Crichel Down affair

For more about the Crichel Down rules, see Compulsory purchase in England and Wales.

The Crichel Down affair was a British political scandal of 1954, with a subsequent effect and notoriety. The Crichel Down Rules^[1] are guidelines applying to compulsory purchase drawn up in the light of the affair.

The Crichel Down land

The case centred on 725 acres (2.93 km²) of agricultural land at Crichel Down, near Long Crichel, Dorset. Much of the land in question was part of the estate of Crichel House, owned by the 3rd Baron Alington. The land was purchased compulsorily in 1938 by the Air Ministry for use for bombing practice by the Royal Air Force. The purchase price when it was requisitioned was £12,006.

In 1940, the owner died on active service in the RAF, and the Crichel Estate passed in trust to his only child, Mary Anna Sturt^[2] (then aged 11), who married Commander Marten in 1949.

In 1941 Winston Churchill gave a promise in Parliament that the land would be returned to its owners, after World War II, when it was no longer required for the purpose for which it had been bought. This promise was not honoured. Instead the land (then valued at £21,000) was handed over to the Ministry of Agriculture who vastly increased the cost of the land beyond the amount the original owners could afford (£32,000), and leased it out.

Aftermath

In 1949 the Martens, now the owners of the Crichel Estate, began a campaign for the Government promise to be kept, by a return sale of the land. They gained a Public Inquiry. This committee of inquiry was chaired by Sir Oliver Franks and, with much publicity, the Franks Report was damning about actions in the case taken by those acting for the Government. Archive material later released caused some shift in interpretation.^{[3][4][5][6][7]}

The Minister responsible resigned, and the Crichel Estate part of the land was sold back to the owners (the Martens), as described in "The Battle for Crichel Down".^[8]

The resignation of the government minister Sir Thomas Dugdale has been taken as setting a precedent on ministerial responsibility, even though the doctrine supposed to arise from the affair is only partially supported by the details. Lord Carrington, Dugdale's junior minister, offered his resignation but was told to stay on.

Crichel had another fight against "authority" on its hands in the 1990s.^[9]

Analysis

From page 3 of the monograph, "Whose land was it anyway? The Crichel Down Rules and the sale of public land" by Roger Gibbard:-

In the history of modern parliament, the Crichel Down affair takes on momentous significance, and has been described as a ‘political bombshell’. The public inquiry into the Crichel Down events revealed a catalogue of ineptitude and maladministration and resulted directly in the resignation of the Secretary of State for Agriculture (Sir Thomas Dugdale), then a senior cabinet position, and was the first case of Ministerial resignation since 1917. Whilst the underlying case was, in the scale of things, trivial, involving the transfer of some seven hundred acres of mediocre agricultural land in Dorset, the ramifications for subsequent government procedure have been enormous, and it is regarded as one of the key events leading to the creation of the post of Ombudsman. Crichel Down was probably the first instance of close and very public scrutiny being directed at a Minister of the Crown in the execution of his duties.

R. T. Fishall mentions the scandal on page 9 of his book "Bureaucrats:How to Annoy Them".^[10]

References

1. ^ http://www.reading.ac.uk/LM/LM/fulltxt/0102.pdf
2. ^ "Mary Marten trustee of the British Museum". The Times (London). 2010-03-08. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7053066.ece. Retrieved 2010-04-30. 
3. ^ http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title=The_Crichel_Down_Case
4. ^ http://www.jstor.org/pss/1090813
5. ^ The Crichel down Affair, by J. A. G. Griffith © 1955 Modern Law Review.
6. ^ "Crichel down - The most famous farm in British constitutional history" by John Griffith, Emeritus Professor of Public Law, London School of Economics, published in Contemporary British History, Volume 1, Issue 1 Spring 1987 , pages 35 - 40
7. ^ http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119472332/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
8. ^ R. Douglas Brown's "The Battle for Crichel Down" (The Bodley Head, 1955)
9. ^ "Crichel Down at centre of new planning fight: Peter Dunn on the latest row over land that once toppled a Cabinet minister". The Independent (London). 1993-08-22. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crichel-down-at-centre-of-new-planning-fight-peter-dunn-on-the-latest-row-over-land-that-once-toppled-a-cabinet-minister-1462674.html. Retrieved 2010-04-30. 
10. ^ Page 9 R. T. Fishall Bureaucrats: How to Annoy Them. Sidgwick and Jones 1981; Arrow Books 1982