11
War and its Consequences

If the Wars of the Roses had been minor dalliances of ambitious families, the wars of the twentieth century most certainly were not. The years between them continued and accelerated the social changes that had been taking place during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. The tenor was of increasing humanity. The upper classes remained very wealthy, but the spread of technology such as electricity, central heating, plumbing, telephones and typewriters was making the need for servants redundant and with it the passing of the attitudes of a class of servitude and deference. The wealthy had lost political and social dominance, but held on to cultural influence and subtly imposed it on the new leaders through the public schools, whose values were not the Victorian ones of hard work and zeal, but those of gentlemen of style and leisure – of the country house, not the urban masses. Caution and conservatism and a devotion to the past and its preservation were the watchwords, with consequences for the rest of the twentieth century.

In 1890, Victoria had reigned over 400 million people and a fifth of the globe. The Empire was seen with patriotic pride, compared with previous times when the colonies had been seen as a burden, necessary for trade, but a nuisance to defend. In the early twentieth century, however, Britain the great power was being overtaken by America and Germany, whilst turning its face strongly to links with the Empire and Commonwealth. Britain was a success, stable and rich, and complacent about its position. It lived in splendid isolation, remaining remote from events in Europe. Its policies simply opposed any European hegemony, following the failed attempt at superiority of the Spaniards with their Armada and the putting down of Napoleon by Marlborough, Nelson and Wellington.

This isolation encouraged the development of German aspirations to expand Germany’s empire and inevitably drew Britain into war in 1914, when the German economy had created a battle fleet clearly superior to what had been until then the prime naval power. The Germans gambled that Britain would wish to stay out of further European involvement, but when Germany invaded Belgium and failed to answer a British ultimatum to withdraw, Britain was dragged into a long and monotonous war. It traumatised a generation and perhaps forever undermined confidence in the leadership of the elite. Millions were killed on all sides; new weapons such as poison gas brought horrors that removed any glory from warfare, and any return to the comfortable, well-ordered society of before 1914 was impossible.

After the War, there was widespread depression. Both agriculture and industry fell into decline. Only 4.2 per cent of the people worked on the land, the rest in towns and cities and unemployment there increased. There was a general strike in May 1926, when unemployment had reached 23 per cent. The heavy industries of the nineteenth century were undermined as other countries joined the competition and the response was not the innovation of the previous century, but a resistance to change, coupled with tariffs on imported goods set by the Government to protect trade. New industries arose in the South East in electrical goods, cars and plastics, many of them needing a better-informed workforce, and the role of the State in controlling the economy and most other aspects of society reached an apotheosis.

New ideas were abroad though. The Fabian Society, a group of theoreticians rather than activists, modified the ideas of Marx. They called for the emancipation of land and industrial capital for the general community, the replacement of profit-mongering capitalism with collective ownership and co-operative management of the means of production and distribution. Keir Hardie, in 1893, had proposed reforms along these lines including Clause 4 of a document that advocated collective ownership. The Liberal Party, the latest development of the Whigs of the eighteenth century, failed to respond and was eclipsed by the Labour Party. The Conservatives, the new Tories, held on to their support in the business and industrial middle-class vote, with no particular ideology other than to support king, Church, State and respectability.

There was a shift in land ownership after the First World War, for land was no longer the basis of political power and was subject to high taxes on inheritance. Nearly a third of the population by 1939 became homeowners, compared with 10 per cent in 1914. Consumerism and car ownership were increasing and the working week had decreased from 56 to 48 hours. At least 11 million people were entitled to at least a week of paid annual holiday. Britain had a very advanced unemployment welfare system; the State played a major role in most of the activities of the population, from the economy to education.

But the tide had turned from the attributes that had held together Victorian society in a time of comparable upheaval following the Napoleonic Wars. Improvement, enterprise, hard work and position were all still present, but there was less confidence in the stability of the future. There were the first signs of emphasis on individual gratification and of indifference to the rest of society. As the masses had gained power, some of the values of previous elites had rubbed off.

