Grain and Chaff from an English Manor Part 7

It is related of Ruskin that, hearing the insistent rattle of a mowing machine in a meadow adjoining his home by the beautiful Coniston Water, and his sense of the fitting being outraged, he interviewed the owner, and, by an offer to pay the trifling difference between machine and hand labour, induced him to discontinue the annoyance.

As to the relative cost of machine and hand wheat-cutting, quite early in my farming I obtained the opinion of a distinguished farmer, then well known on the Council of the Royal Agricultural Society, Mr.

Charles Randell, of Chadbury, near Evesham, on the subject: "If you can get a good crop," he said, "cut, tied, and stocked by hand at anything like 15s. an acre, don't use a machine. If the corn is ripe it knocks out and wastes quite a bushel of wheat per acre" (worth at that time about 5s., now nearer 9s. or 10s.). "I always bring out my machines, and have them oiled and made ready, _but I don't want to use them_."

In a wet harvest the machine is unworkable on sticky clay soil, and after a wet summer, when the corn is badly laid and twisted, it makes very poor work, cutting off the ears and scattering them, and leaving a quant.i.ty of uncut and untidy straw on the ground.

In my own case my equanimity was never disturbed by a reaping machine, with its unwieldy tossing arms, on my land, for I had to find employment for my full staff of regular hands, specially required for the much more important hop-picking a little later, and it pleased me that they should get the extra pay for harvest work as well.

The cream separator, I admit, is a wonderful invention, and its hum is not unmusical; it provides fresh skim milk for the calves and pigs morning and night, which, as well as the cream, is thoroughly cleansed in the process. The aeration of the skim milk leaves it a most wholesome and nourishing article of diet for the villagers if they could be made to understand its value, and that the removal of the cream takes away only the fat (heating material), leaving the bone and muscle making const.i.tuents in the milk. I could never induce my village folk to accept this rudimentary proposition; they fancied that all the goodness was gone with the cream, and though I offered the skim milk at the nominal price of one halfpenny a quart, very few would send their children to fetch it, though they mostly lived within a hundred yards of the dairy.

The hay or straw elevator is one of the greatest helps, saving much heavy overhand labour in rick-building. An old labourer, pointing to one, with great appreciation, on a farm I was visiting, said: "_That's_ a machine as will be always kept in the dry and took care on." He spoke from experience of the arduous work of unloading and the pa.s.sing of heavy weights, sometimes from the bed of the waggon to the summit of the rick; for, as my bailiff often said, "n.o.body knows so well where the shoe pinches as the man who has to wear it."

Steam has not done all that was expected of it as an agricultural slave. The steam plough is not a success on heavy land where the ridges are high and irregular in width, and even the steam cultivator has to be used with caution lest the soil should be carried from the ridges to the furrows, and the "squitch" (couch) buried to a depth at which it is difficult to eradicate. The great convenience of steam cultivation is that full advantage can be taken of a short spell of hot, dry weather for fallowing operations, and the soil is left so hollow that it soon bakes and kills the weeds. I fully sympathize with Tennyson's, _Northern Farmer, Old Style:_

"But summon 'ull come ater mea mayhap wi' 'is kittle o' steam Huzzin' an' maazin' the blessed fealds wi' the Devil's oan team";

for, except on a large farm with immense fields, the ponderous and ungainly steam, tackle gives one a sensation of intrusion. Such a field can be found on a farm between Evesham and Alcester; it contains 300 acres. The occupier, speaking of it, mentioned that it was all wheat that year except one corner. To a question as to the size of the corner, it transpired that it was 50 acres, and growing peas. For comparison there is a story of a Devonshire farmer who said he had been very busy one winter making four fields into one. "Then you've got a big field," said a friend. "Yes," was the reply; "it's just four acres."

When the farm labourer was enfranchised in 1885 he became an important member of the electorate. Candidates and canva.s.sers alike had a much more strenuous time than ever before, the former were constrained to hold meetings in every village, and the latter were obliged to visit nearly every cottage. The late Sir Richard Temple after a distinguished career in India, became Conservative candidate for our division. The doctrine of "three acres and a cow," in opposition to every tenet of rural economy, as well as the division of the land among the labourers, were at the time paraded by theorists and paid agitators, as bribes to purchase the votes of the new electors, and as ensuring the salvation of the rural population, which was then beginning to suffer from unemployment, resulting from the destruction of corn-growing by foreign compet.i.tion.

