Chapter Eight

 THE GARDENERS

If the Victorian period saw an astonishing increase in the numbers of people for whom gardening became a preoccupation, or even just a mild hobby, it also saw an equally astonishing change amongst the ranks of people who serviced gardens, from the grand and almost middle-class head gardener to the half starved wretches, often elderly and female, who travelled from garden to garden, hand picking the caterpillars from the cabbages.

For the best of them, life was terribly hard, and even for the ones who prospered, the trap of illness and desperate penury was easily sprung. For all the gaudy brilliance of the new parterres, for all the extravagant conservatories filled with rare orchids and the latest camellias, for all the new parks and allotments, and for all the charity, private as well as public, the gardens of both great and small were rooted in the dark soil of poverty and exploitation.

In 1851, amidst all the excitement of the Great Exhibition, Prince Albert was awarded a gold medal by the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrial Poor. Though only 'Class VII', it was for designs that he'd done for blocks of flats that were to be let out to artisans in the larger cities. Each block was trimmed in a rather anaemic Tudorbethan way, and comprised flats that were to be rented out at four shillings a week. This represented a return to the landlord of a few percent (each flat cost four hundred and fifty pounds to build). The lucky tenants had a lobby, a living room of ten feet by fifteen, scullery, meat safe, flushing loo, and astonishingly both for the times and the cost, three bedrooms.

Many such flats were soon built in all the major industrial cities, and wherever these model dwellings rose, fever, the bane of poor or rich who lived without running water, disappeared as if by magic. However, such flats must have seemed impossible dreams for a vast percentage of the urban poor, and certainly for the thousands of half-starved jobbing gardeners who tidied the gardens of the fast expanding ranks of the urban middle class. Such unskilled men were badly paid, even by the standards of the times, and the pay was constantly at the mercy of the agricultural depressions that swept over the land throughout the century. During those periods, destitute agricultural workers flocked to the cities in search of work, and, half-starving yet often as skilled, they undercut the meagre wages of itinerant gardeners.

Even a jobbing gardener with all his time filled found it difficult to earn much more then ten or twelve shillings a day, and his weeding-woman helpers got, for much of the century, only eight to ten pence a day. Skilled and trained gardeners fortunate to find themselves permanent places in a household, however small, were slightly better placed. They were at least provided with a roof over their heads, though not all such were equally desirable. They also had an annual salary, clearly defined duties and a rather lowly place in the 'service' hierarchy. A manual written for servants in the 1820's described a situation that held for much of the rest of the century. It set out for the the head gardener various rules along the lines of: "1. Complete every part of an operation as you proceed. 2. Finish off one job before beginning another. 3. In leaving off working at any job, leave the work and the tools in an orderly manner. 4. In leaving off work for the day, make a temporary finish, and carry the tools to the tool house'... and so on. Rule No 9 was 'let no crop of fruit, or herbaceous vegetables, go to waste on the spot' important, for such things might have reminded the employers of how much was wasted in any garden. The manual provides a list of items that an uncertain gardener needed to impress his employers, and provides a picture of what most gardeners would have looked like;"The gardener usually wears a blue woollen apron, which, when he is pruning, he ties up before him, and then serves to hold his nails, shreds, scissors, hammer and pruning knife. He should also be provided with a light measuring rod, flat and narrow, painted and divided on one side into feet and half feet, and on the other into yards and half-yards..." To help in the negotiations which all employees had to undergo, they suggested that his salary should be from fifty to one hundred pounds a year, though with a cottage and generally with vegetables and fuel. If the family was wealthy enough to need several garden staff, then the gardener was in charge of one or more under-gardeners. Such men were to do the 'digging, trenching, weeding, dunging, gravelling, hoeing, manuring, mowing etc.' and they were commonly engaged as weekly servants earning sixteen shillings to a guinea a week, with only vegetables coming for free. In more generous households, some also had a cottage and fuel.

