H.J.

“H. J.” knew Morecambe when the trams on the front were horse-drawn, and he retired to this area over a quarter of a century ago. But his origins and main career were in farming in Lincolnshire. He recalls in this first article aspects of his childhood and family and village life and of farming in the Fens in the early part of this century.

“I was born in Sempringham Fen in 1903 and baptised at Sempringham Priory. My father was a farmer and moved to Rippingale at that period. My parents were happy, hard-working people, and my father was a churchwarden for many years. When he was first married, he had a mill and baking business at Pymore in Cambridgeshire. Before going out with the bread he would fill the mill with corn and leave the brake on. If the wind got up. my mother could let the brake off and the mill would start grinding. He said that as he went on his round it made him very happy to look across the flat fields and see the old mill going. When working for a Mr Pocklington near Sleaford at the turn of the century. he had to go to Boston to fetch the five-ton “cross” on which the sails of Heckington mill turned. His two-horse cart was bogged to the axles in mud, but he hired another horse with the shilling he always carried. The cross had to be lifted inside the tower by block and tackle and father had to climb the tower and fix the sails. Heckington remains the only eight-sailed mill in the country This was one of the stories we children made father tell over and over, in the candle-light; there wasn’t much reading then.

I went to school when I was three, leaving at twelve. At seven I had whooping cough, and remember the doctor arriving in his carriage and horses, and his top bat, from Billingborough, five miles off. The milk had to be delivered before school, and my father bought me a four-guinea cycle when I was ten. We three boys also had to fetch the cattle after school from a mile away. It was a communal field; and, when turned out, the cows found their own way to their farms.

The school yard was gravel, and there weren’t any rubber balls then. The schoolmistress would make us a stocking ball filled with bits of stuff, and we would kick it to pieces quite soon. We had two or three outings a year. The Sunday school went to Skegness by train. The village school drove in farmers’ wagons over to Grimsthorpe Castle for tea, a riding school and sports. We had another holiday when the horses and hounds came by train to hunt the fox; our schoolmaster liked riding, and so we got that day off, too.

In 1913, I and others were posted outside the school to give warning of the approach of B. C. Hooks flying over in his aeroplane, a thing none of us had seen. Next year, at the start of the war, we ran the best part of a mile to see the strange sight of a convoy of army lorries. In the middle of the war, after an air-raid alarm at a dance, we saw the first Zeppelin brought down over Boston.

In 1915, I left school and worked on my father’s farm, under the head waggoner’s orders. We learnt ploughing, harrowing, drilling and, later, stacking and thatching. Those were happy days, particularly when working with the horses. Ploughing was very, very pleasant. I had kept up my sport and had a professional offer when I was eighteen, but I wanted to farm.

As I grew up. I took to carrying a gun, and to poaching: a rabbit-netting party was great fun. I was courting a farmer’s daughter at the time, and a neighbour was seeing another of the girls. Meeting at the gate one night, we thought we saw a pheasant in a tree; so we shot. it with my friend’s gun. Then we found it was the farm’s bantie cockerel, and threw it over the wall. One of the girls afterwards said. a fox had got their bantie cockerel; but we never let on.

When I was still a boy we had to go and tempt the pigs on to the stubble, a miserable job that had to be done after harvest. My mother’s turkeys – she had about sixty – had to be driven from the farmhouse up to the field to feed on the stubble as well. At Christmas, they were to be sold, and mother used to kill them all. Then all the men had to stay at home and pull the birds. That was a rotten job, too, but we’d nit to do else at that time.

Our pigs were about 35 stones, with good wide backs and quite a bit of fat; they were fed on barley meal. After the killing, the pigs were left to drain – and the smell of blood upset the horses when they came in, and they would quickly crowd into their stable. The pig was left all night on the ‘cratch’, a narrow table about five feet long. The bristles were, scraped off with a sharp instrument which looked like a candle-holder. Then the chines were cut; the large ones, after salting, were kept a year or two and then stuffed.

The salting troughs were wooden, about 5ft x 3.5ft and lined with pitch. The flitches were salted and turned weekly for a month. The hams were first rubbed with brown sugar and a little saltpetre round the knuckle. After a month, they were hung on the bacon hooks which were in all kitchens in those days. They dripped a bit of salt for a week and were then dry: it was often a year or two before they were eaten. My mother cut the small chittings ready for sausage skins, soaking them in salt, water, turning them inside out and scraping them with the side of a wooden spoon. The lard was obtained by cutting the fat into chip-sized pieces and rendering it down. (It was a treat to eat the scraps on toast). The red meat was minced for sausages, and the white meat was made into pork pies and taken down to the bakers for baking. There would be about twenty of them: they were delicious. Then, apart from the haslet (oddments wrapped in the “apron”) and brawn (boned, stewed and put in basins), there were the “fries”. These were odd bits of pork meat, with liver, heart and kidneys. We children used to take the fries round to the elderly people – and we’d get a penny each, which supplemented our weekly pocket money of a penny.

My father bought me a farm when I was twenty-two, in the 1920s. It was a bad time. We didn’t lose money, but it was quite a few years before we made much. I had two cows. One was a hard milker, the other was easy, but kicked the bucket over when you’d finished. That’s where I think I got the rest of my education. For, as I sat there milking these cows and looking at a whitewashed wall, I got to thinking I wasn’t very clever if I was going to do that all my life. So, I got someone in to do the milking and spent more time in the office. This farm was in Rippingale, and I rented another four miles away in Hawthorpe (which the owner sold to me after a row about draining). By the 1950s I was farming 1000 acres, and also managing 1500 acres for a friend who was in a nursing home with T. B. for a year.

