Scott of ‘The countryman’

A NOTE arrives from Crispin Gill, present editor of The countryman, that unique rural quarterly that like so many magazines these days is not quite what it was, but which this year celebrates 50 years of successful publication. I am intrigued by the fine‐detailed illustration block at the head of the paper. It shows a farmer‐type in tweeds and soft hat contentedly smoking his pipe as he leans (on a summer's evening?) over a traditional five‐barred gate set in a field stone wall. His faithful collie stands at his heel, the village church nestles in the distance, a flock of birds (rooks?) wing their way over the horizon, a huge briar rose in full bloom angles in from one side, while beneath it an idealised song‐bird perches jauntily on a convenient dead bough, facing a tall clump of cow‐parsley. A sense of rustic peace pervades all. Everything is perfect, completely soporific, quite innocuous. A modern ad‐man's dream of the countryside, in fact. Precisely. And therefore totally the antithesis of everything that old J W Robertson Scott, the magazine's founder and original editor, stood for and believed in. Indeed, he coined his own description of it: ‘townee sentimentalising about the country’ was what he called such stuff.