JOHN WARREN OF HIGHER MOUNT HOUSE, MELPLASH, TALKING TO ALASTAIR WHEELER ON 12TH OCTOBER, 2021.
LESLEY CROCOMBE ALSO PRESENT
TRANSCRIBED BY SALLY WAKEFIELD OCTOBER 2021
AW – Alistair Wheeler
LC = Lesley Crocombe
JW = John Warren
AW So, Higher Mount House. Is this an historic farm building or…………….
JW This is in a way, a Dorset Long House which was a farmstead. When people earned a living with, perhaps, 10 or 12 acres of land. Most people would milk a cow. Excess milk would be turned into butter and cheese, sold to the locals, liquid milk, cheese and butter ‘cos really that’s the only method of preservation pre refrigeration, larders and things like that. And it sustained the whole family. And, of course, we’ve still got exactly the same fields here, they’re all 3 acres and 1 acre, if people don’t fully understand, is about the size of a football pitch. About 70 yards by 70 yards. So 3- acre paddocks – and we’ve got 4 or 5 of them – and the hedges were not bulldozed out and I’ve been a conservationist all my life because one of my sadnesses through my life is seeing Mother Nature being desecrated by human activity. And there’s no doubt about it, Mother Nature’s being killed in the last 60 or 70 years since the war and we’re now right up against it. Time for action.
AW So how long have you had the responsibility for these fields?
JW This is a family base. And it goes back to about, we think, 1750 because that clock, my Grandfather Clock, was manufactured or assembled in Beaminster when Mr……. (the butcher Tett is now) by Harry Peach, and Harry Peach was a long case assembler and we believe that the works were brought in from facilities in Birmingham – probably came in horse and cart – ‘cos this predates any railways. Well at the same time there was a Mr. Brown in Bridport making barometers, or assembling barometers. So this is a pair which people had in their homes. Time wasn’t important until the railways arrived but it was one of these……………… if you could afford it……………….. “must have” super gadgets. You had to have a room high enough to put it in anyway and you had to remember to wind it up once a week.
AW So your family acquired the barometer and the Grandfather Clock………………….?
JW We believe that the Harry Peach clock, from the research we’ve done, cost about £15. Well, when you bear in mind in 17………… it’s about 225 years old…………….. when you think that people………………….. well it was difficult to earn £1 a week, if that, so it was only for those who probably had a business and, of course, our business was agriculture and maybe they had a shilling or two to spare. But they had this clock and it’s been around all over the place but this is its home. And, of course, initially, the problem was that people didn’t have central heated homes and it was flagstone floors, everything was damp and dank, and they used to rot out. If it wasn’t that, the woodworm got them. So many a clock is reduced in height purely because the bottom of it’s rotted away. But this one is OK. It was my grandfather’s and it all passed down the line.
[00:03:59]
AW So did your grandfather live here, in this…………………..?
JW Yes. Not for long because – well that’s another story that – he was part of the Netherbury business.
AW The what business?
JW Netherbury. Cider maker and farmer. Very successful at that. It was a lot to do I can tell you. So, this is base camp and in about 1875 I think it was about then, when we had the first Census in this country and, checking back through all that I could see what was going on as far as the family was concerned. Very interesting. It was Great, Great Uncle Sydney, he was here and he had about 3 of the 3 acre plots in those days and the house was all thatched.
AW And it was called Higher Mount Farm in those days?
JW No, I think just Mount, there was no other buildings here you see. This area of Melplash is flat as a pancake so it’s known as the Mount. That’s it. All the way round. So, he had several sons and daughters but he kept accurate records which we still have of the prices he got – and he grew every vegetable imaginable – and sold it in Bridport market and Dorchester market. And they used to hire horses to haul the wagons up over the downs at Askerswell because they were loaded – on the way back of course they were empty – and by that time most people were “three sheets to the wind” because they’d been drinking in Dorchester all day. So the horses came back and everybody went to sleep for a couple of days. (Laughter). So, the point was he was growing all the modern vegetables. He had an orchard, all the vegetables imaginable in season, and it’s wonderful to see the records of, and he writes, of ‘What I made at Mount.’ (? unclear) And his income, this is 1875-ish was £35 a year and that was a considerable amount of money. No doubt about that. I don’t say it was profit but it’s all written in lovely Victorian handwriting. We’ve still got the ledgers here today and I thought it was just truly remarkable that the family kept all these bits and bobs. My son has it all now because we have a great big deed box because we’ve got the deeds of all this. They’re quite amazing bits of information.
AW That would be amazing documents.
JW They are, all tied up in pink ribbons and goodness what, and great red stamps. (Laughter) And it’s quite interesting actually because all the early deeds of property, there’s always an Entitlement involving the church. The tithes and the church were all powerful. They kept their finger on every cash pot they could. Any way to earn a bob. And this is why the church had all the money and bought a vast amount of land, Church Commissioners are worth a fortune. They’ve got difficulties at the moment but anyway, that’s it.
AW So when did you come into the picture?
[00:07:01]
JW Oh well, you just hang on. (Laughter) So, everything was fine, and various members of the family went off and took on farms. They had farms at Netherbury, they had farms at Waytown. We had land all over the place. And they were all dairy farmers because everybody………………………..
AW So they were dairy farmers?
JW Yes, because what we found, once…………………… You see life changed dramatically in 1845 to 1855 when the railways were built. And it definitely revolutionised transport. That was the first big move because, up to that point, people didn’t go anywhere at all apart from they either had two choices, either on foot or luckily if you had a horse. But here we had a pony house and a cart so we had mobility you see, we could take the goods to town. You could actually drive in and drive back again but very few people had that. There were no vehicles and the roads were not tarmaced. life was tough, it really was, and we’ve still got the well out here where you had to go and get the water.
AW Do you still use it?
JW No. But what was interesting, I’ll just digress for a second or two. I had a phone call a few years ago from the Environmental Agency in Blandford saying did I use the water from my well. I said yes and they asked how much? I said ‘Well that depends how my cow is feeling.’ ‘What?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Bluebell drinks about 6 gallons a day and’ I said, ‘my bucket holds 3 so that’s two bucketfuls I’ve got to drag up from the well, take it to her, give her a drink and come back for breakfast. Are you going to charge me for using the water to feed my Bluebell?’ This lady on the phone was absolutely stunned. It’s actually true. They wanted to tax my well. I said ‘I refuse, point blank’. They have records of wells all over the place you see. Most of them have been filled in but this one’s still active and you could look right down the bottom and it’s still got the winding device. I’ve still got the well bucket. Most people have never seen a well bucket. They’re specially shaped so they tip over when they hit the water. Ordinary bucket floats around. You can’t get any water in it. A well bucket’s different and it’s out there now.
So…………………….. transportation. Once the railways arrived…….1857 the railway arrived from Maiden Newton to Bridport. It was 11 1/4 miles – I read the book many times – and it cost the princely sum of £65,000 which was put up by shareholders in Bridport led by various solicitors. They couldn’t afford to have any trains on it so they got Great Western to provide the locomotives and the rolling stock and Bridport Station was actually built for £1,200. the whole lot, goods yard and all. Not bad really is it? But for the first time people would rise early in the morning, you could go to Bridport, jump on the train at 6 o’clock and you’d get to Paddington by 11 o’clock. You had a few hours in London, get on another train and back to Bridport by 7.30 in the evening. All for the princely stum of a “quid” (£1).
