Len was born in Turville Heath on 10th November 1917 to William Harman and Mary Neighbour. He was one of ten children and was brought up at Turville Heath Farm. He went to the local primary school at Northend, then to Henley Grammar. He was a highly intelligent young man who would have achieved considerable success academically, but his father needed him to work on the farm. It was here that he learnt his farming skills.
Leonard Harman
Len was a deep thinking man, a life-long socialist and a paid-up member of the Communist party, although the family used to tease him that there was no-one more capitalist than Len. He belonged to the CND and was committed to the Peace Movement through his involvement with Wycombe Peace Group.
After service in the Home Guard, he married Margaret Incles in 1943. Margaret, from Nottingham, had joined the Land Army and was posted to Northend to do farm work. Early married life was hard for them both; they lived in radar huts, and Len made a meagre living keeping chickens. Len and Margaret’s first son, Ivan Leonard, was born on 7th January 1945 and Mark appeared on 2nd March 1952.
Margaret Harman
Len was an eccentric, one of life’s great characters, and people loved him. There are many anecdotal stories about him and no doubt more will be added to this section! Please contact me if you have any!
He was a moral man operating to the highest standards of conduct. Before appearing at the Folk Club the family joked about the lengths he went to groom himself, and he always presented himself immaculately. He insisted on high standards from the performers at the club and did not tolerate crudeness. On one occasion he had booked Jasper Carrott. Before Jasper was due to appear at the Club Len went to see him perform elsewhere, but immediately cancelled the booking considering Jasper to be too crude. Jasper wrote an interesting letter in reply.
Stories abound about Len's love of chickens. He had a remarkable ability to communicate with them, and made a recording of what he called “chicken language”. His call to them was 'Pet Birds' and they would dart out of the woods to meet him. He amused many of the locals by driving around in his grey Morris van with one sitting on his lap. To Margaret's despair he sometimes kept a few in the kitchen and would feed them from his mouth. On one occasion Len must have been smiling because a chicken, thinking it was feeding time, mistakenly grabbed Len's false teeth from his mouth. He had a sense of the ridiculous and enjoyed being the centre of attention, showing off with a chicken sitting on his head.
However, he also enjoyed the fine arts, including poetry, and wrote poems which he read at the Club. He once rescued a white battery hen that had literally fallen off the back of a lorry, and nursed it back to health. He was clearly fond of it and wrote an affectionate poem about its lucky break from a world of confinement to free-range freedom. After reading the poem at the Club Len produced the living evidence from a cardboard box. Yet Len was also a farmer at heart and some weeks later he shocked a few people by serving the bird for Sunday lunch.
Len was also unique in being an eco-warrior before his time. Only he could have adapted the insulated milk tank, which became redundant when the dairy herd was sold, as the basis for an inventive, but labour-intensive central heating system. Unfortunately, he had to spend all day stoking the boiler with logs! He strongly fought the case for wildlife preservation and always removed illegal gin-traps and pole-traps when he found them. For him there was probably no better place to live than Idlecombe Farm. Surrounded by nature, Len had a lifelong love of wildlife and was passionately against hunting and the shooting of pheasants . He disliked the predatory behaviour of some wild animals though, and was known to shout at sparrowhawks and magpies when he saw them pursuing other birds. Next to the farmhouse exists a monument to Len - a nature reserve that he created. The family is actively maintaining and enhancing this.
Ivan and Janis were childhood sweethearts, having met at the local village school. Ivan helped his father on the farm, getting the dairy herd in for milking, cutting and feeding silage and sometimes helping when a cow calved. A star pupil at John Hamden Grammar school, he studied at Keele University, then became a teacher of English in High Wycombe. In 1968 Janis and Ivan were married in Turville Church. Ivan shared his father’s enthusiasm for making use of obsolete items; only he could have “improved” his sitting room by inventing a switch for the stereo loudspeaker system using an upside-down wooden bridge salvaged from an Abbatt’s toy train set. When his sons were at Turville School he proudly coached Turville United Football Club, playing on a pitch at the farm. On occasions spectators had the pleasure of both watching deer nearby in the cow field as well as collecting mushrooms from the pitch!
Mark Harman followed his father as a farmer, and developed some of Len's eccentricities. Usually Mr Laid Back, he threw caution to the wind when driving his vans around the farm at break-neck speed. He did not always bother to open gates – he would nudge them open with his van. His partner Alice reports seeing the van overturned and assumed he had cornered too fast. In truth he had decided to tip it over, as it was the easiest way to work on the underside.
There has been great sadness in the Harman family. Len died suddenly on the last day of 1982, just four weeks after the closure of the Folk Club. Ivan and Mark died in the prime of their lives, both aged 51. Margaret passed away in 1997.
The Harman name lives on in Ivan and Janis’ sons, Luke (born 1971) and Keir (born 1973). Indeed many of Len’s characteristics have passed on to them. Luke, who is a teacher, shares Len’s love of nature, and Keir follows in Len’s eco-warrior tradition as a Wind Energy Consultant. Len would have been proud of them both.
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