Commercial Fruit Growing u 



tion on quitting, declared himself unable to make his award until he had 

 legal direction as to the bearing of section 61 of the Agricultural Holdings 

 Act, 1883, upon section 42 (2) of the Agricultural Holdings Act of 1908. 

 This latter Act was supposed to have consolidated the law upon the 

 subject! The County Court judge decided to direct against the market 

 gardener, and his decision was upheld by the Court of Appeal; so once 

 again the coach and four of the courts was driven through the Act, and 

 a large number of market-garden tenants cultivating under yearly 

 tenancies are deprived of the power to obtain compensation for capital 

 and labour expended on improving their holdings, which they thought 

 the law had once for all secured to them. 



The matter was brought to the notice of the Central and Associated 

 Chambers of Agriculture on the report of their Market Garden and 

 Fruit Growing Committee. The gravity of the position was immediately 

 perceived. Members of Parliament present, without respect to party, 

 offered their assistance, with the result that Mr. Eyres-Monsell, the 

 member of Parliament for Evesham, on 8 December, brought in a one- 

 clause Bill, designed to repair the breach which had been made in the 

 law. The autumn session of 1911 was, however, too near its close, and 

 there was not time to pass the measure into law. However, it is hoped 

 the Bill will be passed in the immediate future. 



Section 42 of the Act makes it indisputable that when once it is agreed 

 in writing that any holding shall be cultivated and treated as a market 

 garden the provisions of the Act as to freedom to execute improvements, 

 and as to claim to compensation for them, shall apply, and the tenant will 

 therefore be secure. Even if by a subsequent clause in the agreement the 

 tenant agrees to forgo his right to compensation, his claim will stand, 

 and the landlord cannot enforce it, for Clause 5 provides: "Subject to the 

 foregoing provisions of this Act, any contract (whether under seal or not) 

 made by a tenant of a holding, by virtue of which he is deprived of his 

 right to claim compensation under this Act in respect of any improvement 

 comprised in the First Schedule hereto shall be void so far as it deprives 

 him of that right ". It is significant of the conditions affecting land tenure 

 that such a clause should find its way into an Act of Parliament. 



The difficulty referred to above comes in here, that many landowners 

 and their advisers are averse to agreeing that their land should be used for 

 the purposes of market gardening, which it has been seen can include fruit 

 growing at the option of the tenant. If a tenant who desires to use the 

 land as a market garden and to plant fruit on it agrees to a contract of 

 tenancy in which it is not precisely stipulated that he may do so, then 

 of course he forfeits his right to compensation at the end of his tenancy 

 for anything except the ordinary agricultural items, which, as mostly 

 inapplicable, will in his case amount to very little. If he cannot find a 

 landowner who desires to be the landlord of a market gardener, what is he 

 to do? Now it must be admitted that there is something to be said for the 

 landowners' point of view, which has been quickened by some claims to 



