Daft Laddie tales from North Tyne & Rede: Rocks & plough socks

Northumberland, farming, history, dialect, humour, machinery, ploughing, plough sock(shares), 1950s

By Donald Clegg

Rocks
Not all a Daft Laddie's knowledge was gained the hard way. Some came simply by asking questions of the boss, or the old hands on the farm.

I had been ploughing a field ready to sow corn, or maybe turnips, when the plough struck a rock. This was a very common event on farms in the North Tyne and Rede as most of the soils were of boulder clay which came with the compliments of the ice age from the Scottish Highlands, mixed with large round boulders. It would have been nice to send the back at times.

Rocks to wreck socks
The big boulders which had worked their way up to just below the surface were a real hazard to plough socks (shares). The socks were the removable, pointed bit of the plough which dug up the soil after it had been cut by the coulter, and before the mouldboard inverted it.

The two-furrow mounted plough designed by Harry Ferguson.

Note the round disk coulter to cut the soil, the sock or share to dig it up, and the long mouldboard to turn the cut furrow over.

Socks were a made of hard brittle metal and broke quite easily, and were expensive to replace, as the boss was forever reminding us. So if possible, nuisance stones were dug out and rolled or carted in whole or in bits to the edge of the field, out of harm’s way.

The share or sock on a Fergie plough. The disk coulter is on the right

Use the other end ‘o the heed man
This large stone proved to be a bit of a brute, as I discovered by digging a deep trench right round it. The boss then came to investigate the hold up and, deciding this boulder was too big to dig up, sent me to fetch the sledgehammer to see if we could smash a lump off the top. This particular sledgehammer weighed about ten pounds, with a three-foot hickory shank. The head had one square face and the other chisel shaped.

I was then given the job of trying to break enough off the top of the rock so that it would no longer present a risk to passing plough socks, while the boss looked on. I, in my wisdom, was using the chisel-shaped end, hoping to split a sizeable chunk away, when the boss intervened.

The sharp end and the blunt end

“Howt howt! Use the other end man!” he said. Knowing that, in the distant past he had once worked in a stone quarry and new that these sandstones or freestones (as opposed to the Northumbrian whinstone) had a “grain” or lines caused when they were formed in layers. I bowed to his superior expertise, but asked him why he thought the square end would be more successful than the chisel end? “Whey man, the square end’s heavier!” was his reply.
Obvious, isn’t it?

Daft Laddie tales from North Tyne & Rede: Savin' the boss money

Northumberland, farming, history, humour, Daft Laddie, machinery, dialect

By Donald Clegg


Set hor ganin & loup off
It’s well known that farms are among the most dangerous work places in any industry and that familiarity breeds contempt. The situation never was good on farms, and despite all the bureaucracy of today’s Health & Safety regulations, things are no better and probably worse, because there is more machinery today always waiting to deal to daft human complacency.

That fact nearly resulted in tragedy for me one day in the tettie field. The field had been neatly ridged up the day before and my job was to fill each of the drills with good old Farm Yard Manure (FYM), discussed endlessly (especially at the dinner table) with enormous reverence.

To save labour, it was standard practice in those far off days to set the tractor off in its lowest gear with its full load of muck, at the beginning of each pair of drills. Once the tractor had settled into following the drills, you jumped off, ran roond the back, leapt onto the trailer and started forking muck off the back (at the correct rate) as fast as you could to fill the drills as they appeared.

Nuw loup on again
As the tractor neared the end of the drills, you once again, leapt off the trailer and climbed back into the driving seat. On this occasion, at first all went according to plan, and the tettie drills were filled two-by-two at a nice steady rate. Ye had’nt got te put ower much oot remember as the boss wasn't maed o' muney!

It was raining that day and I was wearing a very old and tattered raincoat (the standard garb), tied in the customary fashion, with binder twine around the waist. As I louped off the tractor at the start of another pair of drills, my holey coat snagged over the knob on the hydraulic lever on the Fergie which raises or lowers the drawbar.

