If Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon celebrated the softer side of the Kentish countryside in some of their works, contrasting it with their searing memories of the First World War (with H E Bates a little later chipping in), George Orwell’s brief, but formative, experience of hop picking in Kent in 1931 made an entirely different impression on his work. Unsurprisingly, for the great essaying and novelist who observed political and social language and behaviour so closely, his fictional and non-fictional response to the few weeks he spent in the environs either of Wateringbury or West Malling showed how the experience left a deep mark on him not so much because of the landscape, but due to the human reality he found. (There is disagreement over where precisely the place he was based was located – it could be Home Farm, a built up area today in the former, or Best’s or Kronk’s Farm in the latter, see https://www.visitkent.co.uk/malling-blue-plaques/#Orwell, and Judith Bastide/Michael Rich, `Follow These Writers in Kent’, Authorhouse, Milton Keynes, 2013, 77. None of these places exist with the same name today).
Born as Eric Blair in 1903, in present day Bihar, India, the son of a member of the British colonial Indian Civil Service, he spent his childhood in Henley-on-Thames before attending Eton, and then joining the Burmese police force. From 1927 onwards, after his return to Britain, he largely focused on his writing career, but in a unique way – undergoing experiences of poverty and homelessness in Paris and then London, which he turned into his first book, `Down and Out in London and Paris’ in 1933. From the late 1920s for a few years he was largely based in Southwold on the Suffolk coast. The conservative atmosphere only prompted him to undertake more journeys around Britain, one of which, in the late summer of 1931, took him to the hop fields of western Kent.
The testimony to this period survives in his diaries and articles, and then in the second chapter of his second published novel, the 1935 `A Clergyman’s Daughter.’ The diaries from 27th August 1931 to the 19th of September are all transcribed at https://hoppicking.wordpress.com/. They describe the ordeal of trying to find work on hop farms, the kinds of other pickers there (either people from London on working holidays, or travellers who went to farm to farm picking various crops) and the general living conditions:
`As to our living accommodation, the best quarters on the farm, ironically enough, were disused stables. Most of us slept in round tin huts about 10 feet across, with no glass in the windows, and all kinds of holes to let in the wind and rain. The furniture of these huts consisted of a heap of straw and hop-vines, and nothing else. There were four of us in our hut, but in some of them there were seven or eight – rather an advantage, really, for it kept the hut warm. Straw is rotten stuff to sleep in (it is much more draughty than hay) and Ginger and I had only a blanket each, so we suffered agonies of cold for the first week; after that we stole enough pokes to keep us warm. The farm gave us free firewood, though not as much as we needed. The water tap was 200 yards away, and the latrine the same distance, but it was so filthy that one would have walked a mile sooner than use it. There was a stream where one could do some laundering, but getting a bath in the village would have been about as easy as buying a tame whale.’ (2/9/31 to 19/9/31).
Orwell describes as well the way in which payments were made – with a constant fight by the farmers to keep prices low largely due to the depressed profits they themselves were suffering. In the article for the `New Statesman and Nation’ published on 17th October 1931, he explained this in great detail:
`Unfortunately, the rate of payment is so low that it is quite impossible for a picker to earn a pound a week, or even, in a wet year like 1931, fifteen shillings[1]. Hop-picking is done on the piece-work system, the pickers being paid at so much a bushel. At the farm where I worked this year, as at most farms in Kent, the tally was six bushels to the shilling – that is, we were paid twopence for each bushel we picked. Now, a good vine yields about half a bushel of hops, and a good picker can strip a vine in ten or fifteen minutes; it follows that an expert picker might, given perfect conditions, earn thirty shillings in a sixty-hour week. But, for a number of reasons, these perfect conditions do not exist. To begin with, hops vary enormously in quality. On some vines they are as large as small pears, on others no bigger than hazel nuts; the bad vines take as long to strip as the good ones – longer, as a rule, for their lower shoots are more tangled – and often five of them will not yield a bushel. Again, there are frequent delays in the work, either in changing from field to field, or on account of rain; an hour or two is wasted in this manner every day, and the pickers are paid no compensation for lost time. And, lastly, the greatest cause of loss, there is unfair measurement. The hops are measured in bushel baskets of standard size, but it must be remembered that hops are not like apples or potatoes, of which one can say that a bushel is a bushel and there is an end of it.’ (`Hop Picking’, https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/hop-picking/)
