins in 1865, when Hewitson was working as chief reporter on the Preston Guardian. He usually wrote at the end of the day, recording his reporting assignments, newspaper work, business dealings, reading, journeys and social encounters alongside domestic events and his reactions to the people and events around him. The diaries were also working records: Hewitson returned to them for information which could be reused in his journalism and historical writing. The result is an unusually detailed record not only of one Victorian family but of the everyday mechanics of provincial journalism - meetings and court cases, news gathering, gossip, freelance work, printing, editing and the commercial running of a newspaper. Diaries by nineteenth-century provincial journalists are extremely rare; Hobbs describes Hewitson’s as ‘the only known diaries of a 19th-century provincial journalist’.

The diaries have been transcribed and edited by journalism historian Andrew Hobbs, with work also undertaken by Hewitson’s descendant Margaret Dickinson, Pauline Wainwright and the Friends of Lancashire Archives. The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson, Provincial Journalist, Volume 1: 1865-1887, edited by Hobbs, was published by Open Book Publishers in 2022 and made freely available online. It contains the surviving diaries for 1865-1868, 1872-1875, 1881, 1884-1885 and 1887, together with autobiographical material and extensive annotation. A second volume, covering the surviving diaries from 1891 to 1912, is in preparation. Transcriptions of much of this later material have meanwhile been made available online by Hobbs through his Hewitson Diaries website. The diaries provide a particularly rich source for the history of Victorian journalism, while also documenting family life, politics, religion, entertainment and the changing social and commercial life of Preston.

6 January 1873 

‘Heard this morning - first day of “Great Saturday Horse Fair” - that my friend Jas. Kenyon had rambled off somewhere in “the blues”. Went with a friend to police station & set on two detectives to search. Found out in evening, that Kenyon had rambled home into Claughton. At night I & wife went to a carding party at house of a person called R. Lancaster in Eastcliff rd. Had supper there, & stayed till 1 in morning.’

22 May 1873 

‘Working in shop nearly all day except a little in morning when I had a dip into John Stuart Mill’s work on Utilitarianism. About 10 at night young George Dixon, clerk to our Union came to my house & gave me some particulars of a séance (Spiritual) he had attended on Tuesday night in Glover St[ree]t, & how he found out the “medium”, a late L[iver]pool sailor named Eades to be an imposter. This Spiritual business, in the shape of Spiritualism is over-riding common sense, & delivering people into all sorts of absurdities. To-day young Woods tobacconist went into shop I left in Fishergate. My charge for fixtures is 5/- per week.’

3 February 1874

‘Preston election to-day. Voting began at 8 in morning & closed at 4 in af[ternoo]n. All mills closed from dinner time. Much crowding in Fishergate; but all orderly. The candidates were Mr E Hermon & Mr J Holker (the two previous Conservative members) & Mr Mottershead, who came down from London as a “Working Man’s candidate”. The result of the election was the return of Hermon & Holker. Mottershead polled more votes than was expected. At night after doing some telegraphing, I had something to drink with some Conservatives.’

20 February 1874

‘Violent railway collision this morning between Euxton & Coppull. Scotch limited mail, through a fog, ran into a standing coal train. Much damage & destruction; & driver & stoker of mail af[terwar]ds died through the injuries they received. I went to scene of accident at noon & got some particulars for our own & other papers. Telegraphed it to The Times. Disraeli’s new administration announced at 12.30 to-night.’

1 April 1874 

‘A tolerably easy day; & April joke making confined to children.’

13 August 1874

‘My 38th birthday. I thank God that I have lived thus far & have amid all changes & struggles enjoyed & felt His wisdom & goodness. May my next 38 years & odd be similarly - nay more fully - imbued with & blessed by His excellence. Working all day & home to White Horse at night.’

18 April 1875

‘To Morecambe with Florence my daughter this morning. Walked from Hest Bank to Morecambe along sands side. Beautiful walk - tide in, sea birds flying about. Spent a good part of day on pier where my father in law has a refreshment room.’

30 January 1884

‘My daughter Florence returned to daughter day from America in the SS “City of Chicago” - same boat she & I went out in. I went to L[iver]pool to meet her - sailed down Mersey in a tender as far as New Brighton. Daughter had a very rough voyage & was sick again. To Preston - home - both of us early.’

Tuesday 25 March 1884

‘To St Anne’s-on-Sea to day in order to get materials for an article on the place. Mr T Fair, who will pay me for the article, wants it for one of the Manchester evening papers. I called at his house and had lunch. Then I went with him in his carriage to St Anne’s round which I rode, & then he left me to my own wanderings & musings. Quiet but pleasant. Home at about 7 in evening.’

