GROWTH UNDER STORMY SKIES. 215 



Mr. Lloyd George had not drafted a Bill, he had at any 

 rate roused high hopes, and a "divine discontent." This is 

 what a special correspondent found, at any rate, in North 

 Essex. 1 



" Helions Bumpstead," said this writer, " is certainly a mile- 

 stone in this campaign. When you talk to the labourers you 

 find that they have been roused by the possibility of a minimum 

 wage of a sovereign, which would be riches to them. Soon after 

 the Land Campaign started many of the Essex farmers put the 

 wages up is. ; but I am told that now it would be difficult even 

 to find a farm in North Essex where the weekly wage is over 

 133." 



Not only were the wages desperately low, but the housing 

 conditions were shockingly bad. Here is a description of 

 some of the tied cottages. 



" I looked into one or two of the cottages. They were neat 

 outside, but inside one dark and damp little room, I found paper 

 peeling off the walls, broken floors, and general disrepair. In 

 one bedroom some pieces of sacking were nailed on the wall. 

 The old man who lived there said they were to cover holes in 

 the plaster. He said that one wet night recently he had to get 

 up and nail some more sacking on the wall. Cottages are left 

 until they become uninhabitable, and this is one cause of the 

 shortage of labour which is being felt severely all over North 

 Essex. Very few cottages are being built, and in some villages 

 in the Saffron Walden Division there is a serious overcrowding. 

 I was told of a two-roomed cottage, in one Essex village, in 

 which twelve people are living. Another case was that of a 

 woman who moved from a cottage to the one next door ' because 

 she did not feel easy in it.' The day after she left it the cottage 

 collapsed from decrepitude." 2 



Not all the farmers, though, in North Essex were mentally 

 living in the remote Early Victorian times, for one of the 

 largest, Mr. Cowell, a magistrate, observed to a Dailv News 

 representative : ' There is no getting away from the fact 

 that farmers will have to pay more money to their labourers, 

 and as for the Helions Bumpstead farmers saying their 

 men must not belong to the Union, it is out of the question. 

 They are years behind the times." 



1 Manchester Guardian, March 14, 



2 Ibid. 