The more credulous of the labourers were excited and unsettled by the alluring prospect of independence thus held out to them, and it was reported that some went so far as to survey the fields around their villages and select the plots they proposed to cultivate, and that others took baskets to the poll in which to bring home the all-powerful magic of the mysterious vote! Among the new voters in a neighbouring village, a man of very decided views found it puzzling to decide by which candidate they were most nearly represented, and, determined to make no mistake at the poll, he consulted a fellow-labourer, inquiring: "Which way be the big uns a-going, because I be agin they?"

The Squire of an adjoining parish met an old villager with whom he had always been on good terms; after mutual greetings, the man sympathised: "I _be_ sorry for you, Squire." "Why?" was the rejoinder.

"Yes, I be regular sorry for you, Squire, that I be.." "What's the matter?" asked the Squire. "Ay! about this here land; 'tis to be divided amongst we working men." "Indeed," said the Squire; "but look here, after a bit, some of you won't want to cultivate it any longer, and some, with improvident habits, will sell their plots to others, so that soon it will be all back again into the hands of a few; what will you do then?" The man looked puzzled, scratched his head, and cogitated deeply, until a simple solution presented itself: "Then, Squire," said he, "we shall divide again!"

Sir Richard Temple was undoubtedly an able man, but he was a complete stranger to the local conditions of the const.i.tuency. The villagers of Badsey especially, as well as of other adjoining parishes, were just beginning to retrieve their position, threatened by the collapse of corn-growing and consequent unemployment, by the adoption of market-gardening and fruit-growing. The land, run down and full of weeds and rubbish, had been cut up into allotments and offered to them as tenants, their only choice lying between years of hard work in redeeming its condition or emigration. Many young men chose the latter, and did well in the States of America; but where there was a wife and young children that course was scarcely possible, and the man became an allotment tenant. Pa.s.sing one of these on a plot full of "squitch," which he was laboriously breaking up with a fork to expose it in big clods to a baking sun, I asked if he had taken it. "Well,"

said he, "I don't know whether I've taken _it_ or it's taken _me_!"

These men, by unceasing labour and self-denial, were just beginning to turn the corner; they had cleaned the land, ameliorated its mechanical condition by application of soot and by deep digging with their beloved forks, and, having discovered how wonderfully asparagus nourished on this deep, rich soil, had planted large areas, as well as plum-trees and other market-garden crops, and the well-merited return was coming in increasingly year by year.

Sir Richard Temple did not understand the difference between the small holder, growing corn and ordinary crops in less favoured parts of the countrymen the one hand, and market-gardeners in the Vale of Evesham, with its early climate, splendid soil, and railway connection with huge artisan populations, delivering the produce with punctuality and despatch, on the other. He considered that small holders could not make an economic success where the farmers had failed, and had made his views well known in the const.i.tuency, but he did not distinguish between the small holder and the market-gardener.

The men of Badsey felt aggrieved, they knew better, and at a meeting he held in the village they gave him a rather noisy hearing, with interruptions such as, "Keep off them steel farks," "Mind them steel farks, Sir Richard," and so on.

Sir Richard came to ask for my support and a.s.sistance in our village, and, as I was not at home, my wife entertained him in my absence, with tea and wedding-cake. She innocently asked if he had come to canva.s.s me; her straightforward query surprised him, but, after a moment's hesitation, he replied cautiously: "Well, something of that sort."

He was eventually returned, and the men of Badsey continued to flourish on asparagus-growing in spite of his warnings; new houses sprang up in every direction, and available labour grew scarcer and scarcer. Those splendid asparagus "sticks" or "buds," as they are called, tied with osier or withy twigs, which may be seen in Covent Garden Market and the large fruiterers' shops in Regent Street, are grown in and around the parishes of Badsey and Aldington. They command high prices, up to 15s. and 20s. a hundred for special stuff, and this year (1919) I see that 21 was realized for the champion hundred at the Badsey Asparagus Show. That, of course, must be regarded as quite exceptional, and possibly there were special considerations which made it worth the money to the purchaser.

Later came difficulties; after successive dry summers the asparagus was attacked by a fungoid complaint, called by the growers "rust."

Instead of growing vigorously after the crop had been gathered--which is the time when the buds for next year's crop are developing on the crowns of the plants--and finally dying off naturally in beautiful feathery plumes of green and gold, it presented a dingy and rusty appearance, eventually turning black. Asparagus cannot stand long-continued summer and autumn drought; it likes plenty of moisture, in free circulation but not stagnant. The crops that followed the appearance I have described were very deficient, proving that the growing season of one year's foliage is the time when next year's crop is decided.

