Out of the Hay and into the Hops: Hop Cultivation in Wealden Kent and Hop Marketing in Southwark, 1744–2000

By Celia Cordle

Based on oral histories and farm books, this account offers a fascinating analysis of some 300 years of hop-cultivation history in the Weald of Kent, a rural area in the South of England, and in the Borough at Southwark, London. The diverse processes of hop agriculture are examined within the wider context of events, such as the advent of the railroads and the effects of war, as are changes to the working practices and technologies used and their reception and implementation in the Weald. Also examining hop trading and dealing, this comprehensive record demonstrates the impact this rural industry had upon the lives of the people engaged in it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Hertfordshire Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781907396267

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Studies in Regional and Local History

General Editor Nigel Goose

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First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

University of Hertfordshire Press

College Lane

Hatfield

Hertfordshire

AL10 9AB

UK

© Celia Cordle 2011

The right of Celia Cordle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-907396-03-8 hardback

ISBN 978-1-907396-04-5 paperback

Design by Geoff Green Book Design, CB4 5RA

Printed in Great Britain by Henry Ling Ltd, Dorchester DT1 1HD

To the memory of my very dear friend Barbara Skittles

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

List of appendices

General Editor’s preface

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: ‘... into the hops’

1 Land and location

The Weald

Changes in hop acreage

Woodland and the hop

The hop and employment

Southwark

2 Fringe farms: the early days of hop cultivation

A farm at Ivychurch: 1789-1812

Ruffins Hill Farm, Burmarsh, Kent, 1696-1720 and Forestall Farm, Burmarsh, Kent, 1764-75

Forestall Farm

Tatlingbury Farm, near Tudeley, Kent, 1744-58

Biddenden Farm 1849-60

Organisation of the work

The plough team

Hop work

Hops in the economy of Biddenden Farm

3 Continuity and change: Combourne and Harper’s Farms 1897-9

Issues of the time

Ernest Wickham and hop cultivation

Manure

Washes and sprays

Hop poles, wirework and creosote

The harvest

Endings

4 The twentieth century: futures

Varieties

Dwarf hops

5 Hop factors and hop merchants: buying and selling hops in the Borough

Middlemen

Direct selling and the Waddington case

Hop factors

Hop merchants

People and places

6 The last hurrah? Tithe commutation and the repeal of hop duty

John Nash and the repeal of hop duty

Conclusion: gathering up and moving on

Appendices

Select bibliography

Index

Figures

1 Geological map of the High and Low Wealds with approximate farm locations

2 Diagram of potential rail access to hop markets from Biddenden Farm

3 Plan of the Borough High Street and neighbourhood

Tables

1 Wealden parish and English hop acreages at intervals between 1866 and 1988

2 Average prices of Kentish hop bags and hop pockets in relation to English hop yields 1787-97

3 The numbers of hop factors and hop merchants in the Borough at selected dates

Appendices

1 Sources and notes for Table 1

2 Tatlingbury Farm finances 1745-58

3 Details of the land tax and church and poor sess payments made from Tatlingbury Farm’s accounts in 1752

4 Sums paid by Tatlingbury Farm for Land Tax and Church and Poor Sesses 1747-57

5 Tatlingbury Farm’s hop yield in relation to English crop figures 1744-58 and harvesting and selling dates and prices per cwt of its hops

6 The costs of hop growing at Tatlingbury Farm 1746-56

7 Annual summary of payments and receipts for Biddenden Farm 1849-59

8 Work at Biddenden Farm

9 Hop picking and drying costs, hop receipts and the dates of sale of Biddenden Farm’s hops and of Hop Duty payments

10 Average hop prices and yields per acre 1849-59

11 Costs of hop cultivation at Biddenden Farm 1849-59

12 Summary of the place of hop growing in the economy of Biddenden Farm 1849-59

13 Comparison of the profits and losses from hops, corn and stock at Biddenden Farm 1849-59

14 Summary of the financial result of farming at Biddenden Farm 1849-59

15 Application of fertilisers at Combourne Farm October 1897-October 1898

16 Hop washing, water barrel duty and sulphuring at Combourne Farm October 1897-October 1898

17 Comparison of the number of days spent monthly on hop work compared with the number spent on other farm work at Combourne Farm between week ended 17 November 1899 and week ended 9 November 1900

