WHAT OF THE HARVEST? 281 



the distinguished Peer upon whom I was calling. My 

 astonishment was great when this very respectable elderly 

 waiter asked me in a voice audible to others if I knew if his 

 lordship paid good wages to farm workers. I answered that 

 I hoped so. Thereupon he burst out with : " It's about 

 time they did. My father was an agricultural labourer and 

 he had to bring nine of us up on los. a week." He said it 

 with such feeling that I felt that if I had put a Red Flag 

 into his hand he would have rushed out into the street 

 heralding the Social Revolution ! 



Mr. Jack Shingfield, the Workers' Union organiser of 

 the farm labourers in Suffolk, was at one time a footman. 

 His father was a farm labourer and a member of Joseph 

 Arch's Union. Jack left school at eleven years of age, 

 when he worked in the gardens attached to a castle. As 

 his calves developed it was but a short flight of steps into 

 the servants' hall ; and he took his calves in the wake of 

 a sporting gentleman on to the hunting fields, the grouse 

 moors and the deck of a yacht. 



Bored with this parasitical kind of labour, and throwing 

 respectability to the winds, he became a London dairyman, 

 and soon agitated to improve conditions for his fellow work- 

 ers, forming what was then known as the National Union of 

 Dairy Employees. Despite his twelve hours a day for seven 

 days a week, he attended classes at the Polytechnic and 

 secured diplomas. At the beginning of the war he was 

 fired with the desire to organise the class from which he had 

 sprung, and he was appointed an eastern counties organiser 

 for the Workers' Union. 



Under forty years of age, he is still young, and his energy 

 found a boundless field in Suffolk and in Essex, where 

 since his appointment as organiser in 1915 he has opened 

 200 new branches with a membership of nearly 30,000. 

 He organised one of the largest and most successful farm 

 labourers' demonstrations ever held in England. This was 

 at Bury St. Edmunds, when it was estimated that 20,000 

 men were present (June, 1919). 



Mr. Shingfield believes in plain language when speaking 

 to labourers, and as an organiser, in giving simple directions 



