Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 238

In the Celtic areas of Britain and especially in Scotland there has developed, mainly since the Second World, an impressive ‘school’ of academics and enthusiasts working in folk life studies. Folk life studies is perhaps best seen as centred on the intersection of folk-lore, ethnography and history, sharing some the concerns of all these disciplines but above all concerned with the relationships around work practices and material culture. In this, how people work, the tools they use and the organization of the labour process are key elements in the shaping of social relations.

Heather Holmes’ fine and interesting book is very much a product of this tradition. Although to an English reader its title suggests that other great movement of casual work – hopping – in fact it centres on very different concerns than those of the ‘holiday’. Rather it constructs a complex picture of change over time centred on the nature of the technology of potato harvesting and the changing nature of the workforce. This picture is made up by the skilful weaving together of government reports, local papers, local government records, farm records and oral accounts.

The general outlines of the ‘story’ fit in with a range of work produced over the last few years on the fluctuations of casual employment in agriculture, particularly in relationship to the employment of women and children. At the end of the nineteenth century the autumn harvest of potatoes was highly labour intensive drawing on local women and children but also urban migrants and Irish workers. By the end of the twentieth century the workforce was much smaller and reliant on quite different groups of workers. However, what is striking is that the technology of the potato harvest underwent much less change, and what change there was was much slower and later than that say of the grain harvest. Holmes shows that many of the basic techniques (and hence labour processes) of potato harvesting not only pre-dated the 1870s but also persisted well into the 1960s. As late as 1963 the Potato Marketing Board could comment that ‘traditional methods persist on all but a small part of the acreage’ (p.58).

The main reason for this was the continued availability of ‘traditional’ labour supply. Children’s employment, for example, which had ceased to be a major part of the cereal harvest, in England at least, by the Great War, not only remained central to the Scottish potato harvest but also history review was encouraged and protected by legislation until 1962. Irish migrants, again a group declining in importance in much of England before 1914, continued central in the Lothians until after the Second World War. Again what figures there are suggest the final decline was in the 1960s. Finally changes in women’s employment patterns, especially the growth of full-time, year-long work in light industry reduced the availability of a key work group.

As a result of the decline in these groups of workers, mechanization, which had been much discussed since the 1920s, finally became urgent. In the late 1950s, with the encouragement of the Potato Marketing Board, but pressed by labour shortage, successful potato harvesters began to appear. The final technical development of the ‘complete harvester’ in the 1970s and its widespread adoption in the subsequent decades ended the old system and its work patterns and workforce.

This broad account centres only on part of a book, which, as I have already suggested, is a complex and detailed study. Its account of the labour process and the social relations it produced is exemplary and all too seldom seen in English histories of agriculture. Its account of the workforce and especially the changing role of women is extremely important, if for no other reason than that there are virtually no accounts of women in twentieth-century agriculture. As with Richard Anthony’s work of a few years ago on the lowland farm worker, Scotland has again provided a pioneering account. It is a sad reflection on English histories of the countryside that we continue to know so little about those who worked the land in the twentieth century, let alone how they worked it.