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Ernie Bowers · aged fifty‐five · thatcher
I started thatching along with my dad at the age of fourteen. This would be round about 1929. My dad had been a thatcher ever since his boyhood. He left school when he was eleven and went along with the local thatcher and he picked the trade up off him. There was a great lot of thatching in those days, you can be sure. And there was plenty of straw to do it with, although straw is rare stuff now.
A thatcher then would have two boys to help him through the summer‐time but after October he’d just have the one. The other was stood off and had to fend for himself until the summer came round again. That is how it was. In those days it was seasonal work for some. There would be plenty of rick‐thatching then, of course. The farmer would come along and say, ‘We’ve got a couple of ricks want doing. You be along early.’ And we were along early, I can tell you – five o’clock most likely. And we’d have done two ricks by midday. Then we would go back to our building job.
I was nineteen when I started on my own. My dad said, ‘Well, son, it’s up to you now.’ It was our parting. That was all he said. I had two boys like the others and I was out on my own. That is how we worked it. The farmers didn’t let the farm labourers do the thatching, they always came to us. It was different in Norfolk, where they’d let anybody do a stack. But in East Suffolk it was a special job and my father and myself, working apart with our two boys each, would thatch anything up to 600 ricks a year. We charged according to the size of the rick. Some ricks would be nine yards long by five yards wide, some would be ten by eleven, some twelve by six and some thirteen by seven. When the rick‐thatching season was on you would go round and measure your work up and make out your accounts.
Every parish had its own thatcher in the 1920s. But in the 1930s things changed. Most of the good thatchers were getting on the old side and beginning to drop out. I can remember five or six great thatchers of the old school dying then. Nobody replaced them. They were men of the old time – of the old life. They didn’t teach their craft to apprentices, they would just pick up the odd man who was walking around on the dole and ask him to give them a hand. They wouldn’t teach this man anything. It was a bad time and people were losing heart, I suppose. There wasn’t the money about and everything was terrible. Those who didn’t see it couldn’t believe it. I would be cycling more than fifteen miles to do a job, and in all weathers. There was skimping on the food. We didn’t have anything and we couldn’t get anything. It was impossible. People have quite forgotten what it was like not to be able to get things. I spent 1s. 6d. a week on my pleasures and gave everything else to Mother. But I got to know the things about the thatching trade which only the old men knew. I can remember the first house I thatched on my own and the first rick. I did the rick alone because my dad fell ill. I was seventeen and it was a stack of reeds at the Church Farm, Campsey Ash. The reeds had been cut and brought up from Alde river at Snape. Thatching reeds is a painful job and plays merry hell with your hands. They were thatched at Campsey to keep them dry until they could be used to mend the barn roof. Reeds are like everything else, you just can’t cut them and lay them in a heap and leave them. They have to be cared for. We like reeds which grow in brackish water best. We like them to grow in the brack caused by the salt tides meeting the river waters every twelve hours. They’re pickled a bit, I suppose.
I never worked on a farm and was glad of it. I was my own man. The farmers round here treated their men shameful before the war and none of us forgets this. I’ve seen a lad only two minutes late who’d be told to ‘take the rest of the day off and come back in the morning’. They had to be so careful. There was always somebody waiting at the gate to take their place. I wasn’t on the farm but I saw it all. And now it’s, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, the poor old farmer! He can’t afford nothing but he has a new car every year. Oh dear, oh dear!’
Thatching was very cheap when I was young. Labour was cheap, everything was cheap. My father would re‐lay a ten‐foot square of roof for £1 and think that he was earning money! Today, a job like that would cost £30 and to thatch the roof of an ordinary cottage will cost between £4–£500. But you must remember that you are getting a sixty‐year roof – a marvellous, beautiful roof, warm in winter, cool in summer – for this price. There is nothing like it. A thatch is wind‐proof, frost‐proof and good to look at. I cock my eye up at thatches I did twenty years past and watch them getting better and better. I strip right down to the rafters before I start – although some won’t. They’ll pile on and pile on. Eventually, like too much sewing of a pair of shoes which brings a pulling away from the welt, the thatch begins to slip off. We did a job at Bacton last year where so much straw had been piled on to the roof over the years that it just fell into the house and the owner had to put a complete new roof on. Most of the old houses still have their original rafters. All of oak, they are and very, very old. I make a roof thatch fourteen inches thick, whether it is straw or reed. The reeds are driven into position with a legget, which is a flat piece of board covered with horseshoe nails and set on a handle at an angle. Cruel work, it is. You start at the bottom of the roof and move upwards till you reach the crown, driving the bundles of reeds into position and fastening them to hazel rods which you cut in the woods during the winter. We use hazel because it is the best splitting wood there is and the best to get a point on. Then comes the pattern. We all have our own pattern; it is our signature, you might say. A thatcher can look at a roof and tell you who thatched it by the pattern.
