English Farmworkers and Local Patriotism, 1900–1930
eBook - ePub

English Farmworkers and Local Patriotism, 1900–1930

Nicholas Mansfield

Share book
  1. 256 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

English Farmworkers and Local Patriotism, 1900–1930

Nicholas Mansfield

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

This new study looks at the ways in which the years surrounding the First World War shaped the lives of the rural workforce in Britain and how the patriotism unleashed by the war was used by those in power to blur class divisions and build conservative attitudes in rural communities. Using the area of Shropshire and the Marches as a focus, the book looks at farmworkers and their trade unions, the structures of agrarian economy, class divisions, local loyalties, cultural institutions and political organisations. From 1917 the growing power of the farmworkers' unions and the rural labour movement mounted a challenge to the landed elites and sought a radical change from rural poverty. The author shows how the elites met this threat dynamically by creating a range of new village institutions, such as ploughing matches, Women's Institutes, village halls, war memorials and the British Legion. The extraordinary growth of rural radicalism at the end of the war was diffused by popular conservatism and local patriotism. Influenced by wartime experiences, the period 1900-1930 saw a change in rural society from parochial concerns to a new sense of loyalty to county and to the English nation.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is English Farmworkers and Local Patriotism, 1900–1930 an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access English Farmworkers and Local Patriotism, 1900–1930 by Nicholas Mansfield in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & World History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351940061
Topic
History
Edition
1

Chapter 1
Farmworkers, Rural Life and England

Sources and Stereotypes

Researching farmworkers’ history is like panning for gold, rather than hewing the rich seam of sources which most labour historians expect from their subject. Given the spread-out work force, the patchy incidence of trade union organisation, the high turnover of membership, the dependence on the commitment of a minority of activists, and the poor housing and living conditions of most farmworkers, very few manuscript sources survive. Even in a comparatively strong union county like Norfolk, which boasted over 300 branches in its heyday, the number of surviving branch minutes can be counted on one hand. The only known remaining minute book of the Norfolk and Norwich Amalgamated Labourers’ Union of the 1890s, was collected accidentally by George Ewart Evans, the oral historian, in the 1950s. However, the relevant pages had been removed, and the empty ones filled with ‘horsemen’s recipes’, a clear indication of the owner’s view that posterity was unlikely to be interested in the contents. Writers of recent histories of the farmworkers’ unions in Wales, Essex, Gloucestershire and Scotland have encountered the same problem.1
Given these conditions, it is unsurprising that there are no known surviving farmworkers’ union records in the Welsh Marches region on either side of Offa’s Dyke. The historian must use documents of indirect relevance, either extrapolating from available national records, or from those of opposing employers’ organisations. Even relevant national records are incomplete or missing, and so non-manuscript sources, such as newspapers, annual reports, trade directories, and material culture must be used to help fill this gap. The wider political movements in the Marches are similarly poorly served for manuscript sources, with only the records of one Conservative Association and a single minute book from a constituency Labour Party surviving. Oral sources, used by the author in other projects, proved difficult to obtain because it was ten years too late to interview farmworkers active in the unions in the key periods. However, other sources like the local press, proved fruitful. In addition the growing secondary sources on farmworkers have been complemented by material usually considered outside the sphere of trade union or labour history, culled from military histories, folklore, memoirs, landscape and cultural studies.
The representation of farmworkers as stereotypes in English literature has a long history, stretching from Chaucer to Thomas Hardy. Some of these have originated from the Marches, as in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the verses of A.E. Housman, George Farquhar’s play The Recruiting Officer and the novels of Mary Webb. Generations of writers have asserted the essential purity of country living compared to crowded and unnatural city life. Farmworkers – often bucolic or comic figures – were depicted as victims, rather than controllers of their own destiny. Even in realistic depictions of working-class life, farmworkers were stereotyped as worthy, in touch with their roots in the uncertainties of the modern world, but powerless. At the turn of the twentieth century, historians like Thorold Rogers and the Hammonds saw farmworkers as heroic, but sadly doomed to failure at the mercy of forces beyond their control. Whilst farmworkers as a group have been reasonably well documented – perhaps as well as most other groups of workers – by the general efforts of historians and sociologists, the resulting descriptions are often couched in a slightly condescending tone, even from the most sympathetic writers and fellow trade unionists. This point is well illustrated by historians’ treatment of the Dorset labourers who attempted to form a union in 1834, and by the evolution of the very term ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’. A noticeable omission is in authoritative regional or local accounts, especially with detailed explanations, of the working and cultural lives of farmworkers.2

