Below is Johnny Smith’s written history of his recollection of living in Egglescliffe. You can follow what he says in his oral history by clicking the above and sitting back and enjoying what he says.
Johnny Smith interviewed by Ian Reynolds on 27thMay 2017.
I was born in the house next door [Manor House] in 1943. I went to school in Eaglescliffe. I used to go to what became Teesside High. It was called Cleveland School and it was run by Miss Chalmers, whose sister lived in Eastbourne Avenue. I went then to a school at Saltburn, which was called Glenhow, as a boarder. Eight weeks at school and two weeks at home. Then I went to a school near Edinburgh called Loretto. Then I did my A levels and studied at Newcastle, got a BSc in Agriculture. When I graduated I got a job as a Farm Manager, when I was 21, at a farm looking after every-day working of the farm for a lady in Piercebridge who was a widow. I was there for two years. Up to the point where I left University I hardly ever lived at home because I was a border from age six. I always missed the [Nov 5th] bonfire because I was at school or at university. The [Parish] council decided a few years ago they wouldn’t let us have the bonfire on the Green anymore, and it’s one of the things I am a bit disappointed about.
My family has been on the farm since probably the early 1800s. My grandfather was born here in 1850, probably in the same room that I was born in. His wife, my grandmother, came from Billingham [Belasis] originally, but the family moved up to Bamburgh where they had the tenancy of Bamburgh Hall Farm. The family was quite large up there and when I was young I used to go and stay with one or more of our relatives for the summer holidays. The first time I had a holiday that was not in Northumberland was when I managed to get a trip to France to visit some English people from Eaglescliffe.
My grandfather was a horse-buyer for the Army in the First World War, so he spent quite a lot of time away from home. The horses were brought here or to a nearby farm where they could be gathered together. They would send a steam engine with horse boxes on which would go from Yarm Station, where they would load the horses, and take them off to be trained as gun carriers or whatever. Eight horses were required to pull a gun carrier, so you couldn’t just find eight horses down the road; you had to go quite a long way to get them.
My father inherited from his father, who died as a result of an accident when out hunting. He fell off a horse and hit his head on a gatepost. He was a very good horseman, but it must have been a roughish horse. The fall probably should have killed him- it didn’t but his personality disappeared. He lasted about ten years after that. My father was Chairman of the Hurworth Hunt for endless years. He was sixteen when his father had the accident and he was brought home from school [Loretto in Edinburgh] to organise the farming. It was a young age to have the responsibility, but he had the experience.
After the Second World War I remember we had ten or twelve people working for my father but a lot of that was to do with bottling milk. He had a herd of dairy cows which were milked, mostly by hand in those days, and that was why there was quite a large farm staff as every man had to milk three cows in the morning and again in the afternoon. The milk was delivered around the village. Some of the young boys in the village would start by asking if they could have a job here when they left school and the job was pretty much delivering milk, at least until lunchtime. But I didn’t do that. I was ‘staff’!
The farm wasn’t just dairy. We were arable – my father grew potatoes and wheat, barley to feed the animals and oats for the horses. The ‘power’ on the land used to be carthorses – it’s now diesel engine tractors. We had eight or ten workhorses and the replacements you bred yourself, so we had a couple of brood mares in the stable. Horses had very nearly been edged out by tractors by the time I was born. It was only anybody that couldn’t get hold of a tractor. Ford sent a whole load from America, also they had a factory in Southern Ireland – Cork, I think – that was building these American Ford tractors, adapted to suit British systems. My father bought one after the War. They were the standard tractor because there were so many of them over here everybody had one. Hand-wound to get it to start and it had a little platform you stood on; sort of a cross between a steam engine and a diesel or petrol tractor.
I remember in harvest time in the early ‘50s most of the farm was running on tractors by then but we did have a couple of horses and the old carts so the children – four or five of us – got a carthorse saddled and bridled up and go to bring a load of sheaves of corn up to where they were stacking it. The very first tractor I remember was an International Harvester tractor that was a wedding present to my father from my mother. The steering wheel was vertical, and you sat on top of the differential with a sack or something on it to stop you getting bolt marks on your trousers! We quickly went on to more modern ones like the grey ‘Fergie’ and probably everybody had one of those. We had a line-up of four Ferguson T20 tractors. A lot of people thought the tractors were too small and light for the jobs like ploughing, but because of its hydraulic system it was able to act like a much bigger tractor. Although there were tractors on farms up till then, the Ferguson was the only one that had a hydraulic system. In fact, I still have one of the original grey ‘Fergie’s’ hidden away.
