after their machines. As it was, many came along to the farm on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday to wash and maintain their machine. No sooner had the Wages Board come into being, however, than it was put into abeyance by World War II.
It was not until 1949 that the Scottish Agricultural Wages Board was set up. To this day, it sets minimum wages and conditions for farm workers. Now the last remaining wages board in Britain, in recent years there have been several campaigns to rid the industry of it. Those who no longer wish to retain the board say that its work has been overtaken by the introduction of a National Minimum Wage, making much of SAWB’s work redundant.
The farming industry is one of the few where working hours change with the seasons. In the early days, reduced hours in winter were dictated by the hours of daylight, but reduced winter hours also reflect the quieter time on the farm, with no crops to be sown or harvested. Winter is defined by the SAWB as being from the ‘first Monday after the second Sunday of November and lasting to the first Monday after the second Sunday in February.’
An example of post-war working hours came with the 1948 SAWB proposals. In summer time from 7 a.m. to 12 noon and from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., with a break of 20 minutes for ‘piece time’ per weekday, and from 7 a.m. to 12 noon on Saturday. In the winter period, the hours were to be 7.30 a.m. to 12 noon and 1 p.m. to 4.40 p.m., with only 13-minute ‘piece time’ breaks.
The issue of mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks, where the men would draw breath, smoke a cigarette or just sit down and eat their ‘pieces’ was another bone of contention for the NFU. In 1918, J. Clements of Balkaithly, Dunino, complained that if all the morning and afternoon tea-breaks were taken out of the working day, then ‘farm servants only worked eight and a half hours per day.’ However, a colleague – Mr Fleming of Renniehill – was in agreement with a number of farms that were taking 2 hours at lunch time instead of 1½ hours because it gave the horses more time to rest.
Throughout the first sixty years of the past century, there was a running battle between the authorities and farmers over the employment of younger people on the farm. In 1920, Fife Education Authority gave permission for potato picking, but children had to be over 12 years old. The vote was not unanimous as the chair pointed out that in Angus and Perth youngsters of 8 and 10 years old were employed. Then at frequent intervals in these decades, and especially after harvest or potato picking time, schoolteachers and education authorities publicly complained that country children were falling asleep as a result of their out-of-school-hours’ duties.
Even with the introduction of the tractor to farm life problems ensued over employing youngsters on farms. Under the title of ‘Vicarious Criminal Responsibility’, Cupar NFU discussed the safety regulations that prevented anyone under the age of 13 driving a tractor on a farm. Union members made comparison with those of a similar age who could lead a horse around the farm without any problem.
Nowadays farmyards, with their huge tractors and massive machines, are no place for anyone other than farm workers. Those with skills are in high demand; they work extraordinarily long hours during sowing and harvest. Often, they operate machinery worth more than £100,000, and they use sophisticated electronic gadgetry that would leave their forebears gasping. With few on the ground, their output is also one hundred times that of their forefathers.
IT was safe in the feeding troughs; they were wide and deep enough for a small body to be far from any reversing horse and cart or tractor, and bogie or trailer. The trough was also a safe refuge from the men working away at filling the carts and emptying the cattle courts. From this vantage point, you could see the skill in peeling off layers of dung rather than delving the graip deep into the heap. You could also see the team of men working around the cart, gradually filling it, but you were not safe or free from the strong ammonia of fresh farmyard manure. It is a smell that makes townfolk wrinkle up their noses and express disgust, but the countryman views it as natural. Although it was definitely not the case, most memories of emptying cattle courts recall frosty winter days, where the heat of the dung in the courts, the breath of the horse standing waiting for their carts to be filled and the men hand graiping onto the cart all combined. The result was plumes of steam that seemed to little eyes to be mist swirling around.
The acceptance of the smell of farmyard manure may also be based on the fact that this by-product of keeping livestock was the main source of fertility in the early days of the century. The full carts would go out of the courts to a midden, where they would be couped, or tipped up, and other men – or, in later times, tractors with front loaders – would help consolidate the dung heap or midden. Such was the importance of farmyard manure to the prosperity of a farm that it was said that farmers on a Sunday tour of the district would doff their hats to any well-made midden. There, in the midden, the farmyard manure would decompose over the summer months before being taken out to the fields in the winter.
To ensure the dung was spread evenly over the field, it was marked out with a shallow plough, or dung tarn. The careful farmer would then cross these marks with others at right angles to leave a patchwork with 5-yard squares; the cart would move down one of the lines and at each intersection, a man at the back of it would pull out a heap of dung using a hauk, as the long-handled graip with tines at right angles to the shaft was called. Completing a heavily labour intensive job, these heaps of dung were then spread around the squares by teams of women so that the next year’s fertility was applied evenly over the field.
Farmers in the East Neuk of Fife and in other parts of Scotland close to the sea also used to go to the shores following any storm tides to collect cartloads of seaweed, another well known fertiliser, especially of the potato crop. One unnamed farmer with a fierce reputation decided seaweed collection was the order of the day and instructed his men with the curt command, ‘Those of you wi’ coats go to the shore and get wrack [seaweed] and those wi’ nae coats or leggings, just go wi’ them!’
The sea also provided more fertility. In 1915, Henry Watson, Drumrack Farm, Anstruther bought rotten fish from a shipwrecked boat, the Glenravel. The farm staff could not have enjoyed the spreading of the decomposing cargo. A few years later, in 1920, the local newspaper reported a trainload of sprats being used as fertiliser on farms in North-East Fife. The wagons were open and on arrival at the rural stations, the sprats were shovelled onto farm carts. On the roads from the station, trails of seagulls followed the farm carts. By the time the sprats were spread on the ground for fertiliser, according to the report, there was ‘intensity of gulls’. The men doing the spreading were like ‘spotted dicks’ as a result of the seagulls dive-bombing them.
Shell fishing has played a major role in the East Neuk and often farmers would buy crab or mussel shells from the local fishmongers for fertiliser. These waste products of the fishing industry were valued for their lime content, and to this day, mussel shells can be turned up in the farmlands close to the fishing towns.
In the early days of the twentieth century when coal was a major source of fuel in the towns, chimney sweeps could sell soot to local farmers as it was also considered first-class fertiliser.
The farmer wanting to add more fertility than his own livestock could produce would buy Peruvian guano, the major fertiliser in the early years of last century. Thousands of tonnes of these sea-bird droppings were shipped across from the Pacific coast of Peru. The trade was based on slave labour bagging up the highly nitrogenous fertiliser accumulated over centuries from roosting points along the sea cliffs and then carrying the sacks down to waiting ships. This continued until well into the twentieth century.
While
