Crichel Down affair

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 the Second World War, 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 price of the land beyond the amount the original owners could afford (£32,000), and leased it out.

In 1949, Toby and Mary Anna Marten (daughter of the third Lord Alington), now the owners of the Crichel estate, began a campaign for the government's promise to be kept, by a return sale of the land. They gained a public inquiry. This inquiry was conducted by Sir Andrew Clark QC whose 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]

The minister responsible, Sir Thomas Dugdale, resigned and the Crichel estate part of the land was sold back to the owners (the Martens).[4]

The resignation of 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 when Commander Marten objected to plans to redevelop a former paper mill the estate had sold to the local council in the mid-1950s.[5]

A fictionalised version of the affair was used in an episode of Foyle's War broadcast on ITV on 7 April 2013, which examined the conflict between "the greater good of the State" and natural justice as it affects government and the security services. The Crichel Down affair is also mentioned in The Late Scholar, a detective novel by Jill Paton Walsh.

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.

Notes

Bibliography

• Brown, R. Douglas (1955), The Battle of Crichel Down (1st ed.), Bodley Head
• Nicholson, I. (1986), The Mystery of Crichel Down (1st ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press

• Summary of report