XXX
Hops are grown in the neighbourhood of Lamberhurst almost as extensively as around Maidstone itself, which every one knows to be the metropolis of the cultivation. The hop-gardens are the vineyards of England, and so marked a feature that it surprises the inquirer who learns that the brewer’s hop was not introduced to this country until the reign of Henry the Eighth. “Hops and heresy came in together,” the Roman Catholics were wont to remark.
There is no certainty about hops, and a hop-grower will readily admit that his trade is little better than gambling. Knowledge, capital, industry are all insufficient to arm him against fate in the shape of red spider, mould, fly, or bad markets, and he is commonly content if he can secure one good crop at average prices in three years. It is a costly cultivation, coming, with rent, rates, taxes, materials, and labour, to an average of £25 per acre.
Only land “just so” will serve. A little too heavy, a little too light, or not being drained to perfection, will spell failure, and a hop-garden must be drained, with pipes or tiles, at least as well as a house.
The hop-grower’s year begins in March, when the “hills,” or stools, are uncovered and dressed by pruning. Then the poles are set up: from two to four to each “hill.” The “hills” being six feet apart, it is a simple calculation to arrive at the number of poles to the acre. There are 3,600, forming a considerable item in the grower’s accounts. Made of ash, alder, chestnut, larch, or oak, of from ten to twelve years’ growth, the great and constant demand for them has given their characteristic appearance to large tracts of land in Kent and Sussex, where the young woodlands are as much a feature as the hop-gardens and the oast-houses themselves. Poles are from thirteen to fourteen feet long, and cost from twelve shillings to a guinea a hundred, larch being the most lasting. To preserve them as long as possible, they are often dipped in creosote.
Early in May the hop-gardens begin to give employment to the women. The young shoots are tied with rushes to the poles, and constantly thinned out, and the poles themselves tied together with a maze of interlacing string for the support of the climbing bine.
All through the summer the alleys between the plants must be kept well weeded, and only when August ends does the grower begin to see his reward in sight; but then rain may bring the “mould,” or the “fly” may come, and all his toil be wasted. Only one thing will cure the “fly,” and that is something utterly beyond control—the coming of the “ladybird.”
Most people know the ladybird or “lady-cow,” as it is sometimes called: the little winged insect with the hard shell of a post-office red, subject of the old rustic rhyme, in which, placing it on the tip of the finger, it would be addressed in this wise:
Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home:
Your house is all burnt, and your children all gone.
Little pop-pop sits on the cold stone,
Crying for mammy, and mammy don’t come.
I heard that rhyme very early, and shall never quite lose the forlorn sense of tragedy in it.
The ladybird is the deadly foe of the “fly,” and seems by some extraordinary instinct to know when and where that pest is rampant; for there is nothing more certain than that a plague of “fly” will be followed by an incursion of ladybirds in countless millions, coming even across the Channel, as steamboat passengers, plentifully covered with them, have testified. The sky rains ladybirds, come vengefully to exterminate the hop-grower’s enemy and to ensure that British beer shall be properly bittered.
If the hops survive all these dangers and chances and are a generally abundant crop, the grower is sometimes in almost as bad a case as if they had been a failure, for prices then rule so ruinously low that they do not pay the cost of growing. Hops have been so high as £25 a hundredweight in times of scarcity, when those fortunate enough to be favoured with a good crop, while their neighbours’ were failures, have retired with fortunes. On the other hand, they have been so low as fifty shillings.
A less anxious, but infinitely more busy time has come when the picking arrives. Responsible gangers have to be employed, and hop-cutters. The hop-cutter cuts through the bines, pulls up the poles, and lays them across the bins of sacking into which the pickers strip the flowers of the hop. The ganger measures out the stripped hops, and in his note-book credits each picker with the amount of his picking, at the rate of eight bushels a shilling.
