Jim had sufficient foresight to view with alarm the gradual dispersion of most of the oldest and best farmers in the neighbourhood, and the conversion to grass of the arable land, owing to the unfair and dangerous competition of American wheat. When we discussed the subject and foretold the straits to which the country would be reduced in the event of war with a great European Power, he concluded these forebodings with the habitual remark, "Well, what I says is, them as lives longest will see the most." A truism, no doubt, but, as time has proved, by no means an incorrect view.
There was always plenty of employment for an estate carpenter on my farms, as I had a vast number of buildings, including four separate sets of barn, stable, sheds, and yard, away from the village, as well as those near the Manor House, and many repairs were necessary. There were, too, very many gates, repairs to fences, hurdle-making, and odd jobs, to keep a man employed for months at a time. The building of three hop-kilns, with the necessary storerooms for green and dried hops, as the hop acreage increased, the preparation of hop-poles, and the erection of wire-work on larger poles, which gradually superseded the ordinary pole system, all demanded a great deal of regular work.
I was most fortunate in obtaining the services of a man living in a neighbouring village, not only as estate carpenter, but as a skilled joiner, and possessing all the knowledge and efficiency of an experienced builder. When I first met him, or very soon afterwards, Tom G. was a teetotaller, and I have always had immense admiration for the strength of will which enabled him to conquer completely the drink habit, for he freely admitted that he was entirely mastered by it in his younger days. He told me, and it proves what a kindly word will sometimes do, that the Squire of his village, who also employed him largely, said to him, after praising some of his work, "There's only one thing the matter with you, Tom, and that's the drink." "I went home," said Tom, "and I thought to myself, if the drink is all that's wrong with me, what a fool I must be to continue it. Next day I went to Evesham and signed the pledge, and I've never touched a drop since, though the smell and the sight of a public-house have been so sore a temptation that many a time after a long day's work, and with money in my pocket, I've gone a mile or two out of my way in order not to pass a place of the sort."
His training as a carpenter had induced habits of great accuracy, exact method, and lucid thought, and a chat with him, and watching his quick and clever workmanship, was an educational opportunity. I have always been fascinated by such work, and one of my earliest recollections is of being taken by my father to interview a carpenter about some small household job. His name was Snewin—I am not sure of the spelling, for I was only about eight years old at the time—and we found him in his workshop vigorously using a long plane on some red deal boards, his feet buried in beautifully curled shavings, and the whole place redolent of the delicious scent of turpentine. Every time his plane travelled along the edge, to my childish fancy, the board said in plaintive tones of remonstrance, in crescendo, his name, "Snewin, Snewin," and again, "SNEWIN," and even now the scent and action of planing a deal board always brings back the scene clearly to my mind.
I suppose, therefore, it was partly old associations that induced the fascination of watching Tom G. at his work, but there were other reasons. With his axe, the edge beautifully ground and sharpened to a razor-like finish, he could trim a piece of wood, or shape it, so neatly that it presented almost the appearance of having been planed; his saw, with no apparent effort, raced from end to end of a board or across the grain of a piece of "quartering," and his chisels and plane irons were ground to the correct concave bevel that relieves the parting of a chip or shaving, and gives what he called "sweetness" to the cutting action. He was a strong Conservative, good at an argument, and had many heated discussions with some of my men whose tendencies leaned to the opposite side; but his sound logic and common sense were observable in all his ideas, and I think he generally came off best as a shrewd and clear-headed debater, for from his employment in various places his horizon was wider than that of the ordinary farm labourers.
Tom G. had considerable knowledge of the Bible, which he sometimes employed in conversation; alluding to the work that was nearly always waiting for him at Aldington, he told a friend of mine that there was "earn (corn) in Egypt"; and when he had a written contract with me for a special piece of work, and wished to suggest that as time went on we might think of some improvement, and that there was no necessity to adhere to the original specifications, he announced that "we bean't Mades, nor we bean't Piersians" (we're not Medes, nor are we Persians).
No necessary measurement was ever guessed at, his "rule" was always handy in a special pocket, but in cases where a rough guess was sufficient he would hazard it by what he called "scowl of brow" (intently regarding it). The agricultural labourer is inclined, both with weights and measures, to be inaccurate, "reckoning it's near enough." I found soon after I came to Aldington that the weighing machine which had been in use throughout the whole of my predecessor's time, and had weighed up hundreds of pounds of wool at 2s. and 2s. 6d. a pound, cheese at 8d., and thousands of sacks of wheat, barley, and beans, was about a pound in each hundredweight against the seller, so that he must have lost a considerable sum in giving overweight.
Tom G. was scornful about weather signs, and summed up his doubts in such matters with sarcasm: "I reckon that the indications for rain are very similar to the indications for fine weather!" But the best epigram I ever heard from him was, "There's a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and folks most in general chooses the wrong un!" I should like to see those words of wisdom on the title-page of every school book, and blazoned up in letters of gold on the wall of every classroom in every school in the kingdom.
I have referred to the hop-kilns I built. Throughout the work of erecting them, and it was no small one, Tom G. was the leading spirit; it gave scope for his abilities, I think, on a larger scale than any building he had previously undertaken. We began with a kiln sufficient for the first 6 acres planted; it was necessary, with the gradual extinction of British corn-growing, to find something to supersede it, and to compensate for the falling off in farm receipts. I had seen something of hops as a pupil on a large farm near Alton, Hampshire, where they occupied an area of over a hundred acres, but at that time I had no intention of growing them myself, and had not been infected with the glamour, formerly attaching to hops beyond any other crop, that came to me later.
I visited the old Alton farm, and obtained all particulars of the latest kind of hop-kiln in the neighbourhood from the inventor, and instructed him to prepare plans and specifications for the conversion of an old malthouse close to the Manor. I contracted with Tom G. for all the carpenter's work, and with an excellent stonemason or bricklayer for that belonging to his department. They both entered with enthusiasm upon the job, and we had many interesting discussions as to improvement, as it proceeded. Tom G. was a man of great resource, and could always find a way out of every difficulty; he told me, before we began, that he could see the completed building as if actually finished, just as a great sculptor once said how easy it was to produce a statue from a block of marble, for all he had to do was to cut away the superfluous material!
The alterations entailed a new roof from end to end of the old building, and a new floor for the upper part, the length being about 70 and the width about 20 feet. The old roof was covered mostly with stone-slates—flakes of limestone from the Cotswolds—very uneven in size and rough as to surface, and in part with ordinary blue slates. The latter lie much more closely on the laths, the stone slates allowing the passage of more air between them, and it was interesting to find that while the ancient laths under the stone slates were fairly well preserved, those beneath the blue slates were much decayed, evidently from the fact of the damp in an unheated building remaining longer where the air was excluded, though one would have expected the close-lying blue slates to be the better protection of the two.
Much expense was saved by Tom G.'s economical use of materials; wherever the old oak beams could be used again they were incorporated with the new work. He never cut sound old or new pieces of timber to waste;