About

We had just caught the tail end of a program on Manx Radio giving an over view of life on the Isle of Man maybe a hundred and fifty years ago. Then a “typical” Manxman would go off to the fishing in the herring season. This was hard, difficult and dangerous work while it lasted. When the fishing season was over the typical Manxman, “Would return to his croft and his morose, indolent existence.”

Patricia who was born a Scot and by her own admission could not tell a joke to save her life remarked philosophically, “I got one of those”.

I grew up in a house with no electricity or plumbing. Oil lamps in the kitchen, candles in the bedrooms, I was fourteen years old before I switched on a light in my own home.

I was four years old in nineteen forty eight when I watched our first tractor, a little gray Fergie, drive up on the yard. Until that time our farm had been entirely horse drawn. About the same time as we got the milking machine.

I drove that tractor round and round “The horse course” to work our stationary threshing mill and have seen the same job done by a pair of horses.

I have harnessed and worked draught horses, mostly for hauling carts, occasionally for light field work.

I have worked the board of a ‘steam mill’. Thinned turnips, who hasn’t?

At the Braide Eisteddfod I was the only man there who knew what a striggle was.

Who these days would recognise a hay knife and know for what it was intended?

I have turned the swathes of grass with a fork to make hay, stacked loose hay in rucks and helped to make hay ropes to tie them down.

I have made bands and tied sheaves of corn. For a few years after I left school I built the stacks of sheaves, cut rushes with a scythe and thatched the stacks. And my stacks did not ‘take water’.

It was a time of change and like Max Boyce “I was there”. I have seen things and done things and heard things.

These are some of the things seen, done or heard over the years.

Just one last word about how these stories are related. Back in the day working with Roly Drower our group was performance orientated. I found it easier to ‘communicate’ with an audience speaking in the first person whether I was there in person or not.