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Victorian London - Publications - Social Investigation/Journalism - The Wilds of London, by James Greenwood, 1874 - Going Hopping
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GOING HOPPING.
FROM the coal-heaver, who with the back of his dirty hand brushes the grime from his lips ere they are allowed to salute the chaste rim of the shining pewter measure that contains his "heavy wet"- (and no one ever yet saw a coal-heaver engage at his pot without this preliminary) - to the wing-whiskered swell who imbibes Bass's or Allsopp's beer-calling it "bittah bee-ah," we are nine-tenths of us interested in the subject of hops. As is popularly supposed, hops and malt enter equally into the concoction of the national beverage ; but the welfare of the latter ingredient is not nearly so much an object of anxiety and solicitude as is the former. This comes of undeviating faithfulness. Our barley we are sure of. The crop may be light, lightish, or heavy, and the price may vary a few shillings in the price of a "quarter" of it, but that is a matter to be settled between farming folks and brewers. It does not, or it seems not to, affect the public at large. Dear wheat means dear bread. If Mark Lane puts the screw on to-day, by to-morrow evening every baker in London is charging an extra penny per quartern for his loaves but there are no such fluctuations in the retail price of beer. The working man gets his quart of it for fourpence, sixpenny ale is never sixpence-half-penny, and the price of "bittah" is as fixed as the corks that secure
[-195-] the creamy nectar. So
long as barley is true to us we are sure of malt and of beer in abundance; its
quality is another matter, and for this the fickle hop, and not the patient
barley, is held responsible.
Never sprang there from the brown bosom of Mother Earth a
plant so "inconstant, insincere." It is a wonder of wonders that
hop-growers live to be such jolly, ruddy, prosperous old gentlemen as we
discover them. Their trials and afflictions are enormous and increasing. From
the moment when the unfortunate little emblem of bitterness thrusts its weak
head into the world, its miseries and the tribulations of its grower begin, and
the grower, unselfish in his grief, allows the public to share it with him.
Surely as the autumn comes may be read in the newspapers frequent bulletins of
the health and growth of the bantling, and invariably are they hopeless, and
melancholy, and dejected. Painful indeed must be the existence of the growing
hop! Before it is a month old there is a horrible whisper of "mildew"
abroad, and should it be nipped in its infancy it would surprise nobody. Then we
are startled by an alarm that the little hop is drowning - that the
long-continued rains have drenched and overwhelmed it, and that it is as good as
gone - nothing can save it but a long, long continuance of hot, sunshiny
weather. Then comes the sun-shiny weather, but, alas! as it never rains but it
pours, so the sun never warms but it scorches; and here is the hop, the
suffering hop, that is but weakly, having outgrown its strength during the rainy
season, having its innocent head baked on its shoulders, and that while it is a
mere husk, and empty as an egg-shell. Now it is mysteriously blighted, and in a
manner that the oldest grower in Kent never before saw the like of and cannot
make out at all. Now gloomy rumours of smut prevail; and barely is Humulus
Capulus so far recovered as to appear with a clean and cheerful face after
the last-mentioned unpleasant visitation, than is issued a startling statement
of a [-196-] plague of flies! Flies have seized on
the persecuted plant, they are eating its head out, and nothing, as we are
informed, can preserve our darling - our tall, graceful, young queen of beer,
from a premature and horrible death.
Then ensues the very natural consequence - the unfortunate
hop-growers are ruined, or very nearly, and to enable them to exist at all the
hard-hearted and exacting Government must remit part of the hop duty - or, at
least, extend the time allowed for paying it. Deputations of growers wait on the
Chancellor of the Exchequer to this end as regularly as the postman waits on his
customers for a Christmas-box, and until the faces of the poor petitioners must
have become quite familiar to him. Several of these unhappy tillers of the soil
he must remember when he was last in office, and as he listens to their tale of
long-suffering and distress, he must feel increased pride in his countrymen when
he sees them bearing their burdens on such broad backs and with jolly
countenances.
