The previous two pictures are of a pair of steam plough engines that my grandfather Frank Parish worked on. They were bought by the Spalding farmers B.N. and C.E. Smith of Spalding in 1919 from a farmer in Suffolk. I recall Mr. C.E. Smith living at Monks House, Bourne Road, Spalding in the 1970’s. The Smiths sold the engines on to J.K. Gandy of Thurlby in 1944 and my grandfather was let out to Gandy’s to do some of the work with them until they stopped using them later in the 1940’s. [ii]
These steam ploughs would have worked in pairs winding a cable across the field to tow the plough forwards and back. Such investment required big enough fields for such an operation. It was possible to use one engine by using a system of windlasses anchored around the field, but this could be harder to run.
The steam plough possibly enabled deeper and quicker ploughing than a horse, but it used more men in that the steam engines required feeding with coal and water, let alone the task of driving them to the field and setting them up and maintaining them. Hence we see my grandfather, a traction engine man on the fields near Bourne contrasting with my great uncle Bill Perkins, a horseman in the same area.
It is telling that my Uncle Bill and my grandfather were like chalk and cheese. From what I was told, Uncle Bill left school at eight. He could barely read or write. But he was no fool. I remember as a young child him sitting in his chair reading a broadsheet newspaper whilst puffing on his pipe. I would enjoy playing with the clouds of smoke, and I reckon he knew this and puffed up more smoke. Whilst he was supposed not to be able to read very well he seemed to enjoy his paper and was very well versed in current affairs. He loved watching westerns on his black and white TV and if John Wayne was on you had to be silent, or else. He owned his own home, had an allotment and a small amount of land. In my time he lived with Auntie Lizzie down Henrietta Street in Bourne which in my childhood was dead opposite the cattle market with a set of cattle stalls at the top of the street. This is now a shopping centre and car park. In the summer he would happily sit in his shed putting the world to rights as a rank Tory whilst smoking his pipe, shaking out his lit matches and dropping them next to a can of paraffin.
In contrast was my grandfather, Frank Parish, he lived mostly in tied houses, in my time (1970’s) at the bottom of Twenty Drove at Spinney Farm. The Smiths sold the farm to Stephensons and he feared eviction, and received legal notice of eviction from Smiths. But Mr Stephenson visited him, they had gone to school together, and he assured him he would not evict him. In return my grandfather did some work on the farm and I remember helping him feed the bullocks. Eventually he retired to a Bourne United charities almshouse in Bourne to a small house that resembles the design of cottages in the 1867 Commission report illustrated earlier. Very cosy with large gardens which he enjoyed growing veg and fruit bushes on. Like Uncle Bill he had a love of westerns both on TV and reading cheap Western paperback pulp fictions. He was a good reader. He had attended school longer than Bill and also went to Sunday School. However he would love to argue with Uncle Bill, occasionally going back in time about traction engines vs horses, but more often the topic of dispute was politics. Frank was rank Labour and had a strong dislike of “Marjorie Thatcher” in contrast to Uncle Bill.
It is perhaps an incredible contrast that for about a hundred years the steam engine and the horse continued to be used on Fenland farms, separately and side by side. But the horseman perhaps had the edge on usefulness and could earn more money and cultivate his own land if he wished. I think it telling that as the May hiring fairs died out in Lincolnshire the reports in the press repeatedly state “only horsemen were hired.”
Lincolnshire was blessed with some strong engineering businesses that contributed to the development of their machines: Rustons of Lincoln, Marshalls of Gainsborough, Clayton and Shuttleworth of Lincoln all established in the steam era. We then see Richard Hornby & Sons of Grantham developing early oil engines. This great centre of agricultural engineering continues today in different forms, such as Tong Engineering at Spilsby with potato and vegetable sorting machinery; Garfords cultivation equipment at Market Deeping; or bespoke electronic equipment by Martin Lishman at Bourne.
One of the first tasks that steam engines undertook on the farm was the act of threshing. This was initially done with a static engine.