22 January 1885

‘Same. At night I & my wife went to Gaiety Theatre to see “the claimant” - the alleged Sir Roger Tichborne, who has recently been released on ticket of leave, after ab[ou]t 10 y[ea]rs imp[risonmen]t for perjury. Prior to his trial he paid a visit to Preston, & at a public gathering - anyhow audience - in the Corn Xchange - I put two or three questions to him. He answered them cunningly but badly. The chief questions were - Did he know anybody except himself who had forgotten t[he] name of his mother and the very alphabet o[f] a language he once was well acquainted with. He looked considerably thinner & was going quite grey in whiskers on Thursday night.’

5 February 1885

‘Unwell. Had a Turkish bath in af[ternoo]n - heat during part of time being 225 degrees. Working till 10.5 at night - on leaving the bath. News published of the fall of Khartoum this morning. Great shock to English.’

A very great curiosity

‘Rode from Mr. Lesly’s to view the Giant’s Causeway. It is certainly a very great curiosity, as an object for speculation, upon the manner of its formation; whether it owes its origin to fire, and is a species of lava, or to chrystalization, or to whatever cause, is a point that has employed the attention of men much more able to decide upon it than I am.’ This is Arthur Young - who went on to become an early contributor to agricultural economy - writing in his diary exactly 250 years ago today. 

Young was born in 1741 in Whitehall, London, the younger son of the Revd Arthur Young, rector of Bradfield Combust, Suffolk, and chaplain to Arthur Onslow, Speaker of the House of Commons. His mother, Anna Lucretia de Coussmaker, came from a Huguenot family. Educated privately, Young received no formal university education but developed an early fascination with farming, estate management and economic improvement. After his father’s death he inherited a small Suffolk estate, where a succession of ambitious but often unsuccessful agricultural experiments convinced him that careful observation and the exchange of practical knowledge were more valuable than theory alone.

From the 1760s, Young established himself as Britain’s leading agricultural writer. He published influential works including A Six Weeks Tour through the Southern Counties of England (1768), A Six Months Tour through the North of England (1770) and The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England (1771), combining detailed observations on farming methods with comments on land ownership, rural society and local economies. In 1784 he founded the Annals of Agriculture, which rapidly became the principal periodical devoted to agricultural improvement in Britain. His reputation brought him into contact with many of the leading scientific, political and landed figures of the age, while his extensive travels made him one of the best-informed observers of the British countryside.

Young’s interests extended beyond agriculture to economics, politics and social reform. Between 1787 and 1789 he travelled widely in France, recording the conditions that immediately preceded the French Revolution in the celebrated Travels in France. In 1793 he was appointed secretary to the newly established Board of Agriculture, a post he held for the remainder of his working life and through which he helped promote agricultural innovation across Britain. Increasing blindness restricted his activities during his later years, but he continued writing and advising until his death in 1820. He was buried at Bradfield Combust in Suffolk. Wikipedia has further information.

Young’s importance as a diarist lies in the remarkable body of journals and notebooks that underpinned his published tours. Although written to support books rather than for private introspection, his daily records capture the rhythms of late eighteenth-century travel with unusual precision. They preserve conversations with farmers, landlords, labourers and politicians, together with observations on crops, livestock, roads, markets, industry, prices and social conditions. Their combination of factual detail and immediate impressions makes them indispensable primary sources for historians of agriculture, rural life and the wider economic history of Britain and Europe.

Young’s Irish journal occupies a distinctive place within this corpus. He toured Ireland between 1776 and 1779, travelling thousands of miles through every province to examine farming practices, land tenure, manufacturing and the condition of the rural population. His observations were published in 1780 as A Tour in Ireland, one of the most detailed contemporary accounts of eighteenth-century Ireland. The journal on which the work was based led to several new editions - including Arthur Young’s Tour of Ireland (George Bell & sons, 1892) which is freely available at Internet Archive - and to modern scholarly editions. Here is Young writing about his day exactly a quarter of a century ago

4 August 1776

‘Accompanied Mr. Lesly to his brother’s at ——, within 3 miles of the Giant’s Causeway, where I had the pleasure of learning several particulars concerning the country upon the coast. They measure by the Cunningham-acre, and rents are on an average 12s. Along the coast there is a tract of clay at from 14s. to 20s. The courses of crops; 1. Potatoes. 2. Barley. 3. Oats. 4. Oats. Potatoes. 2. Barley. 3. Flax. 4. Oats. 5. Oats, and then lay out for 2 years.

