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Hard work, poor pay, but loads of fun: East End families in the garden of England |
When poor Cockneys went to the country
As Melanie McGrath researched her family’s past, she became intrigued by East Enders’ annual trip to Kent’s hop fields, writes Dan Carrier
IT is perhaps the greatest of the East End’s many great traditions: the annual trip in the late summer to help the farmers of Kent bring in the hop harvest.
The labour-intensive job of getting the buds from the climbing vines and off to the brewery was crucial to England’s beer industry – and meant a temporary workforce was needed. The inhabitants of the cramped streets of the most deprived areas of the Empire’s capital were more than ready to provide the muscle.
This annual exodus is the topic of a new semi-fictional book by Kentish Town-based historian and author Melanie McGrath.
Hopping tells the story of her family and their friends leaving the streets of east London for the bountiful fields of Kent. Using historical research and fictional techniques to bring her characters to life, Mel has explored this pilgrimage that was vital to both Britain’s brewing industry and to the poor of the East End.
She is in good company: the importance of hops has often been recognised by writers. Both Charles Dickens and George Orwell wrote of them:
“Kent, sir, everybody knows Kent. Apples, cherries, hops and women,” wrote Dickens in The Pickwick Papers.
Orwell’s Down and Out In Paris and London saw him tramp southwards to join in the annual pick. His critical eye saw the back-breaking labour and starvation rates of pay; he did not see the work for the release it could be.
It was as much a holiday as any city dweller was likely to get in those days. It gave the children growing up in the industrial effluent of the workhouse of London six weeks of fresh air and a much-needed change of diet.
“The annual trip was known as the ‘Londoners’ holiday’,” explains Mel.
“It was like a Cockney Glastonbury. Hopping was a great deal of hard work, for poor pay, but it was the nearest many East Enders ever came to a vacation.
“The money earned was managed by the wives – often the men would have stayed behind in London, working at their usual jobs. It meant it could be spent by the women, and would often be used to pay for winter clothing for their youngsters.”
For Mel, writing this story was a natural continuation of tracing her family’s tale. It follows her book Silvertown, which told the story of her grandmother Jenny Fulcher who ran a greasy spoon in the dockyard area.
“I wanted in its sequel to focus on a tale of a family of hop-pickers – my mother, Margaret Page, had been hopping once or twice in her childhood,” she explains. “My opportunity came in the shape of a man I’ll call Richie Baker. Richie had read Silvertown and recognised in the portrait of my grandmother an old friend of his mother, Daisy Crommelin. Richie and Daisy had passed most of the Second World War in the hop gardens. I began to add my own research to Richie’s reminiscences and soon had, in the story of the Crommelin family, a moving drama of working-class life led in the East End and the Kentish hop gardens.
“The estimated figure of around 200,000 pickers at hopping’s height is gathered from farmers’ records but it can only be an approximation. I decided that the story would be best told through the eyes of a single family. But they were poor and in those days poor people tended not to leave extensive written diaries, letters, photographs or much official documentation so there were events that I had to piece together from scraps of reminiscence or, in a few cases, re-imagine them altogether. I tried to do this in a way that left the larger truth of the story enhanced rather than compromised.”
It means her book is no dry social history of the period – it brings to life a generation long gone, and ensures the hop harvest which played such an important role in so many people’s lives will not be forgotten.
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