FALARAKI, Ayia Napa and Majorca may be today's "hip hop" holiday destinations but in years gone by a fortnight in rural Bosbury was as far as many Bromsgrovians got.

Every September thousands of town and city dewellers left the smoke and grime to spend a couple of weeks in the open air hop picking at the scores of hop fields in Herefordshire and to a lesser extent southern Worcestershire.

The annual pilgrimage from London's East End to the hop gardens of Kent is part of Cockney folk lore.

Before machines took over, 50 or so years ago, the job provided a welcome break from the day to day drudgery of their normal lives, plus the added bonus of being paid.

Seventy years ago families from Bromsgrove who made the trip to the many farms around Bosbury near Ledbury were nailers.

They had a standing annual agreement with the "gangmasters," a Mr and Mrs Swan from Old Station Road, who arranged for the pickers to be collected from Market Street in lorries sent by the farmers. The men travelled in one vehicle with the trunks, the women and children in another, sometimes covered lorry.

The extra cash the hop pickers earned would eke out their meagre wages and buy warm winter clothes for the children.

A century ago schools tended to close their eyes to the fact that pupil numbers plunged at this time of year but as time went on they began to urge the courts to crack down heavily on parents who kept their kids off school.

Town magistrates were kept busy handing out five-shilling fines and, to a lesser extent, dealing with begging tramps who passed through Bromsgrove travelling to and from the hopfields and Birmingham.

Hop harvest

One man with a sharp recollection from the age of five of helping his mother gather the hop harvest is 83-year-old Albert Gossage, from Sidemoor.

His father Joseph, a nailer, died when he was four causing his family to be split between the workhouse and the Cottage Homes. But though desperately poor, his mother Lillian refused to sign papers which would have seen her children shipped to Canada, New Zealand or Australia.

Albert remembers that the temporary accommodation on the farms was primitive, to say the least.

A few boltins of straw on the stone floor of a not very private partitioned communal barn or shed served as a mattress for their "holiday home."

Outside in the yard, the adults built a huge fire on which all the families cooked and heated water. Snuff canisters with a piece of wire for a handle made ideal makeshift billycans.

Washing, clothes and children, was done at a communal farmyard pump.

Potatoes, to go with the fat bacon which was the pickers' staple diet, were bought from the farmers' wives.

At dinnertime in the fields, by way of a welcome change from sandwiches, the pickers could buy fried fish from a man who toured the hop fields or thick stomach-filling wedges of bread pudding from a man called Nind.

Generally, everyone rubbed along amicably, sharing what few possessions they had. But the occasional punch up after the pickers had spent an evening at the pub was not uncommon.

Landlords were reluctant to serve glasses to pickers as many were smashed. Instead they took along their own jam jars for the purpose.

Whether it was the change of air and water or Mother Nature just taking her course, it was said that if school attendance figures were down during the picking season, the resulting baby boom nine months later would more than compensate.

Albert later had various jobs working in a butcher's shop, on a farm and in a factory. Sadly his wife Dorothy died a while ago two months short of their 60th wedding anniversary.