Management & Organizational History

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The last British work songs: Music, community and

class in the Kent hop fields of the early-mid 20th
century

Marek Korczynski , Michael Pickering & Emma Robertson

To cite this article: Marek Korczynski , Michael Pickering & Emma Robertson (2008) The last
British work songs: Music, community and class in the Kent hop fields of the early-mid 20th century,
Management & Organizational History, 3:1, 81-102, DOI: 10.1177/1744935908090999

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MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY Vol 3(1): 81–102
DOI: 10.1177/1744935908090999
Copyright ©2008 SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
http://moh.sagepub.com

M&OH
The last British work songs: Music,
community and class in the Kent hop fields
of the early-mid 20th century
Marek Korczynski Loughborough University

Michael Pickering Loughborough University

Emma Robertson Sheffield Hallam University

Abstract
This article examines the widespread practice of singing during the picking of hops in
the Kent hop fields from the 1920s through to the 1950s.The singing is analysed both
in terms of its position as a late, rare and therefore potentially revealing example of
British work songs in the 20th century, and in terms of the light it casts on the musi-
cal culture of the singers, working class women of London’s East End. It is argued that
the songs expressed and sprang from the strong sense of community amongst the
hop-pickers. Further, singing emerged in hop-picking precisely because it was a ‘work-
ing holiday’ in which the dichotomies of work and leisure broke down. The musical
activity of the hop-pickers is seen as expressing an active culture of creativity, class and
community – in contrast to Stedman Jones’ influential characterization of London’s
working class as enmeshed in a culture of passive consolation.

Key words • community • creativity • culture • history • hop-picking • songs

You’d get someone start a song and everybody would be singing. It was lovely.
(Kathleen Ash, ex-hop-picker, in Schweizer and Hancock 1991, 36)
From the middle of the 19th century through to the late 1950s and early 1960s, late
August and early September witnessed a mass exodus of the working class from London’s
East End to the fields of Kent, some 60 miles away, for the hop-picking season. It is esti-
mated that at its height as many as 250,000 Londoners made this trip for the 4–6 week
season (O’Neil 1990). As the quotation above suggests, it was common for these
itinerant (predominantly women) workers to sing as they picked hops in the fields. This
article concentrates on the most clearly documented period of singing in the hop fields –
from the 1920s through to the 1950s. There being no later documented cases of
unaccompanied singing during labour in the British Isles, the songs of the Kent hop
fields appear to constitute the last examples of British work songs. Given this and given

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that such large numbers of people were involved, it is important to understand these
work songs. A number of key questions suggest themselves: What were the social con-
ditions that led to this late flourishing of a musical culture at work? What did the songs
mean to the hop-pickers, and what social role did the songs play? What kind of musi-
cal culture was this at work? By addressing these questions we relate the relevance of
hopping songs both to a general understanding of British work songs, and to under-
standing the specific musical culture of London’s East End working class.
This article addresses these questions by examining a range of published oral his-
tory accounts of hop-picking from the 1920s through to the 1950s and by analysing
first-hand and second-hand written accounts of hop-picking in this period. It is struc-
tured in the following way. Immediately below, we place the topic within the relevant
literatures by examining the (relatively sparse) literature on British work songs, and
by outlining the main currents in the literature on the musical culture of London’s
working class in the period. In the main section of the article, we turn to the data on
hop-picking and singing. After providing some contextual information on hop-pick-
ing and its social relations, we examine who did the singing, and why. With this
established, we examine the way in which the hopping songs related to class and gen-
der. In the concluding section, we revisit the questions posed in this introduction.

Musical Cultures:Work Songs and East End Londoners

We adopt an open definition of ‘work songs’ as any songs that were sung, independ-
ent of any background music, to accompany manual labour. The term is not meant to
suggest that these songs were necessarily functional to the work, in terms of coordi-
nating the rhythm and pace of work groups, as with shanties (Hugill 1961) and lace
tells (Porter 1994). Nor does the term imply that work songs were songs explicitly
about work (although certainly some work songs have been about work, as our analy-
sis of hopping work songs shows below). This definition revolves around the use of the
song, rather than on focus of a song’s lyrics. This means that songs about work are not
work songs unless they are sung during labour. Thus, for instance, the waulking songs
of the outer Hebrides were mostly about legends and heroes of the Isles. These songs
were sung during labour and so constitute work songs. And by contrast, a song such
as The Miseries of the Framework Knitters, although its lyrics explicitly deal with work
matters, cannot usefully be classed as a work song because there is no evidence to sug-
gest that it was ever sung during labour by framework knitters (see Palmer 1974,
204–5). Rather than approaching work songs as closely tied to one function or one
arena, our overview analysis of British work songs suggests that it is more useful to
look for the multiplicities of meanings and functions inherent in work songs
(Pickering et al. 2006).
Whilst there is a substantial body of literature on the American work song (e.g.
Green 1993) particularly on the songs of slave labourers (e.g. Epstein 1977) and chain
gangs (e.g. Jackson 1999), the literature on the British work song is much thinner.

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There is some literature on songs associated with pre-industrialized work – on the

