A Home Is Not a Castle

Seven years ago Lady Garbett bought a 160-acre farm in the green and gently rolling county of Sussex. For years she had had no settled home while her colo nial officer husband, Sir Colin Garbett, was busy with reclamation and irrigation projects in India and the Middle East. Now, separated from him and tired of wandering, she wanted to settle down in the Elizabethan manor house with her daughter Susan, and run the farm.

Last week six trucks rolled up to the old manor house, and policemen stepped out under the copper beeches and laburnums. Admitted to the great house, one of them thrust a document at Lady Garbett. It was an eviction notice ordering her to leave home and farm by 3 o'clock that afternoon.

"Legalized Robbery." Lady Garbett had committed no crime. No bank was foreclosing a mortgage, no creditor had a complaint. She was being dispossessed of her home and land on the order of the Ministry of Agriculture. Why? Because, in the ministry's judgment, she was not farming her land "in accordance with the rules of good husbandry."

Harrows and plows were loaded into ministry trucks and disappeared. The animals--30 cows, ten goats, eight hens--had been previously boarded out to neighboring farmers. Lady Garbett and her daughter repaired to a nearby hotel with three dogs, twelve cats and three geese. "I call it legalized robbery," wailed Lady Garbett, and retired to bed with a headache. "Grossly immoral and against the Magna Carta," snapped Susan. "Is your property yours, or not?" She did not talk of getting a lawyer. There was nothing illegal about it. It was the law of the land.

The law of the land is the Agriculture Act of 1947. Proposed by the Labor government in the austerity days of pressing food shortages and trade deficits, it offered the farmers a bargain: "guaranteed prices and assured markets" in exchange for an obligation to maintain certain standards of production. The law set up in each county Agricultural Executive Committees (A.E.C.) composed of twelve farmers, who were charged with overseeing all the farmers within their jurisdiction, with the right to inspect whenever they chose, to prowl through barns and fields, to impose advice, and if dissatisfied, to evict those who failed to meet their standards. This power was not confined to eviction of tenant farmers. It included power to evict farm owners from their own farms.

Britain's two major farm organizations were so pleased with their guaranteed prices and markets that they raised no objections to the A.E.C.'s right to snoop and expel. The A.E.C. can expropriate farm land from a small farm and join it to a larger farm on the ground of "greater efficiency." An A.E.C. can decide a certain farm is best suited to cattle raising, and order the owner to put up cow barns, whether he can afford it or not. If a farmer rated laggard is put "under supervision," he can get a hearing before the A.E.C. But since the A.E.C. is both prosecutor and judge, he usually gets little satisfaction. He has no right to confront his accuser; the hearings are closed to both public and press. "We see nothing wrong with the trial of a farmer by his peers," explains an officer of the National Farmers Union, "We regard it as a bold experiment in self-government of the industry."

Strangely enough, in the land that first proclaimed a man's home his castle, the Tories have backed the law as vigorously as the Socialists. In 1952 a Tory government spokesman ringingly pronounced the bad farmer "a menace to society," and announced a renewed drive to crack down on him with a rash of dispossession orders.

A Bag of Beans. There have been only isolated protests. A Cambridgeshire vicar, the Rev. Eric Arthur Marsh, helped start a Farmers and Smallholders Association, demanded bitterly: "Why should not the inefficient factory owner be dispossessed? The inefficient butcher, baker, candlestick maker? The answer is easy. The farmer has sacrificed his liberty and freedom for the price of a bag of beans."

In the nine years the law has run, Labor and Tory governments have dispossessed or evicted 376 farmers. The dispossessed have gone quietly, shrouded in official silence, and without stirring public outrage. Lady Garbett's case differed only in the distinction of her name (her husband was a distant cousin of the late Archbishop of York, was himself knighted for his reclamation work). Though she claimed to have studied agriculture at her husband's side, the A.E.C. put her under supervision. She quickly became rattled and demoralized. Each year, A.E.C. inspectors would stalk around the farm criticizing and commenting, showered her with letters ordering her to plant this, or do that, until Lady Garbett got to the point of refusing even to open A.E.C. letters.

Last week a ministry official declared Lady Garbett had no right of further appeal. She may rent her house and land to a tenant if she can find one "acceptable" to the A.E.C. Or she may sell to an A.E.C.-approved farmer. But she may not move back into her own home. Growled the Daily Express: "Maybe Lady Garbett is a deplorable farmer. Maybe the Ministry of Agriculture is fully justified in its contention that her land is neglected. But is not Britain a free country? Is she not the rightful owner of her own farm? It is a scandal and scar on British justice."

In Britain's welfare state, a farmer is now secure from the hazards of the marketplace. But he is no longer secure in the possession of his own home.

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