If you could afford the £1 which was, of course, a fortune in 1857 – 1858. But that changed everything. Because then it allowed companies to develop, to move their goods around which of course, hauling things around in Dorset with all our steep hills and untarmaced roads was very difficult. No transportation at all. It was really, really good and for the first time people had freedom of movement if they could afford it. They could go places, come back again.
AW And that was when the farms turned to producing milk and dairy?
[00:10:44]
JW Yes. Well, what actually happened was – if we go on a little bit further – population began to increase because people’s life expectancy increased. We had improvements in medicines – the biggest improvement of course was during the war which I shall start in a moment when, thanks to the Americans, the first time in our lives they introduced a drug called Penicillin which was the biggest lifesaver we’d ever come across. We didn’t have any antibiotics up to that time but they were losing, through injury not definitely killed, many soldiers died of the side effects of injury due to more infections. It’s a bit like a modern day Florence Nightingale really. I mean she realised even in Instanbul, or wherever they were fighting, down at the Crimea, if you washed your hands and kept things clean it reduced the amount of infections. That’s Florence for you.
So, once the…………. let’s get into the war scene now. My earliest recollections, because I was born just before the war. September in 1939 was the start of the war. It was quite quiet for a while – obviously I don’t remember any of this but by the time……………
AW So when were you actually born?
JW 15/03/1939. 15th March, 1939. About six months before the war started in the September. But my earliest recollections…………….
AW What part of……………………… what part of a…………… several brothers and sisters here? Was it here you were born?
JW No I was born in Netherbury. I will now fill in the gaps that are here. What happened was the family unit stayed here until 1912. Now in those days there was an old saying that ‘If a hare crossed the road there’d be fire in a week’. Houses were at great risk because of thatch and unswept chimneys and candles and paraffin. It was really, I mean an awful lot of houses got burnt down. I’ve seen houses burnt end to end down in Netherbury. It is really wow! Nothing you can do about it. When the roofs collapse and you lose all your furniture, you’re destitute. You’ve got nothing. Dreadful.
In 1912 we had a lean-to here and, of course, they had their washhouse. This house had two. Well, they overstoked the boiler, sparks came out the top allegedly, set fire to the thatch and the whole lot was burnt to the ground. End to end. And we know that because an old aunty who had gone to Mapperton – she was on a Coatley farm on the Mapperton Estate – she was in charge – Great Aunt Mary. And she had it covered with insurance and the entire house was rebuilt for £300 including, by this time, a slate roof because the trains were coming to Bridport and the Welsh slate was being moved around. You could get Somerset tiles, you could get bricks from Bothenhampton because they made them there. The ones with the holes in all round this part of the world. Beautiful bricks. So that’s why part of the house has got bricks in it and the roof’s covered in slates. They weren’t going to have thatch any more after that. It was the best thing that ever had happened. But, at the same time they raised all the levels of the ceilings up – all with 7ft. 6in. clearances. No more beating your head on ………… and all the walls are straight and square. Took all the internal walls out, rebuilt the outside, pushed it up and everything else inside full of bricks. Straight as a (?unclear). Excellent. Wonderful.
But they didn’t want to live here. Then they started a whole series of tenancies which is a disaster because tenants never care for property and, of course, they took all the little business – people keeping dogs here, people doing all sorts of strange things. But the place went from rack to ruin and that went on I suppose until my grandfather and aunty (my grandfather Harry Warren he was married and lived here for a year or two prior to all this) but his Aunt Mary you see she was contrary. He used to pay his rent in cash and she would not give him a receipt. And he said ‘Aunt Mary if you do not give me a receipt I’m going to seek somewhere else.’ And she refused to give him a receipt for cash. He said ‘Well look I can’t do that because I’ve got no proof that I’ve paid my rent. I’m off.’ Just by chance, at Highfield Farm at Netherbury, it came up for sale and it was bought by a London solicitor who had plenty of cash and he asked around the area did anyone know a qualified farmer who might like to come and take on his property and look after it for him. And somebody said ‘You want that Harry Warren up Mount, he’ll sort it out for you.’ So Harry Warren, from Mount, was invited to go to Highfield Farm at Netherbury and take on the whole shooting match. Which he did bless him, with his wife, and then he produced 3 sons, William, Robert and Hubert. Hubert being my father. Hubert Warren. HHG. And one daughter who came last. So 3 sons and a daughter and they were quite……………….
AW What was the daughter’s name?
JW Mary. Well Mary Ann…………Aunty Mary…………… they tend to keep the family names, the children’s names. Well they used to. They don’t do it now, call them all sorts of weird and wonderful things. That’s life isn’t it. Now, my grandfather he was extremely business orientated and he had a dairy farm as well as, but he could see that there was money to be made growing apples and making cider. So when my father was about 19 he was sent off to a facility in Bristol called Long Ashton, which was a research station, for cider production to understand and learn the science of cider making. Which he did. And he was very good at it. There’s no doubt about it. So my grandfather, if you like, was the marketeer – he’d go out and sell all the stuff – and my father was producing the goods back home.
Now, at the same time, in about the 1930s they set up the Bridport Electric Light Company and for the first time they took power from Bridport up the valley, through Netherbury, to Beaminster. So we had 11,000 volt electricity supply and it’s still here to this day supplying two or three parishes. And up at the other end in Beaminster of course you had families like the Buglers. and Frances Bugler was a first-class engineer and he started the first tractor business in Beaminster along with Mr. Newman who was a brilliant plumber and had the Newmans the plumbing business. That doesn’t exist any more but Buglers, bless them, still go. My grandfather and Frances were great chums and Frances being the engineer came to Netherbury and said ‘Look, I’m going to design a cider making kit for you and what we want is some power. We don’t want Single Phase, we want Three Phase, so you could have it if you wanted to. Bridport Electric Company would provide you with Three Phase electricity where you could have smaller motors and lots of power, no limitation to what you could do. So they set up a cider mill, they set up a press, they had the pumping equipment – all sorts of things they did.
[00:18:35]
AW Where was that?
JW At Highfield Farm. Which is dead opposite the old Star Inn at Netherbury. Right dead opposite, that’s Highfield Farm. Anyway, having had the tenancy from this London solicitor, believe it or not within a few years, and this is really what cemented the deal, this London soliictor lost a fortune playing in the London casinos. He lost his shirt. So the next thing was my grandfather was offered the whole lot. Well that was some thing to take on but he had a good deal. So he bought the whole lot and took out a mortgage which was a very brave thing to do when you had 4 family, not a lot of income but he could see that there was a future to be made. So from there on – this is where he invested more money – and he started planting orchards and all the apple trees that were planted in Netherbury were grown by a company in Chard called Jarmans and they produced cider standard trees. In those days you see they would let the trees grow up about 7 or 8 feet tall, and have the branches above, and the cattle and sheep used to graze the grass below because there were no mechanical means of cutting grass like we’ve got today. And if there was a thistle you went out with your scythe and you cut it off. People don’t realise that if you’ve got a growing thistle animals wont eat them but if you cut if off, and it dries in the sun, they will. As simple as that. That’s the way to get rid of a thistle, seeds and all. Put it through a cow. All these lovely, simple tasks work, you don’t have to spray anything but there we are.
