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The County Agricultural Show was a great event and moved arouhd the county. Every now and then it came to Alcester. 1877 was one such year. That decade farming was depressed and there was a great deal of poverty, instanced, for example, in May, 1979, when an Alcester Committee set up a Poor Relief Fund; a list in the'Alc- ester Chronicle' shows subscriptions from 104 people totalling £57.12.1. This money was spent in giving 253 families gifts of bread, groceries and coal.
The Agricultural Show caused 'A Working Man' to have printed a small poster with a 6 verse poem (to be sung to the tune of 'We won't go home till morning'). It is a humorous effort but in it one notes an underground bitterness about the disparity between the rich and the poor, with the scales weighted in favour of the establishment in rural society. It isn't surprising that this 'working man' did not sign his name.
A couple of the verses go as follows:-
'There'll be lords and ladies fine,
They will all sit down to dine,
And drink such lots of wine,
At the Agricultural Show.
There's lots who'd like to go,
But their pockets are rather low.
There'll be Warwickshire lads and lasses,
They're sure to have their glasses,
They must mind which way they passes,
At the Agricultural Show.
There'll be lords and ladies fine,
They will all sit down to dine,
And drink such lots of wine,
At the Agricultural Show.
But if a poor man goes there,
And gets a drop of beer,
The Bobby he soon stops him,
And into quod he pops him,
And swears he's drunk and cops him,
At the Agricultural Show.
The fifth verse ends with these lines:
...You'll split your sides a laughing,
To hear the farmers chaffing,
Vows they won't let Joseph Arch in At the Agricultural Show.
Warwickshire people, especially, will know of Joseph Arch, the agitator for farm labourers' rights, who formed the National Agricultural Labourers' Union in 1872 and later became a Liberal M.P.
Alcester & District Local History Society