Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-29T00:35:23.879Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Low Pay, Underemployment and Multiple Occupations: Men's Work in the Inter-war Countryside

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Stephen Hussey
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

On a tour of the Chiltern hills upon the eve of the Second World War the rural commentator Henry Massingham came across a Buckinghamshire farmer. As rural ‘characters’ are wont to do in Massingham's books, the farmer was able to recite a piece of rustic wisdom, on this occasion concerning the type of country worker that he always sought to employ, saying ‘A man as can't do more'n one thing baint good for anything’. As an employer of men the farmer simply meant that all his charges should be of sufficient calibre to prove themselves versatile within an industry that called on them to change tasks by the hour, day, week and season. In short, in the eyes of the farmer an adaptable labourer was an efficient labourer. However, there was another side to this equation, as the aphorism also held resonance with workmen across a wide range of trades and not simply agriculture. For it was the man who was able to vary his work patterns, switching between employment sources, going beyond his central occupation if necessary, that was best able to ride-out the vagaries of the rural labour market.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , October 1997 , pp. 217 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © Edinburgh Mathematical Society 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Massingham, H.J., Chiltern Country (London, 1940), p. 4.Google Scholar

2 Higgs, Edward, ‘Occupational census and the agricultural workforce in Victorian England and Wales’, Economic History Review XLVIII 4 (1995)Google Scholar and ‘Women, occupations and work in the nineteenth-century censuses’, History Workshop 23 (1987)Google Scholar

3 Joyce, Patrick, ‘Work’, in Thompson, F.M.L., The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, Volume 2 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 143 and p. 144.Google Scholar

4 Golby, John, ‘Ideas and Debates on Work’, in John, Golby (ed.), Studying Family and Community History, 19th and 20th Centuries, Volume 3–Communities and Families (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar

5 Joyce, , ‘Work’, p. 147.Google Scholar

6 A range of other terms could be used interchangeably with ‘multiple occupations’; these include secondary employment, by-employment and pluri-activity.

7 Malcolmson, Robert, ‘Ways of Getting a Living in Eighteenth-century England’, in Pahl, R.E. (ed.), On Work: Historical and Theoretical Approaches (Oxford, 1988), p. 48.Google Scholar See also Malcolmson, Robert, Life and Labour in England, 1700–1780 (London, 1981) especially chapter 2.Google Scholar

8 For two notable exceptions see Samuel, Raphael, ‘’Quarry roughs”: life and labour in Headington Quarry, 1860–1920. An oral history’, in Raphael, Samuel (ed.), Village Life and Labour (London, 1975)Google Scholar and Pahl, R.E., Divisions of Labour (Oxford, 1984).Google Scholar Pahl has made claim to the diversity of the modern household economies in the Isle of Sheppey writing that ‘It is quite possible to describe households in the 1980s where the mix of work is broadly the same as it was in the thirteenth century’, p. 54.

9 For a more extensive examination of this point see Hussey, Stephen, Work, Gender and the Rural Household in England, 1918 to 1950 (Addison Wesley Longman, forthcoming).Google Scholar

10 In Steeple Bumpstead Rural District Council, for example, the 1921 census lists some 502 or 55.9% of the 898 men over the age of twelve in full-time work as having an ‘agricultural occupation’.

11 Sturt, George, Change in the Village (London, 1912)Google Scholar and Williams, Alfred, Life in a Railway Factory (London, 1915) especially pp. 120–28.Google Scholar

12 Essex County Standard, 19th June 1920.

13 Street, A.G., A.G. Street's Country Calendar (London, 1935, this edition 1986) p. 155 and p. 179.Google Scholar

14 Rowntree, B. Seebohm and Kendal, May, How the Labourer Lives: A Study of the Rural Labour Problem (London, 1913).Google Scholar

15 See Ashby, A.W., ‘Farm Workers' Budgets’, Journal of Ministry of Agriculture, December 1924, January and February 1925Google Scholar‘Weekly Expenditure of Working-Class Households in the United Kingdom in 1937–38’, Ministry of Labour Gazette, February 1941, Volume XLIX;Google ScholarRowntree, B. Seebohm, Human Needs of Labour (London, 1937).Google Scholar

16 Pedley, W.H., Labour on the Land: A Study of the Developments Between the Two Great Wars (London, 1942), p. 12.Google Scholar

