DOREEN'S WAR

You don't see Doreen Wallace mentioned on the nation's literary pages these days, which is a pity because there was a time when she was hardly off them. A prolific writer, political agitator, farmer and gardener, she built a popular literary career especially from the 1930s until well into the 1970s, and indeed until a few years before her death in 1989.
Born in Cumberland in 1897, Doreen was educated at Malvern and Somerville College, Oxford, and in 1922 married Roland Rash, a farmer of Wortham, in Suffolk. It was here, in Suffolk, that she began to add the cadences and eccentricities of East Anglia to her palette of eperiences.
Her novels were good sellers in their day, and they included Barnham Rectory, published in 1934, Going to Sea, The Time of Wild Roses, Green Acres - produced during the Second World War - and later titles including Willow Farm, Sons of Gentlemen, Woman With a Mirror; and her last, in 1976, Landscape With Figures. She also wrote on other subjects, including gardening and the landscape, and was prolific in the short story field.
In 1975 Collins published several of her short stories under the collective title of Changes and Chances, and book in hand I went to Diss to meet her. She autographed it for me. I still have it, and it says, 'Sincerely Yours,' written in Biro, which now feels oddly out of kilter with her and her time, because I suppose I thought she would use a fountain pen. But mainly it is my memory of her as a charming, bespectacled lady which remains, because she deliberately played down the grit and sparkiness for which she was known in her earlier years. 
Doreen Rash was a battler. And the battlefield? The tithe system, a tax which was seen to be crippling farmers particularly during the difficult agricultural depression in the 1930s.
The Tithe Wars, as they became known, had a long history but they came to a head in the 1930s. High profile cases of bankrupts and protests made national headlines. Kent, with hop tithes of up to £1 per acre, formed a tithepayers' defence association, and Suffolk, with an average tithe of seven shillings per acre, was next to organise, followed rapidly by Norfolk and Essex. By 1931, nearly fifty organisations in England and Wales were linked under one national umbrella.
The bitterness ran deep. In 1934, and following non-payment, a bailiff and his men stripped Hall Farm, near Potter Heigham, in Norfolk, seizing futniture and cattle. Then in 1947 AG Mobbs, of Oulton Broad, a leading tithe critic, refused to pay £1 14s 2d. However, the judge at Lowestoft County Court declined to send him to prison, saying, 'There is nothing more foolish than making a martyr.'
As for Doreen and Roland Rash, the bailiffs arrived at Wortham in 1934, putting the farm under siege for six weeks. In 1935 a monument was erected nearby commemorating 'The Tithe War. 134 pigs and 15 cattle seized for the tithe. February 22nd, 1934.' The Rash family lost that particular battle, and they lost again in 1939 when Doreen and Roland were declared bankrupt and the contents of their home were put up for auction on the front lawn at Wortham. On the other hand, you could say that they, and AG Mobbs and others, actually carried the day, because tithes were finally abolished in 1977.
Doreen, who was carried shoulder-high off the lawn by her supporters on that momentous day all those years before, concentrated once again on her writing. And she did so successfully, so you could say she won several major battles.
(Changes and Chances, by Doreen Wallace. Collins, 1975)