Pages from Edwin Gooch: Champion of the Farmworkers

4 Edwin Gooch: Champion of Farmworkers
the new giants of agri-business threatening to undermine rural labour—as
shown by the controversial abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board in England
(established in its supposedly permanent form by Labour’s 1947 legislation) by
the Coalition Government in 2013. Uncertainty remains a fact of a life for the
farmworker, though in practice a good farmer will always value a good worker.
Edwin Gooch carried the spirit of George Edwards’ belief in the power of
“sweet reasonableness” throughout his time in the Union and in Parliament.
However, this ideal could never be taken for granted, and when his preferred
co-operation with the farmers was compromised or undermined by bad faith, he
would not hesitate to call out the miscreants in public.
I was nine-years-old when he died, and my strongest memories of him are
of a pipe-smoking ‘Grandpa’, routinely offering me aromatic “baccy” from his
pouch when we went to call on a weekend “down Wymondham”, and of an old
man basking in the garden. But even as a child I could sense reserves of strength,
and something beyond the average in his personal significance. I was a little shy
of him as a result, though he was a kindly man with a very Norfolk sense of
humour and his manner was always cheery. I can still recall his equable response
of “fair to middling” whenever asked how he was, and his rather period farewells:
“Toodle-pip!” or “Toodle-oo!”.
We once went to visit him in the House of Commons, the family sitting
together in easy chairs in the Members’ Tea Room, and my only regret is that I
never heard that broad Norfolk accent in the chamber itself when speaking on
behalf of his farmworker brothers in the righteous but never solemn manner of
George Edwards and Joseph Arch before him.
Edwin’s second wife and widow Mollie suggested I might write a biography
one day, and I have toyed with the idea in the twenty years since she died. I
carried out relevant researches for a family history some while ago, and it was
a particular pleasure to read back numbers of the Land Worker and thereby get
a very vivid idea of the world in which Edwin Gooch operated. In the 1930s
the journal might promote Soviet collectivisation, but always used a romantic
woodcut of a country scene on its front cover. Those researches at Transport
House, courtesy of the then editor of Landworker Mike Pentelow, and at the
University of Reading’s NUAW Archive, form the backbone of this biography.
I have since inherited photograph albums that are a happy confusion of
family gatherings, holidays on the beach at Wells or on the Broads, and political
conferences—an evocative visual compensation for the lack of personal papers:
Edwin died in office, and had no time and probably no inclination to write a
memoir.
A series of substantial academic works on agricultural trade unionism in