Threshing Day, Holderness Vintage Machinery Club
Holderness Vintage Machinery Club held a threshing day at Welwick, East Yorkshire on 30th December 2007. They had a tractor run around local villages to start the day, then members of the Holderness Vintage Machinery Club helped thresh the wheat that had been cut from a field in Keyingham with a binder.
The baler tied 5 strings around each bale and the whole machine was driven by a tractor with a flat belt pulley. Many farmers would rely on contractors to do the threshing for them and it was common for neighbours to help each other on threshing day. Staff were needed to fork the sheaves (pronounced shavs in Yorkshire) from the rulley up to the top of the machine, untie the bands, feed the machine, bag off the grain, remove the chaff and stack the bales of straw. The hardest work was carrying the sacks of grain away, often up grainery steps and with 16 stone (100kg) in the sacks it was heavy work. In VintageTractorEngineer’s local village the first 4 grainery steps were missing at one farm and there was a plank of wood in their place. After a hard day carrying sacks up the plank of wood and then into the grainery in the 1960’s, VTE’s father decided that the sacks should be weighed as they were rather heavy. The average weight in the sacks was found to be 20 stone (125kg)!
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