'The Last Survivor of an Ancient Race': the Changing Face of Essex Gleaning

'The Last Survivor of an Ancient Race': The Changing Face of Essex Gleaning* By STEPHEN HUSSEY Abstract Past authors have identified the early twentieth century as the point at which gleaning finally vanished from the lives and labour of the rural working-class. This paper seeks to re-position this decline, placing its disappearance forward some forty or fifty years to the decades following the Second World War. However, gleaning did not simply continue unchanged into the twentieth century, as the customary practices that had once accompanied it now became obsolete. The paper examines the reasons for the continued use of gleanfing, its changed form, and places the decline of its customary practice within a wider context of changes occurring in rural popular culture at this time. ISHING tO capture what he It is as though there is no one in the world except believed to be the changing herself who gleans any longer. She is not merely alone: she is the last of the gleaners, the last survivor W character of the inter-war of an ancient race) English countryside H E Bates penned his story of The Gleaner. ~ Bates chose as its The reference to 'an ancient race' was subject the tale of a single day's labour by a deliberate attempt by the author to evoke an elderly woman as she gleaned in the the notion that the twentieth century was late summer's heat of a harvest field. The bringing an end to the 'traditional' culture tale is a short and unremarkable one. and society of the countryside. Sharing a However, the subject matter and the way fashionable vision of the rural world with in which Bates expressed it are of interest a diverse coalition of contemporary politi- as his narration communicates the author's cal, artistic and social commentators who wider observations and emotions. Within included the likes of Stanley Baldwin, r the sto W Bates' gleaner was clearly intended Ralph Vaughan Williams, H V Morton, to represent a lost age in which people's Mary Webb and H J Massingham, Bates lives and fortunes were bound inextricably believed that this 'tradition' lay at the very to the soil upon which they worked. core of the naeaning of England and Where once: Englishness.* His likening of the gleaner to an '...earth-figure, as old and ageless and Long ago, in another century, she also came up to the same field, on just such still, light-flooded primitive as the corn she carries...' and his afternoons, for this same eternal and unchanging description of her as being driven on in purpose. But not alone; they would glean then, in her work by '...some inherent, uncon- fanfilies, occasionallyin villages, with handcarts and scious, eternal impulse...' merely served to barrows, from early morn until evening.. 2- underline his views. For Bates the dwin- Bates' gleaner was now left undisturbed dling number of gleaners in the fields of in her efforts: England was just a further manifestation of the erosion of the peasant-like qualitities *The research for this article was generously supported by Essex of rural working people as they moved County Council through their funding of my position as Essex County Council Kesearch Fellow in Local History at the University of Essex. My thanks also go to John Walter, Alun Hovckins, Steve 3 Ibid, p 71. Caunce and an anonymous referee for their comments on earlier For a brilliant exploration of the range of adherents to the belief drafts of this paper. I alone am responsible for any errors that remain. in the link between the countryside, nation, its people and their H E Bates, 'The gleaner', Cormtry Tales, i938 (1992 ed), pp 69-73. character, see Patrick Wright, Tile Village that died for England: The =lbid, p 69. Strange Story of Tyneham, I995, esp parts z and 3. Ag Hist Rev, 45, I, pp 61-72 61 6:Z THE AGRICULTURAL HISTORY REVIEW onwards into the twentieth century. The sight in harvest fields throughout the 192OS N 'simple' rusticity and organic community and I93OS until the late 194os and early with that had supposedly characterized other I95OS. 9 Nor were these gleaners just the WOU centuries of village life was now being solitary elderly members of an 'ancient nulE swept aside by the coming of the likes of race'. Instead they also contained the mixed in v motor transport, tinned foods, seaside hol- ranks of younger mothers and children that the idays, weekly trips to the cinema and eve- had for decades made up the bulk of the WOU nings around the wireless. gleaners' numbers. What this article dem- of tt Bates' assertions regarding gleaning were onstrates is that rather than eradicating the mg correct in some respects. It did have leng- gleaner, the