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By Root 397 0

some new ones, the quick-rich gentlemen, who can afford to have more gamekeepers than there is game on the job. As I said upstairs, we have some Americans now, and they are as boisterous as they always are . . . I agree that it is the people with motor cars whom we are up against most of all and that they are the people who do the damage, but is that any reason why we should punish the poor people who never get a breath of fresh air, but whom we are now beginning to allow to do so? They always behave themselves, and I think the people in the motor cars are more dangerous than anything else by breaking bottles on the roadside and dropping their cigarettes and other things that are more dangerous than cigarettes. They are a danger to the country generally, and they should be taught decent manners when they are out in the country places. They go and tear up wild flowers, and yet our people have to suffer because these other people cannot behave themselves.’

Robin Turton, the Tory squire who had inherited both his country pile and parliamentary seat of Thirsk and Malton from his uncle, boomed in agreement: ‘Like the honourable member for Durham, we do not always like the man in the Rolls-Royce who wants to transport home most of the countryside, whether poaching for grouse or taking wild plants . . . The honourable member for Durham talked about new landlords, but there are also new people coming to the countryside, who would not come there but for the motors, who do not behave as the people who walked to the countryside behaved in the old days. We must deal with the man who comes in his Rolls-Royce and thinks he owns the countryside. People in the country want protection from that type of man.’

In the Lords debate on the same bill, the point was spelled out with even greater disdain. Viscount Swinton: ‘The man who really does the damage is a much fatter and more prosperous kind of person, who comes in a closed motor car, who takes what he is pleased to call, and what we used to call, carriage exercise, and then, having sat with the windows tight shut smoking a very fat cigar, he emerges with an equally fat partner and probably sets alight to your moor, having first picked anything which is within range.’

To some eyes, there are the noble poor, those grateful saints who, in Ritson’s words, ‘never get a breath of fresh air’ but ‘always behave themselves’ (really?). They’re fine, but it’s the others, you see, who are the problem. Came from the gutter, but instead of having the good grace to stay there, they’ve gone and got themselves some cash, and the airs and graces to go with it. Fur coat and no knickers, don’t you know. It’s John Betjeman’s residents of Slough who ‘talk of sport and makes of cars / In various bogus-Tudor bars / And daren’t look up and see the stars’. And according to Alfred Wainwright, their offspring are even more hideous: ‘The worst offenders [at trashing paths] are parties of school children, often too many in number to keep under control, who treat the paths as playgrounds, kicking and throwing stones, romping over the verges and generally having fun.’ Playgrounds? Fun? In the hallowed cathedral of the countryside? How dare they.

So much the worse, therefore, when these parvenu hooligans start to look at the countryside not just as somewhere to go and ruin on a Sunday afternoon, but as a place in which they’d quite like to live. Then the collective shudder passes through not just the old landowners, but the liberal ramblers as well. Many of them – us, sorry – have also relocated to the country, but of course, we did it for all the right reasons. We are sympathetic, have bought a few books on local history, and even read some of them, have chuckled delightedly at the picaresque habits of our new neighbours and hardly ever grumbled out loud that Ocado doesn’t yet deliver to our postcode district. We respect old country ways, although we are a mite choosy as to which ones we like to uphold. Not so keen on the caged dogs, prying eyes and earthy racism that we pretend not to hear in the pub. But we do adore