18 Seasonal variation in, and monetary value of, hops bought by Arthur Morris and Company from hop factors in the Borough 1893-4 and 1897-8

19 Density of hop traders along a section of the Borough High Street 1736-1990

Studies in Regional and Local History

General Editor’s preface

Volume nine of Studies in Regional and Local History represents a very valuable addition to the series in a number of ways. First, the book covers almost three hundred years of hop cultivation and marketing, from the mid-eighteenth to the end of the twentieth century, and it is thus the only study in the series to date that covers the whole of the modern period. Second, hop growing is of intrinsic interest as an important facet of the agricultural economy of south-east England, and one that fully deserves modern treatment in a full-length study such as this. While this book focuses upon Wealden Kent, hops were also grown in the heart of the county centred upon Maidstone, as well as in the neighbouring counties of Surrey and Sussex. Estimates of the acreage for which hops accounted differ, but there is no doubt about its expansion in the nineteenth century. One author calculates that the cultivated acreage in the High Weald doubled between 1821 and 1874 to reach 16,062 acres, while a report in 1880 noted that ‘Sussex ranks next to Kent as a hop-growing county, there being nearly 10,000 acres of that crop’.¹ The figures presented by Celia Cordle here suggest a peak acreage for England as a whole of 71,327, achieved in 1885, and while this is a small total when compared with a national acreage of all crops and permanent grass in the region of 25 million acres at this date, its regional and local importance in the counties where it was largely situated is undeniable.² Furthermore, while the industry fell away from the late nineteenth century, its decline was a slow rather than a precipitate one, with approximately 20,000 acres still dedicated to the crop through to the end of the 1960s.³ Third, it is a subject of particular fascination to this editor, who grew up in east London listening to stories about the erstwhile tradition of annual working holidays to Kent, the garden of England, for the purpose of picking fruit and hops. While I am quite sure that my parents were never active participants, and most probably not theirs either, the tradition struck a romantic chord in my mind that continues to echo to this day, while also representing a reminder of the manner in which popular memory can make the very best of economic necessity and downright hard work.

This is a multi-faceted study. It combines regional and local history very effectively by presenting an overview of hop production in the Weald as a whole over a long timescale, while also exemplifying the key features and developments through a very detailed analysis of the fortunes of Combourne and Harper’s Farms at the very end of the nineteenth century, which were fortunate enough to be situated on the rich, alluvial soils of the Teise Valley. Chapter 3 thus takes us to the very heart of hop cultivation as experienced at this time, the detailed farm books providing a wealth of information on acreages, methods of production, fertilisation, labour inputs, pests, diseases and the use of insecticides and washes, as well as the all-important harvesting and drying processes. Families participated in hop culture on these farms, women and boys laying out the hop poles ready for erection, while the wives of farmers would also participate in the harvest, alongside Londoners and Gypsies. The Gypsies would live in their own caravans and tents, while the Londoners - who, we learn, had a very strong group identity - would occupy purpose-built huts about 12 feet square, with a concrete floor and a galvanised roof. The romance, comradeship and pecuniary benefits of hop picking are fully reflected here, alongside an appreciation of the harsh conditions and strenuous work involved in bringing in the hops quickly to ensure that they remained in peak condition.

This is also a study that very effectively combines quantitative and qualitative sources, bringing the best advantage to each in the process. The author clearly also has a deep familiarity with the area that she writes about, and has made excellent use too of oral history. Erstwhile hop farmers and factors, and present-day hop researchers, feature prominently in these pages, and help to bring the subject to life in a way that no farm account book can. Finally, this study is unusual in that it follows the process of hop production through from the growing, picking and drying of the hops, to their marketing in the borough of Southwark in London. Thus we learn too about the middlemen - the intermediaries between grower and brewer - and the way in which hop marketing changed during the twentieth century, particularly after closure of the Hop Marketing Board was required by European Economic Community regulations in 1982. The vertical chain of dependency across the whole production and marketing process, and the suspicions and jealousies to which it gave rise, are therefore also explored here, the later twentieth-century developments being exemplified through a personal account of the career of the hop factor Ben Wright. Based upon a thesis that was awarded the first Hasted Prize by the Kent Archaeological Society, this is a deeply, researched, sympathetic and humane study of the growth, trials and, indeed, the romance of hop cultivation and marketing over three centuries.

