The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  ‘Before the example of a court, virtuous, humane and beneficient, the attitude of the British upper classes has undergone a noble change,’ wrote the Rev. Charles Kingsley in 1862. ‘There is no aristocracy in the world, and there never has been, as far as I know, which has so honourably repented … which has so cheerfully asked what its duty was, that it might do it … The whole creed of our young gentlemen is becoming more liberal, their demeanour more courteous, their language more temperate.’23 Even the radical politician, Richard Cobden, was obliged to conclude at the same time that in his experience the upper classes had ‘never stood so high in relative social and political rank’. Certainly they contrived with marked success to hold on to their positions of power. In the 1865 House of Commons over three-quarters of the members were connected with the peerage by marriage, descent or interest. And those of the upper class who were not politicians, and were not occupied exclusively with the management of their estates, were likely to be at least active in local government and recognized by their acknowledged inferiors as being worthy both of responsibility and respect.

  50 Workers on the Land

  ‘When I was ten I left school to work on a farm for £3 a year and my keep,’ recalled Tom Mullins, an old farmer who had started his working life in the early 1870s at the age of seven as a ‘half-timer’ at a rope-works in Leek, Staffordshire, where he had earned is 6d a week by turning the handle of a machine. On the farm he helped to drive the horses, and ‘when there were two [he] had to walk between them while leading and often got trodden on’.

  We often had difficulty in getting our horses and wagons across flooded streams. Often my clothes were quite wet when I took them off at night and still wet when I put them on again next morning … I was always hungry at that place, but after a year I moved to a bigger farm where the living was better … On Sundays I walked ten miles home to have dinner with my parents, and then walked ten miles back to start milking … I then went to work on a farm belonging to Michael Bass. He was an easy man to talk to and you did not realize he was titled. I often went to his house for the hot soup, meat and dripping which were distributed free to the poor of the parish … One of my jobs was to take letters to the post-box, and this I did not like doing for the lane fan alongside a dark wood where rough men wandered about. When I was ten I milked and tended seven cows single-handed.

  Mullins left Bass’s farm to work on a milk-round in Leek, then found employment at a farm near Manchester where the family lived ‘like pigs’ and expected him to exist on bread and dripping. So he left there after a week, and returned to Staffordshire where he worked as a carter on a seventy-five-acre farm. There was little machinery in Staffordshire in those days, he said, and, indeed, steam-ploughs and steam-driven threshing machines were still far from common in several other counties as well. Mullins’s master would not have even a horse in the field, insisting that hard manual work was best and requiring his men to cut corn with a short ‘badging’ hook and hay with a scythe. Little artificial manure was used. Cows’ urine was poured into tanks, carted out to the fields in barrels and spread with a long-handled ladle; night-soil was bought from contractors who collected it in the towns; and women earned 18d a day by following the horses grazing in the pastures and breaking up the dung with long forks. Mullins himself was earning £16 a year and his keep by the time he was seventeen, ‘the highest wage a man could get’. Yet while wages were low, people managed to live on them and even save a bit, since, as he said, money went so much further then than now. ‘Bread was 3d the quarten loaf, milk 3d a quart, tobacco 3d an ounce (what a cry went up when it was raised to 3 ½), while beer was 2d a pint.’ The year’s work ended at Michaelmas ‘when all farm workers took a week’s holiday, and then went to the Hiring Fair, about October, 10th … other holidays were May Day and Well-dressing.’1

  In 1902 when, after more than thirty years of hard work, Mullins had saved enough to rent his own farm, the number of people working on the land had fallen to 712,000, only 12,000 of them women, whereas in 1851 there had been 1,343,000, about 143,000 of them women, apart from 364,000 indoor farm servants of both sexes.2

  Many women farm labourers worked in gangs by which was meant, in the words of an official report, ‘a number of persons, men, women, girls, lads and boys, employed by and under the control of one person who lets them out to different farmers in turn for certain kinds of work’.3 Following a series of inquiries inspired by Lord Shaftesbury in the 1860s these gangs were eventually brought under control by the Gangs Act of 1868; but before that the workers employed in them, up to about thirty in each gang, worked in conditions which horrified the commissioners appointed to investigate them. Working hours were long, rates of pay low: children received no more than 4d a day, women 8d, the same amount paid to the few men, mostly disabled by illness or infirmity, who could get no other work. The gangmaster, acting as foreman, paid wages even lower than these if he could, pocketing all the profits he could make after having agreed with the farmer the price to be paid for the hoeing, weeding, stone-picking or other work that the gang were set to do.

  Since gangs were usually employed on large farms in thinly populated areas, the workers often had to walk long distances from the villages and were often ‘placed in situations where they [could] procure no shelter from rain or inclement weather’ and were consequently subject to ‘intermittent fever, rheumatism, scarlet fever, pleurisy … consumption’ and maladies occasioned by their eating their midday meal while sitting on the damp ground.

