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The hoppers of Kent |
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The migration of the hoppers
Different generations of hoppers
© Richard Filmer |
The labour-intensive nature of September’s hop harvest created a shortage of labour in areas like Kent, the solution was provided by the poor and unemployed from London and other industrial centres. Kent’s baptismal records show that people have been travelling to the area’s hop gardens to be employed as hop pickers, or hoppers as they are known, since the mid 1800s. When the railways arrived, a ‘hop pickers’ special fare was created to cater for families travelling to Kent from London, the Black Country and Wales.
This mass exodus saw urban, poverty-stricken families packing up their possessions and animals and setting off in a ragged procession to Kent’s hop farms. In 1889, John Bickerdyke’s ‘The Curiosities of Ale and Beer’ describes the scene as London’s undesirables traipsed towards Kent:
“The highroad from London to the hopfields of Kent presents a curious appearance immediately before the hop picking season. A stranger might imagine that the poorer classes of a big city are flying before an invading army. Grey haired, decrepit old men and women are to be seen painfully crawling along, their stronger sons and daughters pressing on impatiently.“
After 1834 the numbers travelling to Kent increased due to the Poor Law Amendment Act, which changed the nature of workhouses, and made them a less attractive or viable option for the unemployed and destitute of England’s burgeoning cities.
Modern-day hop picking
© Richard Filmer |
The hop harvest in Kent presented an opportunity for money to be made while many saw the excursion as a sort of holiday, an escape to the country. According to Richard Filmore in his book ‘Hops and hop picking’, often families would return to the same hop garden for several generations. However, work in the hop gardens was no rosy rural retreat, conditions were squalid and over-crowded and the hoppers faced prejudice and discrimination from local people.
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