So all this……….. eventually of course, the apples…………….. he was buying apples from all round the place. Now Hinknowle, here in Melplash, is the basis of the Best family and the Best family were naval officers. Admiral Best was brilliant and he had about 150 acres and he was also interested in apple production as was his son Rupert who we’ve just lost. Rupert. Unfortunately. Because he’s got, had, a vast amount of orchards here where he was growing apples on contract to Bulmers. But in the last two or three years sadly the market for cider has slumped. They don’t want the types of apples that they’re growing. So these producers of apples who are on a 30 year contract have suddenly had the mat pulled from underneath them. ‘We don’t want your apples anymore’ says Mr. Big Bulmer. ‘What are we going to do?’ ‘Tough. Don’t come to us for any money.’
AW So just the last few years that’s happened?
JW Yes, it’s all changing. Big business is cruel just like you’ve seen with the dairy farmers – I’ll come on to that in a minute – and every farmer round here milked a cow, sat on a stool, and the milk van, the lorry, came round and took it off to Beaminster milk factory which was a great source of employment. Also, in Beaminster, you had a big builder called Mr. Bailey who employed 70 people, carpenters, masons, all the skills you wanted. And then, in order to haul things around, Perry & Perry was a beautiful haulage company. They had these 3 and 5 ton trucks and lots and lots of people worked for them so there were these 3 companies, or 4 companies, based in Beaminster. You had Newmans (plumbers), Buglers (engineers), the milk factory doing all sorts of good things, Perry hauling all the gravel, it was full employment everywhere. And Baileys doing all the repairs and buildings. Couldn’t go wrong But everybody worked for these 4 or 5 companies. All completely self contained in Beaminster. And, of course, Beaminster itself thrived. All the shops and people selling things. We had, at one stage, 4 or 5 butchers in Beaminster and now there’s only one. Sam Gibbs, he was a prize butcher in Beaminster. He used to go and buy cattle and the slaughterhouse in Beaminster. Mr. Lewis he was another one. Amazing. Lots went on.
So, try and keep this story in some sort of context. This apple production went ahead and my father and my grandfather were highly successful and they used to have a show in London every year called a Brewer’s Exhibition at Wembley. So samples of cider were sent in casks – like this one here look
AW So you’ve still got a litle cask.
JW Yes, it’s got my grandfather’s name burnt in the end – H.E.R.W – that’s seen a few summers I can tell you. That little chap carries about 4 gallon and is known as a Firkin. It was those little barrels that would be sent on the rail to London and sampled to see if they were good for a prize. And they won prizes galore at the exhibition in London. And the next thing they were supplying cider to the Houses of Parliament and all the country gentlemen. It was good business. My father always said if you could produce and grow the product, manufacture the next stage and turn it into cider and then sell it you were in complete control of the profitability of the enterprise. Many people, of course, had to rely on people buying things from them. Once you have to rely on that you’re in a difficult situation because, if you are not careful, you can be picked off and that’s sadly what big business does today. It’s cruel. They just screw everybody down to almost dead loss. You can’t go on like that really. Eventually, of course, we’re all……………. this is through to 1930s, here we’ve got electricity, we’ve got the energy to do the cider making, all highly mechanised. Bottle fillers, and goodness knows what, and carbonation that was putting the fizz in it, automatic corkers, wires, labels, everything. And the product was known as Linden Lea. Now this goes back to the Dorset poet who sits on top of the plinth in Dorchester if you’ve ever noticed him. Have you noticed him as you go up the hill? Into Dorchester from Maiden Newton?
AW I’ve seen the statue.
LC Let other folk make money faster…………
JW Who is he?
AW I’ve no idea.
JW Ah, you’d best find out. (Transcriber’s Note: This is William Barnes)
AW Go on, tell me.
JW I’ll come to that, even I’ve forgotten at the moment.
LC I can sing the song.
JW Yes, he wrote Linden Lea which is sung. It’s a poem. it’s sung to the Londonderry Air. It’s a really lovely tune. You know the Irish Londonderry Air (Mr. Warren sings a little). Because, my grandfather also knew Cecil Sharp. Now he was a brilliant man who went round this part of the world collecting all the details of all the local songsters. It was a brilliant collection and they used to have a programme on BBC in those days called Down your Way. And, this was just after the war actually, and they came with all the recording instruments to Netherbury and did interviews and we had a very famous agriculturist in Dorset called Ralph Whiteman who lived at Piddletrenthide who you may or may not have heard of. And he was a broadcaster and he knew everybody in Dorset so he’d bring the camera, cameras and recording vans and they did………… it was records………. like you put on a record player. And they set all this up with a recording van and did all the interviews. Yes, I was in on that. I thought it was brilliant. And you could turn on the radio and listen to yourself. That was something different.
[00:27:06]
AW What were they interviewing people for back then?
JW Country lives
AW Country life and the folk songs because he was a collector of folk songs wasn’t he?
JW Yes, correct. So my grandfather had contacts in all directions. Of course you didn’t realise this when you were sort of 10 or 12. You just thought ‘my grandad’s a pretty good chap.’ He also had vehicles you see. He’d go off to Tilleys in Dorchester and he’d come back, about every 2 years, with a brand new vehicle which was fantastic. He had deals going on because he had to deliver this stuff all over the place. Austin 7 vans were the favourites to start with. They were green ones, pile things in the back. You couldn’t go up the hills at Beaminster – you couldn’t go up Whitesheet – because it just didn’t have that power. Especially with a load in the back. You had to go up to the tunnel and across the back. Going down hill was crazy because there was no brakes. It’s all fun. But there was very little traffic that was the thing.
[00:28:08]
So, this went on into the 1930s and then, sadly, of course we reached the situation where the country looked as if it was going to go to war and then things really did change. Because farming up through the period between 1914-18 and 1939 was total austerity. There was no money anywhere. You couldn’t get a shilling a gallon for milk, you couldn’t give it away. It was really desperate times. People could hardly have anything to eat let alone anything to wear or keep warm. It was dreadful. It was tough, there’s no doubt about that. There was no form of any insurances, no pension schemes, no medical help, people were petrified to go to the doctor because it would cost probably about 2s. (a Florin) or Half-a-Crown to see a doctor. People couldn’t afford it. And the average age of death was probably between 40 and 45. It was dreadful. It was mainly due to Tuberculosis and Pneumonia. As I said earlier once we moved into the war era, and the whole country was put on a war footing, the best thing ever happened then was that the government set up the Agriculture departments and they did a census in 1941. They went to every farm in the country and they did an entire census of all the staff, all the animals and told them exactly what they had to grow. And they elected a local farmer of reasonable repute to keep an eye on all his neighbours and if they didn’t behave themselves, and do what they were told, they’d be kicked out. And of course my father became No. 1 in the parish to keep an eye on everybody else again with Master Bowditch from Bowood who was another first class farmer to look over the hedge to see what people were doing. Now, brilliant, there’s no doubt about that.
AW Why was that brilliant?
JW Because they could guarantee that we could produce the food we wanted to feed our nation because by this time the submarines were sinking vessels by the dozen out in the North Atlantic and there was nothing we could do about it. Hitler had about 2 dozen submarines out there firing torpedoes into everything that came across this great gap in the Atlantic. And we were beaten hands down and that’s what he intended to do. Starve us. Get rid of them. He could have done but we had better technololgy – eventually – but it took time. But thousands of boys were killed, millions of tons of kit were lost and everybody went pretty hungry. War rations were severe you know. It was OK for us in the countryside because we produced milk, butter, we had pigs, we had chickens, we had all sorts of things but if you lived in a town you had a very hard existence. No doubt about that.
