266 ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 



" At a very early age I began to feel that things were not 

 very satisfactory, and had a desire to join the Navy. When I 

 was eighteen years of age I had a feeling that I would get into 

 a town, and on my nineteenth birthday I set out for Swindon 

 to look for work, with i8s. in my pocket and all my belongings 

 tied up in a red handkerchief. Boys in a town don't know what 

 an effort has got to be made to get away from the serfdom of the 

 land. I trudged away like Dick Whittington to become a Coun- 

 cillor of Swindon, instead of Lord Mayor of London. I was out 

 of work for four weeks and worked in the townsmen's gardens 

 for odd shillings to keep up the i8s. I started with. At last I 

 got a job in the Railway Works. The laugh that went round 

 the others when they saw me with my brown corduroys on 

 covered with plough dirt, and when I took my coat off and they 

 saw the way my shirts were made, then they tumbled at the 

 truth, that I came from some outlandish place where ignorance 

 was bliss. 



" The lot of the agricultural labourer was going down the 

 hill previous to the war. Piecework and privileges were drop- 

 ping off fast, and prices had a tendency to rise. I remember 

 the time when home-bred meat could be bought for 8d. per Ib. 

 and I have bought 24 eggs for is. We used to go to Cirencester 

 Mop with a few pounds in our pockets which we earned in the 

 summer time at piecework. But the self-binder came in to 

 tie up the corn, and the farmers left the corn to hoe itself rather 

 than pay for its being done. Wages may have stopped still, 

 or even rose is., but the allowances and privileges went, and 

 the piecework gradually dwindled to none at all, and prices went 

 up, while the farm workers grumbled. 



"I cannot say that farm workers generally are more difficult to 

 organise than other men, providing all things were equal, which 

 they are not. In the first place town workers live and work in 

 hundreds and thousands, and it is very easy to put their heads 

 together on any matter if they desire to. If farm workers have 

 a meeting at night, then the farmer comes round to overawe 

 them individually in the morning while at work. If that hap- 

 pened in a factory, it would have to happen before the eyes of 

 all the other workers, who would want to know what was on. 

 The farm workers live in tied cottages, of which town workers 

 generally know nothing of the drawbacks. Men in the villages 

 have all the manhood knocked out of them long before they are 

 grown men, for the reasons I have stated before, and because 

 men cannot be produced on 145. per week. Village influence, 

 and village schools, are inferior to town schools. Generally, if 

 the townsmen had the same difficulties to overcome they would 

 be in the same position as the villagers. 



" I started as organiser for the W.U. early in 1914, and I 



