34 ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 



Arch held his first meeting under the old chestnut tree 

 at Wellesbourne on February 7, 1872. He said he ex- 

 pected to find thirty or forty men there, instead of which 

 he found the place " as lively as a swarm of bees in June, 

 and an audience of nearly a thousand." It was a swarm 

 which had collected without the aid of a single circular or hand- 

 bill. Farm labourers carried the glad tidings in an hour 

 or two. Word was passed from cottage to cottage and farm 

 to farm. The spirit of the hive was soon made manifest. 

 All Wellesbourne village collected there, and men had 

 walked from Moreton, from Loxley, from Charlecot, from 

 Hampden Lucy and from Barford. The night was dark, 

 but the men had got together some bean poles and hung 

 lanterns on them. Arch was mounted on an old pig-stool, 

 and to quote his own words : 



" In the flickering light of the lanterns I saw the earnest 

 upturned faces of these poor brothers of mine faces gaunt with 

 hunger and pinched with want all looking towards me and ready 

 to listen to the words that would fall from my lips. These white 

 slaves of England with the darkness all about them, like the 

 children of Israel waiting for some one to lead them out of the 

 land of Egypt." 



It must be remembered that Arch was a Methodist lay 

 preacher and the Book that he was in the habit of quoting 

 from was the one book his hearers knew. Dressed in a 

 pair of cord trousers, cord vest and an old flannel jacket 

 the hedge cutter was listened to in breathless silence for an 

 hour. A resolution was passed that a union "should be 

 formed then and there, and between two and three hundred 

 names were taken down. 



" That night, I knew," he says, " that a fire had been kindled 

 that would catch on and spread, and run abroad like sparks in 

 stubble : and I felt certain that this night we had set light to a 

 beacon which would prove a rallying point for the agricultural 

 labourers throughout the country." 



It was fortunate for the newly born union that it received 

 a full sympathetic report in the Leamington Chronicle. 

 The editor of this journal, Mr. J. E. Matthew Vincent (the 

 virtual founder of the National Agricultural Labourers' 