There used to be special patterns and decorations for the stacks years ago, particularly for the round stacks. There were three kinds of stacks, the round, the boat‐shaped and the gable‐end, and the stack‐yard was a nice place, I can tell you – very handsome. They were a way of decorating the village when the harvest was over and great pride went into putting them up. They were set where they could be seen from the farmhouse and from the road, so that they could be looked at and enjoyed. My dad always set a great sheaf of fine ears at the top of his round stacks and very nice they looked.
I work as we used to work. I stop thatching about the middle of December and spend the winter bushing‐up. These are the four months when I’m not earning a halfpenny. Just collecting material. I have to search for wheat and rye straw from farms where they aren’t using a combine. Thatching straw must be drum‐thrashed and barley and oat straw is no use at all. I have to search the woods for hazel branches and cut them into lengths and cut the reeds from the marshes. This is the only cut you make on the reed, the one cut when you take it from the river. Thatching is very popular now and I am teaching the craft to my brother’s son, who is eighteen. He’ll carry on. I shall have to teach one of my boys too.
I get up at half past five of a morning. I work many hours. I get tired, but I will be all right, I suppose. There are all these great boys in the house – they keep you lively. But you can’t get into conversation with a young person as you could years ago. They just haven’t got the interest. They don’t want our kind of talk. They’re all strangers – all strangers.
Horry Rose · aged sixty‐one · saddler
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I lost my father when I was nine, so I had to think about work. In those days families didn’t have money and boys hurried to work as early as they could so they could earn something. I thought I would be a harness‐maker. There was this saddler’s shop, you see, right in front of our cottage and a new plate‐glass window had been fixed over the small panes of the old window, so you saw the saddlers at work in the lamp‐light behind the double window. The scene took my eye. I used to long to be inside the window and working away there with the men. It all looked so peaceful and secure. When I was 12½ I forced myself to go inside and talk to the owner, Mr Peterson – ‘Knacker’ Peterson was what this gentleman was called – and I told him how I had watched him at work and how I would like to be like him. He listened and then said, ‘Very well, I’ll take you on. I will give you sixpenc
e a week.’
I wasn’t a bound apprentice. I worked a four‐year apprenticeship and then one year as an improver. I worked from seven till seven each day and after I became fourteen I got 1s. a week. The war had just started and there was a lot to do, and soon the old gentleman was giving me eighteen‐pence a week. Two saddlers were called up and that left only the foreman and myself, which meant that I had to do man’s work. So my wages rose to 5s. – which wasn’t man’s money. My mother said, ‘Well, you can’t help it; you’ve got to honour the arrangement and put up with it.’ It was never a very highly paid job for anybody. A journeyman got £1 a week and the foreman a shilling extra. The old gentleman didn’t die a rich man but he had his satisfactions. After you had got a job you thought less about what you were paid for it than you did in perfecting what you had to do. No matter how many times a young craftsman did his work wrong or badly, his boss could afford to say, ‘Do that again.’ Time was money, but such small money as made no difference. We had to ‘honour bargains’ – it was a religious law amongst the tradesmen. The old gentleman used to say, ‘Horry, if you bargain to do a job for a price, do you do it for that price – even if it takes longer than you thought and you lose a little money. You’ll get the customer’s good‐will, and you’ll also learn a sharp lesson on under‐estimating time when you have to make another deal.’ We had our customers for life. I will say this for the Suffolk farmers, that if you gave them a good deal, they’d stay by you for always. We lived by loyalty.
We also said that the farmers were bad payers, but that was because they hadn’t got the money. They were having a bad time like everybody else. The Scotch farmers who came here in the 1930s were really good payers. They worked harder, farmed better – and paid. Their wives helped them. Too many of the Suffolk farmers’ wives were trying to be ladies.
The saddler’s shop has only been in three hands since 1840. The first owner was a Mr Lyon and he sold it to my old gentleman, and I bought it from him. I got it in 1930. I employed three apprentices but it was a dying trade. I could have done with more boys but they wouldn’t come to work for me if they could get anything else. Our trade came from what was known as ‘heavy work’ which we did for the horse farms. I felt things changing as far back as 1920 and was tempted to leave the village and go to work in Newmarket, but it so happened that my mother was ill. So I lost my chance to go away. Whether I should have been any better off or more satisfied I don’t know. I should have done racehorse work. I was a craftsman here and I would have been a craftsman there, so perhaps it would not have been so much of a change.
The shop has always been the largest village saddlers and harness‐makers in this area. We have had a long run. It used to be from dead horse to live horse, as you might say, because the leather we used to make harness from came from the hides of horses we slaughtered in the knacker’s yard behind the shop. That is why the old gentleman was called Knacker Peterson: it was his common name. There is a rope walk behind the shop where ropes for the farms were made from local flax. They laid the strands out along the walk and then twisted them up. The walls of the rope walk are covered with dozens of little marks, about an inch long. These were the tallies made by a boy called the ‘scratcher’. Every time a length of rope was laid in the walk, he marked it up. So you see the business has always been changing.
