Here's a photograph taken 6th December, 1918:
I have two copies of this. Written on the back of one of them it says "Ouseburn Tatie Scraters"; the other one says "Ouseburn tatie pickers".
So, Ouseburn (which is two villages, Great Ouseburn and Little Ouseburn) is where my mother was born. The verb "to scrat" is dialect, meaning to search beneath a shallow surface (usually earth) for something (usuallyusing the hands). "Tatie" is just short for "potato". The people in the photograph were harvesting potatoes by digging for them with their hands.
These weren't itinerant workers brought over from elsewhere to scrat taties: these were locals. The photograph that calls them "tatie pickers" is signed by my grandmother's sister, Edie; she called them "pickers" rather than "scrat(t)ers" because that sounds less menial. She wanted it to sound less menial because she's one of the people in the picture. That's her on the front row, second from the right, holding a tatie. She'd be 13 at the time.
Most of the scratters are women and old men (wearing ties!), because the Great War had finished less than a month earlier and the younger men hadn't yet been demobilised.
I like the way so many of them are holding tin mugs of tea. Society has seen great social changes since the days when schoolchildren went scratting taties, but some things remain constant.