John Mcrieff, and his wife sponsored a similar collection of essays to share and celebrate their enthusiasm for the town and the surrounding countryside.⁴¹ The contributors to both these small books were drawn from well-respected local people, informed amateur historians and qualified specialists. Both have chapters on the geology and natural history of the area as well as the predictable historical chapters. The only significant identifiable difference in their respective approaches is the rather more ‘establishment’ approach of the Mcrieff collection, but both are essentially in the manner of the early twentieth-century local histories.
   Far more self-consciously aware of their responsibilities as historians are the authors of two studies of the Hoo Peninsula published in 1947 and 1980.⁴² In the later book Philip MacDougall described Ralph Arnold’s 1947 study as the

only ... account published, which dealt specifically with the entire Peninsula ... it is somewhat dated and rather patchy in places. His format was to take the area village by village, with a rather over-zealous one-third of the book devoted to the tiny village of Cooling.⁴³

MacDougall himself took a chronological approach, bringing together a comprehensive account informed by both his own economic and social background and the ideology of the post-war academic local historians. Nevertheless, just as we have seen with the similarities of the eulogies on the Weald over the past 150 years, MacDougall’s introductory chapters deal with his impressions in much the same way as Arnold.
   Arnold was very conscious that there was a historical debate in play when he was writing in the late 1940s and while confessing that when ‘I read Burnet’s History of My Own Time for my special subject [at Oxford], I used to play with the idea of straying down the primrose side paths’. He goes on to justify his ‘literary-historical’ approach focusing on a relatively small local area in the nineteenth century, having already set his credentials as a historian through his grandfather, ‘a member of the Kent Archaeological Society from the year after its foundation in 1857, a frequent contributor to its Transactions, and later one of its Vice-Presidents, [who] was a scientific historian whose scholarship would have satisfied even the exacting standards of the late Professor Bury’.⁴⁴ Although there is much that is dated in Arnold’s work, he believed that local history was about the people who lived and worked in the place, and in this way his awareness of the ‘lesser’ people presaged MacDougall’s more modern approach.
   One of Finberg’s criticism of much local history was that local amateur enthusiasts concentrated too much on the more recent evidence and therefore unbalanced the whole interpretation of a locality and its