We were deeply saddened by the passing of Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September 2022. We give thanks for her remarkable life of service to the Nation and the Commonwealth.
God save the King.
HISTORY SOCIETY NEWS
Speaker Event
Wednesday 23 November 2022. “From voices to pages – Oral history captured” a talk by Stephen Pedrick about recorded memories of life in the South Hams. 7pm at Salcombe Rugby Club, Twomeads, Camperdown Road, TQ8 8AX. Free entry for members, £4.00 for non-members.
Stephen is the author of three excellent books about recollections of life in the South Hams: “A Century of Memories” (2009), “Daishels and Figgy Duff” (2012), and “Brown Bods and The Scissor Grinder” (2021), on sale at Salter’s Bookshelf in Salcombe and the Harbour Bookshop in Kingsbridge.
Coming soon! “A History of Salcombe and Its Surroundings”
A new book by Salcombe Maritime Museum curator and Salcombe History Society research coordinator and archivist, Roger Barrett, is due to be published by the Maritime Museum at the end of October. With 167 pages and 180 illustrations, the book provides a comprehensive account of Salcombe’s history from the earliest times to the present day.
Once a notorious haunt of pirates and smugglers, Salcombe became famous in the 1800s for its clipper fruit schooners. When competition from steamships led to the end of wooden shipbuilding in the 1880s the town began its transition into the yachting and tourist centre it is today. These and other aspects of local history, such as the defence of Fort Charles in the English Civil War, the French Wars from 1793 to 1815, the 1916 Salcombe Lifeboat Disaster, the German bombing raids between 1940-43 and the U.S. Navy in Salcombe 1943-5, are examined in detail.
The book also traces the social and economic development of the town and its surroundings in the inter-war and post-war years with sections on tourism and its impact on community life, on local trades such as boatbuilding and fishing and on the work of the lifeboat and coastguard services.
It is the sixth local history book by Roger Barrett and follows his highly acclaimed “Salcombe, Schooner Port”, a maritime history of Salcombe in the 19th century, which won the Devon History Society’s W G Hoskins prize in 2018.
Due for release on Friday 4 November 2022, the book will be on sale at Salter’s Bookshelf in Salcombe, Ashby’s of Salcombe, and the Harbour Bookshop in Kingsbridge. It can be pre-ordered by emailing info@salcombemuseum.org.uk. The price is £12.99 plus £3.50 post and packing.
An ideal Christmas present for anyone who loves Salcombe!
Vintage Rally
The Society hosted a stall at the ever popular summer Vintage Rally in mid-August at Sorley Cross, which was a great success. Thank you to everyone who dropped by our stall for a chat.
History Society 2023 Calendar
On sale now. Past & present photos of the Salcombe area. £6.00 from Ashby’s of Salcombe, Bonningtons Salcombe, Kingsbridge & Salcombe Gazette, Salcombe Maritime Museum, The Harbour Bookshop Kingsbridge, or £8.00 including UK postage from our website shop at salcombehistorysociety.co.uk.
Another excellent Christmas present!
HARVEST AT MOTHERHILL FARM by Richard Weymouth
Like most jobs in the “good old days” harvest in the 1930’s at Motherhill Farm was very labour intensive, the following 30 years arguably saw the biggest transition in manpower requirements.
Usually by Kingsbridge Fair-Week in late July farmers were getting itchy feet about starting the harvest. But before it could begin the overgrown corn-field hedges had to be tidied up and trimmed back with “paring hooks” (a form of bill hook used to cut grass and light twigs), the cuttings were later swept up and would form the base of the corn ricks buffering the crop from the damp ground.
Bill Parsons from Malborough was working for Fred Weymouth (my grandfather) at the time and would ride aboard the Deering binder pulled by three horses as it either cut spring-sown barley, wheat or oats, bundling it and forming sheaves held together with string. Shortly after this they had to be “stitched” or stood up in groups of nine sheaves with a suitable gap to let the air blow through them to ripen off the straw.
Bill Parsons operating the binder with a team of three horses, a young Alan Weymouth can be seen running along side (late 1930’s).
Within a week to 10 days the sheaves would then be pitched with forks onto horse-drawn wagons and transported, or “dreyed”, to another field to be stacked in ricks for storage until the winter months when Jack Baker, a local threshing contractor from Kingsbridge, would arrive with his steam engine, thresher and trusser (early type of baler) to spend a couple days threshing out the grain and produce some bedding straw for the animals. Limited storage space in the farm buildings meant that he would often visit three or four times before spring.
On the rick, left to right – Fred Hatch, Jack “Bootlace” Rundle and Dick Wood.
On top the thresher, left to right – Alan Weymouth and Bill Prowse.
On the ground, left to right – Fred Putt, Albert Parsons, Bill Steer and Harold Prowse.
The Field Marshall tractor and Thresher belonged to Derek Stidston.
A day of threshing would usually start around 6am with the operator lighting up the engine’s boiler then coming into the kitchen for some breakfast while it got a head of steam. The operation often needed half a dozen men most would come from neighbouring farms to help each other out and to keep it all going, from pitching sheaves from the rick to the top of the thresher, to cutting the strings and feeding them in to the machine heads first, then sacking off the grain in to 1 ½ cwt (75kg) sacks and also to load away the bales of straw.Just prior to World War Two the first tractor arrived at Motherhill, a new Fordson Standard was purchased from Oke Bros of Kingsbridge, and after some minor modifications to the binder it was then towed by the Fordson rather than the horses, usually with Fred at the wheel and Bill on the binder.
As the Second World War raged on the contractors were asked not to travel so far which meant that Jack Baker had to stay closer to home, Fred enlisted the help of Derek Stidston from Bolberry who also had a similar threshing outfit only powered by a Field Marshall single cylinder diesel tractor instead of a steam engine.
In the late 40’s the early combine harvesters appeared on the market which significantly changed the way cereals were harvested, Derek decided to a Massey Ferguson 726 combine in the mid 1950s which meant our binder was then consigned to a corner of a field and also the threshing gangs became a thing of the past.
The early models were known as “Bagger Combines” because of the onboard bagging mechanism which discharging the grain into the 1 ½ cwt (75kg) sacks, effectively it was a two man operation as one steered the machine whilst the second the other controlled the filling of the sacks, tied them and then slid them down a chute on the left side of the machine landing on the ground only to be picked up from the field later.
Left to right – Alan Weymouth, Jack Smith, Fred Weymouth, Albert Parsons, Jack “Bootlace” Rundle, Gerald Weymouth, Derek Stidston, Fred Hatch and Fred Putt.
Impressed with the technology, Alan Weymouth (my father) decided to buy an identical machine in the late 1950s from George Ellis of Trenwell Farm, South Milton, it meant he was no longer reliant on a contractor and it offered him the chance to provide his own contracting service to other farmers around the Malborough area.Times moved on and the tedious task of picking up the sacks of corn from the fields grew out of fashion thanks to the development of the “Tanker Combines” which allowed the grain to be discharged directly into the trailers. Keeping up with the trend Alan bought his next combine in 1965, a Massey Ferguson 780 Special with 8ft cut and a 6 cylinder petrol/TVO engine a farm sale at Diptford and the process at Motherhill took another step forward.
Combining with the Massey bagger combine, Alan Weymouth at the wheel and Bill Parsons managing the grain sacks.
We would be hard pressed to think of any downside to this progress.
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