After writing my short account of the book Akenfield last week it got me thinking about the occupations of many of my and my wife’s ancestors. Agricultural Labourer was a common occupation listed against many of our family members in the early Census returns. Whether it was in Sussex, Surrey, Wigtownshire and Aberdeenshire, working on the land for a farmer or an estate, with a tied cottage or rough accommodation, was a safe and necessary means of working and living.
The book, Akenfield by Ronald Blythe, gave a clear understanding of how life and the land went together especially when there were little other job prospects or opportunities available. The loyalty of the Agricultural Labourer to his employer was usually about the precarious nature of keeping a roof over your head. Dismissal from your job on the land came with eviction from your home. Consequently workers stayed loyal and also good at the work that they did. Coupled with skills of ditching, hedging thatching stock keeping, the Agricultural Worker of the 19th Century was a highly skilled man. The pay was not good and the life very hard.
It was no different in Scotland. My wife’s Great Grandfather, Peter Nicol, started life as an Agricultural Labourer in Aberdeenshire. He was born in Tarland and worked on a farm there. The working practices in rural Aberdeenshire were brutal by today’s standards. Men and women labourers and servants were hired at Hiring Fairs that were held in most towns and villages on a six monthly basis. Workers bartered their labour with farmers for a fixed fee for six months. There were no half day holidays during the week and accommodation might be shared or rough in barns. The labourers and servants had no effective leadership to get things changed until the 1870’s when unionisation became acknowledged by workers, particularly in Aberdeen.
I found an interesting article online, from the Scottish Historical Review of 1952, from which I have compiled these notes.
There were 82 parishes in Aberdeenshire with an average of 200 men and 100 women working on the land in each. When unionisation was floated in 1872 the optimistic objectives were: a shorter working week, increased wages, better sleeping accommodation, and the abolition of hiring fairs.
An initial meeting of one of the first branches was held in Tarland. Eventually the Aberdeenshire Agricultural Labourers Union was formed. The objective of abolishing the hiring fair was not to be achieved because of the isolation of workers and farms and also because each and every town and village held its own hiring fair. They continued until the First World War. Most workers were hired on the Farmers terms and there was a lack of influential leadership within the Union and its members.
Aberdeen appears to have led the agricultural union movement. After its first attempt, there was more encouragement from the English farmworkers unions and in 1887 the Scottish Farm Servants Union was launched. It had two objectives: improvement of working conditions including abolishing the ‘long engagement’, and a weekly half-holiday; the provision of sickness and funeral benefits. It was a slow journey. The weekly half-holiday was secured in 1937 and the long engagement was abolished in 1945.
In practice the Union was not militant and primarily a provident society. It was also primarily an Aberdeenshire Union. Later in 1895, it amalgamated with the Ploughman’s Federal Union based in Perth and became the Scottish Ploughmen and General Labourers Union.
Very little progress was made to improve working conditions because of the aforementioned continuation of the hiring and six monthly flitting which continued until the First World War, and the lack of powerful leadership.
(Evans, Gwenllian. “Farm Servants’ Unions in Aberdeenshire from 1870 -1900”. The Scottish Historical Review vol 31 no. 111. 1952)
This is the backdrop to the life and history of Peter Nicol who was born in 1851. He was born in Tarland, a village in Aberdeenshire that even by today’s standards, feels isolated when you visit in the 21st Century. Peter is found in the 1851 Census return as “N.K. age under 1 month”. He had not yet been baptised and was living in his Grandfather’s house with his parents. It was in this village that Peter grew up in and began his working life.
What the 1851 Census return tells me is that his Grandfather is a Farmer running a 42 acre farm. Hopefully for Peter, he never had to take part in the six monthly hiring fair because I am presuming that he left school at 14 to work on his Grandfather’s farm.
The farm is called Burnside and is located a short way north of the village of Tarland.
The village of Tarland in Aberdeenshire. Burnside is circled. (with permission from National Library of Scotland)
Something happened to inspire Peter to move from Tarland. My research finds him in Ayrshire at the age of 21 working as an Iron Ore Miner near Kilwinning. One researcher that I have been reading has described this period of time as the decline of the iron industry in Ayrshire. What the attraction was is difficult to see. But it was not long before he did two things that changed a lot of lives and created a dynasty. He returned to marry his village sweetheart, Elizabeth Tevendale and brought her down to Ayrshire to start his new life with her. He also discovered that Alfred Nobel had been developing an enormous site near Stevenston that would become the world’s biggest dynamite factory at the end of the 19th Century.