For the first time in the history of Kibworth a military funeral has taken place in the village. On Thursday afternoon upwards of 2,000 people assembled in the streets and at the cemetery for the interment of Private Bertie Pell, aged 20, of the 2nd Leicesters, eldest son of Mr and Mrs B. H. Pell, of Fleckney Road, Kibworth. He passed away in hospital in England last Saturday from injuries sustained in May while in the firing line. He had been previously wounded, in March, and recovering, went again to the front. The cortege was headed by a squad of 12 1st and 2nd Leicesters (all of whom had been wounded at the front), under the commands of Sergeant-Major Read and Sergeant Sands, together with Bugler-Drummer Sharpe. The coffin, covered with the Union Jack, was borne by four of the deceased’s chums … The deceased was a chorister in the Parish Church, a Boy Scout, and a prominent footballer. He is the first Kibworth Grammar School boy to lay down his life for his country.
Market Harborough Advertiser, 6 July 1915
In the village the hosiery factory and shops, and the grammar school, had been closed for the afternoon. The boys from the school lined the route to say farewell to their former schoolmate. They sang ‘Fight the Good Fight’ and afterwards the soldiers fired off three volleys of shots by the graveside. A bugler sounded the Last Post in the summer sunshine while a light breeze stirred the old yew trees in the churchyard. Pell was the first of forty men of the village to die in the mud and horror of the Western Front. With Private Pell’s death we have reached the modern era: what would become known as the Great War marks a dividing line in the history of the village. The story of the last century in Kibworth would merit a book on its own: an enormous amount of material is being gathered from local archives by the Kibworth History Society, and recorded from old people in the village, funds of knowledge about the social life of the place during the transformations of the last fifty years as the village expanded to become as it is today, almost a small town. Here as an epilogue we can only highlight a few of the stories of the village since those now almost unimaginably far-off moments, the Jubilee of 1897, Victoria’s death in 1901 and the beginning of the First World War.
During Victoria’s reign the village had doubled in size, with a particularly big expansion towards the end: the growth of Kibworth Beauchamp in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is particularly noticeable today in Station Road and at the western end of Fleckney Road, where almost a new small town sprang up after the establishment of Johnson & Barnes’s hosiery factory there in 1901, close to the Working Men’s Club and Institute. The Johnson & Barnes factory produced fully fashioned cashmere hose and exported in particular to Canada and Scandinavia until its closure in the sixties. During its heyday before the Second World War it provided employment in Kibworth but also in outlying villages: in the early thirties two busloads of workers came each day from Great Glen and Fleckney. The factory also provided a lot of outdoor home-based work for women in the form of ‘lining’ or ‘seaming’, that is, stitching the toes of the stockings and attaching the foot to the leg. The women took their work home in bundles by bike. With its hosiery factory, gas- and brickworks, railway station and sidings, and sizeable shops like Lynn’s general store, Kibworth now was well and truly part of the urbanized economy of the twentieth century, and the factory-based workforce in the ‘town’ now outnumbered those who still worked as agricultural labourers on the land.
Troops from the village fought and died in the big battles in Flanders, as part of the Leicester Regiment and also the Sherwood Foresters. Eileen Bromley’s father was among them and he vividly conjured the terror of the night before the ‘Big Push’ on the Somme in 1916: ‘I will never forget that night as long as I live … we retired under heavy fire, shells and bullets. What sights I saw, I shall never forget them: there were dead and wounded everywhere.’ There were those though who stuck to the village’s old Nonconformist tradition. The draper Eli Bale was a conscientious objector:
All through my life I have tried to be a follower of Christ and a Christian and I have a conscientious objection to all military service. I consider human life to be sacred, and under no circumstances would I take the same. These views I have held all my life. I have been a Nonconformist local preacher, a teacher in the Sunday School, and will ever serve my principle … I don’t believe Jesus Christ would take part in any military affairs and therefore I cannot.
This story was typical of the village, where (though Bale was in a very small minority) all opinions seem to have been represented.