The difference between being paid by the year and receiving a weekly wage was an important distinction; yearly servants had four months notice on either side, and thus at least a little stability in their lives. Weekly paid servants could be dismissed instantly. However, being paid by the year had its disadvantages, at least early in the century. However badly their masters maltreated them, servants needed the permission of a Justice of the Peace before they could quit their posts. However, if women servants were hired pregnant and the pregnancy was unknown, their employer needed a Justice of the Peace's permission before they could be dismissed. If they were employed, and the employer knew the woman was pregnant, the servant was paid up to the birth, but only a month beyond. Even in other areas, employers had remarkable degrees of control; for instance, servants could be forced to church. Gardeners who were caught selling their masters' produce, or pawning his belongings, were fined two pounds in addition to the goods' value, and could be further jailed or whipped in public. Amongst the rest of the servants, most had far better conditions of employment than the gardeners, though well trained examples of the latter were highly knowledgeable. Even head gardeners were paid, in 1841, for all their skills, only about a tenth of the cook's salary, and half that of the footman. It gave rise to considerable discontent, and gardeners, as a class, were notoriously politicised. One such wrote to the Gardener's Chronicle that 'even breaking stones on the highways pays better'.

The wage levels of late Georgian Britain remained constant for much of the nineteenth century. This was in spite of the fact that the purchasing power of the pound fell more or less constantly throughout the period, leaving them in progressively worse and worse circumstances. For instance, a thirty four year old bachelor gardener, trained in the kitchen garden, advertised for a job in 1860, and hoped for eighteen shilling a week. Another hoped for fourteen to sixteen shillings a week 'besides a House and garden, a pig kept during summer, dinner during harvest, and an allowance of 6d or 1/- when from home delivering produce'. Both men were probably disappointed of their hopes. Such rates were sometimes to be found in the north of the country, but were down to eleven shillings a week in the south where competition for work was more intense. Here, a household in Kensington advertised, in 1842, as follows: "Wanted as Servant in a Small Family at Kensington, a Young Man from the Country about 21; one that has not been in service will not be objected to. .. grounds half in garden, half in cattle etc. Wages 12/-pw" However, even in parts of the North, money wages were kept low, though allowances of food, especially 'porige', were much higher. In Scotland, things were far worse than in the worst parts of England, and it was not uncommon for there to be no money wages at all, but merely 'cottage and keep'.

Public employers were no better than private ones.In 1871, the Public Parks Committee of Manchester advertised for a head gardener for the popular Alexandra Park, offering a salary of eighty four pounds and four shillings a year, together with house, coals, gas and water. This was exactly the same salary given to the previous gardener, the 'late Mr Macmillan', whose widow and children proclaimed in exactly the same issue of the same paper that they were destitute, and appealed for help to keep them from the workhouse. Even with a husband fit and well, and earning around seventy pounds a year (an average sort of salary for a head gardener in some minor garden), a wife could only allow her family a cup of tea once a day. Domestic economists of the mid-century suggested, for instance, that, for families on this sort of income, all domestic items should be kept in very specific places 'so that they can be found without needing to light candles'. However low the salary or wages, the other important consideration was an inter-personal one, for some employing households were plainly lively places in which to work, whilst many others were equally plainly terrible. Many of the gardeners who took to the new media, and wrote of their early careers, had had delightful times, working for employers who were generous, who treated their servants almost as part of the family, and who helped selflessly with their staffs' education and development. Many less vocal gardeners were less lucky; and some who worked in penurious households must have sometimes suffered terribly. For them, we can only hope that their own private family life offered compensation.

In Scotland and parts of northern England, where the infamous 'bothy system' held sway, families in the lower ranks of service were actually split up, consigned to separate bothies. For the garden staff, these were sheds built on the outside of the north wall of the kitchen garden, and offered dark and often dank accommodation. The bothy system began to alarm the philanthropists of the mid-century, and many articles about bothy life began to appear in the press. In one article of the 1860's, a bothy was described as "a house set apart for the men to sit in and cook their victuals, with a sleeping apartment or apartments adjoining. In many cases the bothy is badly kept, and the sleeping apartment dirty and untidy, but there is no necessity for this and it is not inherent in the system... Where there is a bothy, the men get their food and keep by themselves; and when a woman arrived at the years of discretion is appointed to keep their bedroom in proper order, and the bothy clean, they are far from uncomfortable, and prefer it to going into the house for their food. As regards married men, the system is radically wrong..." Once the issue was raised in public, it caused an outcry. Worried apologists wrote to claim that "In a well-conducted bothy, the master allows a female to keep the place clean, light the fires, make the beds, and at the same time cleaning out the apartments, bake the bread... A common arrangement of some bothies is as follows: The male and female servants sit and eat, and pass their evenings in the places where the hands sleep, and the females' sleeping place is in some off-closet, entering from it or in a separate but adjacent apartment. Sometimes the sexes have separate apartments to dwell in, having different doors...” Not always, however, is there such accommodation: "..Some landlords supply no peat or candles... There is consequently no reading in our long winter evenings, and the darkness of the bothies encourages and facilitates deeds of darkness".