  As well as an unhealthy life, it was, as the commissioners declared, an extremely immoral one. No attention was paid by the gangmaster to the habits or character of the women he employed; and if they were not immodest when they entered his employment they soon became so. Decent people were shocked when a gang of women and boys walked past their houses, shouting obscenities at each other, engaged in ‘loud and coarse conversation, with great thick boots, and buskins on their legs’, the petticoats of the women tucked up between their bare legs as they wore them in the fields.

  A Lincolnshire doctor, who had been in practice in Spalding for twenty-five years, told the commissioners that he was convinced that the gang system was the ‘cause of much immorality’. Many girls as young as thirteen or fourteen had been brought into the infirmary pregnant; and he had himself witnessed ‘gross indecencies between boys and girls of fourteen to sixteen years of age’. ‘The evil in the system,’ he considered, ‘is the mixture of the sexes under no control. The gangers pay these children once a week at some beer house, and it is no uncommon thing for the children to be kept waiting at the place till eleven or twelve o’clock at night.’4

  Gangmasters themselves often exercised a kind of droit du seigneur over their employees. In a case heard at Downham Market in 1866, a gangmaster was accused of assaulting a girl aged thirteen who deposed that he threw her to the ground and pulled up her clothes. ‘It was in the sight of the gang,’ she added. ‘We were sitting down to our dinners … The other boys and girls in the gang were around me. I called out. The others laughed. He said, “Open your legs more” … He was lying on me flat. I could not get up … He had a stick … He has threatened to flog us if we told any tales.’5

  Referring to this case, a Member of Parliament observed that there would be far more ‘if children dared to speak’. Certainly it was generally assumed that young women in agricultural gangs were easy prey for such insatiable fornicators as the author of My Secret life.

  ‘You can always have a field girl,’ this man was advised in his youth by his cousin, a wealthy farmer’s son.’ Nobody cares. I have hada dozen or two. ‘He himself seized upon one of about fifteen who, however, resisted him. He overpowered her, violated her, then offered her money to stem her tears, clinking the gold sovereigns in his hand. ‘What a temptation they must have been,’ he thought, ‘to a girl who earned ninepence a day and was often without work at all.’ At this moment the farm foreman appeared. The girl, hesitating, pouting, wriggling h
er shoulders, was persuaded to take a sovereign but said she would tell her sister what had happened. ‘None o’ that, gal,’ the gangmaster warned her, ‘an’ I hears more on that, you won’t work here any more, nor anywhere else in this parish. I knows the whole lot on you. I knows who got yer sister’s belly up … and I knows summut about you, too. Now take care, gal … Say you nought. That be my advice.’ The girl, muttering, went her way.6

  In the earlier years of the century the wages not only of workers in gangs but in the farming industry generally were almost uniformly low, lower in the south and west of the country than in the north and falling in some areas to as little as 6s a week, rising to about 11s or 12s a week in 1832. Thereafter they had risen gradually but erratically, losing ground in such wet years of disastrous harvests as 1879 and varying much from one part of the country to another. By the end of the century ordinary farm labourers in counties where agriculture was the main if not the only means of livelihood were receiving about 15s a week; those in counties where other industries forced up farm wages got about £1. Men with experience as cowmen or shepherds could earn rather more, but a good deal less than they might have been paid in a town. There were, however, certain allowances which could make life more agreeable, milk and potatoes, perhaps, beer or cider, fuel and a cottage.7 On certain estates, like those of the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Bedford, the cottage might be quite comfortable; but for the most part labourers’ cottages, until at least the 1870s, were leaky, draughty, ancient, overcrowded dwellings, little better than the hovels of the Middle Ages: in 1873 it was estimated that ‘one third of the agricultural houses of Great Britain required to be rebuilt’.8 In the Midlands and Lancashire they were generally of brick, in the Cotswolds and much of Yorkshire of stone, elsewhere of timber, wattle and daub, in Scotland commonly and Ireland nearly always of turf.

  In the Oxfordshire village in which Flora Thompson spent her childhood and to which she gave the name Lark Rise, ‘a few of the houses had thatched roofs, whitewashed outer walls and diamond-paned windows, but the majority were just stone or brick boxes with blue-slated roofs. The older houses were relics of pre-enclosure days and were still occupied by descendants of the original squatters, themselves at that time elderly people.’ Apart from one old couple who owned a donkey and cart which they hired out by the day to neighbours, a retired farm bailiff who was said to have ‘well feathered his own nest’ during his years of employment, an old man who owned and worked upon an acre of land, a stone-mason who walked three miles to work in the nearest town every day, and the local innkeeper, all the other men in the village were employed as agricultural labourers.

  Some of the cottages had two bedrooms, others only one, in which case it had to be divided by a screen or curtain to accommodate both parents and children.

  Often the big boys of a family slept downstairs, or were sent to sleep in the second bedroom of an elderly couple whose own children were out in the world. Except at holiday times, there were no big girls to provide for, as they were all out in service. Still it was often a tight fit, for children swarmed, eight, ten or even more in some families, and although they were seldom all at home together, the eldest often being married before the youngest was born, beds and shakedowns were often so closely packed that the inmates had to climb over one bed to get into another … When the wind cut across the flat land to the east, or came roaring down from the north, doors and windows had to be closed, but then, as the hamlet people said, they got more than enough fresh air through the keyhole.

