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Everyone who has worked or grown up on a farm during the early sixties or before remembers threshing day.

The videos from Rosemount Festival have brought back some memories for Dave, who has written in…

 

It has brought back memories to me from the UK in the 50’s.  I remeber the ol Binder & the threshing machine, they used to have a contractor come round to the farm & thresh out the sheaves the binder had made.  It was powered by a single cylinder two stroke diesel Field Marshall, which would produce perfectly round smoke signals out of the exhaust pipe when working hard.

The contractor who came to do the threshing at Vintage Tractor Engiener’s farm used a Field Marshall.  In fact his son still has the tractor and all the original paperwork for it.  The gentleman is no longer with us, but he was also the local garage/mechanic and he learnt his trade as a boiler engineer (I think it was with John Fowler traction engines, but I’m not certain).

Field Marshall tractor ploughing

A Field Marshall ploughing

VTE’s father used to carry corn on the threshing days.  All the farmers used to help each other and one day dad was carrying corn with another guy up into a one and a half story grainery where you had to dip down under the roof trusses with the sack on your back.  Worse still, the first four grainery steps were missing and replaced with an inclined plank of wood.  They thought the sacks were weighing quite a bit, so at drink time (we call it drinkings or louance in our part of Yorkshire) they weighed one.  20 stones!!.

Everyone tells me that if you could manage to do the job then carrying the corn was actually one of the best jobs as it was out of all the dust – unlike the baler operator!