I’m Stan Harris, I was born in the year 1931and I’ve lived in North Dorset all my life.

JOE MURPHY

My name is Joe Murphy, I was born in 1985 and I’m 14 and I’ve lived in Dorset for five years.

Stan

In my lifetime, farming has changed tremendously. A lot of people think it’s for the better because there’s probably not as much hard manual graft to do, but I don’t think it is better really because there was so much more fun in my young days in farming. There were so many more people involved and if you had five or six chaps working together they made their own fun, especially after they’d had a drop of cider haymaking.

Joe

I live in a town but it is surrounded by fields. There’s the cinemas and arcades and slots and Megabowl, whereas in the country it would appear that there aren’t much like that to do.

Stan

No one nowadays is ever hungry. When you were hungry, you realise that you can’t manage without agriculture, but when there’s oceans of food about, all pre-packed, I don’t think you realise how important agriculture is.

Joe

My Mum does the shopping, she goes to supermarkets. I don’t really mind where my food comes from as long as I’ve got my salt and vinegar crisps and chocolate bars.

Joe

How much has farming changed since you started to farm?

Stan

It’s changed considerably since I was a boy in the 1930s. There was no money about to buy food and there was a lot of cheap imported food that came from all over the world — it was very cheap to import it. When the World War came in 1939, the Second Word War, and they couldn’t import the food because the U-boats, the German U-boats, would sink our ships with the food on. Also, we didn’t want to import it, we wanted to spend the money on tanks and guns etc. So we were then encouraged by the government to produce all the food we could. So that was a boon for farming right up though the 50s into the 60s. Then things started to go downhill a bit and we’re now getting much much lower prices, there’s a world surplus of food. The wool which I sold last week, the wool off the sheep, didn’t even come to enough money to pay the shearers for shearing it off. So things aren’t very good at the moment but we’ve gone right through that and we’ll hope that it soon gets better again.

Joe

So what are the major changes in farming?

Stan

Milking machines for milking the cows, as far as we’re concerned, and tractors replacing horses and men. Where there was four or five men employed, there’s now only perhaps one.

Joe

So the milking was done by hand?

Stan

The milking was done by hand. I learned to milk when I was about ten. Most children learnt between the ages of six and twelve and so we milked a couple of cows in the morning before we went to school and a couple when we came back at night. The first cow I milked I remember was an old round short-horn cow called Bessie. It took me as long to milk her as an ordinary man would have milked three cows in the time. But we’ve got an old photo here, that was before my time, of them being milked in the middle of the road, just here in the middle of the road. There was very little traffic. I don’t suppose there was one car went by here in a week. And they sat down on their stool with a bucket and milked them and just carried the milk into the dairy indoors, and made cheese of it mostly.

This field is grass, which is much the same as it’s always been. The way of harvesting it is very different. One man with a grass cutter and a baler has done this field into hailage with these black bags, put all the grass into black bags. When I started, you cut it with a machine with two horses pulling it and you then put it onto wagons and brought it into the yard and made it into a rick for the winter storage.

Joe

What’s a rick?

Stan

A rick is a big heap of grass. A whole field of hay would be put into a rick. That was a great social occasion as well really, when you did it all. A lot of people were involved and in the evenings, their wives would come down because in our area, one of the sidelines for the wives was sewing gloves. And in the evening they would come down and sit onto the chairs and sew their gloves next to the hay rick and talk and see how the men were getting on. All the children would come and ride out in the empty wagons from the yard to the field — perhaps have 20 children in a wagon.

Joe

What different crops do you grow?

Stan

We then grew a lot of mangolds.

Joe

What are mangolds?

Stan

Mangolds is a root. And swedes for the cows in the winter, we grew. And they were all pulled by hand. Nowadays for sugar-beet, which is a similar thing, there is a machine which lifts them out of the ground, cuts the tops off, cleans the dirt off and sends them away.

Joe

Was it a lot different using horses to farm the land?

Stan

Yes it was. In the early 50s it was mostly tractors and very few horses left, but often the tractors then were pulling the old horse implements, whereas nowadays they’re pulling very sophisticated modern implements.

Joe

How many horses did you have on your farm?

Stan

We had three cart-horses — Prince, Duke and Champion. The cart-horses were used for the heavy work.

Joe

What was the heavy work? What did they actually do?

Stan

All the grass cutting and the ploughing and the pulling the wagons. They pulled things like the potato-planter.

Joe

How did that work?