shanties sung by sailors during aspects of their labour (Hugill 1961; Proctor 1992),
and on the songs sung by the women of the Hebridean islands as they beat and shaped,
or ‘waulked’, cloth (Campbell and Collinson 1969). Although pre-industrialized work
songs may have been common in Britain, evidence of this oral culture has faded with
time – and industrialization in Britain, of course, came early. The process of industri-
alization worked against work songs in a number of ways. The noise of the machines
militated against singing, as did the policy of many employers who sought to ban
singing at work in order to instil industrial discipline into the workforce (Korczynski
2003; Porter 1995; Watson 1983). Perhaps too, there was a role for the cultural norms
of workers who generation after generation in industrialization had been educated into
seeing work as a sphere of discipline (Thompson 1968) from which music was
excluded. Although there have been a small number of studies highlighting how
industrial workers challenged the separation of music from work in a range of occu-
pations and sectors (Elbourne 1980; Messenger 1974; Korczynski et al. 2005; Thom
1998), work and music tended to be culturally separated in the process of British
industrialization. Overall, our knowledge of both the life and the death of the British
work song is dim and important light may be cast on this darkness by examining the
last British work songs; the songs of the Kent hop fields.
In particular, because the hop-pickers were predominantly women, further light may
be cast on the role of gender in the history of British work songs. Where work songs have
predominantly been the preserve of women, is it possible to interpret these songs as a
form of feminization of the workplace? If so, does such a feminization imply a cultural
mode of women accommodating themselves to work, rather than resisting and challenging
the nature of work and control? In other words, is there an inherently conservative ele-
ment to the work songs of British women? Ethnographic accounts of women’s work cul-
ture in the latter part of the 20th century certainly suggest this. Pollert (1981,151), for
one, feels that working women’s culture is a matter of ‘style’ rather than substance, whilst
Westwood (1984, 22) locates the relative failure of working women’s resistance in the col-
lusive nature of a ‘culture of femininity’ with ‘patriarchy’.
Our description of the hop-pickers’ songs as the last work songs in Britain
requires a number of points of clarification. By this we mean the last known songs to
have been sung frequently by workgroups during labour, without (radio) music
accompaniment (thus excluding factory workers singing along to the radio). The oral
history publications of hop-pickers’ recollections indicate that singing in hop-fields
continued into the 1950s. These songs, therefore, continued after the widespread
singing undertaken by women in British munitions factories during the Second
World War (Korczynski et al. 2005). This date also indicates that they died out at the
same time as the waulking songs of the Outer Hebrides (Campbell and Collinson
1969). So they appear to be the last work songs of the British Isles – although the
inevitable incompleteness of our knowledge of dispersed oral cultures should not pre-
clude the possibility that other work songs may have existed beyond the 1950s, and
may yet come to light.

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These songs may also cast light upon the nature of the musical culture of the
working class of London’s East End in the early-mid 20th century. Much of the dis-
cussion of this has centred upon the character of the music hall. Although its peak was
roughly from 1890 to 1910, music hall remained an important cultural institution
into the 1920s and 1930s (Bratton 2004, 164). As MacInnes (1967, 24) notes, even
in 1924, some 100,000 people lined the streets of London at the funeral of music hall’s
perhaps best-loved star, Marie Lloyd. Within this literature, Stedman Jones (1974)
made an influential contribution with his characterization of the music hall-centred
culture of London’s working class as primarily a ‘culture of consolation’. His argument
was that the relative political conservatism of London’s working class in the period up
to 1914 was rooted in a defensive, conservative culture centred on ‘pleasure, amuse-
ment, hospitality and sport’ in which the music hall played a key role. The social order
was accepted rather than challenged in this culture, and the entertainment and facade
of community created in music halls consoled the working class for any iniquities
within this social order:
In working class districts, where the multiplicity of occupations, the
separation of home from workplace and the overcrowding and impermanence
of apartments made any stable community life very difficult, the local hall
with its blaze of light, and sham opulence, its laughter and its chorus singing,
fulfilled, if only in an anonymous way, a craving for solidarity in facing the
daily problems of poverty and family life. (Stedman Jones 1974, 225)
While Stedman Jones concentrates on music hall and only takes the argument up to
1914, in principle the argument can be extended into the middle of the 20th century,
with the focus on music halls being replaced by a focus on dance halls and popular
music on the radio. Indeed, Bailey suggests that there is something of this line of
interpretation in Hoggart’s approach to the ‘commercial popular song’ in The Uses of
Literacy (see Bailey 1994, 141).1 Overall, the Stedman Jones approach to the musical
culture of the East End working class has clear correspondence with the idea, discussed
above, that women’s work songs may have been inherently conservative in nature.
Bailey (1994) takes direct issue with Stedman Jones’ arguments. Whereas
Stedman Jones’ approach rests mainly upon an analysis of the lyrics of the music hall
songs, Bailey looks at the song in use, at the way in which the songs are performed
and the audience engages with and uses the song. Once ‘the text [of the songs] has
been made to leave the page’ (p.142), he finds that music hall demanded knowledge
and skill in the participation of its audience: ‘music hall engaged its public in a more
complex set of meanings than that proposed in the compensation model – the relish
in knowingness suggests strongly that this was a culture of competence more than a
culture of consolation’ (p.168). A culture of consolation and a culture of competence,
however, may not be incompatible. A culture that is competent and knowing is not
one that necessarily challenges rather than accepts the social order.
There is considerable strength in looking at songs in use (see, for example, Pickering
1982, 1983; Pickering and Green 1987) and this article takes this approach further than

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Bailey by looking at how the music hall and popular song audiences that were the
London working class used the songs outside of the music halls and dance halls – in the
hop fields of Kent. Here, a key question informed by the debates provoked by the
Stedman Jones position is whether the work songs of the Kent hop fields tended to oper-
ate in a conservative manner of consolation, or in a manner in which a culture of com-
petence could contribute to a culture of class and community. Throughout, the key focus
is upon the period from around 1920 through to the 1950s when the singing stopped.
This is the period where there is clear and abundant evidence on both hopping and the
songs that accompanied this labour.

