HOP PICKING

Evening Star, Issue 20985, 26 December 1931, Page 2

HOP PICKING

[By Eric Blair, in the ‘New Statesman.’]

“A holiday with pay.” ‘‘Keep yourself all the time you’re down there, pay your fare both and come back five quid in pocket.’ 1 quote the words of two experienced hop-pickers, who had been down into Kent, almost every season since they were children, and ought to have known better. For, as a matter of fact, hoppicking is far from being a holiday, and, as far as wages go, no worse employment exists. I do not mean by that that, hoppicking is a disagreeable job in itself. It entails long hours, but it is healthy, outdoor work, and any able-bodied person can do it. The process is extremely simple. The vines, long climbing plants with the hops clustering on them in bunches like grapes, are trained up poles or over wires; all the picker has to do is to tear them down and strip the hops into a bin, keeping them as clean, as possible from leaves. The spiny . stems cut the palms of one s hands to pieces, and in the early morning, before the cuts have reopened, it is- painful work; one has trouble, too, with the plant-lice which infest the hops and crawl down one’s neck, but beyond that there are no annoyances. One can talk and smoke as one works, and on hot days there is no pleasanter place than the shady lanes of hops, with their hitter scent —-an unutterably refreshing scent, like a wind blowing from oceans of cool beer. It would be almost ideal if one could only earn a living at it. ■ Unfortunately, the rate of payment is so low that it is quite impossible for a picker to earn a pound a week, eleven, in a wet year like 1931, 15s. Hop-picking is done on the piecework system, the pickers being paid at so '-much a bushel. At the farm where I worked this year, as at most farms in Kent, the tally was six bushels to the shilling—that ‘is, wo were paid 2d for each bushel we picked. Now, a good vino yields about half a bushel of hops, and a good picker can strip a vine in ten or fifteen minutes; it follows that an expert picker might, given perfect conditions, earn , 30s in a sixty-hour week. But, for a number of reasons, these perfect conditions .do not exist.. To begin with, hops vary enormously in quality. On some vines they are as large as small pears, on others no bigger than hazel nuts; the bad vinestake as long to strip as the good ones —longer, as a rule, for their lower shoots are more tangled—and oitenfive of them will not yield a bushel. Again, there aro frequent delaysi in the work, either in changing from -field to field, or on account of rain; an hour or two is wasted in this manner every day, and the pickers are paid no compensation for lost time. And, lastly, the greatest cause of loss, there is unfair measurement. The hops are measured in bushel baskets of standard size, hut it must he remembered that hops aro not like apples or potatoes, of which one can say, that a bushel is a bushel and there is an end of it. They aro soft things, as compressible as sponges, and it is quite easy for the measurer to crush a bushel of them into a quart if he chooses. As the hop-pickers often sing— , When ho comes to measure, Ho never knows where to stop; 'Ay, ay, get in the bin, ( And take the bloody loti Prom the bin the hops are put, into pokes, which are supposed when full to weigh a hundredweight, and are normally carried by one man. But it often needs two men to handle a full poke, when the measurer has been “taking them heavy.” With these working conditions a friend and myself earned, this September, about 9s a week each. Wo were new to the job, but the experienced pickers did little better. The best pickers in our gang, and among the best in the whole camp, were a family of gipsies, five adults and a child; these people, spending ten hours a day in the hop field, earned just £lO between them in three weeks. Leaving the child out of account (though, as a matter of fact, all the children in the hop field work), this was an average of 13s 4d a week each. There were various farms nearby where the tally was eight or nine bushels to tho shilling, and where even 12s a week would have been hard to earn. Besides these starvation wages, tho hop-picker has to put up with rules which reduce him practically to a slave. One rule, for instance, empowers a farmer to sack Ills employees on any pretext whatever, , and in doing so to confiscate a quarter of their earnings; and the picker’s earnings are also docked if he resigns his job. It is no wonder that itinerant agricultural labourers, most of whom are in work ten months of the year, travel “on the taby” and sleep in tho casual ward between jobs. As to the hop-pickers’ living accommodation, there is now a whole tribe of Government officials to supervise it, so presumably it is better than it used to be But what it can have been like in the old days is hard to imagine, for even now tho ordinary hop-pickers liufc is worse than a stable. (I say this advisedly; on our farm, tho best quarters, specially set apart for, married people, were stables.) My friend and I, with two others, slept in a tin hut 10ft across, with two unglnzed winclows and half a dozen other apertures to let in the wind and rairt, and no furniture save a heap of straw; the latrine was 200 yards away, and the water tap tho samo distance. Some of these huts had to be shared by eight men—but that, at any rate, mitigated the cold, which can be bitter on bep-

tembor nights when one has no bedding but a disused sack. • And, of there were all the normal discomforts of camp life; nob serious hardships, but enough to make sere that when we wore not working or sleeping wo were either fetching water or trying to coax a firo out of wot sticks. I think it will be agreed that those are thoroughly bad conditions of pay and treatment. Yet the curious thing is that there is no lack of pickers, and, what is more, the same people return to the hop-fields year after year. |\hat keeps the business going is probably the fact that the Cockneys rather enjoy the trip to the country, in spite of tho bad pay and m spite of the discomfort. When the season » over'the nickers are heartily glad-glad.to bo back in London, where you do not have to sleep on straw, and you can put n pennv In the gas instead of_ hunting for firewood, and Woolworth s is round the corner —but still, hop-picking is in the category of things that are great fun when thev are over. It figures in the picker’s mind as a holiday, though they lire working hard all the tune and out of pocket at the end. And besides this there is the uiecework system, which disguises tho low rate of payment; for “ s i x Bushels a shilling ’ sounds much more than "fifteen shillings a week. And there is tho tradition of tho good times ten years ago, when hops were dear and the farmers could pay ,6d a bushel; this keeps alive the. tales about "coming home five quid in P oc kot. At anv rate, whatever the cause, theie is no ‘difficulty in getting people to do the work, so perhaps one ought not to complain too loudly about the conditions in the hop fields. But if onei sets pay and treatment against work done, then a hop-picker is appreciably worse off than a sandwich-man.