This picture brings back some memories. We lived about 15 minutes from this location after moving out of London (1968). On a nice day the wife and I and the two children would go for long walks along this path, it’s nice to look at the picture and know where every path takes you. You can just see the trees and the woods in the background where we would collect Horse Chest Nuts and roast them when we got home. Also, in the wood was the hoppers dumping ground, nothing nasty, old pots, jam jars, old clocks, oil lamps and crockery and even old records, things like that. When we first came across this hopping had finished on this farm years before and to me it was like coming across a treasure chest of memories. The wife and children would collect the Chestnuts and I would dig around in the dump, yes, the wife did call me Steptoe, I still have some of the things I found.
- Hop pickers use stilts on a farm at Wateringbury in Kent,1928.
I think this was called Rock Farm?
Hop tokens were used as an on-the-job currency for the hop-pickers. For each bushel picked the farmer would pay with tokens which were exchanged for cash at the end of the hop-picking season.
- Hop Pickers Token, not the farm in the picture above.
- Vinson Farm hop picking with the use of a horse and cart, in Kent, c1910.