"SEE CHARLES SMITH."

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 57, 14 April 1914, Page 5

"SEE CHARLES SMITH."

NEW NOTIONS IN HELIONS BUMPSTEAD.

I have met a new kind of Labour leader. He has little or nothing in common with Mr Jim Larkin, and less with Mr Poutsmaor Mr Bain. He has worked on the land in this Essex village with the bizarre name all his life, says R. H. Stannard, in the '' Daily Mail."

If he can be compared with any type of agitator, it is with Mr Joseph Arch, the agricultural labourer who fifty years ago organised an agricultural labourers' union, created a rise in wages when flour was so dear that the cottage loaf was made of barley, and persuaded the Norfolk labourers to send him to Parliament. >

: "See Charles Smith," said the labourer to me when I asked him what they thought of being locked out for joining the union. Mr Charles Smith is •the labourer who has roused Helions Bumpstead by insisting on the right of the agricultural labourer to belong to a trade union.

It needed a great man to stir up Helions Bumpstead on any question whatever. Barely fifty miles from London, it is as yet untouched by modern civilisation. There is no railway, no telephone, no picture show, and no garage. The '' Marquis of Granby/*' the village inn, is innocent of any sign for motorists. An itinerant organgrinder and mid-Victorian tunes was the only amusement-provider that had called these last few months. SOMETHING WBONG.

What could possibly agitate this, Helions Bumpstead?

Most of the labourers have worked on the same farms since they were boys. They never made any complaint —if they grumbled it was among themselves and not to their masters. Whatever their wages were, however hard it was to get sufficient food, they managed to rear large and fairly healthy families of children; who were certainly stronger than the' slum-bred children of the large towns, - But Mr Charles Smith, who. read the newspaper, felt there was something wrong. He read of miners and bricklayers and shoemakers who demanded a minimum wage and got it, and he thought of his "tharteen shullin a week and wot yar can mak' at 'arvest," and shook his head. I met Mr Smith pitchforking a cartload of manure on to his employer's land. In the village stood his idle companions who had been locked out by indignant farmers for joining the Labourers' Union. I asked him why he had waited until now before complaining. "Bin thinkin' about it fer years," he said; "couldn't go on livin' like this. 'Tain't livin' at all. Knew there was a union, but didn't, know who to write tu. We know now, and we've made our plans. We don't "want any interference from outside. Tharteen shullin' a week and nuthin' on a wet day ain't good enough."

NO SOCIALIST AGITATOE. There was nothing here of the usual stock-in-trade of the Socialist agitator. Nothing bitter about the employer j no resentfulness, and yet no servility. I had expected to hear phrases like ''equal distribution of wealth," "the capitalist system," "the privileged classes." I waited for him to talk of Karl Marx and Henry George—but he knew nothings of them. Within narrow limits of his vocabulary this j man talked of the facts of his own ex-! istence without any embellishments, and they went home. I . understood then how this little man had. started a movement that may make trade-union-ism a new and unexpected force in one

of the most unlikely spots in the kingdom.

An old man behind the cart grunted at the mention of Joseph Arch. "He warn't no good," he said. I reminded him that he secured a rise in wages and that the labourers' thankoffering was to break away from the union.

"I tell ye he warn't no good to us, ?f the old man said. There was a twinkle in Smith's blue eyes, but he said no- . thing. A hundred farm labourers of painfully slow intelligence, without any - specifically made promise of higher wages and better conditions of employment, have really thought it 'worth while to raise the issue of the recognition of trade unionism in their ranks. And all at the bidding of one who . would probably shrink from getting on a public platform, and who has hardly even so much as stood in a crowd. UNIONISM INCREDIBLE. To one type of farmer this lock-out : is the only thinkable action. A union, to him seems incredible—a thing that could never exist within sight of ' Helions Bumpstead. One farmer spoke kindly of the men he had locked out — as of men who have been grievously misled by a charlatan and who will return disillusioned and ashamed. An- ' other type —like Mr Smith's own employer —is untroubled by the new spirit, save that he feels a little sore that men who have been in his own and his father's employ for a lifetime should waprtf a third party, to come between them. The farmer complains that his men have never grumbled to him, have never asked for more, and wonders that > it should have been fear of reprisals that kept them silent. I wonder what could have been in . the atmosphere of Helions Bumpstead to have stirred Mr Smith. There is some sort of social intercourse in the parlour of the "Marquis of Granby." Helions Bumpstead there sometimes discusses the problems of Empire. When they are tired of talking and looking at each other, which is not often, the fathers play the only game which has survived the years in Helions Bumpstead —"ringing the bull" —which is swinging a brass ring till it catches on ; a nail in the wall, with twenty "goes" for each player.

Meanwhile, there are women like Mrs Hughes 1 -with six sitting in aaalmost bare cottage wondering whether there will be enough food for to-mur-row's meals. "You don't have mu-.h .

left," she explained, "in Helioiis Bumpstead when you've paid six siulr lings a. week for your bread, which is never sufficient. I sometimes cry to myself," she adds quietly, "when J think the children have not had onowjh and there's.no more to give them.''