Some examples must have been quite exceptionally unpleasant, as the following: "A lad, and a big boy, and a single woman live in one room, which is badly furnished. There are two benches or forms, which supply the place of stools or chairs, but there is no table. The inmates make use of a chest lid as a substitute. There are two beds of coarse unplaned deals... All the sheets and blankets must be provided by the lads themselves, and all the bowls, plates and spoons. Their food consists of milk, when it can be got, and oatmeal. Beef, mutton, pork or fish or flesh of any kind they rarely taste. The bothy may not be cleaned out or whitewashed for years, and their bedding is washed but seldom... ' Surprisingly, in parts of the country, the bothy system survived well into the twentieth century.

Of course, servants were employed in households where even the employers were scarcely more comfortable. It was possible for households with an income of one hundred and fifty pounds (only twenty five more than was paid to the head gardener at Alexandra Park) to employ one servant. Naturally, this was rarely a gardener, though only slightly more prosperous households commonly employed one full time. They probably managed this by using the commonly advertised arrangement whereby a gardener and his wife were employed if they had no children, with the wife to supervise the house. In the 1850's, if such a couple were given rooms in house, the man was paid one pound a week, his wife ten pounds a year. This arrangement naturally allowed their employers to keep constant watch on their employees lives, and this must often have been onerous. A writer in the 'Cottage Gardener' of 1849 suggested that "Honest, sensible servants will never object to be closely watched. They will place themselves in their mistresses' situation, and be satisfied that they would do exactly the same if their circumstances were reversed. Where servants dislike being strictly looked after, they are either disposed to do that which is evil, or they are ignorant and self-conceited, and fancy that their mistress suspects their honesty, when she is only guarding against thoughtless waste".

An employer like the writer must have made the servants' lives very difficult, for the article continues "With a good, superior servant in the house to overlook all things,a boy or a woman might be employed for a couple of hours in the morning to clean shoes, knives etc. and to perform the little morning offices required, which would be a far cheaper plan... In our intercourse with the poor we must not affect to find them faultless or destitute of evil tempers, unthankful hearts, gross deception often... We must not expect to find the smooth tongue governed by a smooth heart, or the kindness shown always understood and valued." However low the wages, and however dependant the servants' happiness was on the whims of the employer, even such bare comfort as could be expected was extremely precarious. Employers could die, lose their money, simply take a dislike to the servant concerned; gardeners themselves could fall ill, die, have too many grandchildren, or simply age (forty was considered 'old' for a gardener).

The threat of total destitution was present almost every hour of every day. Only the most prosperous and provident gardeners ever managed to save sufficient money to provide for themselves or their families if and when disaster struck. Often elderly gardeners found themselves destitute on retirement, and many had, as an article of the 1840's claims ". . but the honest gardener without other means or extraneous aid to money-making, must perforce leave his wife and family a burden to posterity, pensioners on the Benevolent Institution, or a legacy to the union. And yet surely the workman is worthy of his hire..." It was, for a few decades, not uncommon for the better known of head-gardeners or their dependants to publish heartbreaking appeals in the gardening press. An example from the same decade as the last quote runs 'We, the undersigned, appeal to the Benevolence of the Public, and particularly to Gardeners, on behalf of the widow of the late Robert Runciman, who is left with five children under ten years of age, wholly unprovided for. The late Robert Runciman was many years gardener at Coptfold Hall, Essex, which situation he was obliged to quit three years since in consequence of the gentleman leaving the place; he was not able afterwards able to obtain a situation in consequence of his numerous family, and he commenced Jobbing gardener, when he was unfortunately attacked with severe Rheumatism, which confined him for many months to his bedroom; and thus the little savings he had previously made became exhausted before his death. We know him to have be a steady, sober, and industrious man, and therefore confidently make this appeal on behalf of 'the widow and the fatherless' in the hope that it will meet with that attention which the circumstances of the case deserve'.