AW So there was a distinction between around here and in the towns?
JW Yes, definitely. You wouldn’t realise a war was on. And when you think you’re out in your own garden or – our garden became sort of half an acre patch of orchard because we grew carrots, we grew parsnips, all the seasonal food we were used to, the whole lot was grown because we could sell it. We had – there were millions of rabbits everywhere as well so everyone went rabbiting. We could come out and catch rabbits and we could get 2s. 6d. each for a rabbit so we trained whippets and we got our local garage at Netherbury, Kenneth Dowell (?unclear), he also ran the pub called The Brandon, he had access to a battery charger and we could then get a battery with a headlamp off an old car and go out lamping at night with a whippet and catch as many rabbits as you could carry. Off to Salway Ash to the poultry dealer and meat dealer up there, 2s.6d. a rabbit, which carted them off to London. It was the rabbits that fed London, all these rabbits went to London. They’d skin them, they made gloves and scarves, and people keep warm with a rabbit skin. It was amazing. Mole skins – you could go and catch moles. Everybody wanted that. You know what they use moleskins for? Plumbers use them for doing joints and solder. It’s an insulator and it has a nice smooth finish and that’s what you use, a moleskin. Clever isn’t it. There’s so much to talk about I could go on for days.
AW So it was the government during the war told people what to grow. And it was vegetables mainly by the sound of it?
JW All that was needed to support life. And that was meat and vegetables, also corn because we had to produce some flour to make bread and, of course, Beaminster had several bakeries, Netherbury had a bakery. Each and every village was virtually self contained. You had carpenters, blacksmiths, candlestick makers and in Beaminster, up in Newtown, you had Master Whipmarsh who was O/C paraffin supplies. Brilliant chap. He used to be known as Paraffin Bill, the man who delivered the stuff. He had this lovely old van and a great big tank on the back with a great big brass tap and he used to come through the villages and shout out that paraffin Bill had arrived so you rushed off with your can, bucket, whatever you wanted to put the paraffin in and have a fill up of about half a gallon, or a gallon, and that’s where these lamps came from.
AW The lamps on the mantlepiece?
JW Yes. Well all the houses were lit by paraffin lamps and candles. These typical things here, look. Interesting, a candle is the same size as a 12 bore shotgun, that’s the size the candle is, 12 bore. And they’d fit inside a gun. Did you know that?
AW No I didn’t know that.
JW There you are you see. The Star Inn at Netherbury was illuminated by these things.
AW The candles or the oil lamps.
JW The lamps. Well candles and lamps. Because most people – this is why it was highly dangerous and there was a lot of houses caught fire – because children were running around with candles in a candlestick holder and matches were a bit of a………… you know you had to be very careful. Very careful. There was no central heating, you had a fireplace something like this and you had to keep the fire going 24 hours a day. And you used to have a billy hung up to heat the water, the only source of hot water. There was no hot water anywhere else. There were no toilets. Everybody went down the privy in the garden, emptied out once a fortnight or whatever, stick it under the rhubarb or do something with it.
Society, it was hard during the war and immediately after the war. The best thing that actually happened as far as I am concerned and I mustn’t………. The first thing, in 1947, we had the first Agricultural Act by a Labour Government. Although Mr. Churchill was a fantastic leader of the country it took me years to work out that the country didn’t like the idea of Toryism any more and there was a complete landslide to Labour in the first election in 1947 and this was society saying look, we’ve got to be more equitable, we’ve got to spread it about a bit. You can’t just have the typical class society that we had. Lords and Ladies on the big estates, Victorian thumb on everything, we want more freedom.
And, unfortunately what we’ve seen in my lifetime, we’ve gone……………. the pendulum’s gone full swing from total Victorian domination to “Do what the hell you like” which is crazy. And now we’ve generated a completely selfish society where nobody respects anybody, the boys and girls don’t respect the law, they don’t respect their parents and they don’t respect their teachers. It seems to me a great sadness and they’ve also rejected the church so people are not being taught any form of kindness whatsoever. And that’s how it goes and I frequently say to people……………….. i was only talking to a young lady yesterday and I asked her if she had any idea what the Ten Commandments were. She’d never even heard of the Ten Commandments. But surely, but surely……..
AW You would have learnt the Ten Commandments growing up at school, did you?
JW I was, yes. Well I haven’t got to that stage yet. We haven’t started school ……………………
AW Just got to keep an eye on the clock.
JW I know, well you’ll never get through it all, well unless I whizz along. But I want to try and keep it in some kind of context.
AW you’re doing brilliantly.
[00:37:04]
JW By the time I got to 5, village schools were everywhere but they weren’t a very high standard. So my mother and dad made a great sacrifice and my sister – because I was one of a twin – we were sent off to The Visitation Convent which existed in Bridport which, if you like, was a private school. And we know, looking back because we’ve got all the records, it cost my mum and dad £8 a term which, when you were only earning 30 bob (30s.) a week, was a lot of money. We had to be taken in and brought back and we had to have uniforms and all the rest of it. One of the things that the nuns taught me was to read, to spell, to talk, to communicate, and be kind. Brilliant, no doubt about it. They were first class. But I was confused because I was a choir boy you see in Netherbury church during the weekends but during the week it was all in Latin. And all these incense burners and holy water and goodness knows what. I didn’t know if I was coming or going half the time. It was totally confusing. Well I decided to stick with Netherbury church after we left because we had this…………… everybody had to try and attain this achievement you see, this dreaded Eleven Plus examination. Everybody came up against the barrier which I rather like, so me and my sister went for it and we passed. So the next thing we turn up at Beaminster & Netherbury Grammar School. Now Beaminster & Netherbury Grammar School was formed in Netherbury not far from the village hall in the house opposite and it had a Reading Room attached. When my grandfather was a young man he went there, and I’ve explained this to people in Netherbury, I said ‘Do you know why it’s called the Reading Room?’ ‘No.’ Well my grandfather used to go and read, because he was literate, the local papers to all those who couldn’t read and write. Hence it became known as the Reading Room and they turned up on Friday and Saturday nights, having had a beer up the Brandon, and listened to the local gossip and news from the Bridport News.
AW Read out by your grandfather?
JW Correct. He was also educated there you see and he sent all his children to Grammar School. My 3 uncles, my father, my uncles and my aunt, everybody went to Grammar School.
AW So the whole family went to Grammar School.
JW Oh yes.
AW Girls as well as boys?
JW Yes, everybody. Oh absolutely. Because he was a great believer in education and I am to this day. We’ll come on to that later, you don’t know what I’ve been up to since then. So the other thing that happened in 1947 was the Agricultural Act. But we had for the first time the National Health Service and that was absolutely wonderful. People didn’t have a fear of having to pay to go to the doctor. All free at the point of delivery. Those lovely ladies and lads who didn’t have a penny to their name could actually go and draw a few bob pension and that would last them to the end of their natural days. Wonderful. It really did improve people’s lives. Because it had been tough. People think it’s tough today but it was tougher then.