Our leather was bought from a tannery in Ipswich – W. & A. J. Turner’s in the Bromford Road. We bought black harness backs for heavy work, light brown backs for brown‐work and we had special mule hide for making the great straps for mills, thrashing machines and such like. Our shop had quite a name for making these belts. It was very, very hard work. Some of our material came from a tannery near Stowmarket. Everything we used was bought locally. Horse‐hide is harsh stuff. It is used for special jobs such as heavy glove‐making. We called cow‐hide ‘neats’ hide. Neats is the old word for cattle. These were very supple and nice to work. The leather was bought once or twice a year and when it arrived from Ipswich it was laid on shelves and big lumps of mutton fat, Russian tallow and grease were rubbed into it. We worked the fat in with a bone, just as a soldier bones his boots. Then we let it lay on the shelf for months and months before using it.
Our harness lasted for ever, as you might say. It was our downfall, wasn’t it! We made these things so well that after a while they did us out of a living. We made plough collars for the Suffolk Punches and the great Percheron horses for 12s. 6d. each – fifteen bob if it was extra special. I made hundreds of these collars. Now it is almost impossible to buy one and if you could it would cost about £12. The price of a set of pony harness was five guineas. It was all marvellously hand‐stitched with ten or twelve stitches to the inch and beautifully set out with a little iron.
You don’t make much money if you work with your hands. You can’t make the turnover. But I have no regrets working so slowly. I began in a world without time.
Looking back, I can see that the arrival of the village bus was one of the first nails in the saddler’s coffin. One farmer had a motor‐plough, it is true, but he was rich. The bus told me that motors wouldn’t always be for the rich. During the early part of the Great War some American tractors arrived – huge big things, nearly as vast as traction engines. We didn’t worry too much because they couldn’t be used in wet weather. When the farmers started buying self‐binders I began to take an interest in canvas belts. Each binder would have three of these great belts and I learned how to repair them. After 1929 I concentrated on this canvas work, advertised and got most of the contracts for it in all the surrounding villages. It helped us over the change. Just after the last war the first Massey Harris combine arrived in Akenfield; but, again, it was one of those things you could only use on nice fine days. And you couldn’t cut barley with it, only wheat. Now they are everywhere and the horses are quite gone.
My main job now is making big elevator canvasses for the pea‐harvesting machines. I also make canvas covers for trollies on which to collect the game at shooting parties and halters for Tattersall’s at Newmarket. I don’t see that any craftsman has to stop; he has to develop.
Daphne Ellington · aged thirty‐two · assistant teacher at Akenfield Primary School
I’ve lived in the country for a lot of my life but I’ve never felt that I belonged. I feel I want to spend only part of my life in a village, and particularly this village. It is so strange. Although I have lived in a number of country places and taught in three different village schools, I have never experienced such an atmosphere – in the school itself, I mean – as exists here. I don’t know how to explain it, and I’m not really complaining of it. I have to talk about it simply because it is so curious. It is the power which the children have to resist everybody and everything outside the village.
At first I thought that the 11‐plus selection had quite a lot to do with insularity. That the village children excluded newcomers like the children of American servicemen and of Ipswich business people who have bought houses in Akenfield because these pupils tend to get all the grammar school places. I mean, when you get seven successes and then you find that they are all imported pupils, it makes you think! But I’ve come to the conclusion that this strangeness I am trying to describe has nothing to do with this. The village children aren’t jealous – on the contrary, they are convinced that they have something which none of the newcomers can ever have, some kind of mysterious life which is so perfect that it is a waste of time to search for anything else. I used to wonder at their slowness at absorbing things but now I am beginning to realize that they know from an early age that they don’t need to take in what I am teaching them. They are dreadfully polite. They think that if they are polite it excuses everything. They will do anything you tell them but never that little extra original thing. They have solid faces which say, ‘We will do what teacher wants us to do all day long, and then we’ll do what we want to do!’
I have known instances of ‘outside’ children being beaten up or ridiculed bu
t usually they are simply left on the perimeter of all the playground groups and when school is over, nobody walks home with them. There is just one game from which nobody is ever turned away. This is ‘Peep‐behind‐the‐curtain’. A child stands facing the wall while all the others creep up on him. Every now and then he turns round quickly and whoever he catches moving has to leave the game. It is the only game which everybody is allowed to play. The last person left among those creeping up takes the place of the child facing the wall. It is a game which is played with great intensity. The ‘outside’ child can win this game but it won’t make any difference to his status. He will just have to go on watching when other games are played or, if he tries to join in, he will be ignored.
The school building is seventy‐five years old and it was built on land given to Akenfield by a Victorian duke. It used to hold over ninety children but we don’t have enough space with only forty‐five. There are photographs of the old classes, with boys and girls packed together in tiers. They had to be absolutely still and absolutely silent, and absolutely obedient. Before the First World War, the farmers used to descend on a class now and then and demand the sons of their labourers to help them in the fields, and the teachers would let them go. Most of the parents and farmers thought that education simply interrupted work, and it is a bit like this still. The children are very involved with their parents’ work and with adult gossip. Quite little boys will know the technical names of tractor attachments and what is going on in the fields at a particular time of the year and the girls talk together like grown women. Neither seem to want their childhood.
Voices of Akenfield Page 6