Life on the Home Front meanwhile went on. In December 1916, while the boys endured the miseries of winter in the trenches, the proprietor of the village general store, George Lynn, published for the thirty-fourth year running his free almanac. This gives us a little window into the material life of the village, which for all its industry was still at heart a farming community. In its pages there is advertising for wire netting, dolly tubs, buckets, roofing felt, rat traps, poultry feed, and pig and chicken powders. The monthly calendar is illustrated with photos of horses pulling seeding carts, the village vet at work and the horse-drawn milk cart stacked with huge churns setting out on Lynn’s rounds. With his recently installed telephone, Lynn could now take orders and offer deliveries to villages all over the area, from Gumley to the Langtons.
The preface to his almanac offered news on the government’s rationing of sugar (recommending corn syrup or honey as substitutes), along with adverts for Collis Browne’s cough medicine (that year Kibworth had seen a prolonged and very trying winter with a great snowstorm in February). Pages of ‘useful facts’ include a calendar for 1917 with key dates, and tips for gardeners and vets. There are pages of postal charges, useful foreign phrases, tax tables and pension charts. National pensions were new: the maximum pension was 5s per week for anyone earning less than £21 (5s today is about £12 on the retail price index; £70 on average earnings). In the calendar for 1917 the dates of the hunting season are marked (Kibworth was a hunt area), as well as the anniversaries of the recent battles of Verdun, Jutland and the Somme, together with older imperial landmarks such as the Black Hole of Calcutta and the battles of Quebec and Sebastopol. From Lynn’s adverts one might also infer that for the gentry and landed aristocracy life in the countryside was not too bad: he stocked Irish butter and Danish bacon along with French champagne, Jamaican rum and Spanish red wine.
The First World War marked the village as it did everywhere in England. Even now Armistice Day is commemorated in St Wilfrid’s by a packed church with standing room only. The mental geography of the ordinary people of England had been changed. Previous imperial wars in the Crimea, South Africa and elsewhere had been far away. The First World War was closer to home: the thunder of guns on the killing grounds could be heard in Kent. And everyone knew someone who had died.
Patriotism continued to be drummed into the young at school. In Kibworth, as one villager remembered, Empire Day on 24 May ‘was celebrated at school by an assembly of all classes for the singing of patriotic hymns, followed by half a day holiday’. The 1935 jubilee of George V and Mary was another great patriotic event, with the village hung out with bunting and a huge bonfire. In school, chapel and church the villagers imbibed the myths of empire and with them, at least for a time, a sense of the superiority of English culture over outsiders; in whom, nonetheless, there was a great deal of interest, and from whom and about whom much was learned. ‘Every nation’, it has been observed, ‘is a semi-permeable container, washed over by many different forces and influences from beyond its shores’, and this was especially true of imperial Britain.
Beyond the forty lost lives, the war had a much wider and longer-term impact on the village: few village families were untouched by these wider changes. The old agricultural world of Kibworth, which had been gradually eroding since the 1789 enclosures, was now almost entirely gone. Land was concentrated in a handful of large farms in Beauchamp and Smeeton, with the fields and farms in Harcourt still rented from Merton College. Most smallholding farmers were gone and the old families of smallholders and husbandmen who survived in the village, like the Bromleys, Clarkes, Iliffes and Colmans, were mostly no longer in agriculture. Nonetheless the physical aspect of the village was still rural. As one Kibworthian who lived through the thirties, G. A. Ringrose, observed:
Had anyone contemplated taking up residence in Kibworth between the wars, their reaction would have been that the village had not suffered excessively as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Compared with other villages within the county Kibworth was still relatively unspoilt; a large village certainly, and as it had in the past possessed two markets, it often became the subject of argument regarding its qualification for town status. The agrarian influence was never as obvious as in Smeeton Westerby, nevertheless a rural atmosphere prevailed. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, the neighbourhood was a more tightly knit community than it is today, due perhaps to the fact that no one at that time thought in terms of a classless society; a strict line of demarcation existed within the social strata and it is doubtful if anyone considered crossing it.
(The division between the Kibworth of the ‘stockeners’ and the ‘hunting and fishing’ side was still pronounced and would ebb away only in the last decades of the century.)
