Ted Hartwright and Hop farming in the 1920’s
The beautiful Teme Valley on the borders of Herefordshire and Worcestershire is a natural place for hops to be grown, as they need deep well-watered soil, ideally good loam. Hops are a climbing plant used in the manufacture of beer. The vine lasted roughly eight years. The first shoot that grew in March/April was called the “gut-wire” and pulled out by women. It was the job of the men to do the stringing - attaching the strings that the hops would climb up, to wires which were supported by rows of poles. In the early days this was done by two men on a high platform on a dray pulled by horses. Later the job was done by men on stilts. It took a long time and it was local women from the village who wound the trailing shoots around the strings and tended the vines which were subject to several diseases. In autumn there was an influx of hop-pickers who picked hops and put them into cribs. The hops were measured and the amount noted in a book. Hop-pickers were paid so much a bushel and would sometimes ask for a daily “sub”. The hops were dried in kilns. Where hop-farming has ceased some of the hop kilns have been converted into homes.
Taken from Ted Hartwright’s Reminiscences
1909 - 2000
(I am grateful to Connie,
Ted’s wife, for kindly giving me permission to include this extract
and photograph)
 |
King
Charles house and Holthams circa 1900 |
I was born in 1909 at 4 The Cornmarket Worcester, above Holtham and Co. My father was a director of Holtham’s Seed Merchants and we lived over the premises when I was young....
..... I left school and was learning how to be a hop farmer. Firstly as a pupil on 5s (25p) a week plus keep with Billy Walker of Shelsley Walsh and later with his father T Lawson Walker of Knightwick who had seven farms. At night we used to sit by the fire discussing what was to be done the following day. Then at seven in the morning I would go off on my motor-bike to give Mr Walker’s bailiff his instructions at Ankerdine, Knightwick. I had a motor-bike supplied to me by both farmers one was a Douglas and the other a Riley. They had a belt drive and when it was wet I couldn’t always get up Ankerdine Hill!
Ted Hartwright on his motor
bike
Here are some of the things
I remember about hop-farming.
Mechanisation didn’t take place until many years after I left
hop-farming, so I can remember well the hop-pickers. Whole families
used to come from the industrial area of the Midlands that we know as The Black Country. It was
their holiday, a chance to get away to fresh air, enjoy themselves and
earn some money. A gang leader used to get a group of pickers together
[See page 67 of “A Pocketful of Hops” Orphans Press 1998.
Mrs Ann Wright was a such a gang leader and according to her son Lawson,
used to pick at Ankerdine Farm]. In the Autumn we used to call foggy
mornings “hop-picking mornings”. We had to use all the
farm buildings to house them all. We used what we called barracks,
where at other times we kept pigs. The barracks were thoroughly cleaned
out and disinfected and fresh straw put in for bedding. Each Sunday
morning a family received a quota of potatoes and cider. They bought
the rest of their requirements from the village or the mobile shop.
On one occasion one of the regulars arrived and found her usual “house” occupied by another. She complained to the Master (T L Walker). He and I went straight over and Mr Walker having found out that the woman who was in the “house” was the usurper, man-handled her out of the building. The next thing I knew I was hit over the head by the flat-edge of a hop-knife as the angry husband returned thinking I had had something to do with the rough justice meted out to his wife!
…In 1927 while at Billy Walker’s at Shelsley Walsh, the Midland Auto Club held their first “Hill Climb”, the event continues to this day. Locals used to get in for nothing because the police at the top and the bottom knew that there was a bridle path and they couldn’t stop them! Kennel Bend gets its name from being very close to the site of the old Clifton-on-Teme Hunt kennels. After my father died in 1928 I left the Walkers to go into the business of Holtham 1929 Ltd in the Cornmarket Worcester.