The Agricultural Act for the first time introduced marketing boards for every product that the farmers grew and it guaranteed secure tenure which farmers never had. Now my grandfather suffered this. He rented a field from the Lord of the Manor at Slape. at Waytown, and he had a message sent to him ‘Warren, send the cart.’ Well he couldn’t. He didn’t have it available. So he sent a message back to say ‘I can’t.’ He was evicted within a week. Straight out the door. That’s how it was. If people didn’t like one side of you – down the road. There was no secure tenure anywhere. Well once this Agricultural Act was in position then at least you could say well for 10 years I can plan some sort of business. So everybody went ahead, production, production, production. We had ICI making chemicals. They started making fertilisers and we started putting fertilisers on the fields and the meadows.
AW So what year would that be roughly?
JW 1945/46/47 and up into the 50s. And all through the 50s and 60s more and more more ….. pesticides, insectisides, every ‘sides’ imaginable. But what we were doing, and you could see it, we were killing nature. We used to have Cuckoos everywhere, every Spring the Cuckoo came. Don’t hear a Cuckoo any more. The hedges used to grow up, people would go and cut them down and lay them. Used the wood for their fire and make rows for their peasticks. No, along came the Superstores and the shops all changed. You don’t want to do that you come and buy it from us, dead cheap. Because we’re going to screw some grower into producing that product dead cheap. And we’ve seen this integration all the way through. People used to be able to go to their village shops, just walk and go home with a basket. Now they’ve got to drive. We’ve got congestion, nowhere to park, no village shops, no pubs. It’s crazy. We used to have a really united society, not any more. People used to have their doors and windows wide open. Not any more, they’re fearful of burglars. Everything is locked up solid. No ventilation. People would hardly answer the door, suspicious of a burglar. Amazing. But it’s sad and it’s true. This is where it’s all gone wrong. You’ve seen all this. So from my opinion it’s up to us as adults to do something about it. We’ve got to inculcate this to the youngsters. Now further on in my life, because having finished at Beaminster & Grammar School………………..
AW What age were you when you finished at Beaminster Grammar School?
JW 17. And that was the Suez Crisis. That was another crunch we shouldn’t have got mixed up with. The benefit was you could drive a vehicle with L Plates on and you couldn’t have anybody sitting next to you so by this time we had a Landrover and I took off to Dorchester on my 17th birthday and passed the test first time. Brilliant. So then we had some independence. You could get about. Landrovers were the best thing ever invented. My grandfather drove Landrovers all his life ‘cos he’d also moved on. Although we were still cider making he took on a farm as well as, at Slape, another 50/60 acres so we had proprty all over the place. There was money in milk. You could sit under a cow, or you could get a milking machine, and a tractor cost £625 in those days and you could sell £1,000 milk a month to Beaminster milk factory and you got a cheque every month. That was good living. You could get a good calf out of a cow, you could go to Axminster market and it would make £100. Which was an excellent start to the cow’s income for the year. And it was really good. So what that enabled us to do was to invest in property, machinery and land and we had a house built in Netherbury by the family which cost £2,750 built by Mr.Bailey in Beaminster from start to finish and it was all paid for in 6 years through an overdraft at the bank.
00:44:39]
So it was possible to do these things and it was fantastic to move from an old hovel in Netherbury to a new house that had a bathroom. it had a toilet. it had running water and sanitation. It had electricity, it had lights and plugs and things that worked and a couple of fireplaces and an oven that you could cook the Sunday lunch in. Amazing.
AW What year was that that you moved in there?
JW 1947. You couldn’t get wood anywhere, you were only allowed wood on the upstairs floors, not downstairs. Everything was strictly controlled. Of course my father knew Mr. Bailey you see and he said ‘Harry’ because he was looking for a job, ‘Come out to Netherbury and we’ll see what we can do.’ So the family got together and threw a few bob in the pot ‘cos by this time one of the boys was a Dairy Chemist at Beaminster. He looked after the scientific side of the milk factory and the other one went off to Wincanton at that milk factory. So they were Dairy Chemists but my father went farming and my aunt was still growing up. She was a tiddler. She looked after her grandad and grandad. He was a great chap no doubt about that. Very generous. Brilliant. And of course he got involved in all parish affairs as well. He did too much of that and he admitted at the end it was all this honorary work was never worth doing. When you’re under a tombstone it’s too late then isn’t it.
[00:46:12]
So here we go. Because of the war, and the fact that all this production was going on, the country decided that in each and every county they would set up an Agricultural and Horticultural Farm Institute. Now the one in Dorset happened to be at Kingston Maurward near Dorchester which was a 700 acre grain farm with dairy cattle and God knows what, been there since………… It was all acquired and gifted to the County Council. Somerset had their Sparsholt version and they were all over the country. Anyway because there was all these young men coming back from the army, the services, and wanted a basic training in agriculture so they could then go off and rent a farm from the County who bought little farms to rent to people starting their businesses. Which was a great idea. And they had 40 acre farms, 80 acre farms, 120 acre farms. So you could move up the scale if you wished as time went on. If you wished to do that. So off I went to Kingston Maurward for a year or two, having done A Levels, O levels and goodness knows what, and whilst I was there I took a keen interest in engineering and it was suggested that I scootled off to the West of Scotland Agricultural College which, they had sort of three or four premier colleges in this country, Specialisms. Writtle was the place for some machinery, some of it was going on in the West of Scotland Agricultural College, Glasgow, near Ayr actually, but they also concentrated on butter and cheese production and all sorts of specialist enterprises. And that’s what happened. Best year of my life, flying about all over the place.
And then eventually life comes back with a bit of a bang and I thought well, I’ve been all over England I’m going to reside in West Dorset. I don’t want to go anywhere but West Dorset. I’d been all up through East Anglia, flat as a pancake, and the only place in my life I’ve ever seen snowdrifts made of soil. It was in the Spring. It was a howling Siberian wind coming on this endless flat area – far as the eye could see it was flat as a pancake – and all this soil was being blown by this terrible wind blowing abut 60 or 70 miles per hour and all these little tiny sugar beet plants were leaning over and you had these mounds of soil across the road, just like a snowdrift. All across East Anglia. Too cold for me. You don’t get a hill up there until you get to York.. You don’t realise until you come on the train, yes. Amazing place.
LC Amazing place. Especially Lincolnshire.
JW I loved it in Scotland, they were very generous. They used to wear skirts and play these funny things, you know, drink lots of whisky and that was the first time I flew actually because in 1963 we lost my grandma. And that was very difficult and everything was completely snowed up here for weeks, six weeks, you couldn’t go to Dorchester, you couldn’t go anywhere and they couldn’t have any funerals. Oh, desperate it was. So in those days they used to lay people out in the house on a table, bring the coffin out and that’s it. Well, of course, the house was like a fridge let along anywhere else, so eventually they organised a funeral train from Bridport to Weymouth Crematorium. We put the landrover in front of the hearse, put a chain on board, and took it from Netherbury to Bridport, loaded up (and they had a special train for the job, beautifully done) and off we went. Weymouth Esplanade, it was blowing a hooley. I’ve never been so cold in all my life. Gee Whizz. That was tough, it really was.
AW So the train went carrying people who’d been waiting for a funeral ………………….
JW They had a special carriage for coffins. And all the families. I remember now, it was all in pale blue and purple. They’d obviously had to keep them somewhere, I don’t know. But I mean it was quite amazing, it really was. An education in itself. One of life’s experiences.