Though the war had brought changes for the better, including the extension of the franchise, the late twenties and thirties were a time of economic depression, remembered by more than one Kibworthian as a period which though happy for children was hard for many adults: ‘it was a common sight to see and hear an unemployed man standing in the middle of the street playing a musical instrument.’ Some were young, some were old, but they all had one thing in common – hardship – since National Assistance was a thing of the future. During this time the Jarrow marchers came through Kibworth on their way to London and gathered on the Munt, with tea provided by the locals, to listen to a speech from Ellen Wilkinson MP. But in the thirties the village also saw significant changes in its material life: in the fields the old ways went fast between the world wars, with rapid mechanization. The surviving post windmill in Harcourt ground its last bag of flour in 1925; hand-ploughing died out in the thirties with the arrival of the tractor. The first public telephones arrived with the famous red ‘Jubilee’ box in 1936; radio had come to most houses by the end of the decade.
Another important change was the arrival of a piped water supply. The wells and springs along the Kibworth ridge had sustained life for generations, but a debate over the quality and reliability of the water had begun with the Public Health Act of 1875, in the wake of cholera epidemics in London. The act required all new housing to include running water and internal drainage. But it took a long time for Kibworth to catch up. In bad dry seasons (as in the drought of 1884) many houses in Kibworth had gone without water for weeks on end. Now, as the population of the village grew, the problem became critical. In the First World War Kibworth still relied on public pumps, and many houses were without a proper supply. As with so many places in rural England, the time had come for Kibworth to leave this aspect of its medieval past behind.
As with electric lighting, however, mains water was not eagerly taken up by the villagers. Those who had a good pumped supply were not keen to pay for those who didn’t, and the debate was only resolved in the 1930s, by which time the water of four out of five of the village wells had been condemned as unfit for drinking by modern standards. (In Britain as a whole at this time, more than half of all houses, about 7 million dwellings, lacked a hot-water supply, 6 million had no inside WC, and almost 5 million had no bath.) By May 1938 most of the village was connected, though village and private pumps continued in use for many years after the Second World War. At least one house relied on water from its own well until the drought of 1976 forced the owner to accept a mains supply, and even today wells in the three villages are still in use. As was the case for most of Britain, the arrival of water on tap, hot and cold, with baths (let alone showers), is a comparatively recent phenomenon.
The Second World War
After the Munich crisis of 1938 a village meeting was held in the Oddfellows hall, when villagers were fitted for gas masks. The Kibworth Air Raid Precautions handout was circulated on 27 March 1939, several months before the British declaration of war, but bythen, as older villagers remember, war already seemed inevitable (Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia on 15 March). The document was drawn up by the much-loved headmaster of the old grammar school, J. E. Elliot. On two typed and cyclostyled sheets the five wardens’ posts are enumerated, together with the first-aid point (the village hall) and the ‘Air Raid report centre’ (the grammar school). Over one hundred Kibworth people were mobilized, with first-aid teams, a rescue and demolition squad, ambulance drivers (‘Canon Eacott, Mrs Potts …’) and sixteen auxiliary firemen, including some old village names (John Iliffe was the deputy chief auxiliary fire officer, and two of his brothers also served).
From then on ‘fear of conflict was ever present’, wrote G. A. Ringrose, ‘and no one was surprised when war broke out in September 1939.’ Kibworth was immediately involved. That same weekend the first frightened child evacuees arrived by train from London, carrying their small belongings and a cardboard box for their gas mask, about to spend the next years of their lives far away from the back-to-backs of the East End in the rolling fields of Kibworth and Smeeton. In time the village would even have a small camp for Italian prisoners of war, who saw out the war working on local farms, and at least one of whom subsequently married a local girl.