I liked any job that was to do with tractors. But the things that the tractors pulled weren’t cheap and not many farmers had a good set of tractors and machines. A lot of farmers adapted horse things, adding two or three together because a 20-horse power tractor could do more work than 10 horses. It took no time to learn how to drive a tractor – you just jump on and drive. Nowadays you have to be eleven to sit on a tractor, even with a cab. But a lot of people think it is better to know your child is safe in the tractor cab than walking around the stack yard with students tearing through on the latest Massey-Ferguson.
When you harvested you brought the sheaves of corn up to the farmyard and we had three stack yards because of the layout; at least three farms. One was up at the golf course – the buildings right in the middle of the course where they keep their equipment – that was one farm. There was another between here and straight down to the river and the second last one was opposite where the River Leven comes out. Then what we called ‘Almond’s Farm’ because the tenant was Willy Almond, my father took that farm over because Willy died and his son, Arthur, didn’t fancy being a farmer by himself. So, my father took the land on and took Arthur on as a farm worker, so everybody was happy.
During the War we used to get German POWs on thrashing days to help with the work. My father had a horse trailer that he would put on the back of his car and drive into Stockton, Yarm Lane, where the Post Office used to be. He picked them up there. I think they had a soldier waiting with them. They had a free lunch and at the end of the day they were taken back in the trailer to Stockton, where the soldier would take them back to the camp. We’d get a thrashing company in for the grain and there were a few round here. The one that I remember most was Preston’s of Potto. Dick Preston started out as a farm contractor, bought a thrashing set, which was a tractor, a thrashing machine and another machine on the back of the thrasher which gathered the straw up and was either a baler or just loose with two strings round to make another stack. Oat straw you would feed to cows, it was nearly as good as hay. Wheat [straw] was mostly for bedding for animals. And barley was somewhere in between. Everybody wanted to buy something, so you didn’t throw it away. Thrashing might take two days. The machine would arrive after lunch in the afternoon and the workers would set it all up. The tractor had to be at the right end for driving a flat belt about 9 inches wide and probably 40 feet long. One of the things about harvesting and saving it up to thrash later was that the corn was stored in barns, so you had to be near a wooden floored barn. If you put a bag of wheat on the floor it sucks the water up out of the ground. So, they are either on a wooden floor with a big gap underneath or you have to use it up or sell it. Some would be eaten at home and some would be sold on the open market. They’d come with a tractor and trailer and take six bags away. Later driers came in but that was a whole different system.
The job I didn’t like was hoeing turnips. I remember when I was ten, I had my own hoe and the idea was to get the weeds away from the turnip. I got thruppence a day for doing it, I think. Just in school holidays. Everything’s changed now, the crop is grown then sprayed with weed killer or a growth enhancer or whatever else a salesman thinks you ought to be putting on. The turnips were grown for animal feed. But a cow has only got teeth in the bottom [jaw], they don’t have top teeth so for cattle they needed to be chopped. My father had an expensive chopping machine for dealing with turnips. They only ate the roots. The tops died away, but if they didn’t the machine would flay the tops off. Then farm men would load them into trailers – one turnip at a time. That was in my first job when I went to Mrs Shepherd’s [farm], harvesting turnips after we got the harvest in.
We don’t grow potatoes any more, though they are big money these days. But you have to have good land to grow them on. Not too stony or too clayey. Stones will affect the harvesting. These days you can get attachments for potato harvesters that can tell the difference between a potato and a stone, even though they are the same size. All we had was a spinner which went down the rows of potatoes and threw the soil up and it landed two feet away with the potatoes on top so people could just pick them up. Even the planting is done automatically now, so there isn’t as much heavy hand work in the fields as there used to be. We gave up growing potatoes in 1967 when two little boys had a fire on top of a straw stack in our Dutch barn and burnt the whole lot down. The insulation to keep the potatoes safe from winter frost was straw, so there was a row so many bales high round the outside of what you call a ‘potato pie’ with straw on top. They had a bonfire on top of it and the whole lot went, our whole winter supply of spuds. And all our potato machinery was in the shed and quite a bit of it was wooden, so they went.
