was a typical agreement between farmer and worker on taking the fee. In some cases, the potato perk was measured in drills, leaving the worker and his family to lift the potatoes as part of the deal. One contract at the turn of the last century specified 1,600 yards, or 1,500 metres, of potato drill.
Oatmeal was always part of the deal and a number of working millers delivered around the farms. This basic ingredient of porridge and many other meals was essential, and the general amount was round about 5 stones of oatmeal, or 30 kilos per month.
Milk would also be provided and again there was a generous quantity with 4 pints, or 1.7 litres per family per day being a common figure. Where farms did not have their own milking cows, the local milkman supplied the milk and the farmer paid the bill.
On many farms, workers were allowed to keep 2 pigs per year. The common practice was one at a time so that there was pig meat to eat throughout the year. Pigs in their own crays (or sties) at the end of the cottage gardens were fattened through food waste from the cottage, or food from the farm.
The killing was done on the farm and the local butcher would take part of the carcase as his fee. Often the pig was shared out with cottage neighbours in an informal scheme that would see the move reciprocated when the next pig was slaughtered. After the killing, the pig was immersed in a tub of boiling water, when its hair was taken off with blunt knives. It was not skinned, but hung up and gutted. The hams were then cured by immersion in brine and hung from a hook in the living room. Many such hooks survive to this day and examples of this practice are still carried out on the Continent.
Sometimes, instead of keeping pigs, the farmer would agree to his worker having up to a dozen hens. Again the perk, this time in eggs and even occasionally as chicken meat, helped supply the family table.
On some farms, where wood was scarce for fires and boilers, and these were the only sources of heat, often there was an agreement to supply so many bags or even tons of coal during the year for the worker. There was no electricity in the cottages, but paraffin for the Tilley lamps was also a regular perk of working on a farm.
In addition to these standard perks, others crept in during times of hardship. In the East Neuk of Fife, with its fishing villages, many farmers would buy a barrel of salt herring, which they left in the stable during winter. Workers could help themselves to this source of food, if they wished. In 1918, the farm books at Drumrack Farm show the purchase of a barrel of salt herring for 30/- (£1.50).
Although it was not universal practice, some lairds were also noted for their generosity at Christmas time, giving out gifts that included coals for heat and rabbits for food.
Possibly the most contentious perk of all was the tied house. Back in the early years of the last century it was a fairly common practice to have houses for employees. Many coal mine and factory owners built houses next to the workplace to ensure an on-hand workforce. On farms, the position was similar in that transport was such that living anywhere other than on the farm was not feasible. Cottages were part of the deal with the landlord on tenanted farms, along with the farm steadings and the farmhouse.
The tied house strings have now been loosened with the reduction in the tenanted sector and with increased mobility of the workforce. Very few of the rows of farm cottages in the countryside now house farm workers. Most tractor drivers and others now working on farms own their house or rent them from housing associations.
Working hours and unions
For children, Christmas morning can be a wondrous experience. I was no exception, scrambling down to the bottom of my bed to see what Santa had brought. Outside, I could hear the sound of the cattle as they were being fed and the tractors as they moved about the yard. Right up until the mid-1950s Christmas Day was a normal working day on the farm.
New Year’s Day was different and always had been so. Even when they had few other days off, this was one of the accepted holidays for farm workers.
For the first four decades of the century, the normal working week was 6 full days, with only the Sunday off. Even then, there was an expectation that horsemen would tend to their beasts on the Sabbath.
Just after World War I, the local branch of the NFU argued against men having a half-day off on a Saturday. One member fulminated this was the equivalent of giving them another 26 days’ holiday in the year. When added to the 3 statutory holidays to which they were entitled, then they would be off work for 29 days each year.
Note the 3 – yes, just 3 – statutory days off These were New Year’s Day, feeing market day and Fife Show day. Other than those, the only break from full-time work was Sunday. A year or two later, an application was made to the Fife District Council by the recently formed Scottish Farm Servants Union (SFSU) for a sports day and gala on the first Saturday in July. This was to be held in Thornton, with farm workers from all over the country invited. Again, the NFU saw this as a retrograde step. One member pointed out that they could well be haymaking then. Another suggested the workers give up one of their statutory days if they wanted this holiday.
In 1927, there was a court case when farm servants had refused to work on the fifth Saturday afternoon during the grain harvest. The workers said they were contracted to do 4 full Saturdays, not 5, but the Sheriff found in favour of the farmers, who were awarded damages.
With around 10% of the population involved in agriculture, it was no surprise that the Trade Union movement saw farm workers as potential members. In 1912, they appointed Joseph Duncan, the son of a farm worker, to set up the Farm Servants Union (FSU) in Scotland. The first branch was established in his native Aberdeenshire. For the next few years, during World War I, his work was hampered by the increased wages earned as the nation pushed for more food. A bigger hurdle was that no sooner had a branch been established than the men were off to another area as their fee, or term of work on the farm, was finished.
The big breakthrough in union activity came in 1918–20, just after the end of the war. Farm prices slumped and farmers reduced the wages paid to their men. By 1921, wages were being reduced by up to 30%. Reacting to this, Duncan said he was not prepared to negotiate wages on the basis of price for produce; negotiations had to be carried out on the cost of living. Farmers, he claimed, had made big profits in the latter years of the war and had not paid the ploughmen a fair percentage of that money.
He concentrated his efforts on the feeing markets, urging the men to refuse anything below the agreed rate. It may have been uphill, but within two years in the early 1920s, there were some 200 branches of the Scottish Farm Servants Union.
Incidentally, the use of the word ‘servants’ in the title of their trade union did no more than reflect the attitudes and words prevalent in those days. In another example, the chairman of Cupar NFU in 1925 referred to the good relationship that existed between ‘masters and men.’
The 1893 report by Hunter Pringle into farm workers states that, ‘Farm labourers do not indulge in strikes. They either grin and bear it, or they leave the land.’ This was almost right: apart from a small strike in East Lothian, there has never been any withholding of labour on Scottish farms.
A minimum wage was set by the Corn Production Act of 1917, with a base of 25/- (£1.25) per week, but this was lost when the Act was repealed in 1922. An Agricultural Wages Board was set up in 1937 and that year it agreed wages of 40/- (£2.00) for a 58-hour week for a byreman and 36/- (£1.80) for a 56-hour week for a cattleman.
It also stipulated that horsemen were expected to work 5 hours per week tending their animals outside contracted hours. With the introduction of the tractor, this became a bone of contention as some employers thought the
