Mid Sussex Times January 28 1999

The countryside might not have been strewn with casualties but in the battle for mid Sussex the loser was the land itself.

According to Dr Peter Brandon, chairman of the Sussex branch of the council for the protection of rural England, "until the mid-19 century man and nature in Sussex maintained a harmonious relationship".

The coming of the railway and parallel growth of Brighton put mid Sussex on the map as the place to live; no longer the place to farm.

And an inevitable shift from rural to urban began.

In 1900 Mid Sussex was still largely countryside; the land formed by tenants of a handful of large estate owners such as Danny near Hurstpierpoint, Borde Hill, Balcombe and Heaselands.

Former District Council chief executive Bernard Grimshaw describes how this changed. Victorian and Edwardian London's 'bourgeoisie' leapfrogged the shabbier suburbs south of the river and opted for grand homes in Haywards Heath and Burgess Hill. These urban villages began on commons enclosed by parliamentary act and owe their very existence to increased mobility provided by the railway. From Lewes, the Reverend Lower in his compendious History of Sussex wrote approvingly of Haywards Heath as 'the abode of civilisation, many villas and pleasure residences having sprung up almost by magic'..

Gardeners tended the sandy soil wreathing substantial gabled houses in Tylers Green, Butlers Green, the Lewes Road and Lindfield in fashionable shrubberies of rhododendrons.

Maids prepared breakfast in time for their employers to catch the 8:15 steam train to London Bridge.

Homes of the old established gentry - yeoman and former iron masters - passed gradually into the hands of city financiers.

Newcomers to the Sussex Weald colonised great stretches of countryside, building neo Tudor, Georgian or Gothic mansions.

Some created splendidly ostentatious gardens and the Sussex country gentleman began to change the look of entire parishes such as Ardingly, Horsted Keynes and West Hoathly.

Gravetye, Borde Hill, Leonardslee, Wakehurst Place and Sheffield Park were the earliest of modern gardens, famous for exotic conifers and seedlings imported by adventurers penetrating the foothills of the Andes and Himalayas.

As the 20th century comes to a close nearly half of the economically active residents work outside the district and mid Sussex numbers far more managers, professionals and generalised 'high rollers' than elsewhere in Britain.

Research undertaken for the set up of a local radio station revealed the area within a 15 mile radius of Crawley was the wealthiest per capita in Europe.

In 1938 Middy Editor Albert Gregory was writing: "many mid Sussex people want to be druv by dictators who come from the cities and towns with big ideas and want to revolutionise everything instantly".

But the image of evil developers steamrollering innocent cottage dwellers is false; life on the land – particularly for farm workers and tenants – was harsh, uncertain and physically exhausting.

Farming began in Sussex in Neolithic times around 4000 BCE, when people settled on the downs rather than the thickly wooded Weald.

When forests were cleared, land was laid to pasture to graze the red Sussex breed of beef cattle.

Small domestic farmhouse dairies produced milk and cheese for local families who lived the good life with a pig, a few chickens, beehives, garden fruit trees and small crops of vegetables.

By the end of the 18th century early Weald industry had declined, driving former workers to seek seasonal work – the downland cereal harvest, hop picking and work in the extensive orchards which flourished on the southern slopes of the Ashdown Forest.

First grain imports from Canada and the USA triggered falling home prices, effectively ending the prosperity of Sussex farming as cereal production became uneconomic.

By the early 1900s the introduction of refrigeration brought cheap imports of meat and many Mid Sussex farmers went bankrupt. 

No wonder farmworkers encourage their children into ‘safe’ jobs manning the railway and labouring on road and house construction.

Hall and Russell's report on the agriculture of Kent, Surrey and Sussex, written in 1911 described a Wealden clay plain – “at one time much under the plough is now all covered with poor grass of little value”.

Today landowner Penelope Greenwood of the 3,000 acre Balcombe Estates confirms her steep land is not suitable for arable cultivation and too wet for sheep.

One third of the land is devoted to commercial forestry and shooting with the remaining 2000 acres grazing a 300 strong dairy herd of British Friesians.

Bernard Grimshaw describes the almost feudal ‘paternalism’ of former big farmers and estate owners who literally held the lives of their workers and tenants in the palms of their hands.

By the outbreak of World War I much of Mid Sussex was still thickly wooded – like Lincoln Wood, Fitz Warren and Blunts Wood in Haywards Heath, coppiced commercially during the first few years of the century.

In a chilling foretaste of what was to come 30 years later, World War I triggered huge advances in mechanisation.

Government edicts encouraged ploughing of traditional downland to make the country self-sufficient in food production to withstand a long Atlantic siege.

The development of the tractor allowed steep slopes to be cultivated for the first time, and water was supplied to formally inaccessible areas, making it possible to rear cattle.

Areas of previously open down land were fenced with barbed wire.

Minutes of the county's wartime agricultural committee court poignantly chronicle the shift in manpower and land that changed the face of Sussex countryside forever.

Formally infertile soil was enriched with newly developed chemical fertilisers.

As men who worked on the land volunteered to go to the Western front, landowners and farmers lodged desperate appeals with the military for the temporary release of their pigmen, cattlemen and ploughmen. Some were heeded but most were not, although in August 1916, 27,000 soldiers were released for the local harvest. Children of 14 were press ganged to help out in these desperate times and women ‘were to be instructed into the arts of milking and cow work.”

Local tribunals decided whether individuals could be deemed in reserved occupations – in other words retained on the land.

Farmers were allowed to keep one man per horse team, one man for every 20 cows and 200 sheep.

Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and thatchers were exempt from military service. Remount officers toured farm steads enlisting hunters and plough horses for cavalry work and to haul guns and supplies at the front. Few returned to their stables.

Ratcatchers were paid 10 shillings to eradicate rats on 100 acres, long standing timber was felled. Irish labour was imported. However farmers dubbed efforts by the wages board to increase pay as a ‘great mistake as we are already asked to do more than we have ever done’. 

In 1926 Plumpton Agricultural College was built and students included officers seeking expertise to farm smallholdings granted to them in demobilisation packages.

Courses included poultry, horticulture and bookkeeping.

But for Weald and Downland dwellers, the World War one revolution in land use brought to an end several thousands of years of a farming system and rural life.