Nigel Goose

University of Hertfordshire

August 2010

1. Quoted in N. Verdon, ‘Hay, hops and harvest: women’s work in agriculture in nineteenth-century Sussex’, in N. Goose (ed.), Women’s work in industrial England: regional and local perspectives (Hatfield, 2007), p. 84.

2. For acreages under various crops and grass see E.J.T. Collins (ed.), The agrarian history of England and Wales. Volume 7 1850-1914. Part 2 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 1770-8.

3. See Table 1, Chapter 1, below.

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

This book is based upon my PhD thesis which was awarded the first Hasted Prize given by the Kent Archaeological Society in 2007. I gratefully thank the Society for that award, and for the associated generous financial support which has enabled publication. I also thank David Killingray of the Kent Archaeological Society for his continuing support and advice during the writing of this book.

The Hasted Prize is awarded biennially for a graduate thesis from any university adjudicated by a panel of specialists to be the best submitted thesis on the history or archaeology of the county of Kent (including those parts of the historical county now included within London). The purpose of the Hasted Prize of £3,000 is to recognise high-quality research on the county’s past and to encourage the publication of that work.

The Hertfordshire University Press is grateful to the Kent Archaeological Society for the financial support attached to the Hasted Prize towards the publication of this book.

My heartfelt thanks go to all who helped, and especially to: Keith Snell, trusted and friendly mentor over many years; John and Mollie Rummery; the late Frederick Farley; David Wickham (who also lent family farm books) and Stephen Wickham, who all told of hop cultivation; Peter Darby of Wye Hops Ltd, Harbledown, Canterbury, for information about hop research and work on dwarf hops; Ben Wright, for information about his work as a hop factor; Jane Moores of Wigan Richardson International and Stephen Mackrill of English Hops Ltd for information about hop marketing; the late Ron Weir; Alison Weir, who kindly gave permission to use the John Nash Scrap Book; Brian Bloice of the Streatham Society; Betty Carman of Cranbrook Museum; Stephen Humphrey and Stephen Potter of Southwark Local Studies library; Joan Thirsk who kindly read and commented upon the first draft of the book; and the helpful custodians of records at the Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, the University of Reading Library Archives, the British Library, Colindale Newspaper Library, the Guildhall Library, London, the University of Leicester library, the University of London and the National Archives at Kew and elsewhere.

Thanks also to my husband, Derek, for continued interest and practical support, to Elizabeth, David and Rebecca, Daniel (who always listened, and gave technical help) and Sandra, and all my family and kind friends who wished me well. And, not least, thanks to Jane Housham of the University of Hertfordshire Press for her enthusiasm and invaluable help, to Sarah Elvins who so kindly did the maps and coped with all the queries and amendments, and to the editor Nigel Goose, for adding my book to his series, and for the kind words of his preface.

The title, Out of the Hay and into the Hops, is a quotation from Ernest Wickham, used by kind permission of his grandson, David.

Introduction

‘…into the hops’

This is a history of entanglement: of the common hop, Humulus lupulus, with lives and locations; with livings made or struggled for; with localities linked with its name. When Ernest Wickham, nineteenth-century hop farmer, called ‘out of the hay, and into the hops’ to his workers, he signalled the abandonment of all other tasks, for the hops were ready, and must be picked immediately.¹ The subtext was one well understood across the centuries - hops took precedence. Only their sale could outshine returns from other crops and yield a relative fortune.

Humulus lupulus is the ancestor of all cultivated varieties and is indigenous in Britain; archaeological evidence found it in Cambridgeshire around 3000 BC, and it has grown across the globe for centuries. Although common and wild hops are botanically indistinguishable, wild ones do exist here, and some of their properties have been used in breeding programmes. Those twining the hedgerows today may not truly be wild, because cultivated hops were once so widespread, and the pollen from the male hop flower disperses over considerable distances.²

