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Squire and Community: T.G. Dixon at Holton-le-Moor, 1906–1937

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2007

RICHARD OLNEY
RICHARD OLNEY*
Affiliation:
London
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Abstract

This article looks at a small English rural estate, and at the role of its squire, in the early twentieth century. It describes the estate, parish and village of Holton-le-Moor as inherited by the Reverend T.G. Dixon in 1906, and assesses his impact on all three areas of local society during the following thirty years. Although he was a conscientious landlord and a devoted churchman, his most lasting influence was on the life of the village. Both conservative and progressive in his views, his inconsistencies reflected a rural society in transition; but, especially in providing a village hall in 1910, he anticipated and facilitated post-First World War developments in the structure of village life. Relations between the rural aristocracy and its dependents have often been described in terms of paternalism on the one hand and deference on the other. This article suggests that ideas of community may sometimes be more useful when considering the dealings of a small squire with his villagers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , October 2007 , pp. 201 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

Notes

1. F.M.L. Thompson's English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London and Toronto, 1963) was followed by works such as Heather A.Clemenson, English Country Houses and Landed Estates (London and New York, 1982), David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven and London, 1990) and Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven and London, 1997).

2. The influential work of Raphael Samuel, particularly on Oxfordshire labouring communities, was followed by that of Howard Newby, Alun Howkins, Pamela Horn and others.

3. For instance, G.E. Mingay, The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of a Social Class (London and New York, 1976), although dealing with owners of one thousand acres and upwards, concentrates on the greater gentry. For a revealing study of a lesser gentry family, however, see David Cannadine's chapter on the Cozens-Hardys of Letheringsett (Norfolk) in his Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven and London, 1994), pp. 184–209.

4. Thompson, English Landed Society, p. 115.

5. For instance Dennis R. Mills, Lord and Peasant in Nineteenth Century Britain (London and Totowa, 1980). For a plea for further work on village typologies see Armstrong, W.A., ‘The Countryside’, in Thompson, F.M.L., ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 1990), vol. 1, p. 153Google Scholar.

6. For instance the studies of Tysoe (Warwickshire) and Corsley (Wiltshire) in Mills, Lord and Peasant, pp. 48–60; B.J. Davey, Ashwell 1830–1914: The Decline of a Village Community (Leicester, 1980). For a more ‘mixed’ village and parish, of greater relevance to the present article, see Jean Robin, Elmdon: Continuity and Change in a North-west Essex Village 1861–1964 (Cambridge, 1980). For a recent county study see R.E. Quinault, Landlords and Labourers in Warwickshire c.1870–1920 (Dugdale Society Occasional Paper no. 44, 2004). The case for further local studies is cogently argued, albeit in a different area of social history, by John Smail in The Origins of Middle-Class Culture: Halifax, Yorkshire 1660–1780 (Ithaca and London, 1994), pp. 14–16.

7. These are mainly deposited in Lincolnshire Archives (DIXON) or, in 2004, remaining in private custody (referred to below as ‘family papers’). For access to the latter, as well as for permission to quote from Dixon and Gibbons family papers and for valuable comments and suggestions, I am greatly indebted to the late Mr. Philip Gibbons. This article also owes much to conversations with the late Misses Dora and Joan Gibbons, drawing on their memories of Holton-le-Moor in the early twentieth century.

8. See especially Howard, Newby, ‘The Deferential Dialectic’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 17 (1975), pp. 139–64Google Scholar; Howard Newby, Colin Bell, David Rose and Peter Saunders, Property, Paternalism and Power: Class and Control in Rural England (London, 1978).

9. Margaret, Stacey, ‘The Myth of Community Studies’, British Journal of Sociology, 20 (1969), p.135Google Scholar. For a review of the sociological and socio-anthropological literature see Susan Wright, ‘Image and Analysis: New Directions in Community Studies’, in Brian Short, ed., The English Rural Community: Image and Analysis (Cambridge, 1992).

10. Burke's Landed Gentry, 1937, under Gibbons of Boddington; R.J. Olney, ‘North Lincolnshire Farming Society 1750–1900: The Dixons of Holton-le-Moor’, unpublished typescript.

11. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), under Gibbons family (article by Chris Evans); personal information.

12. Papers of T.G. Gibbons relating to his parochial work in Essex are in the Sperling papers (Essex Record Office, D/DGd). They include a copy of his ‘Wickham Bishops Parish 1899–1907, during the rectorship of T.G. Gibbons, who is now known by the name of T.G. Dixon’ (printed Witham (Essex) 1907: D/DGd/Q14/15).

13. Nikolaus, Pevsner, Studies in Art, Architecture and Design (London, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 132–9Google Scholar; Alastair Service, Edwardian Architecture: A Handbook to Building Design in Britain 1900–1914 (London, 1977), pp. 17, 204–5; Oxford DNB.

14. Wickham Bishops did not get its village hall until 1929 (Wickham Bishops: a Survey of an Essex Village, Wickham Bishops WEA, 1951).

15. Market Rasen Mail, 26th October 1912 (copy in family papers).

16. For the deferential behaviour of tenant farmers and the effect of agricultural depression on landlord-tenant relations see Olney, R.J., Lincolnshire Politics 1832–1885 (Oxford, 1973), pp. 46–7Google Scholar.

17. For access to John Hargrave's farming account books I am grateful to Mr Michael Anyan.

18. In 1901 the average age of the Dixon employees in Holton was sixty-three whilst that of the other heads of labouring families in the parish was only thirty-four (National Archives, RG 13 3098).

19. A blacksmith from a nearby village attended once a week. Holton acquired its first village store in 1916.

20. Olney, ‘North Lincolnshire Farming Society’, p. 298.

21. DIXON 11/5/1 (letter book).

22. 3 DIXON 6/2/3.

23. DIXON 11/5/1.

24. DIXON 11/4/35 (diary of T.G. Dixon 1908–18).

25. DIXON 11/5/1; Lincolnshire Archives NL (records of Nettleship and Son, later Nettleship and Lucas: I am grateful to Lincolnshire Archives for access to this uncatalogued collection); records of the Ann Dixon Trust (in private custody).

26. DIXON 11/5/1; 3 DIXON 6/1/6.

27. DIXON 22/10/15.

28. Dixon almshouses, trustees’ minute book (in private custody).

29. Not untypically: see P.E. Dewey, British Agriculture in the First World War (London, 1989), pp. 231–2, 237; Pamela Horn, Rural Life in England in the First World War (New York and Dublin, 1984), p. 196.

30. DIXON 22/10/11–12; 3 DIXON 6/1/1.

31. Lincolnshire Archives, NL.

32. The land sold by Dixon at that date included a couple of fields on the outskirts of Caistor (inherited by him separately from the Holton estate), on which he had hoped to encourage the development of a garden suburb. Alas, Caistor in the early twentieth century could hardly support itself, let alone a garden suburb, and nobody could be found to back the scheme. (DIXON 11/4/35, 22/10/2, 10; 3 DIXON 6/1/8–9; Market Rasen Mail, 22nd June 1912.)

33. Clemenson, English Country Houses, p. 90.

34. DIXON 11/5/1.

35. Nationally the Church of England experienced a period of growth in the early years of the century (Alun Howkins, Reshaping Rural England: A Social History 1850–1925 (London, 1991), p. 235).

36. Holton-le-Moor parish meeting minute book 1906–, with vestry and P.C.C. minutes 1906–56 (in local custody).

37. DIXON 11/2/2, 11/5/1.

38. Family papers.

39. In his booklet (see n.12 above) he hints that he had been criticised for his live-and-let-live policy.

40. DIXON 11/4/35, 11/6/2, 22/10/13, 15.

41. E.J. Gibbons, ‘Notes on Holton-le-Moor . . . to 1974’ (MS).

42. He had hoped, for instance, to establish technical classes, a cooperative society and a sick club (the last-named presumably overtaken by the National Insurance Act of 1911) (DIXON 11/6/2).

