Imber and Salisbury Plain
By GEOFFREY GRIGSON
MBER is, or Imber was, until its people were I removed in 1943 so that it could be used as a battle-training area, the loneliest village of Salis- bury Plain. Otherwise it was not greatly distin- guished. Roads crossed an unfenced area of the Plain to drop into a valley prettily occupied by a mediaeval church, a vicarage, a manor-house, a school, a Baptist chapel, a pub, a few farm- houses and cottages, and less than 200 people. The church is still intact, though its more ancient furnishings, including two thirteenth-century effigies, have been moved to another church under the Plain. The rest of Imber is a battle- broken mess mercifully covered by a summer shroud of nettles.
The downland of this murdered village and parish grew wheat, oats and barley, and carried sheep, until it began to carry tanks and guns. The War Department regards village and downs as useful dereliction, and intends to keep them that way, and to keep out the intruder, particularly the intruder-in-chief, Austin Underwood, the secretary of the Association for the Restoration of Imber, which wants the rights of way main- tained, the ranges restored to farming, and Imber revived as one of the civil and ecclesiastical parishes of the county of Wiltshire. The Associa- tion is led, energised and was in effect created by its remarkable secretary, a youngish Wiltshire schoolmaster and district councillor from Salis- bury Plain, who reminds me, since his cause appears hopeless when you begin to look into it, of the Rev. George Walker of Londonderry, this time conducting a siege against odds instead of defying one. Imber redivivus, and Not an Inch. And No Surrender of one more square inch of Wiltshire, to that War Department which does not keep its promises—since Imber people say they were promised their village back when con- ditions should allow.
The naked fact of the matter is that Imber- the church alone excepted—belongs ditch, tile and gutter, and dandelion, to the War Depart- ment, by purchase. It belonged to them before the evacuation of 1943. For some while the lmberites had been tenants of the War Depart- ment, at low rents, knowing (but not expecting) that there might arrive a day when their landlord would exercise his agreed right to remove them and take over. War explained and excused the evacuation When it happened, out of the blue, but the restoration of the status quo which the tenants were given to expect when they were bundled out, has never come—and never will if the War Department has its legal way. And now the Department, in peace time, purposes to complete the extinction of Imber by closing—this requires a little more formality or process of law--all rights of way into Imber and over the Imber ranges, for ever.
In January, since action talks loudest, Austin Underwood riposted with a symbolic invasion : he led 'a shining plough and a concourse of Pilgrims and cars back into the ruinatea street of Imber, by ways still assumed to he public. The nettles weren't up. devastation looked the more stark He called for a minute's silence 'to the memory of centuries of craftsmanship and husbandry the military have destroyed, to those who have died broken-hearted before they could return to Imber.' He relayed the Bach Chorale 00 a loudspeaker because—yes, because the Norwegians sang it in Trondheim Cathedral when the Nazis ordered its closure: This body they may kill, But truth abideth still, and then harangued the crowd—he is a good speaker as well as a brilliant campaigner—with a passion they liked. I thought that Imma the Englishman, whose name Imber bears, might have liked it too. Here were prickly, illogically independent English, sons of Imma Cobbett and Co., of that still existing kind which does not care for uniforms on the street or Nabarro moustaches on the face when there does not happen to be a war, certainly of a kind which feudally-minded brisk majors in bile-green jeeps can neither stand nor understand, enjoying a day out against the Military. They might have been kicking the Military's head about on an after- noon of anthropologist's football.
Off the pitch these same applauders may have second thoughts, zeal may decline to indifference, respectability, timidity or good sense, states of mind which George-Walker Underwood or Michael-Foot Underwood (I don't know his politics) has to defeat, if he is to keep his Associa- tion on the draw. Timidity certainly reared up when the War Department began to insist on its powers, and its rights as'owner, erecting new 'Keep Out' placards on the roads into the vil- lage, obtaining an injunction against the officers of the Association, so that they could not enter the range, and in this way spoiling a gay summer programme of Imber incursions. Since then Austin Underwood has had to be content to rally objectors on high ground above the For- bidden Territory. He now waits for the public inquiry promised by Whitehall into the proposed extinction for all time of the Imber rights of way. On this slender target the Association is concentrating its fire for the time being.
The temptation is to dismiss Imber as a local, sentimental affair. The village may be ancient, but it belongs to the War Department, it is dead, and so what? But if you look first at Imber as part of Salisbury Plain, then at the Plain as part of England, you find Imber speaking for much more than its sagging doorways. If the rights of Way are closed, another eighty square miles of Salisbury Plain will be sealed off. This Plain is more than Stonehenge. It is an extraordinary survival of Neolithic and Bronze Age and Iron Age England, an area sheep and cattle nibbled clear of scrub, which (together with some areas of river gravel) supported the first con- siderable population of our ancestors. Here they left their fenced houses or temples, their barrow cemeteries, their cattle boundaries and other earthworks, adding up to the greatest concentra- tion of prehistoric evidence in the British Isles.
All this was not realised sixty-four years ago when the War Department began to bite at Wiltshire. 'The Army wanted more room than the Hampshire heathiand supplied. It wanted open ground for artillery ranges and manoeuvring; and the farmers of the Plain were already in a bad way, and were glad to sell. The War Department bought its first Wiltshire farm in 1894. It acquired farms, estates and manor-houses and old manorial rights and villages (though none of them were Imberised): it built huge atrocious Cities of the Plain, even within view of Stone- henge. Between the wars it turned to Imber in the same way; everyone who farmed or owned land in Imber sold out, even if he stayed on as tenant—until the evacuation. I am assured that the service departments now hold about 120,000 acres, or a third of the Plain and a seventh of the whole county of Wiltshire. Whether this vast Wiltshire holding will continue to be so necessary in an H-bomb era is another matter. Also is it really vital, now, to seal off still more of this ancient life-centre of England, spoiling its fer- tility and its productivity, and damaging, even destroying, its stock of prehistoric evidence?
Salisbury Plain, for wind, light, larks, lap- wings, loneliness, Stonehenge, peculiarity and piety, does deserve to be kept as a National Park; and should not Lo its best third be pocked with explosions, seared with tank tracks, and smeared with military buildings. For the next half-century or century the ideal is a gradual retreat of the War Department to countryside— if such lands are still required—less agreeable and less fertile than the Plain, less charged with history. f he black uplands of the millstone grit might serve The Imber Ow may yet turn out to have been the prelude to this retreat. The more fuss, the more thought; the more chance of realising that we still do not discriminate properly in the use and destiny of such little land as we have, the more chance of ending those acts of oppor- tunistic grab .glibly excusable as in the public interest As with lmber, there is too often a stink of bad faith (and stingy compensation) as well as bad judgment in these grabs. When Austin Underwood staged his January counter-attack and invasion of Imber, he had as one of his speakers a Mr. Sidney Dean, who had farmed in the parish and had been among the dispossessed of 1943; just outside the area, by the main road from Devizes there stands a Robber Stone record- ing how an earlier Mr. Dean of Imber had been set upon by highwaymen in 1829. They were cap- tured and transported, and the stone was raised by public subscription 'as a warning to those who presumptuously think to escape the punish- ment God has threatened against thieves and robbers.' Wiltshire people feel an affront in this perfectly legal grab of Imber, this legal extinc- tion of an ancient village and parish; and there are some who think that a second Robber Stone may have to be erected alongside the first, on which we shall all of us, legality or no, figure as the thieves and the robbers.
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