All of this material was fairly faithfully used, in fictionalised form, in `The Clergyman’s Daughter’, a work widely regarded to have been Orwell’s most experimental (the third chapter of it is in pure dialogue, a little like the Circe sections of Joyce’s `Ulysses’, though nowhere near as surreal), and the one he himself was most self-critical of. The story itself is simple, but unsettling. Dorothy Hare, the daughter of a rector in Suffolk somehow loses her memory, ends up in London, and then undergoes a number of mishaps and adventures, one of which, in the second chapter, is to go hopping in Kent. Nobby, the Cockney boy in London who has encouraged her to do this after coming across her wandering confused along the Old Kent Road, simply declares that they will be `pickin’ ‘ops in Kent!’ (Orwell, `The Clergyman’s Daughter,’ Penguin Edition, London, 2000, 91) Off they set, in a modernist version of the `Canterbury Tales’, though living their story rather than telling it. Going under the assumed name of Ellen (Dorothy cannot yet remember her real name) they catch a train to Sevenoaks, and then walk from there:
`They trailed across commons and through buried villages with incredible names, and lost themselves in lanes that led nowhere, and sprawled exhausted in dry ditches smelling of fennel and tansies, and sneaked into private woods and `drummed up’ in the thickets.’ (Ibid 96)
As in his diaries and the articles, Orwell mentions the kinds of people picking, when they do get to a farm that can employ them, the tedious but simple nature of the work, (`It was stupid work, mechanical, exhausting and every day more painful to the hands’, 113) and the widespread pilfering of apples and other crops from nearby fields. `Hopping,’ Ellen finds out, `was a holiday, but the kind of holiday you were glad to see the last of’ (138). The arrest of Nobby during a police raid and the end of the picking season sees Ellen make her way back to London on one of the special trains that picked hoppers up and which took forever to get to its destination (in this case over six hours for a 35 mile journey). The novel then goes on to trace the recovery of her own memory, and of who she is, though in other locations and through other activities.
Orwell’s departure from Wateringbury Station on 19th September 1931 was a bittersweet moment, and one he recounted with his characteristic clear-sighted realism:
`Ginger and I packed our things and walked over to Wateringbury to catch the hop pickers’ train. On the way we stopped to buy tobacco, and as a sort of farewell to Kent, Ginger cheated the tobacconist’s girl of fourpence, by a very cunning dodge. When we got to Wateringbury station about fifty hoppers were waiting for the train, and the first person we saw was old Deafie, sitting on the grass with a newspaper in front of him. He lifted it aside, and we saw that he had his trousers undone and was exhibiting his penis to the women and children as they passed. I was surprised – such a decent old man, really; but there is hardly a tramp who has not some sexual abnormality.’
Hop picking itself was to figure in the social life of Kent till mechanisation after the war largely removed all the need for human labour. In a collection of memories about this era published in 1999, the editor Peter Stevens wrote that `the deplorable conditions faced by the migratory hop-pickers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to the churches running missions to help them’ (Peter Stevens, `The Truth About Hop-Picking in Faversham: The Locals Remember’, About Faversham Series, No 69, Faversham 1999, 1). Despite this, places like the Hop Farm at Beltring, near Paddock Wood, the world’s largest collection of Victorian oast houses, do their best to celebrate a softer image of this time, and one tangled up with the departure of a Britain which was kinder, more confident, and gentler.
Orwell’s writing style, and his general world view, as his later essays and novels, culminating in `1984’ were to show, was untainted by sentimentality. It is likely therefore that the descriptions spread across his work of life in the hop picking farms was as close as we will get to understanding the true reality of this era. That such a great writer was able to witness this is remarkable good fortune. Hops have been a symbol of the `Garden of England’ image of Kent for many decades. And yet they indicated a far harsher, and more complex reality. And anyone who doesn’t believe this can acquaint themselves with the work of Orwell, who was called the `crystal spirit’ for the clarity of his thought and writing. He died in 1950.