twentieth century brought the thy antecedents which extended back into with it changes in the ways in which gleal biblical references within the books of people gleaned and the uses they put their her Leviticus and Deuteronomy. s Gleaning had gleanings to. Gleaning continued as a fea- field also long been an established part of the ture of village life but the customary regu- cent annual agricultural calendar, becoming a lation that had once accompanied it SUCl7 widespread feature of many household disappeared, while the place occupied by mor economies of the rural poor from the gleaning in the domestic economies of T sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 6 Bates village people was shifted from their centres as it was also accurate in his estimations of the to their mar~ns. than importance that gleaners had once attached harv I to their labour when he wrote 'Since it was An elderly Essex gleaner of the I92OS it re meant so much, since corn was life - that wishing to reflect upon memories of her glea law was as old as time itself- they gleaned annual visits to village rid& during the incessantly, desperately', v Peter King's tice cereal harvest would have been able to research on gleaning in the eighteenth and point to several unbroken features of her tO e valu nineteenth centuries has shown that as days spent gleaning now and those of her coll, much as one-eighth of a labouring house- youth in the I86OS and I87OS. Not least mig hold's annual earnings in central and sou- would be the back-breaking nature of the them England could come from this work amongst the rough stubble which a n~ source. 8 the was always ready to scratch the bare flesh of c However, as an overall indication of of hands, arms and legs. The work the gleaning activity in the countryside during remained as tough and as uncomfortable as enst the inter-war years Bates' account needs to it had ever been. Gleaning also continued this be viewed with a good deal of circum- to be dominated by village women and spection. The research presented here their children. The occasional presence of dela employs a range of oral and documentary an elderly man would be the only represen- colx sources for a single county, Essex, to relo- tation of adult male workers at a time of nim cate the end of gleaning in the village from the year when the demand for farm labour of t '. the late nineteenth century, the position was at its highest point with the annual ing assigned to it by Bates and modern his- harvest. torians alike, forward to the mid-part of the the twentieth. In doing so it reveals that ')This article is based upon aventy-five oral history interviews reca conducted in Steeple Bumpstead, Helions Bumpstead and the gleaner remained a relatively common Toppesfield, North Essex, between 1992 and 1995. Use was also sim] made of d~e oral history interviews of Basil Slaughter (held at the villi 5 Leviticus, xLx, 9 & Io; Deuteronomy, x.',dv, I9 & 21. Essex Record ONce, Chehnsford [hereafter Ell.O]), Essex based ~Peter King, 'Customary rights and women's earnings: the impor- interviews within the Family Life and Work Experience before .'918 Glea tance of gleaning to the labouring poor, 175o-I85o', Econ Hist project (held at the Department of Sociology, University of Essex), field Rev, 2nd set, xxliv, I99I, pp 469-72. and also the written reminiscences of elderly people collected in 7Bates, 'The gleaner', p 69. the annual Age Concern Essay Writing Competition dating from wer~ s King, 'Customary rights', p 474. I955 onwards (held at the Ell.O). the Y THE CHANGING FACE OF ESSEX GLEANING 63 Nonetheless, amongst the continuities cleared, indulge in games or sing songs to wile within her memory the elderly gleaner away the time.'° would also have been able to point to a An Essex farmer's son could also recall his number of significantchanges in the way father employing a 'policeman' at his farm in which gleaning was now organized in in nearby White Colne: the village. Foremost in her thoughts At Colne we used to leave a trave or a couple of would have been the virtual disappearance sheaves standingnear the gate, until the rakings had of the formal mechanisms by which glean- all been taken up. As soon as this was removed the ing had once been regulated. The sight of gleaners knew that they were free to begin." the guard sheaf and the sound of the At Radwinter and its neighbouring gleaning bell would have formed part of parish of Hempstead it was simply noted her youthful experience of the harvest by another correspondent that '...there fields in the second half of the nineteenth used to be sheaf of wheat left in the field century.

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