Spring Elections, School Holidays and Lubbock’s Day

Spring Elections, School Holidays and Lubbock’s Day

An interesting comment from Mark Forskitt:

“Moving the election to May instead of the usual Autumn period  didn't do it, even though the weather was favourable. Personally it meant for the first time in three decades I had no active part in a significant election where I was eligible to vote.  April and May are the busiest times for  general fruit and vegetable growers.  Miss the planting season and it is most of a year's earnings lost.  So I wasn't a candidate and couldn't get involved in campaigning.”

I suddenly realised that almost certainly the reason why the election period used to be in September (Senators) and October (Deputies) was precisely because Jersey was such an agrarian community. When many States members came from the farming community – and I remember that back in the 1970s and even into the 1980s that was the case, then an Autumn election, after the harvest and “all safely gathered in” as the hymn puts it, makes sense.

I know that the UK has often had May or June elections, but in the UK, historically, and certainly before the 1832 Great Reform Act, the farming community in Parliament were rich landowners who certainly had farm managers to look after their business, unlike Jersey, where everything was much more small scale.

It is also part of the reason why both here and in the UK we have long Summer holidays. First harvest is in August – “First Fruits”, and the harvest season goes on through the rest of that month. Children needed to help with gathering that harvest.

As Ronald Hutton  explains in “The Stations of the Sun”

“The last of the cycle of four feasts mentioned in Tochmarc Emire was 'Bron Trogain, earth's sorrowing in autumn'. To keep measure with those before, this would fall upon 1 August, which was indeed the beginning of the autumn season in the medieval British Isles.”

He notes that Máire MacNeill’s study showed “open-air gatherings held by the country people of Ireland to celebrate the opening of the cereal or potato harvest, on 1 August or a Sunday near to it. Drawing mainly upon eighteenth- and nineteenth-century records, she found examples of seventy-eight of these on hills, most in Ulster but also scattered throughout the rest of the island. There were another thirteen in the North Midlands which were held beside lakes or rivers, and a further eighty connected with holy wells.”

And on customs which we take for granted, it is interesting to note how recent, relatively speaking, bank holidays are. They come only late in the 19th century by which time most workers (over 80%) were living in urban rather than rural communities, where time keeping was orderly and the seasonal rhythms had been lost. In other words, they came to a world where there was no disadvantage to having extra days holiday, unlike a rural farming community of two centuries before (over 80% living on the land), where every day mattered.

Harry Glass, writing in “This is Money” section of the Daily Mail, notes:

“Liberal MP John Lubbock who got the ball rolling back in 1871 by tabling the Bank Holidays Act of 1871, aiming to ease the pressure on workers with an extra four days off - at that point on Easter Monday, the first Monday in August, Whit Monday, and Boxing Day.”

“Lubbock was the son of a London banker, and a banker himself before becoming elected the Member of Parliament - in 1870, and again in 1874 - for Maidstone in Kent.  The fine fellow had four main political agendas, one of which was securing additional holidays and shorter working hours for the working classes. “

“The bill was passed, and predictably it went down well with the masses - there were attempts to have the early August bank holiday renamed St Lubbock's Day, but it didn't stick; 'bank holiday' is the favoured term. In fact, today the term is colloquially - albeit incorrectly - used for public holidays such as Good Friday and Christmas Day, which are not officially bank holidays.”

In fact, those days are “public holidays” rather than “bank holidays”. But there were some changes even in the last century:

“A century after the 1871 Act, the Banking and Financial Dealings Act 1971 was passed. The majority of the current bank holidays were specified in the 1971 Act, but New Year's Day and May Day were introduced after 1971.”

“From 1965, the date of the August bank holiday was changed from the first Monday in August to the last. Curiously, there were a few years (e.g. 1968) when this holiday fell in September, but this no longer occurs. The Whitsun bank holiday (Whit Monday) was replaced by the Late Spring Bank Holiday - fixed as the last Monday in May - in 1971. In 1978 the first Monday in May in the UK, and the final Monday of May in Scotland, were designated as bank holidays.”

And why “Bank Holidays”? Glass explains again:

“Why is it even called a 'bank' holiday? Elementary, my friends - it's because the banks are shut for business, and if the banks are shut, no business can be done and so we might as well all give up. And when the financial system comes to a stop, the law makes provision for certain payments to be deferred until the next appropriate day without penalty.”

John Lubbock also bought the land on which the stone circle stands at Avebury, and saved it from developers, introduced the first law on the protection of the UK's archaeological and architectural heritage, and later became Lord Avebury!

Enjoy your bank holiday, and perhaps pour a small glass of wine when you relax in the evening, and raise a toast to John Lubbock!