The hop is a vigorous, perennial climbing plant. From ground level in spring it rapidly twists clockwise up supports by means of hooked hairs on its bine (climbing stem), reaching thirteen to fourteen feet by the end of June, and between twenty to thirty feet by early August.³ The female flowers (called cones) grow on separate plants. Around about July, they may, or may not, be fertilised by the male pollen, but, either way, develop into hops. If pollinated, the incipient hops enlarge and develop seeds. The resulting seedlings, male or female, are always genetically unique because of the separation of the male and female flowers, and only propagation from cuttings ensures breeding true to type.⁴ Kentish hops are traditionally seeded but, after 1971, some seedless varieties suitable for lager beer were cultivated.⁵ Lupulin glands in the hop cones provide the characteristic tastes required by brewers: bitterness from alpha acid, also a preservative; and aroma and flavour, imparted by essential oils.⁶

Hops are singular in more than their genetic make-up. Needing more time, labour and overhead investment than any other crop, they materially affected the lives of the huge numbers of people who planted, cultivated, gathered and marketed them.⁷ What other plant has had special trains laid on for its harvesters? Economic returns from them were so spectacularly uneven (because of their vulnerability to weather and pest damage) that bets were laid upon hop yields as well as upon the consequent hop duty.⁸

Whether for these reasons or for others, they have apparently always possessed a recognisable further significance. Ben Wright, a retired hop factor, was not alone in seeing them as ‘special’, and Margaret Lawrence described them as ‘emotive’, with a ‘soul ... [which] has encircled the lives ... of Kentish people’.⁹ The hop is entwined in Kent’s cultural identity; a hop pole bore the flag of protesters against the New Poor Law at Hernhill in 1835.¹⁰ The many nineteenth-century roundel oasts visible in Kent’s countryside evoke the long association of the county with hops.

Hop pickers often vividly remember their encounters with hops. One elderly lady whom I met at a Beer and Hop Festival in Kent in 1996 came every year to pick again in the traditional way and relive her memories. George Orwell, who in 1931 joined down-and-outs in Trafalgar Square to walk into Kent for the hop picking, wrote about the tribulations of the work factually in Hop-Picking and fictionally in A Clergyman’s Daughter.¹¹ For Dorothy (the daughter of the title) the experience, despite its downsides, held a magic which others felt in reality.¹² Recent hop pickers too have written and spoken of a special freedom and exhilaration, despite the hard labour.¹³

This book covers some 300 years of hop cultivation and marketing through the study of individual farms and hop traders. Relating specifically to the Kentish Weald and Southwark, it includes material about hop pickers, but is chiefly about the work and people involved in growing, drying and selling hops, and about change in this mode of agriculture over time and responses to such change. It assesses the place of hops within farm economies and hop growing in the context of other farm work, together with the evolution of hop trading in the Borough at Southwark, where many Wealden hops were sold, and the environment in which selling took place. It also views hops in the context of national and local hop cultivation, and in the light of wider events and issues such as war, rail travel and agricultural improvement, and, more specifically to the crop, the tithe and hop duty.

Handwritten farm books and hop-trading records contributed much to this account. The dried ink recalled another world, which was amplified by maps, plans, newspapers and journals, tithe files, trade directories and literary and other sources. Oral histories were invaluable. Among those who generously took time to tell me about their work or research were John and Mollie Rummery, hop farmers from the 1950s; the late Frederick Farley, skilled hop cultivator; and David Wickham, who made available and expanded upon family hop-cultivation records and, with his wife, Ann, extended much kind hospitality. Stephen Wickham showed me around his hop farm at the start of my research and again in 2006, when hops were gone and the farm was given over to set-aside and horses. Ben Wright recounted his work as a hop factor; Peter Darby described hop research at Wye College. Their contribution was enormous and I thank them.

Chapter 1 describes the contribution of land structure and early settlement to the development of hop cultivation in Wealden Kent and hop marketing in the Borough. Chapter 2 investigates hop cultivation in differing circumstances from its early days through to Biddenden Farm in 1860 on the eve of the repeal of hop duty. Late-nineteenth-century hop farming in the aftermath of agricultural depression is the subject of Chapter 3, along with innovations of the time. The ‘curse of drink’ was an issue then, as was the poverty of farm labourers. Chapter 4 discusses the ongoing national and local falls in hop acreage and changes to hop farming after the Second World War, while Chapter 5 tells of the build-up, and later decline, of the enclave of hop factors and hop merchants in the Borough; of their links to Kent, their work and the buildings they occupied; and of the new competitive trading. The records of Arthur Morris & Company provide a unique window upon the work of nineteenth-century hop merchants. Chapter 6 looks at the processes of tithe commutation in various Wealden parishes, and at the repeal of hop duty, through the John Nash scrap book.