The threshing machine was recognised as especially dangerous as reported by Edward Stanhope in 1867:
“Work upon threshing machines is condemned on all sides for women. Many farmers have given it up from a sense of its unfitness. Many labourers will not allow their wives to go. Miss Boucherett, in other respects a great advocate for freedom of labour, condemns it from her experience on The Wolds. The women, or woman (for in some parishes it is the custom to have one only), stands upon the stage of the machine, cuts the bands, and hands the sheaf to the man who is feeding the machine, and who is sitting close to the revolving drum. ‘There is danger,’ says one witness, ‘of their dresses being caught in the machinery, as I can bear sad testimony, having had fatal ‘accidents on my farm.’ Moreover there is a possibility of the sheaf striking her as it is put on the machine, and throwing her off her balance. The stage on which she has to stand is often very narrow, sometimes not more than 2 ½ feet.
Now it is not pretended that a man would be free from danger in the same position, but the dress of the woman and its liability to be caught by the drum when raised by a puff of wind render it especially dangerous for her. A great many accidents happen from this cause. Three fatal cases occurred while I was visiting Lincolnshire. It is true that these accidents commonly arise from carelessness; in one case it was from a woman stepping on the drum as she came back to work, but some are undoubtedly caused by the dress.”
It is a telling nature of the times that the solution for women to wear trousers was not considered at least a partial remedy.
The accidents described in the press at the time describe the vivid crushing and even degloving of arms and legs and make for horrendous reading of painful deaths. It was so recognised as a problem that competitions were held to design a guard that would protect the drum and prevent accidents.[i] But despite several designs being created the objections were always that frequent removing of the drum to clear blockages was impeded by any guard.
The concern regarding Threshing became so great that 1877 saw The Threshing Machines Bill seek to improve safety and the enforcement of guards. Some of the comments in Parliament are of interest:
Mr. Henry Chaplin MP for Mid-Lincolnshire made the proposal – “.. in moving that the Bill be now read the second time, said, the object of the measure was to guard, as far as possible, against the occurrence of' those lamentable accidents which too frequently happened in the working of machines of this nature. It contained but one clause. Several men were required in the working of these machines. One was employed in managing the machine and four others in assisting; but as there was not, as the machines were at present constructed, any safeguard at the feeding mouth, and the men being inexperienced, they were constantly exposed to serious accidents—accidents resulting in some cases in loss of life, and in others in permanent injuries. The Bill proposed to provide a safeguard at the feeding mouth, which would be of simple construction, and would have the effect, with care, of preventing such accidents; and it proposed to enforce the use of the guard by inflicting a penalty of 40s. on any person who permitted any such machine, belonging to him to be worked, or on any person in charge of such machine, without using this guard. Threshing machines when at work went at a rapid rate, making several hundred revolutions in a minute, and it was impossible in the absence of such means as the Bill provided to prevent accidents. The provisions of the measure were simple, and he trusted the House, in reference to the objects, would allow it to be read a second time.”
The Bill passed but, it was open to interpretation by magistrates and the penalty was not a large enough deterrent to prevent continued accidents.
The other accident that we see occurring frequently from these machines was by walking into the drive belt which linked the machine to the steam engine. This didn’t just apply to threshing machines, but also turnip crushing machines, wood saws, and any other contraption so linked to a steam engine. The injuries make grim reading from loss of eyes, burn wounds from the belt, injuries to limbs and even partial decapitation. In factories with machinery it was easier to guard drive belts and factory legislation increasingly demanded this and other safety measures, but such actions on a farm with portable machinery were not always practical or viable.
Whilst threshing was dangerous it needs to be understood that prior to it being mechanised it was done either by treading or by beating the grains off the wheat in a highly labour intensive and much slower manner with greater waste. This was a game changer. As were steam ploughs that enabled heavier land to be cultivated and deeper farrows to be ploughed on larger fields.
But the adoption of and investment in farm machinery was slowed from the 1880’s as the Agricultural Depression hit the Fens hard. The large exporters of grain, America and Canada did not experience a faster mechanisation, it is just that they had more land, larger farms and vast economies of scale with growing populations. Indeed, America possibly held onto the use of horses in mainstream agriculture for a decade longer than Britain.
The 1930’s saw more tractors running on oil engines, or various mixes with the use of tractors being developed and encouraged by the government as it sought to improve Agriculture and protect it. But America was far quicker at adopting the use of oil engine driven tractors and with the massive development of production lines and industry it dominated global markets in this equipment in the same way that Britain had dominated steam engines.
