Who were the Migrant Pickers

Who were the Migrant Pickers?

HOP-PICKING
Rural Conflict and Strikes
The Hop-pickers Work
Who were the Migrant Pickers
Work Place Regulation
The Payment System
The Dynamics of Conflict
Conclusion
References
Hop Production in the UK
Reading

Faversham News 21st Sept 1889

The Social Composition of the migrant hop-pickers

MIGRANT HOP-PICKERS travelled to the Kentish hop fields from the East End of London. The picking season lasted about four weeks, starting in the last week of August and finishing, at the latest, by the first week of October, depending upon climatic conditions.

The traditional occupations of the migrant pickers (1885 Report of the Royal Commission)

The numbers of migrant hop-pickers or "foreigners" as they were known, has been estimated to have been as high as 100,000 in peak years. It has been suggested that the occupations of the migrant pickers reflected the vast array of London's industrial activity. The 1885 Report of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes gives details of the pickers by residence and occupation. The list, of which a high proportion are casual and seasonally affected occupations, includes the following: "costermongers, woodcutters, shoemakers, hawkers, dock labourers, tinkers, draymen, brushmakers, tinworkers, matchbox makers, fish basket makers, char women, waterside labourers, whafingers, needlewomen, porters, washerwomen, sack makers paper flower makers, brick-layers, dustmen, general labourers, the wives and daughters of arsenal men.(4)

Dockers and their families - Booth's "Life and Labour"

On closer examination of the composition of the workforce, it would appear that of all the casual occupations represented, it was the dockers and their families that made up the largest occupational group:

"Dockers were preferred by the farmers as they were inured to all work - in all seasons - and are reliable because of the training they have received in gangs."(5)

The popularity of hopping as a summer job among the casual dock labourers is borne out both by the research of historians and the recollections of Kentish folk recorded by the Michael Winstanley oral history project.(6) In Booth's "Life and Labour", he discussed the severe problem of under-employment exacerbated by the system of casualism. The extent to which hop-picking helped take up the surplus of the dockland labour market was described in "The Labour News" when it reported that the end of hop-picking was "felt on the water front" (7)

George Orwell's description of the migrant pickers in 1931

The pickers worked in extended family units with grandparents and children providing a vital source of cheap labour. As George Orwell noted, the children's labour was considered essential to supplement the earnings of the family group and thereby enable a little extra to be taken back to London to pay the rent. Orwell also noticed that the social composition of half the workforce on Blest's farm, where he worked in 1931, consisted of women and gypsies.(8)

By 1935 families whose men were casual dock labourers were still reported to be going hop-picking as complete family units. However, the general trend for the wife and children to go hop-picking leaving the husband to work in London appears to increase.(9) The growth of national insurance coverage combined with the increased opportunities for work in London was probably conducive in reducing the male proportion of the workforce from the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1931 the Kent Messenger reported that "already people are asking if the dole will kill hopping". (10) In 1920 the Kentish Gazette reported that women and children predominated a colony of 400 East London hop-pickers and that in some fields the ratio was as high as nine tenths. (11) This exceedingly high ratio of women pickers which, according to reports such as Orwell's, tends to be lower in the thirties. This may have been due to the post-war boom and the short period of full employment before the recession of the inter-war period. However, one can conclude that by the beginning of the twentieth century there was a positive trend towards women and children working in the hop-fields and that dockers and their families were proportionately high among the migrant labourers, due to the continuing nature of casualism in the docks.

Derek Bright
Date Last Modified: 21/11/03