ARTS
Crafts
The Surrey Peasant
Haslemere today does not seem the most likely site for a series of arts and crafts and rural revival experiments buoyed up by a loathing for urban life and industri- alisation. These days it seems more attuned to the arrival and departure of commuter trains — 'Darling, I had to stand all the way from Waterloo' — than to the slow rhythm of the countryman's year. In fact, the corner of Surrey known as Little Switzerland came into its own in the mid- 19th century with the arrival of the rail- ways. The scientist John Tyndale pronounced the pine-scented air exception- ally healthy, and in no time nearby Hind- head had earned the sobriquet `Mindhead' Linocut by Godfrey Blount because of its resident intelligentsia — Grant Allen, Richard Le Gallienne, Shaw, Conan Doyle and the publisher Methuen were all attracted by its picturesque beauty.
Haslemere keeps its past a secret today — only the remarkable number of arts and crafts and early modern houses hidden amongst its bosky drives and wind- ing lanes and the town's unique Education- al Museum hint at anything unusual. The museum was founded by the surgeon Sir John Hutchinson, at his house at nearby Inval in 1888, as an act of philanthropic
generosity, but since 1926 it has been in its present home in Haslemere High Street. It is the ideal family museum: there is an excellent library and good displays of min- erals, zoology, local history and British birds, as well as its famous bee room which enables visitors to witness the daily life of a hive.
There are, of course, quite a few mus- eums with collections like this, but two of its rooms are given over to a unique group of objects which give the museum special status and take us back to the ethos of turn-of-the-century Haslemere. This is the collection of traditional European peasant art which originally was formed by a Char- terhouse schoolmaster named Davies. His aim was to collect only objects made in the home and for the home and farmstead — defined as 'made for love and not for money'. Most of the collection, significant- ly, came not from Britain but from Europe, particularly Germany and Scandinavia. It was a collection that was much admired and studied by the leaders of Haslemere's arts and crafts community.
Arts and crafts arrived in Haslemere in the 1890s when a high minded barrister and his artistic wife — Joseph and Maud King — settled in the town and started the Haslemere Hand-Weaving Industry, in part inspired by the folk arts of Scandinavia. In 1896, they were joined by Maud's sister Ethel and her husband Godfrey Blount, a Slade-trained eccentric with a passion for Ruskin, Tolstoy and Kropotkin. Blount was the most creative of the four, and he and his wife started up their own enterprise named the Peasant Arts Society. By 1900, Blount had founded his Fellowship of the New Crusade which preached the simple life and the revival of handicrafts, folk music and dance and the restoration of country ways and customs. The New Cru- sade formed the spiritual background to all the various crafts practised by the Blounts and the Kings and their employees — plain weaving in cotton and linen, simple designs appliquéd on linen known as 'peasant tapestries', handloom rugs, ironwork, plas- terwork, bookbinding, linocuts and wood- carving. The Peasant Arts Society's annual reports, the Vineyard, a magazine devoted to tales of peasant life started by Maud
King in 1910 and Blount's numerous books together give an odd picture of this exer- cise in 'peasant' living.
The Peasant Arts Society (which later sprouted a Fellowship and was finally amalgamated into a Guild) had distin- guished members like G.K. Chesterton and Cecil Sharp who spoke at meetings and wrote for the Vineyard. But the final impression, of a group of well-off men and women whose plans for the rural working classes were a mixture of philanthropy and tyranny, is disquieting. Their actual enter- prises in weaving and other crafts were rea- sonable enough. They paid decent wages, which was not necessarily the case with other contemporaneous philanthropic arts and crafts ventures in rural restoration. And the products of the workshops — mainly designed by Blount — look as if they could have formed the basis for some kind of self-perpetuating vernacular art. The various peasant arts activities brought life and fame to Haslemere and attracted other craftsmen, like the weaver Luther Hooper and the furniture maker A. Rom- ney Green. It is only when we examine the writings of Godfrey Blount and his fellow Peasant Lifers that we find ideas that seem curiously unpalatable.
The city and its politicised working class were regarded as the enemy. Blount and his friends chose to idealise a humble, happy, creative peasantry who would be watched over by an enlightened aristocracy. State welfare and socialism were dismissed in favour of voluntary altruism, in which the rich would employ a workforce making 'simple and useful things by hand in the country'. Ironically, this dream was particu- larly inappropriate for England. Early industrialisation, enclosures and innovative farming techniques meant that the English peasantry — unlike their cousins in Ger- many, Scandinavia and France — retained very few craft skills. Only the mass redistri- bution of land — not on Blount's agenda — might have conceivably recreated the conditions for a revival of rural crafts.
Though the Haslemere experiment seems to have benefited local people — the hand-weaving industry was to carry on until the early 1930s — Blount's idea of volun- tary altruism was to come into its own in less happy circumstances in the 1930s. Vol untary occupational centres for the unem- ployed in the Distressed Areas were set up by the National Council for Social Service, and at these centres it became clear that the victims of failed industrialisation were to be rescued by something very like the Haslemere handicraft recipe. Pewter work- ing, mat-making, cobbling, simple carpen- try and fretwork and folk-dance were seen as appropriate occupations for the unem- ployed, whilst team spirit, boys clubs and Toc H were to be a substitute for proper education. Those hostile to the Centres could not help noticing the unreality of the crafts and folk music as panaceas — indeed, the crafts' rather dusty reputation today in part stems from the way it was inflicted on the disabled and the unem- ployed between the wars.
The sentimental idealisation of country life still seems to be a British disease. But, in fact, the collection of folk art at Hasle- mere Educational Museum does not fit all that comfortably with arts and crafts romanticism. Many of the examples of tex- tiles, leather and woodwork possess that stark, inevitable quality that was so admired in folk art by the pioneers of the modern movement.
Whilst British craftsmen and educators made a fetish of handwork well into the 20th century, Germany, Scandinavia and Japan drew on folk art, but put it to very different uses — as source for design for mass production. At present only a small percentage of Haslemere's magnificent col- lection is on display. But it would be nice to see the whole collection in all its glory, act- ing not as a trigger for nostalgia but as a practical inspiration for young designers and manufacturers. How such an idea would have displeased the Blounts and the Kings!
The world owes me a living.'
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