The first major decline in the numbers employed on farms came during World War I. Recruitment posters with Lord Kitchener pointing out, ‘Your Country Needs You’, along with a heady dose of patriotism, saw the biggest-ever reduction in manpower on farms. During that period, one local Union chairman said, ‘There was no doubt that agricultural men were of the best type. They had more stamina than two men. It was strong men that were needed for the war effort.’
Within a matter of four years, more than a third of all male farm workers had enlisted. And where did they end up? The answer is both simple and desperately sad: the vast majority ended up under the soil in a foreign land, as anyone who visits the vast yet neatly kept cemeteries close to the battlefields in France and Belgium can see.
To fill the gap, more women were employed and the same period saw the arrival of the Women’s Land Army. The same Union chief also had a view about female labour on the farm: ‘They have already proven to be very useful and I have heard very good reports of women, but they are no use for driving a pair of horse.’
After the Armistice in 1918, when the surviving troops came home, few former farm workers returned to the land. Initially, wages rose as farmers who had made big profits in the latter years of the war attempted to ensure that their farms were in full production with full staff complements. However, as imports swamped the home market and prices plunged, wages were cut and discontent emerged.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the numbers of farm workers continued to dwindle. This was not a profitable time in the industry and wages meant money going out of the farm. Many of the West Coast farmers setting up in Fife attributed their survival in these hard times to being able to work the farm solely with members of their own families.
World War II saw another drift of farm workers from the land as they went off to fight the enemy. Meanwhile, those left behind picked up the skills needed to operate the tractors and other labour-saving machinery. This post-war surge into more and more mechanisation underlined the fact that the days of having large farm staffs were gone forever. However, there were still some shortages and the Union felt obliged to try and recruit workers from local towns. This had mixed success. One farmer reckoned town dwellers thought that ‘any duffer can do farm work – but that is not the case.’
More recently, Fife may be one of the few areas where employment connected with farming and food production has stabilised. The introduction of labour-intensive commercial soft fruit and vegetable enterprises has brought with it a need for large numbers of harvesting hands. These seldom go into the full-time employed category and the official agricultural employment statistics do not reflect their numbers.
Hierarchy
There was a real hierarchy of workers on the farms, but at the top of the tree was the ‘grieve’. He was in direct contact with the farmer and in charge whenever the farmer was away. One farmer was heard to pronounce that if he was given good gaffers, or grieves, he could farm the half of Fife.
Many of the best of them might have been farmers themselves and often they knew the farm, and definitely the farm workers themselves, better than the farmer. They were men of strong opinion and the relationship between farmer and grieve was often fraught. One story with wide circulation in North Fife related around Jim Duncan, grieve at Rathillet farm and in charge of more than a dozen men.
One day, on his return from market, the farmer, Joe Harper, said that he had bought a hydraulic loader for the tractor. This would take much of the hard work out of jobs such as emptying dung from the cattle courts. Jim Duncan thought all this a bit modern and when the new piece of equipment was delivered, he hung it from the shed couples, or rafters. It apparently stayed there in pristine condition for more than a decade as the farm staff continued to empty the courts by hand graip (forks).
While he may have come off second-best in that instance, Mr Harper evened out the score by wearing a white mark on his wellies at all times when inspecting the ploughing. The mark ensured the men were ploughing at the correct depth.
More evidence of grieves being men of independent mind comes from another farmer, who recalled that his first grieve was an excellent man. There was therefore disappointment when his employee came to hand in his notice. Asked why, the grieve – frustrated by the farmer’s constant interference in the working of the farm – replied that the farmer did not need a grieve, ‘only a talking orraman.’
Even in their leisure time, the farm grieves seldom mixed with the other men. One recollection was of the farm men all waiting for the bus to take them to Cupar while their grieve stood a little way off. The working hierarchy went from farmer to grieve, and onto the horsemen or tractormen. These latter categories were even stricter in who was first among equals.
The first horseman always had the best pair of horse on the farm and he carried out the most prestigious work. His team would plough the rigs close to the road, where the neighbours would look over the dykes to see what was happening. He would lead the team of binders cutting the grain and his cart would be the lead in any teamwork.
His team of horses would be first out of the stable in the morning and first back at night. It was a foolish number two horseman who tried to usurp that position, but equally, the second horseman would stamp on any indiscretion by the man responsible for the third pair of horse, and so on down the line.
This tradition was carried on until late in the last century and I recall tractors coming back home from various corners of the farm, all checking to see they were returning in the correct order. Anyone even slightly ahead of the rightful place was expected to dilly-dally a little to ensure the correct pecking order. Equally, it was not unknown that if someone broke rank coming out of the stable, then he would be sent back in to restore proper order.
And so to the orraman: for much of the century, such men were needed to carry out the many unskilled, but physically hard jobs on the farm. The Courier newspaper used to carry literally dozens of advertisements for those who neither wanted nor could drive horses, nor cope with tractors. They always called for ‘good workers’, but who would describe himself as anything other?
The orramen were those who helped graip at the potato pits, bagged off grain at the threshing mill and carried out other menial tasks on the working farm. Orramen were scarce. They were expected to do any work required of them. Often they were only in demand at busy times of the year.
Then there were the bothy loons and single men, who took the spare pair or the single horse for work such as basic harrowing in spring time, taking the milk cans to the station on a daily basis and carting in the feed for the indoor livestock.
Those working with livestock never went into the stable to get their orders. It was accepted that those working with cattle or sheep would negotiate their work with the farmer, not the farm grieve. Rather reluctantly, the shepherd or cattleman would help at harvest time or possibly even in the spring of the year, but they always did so in their own time after tending to the needs of their stock.
Work was often a family affair, with many of the wives also working year round on the farm. Apart from milking cows and feeding poultry, they were seldom given anything other than menial work. To them fell tasks such as gathering stones off the newly sown ground in the spring to avoid damage to machinery at harvest, gathering the sheaves into stooks for drying when the binders went into the crop and carrying away chaff from the threshing mill. At turnip or sugar beet thinning, the women would come towards the end of the line that was always led by the first horseman.
Women farm workers were traditionally poorly paid. At the end of World War I, they received just over half of men’s wages. This rose to three-quarters by 1938, but