In the days when horses provided most of the power on the farm, and workers provided the skills in ploughing, harrowing and harvesting, everything was done in rhythm. I feel it was much more interesting than today when so much is mechanical. But there were some important machines at the beginning of the century. One was the cultivating machine or steam plough. This consisted of an engine at either end of the field, and a plough dragged up and down by a wire, which could be a quarter of a mile in total length. There was generally a pond in each field, and it was the waggoner’s job to see the engines were supplied they let off a whistle that could be heard for miles when they needed water. The plough would start in the early hours and run continuously till dark, even to ten or eleven o’clock. There was a team of four, one man for each engine, and one for the plough, the fourth was a relief driver and cook. They lived in their own caravan.

The other big steam-driven engine was the thrashing machine. It would take an hour to set it up and get the drum level. The wagoner had to be up at half past four to open the ash-box and load the coal, so that the machine would have a sufficient head of steam by the time the men came at half past six. A team of two ran the machine, and eight to ten men were needed for the other work. A dam was built in the dyke to hold the water, and the boys of the farm were allowed to miss school to carry the water. Thrashing was often done in winter, and it was very cold. This was in the days before wellingtons, and our legs were always wet. When a farm in the village was thrashing, it would get all the boys running back from school to kill mice and rats; this was good fun. Later on, I had a thrashing team of my own, and did contract work.

The men who came to help the thrashing team each had his own job to do. Thrashing was tedious work, and the least liked part was working at the end with the chaff or pulse: this was filthy. The more popular part was weighing and carrying the sacks of corn, even though the wheat was in sacks weighing eighteen stone, that is, over two hundred weight; we just accepted the weight. There was a contrivance for getting the sack onto the shoulders – the hard part. This was a wooden platform which raised the sack by a hand-wheel and chain. We would thrash and shift as much as 50-60 quarters a day, a quarter being two sacks.

The experience came in useful when I went on a cruise to Tenerife on the Fred Olsen line. People who’d been before said I’d be sea-sick, but it was the others who were ill in the Bay of Biscay. My father had told me about carrying the eighteen stone sacks on to barges at Boston. The only way to carry them was to go with the boat, he found that if you fought against the boat, you’d lose the sacks. So with the boat – if you fought against it, you’d be sea-sick. Or perhaps I was just lucky.

Steam-rollers were other early machines I remember because they were built in Grantham and displayed their horse trade-mark. The first tractor I saw was at Gillingate Station in about 1915: it was an American ‘Titan’. It collected a large crowd of farmers returning from Sleaford Market, who found many ways of saying that the farmer who’d bought it was barmy, tractors would never replace horses. This tractor happened to be put on to plough first a sixteen acre field near us. After ploughing half the acreage it broke down and was left in the middle of the field for two years. Then it was towed away, repaired and used for sawing wood. (I recall also, from early days, that when the Kirkstone Pass Inn near Ambleside gave up using horses, beer and supplies were brought up by a Foden steam wagon.)

I have been thinking more about being at school. There were about eight of us in each class, but each teacher had three classes in the room – the Infants (three to five year olds), then those from six to ten years, plus a few odd ones in Class 7 at the top. (I was in Class 7 when I left at twelve.) You went up by merit and some never got beyond Class 3. Each room had a fireplace near the master’s desk and the only ways to get in the front, near the fire, were by being a monitor or by misbehaving. Most children had a tin in their pocket and, if the master went out of the room, there was a mad rush to get some cinders in the tin. I didn’t live more than a quarter of a mile from the school, but some had to walk (no buses or bicycles) a good three miles from the Fens. We often rolled our hoops or trundles up the road to school; if one got broken, the blacksmith would pop it in the forge till it was red-hot, and join the break.

Three of the schoolmasters remain in my mind. The first was an older man, and he retired when I had been in the school about five years. It was a church school, and his pay was low. He was engaged to teach and play the organ in the church on Sundays.

The next one was young. He was very good, and a sportsman, playing football and cricket. I remember (as children do) that he once came to see an aunt of mine who was visiting us, and he gave me twopence to go to bed. In 1914, naturally, he went into the army.

The one after him was rather peculiar, and we felt very sorry for him. He talked to himself, and had a drink problem, and I think he left quite soon.

Nobody stayed away from school because of a cold; and at home nobody bothered much either. We were just given a dose of rhubarb and sweet nitre. In any case we had a dose of Epsom salts every Saturday morning, except that on every fourth Saturday it was brimstone and treacle. Sprains were treated by mother rubbing with a mixture of white oils that she would make up herself. It was also used for the horses.

It seems strange now how seldom we were ill, seeing that we were wet through most days during winter, having no rubber boots or mackintoshes. Our boots were sturdy boots of leather, with two rows of nails round the rim of the sole and four down the centre. We left them by the fire at night, and it was a struggle to get them on in the morning. I remember too, that when we started school again after the harvest, in which all the boys had been working, we would have on new corduroy breeches, and the smell was awful, especially from the very dark brown corduroy.

I never remember any of us ever thinking of breaking anything or doing any damage. But we did go birds-nesting always leaving some eggs in the nest, (water hens eggs and wild ducks’ eggs were delicious.) Also, we knew which of the orchards were the best for early pears or plums; and at harvest time we would go into neighbouring orchards and pinch apples. I had an idea that if I was on the look-out for anyone coming, it was not stealing!

Much of what I have been looking back on applies to the broad arable lands of East Anglia rather than to the stock-farming of the north-west. But there are many aspects of farming and country life in the earlier part of the century which were common to both.

Published in Mourholme Magazines Issue 13 1990 and Issue 14 1990