WORKING LIFE IN HOLLAND FEN IN 1867

Mrs Jackson, Barley Sheaf Inn, labourer’s wife – I have four boys at work. One is in service, one (13) is carrying water for the threshing machine, two others are tenting pigs or leading horses in the manure carts. They are not scholars. Nobody’s are less so. They can’t read. My boys have mostly started work at 6 or 7 years old, and worked ever since when they could. I expect my youngest boy will get work all this winter at odd jobs, dragging turnips, and so on. They go weeding to Mr. Teesdale. He employs a lot of bairns, as many as he can get, and as young as they can go. He has 16 or 17 at weeding times, boys and girls. He has six boys now. At weeding young Williams used to take care of them a few years ago. He was 24. Now it’s an old soldier. He won’t let them speak, he’s strict with them. The weeding and singling will often go on in this way from May Day to harvest. Most of the farmers here employ more women than bairns. Many small farmers have one woman regularly. The women go out at 8, though some make them come by 7 and work till 6. If the corn is ever so wet in the early morning they have to go into it. We’ve been wet round the waist many times pretty nearly all day. But all the boys, even the little ones, have to be at work at 6, and leave off at 6. They’ll have to leave home soon many of them after 5. It is a long day for them, and they only stop one hour for dinner. Many of the men here have to go a very long way to work. If they’re tramp hands with a machine they have to go wherever it goes. My husband and one of my boys left home at 5 this morning to go three or four miles to work. Two nights last week he was not back till half-past 8, and he got nothing extra for it beyond his 3s. My brother’s by the Ferry (more than three and a half miles). In winter the men don’t get regular work, but in summer there ain’t enough of them. Mr. Teesdale had nearly 30 Paddies on at harvest. There were no women. One old man used to bring his wife, she slept in the granaries like the rest. Some of them will stay all year, but most of them will go away before Christmas, when it gets too cold to sleep in their sacks. They don’t pay Paddies so much. It’s very hard on us. Our harvest only lasted three weeks this year. We’ve only one chamber, and a closet for the two big boys. Almost all here have only one chamber. There’s a cottage close by with only one room for sleeping and all. Our rent is £3.15s. , and we pay the rates too. (A slovenly and tumbledown cottage. There were many close by just as bad. They belonged to small freeholders).