England, my England.
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I came across this old YT video of Finchingfield but have only a rough idea of the year it was filmed.
It has a working Threshing machine, red phone box, and pork mince 2 bob a pound.
The best clue though seems to be a very new looking vintage bus. Maybe WCB or JP can tell us when it was please?
It is only a short video but has so many memories within.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwNvEU0h408
Life has changed so much in the last years …I suppose since the war.
So many places unrecognizable.
We have no choice but to change with it…to accept…be happy for your lives…the lives that are behind us…and who knows wonderful experiences ahead of us…embrace it.
You are as usual quite right Marmite but I like to reminisce. Any idea what year it is.
50s…I was born after the war…(welcome home dad!)
my sister was born in Grays …11 years earlier.
we lived in saffron Walden for a few years before moving to greater London…biggest changes for me are London..
If you look in the comments, you will see “Quote” Finchingfield in Essex, and I reckon filmed in 1948 judging by the Bristol K built between 1946 and 1950,
They’re good these old bits of film aren’t they. I remember that the Ministry of Information was set up after the war to generally inform the public of the whys and wherefores of life and to get them used to a more orderly way of life.
Without looking anything up which has to be much more fun anyway, I would hazard a guess that this bit of film was made in the early ’50’s. The large Fordson Major tractor came onto the market just after the war and was often used to drive the threshing machines at harvest with the corn stocks being loaded into it that would have been cut by a binder and stocked in the field to dry. By the mid ’50’s the first “bagger” combines were starting to appear which enabled the corn to be thrashed on the combine and taken back to the grain store in half hundred weight bags which, believe me, took some lifting and produced many a bad back.
Mark you, the double decker bus looks a bit more up to date and Harry Enfield’s narration seems a bit out of place – maybe it was done by his grandfather.
PS – It’s incredible how we remember this stuff when we can’t remember what we had for lunch yesterday.
The coach at the beginning of the clip looks like a Bedford OB. The Double decker looks like a Bristol K series judging from the shape of the front wheel hub covers but without a shot of the front it is difficult to be sure, the shape of the radiator is the give away. 1950 I would say give or take a year or two. Could be an Eastern National bus but I can’t make out a fleet number or the number plate so can’t be sure.
I came across this old YT video of Finchingfield but have only a rough idea of the year it was filmed.
It has a working Threshing machine, red phone box, and pork mince 2 bob a pound.
The best clue though seems to be a very new looking vintage bus. Maybe WCB or JP can tell us when it was please?
It is only a short video but has so many memories within.
If you look Finchingfield up on Google Maps and go to the pictures, it looks almost the same, except that there are cars parked everywhere.
I can remember seeing a cutter binder working on a wheat field in the late forties/early fifties pulled by a pair of horse, a few hundred yads from the house where I was born into. And the farmer giving the gleaners the ok to glean for the spilled ears of wheat for their chickens when they had finished that field.
That field is now covered in houses.
Also a threshing machine like the one in the film driven by a tractor PTO threshing out a rick of stacked wheat like in the film.
The man doing the feeding at the top, cutting the binder twine around the stooks with his penknife and feeding them into the thresher.
My dad took me there a half a mile or so on one of those seats on the crossbar of his bicycle across a country footpath , I must have been 3 or 4 maybe, late forties/early fifties.
As the rick got lower I can remember the rats running out and a labourer running to splat one with a shovel as it tried to escape.
Funny how you remember these images from your past stored in your brain forever.
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