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Growing Up In Feltwell in the 1950s & 60s – Part – 21. The Harvest
In the summer of 1965 Jim and twin brother Richard had obtained summer holiday employment at two adjacent farms in Bell Street: Jim with Herbie and “Aunt Edi” Cock (brother and sister) at Hall Farm and Richard at Home Farm opposite, with brothers Eric and Sammy Rice and sister Olive. Shortly after Jim had started pre-harvest preparations, he told me there was another vacancy at Hall Farm if I was interested. I was. It could be quite hard work dragging bales of straw around, especially if their weight was greatly increased by weeds, but it was good not to be on piece work. And Herbie was not a difficult boss and his two full-time men seemed to run the farm for him. Aunt Edi controlled the finances: neither she nor brother Herbie ever married. Herbie was scared – well, actually terrified – of thunder and if he ever got under the feet of the men, all they had to say was: “You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a bit of thunder later – it’s beginning to gleam like it...” and Herbie would quietly slip away from the fields down the Old Brandon Road muttering that he was just popping back to the farm in case a Favor Parker lorry was waiting to be loaded. This was a source of some amusement to us lads but having an arachnophobic (fear of spiders) son and knowing of a top footballer who is one, I know phobias are no laughing matter.
Both were mixed farms – ie arable with a few beef cattle. If it was too wet to cut then we had little else to do – although the elderly Georgie did get the equivalent of a Blue Plaque with a scrawled inscription on the cattle shed wall, commemorating his achieving 40 ‘Hearts of Oak’ roll-ups in a single day. I expect it is still there. Richard recalls that the Rices had a small cattle shed behind the farmhouse and once he had to paint (ie whitewash) its interior – cobwebs and all! The Rices also had grain storage in the old cinema on the old ‘Methwold’ aerodrome. Eric would back a trailer up and tip it for an auger to fill 1 cwt (50 kg) sacks for collection by Favor Parker. They also had land at Poppylot and Richard recalls a cattle drive back to the farm through the High Street, the men on bicycles with a stick across the handlebars in case the animals needed any persuasion.
That year we had an old, trailed Claas Combine – ie one pulled by a tractor. A Combine “combines” the processes of cutting, threshing and winnowing - which once were all done by hand. Winnowing simply means blowing the chaff away from the separated grain. The threshing involved the grain heads passing over large sieves which blocked easily with the barley “awns” or “harns” - the sharp needle like stems at the top of the grain pod, removed in the threshing process. Our first morning job then was to lower ourselves inside the Combine and remove these harns, by kneeling on the hard, sharp, steel sieves which dug into our flesh even with several sacks spread out on top of them. While we did this, whoever was greasing the nipples would be slowly turning the large pulley wheels which in turn moved the large straw drawing “claws” inside the Combine, up and down around us and the sieves to and fro. All this could take some 20 minutes before breakfast and we were only too aware what might happen if the combine was started while we were inside there!
The man on a trailed Combine was required to fill and tie 1cwt (50kg) corn sacks from the machine’s holding tank whilst in motion. These were placed onto a side chute, then manhandled onto a trailer at a stopping point and taken to the farm to await the feed merchant’s lorry. Next year, we had a self-propelled Combine (second hand and still “cabless”) which shot the grain into a specially made tank on a stationary 2-wheeled trailer. The corn was bagged from that. Sacks could then be pulled more easily onto a larger 4-wheeler alongside.
We were involved with 3 main crops: oats, barley and wheat which were harvested in that order. The oats were purely for feed for the beef cattle kept at Hall Farm. About 10 acres were grown and using an old Binder, were cut first. I think we were the last farm in the village to use one: Combines were now commonplace and we used the Binder for cutting only the oats. It was pulled by Hall Farm’s small International tractor: wooden sails stroked the stems onto the cutting knife so that they fell onto a conveyor belt to be tied up into sheaves and deposited on the cut stubble. Our job then was to “shook” or “shock” them up into stands of 6 or 8 to dry over the next month or so. A picturesque scene was thus created, much like those scenes of the 19th century when corn was cut by hand scythes and the sheaves tied by hand. Once all the barley and wheat had been harvested, the oat “shooks” were dismantled, their sheaves cut free and the grain stems fed by hand onto the Combine’s belt (with the sails lifted of course) so the oats could then be threshed within the Combine’s drum, just as the barley and wheat had been.
But the barley harns and dust posed another problem in 1966. The mesh guard protecting the Combine’s radiator would often become blocked with the dust and the radiator frequently boiled over. Local motor engineer Mike pointed out that the fan, which was meant to cool the engine was actually sucking harns and dust on to the mesh, thus blocking the airflow and causing the engine to overheat. Solution? Reverse the fan so that it blew air and thus the harns and dust, away from the mesh. It worked – for a very short time. The mesh no longer blocked but the engine was no longer cooled. Luckily it was a Perkins diesel engine so when it suddenly burst into flames, it did not explode but the danger from a Combine on fire in the middle of a dry straw field was very real. Fortuitously, Ken the driver was approaching us as we waited with the trailer and the grain holding tank, just as the fire took hold behind him and we were able to alert him to the danger and he wasted no time beating it out with a sack. We went home early that day leaving the blackened combine where it had stopped. But after a visit from the Claas service engineer from Bury, it was working again the next afternoon.
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