Whether it arises from its inability to read newspapers, or
from any other cause, is not ascertained; but it is certain that there is, at
least, one class of persons whose confidence in a tolerably good crop of hops is
undeviating. Where the individuals comprising this class spring from it is hard
even to guess, but all through the latter part of the month of September, and
even for a week or so in October, they may be seen on a Monday morning at London
Bridge Railway Station waiting for the train specially set apart for their cheap
conveyance to the distant hop-gardens.
Not knowing their purpose, the early traveller on the line in
question must be considerably astonished at the strange spectacle. It is as
though the vilest stews of the metropolis had been skimmed, and that here was
the skimming. At a glance it is evident that the stews in question must have
been Irish stews. To say nothing of the characteristic type of rags, [-197-]
especially of hats and bonnets, and the unmistakable physiognomy and
brogue, no company of tatterdemalions but an Irish company would have exhibited
such an amount of good humour at six o'clock of a damp and chilly October
morning, breakfastless, and with no better sitting or standing for their naked
feet than the cold paving-stones. Not that the majority of them were without
shoes, but it is not the economy of the Irish tramp to wear his shoes under such
circumstances. The saving of shoe leather entered into his calculations when he
resolved to ride to Maidstone; and since shoes are only good for walking in, why
should his feet be cumbered with them when for many a mile he has no walking
before him? So he carries them slung across his shoulder, along with a few items
of bedding, and perhaps a second "slop" and pair of breeches, done
into a sizable bundle, and tied in an old patchwork counterpane ; while his wife
- if he is a family man - is laden with, in addition to the baby, a stock of
cheap London grocery and bacon; the biggest boy carrying the cooking kettle, the
barely- closed lid of which reveals the shoes and boots of the small fry,
securely packed within, and only to be worn when stern necessity requires.
The fare charged to Maidstone for these hop-pickers is the
very reasonable one of two shillings ; "children under twelve
half-price"- a piece of liberality which seemed to cause considerable
trouble and vexation to the unlucky official ruling at the turnstile that led to
the departure platform. It was this individual's duty to examine the tickets the
pickers had received in exchange for their money, and certainly the bare-faced
attempts to pass off marriageable young men and women as "under
twelve" was enough to provoke a man whose duty is inexorably regulated by
railway time. "D'ye mean to tell me that she isn't more than twelve?"
exclaimed the bewildered ticket examiner of the mother of a strapping wench of
seventeen at least, and who, with an air of charming, childlike [-198-]
simplicity, held out a half ticket for the officer's inspection -
"Why, she's big and strong enough to carry a sack of coals."
"Big, collicther, dear, but not shthrong," explained the little girl's
mother, coaxingly - "she's outgrowed her strinth, poor soul, and a feather
ind 'ud knock her down." "Then what is she going down for if she is
too weak to work ?" The cute collector thought he had the old lady there,
but she had done battle in the same suit before to-day. "Shure, collicther,
dear, you are no family man, or ye wouldn't ax the quistion; did yer niver hear
that the bitter ov the hop was strinthenin' to invilades? But it isn't the
dirthy shillin' that shall baulk the baby," continued the old lady,
perceiving that the officer was not to be convinced- "I'd rather be the
t'other half iv her out of pocket;" and with a knowing wink at the
"baby," away she went to buy the other half ticket.
And so, after countless skirmishes of a like character, the
whole number pass on their way to the train; and I see no more of them - (I can
hear them plainly enough, though the carriage I occupy is a long distance from
them - I can hear them chanting ditties, both comic and sentimental, and
laughing and "chaffing," as though bound on a holiday instead of to a
bout of hard drudgery) - until Maidstone is reached, and they troop out at the
station gate and take the road like folks who are not at a loss for the right
way to go. This way undoubtedly was the way towards the hop fields, so I, too,
took the road, expecting merry, if not select, company all the way along.