Literature on Farmworkers and their Unions

Some of the earliest accounts of the attempts of farmworkers to organise came out of the campaigns themselves. The rural trade unions of the 1870s were largely documented by Liberal journalists who sought to influence or participate in the events they depicted. ‘Their’ farmworkers were to be electoral fodder to challenge the Conservative hegemony of rural politics. This tone even affected Joseph Arch, the leader of the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union (NALU) and the first farmworker to write a personal account. His autobiography, The Story of his Life (1898), written after his defeat as a Liberal MP, offers a querulous and often embittered version of events. Critics from Hasbach onward have pointed out the blatant inconsistencies in Arch’s Life and his tendency with hindsight to criticise policies, such as emigration and the failed union benefit society, which he was responsible for introducing. Arch was the supreme showman and self-publicist and without his drive and dedication, agricultural trade unionism would not have taken off in the 1870s. The problem is that later historians, in recognising his importance, have taken the book at face value.3
Wilhelm Hasbach’s book, A History of the English Agricultural Labourer (1894), was a pioneering sociological survey of Victorian farmworkers. It includes information on hours, pay, conditions of work, and local variations, and contains the first systematic account of agricultural trades unionism from the 1870s. His authoritative style has caused later historians to repeat his statements without verification. Some of the details may be questioned, however. For example, he confuses the new Eastern Counties Union – which went on to become the National Union of Agricultural Workers (NUAW) – with the old Norfolk and Norwich Labour League of the early 1890s. Nevertheless, he presents still useful insights into the competition between town and country unskilled labourers, the extension of the franchise and the rivalry between National and Federal unions in the 1870s. He also did not exaggerate the influence of nonconformity, which has tended to preoccupy some later writers.
Two other books on unions appeared at the highpoint of the phenomenal union growth from 1917 to 1920. Again written by middle-class sympathisers working within the campaigns they were describing, they share the ‘Heroic March’ approach common to much traditional labour history. Village Trade Unions in Two Centuries by Ernest Selley was published in the heady post-war days of November 1919. It provides the first account of the pre-1914 growth of both the Workers’ Union (WU) and the National Union of Agricultural Workers (NUAW). It also includes valuable information on wages and membership, which because of the paucity of archive sources, is not available elsewhere. With hindsight, Selley was over-optimistic about the future of the Agricultural Wages Board and the long-term strength of the unions. F.E. Green, the author of the second book, had been actively involved in the pre-war debate on the state of the English countryside, urging the break up of landed estates. His book, A History of the English Agricultural Labourer 1870–1920, was published in the latter year. It is particularly informative about the land reform movement and gives a lively description of the war period. This account includes the way the WU insinuated itself onto the Agricultural Wages Board, although Green only hints at the conflict between the unions. As the Labour PPC for Chichester in November 1918 he participated in the events he describes and provides what is still the most complete account of the development of the Labour Party in the countryside. He examines its relationship with the farmworkers’ unions and was the first to highlight the role of railwaymen in the growth of the rural labour movement.
It seems likely that Joseph Arch’s autobiography was at least partly ‘ghosted’ by one of his Liberal journalist friends, but the life story of George Edwards is undoubtedly his own work. From Crow-scaring to Westminster was published in 1922, shortly after Edwards became MP for South Norfolk. Edwards re-founded the union in 1906, and had the single-mindedness and courage to persevere with it, whilst retaining the personal respect, even of his political enemies. The book is a classic working-class autobiography. Edwards, in old age, traces a moral path from his poverty-stricken childhood, through his conversion to Primitive Methodism, and struggle for literacy, to a successful marriage and career. Like Arch, he was a little vain, and justifies his actions, like the quarrel with the Liberal grandees who dominated the union executive in 1911, and his pro-war stance in 1914. However, the plain prose, coupled with the stirring story, gives it a power even today. Although its account of the growth of the union is almost all concerned with Norfolk, this is compensated for by its inside view of the union leadership. Alun Howkins argues that the book’s publication kept the union together in 1922, as Edwards, having just written about his past struggles, led the fight against the new rival Landworkers’ Union. Certainly the book had a strong influence within the NUAW. When I was conducting an oral history programme in Norfolk in the early 1980s, every union activist’s home had a copy of Edwards’ life story, which was reverently brought down when his name was mentioned. Sadly, as the book ends in 1922, it misses the crucial 1923 strike. Ploughboy’s Progress, a sequel written by George Edwards’ son, Noel G. Edwards, was finally published in 1998. With an introduction by Howkins, it fills in many of the personal details of the last decade of the old man’s life.4
