Cider at the agricultural show

The county and regional agricultural societies founded across Britain from the middle of the eighteenth century were voluntary improvement organisations, generally led by landowners and larger tenants, funded by subscription, and committed to raising output through the spread of better practice. They published transactions, offered premiums for specified improvements, and held an annual show.

The show was the visible part of a much wider programme. Livestock classes existed to demonstrate breeding, root and grain classes to demonstrate husbandry, implement displays to spread machinery, and produce classes to demonstrate that a farm could make something well. Cider and perry classes belong in that last category, and they carry the same instructional intent.

The social structure of the thing is worth stating plainly rather than glossing over. Shows were organised by the men who owned the land, judged by their peers, and attended by everyone; a prize was a piece of standing within a hierarchy as well as a statement about a cask of cider. That is not a criticism of the institution, but it does explain what the prize was worth and to whom.

The physical arrangement was consistent enough across counties to describe as a type. Entries were brought in the maker’s own containers, arranged on trestles under canvas, tasted by a panel during the morning, and displayed with cards through the day. The tent held cider and perry alongside butter, cheese, honey, eggs, bread and preserves, which places it accurately: cider was farm produce, not a drinks trade exhibit.

The class list is the most useful surviving document. Which classes a society offered, and how it divided them, records what the county considered the significant distinctions in its own cider — dry against sweet, cider against perry, farmhouse against factory as the twentieth century went on, single-variety classes as those became a category people cared about. Following one society’s list across a hundred years is a decent proxy for the history of what cider was thought to be.

Entries in the earlier period came overwhelmingly from farms rather than from firms. That changed as commercial production grew, and several societies eventually separated commercial and farm classes, which is itself an admission that the two were no longer competing at the same thing.

Beyond the tent, the show was a trading occasion. Nurserymen sold fruit trees and took orders for grafts; makers of mills, presses and cellar equipment demonstrated their machines to farmers who had no other way of seeing them work; merchants met growers; and the large cider firms of the twentieth century used shows to recruit contract growers and to make themselves visible in the counties they bought fruit from.

This commercial function explains why the shows survived when many of the societies’ other activities did not. A publication programme can be replaced by a journal and a premium by a grant, but a day on which the whole agricultural community of a county is in one field is not easily replaced, and that remains true.

It also explains a persistent tension. As shows became large public events with substantial gate revenue, the balance between the agricultural core and the general entertainment around it shifted, and produce tents that once occupied the centre of the ground moved to the edge of it. The cider class survived that shift better in the cider counties than most produce classes did elsewhere, because the drink was also being sold on the day.

Agricultural shows are county institutions, and they did a good deal to construct the idea of a county cider. A show that runs classes for the cider of one county, judged by men from that county against their shared expectation, produces a definition of what that county’s cider ought to be — and then rewards conformity to it, year after year, for generations.

That is a real historical force and not merely a sentiment. Regional style descriptions that are now written down as though they were natural facts about a place were, in part, produced by exactly this mechanism: repeated judgement against a local expectation, in an institution with standing.

The later protected geographical indications for cider and perry in the three western counties and in Wales formalise regional identities that the shows had been maintaining informally for a century and a half. The line of descent is not direct, and the legal criteria are not the show criteria, but the idea that cider has a county is one the shows did a great deal to establish.

County shows continue, and cider and perry classes continue within them, in most of the traditional producing districts. What has changed is that they are no longer the principal public assessment available to a maker: dedicated competitions, festival judging and structured national frameworks have taken that role, and a small producer today is likely to enter several of these.

What the show retains is its position in a county calendar and its mixed audience. A cider class at a county show is tasted by judges and then walked past by several thousand people who have come for the livestock, which is a different kind of exposure from a specialist competition and is one of the few places where cider still meets an agricultural public rather than a drinks one.