THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Despite the decline in agriculture at the end of the nineteenth century, the tree felling and river clearing continued apace. In the Great War, river clearance was seen as employment for prisoners, and in the 1920s as a way of relieving unemployment generally. In 1922 the chief drainage engineer for the Ministry of Agriculture reflected thus upon the constructive uses to which he had put the heroes home from the trenches:
The real value of the results actually achieved has been a most gratifying surprise to everyone concerned, and it is easy, after the event, to reflect wisely upon the fact that a large percentage of the men must have served a long and painful apprenticeship, whilst on Military Service, to the art of transforming swamps into ‘better ‘oles’.51
To supplement the armies of the unemployed, new machines were becoming available. In 1920 the ‘Buckeye’ Ditcher, a bizarre-looking contraption of wheels and pulleys imported from America, arrived at the railway station at St Neots, and was escorted to Croxton Park, where a public demonstration of its capabilities was attended with considerable excitement.52 Primitive drag-lines were soon adopted by the richer drainage boards.
Nonetheless, the situation from a drainage point of view was far from satisfactory. Agriculture had been in steady decline since the 1870s, and after a brief post-war boom was to sink back into it again in the 1930s. Two centuries after the ‘blowing’ of the Denver sluice in 1713, the whole security of the south level of the Fens depended solely upon the security of the restored sluice. In 1919 there was little to distinguish the ‘summer grounds’ of large areas of the Somerset Levels from their saturated state a hundred years earlier. To compound the problem, administrative chaos reigned. There was everywhere ‘a chaos of Authorities and an absence of authority’. In 1922 Sidney Webb wrote that the lords of the level of Romney Marsh, who had inspired the founding of the courts of sewers in 1258, still remained unreformed themselves, an ancient relic of pre-statutory local government.53 The levying of ‘scots’ on Romney Marsh was discontinued only in 1932, after seven centuries of enforcement. Outworn institutions were to stagger on until, in some cases, the outworn machines and sluices which they maintained also collapsed. In 1940 the old Burwell drainage commission finally accepted voluntary dissolution when its ancient pump engine collapsed beyond repair. In 1929 the Somerset drainage commission went out of existence at the height of a great flood.
The Land Drainage Act of 1918 had made an attempt to simplify the administration of land drainage, but in the late 1920s it was clear that confusion still prevailed. In 1927 the Bledisloe Commission submitted a report which was to form the basis of the 1930 Land Drainage Act, the ground rules of which have dominated land drainage to the present day. Catchment boards were set up, which in 1948 became river boards, and in 1964 river authorities. In 1974 these were incorporated into the water authorities.
The still-vexed issue that the 1930 Act attempted to resolve was who was to pay for drainage.54 The courts of sewers, which were abolished in 1930, had always insisted on the principle: no benefit, no rates. The new proposals extended the rating for all works on what is now known as ‘main river’ – the larger watercourses – to the total catchment area. Internal drainage districts (which maintained smaller streams and ditches, especially in the lowlands) were to be funded from within their own areas. The lowlands thus required two sources of income for drainage: one to maintain the main river system, and the second for the back ditches. The householders who lived above the valley bottoms were not happy about paying two sets of rates, needless to say, especially when the towns on the tops of the hills found themselves subsidizing drainage benefits for lowland farmers. The argument put forward by the lowlanders, that they were being flooded out by water sent down to them by those living higher up the hill, was naturally resisted by the latter.
The Denver sluice. Washed out to sea in 1713 and successively rebuilt, it remains the key which controls the floods over the Great Level.
In 1933, following a typical dispute over this issue, Alban Dobson of the Ministry of Agriculture sent a letter to the clerk of the Medway Catchment Board in Maidstone, dictating where the critical cut-off point should lie. This letter, based on expediency and written in a hurry, without any of the proper backing of parliamentary statute, has continued to dictate the terms whereby millions of pounds of public money are spent on land drainage, right up until the mid-1980s. The ministry fixed a cut-off point of eight feet above the known flood-level in all valleys except tidal areas, where five feet was the magic measurement. This has become known as ‘the Medway Letter Line’. All householders living below the line were to be charged a local drainage rate, and this line still dictates the area of jurisdiction of internal drainage boards, whose annual expenditure is considerable and influence on the environment profound. In addition, the Medway Letter Line is the basis for calculating the cost benefit of all schemes carried out on rivers by water authorities and other organizations. As a method for calculating benefit and consequent eligibility for grant, the eight-foot line is, to say the least, haphazard. The concept of ‘known’ flood-level is still vague, and was even vaguer in 1933. The Medway Letter Line was meant to include ‘unknown’ floods, as well as recorded ones, and as information on flooding has become more sophisticated, it can now be seen to have overstated the benefit area by attempting to be on the safe side. In some places the eight-foot line runs along halfway up a hill, and if a valley floor is narrow, it can significantly double the supposed area of benefit. In other places, the line falls below areas which can be said to benefit from improvement. On top of this, the 1930 Land Drainage Act bequeathed a messy and misleading system of raising drainage rates for main-river schemes by precept levied on county and borough councils.
The 1930 Act also opened the way for a new wave of river clearance. In 1954 a paper given at the Institution of Civil Engineers extolling such actions did pause to admit the existence of a peculiarly modern problem:
So much tree clearance work was done during the first ten years of the existence of Catchment Boards that it is now difficult to get a complete picture of the derelict state of the rivers before the passing of the Land Drainage Act in 1930. Unfortunately some of this work was done without a proper appreciation of the fact that the presence of tree growth, and the shade it gave, prevented or at least discouraged the growth of water weeds, the existence of which could form an even greater obstruction than much of the tree growth.55
The relatively uncontrolled use of herbicides in the 1950s and 1960s was temporarily to solve that problem. Landowners by the river Soar in Leicestershire confirm the virtual disappearance of bulrush and water-lilies on the river due to spraying in that period.
The new Catchment Boards’ first decade of river clearance was followed by the outbreak of war, during which Parliament empowered the boards to carry out even more extensive work at the request of county war agricultural executive committees. Government offered a 50 per cent grant for such work, which remained in force after the war. In 1951 the Heneage Report recommended that the length of ‘main river’ to be cleared by river boards be trebled, thus extending their jurisdiction to over 12,000 miles of river. For those who have eyes to see, the legacy of all this activity, rigorously maintained, and in some cases extended by water authorities in the 1970s and 1980s, is a river system in the lowlands of England and Wales which is profoundly impoverished. If the traveller looks out of the car or train window or takes a walk along the local brook and bears in mind what a river should look like, they cannot fail to notice, in many places, mile upon mile of treeless river bank, often devoid of even a decent margin of bulrush. A survey of the middle reaches of the river Idle in Nottinghamshire in 1980 discovered two clumps of marginal plants and three trees over five miles of river. In the late 1930s the Sussex Rother was subjected to total clearance at Bodiam. The scars remain. The Staffordshire Blithe, whose lower reaches escaped the axe and are therefore witness to how
