# 16. Clarence 'Clary' Daws (Part 2)

Working for Clary was not easy work, you were expected to pull your weight the same as the older boys. The first summer I worked there, at about 12½  years old, even if it was for only 7 or 8 working days, they were 8 hour days. We were of course not supposed to be working at that age. In my first year at St Georges, I can remember the class being asked by a teacher if any of us had part-time jobs - I put my hand up along with a few others. Then being told it was illegal to work under 13 years of age, and when you were 13 you were only allowed to do 6 or 8 hours a week. Next year we were asked again and only the lads who had paper rounds put their hands up!

The work we did was much on par with the bigger farms in the area. Nearly all of Clary's equipment was at least second hand. The only piece of equipment that I can remember him buying new, was a single row potato digger.

The first week and a half of the summer holidays would see about 9 or 10 of us employed at one time so that the cauliflowers, brussels sprouts and cabbages could be 'planted out'. One to drive the tractor and four on the planter, the rest in the plant bed pulling the young plants to be transplanted in the main field. By today’s standards it was slow work, quite boring pulling plants for 8 hours a day, back-aching on the planter, being bent over double all day long. The plants, as they do today, were planted in rows evenly spaced out. The spacing was obtained by a simple method - on one of the press wheels under a seat was a set of cogs similar to that on a bicycle, a piece of sprung steel would be fixed to engage a particular cog and every time it went over a tooth it would emit a loud 'ping' which is when you put a plant into the slot made by the coulter and the press wheels firmed it in the ground. There was different spacing of the teeth on each cog, allowing the cauliflowers to be planted 30 inches apart and cabbages 20 inches.

Potato planting was usually done around Easter time. A gang of 5 was used for doing this. Again, slow work, but the machine used for doing the planting was the same used by every farm up until the 1980's. On the planter you would take the seed potatoes from the trays stacked in front of you and between your legs you had a rotating disc with 'cups' around the outside, one potato was put in each cup which would drop the potato into the ground. The cups could be rotated at different speeds to obtain the required distance to which each potato needed to be planted. By the end of the day after having looked at these cups rotating anticlockwise when you stopped at the end of the row the cups appeared to go clockwise.

Other crops that Clary grew such as runner beans and broad beans were planted with old hand pushed single row seed drills which were decades old but were good enough for planting a ¼ or ½ an acre. The plant beds were drilled the same way. He also had a small drill for planting the small acreage of wheat and barley that he grew.

Next month, harvesting Clary's crops.

*Terry Marsh*

Originally published in the Monkton News (December 2023).