Stan

You sat above the wheels on a seat and you put a potato in every foot and that dropped the potato into the ground and the horse pulled it on.

Joe

Did you prefer it when it was manual, or do you prefer it now with machines?

Stan

It was harder work when it was manual, but it was more fun. There was a lot more people involved, the whole community locally was involved and it was a lot more fun, although it was very hard work.

Joe

How much has the countryside changed since the new machines have been brought in?

Stan

It’s changed quite a bit, especially since about 1950. A lot of the farms have got bigger and the hedges have got pushed out. Even around here, the field we’re in at the moment used to be two fields and the villages have changed. Where there used to be about ten people in this village milking, there’s now only three farms left and only one of them is actually milking cows.

DEREK OLD

I’m Derek and I was born in 1939.

KAY OLD

I’m Kay and born in 1938 and we’ve both lived in Dorset all our lives.

Derek

I came here in 1963, there was eight dairy farms here then and I’m the only one left now. I’ve always said I don’t know whether I’ve been the wise one or the fool.

Kay

During my childhood, when food rationing... Country people especially ate rabbits, pigeons, rooks, pheasants, but nowadays the modern housewife wouldn’t want to pick and dress a rabbit. Much easier to go to the supermarket and buy your meat.

Derek

When we were children we always used to help our mothers churn the butter, churn the milk into butter in a churn, about a gallon of cream at a time.

Joe

Was that hard work?

Derek

Very arm aching.

Kay

It could take fifteen minutes or it could take an hour depending sometimes on weather conditions, the heat... so various members of the family would take turns, turning the handle.

Derek

We didn’t have no television to watch at night then, so it was something to do.

Joe

How did you store your food before fridges and freezers?

Kay

In the winter it was no problem because the houses were always cold, no central heating. Fruit we used to make into jams, nearly every farm used to keep a few pigs. A neighbouring farmer here that used to come and kill the pig out in the yard, there were some pig stys and he’d kill it and then straight away they would have to make a small fire and put it over to singe all the hairs off. They used to bring it in here and have a pulley — and there’s a ring on there which is still there from my grandparents’ day — and pull the pig up, put it up there, and they’d slit it open and gut it, catch the blood in a bowl in the bottom and make black pudding. The pig was usually hung for about a week and then it was cut up and put into big vats and covered in salt and left for probably a few weeks to help preserve it.

Joe

Out of all these things that you’ve just told me, what was the part that you really dreaded and hated to do?

Kay

I used to hide upstairs somewhere when they killed the pig. I was only a child then. I never liked doing that. I used to be scared stiff to walk out through past it.

Stan

Come over here and we’ll drive them through. Now we’ll let them rest a minute, because they’ve come from up the village and they’ve run about a mile so they’re a bit puffed. So you mustn’t dip them when they’re blowing, like they’re puffing and panting.

Joe

Which one of these sheep will be going off to market?

Stan

There’s several. That one over there with a blue dot, a blue mark on his forehead.

Joe

When did you first go to market?

Stan

Before I was as old as you, when I was about five or six I would say. We used to take the calves to market in the back of the milk cart with the horse pulling it. The cows walked, until lorries came in — the cattle were always driven to market by two or three men, and probably they had a dog, a collie dog. The men were called drovers and they would collect up the cows from the farms round your area in the morning, and start off with two from this farm and two from the next farm and by the time they got to market, they probably had ten or a dozen cows.

Joe

Have the breeds of the animals changed over the years much?

Stan

Yes quite a lot. Because nearly all the dairy cows, the cows that were kept for milking, were dairy short-horns. Horns were a great asset if the cows were tied up in a long line in a cow stall, which they all were in those days to milk. Because with a horn, when you had a chain round its neck it couldn’t slip the chain over its head, the horns kept it in place. Nowadays horns are a nuisance because in covered yards, you get a bully cow with the horns and she can do a lot of damage to the other cows. As far as the pigs are concerned, they used to be enormous and they’re much smaller now because people don’t want the fat pork and ham like they used to.

Right Joe, I think it’s time we started dipping these now. They’ve all cooled off. We want to drive on about six or eight. Try that one.

Joe

Go on. Up.

Stan

That’s another job done. Here Nettle, come out the way. Nettle, come on. What did you think of your sheep dipping expedition then?

Joe

It was a lot of fun but still quite a lot of hard work.

Stan

Yes, hard work pushing them up the ramp. We’ve got cattle to move now, the next job... In the next day or two, we’ve got to move some cattle. That’s the next thing on the list.