AW Where did that go to?
JW Weymouth Crematorium.
AW Weymouth Crem?
JW Well I don’t know what they used in between but I know you couldn’t dig graves, the ground was solid you see, you couldn’t do anything. Once you’d got your ashes in an urn you could keep them in a pot on the mantlepiece if you want. Not going to do any harm is it? So, sadly, we lost grandfather too so things changed and the tenancies here were in a…………… the whole place had gone to rack and ruin and it was no good at all. My Aunty Rosie, she also farmed in Beaminster on the site which is now the tea factory. That was known as Crow’s farm. She used to be a teacher at Netherbury School when she was a younger lady but when ladies were married, or wed, school mistresses, they were never allowed to teach again. Which was rather sad because she was very capable but they wouldn’t let them do it. Because most of the village schools were controlled by the Church, they were all C of E you see. Salisbury.
AW And they wouldn’t let married women teach?
(Another voice here interrupts)
JW No, no. Not at all.
AW What year was that she got married?
JW I can’t remember the exact date. You’d have to look through the records to find all that. Anyway, she was Rosie Peters and Aunty Rosalie, she was very……… a good lady……………
AW So instead of teaching she ran the farm?
JW No, her husband William did but, unfortunately, he drank too much ale and he had a milk round in Beaminster which consisted of milk crates and a horse and a wagon and he’d trundle off with all this lot and, of course, every pub he came to he had to have a ‘wet’ and by the time he got home he didn’t know if he was coming or going. And he had lots of serious accidents. But he did have a vehicle and he used to drive this thing round – this was before ‘Drink & Drive’. Crazy. And he used to come and visit every Sunday evening with my grandparents and, of course, dead opposite was the Star Inn so Aunty Rosie did the talking, he was down there supping a pint. And off they went to Waytown to the other brothers and sisters and stopped outside the Hare & Hounds while she went to talk………….
(loud noise of clock chiming) so the whole thing, it was a complete nightmare really. But that’s how they went on. There was no other traffic about. Can you imagine all this. Crazy. You couldn’t do it today. It was quite remarkable. I used to think what’s going on here? He was a relatively young person, I used to think let him get on with it.
AW So they could only do it because there was no other traffic around?
[00:53:00]
JW Well that’s true. So here we now go 50s, 60s, 70s. Sixties were tremendous because once we’d got out of rationing that went on here until 1952/55 and I well recall in Netherbury a queue outside the village shops, because we had two, because you were queuing up for some sweeties and you could buy a beautiful block of Cadbury’s milk chocolate for threepence (3d.) It was excellent stuff no doubt about that. First class. But to have it off ration and freely available after years and years of complete austerity and lack of supplies of everything……. Beaminster actually had one of the best shoe shops in the area and it was situated just off the Square. It was Mr. Bryce, where the hardware store is now, and he always sold these beautiful leather hobnail boots. They were called Holdfast and they had studs all over the bottom and great horseshoes round the heels and when you used to be sort of tanking along at night, sparks were flying off the bottom of your boots. They were brilliant. They were waterproof. So we used to then have……. see Christmas time, us boys – we were teenagers – killing geese out in the orchard for Christmas meals. Oh, you want to try picking a goose. There’s two layers to a goose. You’ve got all the feathers and you’ve got all the down underneath. An ideal situation is about an 80 mph wind so, when you pull them out, it all blows away. You get covered. But the benefit of cooking a goose is you keep the grease which you put on your boots to keep them watertight. There were no wellington boots, they didn’t exist. Wonderful what we used to do. So you can actually go back to basics if you’ve got the experience, lived through all these things. So once we go into the 60s white goods, people had electricity, you could then go and buy some gadgets like a refrigerator which was brilliant. You could keep things cool and make it last longer, much much better. Now you could use an iron and do some………. rather than having irons that you had to heat up on the fire to do your ironing, put them back and heat them up again.
LC Plug them into the light socket
JW I know, highly dangerous. You’ve experience that?
LC Oh yes, I used to use a flat iron as well. I know how to tell that it’s hot enough.
JW So a plethora of white goods and, of course, people’s lives improved materialistically to a degree and as far as the countryside was concerned I felt, even then, that we were destroying life and there was a book written called “The Silent Spring” which you may, or may not, have read. Well the only real ……………………….
LC Rachel Carson.
JW Well the only real………. it’s an insecticide or pesticide (people get them mixed up whether they’re herbicides, pesticides and insecticides if they don’t truly understand). That aside, DDT was a dreadful chemical. It was quite effective but what they didn’t realise was it passed down the food chain.
So, if you killed a mouse with DDT and a bird came down and picked up the carcase and ate it, that DDT then went into the carcase and killed the bird. That bird fluttered to death. Along comes a fox or a badger to clear up what’s left over, as Mother Nature tends to clear up, and next thing, that’s dead. So you’ve got this chain reaction which is what’s so evil about things like DDT. ‘Course this wasn’t recognised in the early days and more people would go out using it and they were actually contaminating themselves. Doctors were baffled. Sheep suffered from all sorts of strange and horrible things and they had to be dipped, fly strikes and, oh, nasties. But, of course, it was hot when you did this and people had no protection, sloshing this stuff all over the place and I well recall, and it really had connections to that rascal out in Iraq when he went and killed his local Kurd population using these dreadful chemicals and these were the chemicals that were available because the country wanted to cure the problem of holes in leather caused by a fly which lands on a dairy cow.
Now the story of the fly is that it flies around the animals in the summer time and actually stings them on the legs. And they don’t like it and they run away. Warble it’s called, a Warble Fly, and during the course of the summer months the Warble Fly, having laid the egg in the ankle of the animal, travels through the blood system of the cattle to just beneath the backbone. So the following May it then erupts and changes into the flying form, from the grub to the flying department. And frequently you could milk cows and you’d see these things coming out so you’d squeeze them out and kill them. But of course they left a hole in the leather which the leather producers didn’t like. Could upset production of shoes and all sorts of things you see. So the government decreed that we would have one year when every animal in the country would be treated with a chemical to kill the Warble Fly. Because if you can break the cycle for one year no more Warble Flies. An interesting fact is, and cattle used to do this, if they stand in water the Warble Fly has never attacked them because Warbles don’t fly over water. So cattle in the summertime, for peace of mind, would stand in the water in the shade. All the cattle used to run, they were petrified of this buzzer. It was really like having a great big hornet coming after you – well all of us would run wouldn’t we? They knew it was going to sting. They had to run. Cattle used to rampage all over the place, terrible thing. Nasty Warble. But we did, we killed the Warble but, the insecticide that was used in the form of a liquid application, was supplied through the local vetinaries. It was all controlled through the vets. We took one look at this bottle, which had a skull and crossbones on it, and I said to my father ‘I’m not touching this stuff. We’ll get the vet to come and do it because he’s fully protected. Rubber gloves, aprons.’ Other people would slosh it on left, right and centre. Dreadful. And the side effects were awful.
AW What were the side effects?