Black-out rules were brought in immediately – and so effectively that ‘it was easy to get lost in one’s own village.’ The village appears in Luftwaffe photographs. Close to the US airbase at Bruntingthorpe, and on the German bombers’ flight path into the Black Country, it even saw a little action. The most famous event is still remembered by old people in the village. On a Sunday afternoon in October 1940, a low-flying German Dornier bomber strafed the High Street in Kibworth Beauchamp. Bombs also fell on the village on the night of the Coventry Blitz in November 1940, perhaps from a plane which had failed to reach its target and dropped its load on to the darkened countryside. That night an orange glow spread across the sky from the fires of Coventry, which could be seen clearly from the bedroom windows in Beauchamp. Then came the raids on Germany, when, as G. A. Ringrose remembered, ‘through 1942 in the evenings it was a familiar and almost unforgettable sight to see the skies over Kibworth literally full of bombers.’ Rose Holyoak, who worked as a landgirl driving tractors in a number of villages, remembers that her Uncle Vic, the chief mechanic at the Johnson & Barnes hosiery factory, supplied his own kitchen table to provide a base for the air raid siren which was mounted on the factory roof. (It remained there until the factory was demolished in July 1993!)
The village had its Home Guard unit (‘Dad’s Army’) based at St Wilfrid’s church; it was led by ‘Captain’ Blake, who painted his prized red Singer sports car in camouflage colours so effective that on more than one occasion he lost it and had to send out search parties – much to the amusement of his ‘platoon’. Through the war the village entertainments were kept up, with the dramatic and choral societies doing shows in the village hall, where patriotic and ‘morale-boosting’ government films were also shown. These were received by the villagers with sceptical humour. ‘ “Morale”,’ says Ringrose, ‘became a standard word, followed by “utility”!’ In the village there was deep scepticism about some of the government’s ‘propaganda’ campaigns, especially as they came in class accents. J. B. Priestley’s plain north country accent went down better than exhortations in plummy Eton tones. ‘Everyone felt sure that we would win the war,’ remembered one Kibworthian, ‘we didn’t need to be told to be cheerful: we were cheerful.’ As Ringrose recalled it: ‘wartime society in the village was disciplined and people were allowed to enjoy themselves without being victims of someone’s psychopathic condition!’ Being told to do their duty, in short, was felt to be not only unnecessary but impertinent. From the village newspaper it can be seen that from the start of the war Kibworth people, like the British population as a whole, saw a higher purpose than Churchill’s narrow rhetoric about empire: namely a community of interest with the people of Europe to counteract Germany’s ‘New Europe’. Even in ‘little’ Kibworth they saw that.
That was the Home Front. But, of course, many young men and women of the village fought in all three services throughout the war in North Africa, Italy and Normandy, in battles on land, at sea and in the air. Their experiences and feelings are brought into sharp focus in a home-produced village newspaper which was sent out to the ‘lads and lasses’ of Kibworth serving on all fronts during the war: at its peak in 1944–5 over 350 men and women. The Kibworth News and Forces’ Journal was sent free to all villagers in the forces with a motto from Burke: ‘To Love the little platoon we belong to in society is the germ of all public affection’. The paper was edited by a former First World War soldier, Leslie Clarke. It includes stories, letters, poems, competitions and illustrations, with pages of news from the village, including a record of all baptisms, marriages and deaths. ‘Our desire,’ wrote Clarke, ‘is that every issue of the Kibworth News may be a “memory chain link” reminding you of your home and village.’ The Christmas 1944 issue carries greetings from over thirty village organizations, clubs and societies, from the Working Men’s Club to the Women’s Institute. ‘Kibworth sends affectionate New Year Greetings to our Lads and Lassies on sea, land and in the air, to the sick and suffering and those who tend them, and to all prisoners of war.’ Each issue also contained a roll of honour of those who had lost their lives from Dunkirk to D-Day.
The letters from the troops speak with great affection of ‘that certain village back home in the Midlands of dear old England’, and the cover of the bumper victory issue of December 1945 has ‘Christmas Greetings, Happy family reunions, Good luck and success in Civvy Street’; there is a photo of May Holyoak chosen as ‘Lady Kibworth’ at the village carnival; and a rich letter column reminisces about the ‘Dear Old Village’ from India, Italy and Africa, with a poem from a grateful Kibworthian in Iraq, ‘Bagdad Blues’:
I want to feel the rain again, and mow a tennis lawn
I want to mess about in boats, and watch the bitter dawn …
I want to scurry home again as quickly as I can
To settle back in Kibworth, and be an ordinary man.
