Working the Land: A History of the Farmworker in England from 1850 to the Present Day
Nicola Verdon tells us about her book, Working the Land (2017)
Working the Land was published by Nicola Verdon in 2017. In this post, she tells us about the many years of research, thinking and writing, that went in to this important book for historians and new history students alike. Spoiler alert: The writing was the hardest bit! Here’s what Nicola says about her research and her subsequent publication.
I’ve been researching and writing about gender and employment in the British countryside all my academic career. My first book, Rural Women Workers in Nineteenth Century England (2002), was a typical book-based-on-PhD publication. It is packed full of sources and is a very dense and probably intense read – I can hardly bare to look at it myself anymore. With Working the Land I wanted to do something different. Something that was more accessible to a broader audience, and that spanned a long chronology where patterns of continuity and change over time could be teased out. The chronology posed some challenges for me. I am very well trained in locating and interpreting 19th century sources, and whilst I had moved my research focus into the 1920s and 1930s more recently, I had never written about the Second World War or the decades that followed it. The more contemporary the sources, the more difficult I found them to work with.
Most of all what I wanted to do in this book was to write about the men, women and children who worked on the land from their own perspective, using their own voices where possible. Agricultural work has traditionally been (and in some respects remains) a very poorly paid and highly casualised occupation. People who lived and worked on the land were typically seen as ‘backward’, unimaginative and unsophisticated. The farmworker was periodically subjected to scrutiny from government investigators, journalists and commentators during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, and again for a new generation of sociologists and agricultural economists in the post Second World War period. Whilst these all include interviews and evidence from farmworkers, their stories are mediated through the lens of the writer. Autobiographies and personal memoirs enable the farmworker to take centre stage in their own lives and add a personal perspective but these may not be representative of the farm labour force as whole – they are self-selecting and written by those with the means and drive to tell their story. Whilst all these types of sources are problematic they feature heavily in the book and allowed me to consider the farm as a site of work (in the way you might a mine, or a factory), the types of work that men, women and children did, how they experienced and understood that work, and the importance (or not) that they attached to that work. As Jane Stevenson of Westmorland (now Cumbria) told a government commissioner in the late 1860s, ‘I like out-door work, and I find myself quite unwell if I stay at home for a day’ (p. 95)
I also wrote this book because it reflects my own family history and upbringing. The book is dedicated to my grandad Peter Verdon (1921-2014). One of eight children, he grew up in the Derbyshire village of Spinkhill, where his father Joseph was a gardener at St Mary’s College. After a rudimentary schooling, Peter started farm work as a teenager in the mid 1903s, first in his immediate locality and then, after answering an advert in a farming newspaper, on Glebe farm in the Nottinghamshire village of Norwell, where he ‘lived-in’ with the family and with fellow worker Wallace Smith. There Peter met and married my grandma, Kathleen Dobbs (1925-1981).
Her family rented the adjacent farm, a 42-acre dairy farm, where she grew up, one of 11 children. Peter left farm work in the late 1950s to work as a lorry-driver for a local farmer-haulier. His entry into farm work in the 1930s and his exit from it in the 1950s was very typical for young rural men of his era and social class. Kath didn’t work outside the home after marriage. Peter and Kath remained lifelong friends with Wallace and his wife Phyllis (also from the village). They were all an important part of my childhood in Norwell, where I grew up and went to primary school.
