Hoggie's angels - Ian MacDougall

Part of the "Flashbacks" oral history series and a follow-on from "Hard Work, Ye Ken", this book brings readers the recollections of Jessie Landells and her fellow Midlothian farmworkers. "A wee magnificent little yup" was how Jessie and her fellow "Angels" saw Robert Hogg, their employer, who seems to have stepped straight out of Dickens into Dalkeith High Street and living memory. Hogg himself was a particularly colourful character, but the way he exploited his workers was hardly unique. There was no other work to be had in Dalkeith at the time; as Helen Boyd recalls, "We had tae dae it. That wis a' that wis tae it." The voices of Hoggie's Angels, as his female potato pickers became known, speak from personal experience - experience sometimes painful, even humiliating - of aspects of life in earlier 20th-century Scotland. Yet, theirs' are voices surprisingly humorous and resilient, and totally lacking in self-pity.