Streaming on the Cinema of Ideas from 9 – 16 September, Life in the Woods is an online event exploring our relationship with nature and imagining a sustainable future on Earth. Watch the trailer here.
One of the films in the programme is The Moon and the Sledgehammer: a fascinating documentary from 1971 which captures the strange existence of the Pages, a family living a simple life in the Sussex woodlands without running water, electricity or gas. In this blog, the ICO’s Sami Abdul-Razzak speaks with the film’s director Philip Trevelyan about his experience with the Page family and what we can learn from their approach to life in these times of environmental crisis.
SAR: Hello Philip, thanks very much for taking the time to speak with me. First of all, I’d be interested to know what you were doing around the time the film was made. How did you first hear about the Page family?
PT: Jim Page, the one who makes steam engines in the film, came to work in our village [near Newhaven, East Sussex] in an engineering shop. But I wasn’t aware of him until after he had been to an auction and asked a friend of mine to help him bring what he’d bought back to his wood. I had made two or three films by then so my friend alerted me to them, saying that they were very special and that I should meet them.
SAR: The first time I watched the film the thing that interested me the most about the Pages was their mechanical skill. I got the impression that they could fix anything with their hands. Is that accurate?
PT: Yes, they were lovely skilled blacksmithing workers. They understood machinery well and they had a particular fondness for steam. I worked on a farm as a boy [and later made a short film about it: Lambing] and they used to come to that farm with their threshing gear and I helped during the threshing. Well, did my best to help, I was probably useless. But I’d been among them, heard stories about them, at that stage.
SAR: Are there things that the Pages said back then about our attitude to the land and nature which have been borne out today?
PT: It’s very sad at the moment, the number of people who have left farming. It’s going to have to be revived. There are all sorts of movements at the moment to revive farming, to bring more people back into it and to make food more local. All things that Mr. Page would approve of.
In the film he says “Food first. Work afterwards.” We haven’t got our priorities right, and the priorities were set. By tradition of course, but also by the 1947 Agricultural Act, which was a very fine agricultural act. We’ve gradually worn it away over the years, but it was a very fine piece of work and we should have stuck to it.
SAR: Could you expand a bit on that, why do you think people are leaving farming?
PT: Why are people leaving banks? Why are people leaving anything? All sorts of industries and organisations are trying to make more money by removing people and replacing them with machines. There are now countless people-less systems and I dislike it immensely.
Farmers are incentivised to buy new machinery. Partly to keep the workforces that make the machinery going, but also by the idea that you’ll get more efficient if you get bigger. Having bigger tractors and fewer people is more efficient, it makes more money for the farmer. The government also incentivises farmers to buy new machinery to offset taxes. If they make any profits then they won’t pay tax on them if they buy a new machine, because their profits will be used up.
But it doesn’t chime with the way I look at life, or the way the Page family looked at life. I was once in India where there was a big farm operated by lots of people driving just one tractor. They took it in shifts to operate it and this one little tiny tractor looked after about 500 acres. It was maintained beautifully, looked after and loved, and it went on forever. You didn’t need new tractors.
SAR: Is this what Mr. Page means by his criticism of “push-button” machines?
PT: Yes, it is. There’s a point at which greater efficiency doesn’t do anything for the food we’re producing, or the society that we’re living in.
To be honest I haven’t been thinking about this film at all… I’ve been thinking about my farm. What is it he says about the moon?
SAR: He says he has plenty of room to swing his sledgehammer without hitting the moon.
PT: Yes. That’s his way of saying that going to the moon is a waste of time and a waste of money [the moon landing took place in the weeks following the making of the film]. We’ve got things to do down here that we haven’t sorted out and that’s where I want to put my energy. That’s what he’s saying. And my word, the current state of the world and the country suggests that’s where we should be concentrating all of our efforts.
He’s saying things that a lot of people felt at the time, even in the sixties. We were all mighty troubled by the massive changes that were taking place. I think there were indications of climate change as well, even then. I think it was in 1972 that A Blueprint for Survival was printed [which recommended that people live in small, decentralised and de-industrialised communities, in order to reduce environmental impact and keep agricultural and business practices ecologically sustainable].
SAR: I think at one point in the film Mr. Page says that “Man will invent things to destroy himself”. That now seems scarily accurate.
PT: Yes. You could say that as soon as we invented machines and replaced people with machines there was a thermodynamic revolution, because until then everything had been done by muscle power and all of a sudden we’re taking stuff out of the ground and replacing muscles with oil. It’s the wrong kind of machine, the machine has to be sustainable some way or another. It needs to be run by water or sun, or maybe some hydrogen extracted from the water. We’ve made the wrong machines. We have invented things which are destroying us.
SAR: One of the ideas we’re going to be discussing in the event is how we can reduce our own personal energy use. It’s probably not realistic for everyone to live off-grid like the Pages, but are there things that we can learn from their approach to life?
PT: There are lots of ways in which society can improve. We need a few strong indicators to guide us, and there are indications in what the Pages say. They may seem eccentric, and they may not have been an entirely happy family, but they had some wisdom. They were prepared to speak it, and get angry about things.
I think the main thing is to use as little as possible. For example, heat: if you get a really well-insulated house you can light just a few matches and keep warm. It’s that kind of attitude we need… if you go abroad to colder northern countries you see that the way they keep warm is by keeping the cold out, and retaining any tiny bit of heat that’s inside.
We’re all spoilt, we can get oil and coal out of the ground and make it easy for ourselves. I think it’s got to be slightly more difficult, and thought about more carefully. And I think a lot of people will be thinking very hard this winter.
SAR: Some of the other ideas we’ll be discussing are large-scale rewilding of the planet’s available land, to absorb carbon emissions & support the planet’s biodiversity. Do you see value in those ideas?
PT: Oh absolutely. My son’s work involves trying to get farmers to change their ways: stopping them roll fields when it’s known that birds are nesting, planting wildflower meadows, that kind of thing.
Additionally, there are organisations which are buying up huge amounts of conventional farmland and using it for regenerative farming. It’s things like that, major funding iniatives, that change the way we farm. They’re absolutely vital, and there’s every indication it’s taking hold among farmers at the moment because the prices of fertiliser and chemicals are too high. It needs to happen on a big scale.
SAR: Finally, why do you think people are drawn to the film 50 years on?
PT: For the same reasons they were drawn to it then. There are some funny bits in it, but there are some real lessons in it too. They spoke their minds, they weren’t mealy-mouthed in the way that most people are. They were real and they were telling us straight what they thought.
They were part of society and they were much respected in the district. When Peter died, the whole community turned out. He was put on a steam engine and his coffin went through the village and people threw flowers over it. It was a big event. Peter was the very passionate, slightly awkward one, who lifts spanners into the air. “The world’s all to pieces”, he says.
Life in the Woods is streaming on the Cinema of Ideas from 9 – 16 September, and features The Moon and the Sledgehammer alongside Lucile Hadžihalilović’s beautiful short film De Natura. At 6:30pm on Tuesday 13 September, we’ll be joined by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese (authors of the recently-published Half-Earth Socialism) for a live discussion about their plan for a future free from extinction, climate change and pandemics.