Cider and the Victorian agricultural depression

From the middle of the 1870s British farming entered a prolonged contraction. American prairie grain reached British ports cheaply as railways and steamships cut the cost of carriage, and wheat prices fell to levels that made much English arable unprofitable. A run of bad seasons, worst in 1879, made the position acute.

Refrigerated shipping extended the same pressure to livestock from the 1880s, bringing chilled and frozen meat from the Americas and Australasia. Rents fell, land went out of cultivation, and the agricultural workforce continued its long movement to the towns and overseas. Two royal commissions investigated the depression before the century ended.

The effects were regionally uneven. Arable districts in the east suffered most. Grassland and mixed farming districts in the west, which had less wheat to lose and could turn to milk, fared comparatively better, though nobody in them would have described the period as comfortable.

For a farm with the right land and access to a railway, fruit was one of the few enterprises whose prospects looked better rather than worse. Urban demand for fruit was growing, jam manufacture was expanding, and the crop did not compete directly with the imports that were destroying grain and meat prices.

In the cider counties this produced a modest revival of orchard planting at the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, alongside the reconditioning of neglected orchards. Some of the planting was for dessert and culinary fruit and some for cider, and the distinction is not always recoverable from the records.

The counterpressure was that cider itself was worth very little. A farm could sell fruit to a cider maker for a low but certain price, or make cider badly and sell it for less. The economics pushed towards selling the crop, which is precisely what allowed factories to grow.

The cider allowance to labourers continued through the depression, and for a farm short of cash it became more useful rather than less: drink from one’s own orchard cost nothing that had to be found in coin. That is one reason the custom outlived the legislation aimed at it.

At the same time the quality problem became visible in a new way. As soon as cider had to be sold outside the parish it had to keep, travel and taste consistent, and the ordinary product of a farm cellar did none of those things reliably. Buyers responded by taking fruit rather than cider, and by pressing and fermenting it themselves under better control.

The result was a redistribution of where cider was made. Making moved off the farm and into premises with capital, glass-lined vessels, laboratory control and a railway siding — a shift completed in the following century but visible in outline by 1900.

The depression produced the two ingredients a commercial industry needs: a supply of fruit from farms with no better use for it, and a recognition that the technical problems of cider — spoilage, inconsistency, unsaleable acidity — required more than farm practice could supply.

That recognition is part of the background to the founding of the National Fruit and Cider Institute in 1903. A research station addressing fruit growing and cider making was a response to a rural economy under strain, and was argued for in exactly those terms.

It is worth resisting the reading in which the depression rescues cider. It did nothing of the kind. It made farms poorer, drove people off the land and left orchards in the hands of owners with no money to renew them. What it changed was who made cider, and on what terms.