ChapTer eighT
Wildlife in depression,
c.1870–1940
depression and its consequences
Most discussions of England’s environment in the later nineteenth century, and
the first half of the twentieth, are dominated by the fate of agriculture. From the
mid-1870s, farming began to slide into a long period of depression, principally
caused by the expansion of the American railway network into the prairies of
the mid-west, so that European markets were flooded with cheap grain. No
longer kept artificially high by the operation of the Corn Law, repealed in 1846,
wheat prices were halved between 1873 and 1893, while those for barley and
oats fell by a third. Following a brief period of stabilization, a further intense
depression occurred after 1896, this time affecting not only arable farmers but
also livestock producers, as cheap meat began to be imported on refrigerated
ships from the New World and Australia.^1 In an increasingly globalized world,
British agriculture could not compete. Fortunes recovered during World
War I but there was then a further slump, with only a slight recovery in the
1930s. Only in the period following the outbreak of war in 1939 did British
agriculture return to long-term profitability, ushering in a period of intensive
farming which has continued, more or less, to this day.
Many readers will be aware of the various effects which the agricultural
depression supposedly had upon the countryside. Marginal land brought into
cultivation during the agricultural revolution could now no longer be profitably
farmed: areas of heavy, intractable clay soils, poor heathland and moors
were abandoned to dereliction. Even the more general fabric of the farming
landscape could no longer be adequately maintained. Henry Williamson in the
1930s described ‘the dereliction, the mud, the weeds, the dilapidated buildings,