BBC Radio 4 - Open Country - 5 November 2005

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BBC Radio 4 - 92 to 94 FM and 198 Long Wave

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OPEN COUNTRY

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	PROGRAMME INFO

	Saturday 6.10-6.35am Repeated Thursday 1.30-2.00pm


	From Shetland to the Scilly Isles, Open Country travels the UK in search of the stories, the people and the wildlife that make our countryside such a vibrant place. Each week we visit a new area to hear how local people are growing the crops, protecting the environment, maintaining the traditions and cooking the food that makes their corner of rural Britain unique. Email: [email protected] Postal address: Open Country, BBC Radio 4, Birmingham, B5 7QQ.


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	Listen to Open Country for 5 November 2005


	PRESENTERS

	HELEN MARK and RICHARD URIDGE



	More about Helen Mark




	More about Richard Uridge


	PROGRAMME DETAILS

	Saturday 5 November 2005
To commemorate Armistice Day, this week's Open Country travels to Somerset and Sussex to reflect on how villages coped with the enormous suffering and loss of life in the First World War. The war memorial is a familiar sight on the green or cross roads of most villages, but how many of us stop and read the long list of names inscribed on the stone? More often than not we walk past or drive by without a glance - but each individual name was a farm worker or a squires son, a daughter and loved one and each story tells a personal tale of loss and grief that echoes through the generations. In the small town of Midsomer Norton on a rainy November morning Helen meets Chris Howell, author of No Thankful Village, a book which documents personal stories from veterans or their relatives of life during the Great War. Each story is a piece in a jigsaw that makes up a complex picture of village life during wartime. He tells Helen how the book became a labour of love, he even turned it into a play - casting local men and women as actors and how the names on the memorials seem to have become personal friends. Chris Howell article Dr Keith Grieves meets Helen at the war memorial in Warnham and describes how the influence of the great and the good still dominated in post-war village life and it was often a struggle for the voice of veterans to be heard. Nick Mansfield runs the People's History Museum in Manchester. He meets Helen outside the Guards Memorial at St James's Park in London and tells her of the post-war politics of rural life. The village veterans returned to a life of poverty and hardship - the same deprived and hard life they had left. He says it was the farmers and their sons who stayed behind that prospered during the war. Food prices were high and farmers made lots of money - often sacking workers and employing their own sons on the farm to avoid them being conscripted. He says it was the lowest and the highest classes that suffered the most casualties - the farm labourer and the gentry, the gentry having to sell off land to the farmers who had stayed behind just to pay death duties. There was a strong undercurrent of anger and betrayal in post-war villages and it soon came to a head during the agricultural workers strike of 1923. Ex-servicemen still nursing a residual bitterness from the war took their chance to show a new unionised militancy, ushering in a new age and a new post-war political landscape. Manchester People's History Museum Email Open Country: [email protected] The BBC is not responsible for external web sites

	RELATED LINKS BBC Holiday Category BBC Country file