Agriculture on the Nottinghamshire Wolds: Interviewee 02: Leslie Derrick

	Leslie was born in 1925 at Costock, a village to the west of Wysall. About 1927 he moved with his family to a farm at Wysall and stayed farming in the village. Extracts of a reminscence interview appear below. Illustrative photographs were taken by Leslie's family
Farming family: My father had the tenancy of a farm at Costock for two or three years. He moved back to Wysall when he got a tenancy of the Widmerpool Lane Farm around 1927 and my first memories come from that time. My family had been in Wysall certainly for two or three hundred years. There have been at least three generations of us farming at The Laurels farm, Wysall where my grandfather was at that time. Until father went to Costock and then back to Wysall - apart from the time that he was away in the forces in the First World War - he was farming with him here at The Laurels, where we are approximately at the present time. The family had consisted of nine brothers and sisters in my father's generation. My father was one of only two brothers who went away into the First World War, and the others were in farming all the time. We spent a number of years on the Widmerpool Lane Farm and many of my early memories are there. When my grandfather retired in around 1934, my father and my Uncle Albert, his brother, had part of The Laurels farm each from that time, and father gave up the tenancy on the Widmerpool Lane Farm. We moved into The Laurels farmhouse and had part of that house - my grandfather and grandmother and an aunt having the other part. Albert, my uncle, lived somewhere else in the village, on the Wymeswold Road. When my Uncle Albert obtained a farm tenancy at Willoughby on the Wolds, he went there with his family - his son David being in partnership with him in later years. My grandfather had retired and my father then had the tenancy of the whole farm at The Laurels. In later years my brother Harold and myself were taken into partnership with him until he retired. My brother by that time had decided he didn't want to continue, or that perhaps the opportunities for both in agriculture where not ideal, and so he decided to leave and pursue an agriculture-related career in marketing.	The Laurels Farmhouse, Wysall
Sheep shearing	Wartime: During the course of the war, in the early days particularly, there was of course direction, as there was throughout the war, regarding the growing of certain crops and the acreage we had to grow, to meet the need for additional food production. The Germans were trying to starve us out as a nation. There was the very serious losses in the Atlantic War - both in the bringing of various other materials, but also importing food across the Atlantic. So it was important that there was sufficient labour force for the job. And one of the things that was done, in addition to women being called up into the Forces, was that the Women's Land Army was formed. There was a hostel down in the village of Bunny, which is quite near to here. I don't know how many girls would be down there, twenty to forty possibly, that were housed in the hostel. They used to work in this local area. My first memory of any of the land girls was that of two girls working in the adjacent field to where my brother Harold and myself were hoeing sugar beet. These two girls were doing the same thing in one of Sewells' fields. Those two girls, as it happened, both married farmers. One of them, Joan, married Les Sewell, one of the two brothers who ran the Sewells farm, and she is a widow now - lives down at Bunny, where they had farmed for many years. The other one was Dorothy, and she married Arnold Eggleston. She and Arnold still live at the farm up in Thorpe-in-the-Glebe, although they're getting quite elderl now.
Horse v. Tractor: The Laurels farm, in common with most farms at that time, was mainly dependent on horse-power. Up to the beginning of the war, there was just a very, very few farmers locally that had got tractors, but not very many. During the course of the war, the Government promoted the production of tractor - both importing and producing in this country - because of their importance to the food production effort. So during the war, more and more tractors became available - but were only obtained on a permit basis so as to get a fair distribution of them. We were dependent, apart from having contractors in on tractors during the war, on horse-power still for a lot our work. It wasn't until two, or three years at any rate, after the end of the war, when the Ferguson tractors first came into production, that we had our own tractor. The Ferguson tractors heralded the beginning of a revolution in power on the farm, and in industry as well. Because of the fact that the use of hydraulics, and of course the power take off as well, on the tractors was such an innovation, and made an immense contribution during the years, and really revolutionised so much of what had been very heavy manual work. It was a great benefit to the whole farming industry, and of course the tractors themselves meant that we could do far more work with less labour and in a much shorter time too.	Pigs in yard
Beef cattle in yard showing stone trough	Horses: Most farmers, or quite a few farmers anyway, in our area used to have several horses. And a number of us used to breed foals each year - whether it was done simply as a hobby thing or whether it was for additional income from the sale of the foals, and also keeping the odd one and breaking it in for our own use. Most were Shires, but we ourselves usually had two Shires and one that we called a half-legged horse, which we could use in the float or the trap in addition to the ordinary farm work. If we were needing a geared horse, it was either the front - or one in front of two behind it. If you were ploughing. It would be the half-legged horse that was in front. It gave the additional power. So most of us, or many of us, used to breed foals. And there would be people, one or two particularly, that travelled a stallion in the area during the breeding season. Someone, of the name of Forshaw, used to travel with Shires in this area regularly each season. And it was these that we used. But partly overlapping and part continuing, perhaps somewhat later than the Shire, Frank Sewell, of the farmers who neighboured us to the north, west of our farm, travelled a Suffolk stallion on a regular basis for a number of years. They became quite popular. Although certain in my family reckoned that the Suffolk was not quite heavy enough boned for the work on our heavier land. Rather interesting actually, the Sewells, on slightly higher land in the main, had got considerable lighter land than what we had.
