work and practice he won a championship hedge-cutting match and the title: Champion Hedgecutter of England. He was in demand all over England and Wales and got good, well-paid jobs. To whatever part of the country he travelled, he went on foot and lodged wherever he could. He discussed working conditions with his fellow labourers and realised that ill treatment of the men who toiled on the land was by no means peculiar to Warwickshire.
The cottage in which Joseph Arch was born and died, with the porch that Joseph built himself
family’s meagre income. His first job was scaring crows from a farmer’s field for which he earned fourpence for a twelve hour day. He was nine years old.
After a year working as a crow-scarer, Joseph, or Joe as he was known then, progressed to being a plough boy and his wage increased by twopence a day. Out of this he managed to buy books, even though that left even less money for clothes and meant he only had old hobnailed boots and a rough smock-frock to wear. Every evening after work he would come home and study. Fortunately for Joseph his mother was one of the few labourer’s wives in Barford who could write. She was proud of her son’s efforts to educate himself and was able to help and support him.
By the time he was thirteen Joseph had learnt to drive a pair of horses and plough his own piece. This was called “gee-oh- ing”. As with everything he tackled, Joseph gave it his best and soon became an efficient “gee-oh-er”. There were few distractions in Barford -
lounging and drinking in the public house or playing in the bowling alley were the only leisure activities on offer - so Joseph continued to use what little time he had after work to further his education. Always at the back of his mind was the driving ambition to improve himself: to earn more, to do more and to learn more.
Joseph’s young life had not been easy, and hardship was a constant companion, but in 1842 when he was sixteen, tragedy struck. His mother who, in his own words had been, “mother, teacher, counsellor, guide and familiar friend,” died. He was grief stricken, but more determined than ever to improve himself. For a while he stayed in the cottage in Barford with his father, but soon realised that to progress further he must be prepared to travel.
At that time a new style of hedge-cutting was being introduced to Warwickshire that was proving popular and profitable. Not content just to learn this new skill, Joseph determined to be the best at it, and he was. After much hard
MARCH 2012 v FOUR SHIRES 27
A logical marketable skill to accompany hedge-cutting was mowing, and he became good at that too and would manage teams of labourers in various counties. In our mechanised age it’s worth remembering that in the mid-eighteen hundreds it would not be at all unusual for ten men to go and mow a meadow (with or without Spot the dog), because they would be cutting the grass by hand with scythes. Towards the end of his teens, with money in his pocket, Joseph Arch made his way home
to Barford. He had learnt on his travels that a great advantage that he had compared with most labouring men was that the Arch family cottage was their own, having been bought by Joseph’s grandfather in the eighteenth century, so the Arches couldn’t be turned out on the whim of a farmer or landowner if they wouldn’t accept the working conditions imposed on them. There was also land with the cottage that enabled them to grow vegetables.
At the age of twenty-one Joseph Arch married and began to raise a family, all the while nursing the aspiration to raise the status and living conditions of agricultural labourers. There were some difficult times and many a dispute with the local landowners, farmers and clergy, who both jointly and separately sought to keep the labourer ‘in his place’. Joseph travelled and agitated – but he always kept it legal. Part of his studying had been to familiarise himself
Joseph Arch
s
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