Mrs Runciman and her family do not appear in the literature again, though another example occupied the personal columns for rather longer. After the initial appeal came the following: "Henry Spare acknowledges with heartfelt gratitude the following CONTRIBUTIONS, but for which himself and family must have suffered the greatest distress and privation. He is also deeply impressed with the kindness of his late Noble employer towards his two eldest children, and he begs to add and return his special thanks to MR LOUDON for his gratuitous and prompt appeal on his behalf... " Rather cannily, he published a list of the contributions, though the cost of the public acknowledgment must itself have been high. Sums sent to him range from one shilling from 'Harvey, Camden Town' to £4.12. 6d. from 'Dakin and friends, Eastnor Castle'. A later issue of the Gardeners Chronicle contains yet another advertisement of 'PS Henry Spare will feel thankful to be informed of contributions omitted or delayed (if any) which shall be acknowledged in a future number - Isleworth Feb. 17th 1842'. Sure enough, next week, he had another nine contributions, to about three pounds or so. Perhaps he escaped the full rigours of Victorian poverty.

There were, of course, various means of escape[ Alcohol offered one, and a favourite. Political agitation offered a second, more exciting though no more successful one. Emigration offered a third; dishonesty a fourth. And if not full dishonesty, at least some gardeners used oblique means of increasing a meagre income. Young gardeners and nurserymen felt the main impact of this. Many under-gardeners found it impossible to get posts without offering the head-gardeners to whom they applied for work, a premium. This was sometimes eighteen shillings or twenty shillings a month, almost half of the under-gardener's wages. Head-gardeners were also in a position to blackmail nurseries and seed firms. One nurseryman wrote '. . . it is simply that the gardener has the nurseryman completely in his power. Should a gentleman visit a nursery he has not hitherto patronised, and selects plants to be sent to his gardener, if that functionary finds that there is no chance of his gaining any pecuniary benefit by the transaction, it lays in his power to very soon sicken the squire of that game; if large trees have been bought he will not properly secure or mulch them; choice plants he will 'shove' in a position or soil admirably adapted to 'cook their goose'; if seeds, he will in some way destroy their vitality... Finally, the employer gets discouraged, and confining his patronage to the gardener's favourite tradesmen, the object is obtained.' Even if the gardeners were not quite so malevolent (or simply desperately poor), some brassy gardeners asked the nurseryman for a commission of three pence in the pound, or at the very least, a Christmas box. No wonder so many nurserymen tried to sell 'Plants for the Million', where they did not have to deal with a head gardener.

Alcohol too played, at least in the media, a vastly important role in the lives of the gardening classes throughout much of the nineteenth century. Blasts against the beer-shops, and their effects on the rural or gardening male, began to appear in the 1830's. A writer using the nom-de-plume of 'Falcon' wrote 'It is deplorable to witness the utter want of principle which induces a man to sacrifice the comfort of his wife and children, and his own respectability, to gratify his brutal appetite for intoxicating liquors', and so on. Of course, beer and cider played a major role in the rural economy, and agricultural workers often had rations of both as part of their payment, indeed 'such articles are necessary for carrying on the operations of agriculture, for which purpose they are still considered essential by many of those who are engaged in farming...' The same was equally true of gardeners and gardening. With the increasingly religious attitudes beginning to grip the middle classes, it soon became necessary for every gardener advertising for work to claim that he was teetotal. James Carter and Co, seedsmen, ran an agency for gardeners, and claimed that all the men on their books were suitably 'dry'. However, the gardening press was crammed with beer advertisements -a creative one placed in many of them by Allsopp's brewery in the 1850's featured a letter from the famous chemist Baron Leibig, who had supposedly found that many other makes of beer were flavoured, not with hops or wormwood, but with strychnine. Perhaps it was this that affected the appearance of any man who entered the awful portals of the pub.