[01:00:28]
JW Well people suffered from nausea, strange things that doctors had never seen. It was a nerve agent basically which had been used on the Kurds in Northern Iraq. Honest. We didn’t know the truth of it. And then, because Maggie Thatcher now was at the helm, she said ‘Lower the temperatures at the rendering plants.’ Up to that point in time no farmer ever knew what the constituents of his dairy rations were. You combined these concentrated feeds which composed of wheat, barley, oats and lots of additives plus animal protein. Well it was generally assumed that most of the animal protein was coming from fish. They were caught by the millions of tons in the English Channel. Russian boats used to come and moor up in Weymouth Bay and they’d fill them up and just catch everything. But it wasn’t all that, a lot of that was used for fertiliser in the form of a bonemeal mixture.
When they lowered the temperatures at the rendering plants, which is how you deal with a carcase when you’ve finished with butchering (? unclear) it wasn’t long before they realised cattle were suffering from another form of dementia which was very similar to what sheep had suffered for years. There’s an old saying “as giddy as a ram” and some rams will get giddy and this again is a tumour or something in the brain of the sheep. And of course they only live a few years so it was usually an elderly sheep, but if you had a giddy ram they didn’t know whether they were coming or going. They couldn’t………….. honestly it was complete dementia. It really was sad to see. So of course they got knocked over the head. But of course people didn’t realise that if you weren’t careful, in the spinal column of that animal, you could perhaps pick up infections. Oh yes. And this is why the spinal columns now, today, are removed from all animals at the abbatoirs and they are regularly inspected by vetinary surgeons and filmed today to make sure that this is 100% because these animals, these cattle, have been dying with this dementia and it’s feared, we don’t know, that it could be jumping from one animal source to another. But that has not been proven yet.
But the thing was, you see, when the farmers carried out an investigation and demanded to know what had been put in their feeding stuffs they then found out that the animal protein had come from the rendering plants so you were asking the dairy farmers of this country to ask their animals to be canibals. And that’s exactly what happened. You were feeding animal protein to animals. Well if the process wasn’t 100% watertight and hygienic and sanitised there was this great risk of spreading this neuron type disease. Nasty. And still about.
AW Did that affect you and your family?
JW No. We don’t know what the long term effect…………… You may or may not recall, Master Gummer was feeding these beefburgers to his grandchildren……………………..
AW I remember that. When you were young was that something that’s…………………….
JW No you didn’t know. It didn’t happen until Mrs. Thatcher came along, no. It didn’t happen. But this is the modern consequence you see of trying to cheat the system. If you try and mess with Mother Nature whether you are dealing with a flower in a field……….. the reason we don’t have flowers in a field? People don’t understand it. It’s because we’ve piled on the fertiliser. If you pile on the fertiliser it makes the grass grow rapidly and if the grass grows rapidly there’s no room for a flower. So they’re exterminated. Grown in by grass because grass is what cows eat. So you grow more, and more and more grass and then what do you finish up with? This horrible word called monoculture and that’s what we’ve done. If you’re a bumblebee in West Dorset you’d never, ever get to Somerset because there’s nowhere en route that you can refuel. Every field’s the same. Sprayed, homogenised, pasteurised, everything is, milk, crops, it’s crazy. And that’s the world we’ve got to. It’s really saddened me.
[01:04:58]
Now you also see around, and I don’t dispute this for one moment, if the highway has to be safe for people to travel on by all means use mechanical means of trimming the hedges to make sure that people can see. But there is absolutely no reason to do it on internal hedges on farms. Because what people are not realising is that all the butterflies and the chrysallis, which is from one season to another, overwinter, including the ladybirds, and all these other things, and they lay their eggs on our natural hedges that used to be. Well they’re smashed to smithereens by these mechanical monsters every year and they kill the entire population. There’s nothing to follow. Well they’ve destroyed all the food, there’s no berries, there’s no nuts. I, as a hedgelayer, I’ve been laying hedges for 65 years, 70 odd years, it takes 4 years to get a nut from a Hazel if you lay it. When you get the next nut. Something for the squirrel, something for the dormice, something for the ordinary mice. Somewhere when they’ve come you see the dormice leave little holes in the bank so the bumblebee can set up a nest. Now we’ve got no mice, no holes, no bumblebees. Gone, no food.
AW You know all this because you were doing the hedgelaying?
JW Yes. These fields here, these 4 plots, have not been ploughed for 100 years. And we’ve still got the original flowers. And the last 2 seasons sadly, I’d stand out there in May and June, just before haymaking because that’s all we do, no fertilisers ever been used for the last 60 years. Flowers everywhere, phenomenal aroma. Not a bee, not a butterfly, not a grasshopper, nothing. And it saddens me.
AW Hugely.
JW Yes. Crazy. And now we hear all over TV that people like Master Attenborough are gonna…………… we’ve got to do something with our planet. If we don’t, within 10, 20 years, well that’s the end of it. It’s been an amazing lifetime I’ve had. We’ve had no wars, not big ones anyway, well that’s been a blessing. We’ve seen materialism which is a disaster. We’ve seen selfishness, we’ve seen a great drift from the church. I don’t go to church every Sunday but I’m a Christian hearted man. Because I believe in being kind to people, not unkind. We’ve seen drugs, dreadful. And I wish we’d bring all our soldiers back home and put them in every airport, every port, go through every container, get rid of all the drugs, stop it completely rather than them being shot in these territories overseas. Because they’re not going to stop growing drugs in Afghanistan, that’s all they know poor devils. And the Taliban are back and they’ll carry on wheeling and dealing. Can you imagine Dorset split up into various sections and if you and I wanted to do some business in Dorchester ‘You pay up mate, if not you don’t get.’
AW You mention soldiers. When I spoke to you on the phone you mentioned when you were obviously a very young lad in the war there was suddenly the foreign…………….
JW For the first time in my life when I was about 5 or 6 it was the first …………….. the Americans arrived en masse all over Southern England, Parnham Park was turned into H.Q. for tank regiments. Dozens of Nissen Huts whizzed up, it was quick. We used to walk around the fields, you could see all these things happening ‘cos everything was strict, there wasn’t a squawk from anybody. Everybody had to provide facilities to house a soldier but they were billeted in other words. You had to take one.
AW Everybody had to have one all round the locality?
JW Well also, other people you had to provide for you see was people like the ladies Land Army because they had lots of ladies employed working on farms because the chaps had gone off to fight the war. So there were all these lovely ladies flying about milking cows and doing all sorts of things. And for the first time in my life of course I came across coloured gentlemen. Of course we only saw them as Gollywogs on marmalade pots and in those days a Gollywog was a Gollywog and still is as far as I am concerned. All this nonsense we’ve got today. I’ve got respect for coloured people as long as they’ve got some for me. Works both ways. It was totally amazing, every lane, every road, the whole place was groaning with trees, elm trees in those days. We had beautiful elm trees. Sadly we’ve lost a lot – again man’s intervention. As soon as we start moving things round the planet we spread all the diseases and kill everything off. Should never have happened, but it has. No more elm trees.