Post-war new world
Until the Second World War, it has often been said, the visible agencies of the state were just the policeman and postman, with the taxman unseen in the background. But the draconian wartime powers on the Home Front and the Labour victory in 1945 led to a dramatic increase in state control after 1945, and these changes across post-war England as a whole saw a world transformed: the rise of housing estates, the influx of new waves of immigrants, the end of the old industries like mining, shipbuilding and steel; the arrival of mass media and new forms of popular culture. A new England emerged: its population doubled during the century as all over the country former villages were swallowed by city suburbs. In Kibworth it was in the late forties and fifties that the signs of development which would turn the place into a small town were initially noticed. The first post-war housing scheme consisted of 150 council houses built opposite the church. Kibworth was still separated from Leicester, ten miles away, by open countryside, but as one villager remarked of that time: ‘We were becoming urbanized.’
Further far-reaching changes came in the sixties. More housing estates were built, but there was also a big change for the town’s workforce: with the closure of the hosiery factory in 1961, Kibworth’s long association with the knitting industry ended. ‘When the factory finally closed,’ wrote Ringrose, ‘it was as if a part of the character of Kibworth had vanished … scenes which had been commonplace for years disappeared: the workers on factory corner at Fleckney Road and Dover Street; children in the thirties returning after their midday break, the second shift coming on at 3 p.m. till midnight.’ Not long afterwards the railway station was closed, in the aftermath of Dr Beeching’s cuts. There was also a major reorganization of education, which led to the closure of the old grammar school. The Education Act of 1944 had laid down that ‘no fees were to be charged in respect of admission to any School maintained by a local education authority’, and though the grammar school gave some free places, it had only survived on feepayers. Between 1944 and 1954 the head, Mr Elliott, made a bold effort to revitalize the school, increasing the roll from 300 to over 500 pupils, and bringing Kibworth back to what its medieval or Tudor founders intended – a Free Grammar School. But after much agonizing, it was eventually decided that the school was too small to continue.
Your committee reached its conclusion with the utmost reluctance. It could contemplate the discontinuance of a school of Kibworth’s long tradition only with the most profound regret … but the inexorable fact is that if the Wigston Grammar-Technical School is built it is impossible to find sufficient children suited for the grammar school type of secondary education to keep Kibworth Grammar School in existence.
In 1964 the old premises of Kibworth Grammar School were closed and Kibworth High School was founded on a new site, and has now become a large and thriving school as the population of Kibworth has continued to expand since the sixties. As for the school box, the records going back to Kibworth’s Tudor schoolmaster and the medieval farmers whose gifts became the ‘school lands’, these testimonies to the story of education in the village over the centuries now rest in the County Record Office in Wigston.
The village today
Kibworth today is a thriving place of between 5,000 and 6,000 people. Typical of many large villages in modern England, many of its people work in shops and offices outside the village, some in Leicester, some even commuting through Market Harborough to London, which can now be reached by train in an hour. It still has several large farms, and one or two smaller ones. Merton College, though it sold its houses off in the 1970s, still rents out the fields which formed the large part of Walter of Merton’s original endowment of 1270. It still has a relationship with the village: the warden comes up every three years for a visit, and the college choir performs in St Wilfrid’s church. As it has been through history, the village’s main urban link is with Leicester, which these days is fast expanding southwards. Leicester is possibly the most multicultural city in modern Britain, and has managed the most recent waves of newcomers to England more successfully perhaps than anywhere else. (In 2009 the city announced that it would declare all ethnic groups minorities, even the ‘white’ English.) Kibworth itself is still a predominantly white place, but as members of the successful and vibrant Asian and Caribbean communities in Leicester rise in the middle class they are moving out southwards and Kibworth with its excellent high school is now becoming sought after. (A sign of the times, perhaps: the old Rose and Crown on the A6 is now one of the best Indian restaurants in the region, and a favourite for wedding celebrations with the Indian community in the area.)