Much of the country is in the rundale and likewise in the change-dale system. The little farmers are all weavers, who weave 10 or 1200 linen, and spin great quantities of yarn for the Derry market. Oatmeal and potatoes are the general food of the lower people, who reckon that one barrel of potatoes, to live on, is equal to 2 bushels of meal. One barrel will last a family of six eight days, and costs on an average 3s. 6d. or 4s. Oatmeal 1s. 2d. to 3s. 6d. the 20 lb. but 1½d. per lb. on an average. One bushel of oats yields 18 lb. of meal. The oats are dried at home with turf on kilns, which cost from £3 to £5; they are then sent to a mill to be shelled, in which operation they lose half; after which they are ground; the landlord appoints the mill, and they pay 22d. for it.

The average crop of potatoes is 300 bushels on the Cunningham acre, which is 259 to the English. [. . .]

They are, however, sometimes so low that, instead of profit, the account is a losing one; last year they were 4d. a bushel, and in Coleraine 3d. Oats are now 1s. a bushel; several thousand bushels have been exported from Coleraine to London at that price.

There is a considerable salmon fishery on the coast; the fish are cured in puncheons with common salt, and then in tierces of 42 gallons each, 6 of which make a ton; and it sells at present at £17 a ton, but never before more than £16; average for 10 years £14. This rise of price is attributed to the American supply of the Mediterranean with fish being cut off.

Rode from Mr. Lesly’s to view the Giant’s Causeway. It is certainly a very great curiosity, as an object for speculation, upon the manner of its formation; whether it owes its origin to fire, and is a species of lava, or to chrystalization, or to whatever cause, is a point that has employed the attention of men much more able to decide upon it than I am; and has been so often treated, that nothing I could say could be new. When two bits of these basaltes are rubbed together quick, they emit a considerable scent like burnt leather. Neither the scenery of the Causeway, nor of the adjacent mountains, is very magnificent, though the cliffs are bold; but for a considerable distance there is a strong disposition in the rocks to run into pentagonal cylinders, and even at —— Bridge, by Mr. Lesly’s, is a rock in which the same disposition is plainly visible. I believe the Causeway would have struck me more if I had not seen the prints of Staffa. Returned to Lesly Hill

There the Right Hon. Mr. Jackson assisted me with the greatest politeness in procuring the intelligence I wished about the salmon fishery, which is the greatest in the kingdom; and viewed both fisheries above and below the town, very pleasantly situated on the river Ban. The salmon spawn in all the rivers that run into the Ban about the beginning of August and, as soon as they have done, swim to the sea, where they stay till January, when they begin to return to the fresh water, and continue doing it till August, in which voyage they are taken; the nets are set the middle of January, but by Act of Parliament no nets nor weirs can be kept down after the 12th of August. All the fisheries on the river Ban let at £6000 a year. From the sea to the rock above Coleraine, where the weirs are built, belongs to the London Companies; the greatest part of the rest to Lord Donnegal. The eel fisheries let at £1000 a year; and the salmon fisheries at Coleraine, £1000. The eels make periodical voyages, as the salmon, but instead of spawning in the fresh water, they go to the sea to spawn, and the young fry return against the stream; to enable them to do which with greater ease at the leap, straw ropes are hung in the water for them; when they return to sea, they are taken: many of them weigh 9 or 10 lb. The young salmon are called grawls, and grow at a rate which I should suppose scarce any fish commonly known equals; for within the year some of them will come to 16 and 18 lb. but in general 10 or 12 lb. such as escape the first year’s fishery are salmon; and at 2 years old will generally weigh 20 to 25 lb. This year’s fishery has proved the greatest that ever was known, and they had the largest hawl, taking 1452 salmon at one drag of one net. In the year 1758 they had 882, which was the next greatest hawl. I had the pleasure of seeing 370 drawn in at once. They have this year taken 400 ton of fish; 200 sold fresh at 1d. and 1½d. a lb. and 200 salted, at £18 and £20 per ton, which are sent to London, Spain, and Italy. The fishery employs 80 men, and the expences in general calculated to equal the rent.

The linen manufacture is very general about Coleraine, coarse ten hundred linen. It is carried to Dublin in cars 110 miles, at 5s. per cwt. in summer, and 7s. 6d. in winter. Rents in Derry 10s. 6d. the Irish acre; and farms from 6 to 15 acres. The emigrations from this neighbourhood were in general of idle, loose, disorderly people. It is at present, I was informed, too populous; and if the emigrations are not renewed, the ill effects will be severely felt. The whole county of Derry belongs to the London Companies and the Bishop, except some trifling properties. There is a little trade at Coleraine in hides, butter, and fish, and some meal is imported, which sounds strange after hearing that so many oats had been exported.

Mr. Jackson has made great improvements to his house, which is situated in a very pretty domain of 85 acres on the banks of the river, and all the timber he has used is out of his bog; he gets very large oak and fir trees: they are found 20 feet deep, and all lie exactly east and west.’