Hop-picking:The Work and the Songs

Before proceeding to the analysis of hopping and singing it is necessary to discuss the oral
history methods underpinning most of the data used in this article – data mostly culled
from published oral history collections on hop-picking. Here, the issue of nostalgia
informing people’s accounts of hopping and singing raises its head. How far are these rec-
ollections a nostalgic attempt to create memories of ‘good old days’? How far is singing
accentuated as part of a creation of an idealized earlier age? Three key points suggest that
the recollections of hopping and singing arise from more than nostalgia. First, there are
a small number of contemporaneous accounts of hop-picking which broadly correspond
with the picture painted in the oral history accounts (see Farley 1962; Orwell 1970 [writ-
ten 1931], and Sargent 1933). Second, the extent of the oral histories connecting hop-
picking with singing and with happiness is striking – as becomes clear in the discussion
below. It seems unlikely, though possible, that a nostalgia of precisely the same form
should have informed the accounts of so many people. Third, it should be noted that the
oral history recollections are not simply one-dimensional stories of happy days. Many of
the recollections include descriptions of hard work, cold weather, poor housing, and
antipathetic locals. This comes out clearly in the discussion below of the lack of singing
in the mornings. Taken together these points provide a strong case that the data consti-
tute much more than idealized stories of people’s happier, younger lives.2

Hopping and its Social Relations

There were two main sets of hop-pickers during the harvest season: locals from rural
Kent and the ‘hoppers’ who came for 4–6 weeks, mainly from East London. The
London exodus towards the hop fields was a predominantly female one (Grieco 1996;
O’Neil 1990), with women leading their children and wider family members to the
same hop farms where they had worked in previous years. Grieco notes that ‘hop
picking provided a reliable and independently earned form of income for the women
of the East End household’ (p.3). Husbands tended to visit only on weekends, so the
main immigrant labour force in the fields was made up of women and children of
various ages. The workforce of individual farms was bound by strong neighbourhood

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community relations as well as by kinship. As Kit O’Connell put it in an oral his-

tory collection, ‘the majority of people down the street where I lived went hop-pick-
ing at the same time and on the same farm as us’ (in Schweizer and Hancock 1991,
10). The job of hop-picking itself involved pulling down the long bines, or branches,
of the hop plant and stripping them of their berries, which were collected in a con-
tainer known as a hopping bin. While the immigrant labourers occupied the pick-
ing jobs, the jobs of measuring and of pole pulling (loosening the hop branches from
high wires so they were accessible to be picked) were done by men, usually local men
(Grieco 1996; O’Neil 1990; Schweizer and Hancock 1991). There was no guaranteed
wage, rather payment was made per volume of hop berries collected in the bins. This
system of piece-rate pay meant that there was only very light direct supervision of
the work within the fields. The hoppers were given considerable autonomy in the
labour process – they were more or less left to get on with the picking themselves.
The main points at which the hierarchy of the employment relationship became vis-
ible were the setting of the payment rate per volume, the measuring of the berries
collected and the prescribed starting and finishing times for the day’s work. As
shown below, these were also important points related to whether songs were sung,
and the content of the songs.

Who did the Singing, and why

When you go a ‘oppin’

‘Oppin’ dahn in Kent….
Forty years ago [this] was sung in hop gardens all over Kent by cockney choirs
of anything from a couple of dozen to a hundred or more voices, more
enthusiastic than musical, welling up spontaneously and lasting for as many
verses as the singers’ ingenuity could sustain before it died away to be
replaced. (Bignell 1977, 9)
Bignell’s description of the work songs of the hop gardens notes that the songs were
carried by the voices of cockney choirs. This is apposite for all the evidence shows that
the singing was undertaken exclusively by the immigrant working class labourers of
East London. It is in the oral histories from ex-hoppers from London that we hear con-
sistently of the singing (Heffernan 1999, 2000, 2004; O’Neil 1990; Schweizer and
Hancock 1991). Indeed, singing was so pervasive among the London hop-pickers that
even when the church missionaries went round serving food and drink to the pickers,
it had to be done with a song:
[The food and drink barrow] needs a team of a at least four to work it
properly, and the team has also to act as a male choir, since everything ‘down
picking’ is done with a song, and a dance too if possible. Its entry to the hop-
lines is announced by the singing of two lines of a Yiddish song:

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 KORCZYNSKI ET AL.:THE LAST BRITISH WORK SONGS

Yoi, yoi, what a gime it is,

What a gime iti is, yoi, yoi.
This is sung to a very good plainsong melody, not of our invention; we took it
over with the song. (Sargent 1933, 34)
For the church missionaries, song was seen as so pervasive that some hoppers were
even remembered and named by the songs they sang:
Out of the mists of memory loom the faces of hoppers… One such was that of
Balaclava, or more generally ‘Bala’. That name was bestowed on her because
one of the songs she used to sing was ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’.
(Farley 1962, 78)
By contrast in an oral history of Kent locals who took part in hop-picking there is no
mention of singing done by the locals (Stevens 1999) – rather the singing that is men-
tioned is clearly ascribed to the ‘Londoners’ (p.14) (also see Schweizer and Hancock
1991, 117). Further in Orwell’s account of hop-picking work with ‘tramps’, again the
only singing mentioned is that undertaken by ‘an old East End woman and her grand-
children’ who ‘were always singing’ (1970, 30).
It is significant that it was only the East End Londoners who sang while picking.
It was only they who shared the key conditions that informed the singing – a sense of
hopping as a ‘working holiday’ combined with a strong sense of community within
the fields. These factors, combined with autonomy within the labour process, led to
the flourishing of the work songs among the Londoners in the hop gardens. They are
discussed in turn below.

Working Holiday
Stedman Jones (1971, 91) notes that as early as the 1870s, ‘hopping was welcomed
as the nearest equivalent to a holiday’. George Orwell’s account of hop-picking
notes how he felt ‘a wreck’ at the end of the season’s labour, although ‘most of the
people there looked on it as a holiday’ (1970, 38). It was ‘work’ but it was also a
‘holiday’. Indeed, the evidence shows that the London pickers saw hop-picking as a
‘Working Holiday in the Hop Gardens’, as the title of an article in a 1912 edition
of the East London newspaper The Sign put it (see Grieco 1996, 112). The trip from
the crowded and often dirty cramped environment of the East London streets to the
fresh-air and open spaces of the Kent countryside had the flavour of a holiday for
those making the journey. This trip was the only one of the year that involved them
leaving London – their income levels were not such that could support pure ‘leisure’
holidays. For women, the trip also had the flavour of a holiday away from a range of
restrictions placed on them in the many spheres of their London life dominated by
men and masculinity (Grieco 1996). In addition, the lack of direct supervision
within the labour process allowed the motif of hopping as a holiday to stay strong
in the pickers’ minds:

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MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY 3(1)

It’s jolly holiday, not arf. Lot better than the Bun Factory. (hop-picker quoted
in the Southwark Recorder, 31st August, 1928)
Many of the oral history accounts give mention of hopping as a holiday:
When I met my husband, he’d never been hop-picking and I introduced him
to the hop field. We started going for our summer holidays. (Ellen Tucker in
Schweizer and Hancock 1991, 9)
We went hop-picking every year. My mum wouldn’t have missed going for the
world, she loved it… That was our annual holiday, and we’d gone every year
since we were children. (Florence Burgess, in Schweizer and Hancock 1991, 11)
The co-existence of work and holiday motifs comes out clearly in Stanley Rose’s
account:
Hop-picking was our only holiday. But mind you, it was bloody hard down
there, in the hop fields, but it was better there, because you had the open air.
(Schweizer and Hancock 1991, 7)
Maureen Vindall put it plainly: ‘families went down to have a working holiday’
(Heffernan 2000, 44).
Also the meaning to the London pickers of hopping as a working holiday comes
out clearly in the hopping postcards that were commonly sent back to friends and
family left behind in London and in the photographs taken of themselves by the hop-
pers (see Heffernan 1996). Figure 1 is a typical example of the front of the postcards.3
It shows a group of pickers at work in the Kent hop fields in good weather. The
medium of a postcard from an exotic locale sent back to friends and family who have
remained in the familiar habitat is a central part of the cultural practice of holiday-
making.4 At the same time, the content of these postcards highlights not only the
exotic and the good weather, but also the work involved in the hop fields. These post-
cards expressed clearly the cultural meaning to the immigrant Londoners of hop-pick-
ing as a working holiday. The common practice of hoppers taking pictures of
themselves working in the fields also speaks to a motif of a working holiday.
This positioning, by the pickers themselves, of hopping as a working holiday is
very significant for the flourishing of work songs in the fields. The very concept of a
working holiday implies a breaking down of the cultural dichotomies of work and
leisure which had worked against the development of music (associated with leisure)
within industrial workplaces. When they entered the fields the pickers entered a
‘work-holiday place’ rather than a ‘workplace’. Thus any cultural norms developed which
militated against singing at work fell away in the Kent hop fields. Indeed, other activities
associated with ‘leisure’ rather than with ‘work’, such as children’s games, and roman-
tic courting, also flourished in the fields. We can see the concept of a ‘working holi-
day’ as one of the clearest and most direct articulations of the various challenges that
workers have posed to the separation of leisure from work within industrialization –
for instance, see the literature on ‘games’ at work reviewed by Ackroyd and Thompson

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 KORCZYNSKI ET AL.:THE LAST BRITISH WORK SONGS

Figure 1

(1999). It is an extreme example of a more widespread tendency to challenge the

work/leisure dichotomy of industrialization. Of course, it should be borne in mind
that this ‘working holiday’ challenge to the work/leisure dichotomy sprang out of
necessity. These were people who could not afford ‘leisure’ holidays, and people who
needed the extra income offered in the hopping fields: these were people bent on sus-
taining a cultural element of a holiday in the context of pressing necessities.
The hoppers from East London brought with them a strong oral musical culture,
associated with the leisure forums of the music hall, where it was traditional for the
audience to join in on the choruses, and of the pub, where communal singing was
common. This oral musical culture found expression in other spheres around the hop-
ping trip – there are numerous mentions in the oral history accounts of singsongs on
the journey from London to Kent, round the camp fire, in the pub, and on the way
home from the pub (see Heffernan 1999; O’Neil 1990; Schweizer and Hancock 1991).
And this strong musical culture elided easily into work-holiday fields as well.
At least, it did in the afternoons of the hopping days. As George Orwell’s fiction-
alized account of The Clergyman’s Daughter working in the fields, brings out, it was the
afternoons when the singing really flourished:
It was always the afternoons that Dorothy remembered. Those long, laborious
hours in the strong sunlight, in the sound of forty voices singing, in the smell of
hops and wood smoke, had a quality peculiar and unforgettable. As the afternoon
wore on… you were happy, with an unreasonable happiness. The work took hold
of you and absorbed you… It gave you a physical joy, a warm satisfied feeling
inside you, to stand there hour after hour, tearing off the heavy clusters and
watching the pale green pile grow higher and higher in your bin, every bushel

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another two pence in your pocket… When the sun was shining everybody sang as
they worked; the plantations rang with singing. (1981/1935, 321)
Michael Fitzgerald’s and Ritz Game’s accounts of their time hop-picking concur:
In the afternoon one of the women might start a song, and soon everybody
would be joining in. Those were happy times. (Fitzgerald 1987, 541)
I loved the afternoons best. After a packed lunch and tea made on the meths
stove the families would set to work picking again and before long someone
would start to sing, followed by another and another, until the whole field of
perhaps a hundred people would be singing. (in Heffernan 1999, 91)
No accounts are given which directly link singing to the morning. Rather, the
enforced starting time of 7am lent to the morning period a feeling more of work than
of a working holiday:
The stickie was the knocker-up… he had a stick and he’d come and bang on
the doors of the huts in the morning to get us all up… we all used to shout at
him to go away. (Tom Easterbrook in Schweizer and Hancock 1991, 28)
The bailiff would come down. He was actually a foreman but we used to call him
the bailiff. He would come around, call out your name and tell you which hop set
you were going into and the number of your bins… I used to hate the early
mornings when you pulled in the bins of hops. The bines used to be covered in dew
and you got soaking wet. (Kit O’Connell in Schweizer and Hancock 1991, 29)
Hop-picking only really came to have meaning as a working holiday in the afternoons,
and that is when the songs were sung.
Singing while working can be seen as both springing from the meaning of hop-
ping as a working holiday and as reinforcing and expressing this meaning. Notably,
in the oral history accounts of singing the main accompanying motif is that of happi-
ness, as singing expressing ‘happy times’. Of course holidaying as a cultural practice
is intimately tied up with the creation of such ‘happy times’. The following accounts
are typical of how singing while picking is linked to happy times:
They were happy times, singing and laughing. (Mrs. J. in O’Neil 1990, 105)
There are happy memories too, and these will be always in my mind… of
children laughing and crying and of happy Hoppers singing and joking.
Memories like that will live with me all my days. Quite simply, I loved it.
(Patrick O’Connor, in Heffernan 2004, 62)
Oh, it’s a lovely life – out in the fields, singing, picking. (Mrs. Riley in Clayre
1974, 189)
Happy times could be further reinforced by the hoppers’ singing being recognized by
others as expressing happy times:

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 KORCZYNSKI ET AL.:THE LAST BRITISH WORK SONGS

Well, when we was out there in the fields we used to laugh and sing all the old
songs. One day the farmer came out and said, ‘I’ve really enjoyed today.’ And I
said, ‘Have you?’ And he said, ‘Yes. Hearing you girls singing all those songs. I’ve
really enjoyed it. It’s a treat to see you all like this. (Mrs. AB in O’Neil 1990, 99)
Also, most of the songs that are named as having been sung carried motifs of happiness.
For instance, we can look at the songs that Rita Game (in Heffernan 1999, 91) recalls as
being sung: Nellie Dean, The White Cliffs of Dover and The Sunny Side of the Street. MacInnes
(1967, 121) describes Nellie Dean as a long-standing music hall song that gives an exces-
sively sentimentalized version of idyllic rural life. The White Cliffs of Dover5 offers an
equally sentimentalized version of the virtues of British life (Murdoch 1990, 186):

The shepherd will tend his sheep,

The valley will bloom again
And Jimmy will go to sleep,
In his own little room again.
There’ll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover

Again, there is a strong rural motif in this song, and the close proximity of the Kent
hop fields to the white cliffs of Dover would have given this song additional resonance
for the hoppers. The Sunny Side of the Street6 is typical of the songs which Tom Harrison
(1938, 66) described as ‘the jazz songs… of hope and happiness in a dreamworld every
moon night…our mass poetry, a new folklore’:

Grab your coat and get your hat

Leave your worries on the doorstep
Life can be so sweet
On the sunny side of the street I used to walk in the shade with my blues on
parade
But I’m not afraid...this rover’s crossed over …On the sunny side of the street

As Harrison notes, ‘explicit in many songs [including the above] is the idea that the
singing of them will itself have an effect’ – singing will bring happiness (p.62). In the
song, the singing of it represents stepping over from the shade into the sunshine where
there is happy tune in each step taken. In the hop fields, the singing had the effect of
expressing and reinforcing the idea that hopping was a working holiday, and if the hop-
pers sang as they worked, there would literally be a happy tune in their steps.

Community
The community of family, friends and neighbours that existed for so many of the
London immigrant pickers was a key factor informing the singing. In turn, the
singing expressed and reinforced the sense of community. From the oral history

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accounts, it is clear that the feeling of togetherness among the pickers was the central
feature of hopping that was valued the most:
I would consider these to be happy times of close-knit family life and
neighbours who were pleased to share. (Tony Whytock, in Schweizer and
Hancock 1991, 107)
Lovely it was. And everybody who went says the same thing. It was an
opportunity to meet all the family. To all be together at the same time. It was
magical really. (Anne Fitzgerald, in Schweizer and Hancock 1991, 107)
We miss it very much; those by-gone days, all the fun and companionship and
seeing seasonal friends each year. (Pat and George Cooke, in Heffernan 2000, 111)
This sense of a large but meaningful and deep community among the pickers informs
the way the songs are described as spreading within a field:
We all had to work. People would sing. Somebody would start singing and
everybody else would join in. All the old fashioned songs: all the very old
songs… It was good, very good. (Laura Murphy, in Schweizer and Hancock
1991, 34)
You’d get somebody start a song and everybody would be singing. It was
lovely. (Kathleen Ash, in Schweizer and Hancock 1991, 36)
Aunt Bob was always the joker in the pack. She had everyone in fits of
laughter with her impersonations of Gracie Fields marching up and down the
drifts in wellies singing ‘Sing as we go and let the world go by’,7 or trying to
walk on her knees with Rose Lynch holding her hand as if she was a child,
singing ‘I’m a sister in the Salvation army’. She’d get the whole set singing
popular songs of the day like ‘My old man’s a dustman’ with a few rude words
thrown in. (Bob Orris, in Heffernan 1999, 100)8
With fields containing extended communities of family, friends and neighbours,
singing was done by large groups, with the memories of singing and the memories of
community flowing easily into each other in hoppers’ accounts:
There was great comradeship in the fields, what with singing all the songs and
the wise-cracking. (C. Mortimore in Heffernan 1999, 53)
There was always a lot of singing, someone only had to start and the whole set
would join in a sing song, regardless of the weather and conditions everyone
enjoyed what they were doing. If anyone had difficulties then there was always
someone to help them. (Adnams 2002)
Indeed, for one hopper, the singing brought the best out of the community:
I would say the people were important to you when they’re amicable. Which
they were. [Pause] As long as they didn’t quarrel I was all right. And if they

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were singing, I was all right… But it was a community life really. We all
shared. Good and bad. (Mrs. C. in O’Neil 1990, 111)
The importance of the link between community and singing also comes out clearly in the
accounts of the end of hand-picking, with the introduction of machine-picking in the 1950s
and 1960s. A stark contrast is painted between the times of hand-picking, singing and
community and the times of machine-picking, industrial noise and lack of community:
Changing over the machines took the atmosphere out of hopping. After the
machines came, there was no family atmosphere. Before, when you had sacking
and bins, and everybody had them in rows, you’d pull your bines down and
you’d stand there picking them and we’d all shout out telling one another
jokes or start singing… and then they done away with the bins and they
started the machine picking and it was like you were in a factory… They’d go
out and cut the hops down, then hook them on great big hooks and we’d all
be standing in a row at the machines, either side. They’d go round and strip
the nines then you’d got to sort the leaves out… like being in a factory. (Tom
Easterbrook, in Schweizer and Hancock 1991, 102)
We stopped and did a bit of hopping for him when he got a machine. But we
didn’t like that… ‘Aww’, I said, ‘I couldn’t go on the machine no more.’
Didn’t like it… Oh gawd! The days dragged. No one talking to anybody else,
‘cos you couldn’t hear no one, ‘cos of the machine, could you? The noise was
terrific. Like a rotten factory. (Mrs. D. in O’Neil 1990, 122)