The growth of asparagus is still a very important part of the market-gardener's business in the parishes referred to, but it does not continue to produce the best results indefinitely and continuously on the same land, and the growers have been obliged to extend their acreages and take fresh plots. I have little doubt that with the scientific application of artificial fertilizers the yield would continue satisfactory for a much longer period. Plant disease of any kind is nearly always due to starvation for want of the chemical const.i.tuents upon which the crop feeds, though sometimes caused by unhealthy sap, the result of late spring frosts or unsuitable weather.

The asparagus-growers relied too much upon soot as a fertilizer; it has a marvellous effect upon the mechanical condition of heavy land; its particles intervene between the particles of the almost impalpable powder of which clay is composed, and the soil approximates to a well-tilled garden plot after a few applications and careful incorporation, and in the local phraseology, it becomes "all of a myrtle." But as plant food soot contains nitrogen only, a great plant stimulant, which quickly exhausts the soil of the other necessary const.i.tuents. If the growers would make use of basic slag, superphosphate, or bone dust to replace the phosphate of lime removed by the crop, and of potash in one of its available forms, they would soon experience a great improvement in the power of their asparagus to resist disease and deterioration.

I am aware that some of the smaller growers regard all kinds of artificial fertilizers with suspicion, but they may be interested, should they ever read these pages, in the following story. When Peruvian guano was first introduced into this country, the farmers could not be persuaded that it merited any reliance as a manure. The importers, in despair, caused some of the despised stuff to be sown in the form of huge letters spelling the word "FOOLS" upon a bare hillside, visible from a great distance. The following spring, with the beginning of growth, and throughout the summer, the word stared the farmers in the face whenever they chanced to look that way, in dark green outstanding characters upon the yellow background; after this practical demonstration there was no difficulty in finding purchasers.

Sir Richard Temple was opposed by Mr. Arthur Chamberlain, one at least of whose canva.s.sers was not above stretching a point to obtain the votes of the labourers. My men told me that they had been promised roast beef and plum pudding every day of their lives should the Liberal party be returned. These tactics were again resorted to in the election of 1906, when walls were placarded with pictures of the Chinese employed in the gold-mines of the Transvaal, driven in chains by cruel overseers, presumably representing the Conservative Government which had sanctioned their employment. I know from what I heard in my new home, for I was no longer at Aldington, that this misrepresentation decided the votes of many of the more ignorant voters.

CHAPTER VIII.

MY THREE VICARS--CHURCH RESTORATION--CHURCHWARDEN EXPERIENCES-- CLERICAL AND OTHER STORIES.

"Where many a generation's prayer, Hath perfumed and hath blessed the air."

--GLADSTONE.

I saw a good deal of my three successive Vicars, for I was Vicar's churchwarden for a period of nearly twenty years, and was treasurer of the fund for the restoration and enlargement of Badsey Church. My first Vicar had held the living for over thirty years when we decided upon this important undertaking; and not wishing to be burdened with the correspondence which the work would entail, he invited me to act for him. I was pleased, because I have always been interested in the architecture of old buildings, especially churches, and readily undertook the post. I had the constant and intimate co-operation of my co-warden, Mr. Julius Sladden, of Badsey, and I may say that no two people ever worked together with greater harmony.

The restoration had been debated for many years; the ancient church was sadly dilapidated, and disfigured by an ugly gallery at the west end of the nave, which obscured the finest arch in the building, leading into the tower; and the incident which brought the matter within the range of possibility was romantic. The Vicar succeeded quite unexpectedly to a large inheritance; the news reached him and his wife, who was away from home at the time, simultaneously. The letters they wrote to each other on their good fortune crossed in the post, and characteristically each wrote "Badsey Church must now be restored." Soon afterwards the Vicar came to my house and, sitting down at my table, wrote me a cheque for 500 to start the fund.

On the advice of the patrons of the living--the Dean and Chapter of Christ Church, Oxford--we invited Mr. Thomas Graham Jackson, now Sir Thomas Graham Jackson, R.A., to undertake the duties of architect. His work was well known at Oxford at the time, as the beautiful New Schools had just been completed from his designs; we were also most fortunate in obtaining the services of Mr. Thomas Collins, of Tewkesbury, as builder. Mr. Collins was devoted to church architecture, and the financial consideration of such work was to him quite secondary to the pleasure he experienced as a connoisseur in restoring to the dignity and beauty of the past any ecclesiastical building of distinguished interest. The first estimate was, I think, 1,500, exclusive of architect's fees, but when the work was completed we had expended in all a sum of over 2,130. We did not finally clear off the debt until 1894, nine years after the reopening of the church, and since then a considerable further sum has been expended in rehanging the old bells and adding two new ones to make up the full peal of eight.

