Agricultural Modernity as a Product of the Great War: The Founding of the Official Seed Testing Station for England and Wales, 1917–1921

Abstract

The Seed Testing Station (STS) is a key and clear example of agricultural modernization in twentieth-century Britain, one which was produced by the pressures of the First World War. Part of the agricultural industry that had for generations been managed by non-governmental means (the production and sale of seed) was now intruded upon, in the name of efficiency, purity, and national productivity. Founded in 1917, the STS initially operated out of offices within the Food Production Department (FPD), itself established that same year and tasked with increasing domestic agricultural output. Soon after the war, a vast purpose-built headquarters was erected for the Station in Cambridge, funded through subscriptions from various agricultural trades and through grants from the Development Commission (DC). In making this move, the STS also thereby became the Official STS (OSTS), an institution which continues to operate from the same Cambridge site to this day. In this article, the STS’s multiple layers of social meaning are uncovered, an effort that requires an interdisciplinary approach. Drawing together existing work on the history of science within the Great War, and the most recent interpretations of the meaning of that war from historians working on gender, design, and disability, this paper uncovers the deep connections between national efficiency, eugenics, architecture, women’s employment, and disabled ex-servicemen, that together constituted the OSTS.

Keywords:

• food production
• agriculture
• Great War
• history of science
• national efficiency

Acknowledgements

My very sincere thanks to Jessica Meyer, whose thorough revising of several drafts and generosity (both intellectual and temporal) turned this article into something presentable. Tricia Cullimore at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany provided essential help and support throughout the researching of this paper, while her OSTS-based colleague Paul Thompson did much to bring the history of the Station alive by sharing his own research and experiences. Gregory Radick continues to keep me on track, while Paolo Palladino manages to reply to my numerous questions with considerable patience. Christopher Phillips checked my working. This research was generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/1020969/1).