We grew linseed for animal feed, to save buying oil replacements. It’s quite high protein as well. You mixed crushed linseed seeds with crushed oats and you got quite a good feed for cattle and sheep. I remember trying to harvest the linseed and ‘trying’ is the operative word there. The stems are not necessarily very thick but tough – you can’t just go along with a pen knife and slice it through. One of the reasons we stopped growing it! And we have probably been growing rape for 25 years [as a linseed replacement].
When farming was more labour intensive the Victorians would go to a thing called ‘The Hirings’ where they would all gather in Yarm High Street. If you wanted a job you went down there, and you’d see the farmers and talk to them. Or if the farmer wanted some labour he’d be down there asking the unemployed if they would work for him. There were two Hirings every year; one was probably integrated with Yarm fair in October time. We had a little bit of accommodation for workers on the farm. The Farm Forman lived in that house [Ferncliffe?] and there’s a little cottage on the corner [Rose Cottage] which was the Farm Forman’s son’s. This house had bedrooms in the loft, so my grandfather probably had four men living in the top and also people around the village would take in lodgers. I remember someone in Eastbourne Avenue regularly used to take a farm worker at harvest time, when there’s a lot of hand work to do. Harvest would take a month so that was a fairly good job for somebody. Or maybe for picking potatoes; that would be a week and it always clashed with half term for the schools, so the schoolchildren used to come as well.
My grandfather lived in the Manor House and farmworkers lived in the Old Hall, latterly. The fellow who was senior man on the cows, he generally would have that house. It was draughty. The walls are eighteen inches to two feet thick stone, but the windows didn’t fit very well. But it had a good water supply – a tap in the house – and I’m not sure how many of the villagers’ houses had a cold tap in those days! I remember two wells on the Green – one in Pump Row I never knew and one behind my brother’s house. And the gap between the Old Hall and the new buildings was wide enough to put a bath in there; probably one of the only houses in the village with a bath. It also had a gas supply.
My father tried to get a grant from the local council in the late ‘50s early ‘60s to have it done up but the fellow who came to inspect it said, ‘what are these buildings here?’ which is where the cows were in a byre where we milked. He said ‘Oh, it’s attached to this house, you can’t have anybody living in it.’ So that’s why it became empty. My wife and I had considered living in it when we got married but we were unable to because of that.
I joined a group of people who lived in the village who were keen to get it designated as a conservation area. We were known as the Village Amenity Society. I think Egglescliffe was the second or third village [ in the country] to be awarded conservation status and I was Chairman of the Committee that put that together. I remember going round and counting trees and drawing them on a map. We are lucky that one of the people who was involved in the village part worked for Stockton Council, so it was right up his street. He got the paperwork put together.
We used to plant flowers on and around the Green in little areas and they used to have a ‘Tidy Village’ competition, Egglescliffe won it two or three times in a row. We very nearly claimed the trophy – I think it was a horseshoe on a pole that the local Council put up for us. But as soon as the year was up they took it away! But it was beside the Village Cross.
We also revived the ‘Village Pound’. It was down by the telephone box – it was where all the stray animals were put at night and you had to pay to get them out. You don’t see many of those now, but I’m pleased it’s still there and part of the village’s history.
Because of the increase of children in the area the local school became too small, so they decided to build a bigger school, and commandeered the Rectory vegetable garden and put the school there. Then the Parish Council decided to use the old school as a village hall. It was Councillor Gregory that got things going. I was at the time Chairman of the Amenity Society. Dick Greenhalsh, who was one of the local council people, came to see me and said, ‘we need a chairman for the village hall, will you be it?’ We had a meeting and decided to put a committee together. At the second meeting quite a few people had things to say and this fellow, Bill Bingham, had all sorts of complaints about whose going to look after the village hall. After a while Councillor Gregory said ‘you’ll be exactly the right person to run the village hall. I propose you as the Secretary!’ So we all voted for Bill Bingham to be Secretary. And Richard Fawcett was Treasurer. He had been on the Parochial Church Council and he got the financial bits underway. It was Church money that was used to do the hall up. So the two people who really got the village hall going were Bill Bingham, ex- Captain in the Royal Merchant Navy and Richard Fawcett. So the old school, instead of being knocked down, was done up and an entrance added. I was Chairman of the Parish Hall Committee for 39 years. For the first ten years my wife and I also did the bookings because Bill went and got married and disappeared. When I retired Simon took over and he’s ongoing to this day. Simon is following in my footsteps which makes me very proud. He is taking the farm forward for the next generation and keeping alive the Smith farming heritage of my family in Egglescliffe.