Country Life
July 2004
90 years after the outbreak of World War I
an old photograph album provides a snapshot of rural life then and now. Charlotte
Cory visits the photogenic village of Hopesay in Shropshire.
Last summer rummaging at a carboot
sale, I found a battered photograph album full of faded sepia snaps of rural
life, taken sometime at the beginning of the last century. Sheep, pigs, cows
and geese, all at slightly odd angles, are pictured alongside rustic gentlemen
with walking sticks leaning on gates and young women in long skirts and floppy
hats strolling with their dogs. They present a casual, attractive vision of
a by-gone age and as the album only cost a few pounds, I bought it.
When I got home and examined the photographs more carefully,
I was intrigued to notice that the two women who figure in many of the pictures,
both carry box-cameras which they occasionally direct at my photographer. Three
friends – sisters, maybe, although my photographer could have been a man
- had evidently taken their dogs and cameras for a walk in the country, snapping
as they went.
There is no handwriting in the album but a few of the 3x4 inch pictures do contain
vital clues to their date and place. Outstretched arms on a signpost (faded,
but still just legible) point to “Aston” a mile in one direction,
and “Edgton” a mile and a quarter in the other. A road atlas soon
established that this signpost could only have been located at Hopesay, a village
near Craven Arms in Shropshire. 
Another
photograph shows some posters printed in black type and pasted up on a wooden
door. These (after being scanned into my computer and, may I modestly say, skilfully
restored) turned out to concern: a furniture auction to be held on August 19th
1914 at the Market Hall in Craven Arms; a stark announcement that the “Craven
Arms Show is abandoned”; “The Lord Lieutenant’s Message to
the County” urging food producers not to profiteer in the current crisis
and exhorting readers to “BE A PATRIOT”; finally, a rather chilling
notice requiring “aliens of German nationality” to register immediately
with the police or face a £100 fine or six months’ imprisonment.
I now wondered if the person who compiled the album
had been consciously recording a world that was about to change. This rural
idyll, captured at the outbreak of the First World War, seemed now to recall
“those blue remembered hills”, suffused with melancholy and nostalgic
yearning in A E Housman’s poems about “the land of lost content”
in The Shropshire Lad. The man leading a laiden horse-drawn hay-waggon
now brought to mind all the farmworkers and carthorses who, shortly after this
picture was taken, went from quiet places like Hopesay to meet their doom serving
King and Country in Northern France.
At the first opportunity I drove to Hopesay and found myself parking outside
a cottage immediately recognizable from the pictures. A metal signpost - yes,
to Aston and Edgton - has replaced the wooden one, and been relocated from the
middle of the junction to the pavement outside this cottage, otherwise little
was changed. A distinctive clump of weatherbeaten larches on top of Hopesay
Hill (which now belongs to the National Trust) did not appear to have grown
in 90 years and yet many other trees I knew from the pictures seemed to greet
me like old and flourishing friends. I was almost surprised to find them green,
and not sepia. I strolled about, eyed by sundry sheep, cows, dogs and geese,
spotting familiar gates, door handles, gable ends, chimney stacks. I found a
neatly kept lake where my floppy hatted photographers had posed with a boat,
and a granary that has now been attractively converted into a residential complex
yet still retaining its distinctive outside steps and railing. 
Most
astonishing was the barn in the middle of the village which was still being
used as a notice board. The wooden slats of the barn door, even the nails holding
the hinges in place, were almost identical to those in the enhanced sepia picture.
The current notices – advertising coffee mornings, church fundraising
events, computer courses, various services and lost dogs - provided as much
a snapshot of village life now as those posters in 1914 had then. Far from having
vanished, this rural idyll appeared to have adapted with the times. Ironically
there was a recruiting poster for Broadband internet services, with a picture
of Lord Kitchener characteristically pointing and saying, “Your community
needs you”.
Knowing that the photographs were taken exactly 90 years ago this summer, I
decided to return to Hopesay, which turns out to be famous as family home of
the minor romantic poet, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, (1803-49) author amongst other
things of Dream-Pedlary: If there were dreams to sell, what would you buy?
A new poster on the barn advertising a gardens open day, complete with cake
and plant stall to be held in aid of church funds, provided the perfect encouragement
to visit with my own camera and compile a new album of life in the same village
now.
(full picture album of Hopesay Then and Now to
be added shortly!)
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