Dear Webmaster for Widdington

I as a 5-9 yr old lived at Newlands Farm. Our family was Peter and Lois Wright and I had an older sister ,Tessa, and a younger brother, Bevis. My parents (mainly my mother as my father was working some distance away during the week) ran the farm and Bill Dellow and Dick (?Wright) helped out with farm work. We also had a (1) Land Girl! The farm ran large black pigs and Angus cattle.In those days (the late 1940's) there was an old railway carriage on the grass just before the horse pond that was used for raising chicks in! Ivy (?Wright) lived in a cottage down the road just where our drive started, and I remember the names Rust, Ruxton and Ketteridge that are mentioned on the Widdington site.

What I would love to see are pictures of Newlands around this time or even as it is today. I did visit some years ago and of course it is all done up and not so much a working farm as it was then.

Do hope you can help

Yours sincerely

Jennifer Andrews

Dear Gary

I was so excited to see the pictures you sent. When I think that we went to Newlands in 1947 and that photo taken about 1946 show a large contingent of workers and a flourishing garden I wonder what happened. When we moved in there was a big hole in the roof on the yard side, along with the other things like no real bathroom or electricity, and the garden was very neglected.

Newlands was paradise for me. Eventually I had a pony and I rode everywhere even to Little Henham through Prior Wood and along the Cam to see a friend of mine from school. I suppose my mother was busy with the farm, my father was away working and so I was a free spirit and it was wonderful!

I was only just coming up to five when we moved in and spent one year at the village school then run by the church I think. I remember 2 classes and the teacher (don't know her name) up on a platform at the front. (I then went to Friends Junior School in Saffron Walden.) I remember the playground with a huge oak tree and school photographs that were black and white but hand coloured for dress (no uniform), pink cheeks etc.

I knew David Istance from the shop that his parents ran. He played the piano very well. He would have been about early teens I think. The shop was a post office and what seemed to me primarily a sweet shop! Large glass jars full of all sorts of amazing sweets. We had 1 penny for every year of our livese as pocket money and I spent it all on sweets which quite often were eaten before I had walked or ridden home!!!!! I'm pretty certain they sold groceries as well because I think I remember having to get sugar or something and it was measured out and weighed in blue thick paper bags! My sister was friendly with Jane Carmichael and rode her pony with her.

There were also the Ruxton boys from Rumbolds(?) - we used to play with them too. Then there was Ivy (Wright?) who lived in a cottage just as our drive started and we bought a lovely (2) baby grand from them - what were they doing with a baby grand? She helped my mother with things in the house but the main person who helped in the house was Ted (?) - he was lovely but a little mentally handicapped. He would get on his hands and knees and scrub the quarry tiles and flagstones and sing or whistle song after song. there was also Alan who lived in the cottage  - well I think then it was a row of cottages but today no doubt is a house - behind Widdington House which at those times was owned by the Tugenhats (the son went on to be an MP or something i think). Alan and I spent much time climbing trees - there was one huge pine of some sort at his place and we had to climb onto the roof of his cottage and then into the tree. You could see for miles at the top! I don't think my parents knew. I had already fallen off a moving trailer at the corner of Newlands Lane and Wood End Road as I stood up to wave at someone and lost my balance! Talking of pines, we had a large pine tree at our place and my mother had guinea fowl. they would roost in it at night. One morning they were all gone and we never did know what happened, but someone told us it was poachers and they'd light a meths/turps/kerosene? rag under the perching birds and the fumes would knock them out and they would fall silently to the ground.

Bill Dellow looked just as he does in that picture on the website in one of the pubs. Both he and Dick Wright worked for us mainly at harvest but at other times too. Aat elevenses they would all be in the kitchen and i was fascinated by the cooling of tea by pouring it from the cup to the saucer and back and then Bill with very shaky hand managing to dribble a lot down his chin! The things you remember!