43. For historical theories of the pre-Conquest free village community see J.W. Burrow, ‘The “Village Community” and the Uses of History in late Nineteenth-Century England’, Neil McKendrick, ed., Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in honour of J.H. Plumb (London, 1974), pp. 255–84.

44. Dixon had, however, as chairman widened its discussions to embrace matters of general parish interest.

45. Holton-le-Moor Moot Hall minute book 1918–52 (in private custody). Trustees were not created for the hall until 1974.

46. Family papers. For the Women's Institutes see for instance Pamela Horn, Rural Life, pp. 137–9.

47. See Keith Grieves, ‘Common Meeting Places and the Brightening of Rural Life: Local Debates on Village Halls in Sussex after the First World War’, Rural History, 10 (1999), 172. Lady Denman, a pioneer of the WI movement, built a splendid village hall at Balcombe (Sussex): see also Gervase Huxley, Lady Denman, GBE, 1884–1954 (London, 1961).

48. It seems, for instance, to have coped well with successive influxes of ‘strangers’ – a Belgian refugee family, a female gang to clear the felled timber, and boys from Bournville to help with the harvest of 1918.

49. Family papers.

50. Horn, Rural Life, p. 196; R.J. Moore-Colyer, ‘From Great Wen to Toad Hall: Aspects of the Urban-Rural Divide in Inter-War Britain’, Rural History, 10 (1999), 110.

51. In the autumn of 1914 he had taken advantage of Dixon's late arrival at a meeting to allocate all the parts in a theatrical production, and at another meeting the following year Dixon had had to call him to order after he had given a heated personal turn to the discussion. (Family papers.)

52. Family papers. Between Weatherill's appointment in 1913 and Holton's reversion to a female head teacher in the late 1930s, successive Holton schoolmasters played a significant role in local activities as organisers and minute-takers. Robertson Scott, as quoted by Grieves (‘Common Meeting Places’, p. 186), went so far as to claim that after the War ‘the social leadership of villages passed from the parson to the schoolmistress and the students of wireless and first aid’.

53. Family papers.

54. Parish meeting minute book.

55. I owe this point to the late Mr. Philip Gibbons.

56. Jeremy, Burchardt, ‘Reconstructing the Rural Community: Village Halls and the National Council of Social Service, 1919 to 1939’, Rural History, 10 (1999), 201Google Scholar.

57. The population of the parish, however, had risen from 163 in 1901 to 218 in 1921.

58. Family papers (notes by Mrs Foster, a former Holton schoolmistress); information from the late Miss D.M. Gibbons. On the importance of overlapping roles see Stacey, ‘The Myth of Community Studies’, p. 142.

59. Market Rasen Mail, 26th October 1912.

60. Howard Newby, ‘The Deferential Dialectic’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 17 (1975), p. 157.

61. Family papers (notes by Mrs Foster).

62. 3 DIXON 6/1/10.

63. Newby et al., Property, Paternalism and Power, pp. 87, 332.

64. DIXON 22/10/15.

65. The sociologist can tease out attitudes in a programme of interviews: the historian, of course, is more dependent on archival material, and that normally from the angle of the big house rather than the cottage.

66. At Elmdon, Jack Wilkes continued to behave as the squire until his death in 1958, even though the estate had been sold in 1927 (Jean Robin, Elmdon, p. 237).

67. In this respect Holton can be contrasted with some larger and more open villages, where during the nineteenth century economic and social changes had hastened the decay of once strong local communities (Davey, Ashwell 1830–1914, passim).

68. This certainly seems to have been the case later in the century: see Newby et al., Property, Paternalism and Power, p. 279; Marilyn, Strathern, ‘The Village as an Idea: Constructs of Village-ness in Elmdon, Essex’, in Cohen, Anthony P., ed., Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures (London, 1982), p. 253Google Scholar.

69. Pamela Horn, Ladies of the Manor: Wives and Daughters in Country-House Society 1830–1918 (Stroud, 1991), pp. 5–7, 111–36.

70. It was not uncommon for country clergymen to succeed their brothers or cousins in landed estates following failures in the more direct male line.

71. Howkins, Reshaping Rural England, pp. 289–90.

72. DIXON 11/5/3/97.