The Broads between the Wars

In the Broadland waterway, the changes that had resulted largely from urbanisation were complete. The waters, especially the Broads, were choked with weed, if looked at from the point of view of a sailor or fishermen, rich expanses of submerged plants if you were a naturalist. Patterson’s place as the doyen of the local naturalists had been taken by Ted Ellis, who had typed notes for him as a teenager. Ellis surveyed Wheatfen Broad, close to Rockland and Surlingham Broads on the River Yare in 1941 and gives a full list of species. The hornwort was predominant with plenty of yellow water-lily, fan-leaved water-crowfoot, mare’s tail, spiked water-milfoil and common water-starwort. There were the water soldier, Canadian pondweed, shining, curled and grass-wrack pondweeds and great beds of fennel pondweed, together with four species of duckweeds, common, fat, ivy-leaved and greater, and frogbit.

It was not only a long list of plants with a high biomass, it was very much a list of those plants thriving at high nutrient concentrations. For although raw sewage was no longer being discharged from Norwich, the sewage works upstream at Whitlingham was releasing an effluent almost as rich in nutrients as raw sewage. Conventional sewage treatment for most of the twentieth century removed the organic matter and therefore the deoxygenating capacity and obnoxiousness of the sewage, but released the inorganic products of this decomposition as a nutrient-rich effluent.

On the Bure, where the towns of Aylsham, Wroxham and Hoveton had expanded, the water plants were still abundant, but there are also some records of the algal plankton suspended in the water. Benjamin Millard Griffiths, a lecturer at Durham University, had taken advantage of a base provided by the Gurney brothers, Eustace and Robert. This was the first freshwater biological laboratory to have been founded in Britain, in 1901, at Sutton Broad on the River Ant (Plate 18). Griffiths had taken plankton samples with a net in 1924. He gave no indication of the size of the algal population or whether it was sufficient to make the water turbid from time to time. However, he described the water in Wroxham Broad as brown at the time of sampling, and the list of species he gives is one of nutrient-rich conditions.

The same species occurred in Rockland Broad, where Griffiths describes large beds of plants – pondweeds, water-lilies, mare’s tail and arrowhead. In Ormesby Broad, there was a surface bloom of blue-green algae, which Griffiths established by local enquiry not to be unusual, but he makes no mention of plants. The Broad was described as lily-covered, however, in 1897 by the photographer Payne Jennings who published a set of tourist photographs, Sun Pictures of the Norfolk Broads, that year.

The relationship between plants and plankton is a complex one in which the plants are at a great disadvantage. Eventually, as discussed later, the plants were to disappear completely from much of Broadland, to be replaced by dense growths of plankton from February or March until November. This had not happened by the Second World War, but in the early and late season before the plants had fully developed, and as they were senescing for the year, the planktonic algae were demonstrating the greater potential for growth offered by the increased nutrient supplies.

Charophytes persisted until the early twentieth century in Hickling Broad, but were progressively replaced by vascular species with increasing amounts of filamentous algae, Cladophora sauteri, which began to interfere with boating activities and had to be cut. The most common vegetation of the inter-war years seems to have been of vascular plants, pondweeds and lilies, hornwort and lemnids, water soldier and frogbit. They formed a dense tangle in summer and accompanied increasing diatom growths in spring, and green and blue-green algae in the late summer and autumn.

Serious freshwater biology!

Yet another change that affected Broadland was the establishment between the Wars of freshwater biology as a science. The Gurney brothers were members of a family wealthy enough, from the profits of Gurneys Bank, later Barclays, in Norwich, to be able to lead the existence of gentlemen-naturalists. Eustace built the house at Sutton Broad in 1901 (Plate 18), which was to become a laboratory from 1903 to 1907, mainly to house the work of the brothers, especially Robert, but others were encouraged to use the facilities.

The brothers were somewhat critical, perhaps, of the abilities of some of their visitors (including Griffiths) and so the place did not become very popular and Robert retreated to work at his home, Ingham Hall, near Sea Palling and Hickling, for many years before finally moving to Oxford. He was shy, self-critical and diffident, but produced major works on crustaceans, especially the copepods and decapods, that made him a world authority. He also kept detailed diaries and notebooks of his collections in Broadland, especially from Calthorpe Broad, which he owned. His work was essentially taxonomic and evolutionary, but very valuable in establishing the nature of the crustacean communities in Broadland during the first half of the twentieth century.

