Listening to the oral history testimonies allows your mind to drift to an earlier time, one that may seem very different but somewhat familiar at the same time. The interview with Mr. Robson begins with Robin Gard, Archivist at the time of the recording in 1974, asking Mr. Robson to generally chat about his memories of the Felton and Swarland area (Northumberland Archives reference number T/56 and T/57). And that he does.
Mr. Robson tells the listener that his father and grandfather had been mole-catchers in the area, his father working on the farms between Coal Houses at Acklington and up to the Felton area. He remembers his school days, being taught reading, writing and arithmetic using a slate and pencil to write with. His first job, aged 14, delivering milk from a pony and trap, pouring it into jugs or basins from a large can with a tap. He had always wanted to be a miner, he joined his first pit, Widdrington Colliery six-months later. He worked at the Isabella Pit and Bullocks Hall bore hole before beginning to work on the roads and helping with the first tarred stone surface on the A1. He also recalls his time in France during World War One as part of the Royal Artillery protecting the barrage balloons from attack.
Mr. Robson also reminisces about life in an agricultural village; the majority of people worked on the farms, although he chose not to. A horse-drawn machine would work the field, one man would stand on it reaping the corn using a hand scythe whilst another would use a rake to sweep it off the blades for the men on the ground to tie it into a sheaf. Between the Wars new machinery was introduced which put the corn into the sheaf, all the men in the fields had to do was ‘stook it up’ or stand it on its ends. The sheaves would be left in the fields for a couple of weeks, depending on the weather, before being taken to the farmstead. The corn would be stacked in round or square stacks first before being taken to the ‘gin-gang’ to be threshed. A gin-gang was a horse-engine house, usually a round building, attached to a threshing barn. A threshing machine in the barn was connected to the gin-gang and powered by horse walking round and round inside the building (https://co-curate.ncl.ac.uk/gin-gang/). Nearly every farm one; Mr. Robson had observed a gin-gang using eight horses, four sets of two, being used. Horse-power was later replaced with a steam boiler. After threshing, grain would be taken to the nearby windmill to grind into corn flour.
Mr. Robson also recalled seeing the women working in the fields, they were known as ‘bondagers’. Typically used in the north-east of England and southern Scotland, these were women supplied to the farm owner by the tenant to undertake work on the farm. They would wear what Mr. Robson described as ‘rough clothing’ as well as a straw hat to protect themselves from the weather. Through the ever-changing weather, the introduction of more modernised machinery over the decades, the harvest still gets done, the same but different.