Music and Class

So far we have shown how the hoppers’ songs sprang from and reinforced the mean-
ing of hopping as a working holiday and the importance of community in the hop
fields. To analyse the songs more fully vis-à-vis the debates around East End
Londoners having a musical culture of consolation, and around women’s work songs
being inherently conservative in nature, we need to go further and consider the songs
in terms of class, control and resistance. Here we consider class mainly in terms of
class at the point of production, in terms of the effort-bargain with the employer and
in terms of overall consciousness regarding the employer.
George Orwell (1970, 31–2) was deeply pessimistic about the ability of the hop-
pickers to act as a unified body to improve their poor conditions:
When one starts work the farm gives one a printed copy of rules, which are
designed to reduce a picker more or less to a slave… Altogether the farmers have
the hop-pickers in a cleft stick, and always will have until there is a pickers’
union. It is not much use to try and form a union, though, for about half the
pickers are women and gypsies, and are too stupid to see the advantages of it.
Orwell comes out of this badly. Not only are his prejudices highlighted, but his analysis
of the pickers’ inability to take collective action to further their interests is misconceived.

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Orwell’s problem here lies in seeing collective action only in terms of the formal body
of a trade union. In fact, accounts of hopping consistently report that strikes were com-
mon, and that the strikes were organized directly by the informal collectivity of the
hoppers themselves, rather than by a formal trade union structure. Grieco (1996, 211)
believes that the early season strikes in order to bargain for a better payment per weight
of hop fruits picked were so common that they can be thought of as ‘the ritual of the
early season strikes’. The evidence suggests that typically a one-day strike would be
called on the second day of the season in order to try to force the farmer to give a bet-
ter rate (e.g. see Ash 1982, 17). Despite Orwell’s opinion of women and collective
action, accounts that give sufficient detail suggest that the strikes were led by women:
My mum thought we needed more pay for our work and when the farmer
refused she shouted ‘That’s it. Down tools!’ and walked off the fields followed
by the other Hoppers. They wanted an extra shilling per bushel. (Pat Bevan in
Heffernan 2004, 75)
This is consistent with the fact that the migration from London to Kent was women-
led.9 Indeed, at the early stage of the second day of the picking season, very few men
would have yet visited from London. Further, accounts suggest that the local men
involved as pickers and measurers were reluctant to take part in strike action (e.g.
Heffernan 1999, 36, 115).
Given that the community of pickers on a farm was the informal body that took
strike action and given that songs played a role in cementing the strength of this
community, we can see that music, at least indirectly, served to support this form of
class conflict. Further, some common songs had a more direct role than this. From
the accounts of hop-picking, two work songs stand out as being mentioned most
consistently and frequently in the period being analysed – Hopping Down in Kent,
and Our Lovely/Lousy Hops. Both make direct reference to hop-picking and both were
sung during labour. Both were work songs explicitly about work. Both songs have
important class implications. As is inevitable with a vibrant oral musical culture,
there is no one definitive lyric of either song. Rather, the hop-pickers constantly
improvised lyrics around the frame of both songs. As Bignell notes, Hopping Down
in Kent could last ‘for as many verses as the singers’ ingenuity could sustain’ (Bignell
1977, 9). Below, we give three excerpts of versions of Hopping Down in Kent. These
show that class awareness and class conflict were central to the way in which these
songs were improvized.

Same say ‘opping’s lousy

I do believe it’s true,
But when I go down hopping
I earn me bob or two
With an ee I oo ee I oo
Down on Old Holmes farm
That’s where we get the cramp

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For laying in the damp

Beside an oil lamp
When we get up in the morning
We hear old Holmes ee calling
Pick them hops up, pick them hops up
Down on old Holme ee’s Farm
(sung by Williams family, in Grieco 1996, 154)
When you go down hopping
Hopping down in Kent
See your Mother Riley
Sitting in a tent
With a te-i-o, and a te-i-o,
A te-i-o
Some say hopping’s lousy
You don’t believe it’s true
We only go down hopping
To earn a bob or two
(Kathleen Ash, ex-hop-picker, in Schweizer and Hancock 1991, 36)

Both of these versions include verses highlighting the importance of earning adequate
money hop-picking – here, hopping is centrally about earning ‘a bob or two’. Within the
musical culture which sustains the motif of a working holiday for the hoppers here is a
reminder to all, fellow hoppers and measurers and employers, that the holiday side of this
motif should not be pushed too far. There is money that has to be earned alongside the hol-
iday aspect of the hopping season. This is a call to fellow hoppers not to accept a poor piece
rate, and to fight for a fair measurement of the hops picked. In addition, in the Williams
family version, class conflict is expressed through the juxtaposition of the poor housing
conditions provided by the farmer for the hoppers against the demeaning demands made
by the measurer to the hoppers to ensure that all hops were placed in the bin, rather than
left lying on the field. This also is a warning to the measurer to curtail these demands.