But in this I was mistaken. I speedily discovered that it was
only when herding together, with nobody to look and nothing to be made by
dissimulation, that they indulged in a natural flow of spirits. Soon as they
were on the highway they broke up into gangs of three or four-some loitering,
while others went ahead, so as to divide the chances of the road fairly amongst
them ; and became halting, whining beggars, implor-[-199-]ing
of every passer-by the "laste thrifle in the wurrld, yer honner, for the
blessed God's sake," to save them from "dhroppin' down," they
having tramped it all the way from London. And really they were enabled to put
on an appearance so fagged and wobegone - an air so eloquent of dustiness and
footsoreness, that I have little doubt that in a walk of a mile or so they were
able to cadge at least half their passage money.
Did the reader ever see a hop garden? It is a curiously
pretty sight. I never saw a vineyard, but should imagine that a hop garden was
its exact counterpart. A great level plain that at a distance looks completely
and thickly covered by slender flowing pillars, all green and gold, but which on
closer inspection prove to be a succession of fruitful walls, with a path about
six feet in width between each. These are the hops on the straight ranks of
poles, each one planted in a little mound about a foot round and a foot high. In
each mound three roots are planted, and under favourable circumstances flourish
and make such a grand display of foliage, and twine and bind one pole's covering
with that of its next neighbour, that it is like a weaving of leaves and fruit
through the entire length of the row, and, with the sun shining through the
interstices, throws odd-shaped, quivering patches of light across the shadowy
path, making a picture not easily forgotten.
There are many different kinds of hops, differing much in
price. There are " Goldings" (the best), and "white bines,"
and "grapes," and "Joneses," and "Colgates," the
last-named the most prolific, but accounted the rankest. The picking is
"piece work." Part of the hop-grower's stock-in-trade consists in a
vast number of enormous wicker baskets, and these you see in the rows where the
pickers are at work. They work in gangs, and to each gang is attached a
"pole-puller," whose business it is to cut the plants close off at the
roots, and then, pulling up the pole, convey the lot bodily to the
"bin" [-200-] or basket, where the
pickers are at work. The price paid depends on the leanness or fatness of the
crop. At a plentiful harvest "nine a shilling" is the prevailing
tariff - that is, nine bushels a shilling ; but in bad, "thin" seasons
work at such a price would be little better than starvation for the poor picker,
and as much as sixpence a bushel has, as I was informed, been paid. Some growers
allow perquisites in the shape of prematurely ripe and weakly flowers, which are
known as "blowers," and are used in the brewing of small beer. Several
times in the course of the day the "measurers" come round with their
great bags and bushels, and the produce of the picking deposited in the
"bin," round which the gang squat, is "told." This is a part
of the proceedings watched jealously by the pickers. It seems that there are two
sorts of measurers, known respectively as "duff" handed and
"feather" handed, and the picker very much prefers the latter. The
"duff" (heavy) handed measurer is generally a "master's
man," - that is to say, he studies his master's interests, even to the
extent of cheating the ragged labourers ; and in teeming the flowers from the
bin to the bushel, will dexterously lay so heavy a hand on them that they are
crushed down and flattened ; whereas a "feather" handed measurer will
pile them in fairly and lightly, topping off with a flat strike, heaped-up
measures being against the laws that regulate hop-picking. Very few single men
or women, or even married couples without children, are to be met amongst the
pickers. It is the family man that makes good harvesting. Any baby of three
years old is clever enough to strip the flowers from a hop bunch, and there you
may see them, too little to reach the "bin," squatting round a big
open cotton umbrella, playing at pork, and making fine fun of it, and all the
while they are putting a penny in mamma's pocket. An industrious family of seven
or eight in a fair season will earn as much as eight or nine shillings a day.
Out of this, all they have to provide is food. Firing for
cooking purposes is yielded by the neighbouring woods and hedges, and the
labourers are lodged at the cost of the growers. And this is the worst part of
the whole business. The place they are housed in is generally a barn or shed,
used in the winter for sheltering fattening bullocks. Sometimes the floor is
boarded, sometimes bricked. Beds there are none, nor even straw, except of the
lodger's own lucky finding. If the pickers do not bring a blanket with them,
they lie bare, except for the rags on their backs; and there they herd, little
children, grown boys and girls, married and single, higgledy-piggledy, without
even a lantern light, till morning and the stick of the "foreman
picker" hammering at the barn door rouses them.