At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century Kibworth reached what is perhaps the optimum size for a community, about 5,000 people (ten times its population in 1086). As it had in the nineteenth century, and during the Second World War, the village has a huge number of clubs, societies and institutions: in fact, more so than at any other time in its past. These many different groupings come together for spectacular events like the Relay for Life for Cancer Research, which raised £65,000. Of course, there have been huge changes in the last two centuries, but in some respects the village would still be recognizable to Woodford from the 1860s: it has football, bowls, golf and tennis clubs, and a very successful cricket club – founded 150 years ago, the club became national village champions in 2008. Music is still a very important aspect of village life, and there are many music and choral societies and two brass bands, one of which was established a century ago and became national village champions in 2006. The village has its own newspaper, the Kibworth Chronicle, which is published ten times a year, the layout done by hand in the village hall in the old-fashioned way for the simple reason that it involves more people. Kibworth also has a library, three dramatic societies, gardening clubs, three reading groups, Chinese and Indian takeaways and one of the finest Italian restaurants in England, set up by a charming Milanese, Lino Poli, who was drawn by love to Leicestershire, but ‘just liked it in Kibworth’.
So going back to William Blake’s aphorism with which this book began: one can always generalize about history; one can always tell it through the stories of kings and queens. But it is only by particularizing, by looking at it from the point of view of the ordinary people, that we begin to see the gradual development of society over time; how our rights and duties evolved; how the people were actors in their own history from the earliest times. We can see, too, how waves of newcomers have changed us, and renewed us, in our gene pool and in our language and culture. Kibworth is an ordinary place, realistic and down to earth in its social life, but like thousands of other places in England it is a living testimony to the way our communities have crystallized over time; a pointer to the fact that deep-rooted ideas and habits can be transmitted over very long periods, persisting like a current just below the surface of history, unseen but still there nonetheless, and still moving things along. Here the historian perhaps can only express a personal response to a year spent in one living and changing English community. There is at the moment an obsession with defining identity, with categorizing and even trying to measure it and teach it. But when we look at history from this perspective, through the eyes of one community over time, then what appears is obvious: that identity doesn’t come from the top down at all, it is not genetic, it is not fixed, safe and secure, for it can be reshaped by history and culture; so it is always in the making and never made; but it is the creation of the people themselves.
‘For ever England’
Let us leave the last word to a villager. In late 1944 the editor of the Kibworth Forces’ Journal, Leslie Clarke, was trying to catch up with the dramatic developments of the year for his news section: ‘Christmas is fast approaching,’ he wrote, ‘what tricks of time the war plays on us all!’ Clarke came from an old village family: by a strange chance, though he can scarcely have been aware of it, one of his ancestors in the seventeenth century had married a daughter of the Polles, who themselves after so many centuries in the village had finally run out of sons. So the story of the village ran in his veins far back in time, to the thirteenth century and beyond. He knew the face of war, having been wounded and captured in the Great War. Generous, public-spirited and self-effacing, he it was who had had the idea for the newspaper and the vision and energy to carry it through, ‘trying always’, as he put it, ‘to convey the spirit of friendship and understanding’. He had opened the letters page to the men and women on the front and had received comments from many of the three or four hundred young Kibworthians on active service, and from others who had read the paper as it was passed around, whether in Palestine, India or Africa. That winter of 1944, with the Allied march on Berlin now well under way, and victory all but certain, moved by what he read in their ‘letters to the editor’, his thoughts had turned to the future; about jobs for the young after the war; ‘how youth is to be served when youth comes home’, when a new, democratic and less class-ridden England would arise. But also, he wrote: ‘it is as well for us at times to think backwards as well as to look forward’, and he found himself reflecting on the history of the village:
During the past four and a half years I have gained such experience of the life of our village, but more important, I have found where the heart of the village lies. To me Kibworth has always been friendly, but that friendly spirit has never been more generously displayed than it is today … I walked through the three Parishes of Beauchamp, Harcourt and Smeeton the other evening. I looked upon them and thought of them. Yes, ‘Our Village’ (because we really should be one and united), with its houses tucked edgeways and sideways, looked to me very homelike and very beautiful. For our village – which fought in Flanders, in Greece and Crete, at El Alamein, fought on the sea and under the sea, in the Battle of Britain, in North Africa and Italy, in Normandy and France … our grumbling, friendly, warmhearted, gossip-loving village truly represents with ten thousand others of her kind, that free spirit – true and precious – which is, and will be, for ever England.