Following on from the introduction to how the Centre for Rural Economy (CRE) came into existence, Professor Christopher Ritson takes a look at the Faculty of Agriculture at Newcastle 50 years ago and comments on some of the main things which have changed since then.

Have you ever wondered why our building has an eighth floor, like a set of portacabins stuck on a flat roof?

Before I tell you, it is necessary to state that Part II of this blog comes with a health warning. To the best of my knowledge, Part I was an accurate, mainly factual, account of the evolution at Newcastle of social science related to agriculture, food and the rural economy in the 25 years prior to the establishment of the CRE. Part II draws on my experience as a Research Associate in the Agricultural Adjustment Unit (AAU) for one year, 1968/1969. It is based on ‘things I was told’ then, and also when I had returned to Newcastle as Head of the Agricultural Marketing Department ten years later. It contains  some ‘conjecture’ on my part!

The Eighth Floor

The Agriculture Building, designed in the 1950s for the Faculty of Agriculture at King’s College, is a classic example of soulless post- war British architecture. The Faculty consisted of seven departments – so, one floor for each department? Well, not quite. Agricultural Engineering occupied the Porter Building at the bottom of St Thomas Street, but otherwise it was Agriculture on floor 1; Agricultural Economics on 2; Agricultural Zoology and Plant Science (subsequently merged as Agricultural Biology) on 3 and 4; Soil Science on 5; and Agricultural Biochemistry on 6. Floor 7 was common user labs. Thus when the Ministry of Agriculture funded the addition of an eighth department, some  extra accommodation had to be added on the roof. That is where the Department of Agricultural Marketing was located until the Faculty expanded during the 1980s into the vacated Old Medical School building across the road.

The eighth floor also contained a glass “Insect House” at the south end, so marketing staff in need of a break could go onto the roof and watch the locusts flying around. The Insect House was not the only wildlife kept in the Agriculture Building. If you left the building via the basement then you would usually hear a few “Baa’s” on your way out, from the sheep kept there.

Two new professors

Having 6-8 small departments of roughly equal size in each faculty was typical of the University structure at that time. Each department would have an “Established” named Chair, and “The Professor” was usually also the Head of Department. However, in 1960 there was no Professor of Agricultural Economics at Newcastle. So how did a nondescript backwater of the subject acquire two of them and large injections of funding to develop Agricultural Marketing and the AAU? Elsewhere in the country, agricultural economics was characterized by a small number of high-profile individuals who dominated their own local territory. So, ‘what I was told’ is that Agricultural marketing was first offered by the Ministry to another English university, but the incumbent professor there turned it down, because it would lead to ‘divide and rule’. Thus, the lack of a dominant figure who might feel threatened by a second Chair was instrumental in Newcastle being chosen. 

There were two attempts at filling the new Chair in Agricultural Marketing, and eventually, the head of Agricultural Economics, Mark Carpenter, was appointed. The Ministry representative on the Selection Committee was their deputy head of Economics, John Ashton, and he persuaded King’s College that what they really needed was a Professor of Agricultural Economics as well, and that he was the man for the job.  The status of a professor at that time is evidenced by the fact that John Ashton had written into his appointment that the Chair in Agricultural Economics would be “the Senior Chair in this area”. Soon after his appointment, John Ashton met the representative from the Kellogg Foundation (who was in search of a suitable location in Europe to promote agricultural adjustment) at King’s Cross. By the time the train reached Newcastle Central Station, the whole thing was sorted (doubtless with a degree of assistance from the buffet bar).

Experience as a Research Associate

The AAU was a very fertile place for a young researcher to learn his trade. There was a variety of projects to work on, and excellent guidance from senior staff. One who was particularly supportive of me was a retired Australian trade diplomat, Frank Grogan. He had the capacity to incorporate the word ‘bloody’ into nearly every sentence. The one that has always stuck in my mind was his subtle refinement of Ricardian trade theory into ‘Comparative Bloody Advantage’.

One piece of work that I was given concerned a survey of Northern dairy farms commissioned by the Ministry in which the usual summary tables did not really tell you anything. John Ashton asked if I could (what would now be described as) ‘sex it up’ a bit with some quantitative analysis. Quantitative analysis then involved putting data on to a set of punch cards, taking them to ‘The University Computer’, and returning the following day to collect the printout. The data set was remarkable in that nothing seemed to be related to anything else, no matter how rational the hypothesis – e.g. economies of scale. But then I had a eureka moment when the printout came back with a fantastic R²; until, that is, I realized I had managed to put the same variable on both sides of the equation.

