Tag Archives: tractor

Pete Smith: Funeral 1951

Funeral in snow from Dog Kennel Cottage 1950

Funeral in snow from Dog Kennel Cottage 1950

I remember waiting with my Mum in the snow at the bus stop by Heal’s cart shed (on the corner of Broad Lane opposite Newclose Farm) and being very cold. No bus came along, but while we were waiting, a strange sight came into view; a tractor pulling a trailer with a coffin upon it preceded by my great grandfather Robert (Bob) May the undertaker, with his black funeral great coat and top hat. It was so cold that the tractor, from Tapnell Farm, had an old army coat thrown over the radiator to stop it freezing; a very strange sight indeed for a four year old lad to take in. The bus never did arrive due to the snow.

This was the funeral of Mrs Reader who lived at Dog Kennel Cottage up Broad Lane, on December 16th 1950. Peter Smith b 1946

Jane Phillips: Newclose Farm, Thorley, 1950s

Newclose Farm

How did I come to be milking the herd of cows at Newclose Farm?

Broad Lane to Newclose Farm buildings 2013

Broad Lane to Newclose Farm buildings 2013       Newclose Farmhouse on left, old milking parlour at end of road.

I’d spent a couple of years at a rather grand school in London, Mary Datchelors, which was famous for its singing. It’s left me with a love for classical music, but I was such a dunce!   After a couple of years in the Remove, struggling with algebra, geometry, trigonometry, Latin and French, they thought I’d better not go on.

So I came home, didn’t know what to do. ‘You’re too stupid to work in Woolworth’s,’ they told me, so they let me go to work farming.

I did three years at Cliff End at 2/6 a week. There was no keep included, but they bought cakes once a week on a Tuesday. The mice pretty soon got’em so they gave us the mousey ones, and we’d break off the mousey bits.

Do you know that little green magazine ‘The Countryman’? There was an advert in there from the UK Sponsoring Authority. You could go to a farm in France, Belgium or Holland. Well, I went off to Friesland in Holland. At Cliff farm they thought I was going off to darkest Africa – wouldn’t let me take my hoe and my 2 pronged fork that I’d saved up for and bought myself.

After a year in Holland, some time in Derbyshire and then in Devon, Ernest Heal offered me a job in charge of 30 cows at Newclose. Can you imagine how I felt?  It gave me such confidence. He left me in charge, didn’t want to know unless there was anything wrong. I was so grateful to him. He opened so much for me in life.

Newclose Farm is on the crossroads and I used to have to take the heifers up Broad Lane to Dog Kennel. What a job! They’d run like mad and there were no hedges, they’d been taken out just before I started at Newclose.
I was smarter with the calves though. I had 6 or so and I bought some halters and used to walk them up through the fields by where Holmfield Avenue is – there was just the one house there.  Mind you, I’d be walking them over the crossroads and a bus would come, and the calves would be tying themselves up.

Picking up sheaves with working horses

Picking up sheaves with working horses

Char Courtney and Shep Hillier worked there too. Char was in charge of the tractor and the horse –  Ernest Heal had the last working horse on the Island. Char was supposed to know the names of all the cows and all about them; which ones needed a stone on the machine when they were being milked and so on. Did he hell! He knew all the horses at the bookies!

One day he was driving the tractor, getting the kale from a field up Broad Lane. The tractor couldn’t get up the slope but the old horse could.

I worked there for about 3 or 4 years till 1956. I didn’t live there, I had a room at The Old House in Yarmouth with a Mrs Weston – £7 a week it cost me, the same as I earned, so Ernest Heal had to make my money up a bit, because I smoked too in those days. In the summer I lived in a sort of shed at the end of Wheatsheaf Lane.

Den ( Dennis Phillips from Compton farm))  and I were courting, while I was at Newclose.   I remember sitting in a ditch at the side of the farm chatting with the old roadmen. One of them had a wooden leg so I used to help him chuck up the sweepings into the cart. A lorry went by, ‘Oh look, it’s a Dennis!’ I said and didn’t they tease me!

We did have our own names for places. We called the cross roads ‘Flat Rat cross roads’…

When I left to get married, Ernest Heal gave me several bits of silver plate which must have been in his family. One is a real beauty, a simple epergne, which looks lovely with fruit piled up.
Jane Phillips nee Alder b 1932

Ron Wallis: 1940s Free Time

My out of school hours were all taken up with helping Dad with the farm, playing around the farm buildings, so I never did mix with those Yarmouth chaps.  I knew them well enough.  I had some very good friends.  The radio specialist down at Yarmouth – Westons – Reggie Weston, the son, was probably my best friend at Yarmouth School, and the other one who was a very good friend is Roger Smith, Bill Smith was his dad and he was a Yarmouth postman and lived in a little cottage just off St James’s Street.

 I was needed  back at home helping with the milking, and in summer I spent quite a lot of hours driving the tractor.  It took me back last weekend when I went to watch the ploughing match.  From the age of nine I was driving a tractor.  To start it, you had to wind it up, make sure you didn’t have your hand round the back.  Ron Wallis b 1935