Havesting: The harvesting of corn - for, certainly in the early years of my life and right through the war, until a little while after the war - was done by what was called a binder. These had come in very soon after the First World War, possibly nearer to the time of my birth or soon afterwards. Previously my father had worked what was called a side delivery rake, where the sheaves had to be tied by hand. The binder itself actually made the sheaves and tied it up and threw it out on the ground. And from then on, they had to be handled by hand literally. If the sheaves were being stacked and stored away for winter threshing, it meant that they would have to be handled, in the processes that were carried out, from six to eight times each. If the corn was very ripe, it meant that every time you handled them there was a danger to the certain amount of the grain rattled out. So overall the loss was quite substantial, because of the multiple times that it was handled. It was some years later of course when the combine harvesters came along - but I do actually remember the first combine harvester that came into this village. It was in the early years after the war, and Mr. Ferreira, who had been doing contract work - giving that sort of service in the area throughout the war years, had a combine to trial. Whether or not it came on a trial or hire basis - I've no idea, but I remember him taking it off to try, and my grandfather commenting, "Aye those things maybe alright in Canada, but they're not any good in this country." But, of course, these things all have to be adapted and time changes everything, doesn't it?	Leslie Derek combining
Beef cattle in a field by the Old Vicarage	Milking: On our farm we milked up to twenty-five - twenty-eight cows, that sort of figure, and it was all done by hand until after the war, when the milking machines were introduced. There were one or two people, possibly two in the village, who had them from the beginning of the war, but certainly not more. Cooling of the milk was done with a open type cooler on the surface, with the water flowing through the centre of the cooler; or in later years, through what was called a rotary cooler that fitted on the top of the churn - not a very efficient method, but the best that we'd got at that time. During the time while my brother and myself were in partnership with my father, we built up our herd to a TT herd - by the process of testing and rejecting those who failed to pass the Tuberculin Test - until after two or three years we became a completely tuberculosis-free herd. At that same time, we upgraded the farm buildings: the livestock buildings, milk parlour; and created a new dairy, so that we were licensed to produce TT milk. We also started to make silage - in a pit that we built ourselves... There wasn't the modern equipment available for it that there is these days by any means, and it was extremely hard work. But we did that on a regular basis and it became an essential part of our programme of providing winter feed
Change: We went out of milking in the year that the Fosse Road was dual-carriaged from Leicester through to Widmerpool. There was a problem with employment at that particular time... also drainage problems, because the problem of effluent in streams was coming into it. We were becoming conscious of the problems that would arise with that for some of us, and certainly in the situation of the way that our land lay. I could see us having considerable difficulties with getting out of that situation once we were banned from any effluent going down the street drains, as they had been doing previously to that - I suppose as far back as farming was operating in the area. So we went out of milking. And I went in for a policy of eighteen months beef cattle, pig breeding, selling weaners; keeping eighty to a hundred breeding ewes, which were Border Leicester/Suffolk cross - and then in later years, mules, because they were more productive; also rotational grain. So that there was this four-year rotation of cereals and grass, with wheat grown for seed and barley for feed; although some of the wheat was going for feed as well.	Feeding the sheep
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