The hopper’s hut is not the last word in convenience, although for the occasion, and by way of change from the hopper’s native slum, it may be comfortable enough. It is usually one of a long row of little brick dens, not altogether unlike some of the wild animals’ lairs at the Zoological Gardens, and is whitewashed inside in the manner of a cattle-pen. There are—is it necessary to add?—no pictures on the walls and no domestic knick-knacks. There is not even any furniture, nor a bed. If you are a hopper you doss on the floor, luxuriating in clean straw provided by the hop-grower, and wrapped in the not over-clean blankets brought by yourself; and you and yours “clean yourselves”—in these circles you do not merely “wash”—in the open, at buckets and tins. In the open, too, you dress and get shaved, and cook and eat; and if the August and September days be kind, there is enjoyment rather than discomfort in it. Sometimes barns and tents supplement the huts: sometimes, too, it rains, and then, on a really wet day, when work is at a standstill and the women and the children are miserable and sulky and cry, the male hopper—who, although as a rule he uses dreadful language, is not a bad fellow at heart—goes off to the nearest pub. and soaks on four-ale, and there is trouble.
KENT.
There are, every year, some 50,000 hop-pickers, picking from 35,000 to 40,000 acres of hop-gardens. Of these the larger proportion is contributed by the villagers; but the railways convey about 20,000 from London by the “hopper specials” at very low rates, and many, who cannot afford even those very cheap fares, tramp down.
The special trains would make the patrons of the Continental expresses stare. They set out at midnight, or thereabouts, and are filled with a motley crowd, bringing mattresses, blankets, frying-pans, kettles, and a host of small domestic requirements for a fortnight or three weeks.
They book to whatever station they fancy as the likeliest point whence to seek a job; for while some hop-pickers, during a steady succession of years, know where they will be welcome, many of them go on sheer speculation, and tramp from village to village until they find vacancies. In later years, and in bad or wet seasons, the number of the unsuccessful claiming admission at the casual wards, especially at Maidstone, has seriously embarrassed the workhouse authorities and those good folk who not only missionise the hoppers with Bible and Prayer Book, but feed and clothe their bodies in this world as well as showing anxiety for their souls in the next.
Hop-picking is for many poor Londoners the only holiday they get throughout the year. It is that best of holidays, change of work and of scene. Its chief merits are that it requires no skill, and that the whole family can take part in it, except the baby, who is at any rate brought into the hop-garden to look on, and left to amuse himself or to sleep under an umbrella, while grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, uncles and aunts, and brothers and sisters are all busily filling the bins and earning, according to their degrees of “slippiness,” a shilling to two shillings the day.
Each hop-grower is his own dryer: hence the kilns, the strangely cowled “oast-houses” attached to every hop-garden. To these the hops are taken, to be dried. Most oast-houses are circular, that form being considered to distribute the heat more evenly than the square. The interior is instructive, and would not be at all unwelcome on one of those wet and chilly days that are not unknown to the English summer, were it not for the universal practice of mixing sulphur with the coke fires, which, to a stranger, results in an inconvenient hoarseness and sore throat. The reason for the sulphur is that the fumes it throws off give a yellowish colour to the dried hops, a tint conventionally required by the factors, although it makes them neither better nor worse.
The fires are on the ground level. Above, the hops are spread on the drying-floor, formed of wire-netting, covered with hair-cloth. Through this the warm air ascends, and in twelve hours some 1,050 lb. weight of hops are dried, and incidentally reduced by the evaporation of the moisture in them to 200 lb. The heat ascends and leaves the oast-house by the cowl, which turns on bearings, according to the direction of the wind.
From the drying-floor to the cooling-floor the hops are transferred with a wooden shovel, and then packed into the “pockets.” “Pockets” are sacks, and are nowadays filled by being suspended from a hole in the floor, and filled with the light feathery dried hops; and then repeatedly pressed down, re-filled and re-pressed by a heavy iron screw-press. In the result, a pocket of hops is as hard and unyielding to the touch as a mass of iron, and samples cut from it hold together like so much cake-tobacco. The older method of packing was for a “jumper” to press the hops down by his own unaided efforts.