The years 1925–45 were relatively unfruitful ones for the farmworkers’ union and this is reflected in the shortage of literature produced during the period. The Labour landslide of 1945 was a spur to labour history generally and the post-war period produced the book which dominates the historiography of the union; Reg Groves’, Sharpen the Sickle! – The History of the Farmworkers’ Union (1949). The book appeared when NUAW membership was at its zenith, and when Edwin Gooch, the NUAW President, became Labour Party chairman. The farmworkers already occupied an important role in the myths of the labour movement through the Tolpuddle Martyrs. They needed a union history, and the book was published in a cheap members’ edition. The choice of Groves – one of the first British Trotskyists – as author, was perhaps an unlikely one. An experienced journalist, he skilfully used material from members to celebrate and inform in a narrative sweep covering Captain Swing, Tolpuddle, Arch, Edwards and the 1923 Strike, as well as what the author wisely calls ‘The Lean Years’. Both Groves’ left-wing and Gooch’s moderate view coincided in a heroic ‘March of Labour’ approach. In common with many union histories, there is little analysis of problems like Arch’s intrigues, the splits with the Federal unions, those workers who did not join the union, and the rivalry between the WU and the NUAW. Despite limitations and eccentricities, after half a century the book still has something pertinent to say about every area where the unions operated. Significantly, Sharpen the Sickle! was reprinted in 1981, at the time of the NUAW joining the TGWU.
The period after the Second World War also saw a growth in ‘countryside books’. A few of these make reference to the unions, the best being Josiah Sage, The Memoirs of Josiah Sage (1951). This is a combative story from a Norfolk activist in both Arch’s and Edwards’ unions, whose descriptions of grass-roots issues and the local impact of national events makes it important evidence for later historians. In the Marches, Sidney Box’s lively, detailed but sometimes confused account of his time as a WU organiser, The Good Old Days: Then and Now (1954) occupies a similar position. In contrast, the youthful memoirs of the WU’s president, John Beard’s, My Shropshire Days on Common Ways (1945) is a frustrating travelogue of the Marches rather than a potentially useful account of rural radicalism. Ida Gandy’s An Idler on the Shropshire Border (1970) whilst enlightening about the mindset of border dwellers, is tantalising in its absence of political commentary politics, considering that her GP husband had been chairman of a local Labour Party branch.
It took some time for the post-Second World War labour history movement to become interested in farmworkers. This interest was restricted to the early nineteenth century, with books like A.J. Peacock’s Bread or Blood (1965) on the 1816 East Anglian revolt, or E.J. Hobsbawm and George Rude’s Captain Swing (1969) an analysis of the ‘Last Rising’ of 1831–32. J.P.D. Dunbabin published pioneering articles on the growth and distribution of Arch’s union. The only major new work on the farmworkers’ unions was Rex Russell’s WEA class source book, The Revolt of the Field in Lincolnshire (1956). The latter was published in a cheap edition by the NUAW, whose Lincolnshire membership was second only to Norfolk’s, but the union was selective on what view of its history it would support. A thesis on the union written by its former Ruskin student, Michael Madden was finished for the union’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations in 1956 but remained unpublished. It provides a useful corrective to Groves’ work, particularly on the issue of national leaderships, but failed to find favour with the NUAW, though its findings have been skilfully used by Newby and others. This applied also to another ex-Ruskin student, A.J. Peacock, who had his work on Arch’s union in East Anglia published, initially under the auspices of the Communist Party.5
Pamela Horn’s biography, Joseph Arch (1826–1919) – The Farm Workers’ Leader was published in 1971. Horn’s work is essentially descriptive rather than analytical. Her considerable output, on many aspects of nineteenth-century country life, has had the effect of stressing the overriding importance of the NALU and Arch himself in the unions of the 1870s. Richard Hyman’s book, The Workers’ Union (1971), in which farmworkers figure as minor players, covers the shifting story of the various groups of workers, geographically and by trades, who were organised under the WU banner. Perhaps because of the very complexity of its subject, it concentrates more on the union’s national leadership than is currently fashionable amongst labour histories. It does recognise the conflict between the NUAW and the WU, but tends unconsciously to side with the latter. However, Hyman’s book remains the only detailed secondary source for the WU, which as the apparent loser in the contest, has otherwise been written out of history.
Howard Newby’s The Deferential Worker: A Study of Farmworkers in East Anglia (1977) is a sociological study, based on extensive fieldwork in Suffolk in the early 1970s. The chapter on the history of agricultural trades unionism is a refreshing antidote to the heroic approach, with its willingness to face the harsh realities of the subject. However his work is deeply pessimistic about agricultural trades unionism, which makes some of his conclusions suspect if viewed from a long historical viewpoint. His insistence on the failure of the union if judged by urban standards, may be countered by the view that any rural organisation is remarkable in itself, and some of his conclusions about the NUAW/WU are questionable. Newby’s ‘deferential’ subjects may also be the particular product of their place and time. Suffolk, after the 1874 lockout, was never a very strong union county, and like Shropshire, was a key setting for the NUAW/WU conflict. Also, the early 1970s were an unhappy time for the unions as mechanisation started to bite, membership tumbled, and long-serving organisers were ...

Table of contents