Professor Alun Howkins
Scholar of rural life who exploded cosy myths about the countryside as a place of social harmony
PROFESSOR ALUN HOWKINS, who has died aged 70, was a leading historian of English rural society with a particular interest in the rural labouring poor and in rural folklore; in 1999 he wrote and presented a four-part history of agriculture, Fruitful Earth, for BBC Two. Howkins wrote on a range of subjects, from the works of JMW Turner to the politics of the British Communist Party (of which he had been a member), but was best known for three books in which he sought to explode comfortable myths about the countryside as an idyllic place of social harmony. At one level, he fitted easily into the radical Marxist tradition; the strongest influence on his early work was Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop movement.
But he was not easy to pigeonhole. He served as a long-term member of the mainstream British Agricultural History Society and contributed to the Agrarian History of England and Wales, his politics showing itself more in his sympathy for the underdog and interest in working-class culture than through any superimposed theory.
In Poor Labouring Men: Rural Radicalism in Norfolk, 1872-1923 (1985), one of his most influential works, Howkins portrayed the complexity of rural class conflict during a time of dramatic change in the farming sector, contrasting the ideology of the stable rural community promoted by landowners with the reality of dismissal, eviction and blacklisting that was the lot of labourers who dared to challenge the status quo.
His Reshaping Rural England: A Social History, 1850-1925 (1991) covered the period from the high point of Britain’s agricultural power in the 1850s and 1860s to the grim years of the interwar period, exploring the role of women, the family, the workplace and religion.
The last of the three, The Death of Rural England: A Social History of the Countryside since 1900 (2003) was a panoramic study of rural England and Wales in the 20th century, showing how, as the countryside became more and more a place of leisure and of living rather than simply working, the nature of the countryside, its appearance and the relationship of farming to the “natural world” became as important to the urban as the rural world.
In particular he explored the way in which, in recent years, worries about environmental damage and factory farming, followed by a series of food scandals and the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, together with the widespread perception that a subsidised agriculture is simply protecting a rich and privileged group, have led to a harsher public view of farming.
Perhaps Howkins’s most distinctive contribution in all these works was to draw attention to the development of an independent rural working-class culture based on nonconformity, especially Primitive Methodism, and trade unionism. He emphasised the strength of this culture, its links to the wider world of working-class solidarity and its disappearance under the impact of agricultural mechanisation and the collapse in the farm labour force from the mid-20th century onwards.
In his introduction to The Death of Rural England, Howkins described his own mixed feelings about the changes that had occurred since his birth on August 8 1947 in a terrace house, with no hot water or inside lavatory, which his parents rented just outside Bicester, Oxfordshire: “I remember horses in the fields … I remember when cows weren’t all black and white and when corn fields were full of poppies. I literally saw the fields of my childhood turned into a housing estate. But I also remember low wages and houses without toilets or tap water.
“I have stood with a union banner while a family was turned out of a cottage, which had been their home for the best part of 20 years … The land of lost content where ‘I went and cannot come again’ is my own past as well as the past of rural England and Wales.”
Alun Howkins described his father as a “working class Stalinist” who had joined the Communist Party in the interwar years. Badly wounded in the head during the Second World War in the Middle East, he struggled to keep going as a motor mechanic, later taking semi-skilled jobs, Alun’s mother working as a night orderly in a cottage hospital to make ends meet.
Young Alun failed his 11-plus and attended Bicester Highfield Secondary Modern. He then went to Banbury Tech to do O-levels, but was expelled after nine months for bad behaviour and poor grades. He got a job as a farm worker on an apprenticeship and joined the National Union of Agricultural Workers, then, after 18 months, went to work at the Central Ordnance Depot, Bicester. In 1964 he got a job as a copywriter for Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon Publishing, where he set up a branch of the Clerical and Administrative Workers Union.
By this stage he had become interested in folk music, attending folk clubs through which he became involved in the Communist Party. He heard Ewan Maccoll sing at a party meeting in 1964 and he himself performed songs such as Trimdon Grange Explosion (about the Co Durham colliery disaster of 1882) at folk clubs and became involved over the years in several folk bands. Confronted about his communism by his employers in 1966, he was duly sacked – “formally for being idle, [which was] probably true”.
After a period working at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford, in 1968 he signed up for an adult education course at Ruskin College, Oxford, the trade-union college for adult students where, inspired by the historian and one-time Communist Party member, Raphael Samuel, he joined the History Workshop. It was Samuel, he said, who opened his eyes to the “possibility that history might involve people like me, ordinary men and women”.
He went from there to the University of Oxford to read History and to Essex to complete a PHD. In 1976 he was appointed to the School of Cultural and Community Studies at the University of Sussex, where he became a professor of History, and eventually moved to the School of Humanities, where he became director of the Graduate Centre. On his retirement in 2010 he moved to Norfolk and became honorary professor in the school of history at the University of East Anglia.
An inspiring teacher, who included stirring bursts of folk song in his lectures and tutorials, Howkins taught numerous PHD students. During the 1980s he joined the Labour Party to “fight Thatcher”. He was one of the founders of the journal Rural History and served for many years on its editorial board. He also edited the History Workshop Journal. As well as Fruitful Earth, his television work included contributions to series such as Edwardian Farm and Mud, Sweat and Tractors: The Story of Agriculture.
He is survived by his partner Linda Merricks, also a social historian, and by two sons.
Alun Howkins, born August 8 1947, died July 12 2018