Harvest was horses and tractors and sheaves and stack building. The thresher came and hay was cut from the stacks with a huge (3)  stack knife. I remember the huge church fetes with all sorts of competitions and tents in the garden of one of the big houses down towards Spring Hill - was it the Rectory garden? We walked the footpath from Newlands to the village - it came out opposite the church - to go to Sunday School.

One other memory is of a house on the road up to Mole Hall that had a miniature house in the garden for the children and I mean a proper house one that a young teenager could stand up in but not an adult with all the rooms as a normal house would have. At the corner of that road and the high street was the timber yard run by Chips (Mr. Chipperfield) was also a builder we would love going with our father there to get timber for the repairs and fencing and the like. I wonder what's there now.

Anyway enough of my rambling. I will ask my sister for some photographs - I have one immediately to hand which I will send in a separate email, but Tessa does the family tree and I think she may have several of Dick and Bill Dellow and the like. You've probably gathered that I live in Australia but do come to UK on occasion - I must take a trip down a memory lane that is all built up and gentrified but with no doubt a lot of things that will bring memories hurtling back.

Regards

               Jenny

FOOTNOTE

(1)  Land Girl, At its peak in 1944, there were more than 80,000 women often known as ‘land girls in the Women’s Land Army. Land girls did a wide variety of jobs on the land. They worked in all weathers and conditions.

(2) A Baby Grand, is a Piano.

(3) Side handle hay stack knife - This item has a large knife-like blade, the blade back is very thick and it is believed that this is to assist in the cutting of layered hay, whereby the extra weight assists in the cutting process. The tool is the result of a one piece construction, the handle is set at 90 degrees to allow precision and is large enough to accommodate a two handed operation. The handle is covered in wood and is a 'T' shape.

Hi Gary,

I am Jennifer Wright's sister.  I was looking at your website and noticed that the hay knife on the Newlands section has the suggestion that the hay was sliced from the stack horizontally.  My recollection is that it was mainly used vertically so that the worker could lean down on the handles and push down in order to cut a slice from the stack.  I suspect using it horizontally would not be very efficient.  Obviously he would have to climb a ladder to the top of the stack and begin to slice it down from there.

Tessa 

Hi Gary,

Most of the photos I have, which are not vast numbers are of family and friends, rather than farm.  Below I have included a few which might be of interest to your readers.

Dick Wright with a pig bat (used to guide pigs into a lorry or new accommodation (not to wallop them!)

When we first went to Newlands the nearest running water was outside one of the cowsheds next to the drive leading up to the house.  A trench had to be dug to pipe the water from there to the house.

If I come across any more I shall send them to you.

Best wishes, Tessa (Wright)

I'm sure your haystack picture must be helpful for your readers to understand the whole process as it happened before there were balers which made  accessing the hay easier.  We did have straw baled later on, after the threshing machine had been to thresh the corn.  The threshing machine sent the straw to be baled by a baling machine attached to the threshing machine.  But hay is the animal fodder made from dried grass and we just put that into a stack as we harvested it because we had no baler.  It's obvious to a lot of people but some confuse hay and straw.  Hay is dried grass.  Straw is the dried stalks of the wheat/oats/barley , what is left after the grain has been 'threshed' out of it, used as animal bedding and sometimes fodder for cattle.
Harvest time was special too because we used to get extra rations of bread, milk, jam, tea for the men helping with the harvest.  We used to carry the  enamel tea cans with handles, and the jam sandwiches, out to the field where the harvesting was being done. 
This was before combine harvesters which cut and thresh the crop and feed the grain into a trailer and the straw into a baler.  The harvester we used tied the cut corn into sheaves and dropped them on the ground.  The workers would then 'stook' them, stand them up leaning against each other so that the stalks can dry out.  When they were dry they had to be loaded onto trailers to go to the stackyard to await the exciting day when the thresher came to thresh the grain from the sheaves. 

Best wishes, Tessa