17 Essex Farmers' Journal, September 1925.

18 Perkins, Harold, Toppesfield, Essex, born 1909, interviewed 1993.Google Scholar

19 Essex Farmers' Journal, September 1929.

20 Beales, H.L. and Lambert, R.S.(eds.), Memoirs of the Unemployed (London, 1934) pp. 190–91.Google Scholar

21 Benn, Herbert, Helions Bumpstead, Essex, born 1915, interviewed 1995Google Scholar

22 Watson, Jim, Steeple Bumpstead, Essex, born 1908, interviewed 1992Google Scholar

23 Simmonds, Bert, Steeple Bumpstead, Essex, born 1916, interviewed 1992Google Scholar

24 Mayes, L.J., The History of Chairmaking in High Wycombe (London, 1960) p. 138.Google Scholar

25 Barrack, Alayne, The Furniture Industry of High Wycombe in the Inter-war Period with Special Reference to E. Gomme Limited (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Bristol, 1987), p. 11.Google Scholar

26 Webb, Sidney and Freeman, Arnold, Seasonal Trades (London, 1912) pp. vi–vii.Google Scholar

27 Mayes, , The History, p. 144.Google Scholar

28 ibid. p. 137.

29 Miller, George, Naphill, Buckinghamshire, born 1911, interviewed 1993.Google Scholar

30 Simpson, Dick, Naphill, Buckinghamshire, born 1920, interviewed 1994.Google Scholar

31 Miller, George.Google Scholar

32 Juliet Stuart Poynttz in Webb and Freeman, Seasonal Trades, p. 6.

33 Malcolmson, , Life and LabourGoogle ScholarHassell Smith, A., ‘Labourers in Late Sixteenth-century England: a case study from north Norfolk’, Continuity and Change, Volume 4, numbers 2 and 3 (1989);Google ScholarEveritt, Alan, ‘Farm Labourers’, in Joan, Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume IV 1500–1640 (Cambridge, 1967).Google Scholar

34 Samuel, Raphael, ‘Mineral Workers’, in his edited collection Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers (London, 1977)Google ScholarSamuel, Raphael, ‘Comers and Goers’, in Dyos, H.J. and Wolff, Michael, The Victorian City: Images and Realities, Volume I (London, 1973);Google ScholarSamuel, Raphael, ‘Quarry Roughs’.Google Scholar

35 Samuel, , ‘Quarry Roughs’, p. 243.Google Scholar

36 For instance, multiple occupations warrant no mention in the analysis of the twentieth-century farm labourer contained in Armstrong, AlanFarmworkers: A Social and Economic History 1770–1980 (London, 1988).Google Scholar

37 Benson, John, The Penny Capitalists (Dublin, 1983), p. 2.Google Scholar

38 Davies, M.F., Life in an English Village (London, 1909), p. 105.Google Scholar

39 Moore, J.C., Portrait of Elmbury (London, 1945).Google Scholar Elmbury being the name Moore used for Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire.

40 Samuel, , ‘Quarry Roughs’, p. 168.Google Scholar

41 Other authors have also chosen less than flattering descriptions of these sort of characters. Bob Copper calls his local example a ‘wild sort of man’, while Chris Ketteridge and Spike Mays refer to their examples as men who ‘formed the nucleus of the poaching gang, who did not regard poaching as stealing’. Copper, Bob, Early to Rise: A Sussex Boyhood (London, 1976), pp. 186–7.Google ScholarKetteridge, Chris and Mays, Spike, Five Miles from Bunkum: A Village and its Crafts (London, 1972), p. 109.Google Scholar

42 Phillips, Bert, Naphill, Buckinghamshire, born 1903, interviewed 1992.Google Scholar

43 Thomas, Edgar and Elms, C.E., An Economic Survey of Buckinghamshire Agriculture, Part I, Farms and Estates (University of Reading Agricultural Economics Department, 1938), pp. 16–17.Google Scholar

44 Folley, Bill, Naphill, Buckinghamshire, born 1914, interviewed 1993.Google Scholar

45 Simpson, Dick.Google Scholar

46 Hurst, Sid, Naphill, Buckinghamshire, born 1914, interviewed 1993.Google Scholar

47 Phillips, Bert.Google Scholar

48 Mays, Spike, Reuben's Comer (London, 1969), p. 12.Google Scholar

49 Gasson, Ruth, Mobility of Farm Workers (Cambridge, 1974), p. 6.Google Scholar

50 Smith, Ron, Steeple Bumpstead, Essex, born 1910, interviewed 1993.Google Scholar

51 Bell, Adrian, Silver Ley (London, 1931), pp. 185–187.Google Scholar