Memories Of My Time At Newton On Ouse

A Memory of Newton-on-Ouse.

I was born at Newton On Ouse in March 1928. At the age of five I attended the local school whose headmaster was Alf Bradbury. Also at the age of five I began visiting Village Farm that was owned by Mathew Clark. The main attraction was that Mr Clark had a motor car but could not drive but his son George could. George was courting a girl named Annie Bell that lived at Melbourne and used to take me with him when he went to see Annie. Needless to say I had to sit in the car for about two hours before he was ready to return home.

Harvest time was the best period on the farm because for one thing it was always warm besides which the binder that cut and baled the corn kept breaking the wooden connecting rod which meant a dash into York by the car, with me as passenger, to buy a new one from Bushells.

I also went with the Clarks on a long distance run to Skipton where they bought a new flock of sheep every year, I even bought one for myself for sixpence but it soon died.

I did not care too much about the winter as that was the time that the sugar beet was cut by hand before being loaded onto the horse drawn cart and brought to the field gate for Mr Fothergill, haulage contractor, to take it to the Suger Beet Factory at York. However, winter saw the thrashing machine arriving in the stackyard to thrash the corn. This was very exciting as the machine was towed by a steam traction engine which had a lovely smell of steam and smoke as it was providing power, via a thick leather belt, to the thrashing machine.

I did not care much for harvesting the potatoes as this was very manual where the potatoes were uprouted by the horse drawn plough but had to be "scratted" with one's fingers then picked up and placed in a wicker basket which a farm labourer tipped into the horse-drawn cart, then taken to the Potatoe Pie located near the road gate. The "pie" was first covered with straw before placing soil all over it. The reason for this was that the potatoe wholesaler could not deal with the vast number of tons of potatoes all at once so allocated dates to the hundreds of farms who then opened their "pies" and bagged them at the appropriate time.

Around the early spring time the smelly job of emptying the fold yard had to be done. This was the result of numerous cattle that had been sheltered in the fold yard over the winter months. Thankfully the straw used for their bedding absorbed much of the excrement but even so the pong was not very nice. Incidentally this muck had to be tossed from the cart onto the land, which in most cases had been where the corn had been harvested.

By the time I was 12 years old I was looking for pastures new as I was getting a bit fed up with farming. I turned my attention to the local haulage contractor, Mr Matt Fothergill who possessed two two motor lorries, strangely enough driven by two employees not by himself. Many was the tasks taken on by these lorries but the main one was bringing coal direct from the collieries located at Castleford. Yet again my interest was riding in these lorries but I had to 'sing for my supper' by holding the sacks open for the drivers to shovel the coal into the sacks. This could be painful to my knuckles especially when filling them with the best large lumpy coal. Incidentally the coal retailed at one shilling and eight pence for small coal and one shilling and 11 pence for the best. We went to the pits on a Thursday then distributed the sacked coal on Friday to adjacent villages of Tollerton, Flawith and Tholthorpe. On the Saturday we delivered to our own village of Newton-on-Ouse where almost all the villagers were customers. It may seem strange to readers of this tome that no one locked their doors in those days.

I was so keen to attend school that I only missed one half day in the whole time I attended, this half day was because I 'messed' my trousers on the first day due to nerves.

Returning to the year 1936 saw great activity at Newton when the Air Ministry decided to build an aerodrome at neigbouring Linton-on-Ouse. Life at Newton would thereafter never be the same as many of the workers at Newton found jobs at the airfield. Road traffic too increased dramatically from 1936 onwards which neccessitated making the roads much wider. It was an excitiing time for me when the first Whitley bomber flew in. Up to this time I had thought that aeroplanes took off with the nose becoming airborne before the tail, but in fact it did just the opposite. Incidentally the RAF camp brought extra work for the Newton coalman as he obtained the contract for supplying the married quarters.

I note that I must now bring this story to a close but before I do I would just like to add that I too found work at RAF Linton during WW2 when I found that I liked working alongside the airmen so much that after doing my national service during the war I found employment at RAF Linton as a Civil Servant, Radar and Radio technician, where I spent the following 32 happy years.

---

---