Such sins were thought to be instantly visible -"It is astonishing to observe the differences in the LOOK between the sober man and the drinker'. This was from the 'Cottage Gardener' of 1851. The writer was 'Rosa', whom we have already met. She went on: 'There is always a cheerful, clean, open air look about the former, and a leary, sodden, ashamed face in the latter character. Vice always marks the man, however he may try to conceal it, and it marks his family too; for it is IMPOSSIBLE for his wife and children to look well clothed and happy when he drinks half his wages, and comes home cross, and violent, if not in a state of positive intoxication" For those who were more fastidious or better off, or for their wives, alcohol came in many respectable disguises, whether in medicines,or more imaginatively, as perfumes like one in an advertisement that read 'Travellers and Visitors to the Sea-Coast would do well to provide themselves with a bottle of ROWLAND'S AQUA D'ORO. This fragrant and spirituous perfume refreshes and invigorates the system during the heat of summer... In all cases of excitement, lassitude, or over-exertion, it will prove of great advantage taken as a beverage, diluted with water...' The same firm marketed also the famous macassar oil that saved so many gardeners from unbecoming baldness. Some of the magazines aimed at gardeners rather than garden owners preached, in tones ranging from the headmasterly to the morally precious, against the evils of beer. 'Rosa', of course, adopted an enthusiastically superior voice, and wrote, in 1850, "No space NEED be lost, and every spot of ground that is turned to account adds tote beauty and the profit of the little homestead. How many beer-houses would be closed, how many empty seats in churches would be filled, how many suffering village shopkeepers would thrive... A parish would be indeed one blooming garden" Indeed.

She found almost every social activity gave rise to temptation, even the ringing of the church's bells at New Year; "I wish their hearts and voices were mixed with the joyful peal. I wish, too, that my cottage readers would take a friendly warning at this special time, and strive to separate the work of ringing from that of drinking, for they are apt to travel hand-in-hand, and that which is intended as a mark of joy and gratitude, becomes a means of intemperance and sin. This should not be. Even our harmless amusements and useful employments may thus bring down a curse, and not a blessing, on our heads". She saw alcohol everywhere and especially in the garden where "Neatness and attendance bespeak activity, diligence, and care; neglect and untidiness tell of the BEER-HOUSE." Alcohol became a matter for public self-confession, and the cheaper magazines often ran 'true confessions' of reformed drunkards. One we've already met. Not surprisingly, with a body of men who had at least some education, but were kept in a lowly position in society, discontent was rife. Both they, and the employing classes who felt the foundations of their lives shaking, wrote to the garden press. John Claudius Loudon, once an under-gardener himself, and now ever a liberal, wrote of the unemployed and discontented "But when he is told that he is not wanted - that the thing he possesses, his bodily strength, is useless... what CAN he do but sink in misery, abandon himself to despair... How can we wonder, then, at his lending a ready ear to what designing demagogues may say - for what is the fabric of society to him?"

"It is employment that must be found, if we mean to sleep securely in our beds... Give them something of their own that is worth keeping, and they are not the men to risk losing it..." However, solidarity was not especially strong amongst the gardening classes, or perhaps too many of them had been caught up in the self-righteous conservatism of the lower middle class. One quisling gardener wrote to an editor that "the sort of agitation attempted in the printed correspondence upon the subject [of gardeners' wages] I think ill-advised indeed, for I feel assured that the attempts of a few malcontents to represent the whole body of under-gardeners as a body of discontented growling paupers, meets the disapprobation of every spirited practitioner in the profession." The fear that otherwise sober gardeners might become raging alcoholics was even used as excuse to keep them continuously busy. In 1841, one exhausted gardener wrote to the 'Gardeners Chronicle' to plead for 'liberty days' when they could visit other gardens to learn more about their craft, or to read books. The writers claimed, falsely, that drinking habits were changing fast, and so the time thus freed would not be abused. For those impoverished gardeners who were not attracted to the multitude of raucous and convivial beer-shops, the lure of foreign lands proved strong, or the lure of new sorts of employment. While one editor of 1849 was "sorry to hear that MR FORSYTH, the talented gardener lately employed by the E. of Shrewsbury, has left his situation, and is now a guard on the North Staffordshire Railway.'It is truly a pity', adds our informant, 'that such abilities should be idle'".

