Not to be trusted
Michael Vestey
Xeassic tale of how governments can nege on agreements with people was broadcast this week in Document: Lucilla and the Lost Lands (Radio Four, Monday). In 1942, under emergency powers legislation, the residents of six villages in the Breckland district of Norfolk were given a month to leave their homes and schools so that the area could be turned into a training ground for the airforce and army.
Many were prepared to resist, even with pitchforks, until the local landowner, Lord Walsingham, negotiated a deal with the government that would allow the villagers to return to their homes after the war. Similar agreements were made in Dorset (where the government also broke its promise), Devon, Wiltshire and Snowdonia. The new post-war Labour government decided, though, to hang on to the land. The Cold War had started and National Service was to be introduced in 1947. The present Lord Walsingham told the presenter Mike Thomson that his father had been devastated by this betrayal. `To be perfectly honest, he never got over it.' It was thought of as a local disaster as the names of the people in those houses hadn't changed since the Black Death of 1350.
The Lucilla of the title was Walsingham's land agent Lucilla Reeve, who also ran a farm in the area later designated for military use. She sounds a colourful figure: the illegitimate daughter of one of the household's parlour maids; mysteriously well educated in London by a benefactor, thought to be a member of the Walsingham family; a pre-war supporter of Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts and a poet. She first came to the notice of the government over her political activities. Lord Walsingham recounted how his father had received a telephone call from Whitehall saying that she was to be interned. Walsingham told them not to do that. He needed a land agent while he was away on wartime duties and, as he carried a pistol with him, if any Nazis landed in Norfolk he would personally shoot her. Would he have done? asked Thomson. 'I'm quite certain he would, yes,' replied the present baron nonchalantly. 'He shot a number of people in his time, for goodness sake.'
But Miss Reeve also upset the government over her opposition to the takeover. She left her farmhouse but continued to keep pigs and sheep on the land, dodging tanks, craters and barbed wire. Walsingham had given her renovated chicken huts as a residence on the edge of the training ground. Eventually, in despair, in 1950 she hanged herself and was buried at St Andrew's Church within the training area. The programme's attempts to visit her grave were thwarted by the Ministry of Defence. It clearly didn't like the idea of Document raking over an old injustice.
A local man told Thomson that when he and other villagers were allowed to visit the churchyard he gave an interview on local television about Miss Reeve and was spoken to by the military police who, he felt, intimidated him. Professor Gerry Rubin, an expert on military legislation at Kent University, was mystified that the MoD wouldn't even agree to a radio interview. He pointed out, though, that currently going through Parliament is the Civil Contingencies Bill, which provides for the requisitioning and confiscation of property 'with or without compensation'. Perhaps the government doesn't wish to attract attention to this wicked piece of legislation.
Suddenly, though, the MoD changed its mind. The army came back to Thomson to say that as the graveyard was owned by the church he could visit, if permission was given by the diocese. It was, and he found himself being escorted by friendly and helpful soldiers to the site. Miss Reeve's grave was slightly grander than he had expected and had been damaged. As a suicide it had not been allowed inside the churchyard hut, as the wall had been knocked down during an exercise, the grave was later incorporated within the new boundary.
The documents that justify the nature of this programme were Miss Reeve's case notes from the Resettlement Committee which had met later to decide on compensation and rehousing. There was a public inquiry but the government relied on the lack of sophistication of the villagers and their ignorance of the law. It's a shocking story, really, but after hearing what Whitehall was capable of during the Hutton inquiry, the ruthlessness at the heart of government, it comes as little surprise. Document, as a series, is rather a good idea, and it is rarely dull.
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