It was delightful to experience the willingness of everybody to help; subscriptions, large and small, came in readily at the very outset, and this part of the work never became arduous until the last few hundreds had to be raised. Most of us experienced the truth of the proverb _Bis dat qui cito dat_, but in a different sense from that which usually commends it, for many who gave quickly not only literally gave twice, but three times or more. Bazaars, concerts, and entertainments of all kinds were undertaken by the parishioners, a sum of 376 being raised by these means. Among them a bazaar at Badsey realized 130; another, later, at Aldington in one of my old barns, 80; and two concerts--afternoon and evening--at Malvern, organized by my wife and her sister, Miss Poulton, 100.

The Vicar received a notable letter from the late Lord Salisbury, the Premier; they had been at Eton and Christ Church together, and Lord Salisbury was G.o.dfather to the Vicar's eldest son. The Vicar had written of the fortune he had inherited, and spoke of some rooks as having brought the luck by building, for the first time, in an elm-tree in the vicarage grounds. Lord Salisbury, in sending a donation of 25 to the restoration fund, added: "I see a great many rooks building near my house" (Hatfield), "but the luck has not come to me yet." The Vicar's comment to me was: "If the luck has not yet come to Lord Salisbury, I don't see how anyone can hope for it!"

The Malvern concert was a strenuous undertaking; Badsey being a long way from Malvern, it was necessary to interest the inhabitants and to some extent to plead _in forma pauperis_, for we were really a poor parish without any large resident landowners. The first thing was to get a good list of influential local patrons; and as soon as Lady Emily Foley consented, the promoters felt that the work was half done.

Lady Emily Foley was supreme at Malvern, a very distinguished old lady and most popular, but perhaps a little alarming.

On the day of the two concerts I was detailed with a troop of young men, relatives of the patrons, to conduct the people to their seats, and an elaborate plan of the large a.s.sembly Room was given me, with minute particulars of the lettered rows and numbered seats, presenting the appearance, somewhat, of a labyrinth. I was studying it at the doors, and arranging with the young stewards as to their individual functions, when I heard an alarmed exclamation from one of them: "Look out! here comes Lady Emily Foley!" In an instant the whole crowd took to their heels and disappeared down the corridor. With some little difficulty I succeeded in finding the seats of Lady Emily Foley's party, but I could see that she regarded me as a rather feeble cicerone.

She was, however, exceedingly gracious after my wife's first solo, which pleased her so much that we had to make an exception in this case, and allow an encore by her special request, though it had been arranged, owing to the length of the programme, that no encores were to be given. Lady Alwyne Compton, wife of the Dean of Worcester, very kindly a.s.sisted as a performer, my wife having frequently sung at charity concerts and entertainments for her in Worcester and the neighbourhood, among them a recital by Mr. Brandram of _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, when she undertook the soprano solos occurring in the play, at the Worcester Guildhall. Lady Alwyne Compton was very musical, and rehearsals were held in the stone-vaulted crypt beneath the Deanery, a place of splendid acoustic properties, which intensified the sound without coa.r.s.ening it, and brought the voice back to the singer in a way unknown on the usual platform, decorated with screens, curtains, and flags, and obstructed by floral impedimenta.

Among the performers at the Malvern concerts some professionals had been engaged from London, including Miss Margaret Wild, a well-known pianist. I had given my men a holiday for the occasion and was anxious to hear their opinion of the performances. They considered the music rather too high cla.s.s for them, but they thoroughly appreciated the nimble fingers of Miss Margaret Wild; one of them adding enthusiastically: "My word, her did make 'im (the piano) rottle!" Our old parish clerk too, at the time over eighty years of age, who walked three miles to Evesham Station in the morning, ascended the Worcestershire Beacon--nearly 1,500 feet--and finally walked back from Evesham to Badsey at night, was much struck by the recitations of Miss Isabel Bateman at the concert. The dear old man was somewhat deaf, and told me that, sitting towards the back of the room, "I couldn't hear nothing, but I could see as the gesters [gestures] was all right."

This old clerk was prominently devout in the church responses, and had some original p.r.o.nunciations of unusual words; in the Nicene Creed he generally followed a few bars, so to speak, behind the Vicar, but one never failed to catch the words "apost'lick church" towards the end.

He was very scornful of ghosts, and told me that he had been about the churchyard very often at night for fifty years without seeing anything like an apparition. But the whole village was alarmed, including the clerk, one Sunday when, about midnight, the tenor bell was heard solemnly tolling. The clerk, with some supporters and a lantern, unlocked the door, and found the village idiot--silly C.--in the tower ringing the bell. It appeared that, after service, the clerk had extinguished the lights and locked up for the night about eight o'clock. C., who had gone to sleep in the gallery with his head upon his arms before him on the desk, slumbered on until he woke in alarm some four hours later, to find himself alone and the church in total darkness, but he was intelligent enough to remember the bell and get his release.

