WHAT OF THE HARVEST? 267 



should say that the main factors then that helped us were that 

 the villagers thought that they had a backing by Lloyd George's 

 campaign, and they had a further backing by the offer to them of 

 a^ townsman's Union. The fact that we told the men that the 

 Union would back them at once if they joined us, gave them much 

 courage.', and they mustered up their strength with such force 

 that I believe we were well on the road to success when the war 

 started. The war took the live blood from our new branches. 

 I had one branch, which, after I had been waiting for some time 

 for a reply for the secretary, I went over to see what had hap- 

 pened, and found that the secretary, president, and all the mem- 

 bers but five old men, had gone off one morning to join the army. 

 Times again, as fast as we got a secretary the army got him, 

 and after making every effort to officer a branch, it would dwin- 

 dle down to nothing. I have never had a rowdy meeting of farm 

 workers, except at Eynsham, Oxon., where a butcher and a 

 farmer's son tried to upset the meeting. If the Unions go down 

 in the villages now, it will be the greatest calamity that could 

 happen to the villages." 



" Regarding my own history," writes Mr. Tom Mackley, 

 organiser for the N.A.L.U. in Nottingham and Lincolnshire, 

 " one feels somewhat diffident about doing more than just out- 

 lining a few of the more pertinent incidents in a life that never 

 was three weeks from the workhouse door for nearly forty-five 

 years. Born in the little hamlet of Garthorpe, near Melton 

 Mowbray, Leics., of hard-working parents, fifty-four years ago 

 on August 18, 1919, T have had some experience of the lot 

 of the land worker. 



" My father married twice, and all his family (six) being from 

 his second wife, we were young when he was grey. I was the 

 second son and second in family. My father having got his feet 

 fro/en cutting hedges in winter of iS/j, and gangrene intervening, 

 he was taken to Leicester in firman*, leaving my mother with 

 six children, and only one 1 working and being paid js. (>d. weekly. 

 1 was taken from school at nine years of age and got ^s. a week 

 as a bird-teP.de]-, Os. Od. all told to keep mother and six chil- 

 dren, not to mention the expense of my father at Leicester. 

 My father worked on the same farm for 55 l , years without any 

 break whatever, and won the long service prize given by the 

 Leicester Agricultural Society for Long Service the year he had 

 to cease work. His employer got the pri/e-money and was 

 going to dole it out in usual fashion until my mother threw it 

 back at the person who brought; it. 



" At just turned ten years 1 was packed off to I -'arm Si rvice, 

 i.e. SI.AVKK v, and did some five years at various places. At 

 the last place I had to clean thirteen pairs of boots, milk seven 