Back to the eighth floor

The staff complement for the Department of Agricultural Marketing consisted of a professor, six lecturers, a demonstrator (teaching assistant), a computational officer, two clerical staff (typists), and a butcher, Ken (not joking). Ken had been employed  given the departments  intitial research having been commissioned by the Meat and Livestock Commission on consumer attitudes within the red meat sector. One evening Ken worried that he had left the oven on in the meat laboratory (kitchen) on the eighth floor. He telephoned University Security and asked them to check. Half an hour later the security officer telephoned back and said he was sorry, but the Agriculture Building did not have an eighth floor. (He believed the lift!)

For the Agricultural Marketing department, at first, the working week included Saturday morning. (probablya legacy of its Ministry funding, and not a University-wide practice).  On Saturday mornings, Mark Carpenter would stroll round the roof to look in every office window to check that all were present. Once he observed one of the lecturers, David Lesser, with his feet up reading The Times, and told him subsequently that he was not there “to educate himself”. For most staff, working on the eighth floor on Saturday mornings was viewed mainly as an overture to The Hotspur at lunch time. This requirement to work on Saturday mornings did not last long, though the Hotspur tradition lived on for more many more years.

Plus Ça Change

So, “things were different in them days”. What stands out was the university structure of many small departments, in faculties not much bigger than today’s Schools. (Large Schools of course then have to create divisions with ‘line managers’, a bit like the old departments.) There were few professors, and virtually all occupied ‘Established Chairs’. Promotion to Professor almost always meant moving to a different university. This was the case for Ken Thompson, Alan Buckwell, and David Harvey (as I mentioned in Part I), and indeed also for me.

One other major difference occurred to me while writing this. During my first few years in the agricultural marketing department, the degree of Agricultural and Food Marketing had an annual intake of 50-55 students, which was very large for a small department. Of those who reached graduation, typically, 30% would be awarded an upper second, 60% a lower second and 10% a Third. Every other year or so, a First Class degree would be awarded to an outstanding student (a different ratio to today’s intake).

One of the merits of a small department, with perhaps just a single degree programme, was the sense of identity and community spirit it gave to both staff and students. This is lacking in large Schools. Alumni from 40 years ago have no idea to which bit of the current university they relate. However, I think the CRE, at least for staff and research students, has recreated this lost sense of identity – of belonging to something – of a community of like-minded individuals with similar interests. Let us hope they do not now decide to merge the CRE with something else, to create “a larger more efficient” unit.

With the Centre for Rural Economy fast approaching its 30^th birthday next year, Emeritus Professor Christopher Ritson recounts the 25 years of social science agriculture, food and the rural economy prior to the centre’s establishment.

In this first Blog I want to put on record the string of events over a period of 25 years which led to the establishment of the Centre for Rural Economy (CRE). In Part II, I take a more light-hearted look at life in the Agriculture Building 50 years ago.

­Where did it all begin?

Oddly, it started with the arrival of Agricultural Marketing at Newcastle. During the 1950s, the UK moved rapidly from early post-war food shortage and rationing, in which the policy priority was increasing output and improving the productivity of domestic agriculture, to the problem becoming declining and unstable farm product prices. The challenges of this period were reminiscent of those faced in 1930s, which had led to the establishment of Marketing Boards for most agricultural commodities.

In this context, the Ministry of Agriculture, which had developed the network of farm business data collection based in agricultural economics departments throughout the country, decided that agricultural economics research needed to move away from concentrating on farm production economics towards studying the economics of post-farm gate markets. In the early 1960s, it financed the creation of a Chair and Department of Agricultural Marketing at King’s College, Newcastle (then part of Durham University, but soon to become independent as the University of Newcastle upon Tyne). Here is an extract from the press release issued under the name of the Rector of King’s College, Charles Bosanquet:

“Experience has convinced both the Ministry and King’s College that there is an extreme shortage of economists adequately trained to study distribution economics, and that the changes in the agricultural policy of the UK that may be expected will make it desirable to build up studies in marketing to the point at which they at least equal the national effort in production economics.”

Why Newcastle was chosen for this substantial investment is something of a mystery, as there were, at the time, around a dozen agricultural economics centres throughout the UK with a more distinguish academic profile than Newcastle. (I can offer one explanation, albeit based only on anecdotal evidence. For this you will have to wait for Part II of this blog.)

