Bring Back the Lengthsmen!

 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. 

[3] Jack Hargreaves was an English television presenter who, in an entertaining but non-sentimental manner, attempted to explain old countryways and rural traditions to a predominantly urban and suburban audience. He presented a weekly show, Out of Town, for over twenty years on ITV which I used to enjoy watching as a child in the Seventies. 

      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. 

An Epicormic Easter Sermon

 

'Go! Tell them the Cross is a Tree again, and they 

may eat the fruit if they can reach the branches.'

 

 

I. 

 

If you ask your local council why it is that they savagely pollard the remaining large trees each spring, they will tell you it's for a variety of reasons; mostly related to issues of public health and safety and the protection of property, although often they claim it's in order to protect the trees themselves from disease. 

 

But I think we all know that this is mostly to disguise the real agenda; namely, to discourage birds from nesting and, ultimately, to remove the trees altogether and thereby save the money that would otherwise be spent on their management. The potential hazard posed by large trees is massively exaggerated (I have lived in Essex for many years and have never yet been injured by a falling branch).  

  

II.

 

Let's back this up with some data, shall we ...

 

The London Borough of Havering, which happens to be my local authority - one which last year had to secure £54 million in central government support to avoid going bankrupt and who earlier this year accepted another £88 million bailout loan as their dire financial state worsened - has seen the biggest reduction in tree cover of any London borough in the last seven years (this according to a recent report for the GLA).       

 

In 2018, Havering had 25% tree coverage (above the London average); but by 2024 it had fallen to just 14% (below the London average). The fact that in December 2023 the Council accidently cut down 4,000 young trees at Harrow Lodge Park planted by volunteers - along with a number of more mature treees and five holly bushes - didn't help.   

 

Havering Council, however, claim they do not recognise the data in this report and say that there has been no net loss of trees in the last ten years on council land ... And maybe that's so; but the big loss, of course, is of trees that once stood on private land as more and more people cut them down in order to build on or simply pave over what were once gardens.

Thus, it's not simply the Council who are to blame for the degreening of Havering. A large number of residents - many of whom only arrived in the Borough in recent years - clearly do not value the local flora or fauna and concepts such as environmental degradation and protecting wildlife mean absolutely nothing to them. So long as they can have their extensions and driveways and outbuildings, they are happy.

 

 

III.

 

For me, pollarding might be viewed as a form of hate crime born of a peculiar fear of trees (dendrophobia). 

 

And if I could, I would have all maniacal dendrophobes and other ecocidal lunatics rounded up and exiled on Mars before they transform this world into a barren and inhospitable hellscape in which no birds do sing and no flowers blossom.   

 

But, as it's Easter, let's close on an epicormically positive note and express the hope that, one day, even the Cross will put forth new branches and bear surprisingly sweet fruit ... 

 

 

Lady Chatterley's Lover Visits Harold Hill

My local boozer, The Pompadours - 

and some Lawrence scholars find the Sun Inn, Eastwood, a bit rough ...

 

 

Harold Hill is a long way removed (in every sense) from the fictional mining village of Tevershall, which Lawrence imagines in his novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). 

 

And of course, I'm no Oliver Mellors, the ex-soldier turned gamekeeper who strides through the pages of the above in his dark green trousers "with a red face and red moustache" [1], angry at the world. 

 

Having said that, sometimes when walking around the postwar housing estate on the far north-eastern fringes of Greater London that is Harold Hill [2], I'm tempted to tell the natives - whom my mother always disparagingly called Cockneys - something similar to what Mellors wishes to tell the working men and women of Tevershall:

 

"'I'd tell 'em: Look! look at yerselves! One shoulder higher than t'other, legs twisted, feet all lumps! What have yer done ter yerselves [...] Spoilt yerselves an' yer lives. [...] Take yer clothes off an' look at yerselves. Yer ought ter be alive an' beautiful, an' yer ugly an' half dead.'" [3] 

 

Of course, I'd not say this with a broad East Midland's accent. 

 

And I can't blame the degenerate condition of the locals on years of hard physical toil - on the contrary, it's the fact that many of them don't work (or exercise) that's the problem; that they prefer vegetating on the sofa watching Netflix, eating junk food delivered to their doors, driving even the shortest distance, rather than walk a few hundred yards.

 

To paraphrase Mellors: Their spunk's gone dead - e-scooters and mobile phones and cannabis suck the last bit out of them. Which is a shame, but there you go. 

 

I won't bore readers with statistics, but the stats for the London Borough of Havering when it comes to things like health don't make for happy reading. Obesity, for example, is the norm; if the 18th-century Essex grocer Edward Bright were alive today and decided to ply his trade at Hilldene shops, no one would blink an eye at his great girth. 

 

People down south often like to joke that it's grim up north, but, believe me, it's fucking grim on Harold Hill too [4].     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 46. For a full description and character analysis of Oliver Mellors, see my post of July 2020: click here. 

 

[2] Readers interested in knowing more about Harold Hill are reminded of the post published on 28 May 2016 entitled 'And No Birds Sing': click here. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, p. 219. 

 

[4] And if you don't believe me, see the report in the Romford Recorder which revealed that whilst Havering is home to some extremely affluent neighbourhoods, six roads in Harold Hill have been classed by the UK government as among the most deprived in all England: click here.