What is particularly interesting, however, is that in 1929, Robert Gurney was invited to be a member of a committee, seeking to establish a freshwater biological station in Britain. This committee included the main freshwater worthies of the day – Frederick Fritsch, Benjamin Millard Griffiths, H.S. Holden, William Pearsall, Edward Russell, J.T. Saunders and Frank Balfour-Browne (who had briefly directed the Sutton Broad laboratory in 1903). After a discussion at the British Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting in Glasgow, the committee agreed a circular making the case for a station and association. Their grounds were those of a need to establish fundamental information on freshwater bodies, which were becoming polluted, and to advise Government on freshwater problems, such as fisheries and water supply. Gurney was at first unwilling to put his name to the document, which was to lead to the founding of a famous laboratory at Windermere in the English Lake District.

His reasons were that it seemed that the laboratory would do applied work, in, for example, the regulation of fisheries, as opposed to the pure science that he found most amenable. He rationalised his gentlemanly objection by saying that that he thought the document promised firm solutions to problems and he felt these could not be delivered, in the light of current knowledge. He was, in the end, persuaded at least to be a signatory, but not before he had been accused by Balfour-Browne that his view was ‘because you have lived in such isolation in Norfolk that you have not advanced with the times’. His feelings towards applied science, however, were much more widespread and the same imbalance of esteem still persists. The irony is that the Broads in 1929 were developing just such problems as the Freshwater Biological Association was amply equipped to investigate. A man less retiring than Gurney could easily have influenced the committee to locate the Association in Broadland rather than Cumbria, where the freshwater problems, though also developing, were nowhere near as severe as they were to become in the lowlands.

The Second World War

The Second World War revived a sense of community. Britain had emerged triumphant from the First, the Great War. France and Germany had suffered devastation. Future war was considered unlikely and Britain disarmed. The recession in Germany, however, brought renewed promises of glory by the Nazi party in 1933 and an invasion of Austria in 1938. Britain was drawn in, again by movements of hostile forces into Belgium and now also Holland in 1939. The bigger Broads were closed off to boats from 1940 to 1943 and the hire cruisers were moored in the open water to prevent the landing of German seaplanes. There followed a major air war, the Battle of Britain, in 1940, which the Germans were forced to abandon, then a sea war, when food supplies from America and the Commonwealth were jeopardised by submarines. This alone was to have major effects on agriculture in general and Broadland in particular in the post-war period. Eventually Germany and its allies were defeated in 1945.

Fig. 11.1 (opposite) The implications of the World Wars of the twentieth century – a chart of some of the impacts on the Broadland system.

The Second World War affected everyone. Fewer were killed than in the First, but society had changed remarkably. The war effort had created a near totalitarian, regimented state for six years. There were identity cards, rationing of food, clothes and enforced conscription into the army. Huge taxation levelled out a society of few comforts and considerable hardships, but a renewed sense of unity and nostalgia. Economically, Britain once again attempted to remain insular, whilst America and Russia left its influence far behind. But, especially with the revelation of the horrors of the German concentration camps after the War, there was a moral dimension of good triumphing over evil. The British of 1945 were led to believe that a new and enlightened age was about to emerge, especially with the accession of a young Queen in 1953, fortuitously with the name Elizabeth, who, it was hoped, might have the influence that Elizabeth I had had.

In Broadland, it was impossible to foresee exactly what would happen over the next 50 years. For many, the omens appeared good – agriculture was to be well supported, a better distribution of wealth gave a greater market for the boat hire industry, the waterways were rich in plants and fish and the bird communities continued to display the recovery that had followed the Bird Protection Acts. Increased legislation was passed to protect natural areas. Better housing, better water supplies, improved sewerage and sewage treatment all bade well.

But Broadland had traditionally been managed in a labour-intensive way and the post-war population rightly demanded a status and payment that was not affordable by the owners of large Broadland estates. Moreover, the quality of the waters was to change as post-war technology introduced domestic and agricultural chemicals that the natural systems had not met before and with which they could not easily cope. And the sea was continuing to rise, as it had for centuries, whilst the established ways of controlling its tendency to invade Broadland were coming under increasing pressure. Broadland, in the last half of the twentieth century, was to suffer almost all of the ills to which freshwater systems are prone under severe human pressure (Fig. 11.1). It is this situation and the possible future that will be explored in the remainder of this book.

11War and its Consequences

The Broads between the Wars

Serious freshwater biology!

The Second World War

Further reading

11
War and its Consequences