Like your correspondents Roger Fieldhouse and John Morrison (Letters, 6 October) I too was a (briefly) WEA tutor organiser in North Yorkshire (1973-74) and met the wonderful Ted and Nora Drake. I think they’d have been deeply appalled by the parade of joyless stereotypes that later passed for “an everyday story of country folk”. As part of my job I’d go to evening meetings of the Agricultural Workers’ Union, with their sainted district organiser, Joan Maynard (later MP for Sheffield Brightside), where we heard, too often, the awful accounts of the treatment of farmhands by their employers. We also monitored The Archers and would occasionally fire off indignant letters to the BBC about its woeful misrepresentation of agricultural workers and their trade union representatives. There was rarely a mention of their work conditions and pitiful wages were which were some of the worst of any occupation and instead the lower orders were more usually represented in the programme by the drivelling inanities of Walter Gabriel and the Grundys and their like. I still marvel at its popularity – not so much “Merry England” as middle England’s Animal Farm.
Tom Steele
Otley, West Yorkshire
• It wasn’t only the boys who listened (Letters, 8 October)! Growing up in safe rural Worcestershire in the 40s, I found Dick Barton a wonderful escape into excitement and dramatic deadlines. My father, who was the county’s senior local government official, assuaged my bitter complaints at its impending end by sharing a big secret with me: that several of “his” officials in County Hall were helping the BBC in Birmingham to set up this new serial, with suitable agricultural information to be slotted into its storylines – and that the layout of this invented community would be based around a village that we knew slightly at the Birmingham end of the county. With such a guarantee, I was able to switch my nine-year-old allegiance without difficulty to characters who could be imagined in a landscape that was already familiar.
Helen McPhail
Shrewsbury
• It is a common mistake to say that The Archers replaced Dick Barton. He was actually dislodged by The Daring Dexters, a circus family, who were then replaced by the Archer family. A mere bunch of farmers could never have displaced Dick, Jock and Snowy.
Claude Scott
Richmond, Surrey
• My late father-in-law (Newton Loynes), who at the time was county secretary of Lincolnshire Farmers Union, recounted the story that after a meeting of farmers, someone suggested that what was needed was “a Dick Barton for farmers”; from this conversation, the idea for The Archers was born.
Bruce Oliver
Coventry
• It’s time to provide a definitive answer to this conundrum of how The Archers was created. The BBC pinched the idea from Tony Hancock’s excellent radio serial The Bowmans, in which he played Joshua Merriweather. When the title was changed to The Merriweathers, the BBC thought they would be safe from accusations of plagiarism by calling their show The Archers. I believe that Mr Hancock had some help from two young writers called Ray Galton and Alan Simpson in the creation of The Bowmans and The Merriweathers, but I can’t definitively prove this. I hope that this now puts an end to the debate.
Brian Carr
St Helens, Merseyside
• Credit is also due to letter writers Roger Fieldhouse, John Morrison and Peter Branston for enabling three references in two days to “adult education”, a rare bird indeed in the Guardian over several years.
David Browning
Huddersfield
