UNIONJACKSTILLDOING HIS BEST…
UNIONJACKSTILLDOING HIS BEST…
Farming has gone through
enormous changes and, at
92, Jack Humphrey has
seen more of them
than most people.
Laurence Dopson
talked to him
JACK Humphrey, MBE, has been a member of the Agricultural Workers Union for 75 years. He is 92 now, lectures on the social history of farming, preaches at Harvest Festival services and is chairman of the Somerset and Avon Proficiency Testing Committee.
At Cannington College of Agriculture, where he was a governor for 40 years, the Agricultural Engineering Centre bears the name J Humphrey Centre.
But he is most proud of the fact that while he was Somerset country organiser for the then separate Agricultural Workers Union, there were "very good relationships" between the National Farmers Union and and the AWU. "And why not?" he says.
It used to be said: "Jack is the person who preaches to farmers on Sunday and asks them for half a crown on Mondays." Those were the days when trade unionist Jack combined pay negotiations with preaching – the days before 42 village chapels in Somerset closed, just one of the profound changes in rural life which Jack has seen.
* Norfolk-born
"Before I came from Norfolk, where I was born on the Holkham estate – my father was a gamekeeper – I can remember 40 men hand-scything a field of corn. I can remember the first combined harvester coming to South Creake in 1931. I was branch secretary at Burnham Market. There were far more people on the land than now and there were Union branches in most of the villages.
"Of course with not so many workers on the land, membership has gone down, which is understandable, and the separate Agricultural Workers Union went into the large Transport and General Workers Union."
Does he think there is still a need for farm workers to join the Union?
"Yes, I do," says Jack emphatically. He remembers the agricultural labourers strike of 1923 and notes that the agricultural workers is the oldest statutory wage. "I have seen so many changes in the employees position and all for the best," he says. He firmly believes that the key to maintaining improvement is for all to be members of the union.
* Walked to school
As a young man Jack regularly walked two-and-a-half miles to night school to do a course in elocution. It served him well both as a trades unionist and a lay preacher. He qualified as a Methodist lay preacher at Fakenham and preached in the chapel at Marsham from the pulpit used by farm labourer- turned-MP Sir George Edwards, who wrote From Crow Scaring to Westminster, a book Jack treasures.
"There is nothing worse than to speak at a meeting or a service and people not to be able to hear you," says Jack, praising his Workers Education Association elocution course. He became chairman of the WEA in Norfolk.
In retirement he is no longer a JP but he carries on preaching – "the denomination doesnt matter" – and lecturing. "I dont want to be paid – only to be fetched and returned." These days he lives on his own but visits his wife, Grace, who has Alzheimers, in a home. His philosophy: "You cant live in the past but you can learn from it."