William Ball, the owner of a market garden, and a gardener's agent, advertised a situation in India. He was deluged with replies, and had to insert an advertisement apologising for his inability to reply individually to each applicant, as well as another one for a foreman at his own business (he was offering an excellent salary too; one hundred pounds a year, and with an annual increment of ten pounds). It was his foreman who had gone to India

Opportunities existed all over the globe. In the 1840's, estate owners in the West Indies were looking for experienced gardeners to tend the new crops of nutmegs, and cloves. An estate near Marseilles frequently advertised for English bachelors to take up two-year contracts at twenty fours shillings and four pence a week (it advertised itself as employing many other Englishmen). Australia and New Zealand were opening up.

In 1852, "A Few Friends of the Family of Mr James Corton, once Gardener at Syon House, and now wholly destitute, having formed a small purse, in order that he may emigrate with his family to Australia, solicit some further aid, in order to enable them to compete their arrangements". The New Zealand Society offered allotments near Canterbury in many garden magazines, and clever marketing often ensured that the offers were on the same page as various Life Assurance adverts, and even of the appropriate though odd 'Laurie's Patent Floatable Mattresses' to reassure anyone nervous of the high seas!

Even apparently successful gardeners emigrated. Mr Tweedie left for Buenos Aires when he was fifty, but thereafter played a quite pivotal role in the development of nineteenth century gardening. Travel to distant lands was cheap. It cost, in the 1850's, only three pounds to get from London to Quebec, though the migrants had to provide their own food. Conditions on the boats were terrible, at least until the public outcry of the 1860's; after a journey to Canada of between six to eleven weeks the ships could be smelt on land long before they docked.

The gardener emigrants naturally wanted to take some garden plants with them, especially as many of them hoped to set up as nurserymen. Garden magazines published many queries from intending migrants about the best ways of transporting seeds and plants to the Colonies. The techniques for doing both of these things had improved dramatically since the beginning of the century, though the fact that seeds would still germinate after packing in nothing more substantial that dry paper envelopes still caused great surprise. One editor insisted, in 1850, that "sending seeds abroad in bottles, or sealed Indian or Chinese jars is now totally obsolete..." But how did the gardeners and garden staff, the ones who remained behind and were determined to avoid any temptation, live from day to day?

Under-gardeners, weeding women, watering boys and the rest mostly lived in considerable discomfort. On the whole, they have left little record of how they managed, and it is only possible to view their lives from the other side of the social gulf. Even so, the picture of their poverty, even though there were considerable attempts to turn it into the sentimental fantasy of 'cottage life', was not pleasant. In the 1840s, when the one of the frequent agricultural depressions was filling up the poor-houses all over the country, endless schemes were discussed for creating useful work for the unemployed, especially for farm and garden labourers. Writers to all the magazines try to suggest things that the unemployed could usefully do. Some parishes tried distributing labourers to the local rate-payers, with highly rated people getting several. The scheme was intended to act as a sort of tax, for the rich then had to provide work, and therefore wages to the poor; in fact, this system merely undercut those labourers and gardeners still with regular work, however dreadful their wages already were. The middle classes developed guilty consciences. In a series of articles called cosily OUR VILLAGE, Rosa stated that "Much is doing, in many ways, for the poor, but their health and comfort would be greatly increased if their dwellings were improved where it can be effected. I think much would be altered in this, as in every other case, if men would regard everything they possess as a talent committed to them by God. Men would not dare 'grind the faces of the poor', nor to neglect even their common daily comforts" Even if that were not possible, at least the ladies of the village could help out, for "A large jar of blackberry jam would be a very useful gift to a poor family, and a small quantity thinly spread on the children's bread would make it much more satisfying... In my neighbourhood the poor are so extremely poor, that it is impossible to think that they could make even blackberry jam for their childrens' food..." In a similar vein, another article proclaimed that "The rich are often little aware of the sufferings and privations of the poor, and how much relief they might afford by what in their abundance they think nothing of. A few baked apples, a jug of apple water, or a pot of apple-jam, are useful and grateful to those who are sick and possess NOTHING." She goes on to give various elementary recipes for basic jams and preserves. 'Apple water' turns out to be a thin tea made by pouring boiling water over sliced fruit, and slightly sweetening the result; it doesn't sound very appetising.