From Crow-Scaring to Westminster: An AutobiographyEdwards, George, Sir
History
From Crow-Scaring to Westminster: An Autobiography
Edwards, George, Sir
George Edwards, 1850-1933
The committee at their quarterly meeting held at Cozens' Temperance
Hotel, at King's Lynn, on Saturday, July 30th, decided, on the motion of
Mr. Winfrey, to move the office of the Union from Gresham to Fakenham,
if a suitable house could be found, and they appointed Mr. Robert Green
and myself a sub-committee to secure one if possible. This we did after
a good deal of correspondence. We first agreed on one on a seven years'
lease in Walsall Terrace, Queen's Road, Fakenham, at a rental of L17 per
annum and rates; but before the agreement could be signed and the lease
drawn up, it transpired that the house was let to another man without
the knowledge of the house agent. Then a Mr. Philips of Fakenham offered
us Wensum House at Hempton, near Fakenham, at a rental of L20 per annum.
This we accepted and took on a seven years' lease. This was a ten-roomed
house with two large attics. The two front rooms were very large. One of
the front rooms was taken as an office, and it was a very fine and
suitable room at that time, and quite large enough to be used as a board
room for the committee. The committee also decided that I should pay
them the same rent as I paid my landlord for my cottage and garden at
Gresham, namely L5 per year. The moving from my village caused me a good
deal of pain, but I knew I must bow to the inevitable, for the Union had
outgrown my little bedroom. I did, however, love my garden and my little
cottage, small as it was. I cultivated my garden as a relief early in
the morning when at home to occupy my mind from the worries of my
official duties. I always managed so that I had some kind of vegetable
all the year round. I was very fond of vegetable marrow and used to grow
a very fine kind. We ate some as vegetables, the rest we could cut and
keep and my wife would make what we called in our agricultural
labourer's phrase, "million pies." My wife, too, was very fond of fowls,
and we kept just enough to produce a few eggs for our own use. To my
little cottage my dear wife and myself were devoted. In fact, I was as
proud of it as any duke is of his palace. We had two downstair rooms,
the front room 12 ft. by 14 ft., its height about 6 ft. 8 in., the back
kitchen which we used to live in most of our time 9 ft. by 7 ft. There
was a little cooking-stove in it and a perpetual oven in the wall in
which my wife did most of her baking. The front room floor she covered
with cocoanut matting and put a nice paper on the walls, and there were
plenty of pictures and my bookshelf at one corner full of books, of
which I am so proud. As we both looked at this little cottage home,
which had so many sweet memories, one can understand how unwilling we
were to leave it. Further, I was living there amongst my own fellow
agricultural labourers, and the environments and surroundings were so
dear to me as to be part of myself.
[Illustration: THE FIRST OFFICE OF THE AGRICULTURAL WORKERS' UNION,
GRESHAM, NORFOLK.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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