For people in the latter half of the 20th century, there were two main choices for comprehensive guidebooks about local history and the record of the built environment across the whole of England. One of these was the immense work of the German émigré to Britain Nikolaus Pevsner, `The Buildings of England,’ produced in county-by-county editions from 1951 to 1974, some by him and some by people under his direction, and since revised and reissued by other authors. The somewhat clinical and forensic style of this work was countered by the diametrically opposite work of Arthur Mee (1875-1943), in `The King’s England’, which commenced publishing in 1936, and then went on to cover over 10,000 towns, villages and hamlets across the country. The style of this epic work is often stirring to the point of being bombastic; it offers a history which is geared towards instilling a firm sense of emotional attachment and patriotic pride in a particular kind of England; one where the roll call of monarchs down the ages, and great writers and figures is deployed to promote a belief in the immutable, unchangeable qualities of both being English, but also of a very settled narrative of what the history of this place was. Mee’s work is good on churches, anecdotes and atmosphere; as a guide to the built environment, it probably made Pevsner’s head spin!
Mee himself lived for some years in Eynsford, where he had a house built for himself in 1913 (tellingly, despite its prominence, this house does not figure in Pevsner’s work!) According to his biographer, Keith Crawford (`Arthur Mee: A Biography’, Lutterworth Press, Cambridge, 2016) `Mee wanted something about his new home that symbolised his romanticised and emotional attachment to England’ (ibid, 32). The plot of land he bought overlooked the Darent Valley, and had excellent views of the countryside. It was designed by the well known architect Percy Morley Horder, who had also built houses for the Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
Mee’s writing had made him wealthy. So the house was much as he wanted it – a telling combination of old style features (or features regarded as old style by Mee), but with all modern conveniences of the time laid on. One of the most striking of these was a sizeable library. Once the building was finished, he entertained a number of literary associates there. These may have included the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who named a character in perhaps his best know work, `Pygmalion’ Eynsford Hill. Crawford speculates that this was perhaps more from Shaw’s sense of mischievousness, because it seems that the two had little regard for each other, and Shaw’s play was produced a year before Mee’s house was finished, and may have arisen from him simply hearing about the other writer’s grand plans. It is apparently impossible to prove from what records remain why Shaw used this, but was perhaps the Fabian playwright slightly sending up the much more right wing, traditionalist popular author and his pretensions.
Whether one agrees or not with the vision and values Mee espoused, few could fault his work ethic. His `Children’s Encyclopaedia’ from 1908, which he edited, and which continued to 1964 long after his death, involved a large amount of content produced by him. He produced an enormous amount of other kinds of writing. He was the quintessential professional writer. Born in Stapleford, near Nottingham, he had left school at 14, training immediately as a journalist on a local paper before joining the staff of the `Daily Mail’ in 1898, and becoming their literary editor in 1903. He chose Eynsford as a base because of its relatively close proximity to London and his office in Fleet Street, and because he claimed that he could see `a straight mile: unique on the map of rural England, with Roman, Normal, Saxon and Tudor architecture’ (`Eynsford – the protected village with chocolate box charm’, Kentish Times, 17th May 1973). By this he is referring to the site of the Roman house (not properly excavated till the 1950s), the Norman castle still standing partially ruined outside the village, and the Saxon settlement from which the village had originally grown. . Ironically, despite writing so much for children, and having one child of his own. Mee himself confessed to having no particular affinity with young people.
`The King’s History’ is a remarkable work, as much for the vision of England it presents as for the information (of which there is much) about major buildings. Inevitably many of these were churches. The entry for Canterbury is symptomatic, starting with the somewhat breathless lines:
`Well may he pause who comes to Canterbury. The meanest flower that blows brought thoughts too deep for tears for William Wordsworth; this proudest shrine of all our Motherland stirs thoughts too deep for tears for us.’ (Mee, `King’s England: Kent’ revised A F Kersting, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1969).
That Wordsworth’s poem `Thoughts That Do Often Lie to Deep For Tears’ has nothing whatsoever to do with Canterbury can be put down to artistic licence – though it is a little misleading to start off an entry this way. The reference to the `Motherland’ though is where things get more interesting – with the rest of the article, one of the longest entries, harking back persistently to the centrality of this city in this particular sense of national tradition and identity. Perhaps it was the turbulent politics of the 1930s, and the looming Second World War that had intensified Mee’s brand of patriotism and his urgent need to instil it in the young. Whatever its merits, his view of England from his books is often a very nostalgic one, looking back on a place that perhaps existed more in the imagination than in reality.
Mee’s work itself does instil nostalgia, though for somewhat different, more tangible reasons now. In some of the original editions of `The King’s England’, he records a world that amazingly still stands with all the continuity that implies, but also one long gone. In 2009, on a whim, I used a 1936 edition to go around some places in central Kent. For a surprising amount of time the book was still serviceable. The one problem was a couple of times when I was hunting for churches the guide wrote mellifluously about. Dunkirk church was inaccessible because it had long since been turned into a private residence. Eastwell Church had a more unfortunate fate: it had been bombed in the war, with only the walls standing, and the splendid Jacobean tombs now still visible – but in the Victoria and Albert Museum over 40 miles away! But these two were exceptions. Much of Mee’s world is still there. Perhaps, though, people now feel differently about it.