Professor J. A. SCOTT WATSON (Professor of Rural
Economy in the University of Oxford)
Professor Scott Watson will talk generally this evening of Britain-yesterday, today, and tomorrow, or, as he so graphically describes it, of Cobbett's Country. William Cobbett , it will bo remembered, lived in both the end of the eighteenth century and in the beginning of the nineteenth, so that his times were as critical and stirring as our own. His grandfather a day labourer, his father a small farmer, he himself worked in the fields as a boy ; and, returning to the land after a varied career, he contrasted it with the countryside as he remembered it and as it had become under the stress of war-time prices and oppressions. The helplessness of the people touched his passionate sympathy with the under-dog. His Rural Ride8 showed his impressions of a changing England ; in fact, in this first-hand survey of the land he was doing just over a hundred years ago what Professor Scott Watson is doing today. The broadcast this evening will end with a discussion between a farmer and h;s son.