Now here comes our old measurer

With his long nose and chin
With is ten gallon basket
And don’t he pop ‘em in
With a te-i-o, and a te-i-o,
A te-i-o
When our old pole-puller
He does come around
He says ‘come on you dirty old hop pickers
Pick ‘em up off of the ground’
With a te-i-o, and a te-i-o,
A te-i-o

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Now hopping is all over

All the money’s spent
And don’t I wish I never went
Hopping down in Kent
With a te-i-o, and a te-i-o,
A te-i-o
(Louise Fuller’s version of the song on Hidden English, various artists, Topic
Records TSCD600)

In the first verse of this version, a warning is issued about unfair practices of the meas-
urer relating both to the size of the hopping bin, and the propensity of the measurer
to press the hops picked too tightly down when he does the measuring. The other two
verses recall points made in the other two versions.
The crux of Our Lovely/Lousy Hops centres again on the demands for a fair wage-
effort bargain vis-à-vis the tendency of the measurer to under-measure hops picked
by pushing them down in the bins. O’Neil (1990, 56) describes well both the way
the song was improvised and the ways these improvisations were informed by class
concerns:
One of the most popular hoping songs was rendered in a variety of moods,
depending on the tally.

Our lovely hops, our lovely hops

When the measurer he comes round
Pick ‘em up, pick ‘em off the ground
When he starts to measure he don’t know when to stop
Aye aye get in the bin and take the blooming lot

That was Mrs C’s version of the song and the one which had the most polite words.10
Other versions express just how much power the measurer had over the pickers, and
how strongly they felt about the fairness, or not, of the authority he wielded.
The class-informed improvisation of these common songs suggests that these women’s
work songs were far from acquiescent in attitude. The improvisations show more of a musi-
cal culture of class and community than a musical culture of consolation among the hop-
pickers. Indeed, looking beyond the text of other songs to see the songs in use, we see how
tempting but inappropriate the term ‘culture of consolation’ is, and how inappropriate it is
to assume that women’s work songs are necessarily conservative in nature. Even with The
Sunny Side of the Street, discussed earlier, in which the lyrics suggest a clear culture of conso-
lation, it was shown that the song in use had an important role in defining hopping as a
working holiday. In singing this song the hoppers were not just consoling themselves, but
were actively creating an environment in which work and pleasure could co-exist. Take
another apparently archetypal song of consolation, Happy Days Are Here Again:11
Altogether shout it now
There’s no one
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 KORCZYNSKI ET AL.:THE LAST BRITISH WORK SONGS

Who can doubt it now

So let’s tell the world about it now
Happy days are here again
Your cares and troubles are gone
There’ll be no more from now on
From now on...
Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So, Let’s sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again

And set this text beside an example of how the song was used to warn fellow hoppers
that the farmer was going round checking:
[The farmer’s name] was Mr Day, and that was when the song came out,
‘Happy days are here again’. Well when we saw the farmer coming, those up
the top end used to start singing, ‘Happy days are here again’. And everybody
started singing so that they would give all the others a warning that Mr Day
was coming round. (Ruby Jones, in Schweizer and Hancock 1991, 31).
These frequently sung work songs then had a clear role of expressing a class voice at the
point of production. Further, in terms of the songs’ role regarding consciousness vis-à-
vis the employer, the songs articulate separate and opposing interests between the work-
ers and the employer. Notably, there is none of the rhetoric of praise to the employer that
arises in some agricultural songs, such as God Speed the Plough which intones:

Here’s a health to the farmer and God speed the plough…

The farmer indeed is a capital man. (Palmer, 1979, 49)12

It should be noted, however, that the expression of class in these songs does not extend
beyond the immediate point of production. We do not hear in any of these songs dis-
cussed above a call for wider class solidarity, either informally or in terms of a call for
links with formal class institutions such as trade unions or political parties. It is pos-
sible to speculate that these work songs may have been necessarily limited in their
articulation of a class voice by their very role within the labour process. Their func-
tioning as a cultural form within the labour process to express community and to cre-
ate a culture of a working holiday, may have implicitly served to preclude them
serving as modes of developing a wider class consciousness.

Conclusion

This article has examined the last known British work songs – the songs sung in the
early-mid 20th century by immigrant Londoners in the fields of Kent during the hopping
season. It has shown that these songs were informed by the strong sense of community
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amongst the hop-pickers, and by the definition by the hop-pickers themselves of hop-
ping as a working holiday. In addition, the songs served to express and reinforce both of
these aspects. The widespread singing did not appear to inform a culture of consolation,
in which singing took the place of collective interest articulation and collective action.
Rather, singing served to inform class awareness and class conflict vis-à-vis the effort
bargain in hop-picking. The expression of class voice in the songs did not extend, how-
ever, beyond the immediate point of production. Overall, the use of the work songs by
hop-pickers shows a culture of competence and creativity that informed community and
class (albeit in a limited way) rather more than it informed passive consolation. This
much shows the implications of our findings for our understanding of the musical cul-
ture of East End Londoners in the early-mid 20th century. But what of the implications
of our findings for an understanding of work songs, more generally?
It is piquant to note that in the records of the last known outpouring of British work
songs there is an acknowledgement of the continuities with work songs in pre-industrial
times. George Orwell (1970, 18) notes that amongst a group in a boarding house in
London who were on the point of journeying to Kent for the hop season, was a young
labourer who repeated verses from Wordsworth’s The Solitary Reaper – a poem which
stands as one of the earliest and most romantic representations of a work song in Britain:13

Behold her, single in the field,

Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
Oh listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

It seems that the labourer is anticipating the songs of the hop fields by recalling the
work song described in this poem. There is much in this connection that is apposite for
our analysis, also. For a crucial aspect that The Solitary Reaper and the hoppers shared was
that they both stood outside the cultural separation of song and work that came with
industrialization. The reaper stood outside this because industrialization was still a long
way from reaching the Outer Hebridean Isles in the early 1800s (when the poem was
composed) (e.g. see Thompson 1993). The hoppers stood outside this because of the
direct challenge given to the work/leisure dichotomy by the identification of hopping as
a ‘working holiday’. As noted above, in practice, workers, under industrialization, have
made many forms of challenge to the separation of leisure from work, but what stands
out in this case, is the London hop-pickers’ concept of a working holiday – created out
of necessity – as an extreme form of this tendency to challenge the dichotomy. This
extreme form of challenge, linked to an already strong oral musical culture among the
workers concerned, made it possible that work songs could flourish for such an extended