The Fenland farmers entered the Second World War with many processes still reliant upon men and horses. Potato picking and sugar beet in particular could be brutal jobs. Children were called from schools into the fields. The government recognised this and extended School summer holidays with a 22 day licence, but local schools took a pragmatic view to enforcing attendance. But the wartime period and after did see an influx of American made machines shipped in effectively in kit form to be assembled in the UK. One example of this is Allis Chalmers tractors which from 1947 many were assembled at Carlby near Stamford[iii]
Many of the earlier tractors did not have a PTO shaft, that is the shaft that runs from the rear of a tractor that operates most modern farm equipment by transferring the power from the tractor. This is despite it being invented in 1918. But rather you saw horse drawn equipment such as manure spreaders, liquid fertiliser tanks, hay turners and ploughs simply adapted to being pulled behind the tractor. The tractor had to work alongside the horse and steam. This meant that many tractors had a belt drum which could enable them to replace the heavy steam engines that rapidly disappeared in the post war period. The adoption of technology in farming appeared to be constrained by having to dovetail with prior technologies. But the beauty of the tractor is that it was affordable to smaller farmers, lighter, more versatile and required just one man to drive and operate it. As such it has had a larger effect on Agriculture than any other single development.
The arrival of the combine on Fenland Farms saw the cutting, lifting and threshing of grain all done in one process driven by one man. Larger quantities of grain meant that drying and storage capacity had to be increased, thus we see farm buildings change and a great increase in steel framed building appearing across the fens.
Potato lifting has always been labour intensive. But the tractor saw the back of the job being broken, and larger tractors have seen larger machines lifting. Other farms use large machines that are dedicated just to lifting potatoes, but whilst it is a valuable and potentially profitable crop the use of specialist machinery does tunnel such operations into being done by specialist contractors. This is certainly the direction we have seen with such crops as Sugar Beet and Peas where the large pieces of kit become harder or mostly impossible for many individual farmers to justify. It is now true that many farms cannot justify the cost of owning a combine harvester unless they are large enough and thus we see many aspects of mechanisation favouring the larger farmers of the fens and beyond. It will be interesting to see whether future robotic operations may see a reversal of this with smaller machines.
With machinery comes the hazard of ensuring the various silt and peat lands of the fens are not damaged. The silt soils on Holbeach Marsh, for example, are only 8 or 9 inches deep. In wet weather the black land peaty fen soils can act like a sponge and become very difficult to go on without damaging the soil. Plus as black land dries out the top can be a dry crust just waiting for an unsuspecting wheel to break through. Hence we see more tracked vehicles appearing on farms to avoid compaction as well as being able to operate in a wider range of conditions.
Farming is dangerous for many reasons and each generation of farming has different dangers. Older machinery has no cab and no roll bar. My late father-in-law recounted a tale of one man that had a crawler roll over on him due to it tipping in a hole in the field. With no cab or bar to protect him he was crushed into the field. However, fortunately due to the ground being soft it merely pressed him into the ground and he got away with bruises.
It needs to be remembered that not all farm machinery is in the field. For example once lifted potatoes have to be sorted or graded by size and quality. This is a fairly labour intensive operation despite it being increasingly mechanised. At one end of the machine you have potatoes entering from boxes and they go along various rubber belts. The machine can often sort into two or more sizes, but it also requires manual intervention of teams of four to six people to physically spot and lift out bad potatoes and stones etc. that are pretending to be potatoes. Even then mechanisation poses its own problems as you have to ensure that the potato is well managed and not bruised or damaged as it works its way along the line. This can even be monitored by adding an electronic potato to the line that transmits how much it is moved and dropped to a pad. The only difficulty being is that you ensure that you retreive the expensive electronic potato before it reaches a box resulting in the box being emptied out and a frantic hunt – as I have found to my cost and annoyance.
It strikes me that each level of mechanisation in Agriculture, whilst it can reduce people in some areas of the operation it can need more in other areas.
[i] Lincolnshire Steam In Camera by Harold Bonnett 1988
[ii] Norwich Mercury 1874
[iii] Allis Chalmers Tractors were assembled from 1947 by Eastern Farm Implements Ltd at Carlby.
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