Having outlined the CWAECs’ powers of dispossession and the various scales at which this power could be analysed, we can now turn from the aggregate to the singular, from statistical abstraction to human frailty. In particular we examine a clash between one committee, that for Hampshire, and one Hampshire farmer. At the local scale, Whitehall policies become meaningful social relations, human feelings and experience. An otherwise unremarkable farmer, George Raymond (known locally as Ray) Walden, was shot dead by police in July 1940, in his own farmhouse. This chapter demonstrates and evaluates the extreme measures available to CWAECs and the relations of power within agricultural communities.

The huge loss of life in the Second World War left few United Kingdom families untouched. There were over 67,000 civilian deaths, alongside the 300,000 killed from the forces and auxiliary forces. So amongst this degree of upheaval and loss, it is pertinent to ask why the death of one man in particular should occasion special treatment. But this was a strange death.

There are few studies which illustrate the impact of CWAEC policies at the farm level, other than through autobiographies. If official accounts maintained that relations between individuals and CWAECs were fairly harmonious throughout the war, there were other cases where accusations were levelled of mishandling and bullying by the CWAECs, some of which were touched on in Chapter 6. The CWAECs were required to employ ‘firmer measures against the recalcitrant or hopelessly inefficient’. As we have seen, this could include legal action by magistrates, taking possession of some of a farm’s land, or finally all of the land and the farmhouse, thereby requiring the eviction of the resident. Depending on the contingent circumstances of each case, these ultimate measures could be undertaken in ways which ensured compliance or, at the other extreme, great hostility.

The Hampshire WAEC

The Hampshire WAEC was chaired throughout the war by Charles Lennard Chute from The Vyne, Basingstoke. He was assisted by two vice-chairs: Roland Dudley from Linkenholt, and Gerald Wallop (Viscount Lymington, the ninth Earl of Portsmouth), from Farleigh Wallop, whose A knot of roots (1965) offers insights into other personalities on the CWAEC, such as Tom Mitchell, with whom Portsmouth worked at tasks ‘sometimes sad ones when a really hopeless farmer had to be turned out of his holding to make way for better food producers’.