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time within the 20th century. This challenge, therefore, helps explain why the songs of
the Kent hop fields effectively constituted the last British work songs.
The connection made by the labourer between the hopping songs and the pre-
industrialized work songs, exemplified by the song of The Solitary Reaper, also suggests
a certain nostalgia. There is an implicit nostalgia in the labourer’s recounting of a poem
describing a romanticized pre-industrial work scene. But there may also be a form of
nostalgia elsewhere – perhaps within the singing of the hop-pickers themselves. If we
understand that there can be both conservative and progressive dimensions to nostal-
gia (Pickering and Keightley 2006), we can see that the songs of the hop-pickers not
only helped to create a culture of a working holiday, but also implicitly articulated a
nostalgia for a better form of working life where there could be a more integrated pat-
tern of work and leisure, where work did not equate with pleasureless endurance and
leisure with hedonistic enjoyment. This implicit nostalgia may have been conservative
in terms of relating back to a romanticized version of the past, but also progressive in
terms of expressing the possibilities for the reintegration of work and leisure in the
present and in the future. As Clayre (1974, 146) puts it, such songs implicitly ‘contain
a possible alternative ideal in working people’s own inherited consciousness’.
A final link to make between The Solitary Reaper and hop-picking is that both fea-
ture women singing. Within the article’s discussion, it has been emphasized that hop-
picking was a women-led activity. While occasional mention has been made of men
singing, it is also clear that singing while hopping was a women-led activity. The intro-
duction asked the question whether women’s work songs were inherently conservative
in nature, creating a cultural mode of women simply accommodating themselves to
work. The analysis of the case of women hoppers showed no support for this. Rather, it
has been shown clearly that women’s work songs in the Kent hop fields were used to
articulate issues of community and class conflict. Further, this finding rests well with
the similar findings of Korczynski et al. (2005) in their analysis of women singing in
factories during the Second World War, and with the findings of Messenger (1974) in
her analysis of the songs of the Belfast textile (predominantly women) workers. Women’s
work songs may have involved a feminization of the workplaces in some senses but this
did not preclude these work songs expressing conflict and resistance.

Notes

1. Hoggart, of course, wrote first – The Uses of Literacy having been published in 1958. The point is
that there is a good deal of overlap in the tone of their arguments, although they are applied to dif-
ferent time periods.
2. Indeed, it seems likely that a form of nostalgia may have informed the actual singing rather more
than the recollections of it. This is a point to which we return in the conclusion.
3. The postcard is entitled ‘Hop Picking: Pickers at the Bins’, published by Sweetman and Sons Ltd,
Tunbridge Wells, and has been posted in 1954.
4. For a discussion of the place of postcards in the social practice of holiday-making, see Wavin (1978)
and for an examination of postcards in East Londoners’ general culture see Girling (2002).

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5. The White Cliffs of Dover (1941), written by Nat Burton and Walter Kent.
6. The Sunny Side of the Street (1929), written by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh.
7. Sing As We Go (1934), words and music by Harry Parr-Davies.
8. My Old Man’s a Dustman (1960), traditional tune, lyrics by Lonnie Donegan.
9. Note that some of the songs sung by the women hoppers meeting at a reunion speak strongly to a
sense of collective strength having existed among the women. In particular:

We are the Deptford girls,

We are some of the lads
We know our manners
Spend all our tanners
We are respected wherever we go.
We are marching down the Old Kent Road.
Doors and windows open wide.
If you see a copper come
Hit him in the eye and run,
We are the Deptford girls
(in Heffernan 1996, 7)

10. See, for instance, Orwell (1970, 30) reporting that the song’s main refrain was ‘Our lousy hops’, and
that the measurer is enjoined to take ‘the fucking lot’.
11. Happy Days Are Here Again (1929), written by Jack Yellen and Milton Ager.
12. Although, the popularity of ‘health to the master’ songs should not be overstated. Indeed, there is
a case that All Jolly Fellows Who Follow the Plough appears to have been one of the most popular songs
among agricultural labourers. This is a song that expresses the need for collective resistance to
employer trickery.
13. See Heaney (2001) for a discussion of how Wordsworth’s poem follows an actual observation of a
female field worker made by his friend Thomas Wilkinson on a journey in the Hebrides.

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Marek Korczynski [m.korczynski@lboro.ac.uk] is Professor of Sociology of Work at

Loughborough University Business School. He has published widely in leading organization studies
journals, such as Journal of Management Studies, Organisation Studies, Organization, and Work,
Employment and Society, and in historical journals such as Business History and Labour History Review.
Among his books are Social Theory at Work (Oxford University Press, 2006, edited with Paul Edwards
and Randy Hodson), and On the Front Line (Cornell University Press, 1999, co-authored).

Michael Pickering [m.j.pickering@lboro.ac.uk] is Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis at

Loughborough University. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Folk Music Journal. He has a
long-standing interest in the musical expression of working communities, dating back to his 1982
book Village Song and Culture. He has published widely in historical journals, including Media History
and Rethinking History.Among his books are History, Experience and Cultural Studies (Macmillan, 1997)
and Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value (SAGE, 2004, co-authored).

Emma Robertson [E.Robertson@shu.ac.uk] is a Lecturer in History at Sheffield Hallam

University. She has a forthcoming book with Manchester University Press entitled, Chocolate,Women
and Empire and has co-edited the book The Feminist Seventies (Raw Nerve Books, 2003). She has
worked as Research Fellow on the music and work research projects at Loughborough University
and is currently working on a history of the BBC World Service.

Professor Korczynski, Professor Pickering and Dr Robertson hold grants from the Arts and
Humanities Research Council and the British Academy for research into the history of British work
songs.A number of articles have been accepted for publication from these projects (in Labour History
Review, Popular Music, Folk Music Journal, Cultural and Social History and Business History) and the cur-
rent article also comes from these projects. The authors are putting together a CD compilation:
Rhythms of Labour: Work Songs of the British Isles to be released on the Harbourtown label.

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