Agricultural Adjustment

This was the first step in the journey towards the broader study of the rural economy – the application of “economic principles to the problems of identifying and satisfying the needs and preferences of consumers, by the most effective use of markets, processing plants, transport, advertising, and retail outlets.” (Again, from the Bosanquet press release.)

In parallel with this was the view that the structure of farming itself needed to “adjust” to the way agricultural product markets and consumer food demand were evolving. So, just a few years after the Ministry of Agriculture’s finance of agricultural marketing at King’s College, there was a second massive investment, this time by the Kellogg Foundation, to establish the Agricultural Adjustment Unit (AAU). The Grant was secured by the recently appointed Professor of Agricultural Economics, John Ashton (more of this in Part II), and provided five years funding for six research associates, together with support staff.

The upshot was that over a period of 10 years, from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, agricultural economics at Newcastle was transformed from something of a backwater into one of the leading UK centres for social science research related to agriculture, food and the rural economy.

Agricultural Marketing at Newcastle was awarded the top grade in the first national Research Assessment Exercise. However, the main legacy of the agricultural marketing initiative turned out to be in teaching. The Chair in Agricultural Marketing is reputed to be the first anywhere in Europe with the word “marketing” in its title. The Department’s MSc in Marketing (note, just “marketing”, not agricultural marketing) was the first marketing degree in the UK, and the BSc Agricultural and Food Marketing, the first “marketing” undergraduate degree. Gradually, marketing came to dominate “agriculture and food” with many new teaching initiatives, most of which have now been transferred to the Business School.

The baton for meeting the Ministry requirement for agricultural economics research to support “the changes in agricultural policy in the UK that may be expected” was, in part, picked up by three members of staff in the Agricultural Economics department, Ken Thompson, Allan Buckwell, and David Harvey, who together published a book on the subject, titled “The Cost of the Common Agricultural Policy” (1982). Soon all three were to leave for Chairs at Aberdeen, Wye College, and Reading respectively, though David was only on loan to Reading for a few years!

Countryside Change

Perhaps the most important step on the path towards the creation of the CRE itself was the work of Martin Whitby. Martin was a lecturer in agricultural economics during the time of the AAU, and a major contributor to its output. Part of the “adjustment” envisaged for the agricultural sector concerned rural employment and labour migration, and this was Martin’s area of expertise. When the funding for the AAU ended, Martin carried his interest forward with a sort of “slimmed down” version of it.

The AAU eventually became the Countryside Change Unit (CCU), following a successful bid to a call from the ESRC in 1987 by Martin and David Harvey (by then back at Newcastle) for research into the changing nature of the British countryside. The ESRC funded two centres in response to their call, the CCU at Newcastle (three full time researchers for five years – of whom one was current CRE director Guy Garrod), and a similar unit at University College London (UCL), co-led by Philip Lowe.

The creation of the CRE

When the Chancellor of Newcastle University, the Duke of Northumberland, died in 1988, a funding appeal was launched in his memory. A blueprint for a “Centre for Rural Economy”, written by Martin Whitby, was put forward from the Faculty of Agriculture in response to a university-wide invitation for proposals for the funding raised. Given the dominance of the Medical School at Newcastle, it was expected that funds from appeals of this kind would usually finance medical research. However, Martin’s proposal struck a chord with the land-owning Northern contributors to the Duke of Northumberland Appeal, and the proposal to create a Centre for Rural Economy was the successful application.

That the Centre would be located in the Faculty of Agriculture (then in the process of becoming the larger Faculty of Agriculture and Biological Sciences) was not a foregone conclusion. The Head of the Department of Geography, John Goddard, put forward an academic case for the Centre to be in Geography as part of, or at least alongside, the high-profile Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS). However, the Agriculture Dean, Keith Syers (the Head of a faculty was then called “The Dean”) told me that the message coming from the major donors to the appeal fund was that they regarded it as “unthinkable” that the Centre would not be located “in Agriculture”.

Nevertheless, Geography was accorded a role in the establishment of the CRE. John Goddard and I (at the time, head of the recently merged Department of Agricultural Economics and Food Marketing) jointly undertook a series of informal interviews with long-list candidates for what had become designated as “The Duke of Northumberland Professor of Rural Economy”. Four candidates went forward for final interview. The successful candidate was the Director of the UCL CCU, Philip Lowe. In addition, a personal Chair was also secured for Martin Whitby.

Thus, the CRE was born. In Part II I take a more light-hearted look at life in the Agriculture Building 50 years ago.