1. David Wickham, March 2000.

2. R.A. Neve, Hops (London, 1991), pp. 25-8; A.H. Burgess, Hops: botany, cultivation and utilization (London, 1964), p. 19; Peter Darby, Hop Research Unit, Wye College, 9 October 1996.

3. Burgess, Hops, pp. 22, 35.

4. Peter Darby; Hop Research Unit, Botany and propagation of hops, student information sheet (Wye, undated); H.H. Parker, The hop industry (London, 1934), pp. 102-3.

5. W.G.G. Alexander, A farming century: the Darent Valley 1892-1992 (London, 1991), p. 127.

6. The National Hop Association of England, The guide to English grown hops (London, 1996), p. 4.

7. D.W. Harvey, ‘Locational change in the Kentish hop industry and the analysis of land use patterns’, in A.R.H. Baker, J.D. Hamshere and J. Langton (eds), Geographical interpretations of historical sources: readings in historical geography (Newton Abbot, 1970), p. 252.

8. G. Clinch, English hops: a history of cultivation and preparation for the market from the earliest times (London, 1919), pp. 56-7.

9. Ben Wright, April 1998; M. Lawrence, The encircling hop. a history of hops and brewing (Sittingbourne, 1990), preface, paragraph 6.

10. B. Reay, The last rising of the agricultural labourers: rural life and protest in nineteenth-century England (Oxford, 1990), p. 77.

11. G. Orwell, ‘Hop-picking’, in S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds), The collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell. Volume 1 an age like this 1920-1940 (London, 1968), pp. 52-71; G. Orwell, A clergyman’s daughter (Harmondsworth, 1964), pp. 85-123.

12. Orwell, Clergyman’s daughter, pp. 97, 105.

13. For example see G. O’Neill, Pull no more bines. An oral history of east London women hop pickers (London, 1990), part of photograph caption opposite p. 77.

Chapter 1

Land and location

This chapter considers how land character and position influenced settlement and the development of hop cultivation in the Weald of Kent and hop marketing in the Borough (as Southwark was, and is, commonly known). The two areas had very different histories. But one common endowment from the disparate geographies of the late-settled, remote, rural Weald and the early-occupied, insalubrious, urban Borough was that both originated as outsider communities of nonconformist character, and retained some perception of separateness at least as late as the nineteenth century. The Wealden country lay beyond the hop-growing heartland, while Southwark was sited outside the city walls, over the river from London. This otherness was a factor in their respective, but linked, involvement with hops.

The Weald

Names encapsulate the essence of a place, but how that essence is envisaged varies. While ‘Southwark’ remembers a single undertaking, the fortification of the south side of London Bridge, ‘Weald’ embodies the ‘clayey woodlands’ of its innate topography.¹ The name is the Kentish version of the Old English ‘wald’, or ‘forest’; in Saxon times it was Andredesweald, the ancient woodland then covering much of south-eastern England.²

The Weald is one of six distinctive landscapes lying on a north-south axis through Kent. Extending into Surrey and Sussex, it lies within the arms of the North and South Downs as they open out from west to east, its character stemming from its geology and subsequent soil formation.³ Access to this heavy, wooded land was difficult, and it was used for centuries as the detached summer pasture of earlier-settled regions, where pigs and cattle fattened on acorns and beech mast.⁴ Permanent habitation began slowly from around the eleventh century, with most settlement occurring between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries; but by the mid-seventeenth century migration had made the Weald one of the most densely populated areas in Kent.⁵ Then still mainly used for pasture, the Weald was a valuable resource - but, thickly wooded and intimidating, it was widely regarded as unsafe, a fearful place of waste and wilderness, a view reflected right through to the nineteenth century. Over the centuries it has been variously described as ‘thick and inaccessible, the abode of deer, swine and wolves’ (Bede); ‘disgusting to ride over, and most discouraging to farm in’ (William Marshall, 1791); ‘low, wet, stiff land’ (Cobbett).⁶ The adjectives ‘stiff’, ‘cold’ and ‘intractable’ were frequently applied, while Everitt attributed the use of oxen to plough the Weald in Victorian times to that