The land market, 1880-1925 : A reappraisal reappraised

The notion that there was a revolution in landownership' in the spate of land sales in 1918-21 was based on claims in the trade journal, the Estates Gazette. Beckett and Turners article, 'The end of the old order?', demonstrates conclusively that that journal did not contain the detailed evidence to support its claims, thus appearing to demolish the 'revolution. Consideration of the scale and timing of the growth of ownerfarming, however, coupled with experimental use of data on landownership from Kelly's Directories, calls for second thoughts. It seems possible that something not far short of 'a quarter of England' may actually have changed hands in 1918-21. It was a tremendous, and most touching, compliment to have the 2005 Winter Conference of the British Agricultural History Society devoted to themes from my own publications, and a very special boost to the ego to find that in their contribution John Beckett and Michael Turner had engaged in a serious, detailed, cross-examination and deconstruction of something I published more than 40 years ago. Deploying their characteristic statistical skills Beckett and Turner have reopened the question of the scale of land transfers in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, and their significance in the longer term for the structure of landownership and the nature of rural society. Since England possesses no central register of landownership and thus no public record of land transfers, as Beckett and Turner explain, it remains unlikely that the amount of land changing hands in the four years, 1918-21, can be definitively established.1 Nevertheless, the size of these land transfers, whether exceptionally large or merely normal and average, remains of some importance to understanding some of the major socio-economic and political developments in inter-war Britain. The disappearance of the land question from its pre-1914 position in the front line of public debate, the rise of the National Farmers Union to become something not unlike a pillar of a virtual corporate state, and the accelerated decline of the landowner contingent in the House of Commons, these were matters which may, or may not, have been profoundly affected by the operations of the land market. What is at issue for Beckett and Turner is the reliability of the claim in the Estates Gazette on 31 December 1921 that one quarter of England must have changed hands in four years'. It is true 1 John Beckett and Michael Turner, 'End of the Old Order? F. M. L. Thompson, the Land Question, and the burden of ownership in England, 0.1880-1925', AgHR 55 (2007), pp. 269-88. AgHR 55> H> PP289-300 289 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.132 on Thu, 15 Sep 2016 05:55:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 290 AGRICULTURAL HISTORY REVIEW that I gave renewed currency to this claim by quoting it, in 1963, and translating the concept of 'England changing hands' into land area, by pointing out that if one quarter of the country was indeed transferred, then 'it is possible that in the four years of intense activity between 1918 and 1921 something between six and eight million acres changed hands in England'.2 The claim, however, originated in the Estates Gazette, albeit given considerable support by national newspapers which were well aware of the hectic activity in the land market in these years, and Beckett and Turner s prime purpose is to discover whether the Estates Gazette possessed enough evidence to sustain that claim.3 A very minor subsidiary question is whether, either in 1963 or in 2005, 1 happened to think that that claim was reasonably accurate. It should be readily accepted that Beckett and Turner s painstaking, ingenious, and exhaustive examination and sophisticated processing of the figures of estate sales reported in the Estates Gazette, and of the annual record of sales in the Year Books of Auction Sales, establishes that neither of those sources contains evidence of sales in the four years in question, when the individual records are aggregated, that covered anything like a quarter of the area of England. Their conclusion is that the Estates Gazette recorded sales which amounted to 6.5 per cent of the land area of England (or 8.7 per cent of the total cultivated area of England) that is about two million acres, nowhere near to one quarter. Their explanation of the discrepancy between the land sales which the Estates Gazette itself reported and its editorial assertions about their magnitude is that the journal, and the property professionals which it served, were obsessed by the break-up of large, inherited, aristocratic estates and the disappearance of the old social and political order which this break-up either reflected or caused. Hence the argument is that the trade journal, and by association the national press which was singing the same tune, exaggerated the scale of land transfers either deliberately in order to scare their followers into doing something to stop the disintegration of the old order, or from hysterical panic reaction to what they saw as approaching doom. That is of course a possibility, although it is not instantly apparent why either a calculating or a hysterical exaggeration should have been restricted to a cry that one quarter of England had changed hands. A less emotive, and a possibly verifiable, explanation is that the Estates Gazette and the Year Books of Auction Sales under-recorded the actual volume of sales, and that those journals were well aware of this. It is possible that the editors, through their experience of the workings of the land market and their knowledge of the means by which they collected reports of its transactions, were able to make a well-informed estimate of the appropriate multiplier for converting reported acreages sold into a figure for the total area actually transferred. Since there is no evidence that the journal ever did the meticulous addition sums of sales reported in its pages in the way that Beckett and Turner have now done, it might seem unlikely that the editors' minds worked in this fashion. Nevertheless, in the 1890s the editor thought that 'the total of sales at the Estate Exchange is merely an index to, not a record of, business done in the land market . . . The offices of solicitors having important conveyancing practice are in themselves a medium of transfer at figures probably in excess of all the public business recorded at the 2 F. M. L. Thompson, English landed society in the nineteenth century (1963), p. 332. 3 The Times, which had always had a keen eye for estat sales, reported on the feverish activity, for example, on 22 Mar., 29 Mar., 15 May, 30 and 31 Dec, 1919, 19 May 1920, 15 Oct. and 31 Dec. 1921. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.132 on Thu, 15 Sep 2016 05:55:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE LAND MARKET, A REAPPRAISAL REAPPRAISED 291 Auction Mart'.4 This implied in a tentative way that the 'business done in the land market' was at least double the amount recorded in the Estates Gazette, and implicitly much more than double since there were also many sales at auctions, besides the private treaty sales handled by solicitors, which were not known to the London Auction Mart. There is no equivalent statement of the editorial hunch in the early 1920s, but conceivably there was still in mind a view that the reported figures represented half, or less than half, of the actual 'business done in the land market'. Some of the leading estate agents who handled many estate sales did indeed total their annual dealings, in both acreage and money terms, and publicise the figures, as Norton, Trist, and Gilbert had done in the previous century,5 and with some idea of their market share it would have been possible to extrapolate from individual firms' turnover to an estimate of the total volume of transactions. Unfortunately there is a lack of evidence that the Estates Gazette carried out any of these hypothetical calculations for converting its recorded land sales into the assertion that one quarter of England had changed hands. It is not too difficult to show that significant sales were not captured by the Estates Gazette.6 It would be an altogether different matter to establish the overall scale of this underrecording by tracing a credible regional or national sample of unrecorded sales. That would entail a trawl through a large number of estate and solicitors' archives to establish details of sales, followed by comparing the results with Estates Gazette coverage: a laborious task which might be tacked on to the remit of, say, a VCH county researcher, but hardly one which would merit a self-standing research project. Luckily, despite the absence of a central register of land transfers, the Estates Gazette is not the only source available for estimating the scale of sales in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. A starting point is the re-emergence of the yeomen, or owner-farmers, in the twentieth century. Owner-occupation generated statistics, more reliable for some years than for others, which were analysed in the classic 1955 article by S. G. Sturmey, 'Owner-farming in England and Wales, 1900-1950'.7 Sturmey showed that owner-occupation increased from 10.9 per cent of the cultivated area of England and Wales in 1914, to 36 per cent of the cultivated area in 1927, an increase from 2.9 million acres to 9.2 million acres, that is roughly one quarter of the cultivated area changed from being tenanted land to being land owned by the farmers.8 Beckett and Turner note this rather large transfer of land somewhat in passing, without indicating how it might affect their own estimates of the quantity of land changing hands.9 'The main part of the increase in owner-occupation which occurred between 1909 and 1927 occurred in the years 1919 to 1921', Sturmey concluded.1