Most of us will have discovered farm workers somewhere
in our family history as the majority of those who lived in rural areas
were employed in some way in the agricultural economy. Some of us will
have come across ancestors described as farm servants’ (or simply
‘servants’) by census enumerators. Farm servants were usually young,
single and hired on a yearly contract. Here Walter Townsend describes,
from family memories learned at his mother’s knee, the life of farm
workers at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Both my parents, in their youth, were farm servants, my
father working outdoors and my mother employed indoors helping the lady
of the house with all her chores: the dairy, the poultry and looking
after other servants.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, farm service
was a common, perhaps the most common, way of dealing with rural
youngsters when they reached working age and became too big and too
hungry to fit into the crowded cottage of the agricultural worker.
Children of farmers often went into service, so it was not only an
institution catering for the labouring poor. The youngsters benefited
from being housed and fed by the farmer whilst learning the skills
needed to carry them through their working lives. They gained freedom
from parental control and were able to broaden their horizons and mix
with other workers within the system; they also received an annual wage
from which the thrifty would save towards the future and marriage and
which the not-so-thrifty would spend on beer and tobacco. They might,
in their time as servants, work on several farms, usually within a
radius of 10 or 15 miles of home.
In times when labour was scarce and wages consequently
high, farmers were all in favour of a system that enabled them to hold
a captive workforce throughout the year at relatively low cost. As
farming became adversely affected by the importation of large
quantities of Canadian grain and other foodstuffs towards the end of
the nineteenth century, labour became plentiful and cheap and the
system gradually died out in most parts of England. Then it was more
profitable for the farmer to employ full-time only those workers
essential for the day-to-day running of the farm, such as carters,
shepherds or cowmen, and to engage casual labour when the seasonal
workload made it necessary.
Farm service ensured that few village children were
without a job when they reached working age, and remained an
established institution in a few areas of England until well into the
twentieth century. My father, Charles Townsend, was a farm servant
until 1929 and my mother, now 96, started her working life at the age
of twelve as an indoor servant. This was in the East Riding of
Yorkshire where, on the large scattered farms, farmers thought it
prudent to keep their workforce near at hand. Because there was a
shortage of men to work the land after the depredations of the First
World War, boys of my father’s age were allowed to leave school early
and could start work at the age of twelve. My father went into service,
earning £8 for the first year as ‘third lad’ or 'Tommy Nowt’, the
very lowest in the hierarchy of farm workers. The notoriously hard
regime has been well documented: working from dawn to dark, often seven
days a week (except when the master insisted that his workers attended
church on Sunday), 51weeks a year for eight pounds. The horses had it
easier, finishing work at 2.30 in the afternoon, while the lads
laboured on. The youngsters did not go into service ignorant of what
awaited them. They were fully versed in the ways of labouring life,
having been engaged in it from a very young age, helping out on the
farms whenever they could. By the age of twelve or thirteen they could
manage a team of heavy horses. Going into service marked the start of
their adulthood, an event they had been looking forward to as their
escape route from the confinement of the schoolroom.
The hirelings lived with the farmer or farm foreman, whose
wife looked after them and on whose cooking skills, care and
consideration their wellbeing depended. Living conditions were basic
and on the rough and ready side; sleeping in crowded attic rooms,
sweltering in summer and waking to frozen-stiff clothes in winter, they
had no bath or washing facilities except a cold tap in the yard outside
the kitchen door. My father spent his first £8, paid in gold
sovereigns in 1919, on a second-hand bike, a pair of strong boots,
working clothes and a best suit — all made by village craftsmen — and
gave the balance to his mother for her to use on his behalf as
necessary. The large farms on the Wolds may have employed a dozen or
more servants, so there was always plenty of company and friendships
were forged for life.
Although they were engaged for a year, the servants were
dismissed one week before the working year ended, a hang-over from the
times of poor law settlement when a full year of residence in one place
put the responsibility for their support in times of need on that
parish. In the East Riding this dismissal took place at Martinmas,
officially in the second week of November, but for agricultural
purposes celebrated on or near the 23rd with the hiring fairs
(something to do with the loss of twelve days when the calendar changed
from Julian to Gregorian in 1752, I believe). As they were handed their
lump-sum wage for the year, those favoured by the farmer would be asked
if they would stay for another year. Whether they stayed or not
depended on how they viewed their treatment during the year, for some
farmers were bad masters. Those that left took themselves off to the
nearest market town where the annual hiring fair was held. Dressed in
their best they paraded to show themselves off to the farmers, who
walked up and down assessing and questioning those offering their
services. A servant was engaged for the coming year, after a bout of
bargaining had settled the wage, by a handshake and the acceptance of a
fastener or ‘fest’ of a form (10 pence) or half-a-crown (12fi pence).
If the coin was accepted a legal contract had been drawn, which could
not be broken.
Hiring fairs allowed the farm worker some scope for
bargaining with his masters and it has been observed that agricultural
wages in areas where they survived were far better than in those where
they had died out. My grandfather, Henry Townsend, migrated to the East
Riding in the 1890s because there were too many agricultural workers
chasing too few jobs in his native Oxfordshire and wages were too low
to sustain a family — 8 to 10 shillings a week. At the same time, on
the Yorkshire Wolds farm wages were as high as £1 (20 shillings)
a week and attracted many workers from the south of England. However,
the introduction of a national minimum wage for farm workers sounded
the death knell for the hirings and they gradually petered out in the
East Riding, one of their last strongholds in England, to be replaced
by annual funfairs, which continue to this day at the same time of year.
So the system of Servants in Husbandry persisted in
Yorkshire until the 1930s generally and even into the 1940s on a few
isolated farms. In the main it involved the young of rural areas and
provided almost certain employment in their early adult years, with
bed, board, training and a small income. When marriage came along a
house and a weekly wage became a necessity and the erstwhile servant’s
life-style changed dramatically. Many men who did not marry stayed in
service for much of their working lives.
BerksFHS 
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