H.E. Bates Companion

Bates reflects on the first twenty-five years of the magazine The Countryman, founded and edited by J.W. Robertson Scott in 1927. He notes that two wars and the automobile ironically have had an "incisive, broadening and in a way... liberating effect on the countryside." He recalls conditions in Kent when he settled in there in 1932: extreme poverty, hunger, and illness alongside great wealth, waste, and aristocratic social structures. He praises the farm laborers as "the most remarkable person to emerge from the quarter-century" due to his increased wages, inclusion in social insurance, and embrace of farm technology. Repeating a theme expressed in other writings, Bates praises the increasingly easy communication between English town and country as a boon not felt by larger countries with wider rural expanses. He praises the magazine for balancing its coverage of old and new, quaint and practical, and predicts another several decades of "intelligence and vision" as rural change continues. In The Countryman (Spring 1952, xlv, 1, pp. 33-39); The Countryman Anthology (1962, London, pp. 11-20).