I wanted to find a place which had quite a lot of farm workers, because I wanted to talk
to a lot [of them], I needed to have, for reasons I’ll come on to in a minute, I needed
to have a variability of work situations.
That really meant East Anglia, which was convenient, being at Essex anyway.
I wanted, too, to have a place which could give me a range of community situations from
the commuter type villages that had been overrun, through to what one might call traditional
agricultural communities where the commuters hadn’t yet penetrated.
That took me to Suffolk.
Essex was too close to London to find any real agricultural communities left, but north
of Ipswich, and this was before the A12, before motorways, before even long-distance rail
commuting, north of Ipswich you could still find this range of commuter villages on the
immediate outskirts of Ipswich, who were commuting into Ipswich rather than London, through to
genuinely agricultural communities in the north of the County.
And there are two other factors.
One other factor, in particular, which drew me towards Suffolk, was the work of George
Ewart-Evans, the oral historian.
I knew George by then, had read his books, starting with, Ask the Fellows Who Cut the
Hay, and in a way it was those oral histories which began to make me understand I needed
to do some fieldwork, I couldn’t address the problems I was interested in – namely
the issue of deference – without actually not only talking to farm workers through some
sort of questionnaire, but also living there and observing the community life.
So I gravitated to Suffolk, and then did quite a lot of statistical analysis on the Census,
actually, to define the area, and I ended up with 44 parishes north of Ipswich, in East
Suffolk.
I ended up living, for those six months, in a tied cottage with a farm worker and his
family, just outside Framlingham.
And I was put on to that through the Trade Union.
The local District Organiser was very helpful.
I talked to him a lot about the study, and he put me on to this family who he thought
would look after me, which they did.
So March 1972, I moved into this little tied cottage in a very remote part – it wasn’t
in a village, it was actually out on a farm, about two miles north of Framlingham – and
with Fred and Margaret Melser and their two little girls, and they were the – unbeknown
to me – they were the best informants I could ever have wanted!
I got on so well with them, kept in touch - they’re both now dead, sadly, kept in
touch with them over the years.
They were just wonderful to me, not only in feeding me, but also in just talking to me,
helping me to - remember, I had no knowledge of farming.
I couldn’t, to use an epithet they used in Suffolk then, I “couldn’t tell wheat
from barley”!
But through them, I could tell wheat from barley, and I did quite a lot of anthropological
fieldwork in the area as well – one particular incident I’ll come back to in a moment.
Just explain what you mean by that.
I spent a lot of time with them in the community, simply observing.
I can fast forward a moment.
Even after I’d talked to a lot of - even after I’d interviewed 270 farm workers in
these 44 parishes, but was still having difficulty understanding how farm workers could identify,
so closely, with their employers, when, objectively, they were poorly paid, living often in not
the best of conditions, in tied housing – they had no security of tenure then, they did later,
but not then.
It was one of those fieldwork events, really, which you often find in the literature.
Every year the local estate had an annual cricket match between the farmers and the
farm workers.
It wasn’t actually the farm on which Fred Melser worked and on which I was living, but
it was nearby.
And it was quite an annual event, and it was played in the ground of Framlingham Castle,
and I went along to this and sat on the boundary, with Margaret, watching the game.
I noticed - I was sitting to the side of the pavilion, and the pavilion was entirely occupied
by the farmers and landowners, drinking their beers and chatting to each other, but what
I noticed was that every time one of them came out of the pavilion to perhaps go and
get something from the car, or just to walk around the boundary, they stopped and talked
to Margaret and to Fred.
They didn’t have to do that, but they did.
I began to think carefully, “Why were they doing this?
Why were they doing this?”
And in theoretical terms, this led actually to, I think, really, the only kind of theoretical
piece I’ve ever written that’s any use.
It led to an article in Comparative Studies in Society and History, which I published
in 1976, called “The Deferential Dialectic”.
I began to understand that, actually, what deference is, is a dialectical relationship
that involves identification and differentiation at one and the same time.
These interactions were both reinforcing the differentiation between employer and employee
between, frankly, upper class and working class rural inhabitants, but at the same time
was cementing the identification between them.
If they’d walked past without saying anything, that would have been a huge social faux pas.
It simply was not done, because there were these bonds of identification which, at the
same time, ironically, reinforced the differentiation and vice-versa.
Farm workers knew their place, and these sorts of interactions simply reinforced that sense
of social place.
And then it all sort of came together like pieces of a jig-saw, really, and then both
the fieldwork – which I’ll come back to in a minute – and the interviews all began
to make some sense, and that was written up as The Deferential Worker.