C. had a hand-to-hand fight in the church tower with Aldington's special imbecile. After service the clerk invited me to the scene of the battle, pointing out some crimson traces on the stone pavement. I called upon our imbecile's parents on my way home, and the old father was greatly shocked. "Here he be, sir," he said; "I hope you'll give him a jolly good hiding." I told him I could hardly undertake the role of executioner on a Sunday, in cold blood, and contented myself with a severe reprimand.

I was handing the collecting-bag one morning after service, and finding it did not return from the end of the row of chairs as quickly as usual, I discovered this same individual with his hand _in the bag_. I signed to him impatiently to pa.s.s it back. After service he came to the vestry and said that he had contributed a florin in mistake for a penny, and was trying to retrieve it. I could generally estimate pretty accurately the amount of the collection, as I handed the bag, knowing the extent of each person's usual gift, and sure enough, there was an extra florin among the coins, with which I sent him away happy.

The parish must have been an uncivilized place in former times; there was an accusing record beneath the west window of the tower, in the shape of a blocked up entrance. I was told that the ringers, not wishing to enter or leave the tower through the church door during service, and also to facilitate the smuggling in of unlimited cider had, after strenuous efforts, cut an opening through the ancient wall and base some feet in thickness, and that the achievement was announced to the village by uproarious cheering when at last they succeeded. A door was afterwards fitted to the aperture, but the entrance was abolished later by a more reverent Vicar.

The belfry was decorated with various bones of legs of mutton and of joints of beef, hung up to commemorate notable weddings of prominent parishioners--perhaps, too, as a hint to future aspirants to the state of matrimony--when the ringers had enjoyed a substantial meal and gallons of cider at the expense of the bridegroom. There seems to have been a traditional connection between church bell-ringing and thirst, for Gilbert White relates that when the bells of Selborne Church were recast and a new one presented in 1735, "The day of the arrival of this tuneable peal was observed as an high festival by the village, and rendered more joyous by an order from the donor that the treble bell should be fixed bottom upward in the ground and filled with punch, of which all present were permitted to partake."

The Vicar of Badsey told me that at the neighbouring church of Wickhamford, then also in his jurisdiction, that when he first came, in the early fifties, it was customary, as the men entered the church by the chancel door, to pitch their hats in a heap on the altar. Also that on his home-coming with his bride, he was, the same evening, requisitioned to put a stop to a fight between two drunken reprobates outside the vicarage gate. Badsey people can in these modern times point with pride to a much higher standard of civilization, and they fully recognize that "'Eave 'alf a brick at his 'ead; Bill," is a method of welcome to a stranger not considered precisely etiquette at the present day.

There was no vestry before the restoration of Badsey Church; the Vicar's surplice might be seen hanging over the side of one of the square pews which obstructed the chancel, and when the Vicar appeared he was followed by the clerk, who a.s.sisted at the public ceremony of robing. Church decorations at Christmas consisted at that time of sprigs of holly stuck upright in holes bored along the tops of the pew part.i.tions at regular intervals, and at the harvest thanksgiving an historic miniature rick of corn annually made its appearance on the altar. In those days, however, flowers, which are scarcely suitable for a festival where the decorations should proclaim the abundance of the matured season of growth, by corn and fruit, were not included. I have seen too many of these, to the exclusion of corn, in modern town churches, and even wild oats, which, though very pretty, are not exactly typical of thanksgiving.

It is surprising how much damage may be done to valuable old woodwork by an enthusiastic band of decorators, a.s.sisted by an indiscriminating curate, and how inharmonious may be the general effect of individual labours--though charming taken separately--where a comprehensive scheme is neglected. I have counted fourteen differing reds--not tones or shades of the same colour--including the hood of the officiating clergyman, in one chancel at the same time, bewildering to the eye and distracting to the mind. And I once saw a beautiful and priceless old Elizabethan table in a vestry, covered with a mouldy piece of purple velvet secured with tin-tacks driven into the tortured oak. There are, or were, two lovely old Chippendale chairs with the characteristic backs and legs inside the altar-rails of Badsey Church; they are valuable and no doubt duly appreciated, not only for their own sake, but because they were the gift of dear old Barnard, the clerk, who spent fifty years of his life in the service of the church.

I once heard a curate preaching to an agricultural congregation at a harvest thanksgiving after a disastrous season, when the earth had not yielded much by way of increase, remarking that in such a time of scarcity we might be thankful that plenty of foreign corn would be available; good theology, perhaps, but scarcely expedient under the circ.u.mstances.