Harking back to hazy days of hop picking in the counties (From Worcester News)

Harking back to hazy days of hop picking in the counties

3:34pm Wednesday 4th May 2011 in Country News latest By Mike Pryce

PERISH the thought that they’re wishing away summer, especially as it appears to have arrived early this year, but at the Hop Pocket craft centre in the village of Bishop’s Frome, an exhibition has opened covering one of this area’s most traditional autumn agricultural activities.

Hop picking was once one of Worcestershire and Herefordshire’s prime farming enterprises.

Many farms had a few acres devoted to hops right up until the 1960s – indeed, some small operations survived 30 years beyond that – but now most are gone.

What remain are the larger commercial holdings with the acreage and equipment to cope with what can be an unpredictable crop.

However, the Hop Pocket exhibition, mounted by Bromyard and District History Society, takes us back to the days when the local effort was swelled by a small army of hop pickers with tin trunks arriving by train, lorry and charabanc from the Black Country and South Wales.

Gipsies set up their encampments in nearby fields and during the war years, land army girls and prisoners of war all helped.

By the 1960s, there were also students helping out, especially those from the agricultural colleges.

All lived cheek by jowl in these hastily assembled rural communities and keeping the peace in the evenings, amid the cider drinking, singing and larking about, was no mean feat.

Farm bailiffs needed to be strong-willed characters and if they sent for the local policeman, he usually arrived on his bike and with a nickname, such as Gunboat Smith at Tarrington or Tug Wilson at Powick. The district nurse at Knightwick delivered a baby born in a hedgerow.

Nineteen-hour days organised into two shifts from 6am to 3.30pm and 3.30pm to 1am were the order of the day to get the hops picked and dried.

Dinners were cooked over big iron grates (barbecues are not new) and old blackened kettles provided hot water for the thermos of tea taken to the hop yards along with piles of sandwiches.

“Going hopping” for children meant sleeping on straw pallets, eating rabbit stews, avoiding wasps and picking hops into an old umbrella while their mothers worked at the cribs to fill the green sacks. It was a hard “working holiday” but in the evening, there was singing around the fires and places to explore. At the end of their stay, they returned home with apples, damsons, potatoes, bunches of hops for their chapel and church harvest festivals, suntanned, fitter, and with extra money for the months ahead in their pockets.

But in the second half of the 20th century it all gradually changed, with the standardisation of school holidays by Education Acts, the introduction of large-scale mechanisation, competition from foreign hops and the devastating effect of the hop wilt disease.

However, the exhibition at the Hop Pocket takes you back to the days of how it used to be with hop cribs and colourful gipsy caravans, open fires – and the occasional fight.

* The exhibition will be open during normal Hop Pocket opening hours, which are Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 5.30pm and Sunday from 11am to 5pm.

The Hop Pocket is situated off the A4103 Worcester to Hereford Road and is well signposted.