Harry Marsh
Photo Courtesy Vince Marsh
When I first read the following excerpt from the publication "East
Kent - in living memory" published by Kent Women's Institutes, I thought
of the description of a working man's life as recited when I was a child
in England - "Yer gits up. Yer goes to work. Yer comes 'ome. Yer goes to
bed." - repeated ad nauseum . We are grateful to Vincent Craig Marsh for
sharing this article about his grand uncle.
Bill Marsh, 10 October 2002
My Dad was born on 8th October 1900, the seventh child in a family of 14. He was christened Henry John, but was always known as Harry. When he was 11 his father was killed at his job of woodman at one of the estates near Dover. There were no pensions for widows in those days, so his mother had to go to work, one of the older girls staying at home to look after the small children. The youngest one was three weeks old when the accident happened.
When he finally left school at 13, he got a job as gardener’s boy and boot boy, doing all the mucky, heavy jobs the maids couldn’t do at the big house. At 18 he moved on to a job as a general labourer, working on thatching, hedging, and ditching, and anything else that needed doing. By the time he was 21, he was an all-round farm labourer, and had at his finger tips many skills he never forgot.
At 21 he really found his life’s vocation: Horses! To start with he took a job as a waggoner’s mate, living in a room at the waggoner’s house, being looked after by the waggoner’s wife. For five years he lived in this way, never hungry but on a very meagre diet. How many people in these days would go to work on a breakfast of bread and milk with a lump of boiled fat pork in it? He did, every day for five years including Sundays. When Dad was 30, the waggoner left and Dad was offered the job.
A typical job for Dad was to get up at 5.30 am to light the kitchen fire and put the kettle on to boil (no electricity). Then out to the stable (electricity from a generator out there), to get the horses up and feed them, then back indoors to have a cup of tea and breakfast, take Mum a cup of tea, then out to the stable again to groom the horses, throw out the bedding and get the corn and water etc ready for their meal when the morning’s work was done.
In those days men working with the horses kept peculiar hours. They went out to the fields at about 7.30am, at nine o’clock they’d stop for 15 minutes for a hunk of bread and cheese (dry bread), and a drink of cold, milkless, sugarless tea from a lemonade bottle in the summer or a bottle of cocoa in the winter, the bottle snuggled up in about three or four legs of old socks. There were no thermos flasks for the likes of farm workers in those days. The break was called “progger time”. I’ve no idea why.
After this break, off they would go to work again until 2.00pm. They then went back to the stable, put the horse inside, gave them the food prepared in the morning, then went off to their own home for a meal, returning at 3.30pm until 5.00pm. During this time the horse had to be groomed, the harness cleaned, and the evening meal prepared, corn measured out, fodder and hay chopped, and water put into the reserve trough. The stable was swept out and all the bits brought in from the fields got rid of. These jobs and the way the hours were worked, were called a “one yoke”.
After going home to tea at 5.00pm, Dad’s time was his own until 7.30pm in the winter and 8.00pm in the summer (if he wasn’t working late) when the horses had to be bedded down and their last feed was given; this was called “serving up”.
That was a typical day, whatever the job, whether it was ploughing, harrowing, rolling or carrying manure in a small boxy cart, called obviously a dung cart, or driving one of the long harvest wagons loaded with the sheaves.
Until the end of the war, when farm workers began to be appreciated, there was no overtime pay. They had to work as many hours as they were asked for no extra money. For years my Dad’s wages were £1 7s 6d and out of this he had to pay three shillings and sixpence for rent. We also got a two pint can of skimmed milk every day; one of the children (usually me) had to go to the back door of the big house either before or after school. My dad got sixpence more than the other men because he had the horses to look after.
After the war the wages did get progressively better. This life went on until the 1950s, when the farm horse began to disappear. Poor dad, it broke his heart, when first one then two then three tractors appeared. His employer let him keep one old horse to do odd jobs on the farm, taking food to the sheep in the winter etc. But came the day when the axe finally fell. There was just nothing for a horse to do, so he had to go. Someone a few miles away gave him a home, and he spent his final years in a nice wooded meadow with a couple of donkeys, and he was happy. Dad took us to see where he was one Sunday. He stood along the wall around the field, and called his name. The horse looked up and just took off galloping across the field; he made such a fuss I just stood and cried.
After losing his beloved horses, Dad was asked if he would like to learn to drive a tractor. The polite translation of his answer was. “No, thank you. You can’t talk to a tractor, and they don’t stop if you say whoa”.
As almost everything on the farm was by now mechanised, there wasn’t a lot of work Dad could be given, so the next question he was asked was, “How would you like to look after the garden, clean the shoes, bring in the coal etc?”
For Henry John, known as Harry, born in 1900, by 1960 his life had come full circle. He died in 1972 having worked for 48 years on the same farm. This was my Dad, the waggoner.