Looking back THE HARVESTERS
GETTING FRESH BRITISH FOOD TO OUR PLATES HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE WORK OF MANY HANDS. FROM HOP- PICKERS TO HERRING GIRLS, WE CELEBRATE THE HARD GRAFT OF SEASONAL WORKERS
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“An adult woman earned on average eight pence a day picking crops”
From ice cold ciders in warm pub gardens, to picnic spreads laden with fresh fruit and veg, food has always been a staple of the great British summer. With many of these crops only ripe for a few months of the year – or weeks, even – we’ve always been reliant on an army of seasonal pickers to take them from farm to table.
GANG LIFE
In the 1800s, seasonal harvesting was carried out by ‘gangs’. Not the stereotype Sharks and Jets style gangs as we might imagine, but huge groups of women and children. As well as the harvest, they did everything from brick making to piling hay, working whatever farm jobs they could. Travelling the farms and fields of England, they plucked strawberries in summer, beetroot in spring and onions in autumn.
The hours spent outside were far from idyllic. And the law actually worsened their situation rather than helped. In 1834, Britain had introduced a new ‘poor law’, which meant that no ‘able bodied’ person could get financial help (or what we’d know now as benefits) unless they were in a workhouse. This was an unimaginable blow to the many people of the era who were struggling to even scrape by. Workhouses tore families apart, separating them from each other and conditions were so bad that there were cases where some people actually opted for death, rather than going into one. And so, suddenly women and children across the country were desperately seeking any work they could, just to keep their families afloat.
‘Gangmasters’ took advantage of this. They deliberately formed their gangs from women and children so they could get away with barely paying them. A woman earned on average eight pence a day picking seasonal crops (around £2.26 today). The gangs would often walk miles a day to reach each job, on top of the hours of manual labour. Bullying was also rampant and »
children in gangs were frequently denied an education. An assessment of gangs at the time called them “rude, rough and lawless”. Women working in gangs were frequently vilified by society, and blamed for greater ills: one 1867 report was concerned that wives would come home so tired and “slatternly and cross” from working in gangs that their husbands would become “drunkards”!
Fortunately, in 1867, this entry for the world’s worst job award came to an end. The Government brought in the ‘Gangs Act’, forcing gangmasters to give workers better treatment. Then, three years later, it became compulsory for children to go to school and, with half of their workforce gone, ‘gangs’ started to fade away.
ON THE HOPS
The decline of the gangs didn’t stop the harvesting of Britain’s seasonal crops being dependent on children. During the early 20th century, every summer, hordes of families from London’s East End would up sticks for a jolly holiday of hop-picking.
At its height, hundreds of thousands of Londoners boarded specially put-on trains to the Kent countryside, where they’d sleep in huts and tents. Combining their annual getaway with the chance to earn some extra cash, dads, mums and kids all worked together down the vast hedgerows of hops, with each family member paid by the bushel. The holiday fun included things like the crowning of a ‘hop queen’.
Come October, the holiday didn’t always end and many of the children were still being out in the fields come the middle of term.
With schoolwork on the line, in 1963, the Government passed a new act which made it much harder for children to work during school hours and the hop holidays came to an end.
Still, many of the hop-pickers grew up to remember it as one of the best times of their childhoods: the first time they saw the countryside and got to play in fresh air.
“Dads, mums and kids all worked together down the vast hedgerows”
A FISHY FIGHT
From around 1700, many working women made their income through both seasonal and parttime work, with some travelling far and wide for work. The Herring Girls were no exception to this: hailing from Barra in the outer Hebrides, every summer from 1880 onwards, these young women would march across their island to take a ferry, then a specially chartered train to Great Yarmouth for the herring season, a journey that took days. Yet thousands managed it each year – by 1931, there were 5,000 of them each year.
Once – finally – there, they’d gut, clean and pack the herring. It was messy and tough, but the Herring Girls worked hard and played harder, singing songs and dancing well into the wee hours after the day’s work ended.
But it wasn’t all fun. Their working conditions could be grim, with the girls suffering injuries from gutting the fish, then having salt literally rubbed into the wounds when they preserved the herrings. The women took things into their own hands, causing the entire herring harvest to grind to a halt when they went on strike in 1936. Herrings were left rotting on the harbourside, and several strikers arrested. But they stayed strong and two days later their demands were met. With each girl earning two pence more per barrel they collected, it was a huge win: according to historian Helen Antrobus, the Herring Girls “should be remembered as an important milestone in the fight for better working conditions for women”.
In fact, achievements like those of the Herring Girls, combined with the industrial revolution, meant that a whole host of new jobs became available and many seasonal pickers ditched their pitchforks for a steadier income, creating an agricultural workforce crisis. Interestingly, the solution to that crisis was the steady introduction of migrant workers from the EU and other countries – currently numbering over 80,000. In the wake of Brexit, seasonal work visa schemes are currently being trialled. Though the work and rights evolve through the centuries, it’s clear that whether it’s gangs, hop-pickers or Herring Girls, temporary workers hold the key to our bountiful seasonal spreads.