On the left: a lengthsman in the village of Bramshill, Hampshire (1911),
seen with his wooden wheelbarrow containing traditional tools of the trade
(a long-handled shovel, a scythe, etc.)
On the right: a 'ground maintenance crew' working in the London Borough of Havering
with their machinery and PPE in June 2023 [1]
I.
I hate to begin a post with one of those proverbs that inane people often like to trot out as if they're in possession of some profound ancient wisdom, but ... If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well [2] is something that should be drilled into the teams of subcontracted operatives sent by my local council to tend for what remains of the natural environment - the roadside hedges, grass verges, trees, ditches, brooks and streams, etc.
It's not so much a demand for greater excellence, as a demand for care. I want the men responsible for the above to possess a reasonable amount of skill and a certain degree of knowledge - want them to take pleasure and have pride in their work - but most of all I want them to care about the vegetation and wildlife and stop using noisy and destructive machines such as tractor-mounted flail-mowers.
II.
Without coming over all Jack Hargreaves [3], there once was an England - before severe budget cuts forced councils to use uncaring private contractors, adopt strict maintenance schedules, and use power tools that rip and rend rather than prune - in which open green spaces, shaded woodland, wild flower meadows, and small ponds, etc. were cherished and cared for not only as natural habitats for a huge variety of creatures, but as magical places in themselves.
There was a time, indeed, when there were characters known as lengthsmen [4] who cheerfully kept a stretch of road neat and tidy, or worked as stewards along the canals and railways [5].
Employed either by the Lords of the Manor or the parish councils, these men - dressed not in ghastly hi-vis coveralls and various items of PPE, but traditional heavy-duty clothing (a hat, thick woollen trousers, leather boots, and a durable jacket) - would prevent the vegetation from running riot (but without spraying toxic chemicals such as glyphosate), keep drainage ditches clear, repair fences and walls, lay hedges, and plant wild flowers.
They would even collect litter - such as it was prior to the 1950s [6] - not shred it with electric strimmers into thousands of ever-smaller pieces of plastic and then drive off, uncaring, with sound systems blaring.
Notes
[1] The first image comes via the Facebook group Historic Hampshire in old Photographs and was posted by Gary Allam on 11 August 2021: click here. The second image is via Havering Council's account on X -@LBofHavering - and was posted on 28 June 2023: click here.
I don't wish to single out Havering Council as being particularly bad when it comes to environmental issues; I refer to them simply because they are the ones charging me over £2000 a year in council tax.
[2] The earliest documented version of this proverb was penned by Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, in a letter to his son in 1774.
In each episode Hargreaves appeared in short film reports on some aspect of rural life, introduced and narrated by him from a studio set based on the interior of a garden shed.
[4] Although the official term lengthsman was coined in the 1700s, there have been men effectively fulfilling this role since the Tudor period.
[5] Obviously, I'm painting a slightly rosy picture here of the past; I'm aware that rural labour was often extremely gruelling and poorly paid.
[6] The nature (and sheer volume) of litter changed significantly with the post-WWII boom in mass-produced, single-use plastics and packaging. Prior to the mid-20th century, roadside rubbish consisted primarily of degradable paper, cardboard, and highly recyclable tin or glass. Thus, an old-school lengthsman clearing a ditch was dealing with materials that would either rot or hold value.
Now, the environment is littered daily with millions of casually discarded objects engineered to last for centuries. Thus, when modern maintenance crews choose to run over these items with heavy machinery rather than collect them, they are not merely failing to tidy up; they are actively transforming macro-pollution into thousands of indestructible microplastic fragments, permanently poisoning the local soil and waterways.
