Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village

This is at first sight a similar project to Ask the fellows who cut the hay, an oral history project based around the residents of a small Suffolk village. Blythe merged the real villages of Charsfield and Debach, where he lived, into the fictitious "Akenfield" to protect the privacy of his contributors. But it's not quite the same thing. Where Evans focusses on memories of pre-mechanical times, Blythe is really more interested in how the village works now, in the late 1960s. It's oral sociology, rather than history. The villagers' memories of earlier times are relevant for the context it gives to their present attitudes to their work, the people they work for, and the kind of aspirations they have, but the past here isn't a show more disappearing world of splendid traditions so much as an era of social inequality, squalid living conditions, poor education and low wages. A time when men left the village only to be killed pointlessly in South Africa or Flanders.

That isn't to say that Blythe is an uncritical supporter of "progress" — his contributors note that agricultural wages are still very low compared to unskilled factory jobs, that the agricultural workers' union has little real power to change things, and that technical college courses for farm-workers (he talks to both students and lecturers) don't seem to be designed to help young people advance in their jobs.

Moreover, it's clear (even more so 60 years on!) that farms in 1967 were still going through big technical transitions in directions many farmers and farm-workers weren't happy with — factory-farming of pigs and poultry, heavy use of chemicals, etc.

A fascinating book, very influential at the time, and much less dated than you might expect. show less

Ronald Blythe's 'strange journey to a familiar land' is an oral history classic. Written more than 40 years ago, it still seems quite fresh. It is prescient - documenting the beginnings of factory farming and monoculture. It makes observations about people retiring to the village for a life in the country - who purchase plants from garden centres and can name 100 different kinds of roses, but have no idea what grows in the hedgerows. The book can also be heartbreaking, full of loneliness and stifled ambitions.

I know there was a follow-up written in the 1980's , but it does not give us updates on individuals. I would like to know what happened to some of their hopes and dreams.

Wonderful book. So many insights to Suffolk village life between the wars. The remnants of the feudal system; deference of the working class, arrogance of the landed class. At times brutal and unsympathetic. Suffolk folk were tradionally reluctant to express true feelings but these characters so insightful and articulate. Reminded me of Dad's suspicion of middle-class professional newcomers to the village! Destroys the illusion of a golden age of village life. But so many memorable characters and stories.

Wonderful book. So many insights to Suffolk village life between the wars. The remnants of the feudal system; deference of the working class, arrogance of the landed class. At times brutal and unsympathetic. Suffolk folk were tradionally reluctant to express true feelings but these characters so insightful and articulate. Reminded me of Dad's suspicion of middle-class professional newcomers to the village! Destroys the illusion of a golden age of village life. But so many memorable characters and stories.

I read this four years ago and still think about it frequently. It is an incredible historical and historiographical document, and reminds me a little of the Up series (oral history of selected subjects, examining life and class in Great Britain in the 60s, using problematic and outdated methods that nonetheless lead to a phenomenal work of art, etc.). If you have any interest in social history, especially of the UK, there really is not another book I can think of as good as Akenfield.

I reread this after a long break. Akenfield is a microhistory of a Suffolk village written in the style of a novel or ethnography. It is based on intimate interviews with people who lived for generations in the same place. The most moving for me are those with those Blythe calls 'The Survivors'. These are those whose memories extend back before the first world war and the introduction of mechanization into agriculture. Their lives were unspeakably hard and narrow. Besides beer, which was paid to rural workers in the field as part of their wages, there were almost no pleasures. 'We had singing', one man says, but Blythe describes a song delivered in a pub as 'violent and full of attack'. Religion provided the main cultural life - and show more there were plenty to choose from. Most C of E but a proliferation of Chapel-based activities, especially the Strict Baptists who follow a rigid bible-led piety that shores up the boundaries between the insiders and outsiders. Blythe lists the Rules of the Strict Baptist Church and it seems a marvel that it had any members at all. At the CofE, the Rural Dean seems like a visitor from another world. He had arrived after the war and had seen the rural revolution, but he saw the village people as fundamentally the children of Dissent - Unitarianism, anabaptism, socialism. These were their creeds. Because of low levels of literacy, those who escaped this constrained world by emigration to Canada or Australia were really lost - no letters came back. Overall, a justly famous study of a world that no longer exists. show less

This has perhaps got to be one of my favourite books of all time. The true tales of the inhabitants of a 60s village told in their own words not only grab the reader with their authenticity, they tell of a bygone age and teach of how it was that we came to be where we are now. So much forgotten wisdom and knowledge is shared within the pages of this treasure trove I am excited every time I come to open my lovely second hand first edition copy and always delighted by what I find; from the tragedy of the first world war losses to the farmers' Dickenisan treatment of their workers it doesn't paint a happy picture of rural England in the first half of the 20th century but it does bring it to life in the everyday language of the men and show more women who lived in a small farming community in the SE of England. show less