Footsteps in the Furrow. Andrew Arbuckle
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the NFU saw this as a retrograde step. One member pointed out that they could well be haymaking then. Another suggested the workers give up one of their statutory days if they wanted this holiday.
In 1927, there was a court case when farm servants had refused to work on the fifth Saturday afternoon during the grain harvest. The workers said they were contracted to do 4 full Saturdays, not 5, but the Sheriff found in favour of the farmers, who were awarded damages.
With around 10% of the population involved in agriculture, it was no surprise that the Trade Union movement saw farm workers as potential members. In 1912, they appointed Joseph Duncan, the son of a farm worker, to set up the Farm Servants Union (FSU) in Scotland. The first branch was established in his native Aberdeenshire. For the next few years, during World War I, his work was hampered by the increased wages earned as the nation pushed for more food. A bigger hurdle was that no sooner had a branch been established than the men were off to another area as their fee, or term of work on the farm, was finished.
The big breakthrough in union activity came in 1918–20, just after the end of the war. Farm prices slumped and farmers reduced the wages paid to their men. By 1921, wages were being reduced by up to 30%. Reacting to this, Duncan said he was not prepared to negotiate wages on the basis of price for produce; negotiations had to be carried out on the cost of living. Farmers, he claimed, had made big profits in the latter years of the war and had not paid the ploughmen a fair percentage of that money.
He concentrated his efforts on the feeing markets, urging the men to refuse anything below the agreed rate. It may have been uphill, but within two years in the early 1920s, there were some 200 branches of the Scottish Farm Servants Union.
Incidentally, the use of the word ‘servants’ in the title of their trade union did no more than reflect the attitudes and words prevalent in those days. In another example, the chairman of Cupar NFU in 1925 referred to the good relationship that existed between ‘masters and men.’
The 1893 report by Hunter Pringle into farm workers states that, ‘Farm labourers do not indulge in strikes. They either grin and bear it, or they leave the land.’ This was almost right: apart from a small strike in East Lothian, there has never been any withholding of labour on Scottish farms.
A minimum wage was set by the Corn Production Act of 1917, with a base of 25/- (£1.25) per week, but this was lost when the Act was repealed in 1922. An Agricultural Wages Board was set up in 1937 and that year it agreed wages of 40/- (£2.00) for a 58-hour week for a byreman and 36/- (£1.80) for a 56-hour week for a cattleman.
It also stipulated that horsemen were expected to work 5 hours per week tending their animals outside contracted hours. With the introduction of the tractor, this became a bone of contention as some employers thought the same ‘extra hours’ should be carried out by tractormen looking after their machines. As it was, many came along to the farm on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday to wash and maintain their machine. No sooner had the Wages Board come into being, however, than it was put into abeyance by World War II.
It was not until 1949 that the Scottish Agricultural Wages Board was set up. To this day, it sets minimum wages and conditions for farm workers. Now the last remaining wages board in Britain, in recent years there have been several campaigns to rid the industry of it. Those who no longer wish to retain the board say that its work has been overtaken by the introduction of a National Minimum Wage, making much of SAWB’s work redundant.
The farming industry is one of the few where working hours change with the seasons. In the early days, reduced hours in winter were dictated by the hours of daylight, but reduced winter hours also reflect the quieter time on the farm, with no crops to be sown or harvested. Winter is defined by the SAWB as being from the ‘first Monday after the second Sunday of November and lasting to the first Monday after the second Sunday in February.’
An example of post-war working hours came with the 1948 SAWB proposals. In summer time from 7 a.m. to 12 noon and from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., with a break of 20 minutes for ‘piece time’ per weekday, and from 7 a.m. to 12 noon on Saturday. In the winter period, the hours were to be 7.30 a.m. to 12 noon and 1 p.m. to 4.40 p.m., with only 13-minute ‘piece time’ breaks.
The issue of mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks, where the men would draw breath, smoke a cigarette or just sit down and eat their ‘pieces’ was another bone of contention for the NFU. In 1918, J. Clements of Balkaithly, Dunino, complained that if all the morning and afternoon tea-breaks were taken out of the working day, then ‘farm servants only worked eight and a half hours per day.’ However, a colleague – Mr Fleming of Renniehill – was in agreement with a number of farms that were taking 2 hours at lunch time instead of 1½ hours because it gave the horses more time to rest.
Throughout the first sixty years of the past century, there was a running battle between the authorities and farmers over the employment of younger people on the farm. In 1920, Fife Education Authority gave permission for potato picking, but children had to be over 12 years old. The vote was not unanimous as the chair pointed out that in Angus and Perth youngsters of 8 and 10 years old were employed. Then at frequent intervals in these decades, and especially after harvest or potato picking time, schoolteachers and education authorities publicly complained that country children were falling asleep as a result of their out-of-school-hours’ duties.
Even with the introduction of the tractor to farm life problems ensued over employing youngsters on farms. Under the title of ‘Vicarious Criminal Responsibility’, Cupar NFU discussed the safety regulations that prevented anyone under the age of 13 driving a tractor on a farm. Union members made comparison with those of a similar age who could lead a horse around the farm without any problem.
Nowadays farmyards, with their huge tractors and massive machines, are no place for anyone other than farm workers. Those with skills are in high demand; they work extraordinarily long hours during sowing and harvest. Often, they operate machinery worth more than £100,000, and they use sophisticated electronic gadgetry that would leave their forebears gasping. With few on the ground, their output is also one hundred times that of their forefathers.
IT was safe in the feeding troughs; they were wide and deep enough for a small body to be far from any reversing horse and cart or tractor, and bogie or trailer. The trough was also a safe refuge from the men working away at filling the carts and emptying the cattle courts. From this vantage point, you could see the skill in peeling off layers of dung rather than delving the graip deep into the heap. You could also see the team of men working around the cart, gradually filling it, but you were not safe or free from the strong ammonia of fresh farmyard manure. It is a smell that makes townfolk wrinkle up their noses and express disgust, but the countryman views it as natural. Although it was definitely not the case, most memories of emptying cattle courts recall frosty winter days, where the heat of the dung in the courts, the breath of the horse standing waiting for their carts to be filled and the men hand graiping onto the cart all combined. The result was plumes of steam that seemed to little eyes to be mist swirling around.
The acceptance of the smell of farmyard manure may also be based on the fact that this by-product of keeping livestock was the main source of fertility in the early days of the century. The full carts would go out of the courts to a midden, where they would be couped, or tipped up, and other men – or, in later times, tractors with front loaders – would help consolidate the dung heap or midden. Such was the importance of farmyard manure to the prosperity of a farm that it was said that farmers on a Sunday tour of the district would doff their hats to any well-made midden. There, in the midden, the farmyard manure would decompose over the summer months before being taken out to the fields in the winter.
To ensure the dung was spread evenly over the field, it was marked out with a shallow plough, or dung tarn. The careful farmer would then cross these marks with others