I have been reading this book after I read the author’s obituary earlier in the year. Ronald Blythe lived in Suffolk and created this oral history of the village that he lived close to. He kept the name of the village anonymous and the name Akenfield is invented from possibly two other village names. He also made the people he spoke to anonymous by giving them names that he took from local gravestones. I can assume that it was close to Woodbridge from some of the conversations in the book.
The book was published in 1969 and I can recall the publicity and reviews in the newspapers at the time. I had just started my first job working with children at the Caldecott Community in Kent. I was attracted to the publicity surrounding Akenfield but never read it. So, when Blythe died and I read his obituary in the Guardian, Akenfield was the lost book that I just had to read, essentially because I am writing this blog and offering readers accounts of my ancestors who led their lives in a similar way to those in Akenfield.
Ronald Blythe was a British writer, essayist and editor. He was probably best know by most readers as the author of Akenfield. It is an account of agricultural life in Suffolk from the turn of the 19th Century until the 1960’s.
Akenfield, written in 1967 was based upon conversations that Blythe had with people living in the village, or working there, telling their history, memories or perceptions of life there with him. Blythe then created a book that looks like an oral history. This was a problem for some of his critics. The process and skill of oral history was in its infancy and only in the 1960’s did it becoming a learned skill. Oral historians did not like Blythe’s approach which they felt was not undertaken using the principles of this new research method. For example, he was not using a tape recorder. They were also concerned about the anonymity of the people and village which meant that it was almost a fictional account. However, anonymity is a feature of many interviews about lived experience that we see on television and hear on the radio.
In a new preface for the second edition, Blythe took this criticism on the chin and accepted that he had written the book at a time when the term ‘oral history’ was not in the common language or understanding of most people, including him.
I personally do not have any difficulty with this. Blythe’s approach gives me a sense of reportage of a documentary style that translates well to television, for example. How many reporters had a recorder in the 1960’s with them? Blythe lived and breathed and worked in the Akenfield countryside. He was taking note of the conversations that he had and then created stories and accounts that appear accurate to me and which seem connected to the information about my ancestors that I write about and which I create not from conversations alone but public records. In this way it is like writing about the ‘lived experiences’ of our ancestors in the past. Like ‘oral history’, recording ‘lived experiences’ seem like a new method of reporting that is in its infancy.
The life of the Agricultural Worker was gruelling and hard. Why would a man, and his sons, accept the working conditions dictated by farmers, who wanted every daylight hour worked by them for a pittance and tied accommodation that they could be evicted from immediately on cessation of employment, and yet be proud of the perfection of their work ?
This was the mystery that unfolds with the memories and conversations that Blythe had with those farm workers and with educators in the village school and agricultural college in the 1960’s.
Akenfield is an account of a life that very few would accept today and also of a way of life that was to disappear rapidly after the publication of the book in 1969.
In some ways, for me, it offers answers about why and how many of my ancestors, only a couple of generations away, did the work that they did. The Agricultural Worker, the Gardener, the Coach Builder and Painter – they were all essential parts of a way of life that changed for ever with the invention of the motor car and the tractor.
It was never to be a whimsical or romantic account, like Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee. It was a direct account of the hardships, the discipline, the pride and the skills of the people of Akenfield. With them and their children, and the coming of modernisation, we have lost the everyday skills of hedging, thatching, scything, ploughing with horses, ditching and harvesting.