[01:10:15]
Thousands of vehicles parked up all over West Dorset. We didn’t know half of what was going on but it was all being planned and on the morning of 6th June, 1944 the whole world changed. I’ve never heard and seen anything like it before or since. Obviously it’s light very early in the morning – this was about half-past-four, or 5 o’clock – the noise of all these aeroplanes flying across here, gliders being towed by Dakotas, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, horizon to horizon. The noise was intense. You couldn’t sleep through that. You knew something was on. That was the first wave of the airborne going to Northern France. Highly secretive. Nothing on the radio, nothing. Hush, hush. Mum’s the word. Don’t speak to anybody. Nobody did either. My grandfather had the radio, the only one in Netherbury – we all tuned in at 6 o’clock – John Snagge I think was the announcer – and they announced that we’d made landings in Europe. Then we all knew what was going on but we knew before then, we had a good idea because the deafening noise of the thunder of gunfire – because it’s about 120 miles from the Normandy coast to here – reverberated all day long. Baboom! Baboom! Salvo after salvo. Baboom! It readlly was like a gigantic thunderstorm going on so you knew something was happening but you didn’t know what you see. And all the Americans soldiers, they all disappeared because they were all (JW makes a whistling noise) in less than 2 or 3 days they were all gone, everything was gone. Everything gone. Nothing.
AW And that was that?
[01:12:14]
JW Yes, it was. The most dangerous thing was when they used to fly the German bombers over here you see raiding places like Cardiff and Bristol and we were out in the fields and they’d come hedge-hopping practically, trying to get home. See the (? unclear) that was on the side. We used to wave at the pilots. Well it was all a bit of fun really when you’re only 5 and 6. You didn’t worry about it too much. So yes, having gone through West of Scotland and fiddled around here for a while then eventually ……………………………..
AW We’ll have to keep a bit of an eye on the time…………….
JW Yes I know. Well going full circle really because my father carried on farming and we carried on cider making but they introduced a tax on the cider. Never been taxed before, it was a poor man’s drink and he wasn’t a marketeer so things dwindled and really it just disappeared and so when we lost him and my mother, my mother said ‘I think the best thing we can do is sell it all.’ So, I have a twin sister so, 50/50, we couldn’t believe that something we’d paid, and I’ll be honest with you, £2,500 for, and the land was about £6,000, so that would be £8.500 investment, roll the years on to the mid 70’s, early 80s and then go for public auction by Symonds & Sampson to sell the agricultural unit. £550,000. We couldn’t believe it and yet, at the time, that £2,500 was a barrier almost, you didn’t know quite what to do next. Because everybody was on £1 a week. So I said to my sister 50/50? Yes, she said. I said OK.
Oh, what a battle royal that was. My father was technically a farmer and cider maker you see and they wouldn’t believe it and so everything stayed in sheds, everything, for about 5 years before we could prove the probate. Dealing with the tax and revenue and God knows what. Anyway, we negotiated a settlement and that tidied all that up and so then, by this time, I’d moved here as a tenant but it was in a total run down state and I wasn’t going to do anything until it was mine. If I could buy it off the family. Well that caused great upsets because my aunt got mixed up with a strange fellow who was very greedy and………… he’s dead and gone too. They all have. Eventually we negotiaed a deal so we set about revamping this house and the door you see there hadn’t been opened for 60 years because that was the butter and cheese making department in there next to the well. They were highly organised.
And so I had been employed – and I was very fortunate actually – when Maggie Thatcher, she had a problem because she had about 3 1/2 to 4 million young people unemployed. So what she did, she organised some money and introduced the Youth Training Scheme and she supplied cash to all the universities and centres of higher and further education to get people from business background into the educational sector to give people the will to work and get on. So the Manpower Services Commission was set up in Westminster to administer the cash which came quite freely because there was lots money being earnt in the North Sea with the revenues from the oil that Maggie and Co. found.
My son was involved in most of those activities when they privatised industry because he moved away. He was a very successful mathematician and he went to the stockmarket in London and joined various companies up there and ultimately finished up as a partner in Goldman Sachs and it doesn’t get any better than that. And privatised fuel and oil all over the world. Meanwhile, back at Kingston Maurward there was this vast injection of money to get these boys and girls, who had an interest in agriculture or horticulture, trained to get a job. Maggie said you either stay at school, get a job or join a YTS scheme. That’s it. Good idea. She was quite firm. I quite liked her in many respects although she was a person that made people selfish because she made money her God and I didn’t go along with that and it caused all sorts of discontent particularly amongst social housing which we’ve all seen – houses used to be called Council Houses, well they decided to change that. Still a Council House, but the fact was she shouldn’t have sold the housing stock of the country because they’ll always be a demand for those poor folks who can’t afford a mortgage. They’ve got to have somewhere over their head and they don’t mind renting. And here we are in a crazy situation today where we haven’t got enough room for anybody, have we? Mad. We throw out the baby with the bathwater. Then you see…………. I had a letter from the Principal of the college at Dorchester, would I like to be considered as a Lecturer in Machinery. I wrote back and said yes so I was invited for an interview. Education interviews are most strange things. It’s sudden death play-off You spend all day with half-a-dozen people you’ll never see the rest of your life and then, if you’re lucky, your name’s called up at the end of the day, which it was, and you’re asked if you want the job. Brilliant. So I had 15 years up there. Excellent. Thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it.
AW Up at…………….?
JW Kingston Maurward, Dorchester.
AW And what was it you were doing there?
JW Farm mechanisation. All things mechanical. We had our own workshops, we had everything and we used to teach every boy and girl how to go off to do their driving test. You may not know this but if you work on a farm you can actually drive a tractor when you are 16, with L Plates, on your own. And you’e eligible to go for a test. Well, we used to send them into Dorchester. Well prepared because I wont accept failure. We never had a failure and we used to do introductory courses for a fortnight and I used to have 50 or 60 boys and girls who didn’t know whether they were punchball, or counter sunk, and I used to write on my board “Respect” ‘ Anyone got any idea what the word means?’ And of course, as we all know, when you are up on the lectern all the brains are in the back row. Endless talking. Saying ‘Right. We’ll select a person from the back row’ Behind me a clock with one big minute, second hand on it, ‘Right’ I said, ‘Come on. One minute on a clothespeg’. ‘Urr?’ ‘Not urr,’ I said, ‘One minute on a clothespeg. You all know what they look like, do you know what they are used for? Come on. You’ve been doing all the talking down the back row.’ Wonderful stuff. Applied psychology. Once you’ve got them in the palm of your hand you can teach them anything. Certainly enjoyable, recommend it to anybody.
AW Sounds great. But we’ll have to begin to draw to a close. Thank you very much indeed for ………………
JW It’s a pleasure, I could go on all day…………
AW That’s great. So what we need to do is pass this on to them in charge and hopefully they’ll agree that this is……….
JW But if they want any more information on anything else. There’s so much went on. I mean I spent a vast amount of my time in the Boy Scouts you see and set up Beaminster Boy Scouts years ago. Used to do everythihng. Go camping, on the River Brit. Before the sluice gates were demolished we used to go canoeing up and down. All sorts of nonsense. I grew Christmas trees by the dozen. We had a really good time selling Christmas trees – I used to give them £1 a tree every time we sold a tree, it was brilliant the way they marketed it. I put all these trees in and I thought how am I going to sell them? And it suddenly dawned on me the idea, ‘I know what I’ll do, Beaminster Scouts.’ It was all round Beaminster with a flew flyers. Gosh we never looked back. We didn’t. There’s money in trees I said to my father. You see, because grew them, I got told off by the Bridport News and commercial people in Bridport. They said I was selling my trees too cheaply. I sent a message back, I said ‘I grow the trees, I sell the trees, I give the Scouts a £1 a tree, I will sell them for what I want to sell them at.’ Never heard any more.
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