I was hooked!
I was hooked, and couldn’t free myself and was being dragged along sideways inches in front of the tractor wheel. In desperation, after what seemed a lifetime, I managed to rip yet another tear in the old coat and fell back on to the muddy ridges as the tractor and its load trundled on past me. I had to slip and slide twenty yards to catch up with the tractor and clambered aboard via the draw bar to bring it to a stop. Shouting, “Woah ye old bitch”, which would have stopped the horse in former times but didn’t work with Fergie.

I found my legs were shaking so much as I realised what a close shave I’d had, that I had to wait for ages before I could reverse the load to the edge of the field and get back to mucking drills. I still have visions, which I can now laugh about, of being squashed into a tettie drill while the tractor tried hour after hour to climb the stone dyke at the end of the field.

The Boss would probably have given my corpse a good swearin' for wrecking his tractor front end and the dyke at the end of the drills if I had not survived!

Daft Laddie tales from North Tyne & Rede: Bracken crushin

Northumberland, farming, history, dialect, daft laddies, farm machinery, bracken cutting, 1950s

By Donald Clegg

Dead bracken, smothering the pasture by Kielder dam

Crushin' the bracken
On another farm, with several years’ experience behind me, I was required to spend some days bracken crushing. On hill farms, good grazing for the sheep was at a premium so any encroachment on to grassy areas by gorse, heather or bracken was tackled with enthusiasm.

Gorse and heather could be burnt, which effectively stopped their advance, at least for a year or two. Bracken on the other hand, with its creeping, under-ground stems, was a different kettle of fish. Cutting it just encouraged more underground growth. Burning, similarly, had no effect. And bracken was poisonous to cattle at the green, actively-growing stage if they ate too much. It didn't take much to kill them.

Heather and bent grass could be burned to keep it short and nutritious, but burning bracken did no good. Its roots (rhizomes) below ground were well proteced from fire

Choice of weapons
Various pieces of equipment came onto the market in the 1950’s, and the simplest (and probably cheapest) was acquired by my new boss. It was pulled behind a tractor rather like a gang mower used for cutting sports' fields – three mowers in line abreast followed by two more behind them.
In the case of the bracken crusher, the mowers were replaced by heavy, square- section rollers, the idea being that, as the rollers turned, the sharp cutting edges of each roller would bruise and chop into the bracken’s root system just below the surface.

Eventually, after repeated application of the crusher, the bracken fronds would weaken and finally give up the ghost, allowing grass once again to grow through and flourish. This was a Daft Laddie’s dream of a job – spending days sitting on a tractor, dein’ nowt but steering and gazing out over the rolling hills, thinking of the next Saturday night dance. Couldn’t be easier, I thought.

Var nigh couped!
All went well for the first two days apart, that is, from one occasion when I almost capsized the tractor by driving across the face of a too steep hillside and another when I got much too close to a dry stone dyke and took ages to extricate myself. About three o’clock on the third day I had dealt with most of the bigger patches of bracken on the hill and had come down to a burn side just to finish off.

There was a particularly lush patch of bracken on the far side of the burn so I slithered and slipped the tractor and its crusher down a short, steep bank, through the burn and on to the other side. Half an hour later the bracken had been crushed and chopped to my satisfaction and I recrossed the burn ready to return to the farm. Now, however, the short, steep bank I’d so gaily slid down earlier, proved too steep and slippery for my tractor.

Late for lowse

The problem lay in the drag from the heavy crushing rollers so, after a lot of heaving and straining, and the loss of a considerable amount of sweat, I concluded I had no option but to start dismantling the rollers, one by one, and manhandling them to the top of the bank.

As each roller must have weighed about ten stones (140lbs), by the time I got all five of them, one at a time, dragged over the burn, hauled inch by inch up the bank and rearranged and reassembled on the opposite shore, I was totally exhausted. I eventually reached the farmyard nearly two hours after lowse (finishing time). The boss, in passing, remarked on my dedication to duty – but I never did recount the facts or claim the overtime!

Bracken (Pteridium esculentum)