Swavesey & District History Society

Swavesey & District History Society

September 2024 meeting.  The season opened to hear Swavesey resident, Selwyn, give a talk on Fenland Farming in the 1950s.  Down in the fens 2½ miles northwest of Downham Market in Norfolk was a large farm built in 1847 which was compulsorily purchased from the lord of the manor by Norfolk County Council in 1919.  Selwyn’s father was one of six smallholders sharing the extensive farm buildings and the highly productive peat/silt fenland.  The surrounding land is between -1 and -2m below mean sea level and because of the serious risk of inundation by the sea, this high quality agricultural land is kept very efficiently drained to a low level by the Crabb’s Abbey Pumping Station at Magdalen and the Common Lode Drain Pumping Station at Stow Bridge, both with enormously powerful pumping capacity into the river Great Ouse.

The main crops grown were potatoes and sugar beet, with a small area of strawberries on almost every smallholding throughout the parish and often a few acres of onions or peas.  Cereals were grown almost reluctantly to preserve the crop rotation.  Almost all farms kept chickens because the weekly income from eggs was paid for in cash the following week by the buyer, convenient to use quickly for the weeks’ groceries in the village shop, thus bypassing the taxman.  Most kept pigs, with the occasional house cow to provide milk, butter and cream.

In 1953 his three older brothers were 15, 17 and 18 years old so, along with father, there was a physically strong labour force available in a decade when farming was physically demanding – Selwyn and his youngest brother were born in the late 1940s.  Potato picking was a very labour intensive job at that time since it was all done by hand.  Most of the picking was done by women because the farmer paid a woman a lower wage than a man for doing the same job.  However, strawberry picking was done by piecework which meant that the picker was paid per pound weight picked, not time working.  Many of the women were faster pickers than the men and easily earned enough to pay for a new twin-tub washing machine or their first refrigerator or a family holiday in a caravan at Hunstanton. 

Sugar beet growing also involved much hard labour since soon after emergence the crop had to be chopped out by hoe and the beet singled by hand then later the weeds within the rows were removed by more hoeing because there were few herbicides available.  At harvest, after the beet were mechanically squeezed out of the ground from underneath, they were pulled up by hand and knocked together to remove soil then topped by hand and loaded into carts.  Heaps of beet were usually made along the roadside ready to be loaded by hand into a lorry for transport to the factory at Wissington. 

Next meeting-

22 October.  Bastardy, Bigamy, Brawling and Brothels.  Gill Shapland.