  In nearly all the cottages there was but one room downstairs, and many of these were poor and bare, with only a table and a few chairs and stools for furniture and a superannuated potato-sack thrown down by way of hearthrug. Other rooms were bright and cosy, with dressers of crockery, cushioned chairs, pictures on the walls, and brightly coloured hand-made rag rugs on the floor. In these there would be pots of geraniums, fuchsias, and old-fashioned, sweet-smelling musk on the window-sills. In the older cottages there were grandfathers’ clocks, gate-legged tables, and rows of pewter, relics of a time when life was easier for country folk.

  The interiors varied, according to the number of mouths to be fed and the thrift and skill of the housewife, or the lack of those qualities; but the income in all was precisely the same, for ten shillings a week was the standard wage of the farm labourer at that time in that district.9

  Poor and cramped as many of the cottages in Lark Rise were, however, some of those that the Rev. Francis Kilvert entered in the 1870s as curate at Clyro near Hay-on-Wye were much poorer still. In one the bedroom was a ‘dark hovel hole almost underground’. Here an old man of eighty-two lay dying next to ‘a fair haired little girl of 4 years old’. In another the bedroom was ‘a low and crazy loft in the roof which was so dark that it was impossible to discern the features of the occupants. ‘A small and filthy child knelt or crouched in the ashes of the hearth before a black grate and cold cinders. No one else was in the house and the rain splashed in the court and on the roof and the wind whistled through the tiles. Almost all the glass was smashed out of the bedroom or rather bed loft window, and there was only a dirty cloth hanging before the ruin of the window to keep the wind away.’10

  The size of the farms upon which the occupants of such places worked varied widely from district to district. Yeomen farming their own (usually quite modest) acreages were now a dying breed. Most farmers rented their land from the gentry and either hired labour by the year if the size of their farm warranted it or worked the land themselves with the help of their families if it did not. Large farms were tending to grow larger and small farms fewer. In the Cotswolds and East Anglia, for example, there were several large farmers who had held the same land for generations and were, in the words of W. Johnston, writing in 1850, permitted to ‘mix with the landowners in their field sports’. This association was, however, ‘upon a footing of understood inferiority, and the association exists only out of doors, or in the public room of an inn after a cattle-show or an election. The difference in manners of the two classes does not admit of anything like social and family intercourse’.11 The gulf between the large farmer and the smallholder was almost equally wide, the latter being ‘scarcely above the labourers in education or in general manner of life’.12

  In Yorkshire there were both large farms of over 1000 acres in extent and smallholdings of less than twenty. The large farms commonly employed several men and women who were provided with board and lodging – often in primitive buildings presided over by elderly female caretakers and cooks – as well as with wages which were rarely paid more than three times in the year. They were engaged on an annual basis at the Martinmas hirings and usually moved on to a new farm when their year’s employment was over.13 The tenants of some of the smallholdings in the West Riding continued to eke out their meagre living with industrial labour as their forebears had done in the eighteenth century.

  They have looms in their houses [wrote James Caird, the agriculturist, in 1851], and unite the business of weavers and farmers. When trade is good the farm is neglected; when trade is dull the weaver becomes a more attentive farmer. His holding is generally under twenty acres, and his chief stock consists of dairy cows, with a horse to convey his manufactured goods and his milk to market. The union of trades has been long in existence in this part of the country, but it seldom leads to much success on the part of the weaver-farmer himself, and the land he occupies is believed to be the worst managed in the district.14

  Men like these and the agricultural labourer, the ignorant, ‘tall, long, smock-frocked, straw-hatted, ankle-booted fellow’ of William Howitt’s description, lived hard lives which few looked back upon with contentment and satisfaction.

  Admittedly, some farm labourers remembered being happy and well fed with ‘any amount of bread and bacon, and plenty of home-brewed beer, and, in the winter, a sure, drowsy place by the kitchen fire’. Most, however, recalled less happy times, rising at dawn to work until sunset for their paltry
wages, eating bread and potatoes with an occasional piece of bacon and an apple dumpling, often going to bed hungry. One, no doubt characteristic, family in Yorkshire, had bread and treacle for breakfast, and sometimes a little tea made from used leaves collected from a local inn; for dinner there was broth obtained from a nearby farm three days a week, potatoes and possibly dumplings; supper was like breakfast with the occasional addition of an apple pie. It was estimated that by now about 2 million people in Britain lived largely on potatoes. In Ireland 4 million – nearly half the total population in 1841 – did so; and when the Irish crop failed hardship and famine were inevitable. In successive years after 1845 the Irish crop was blighted and hundreds of thousands of people died either by starvation or of the fevers that attended malnutrition. Many more, perhaps a million, emigrated within the six years before 1851, most of them to America, but many to England where they not only poured into the industrial towns – between a third and a fifth of Manchester’s and Liverpool’s labouring populations were composed of Irish immigrants15 – but also into the countryside, swelling the number of casual agricultural labourers and adding to the problems of farming communities.