A well-remembered icon of the two decades between the wars is the itinerant stallion. This

great, princely beast of some 17hh, and weighing about a ton, was led round on the right-

hand side of the road from farm to farm in the early months of the year to service in-season

It was a small man, in smart breeches and leggings and soft hat, who led him. Goodness

knows how many miles they walked. At the end of the day horse and man were kept

overnight at the last call. When a mare was mated there was a charge of 3/-. This great

horse had never had the indignity of harness on his back, only the cloth roller and halter and

bit. He had never stood between shafts nor been burdened with heavy loads, but the

progeny of him and his kind had borne all the harvests of long-past seasons, and without

them, as D.N. Nixon writes, there would be no harvest now. Inevitably, we small boys were

Winston Churchill once said that he considered the substitution of the internal combustion

engine for the horse marked a gloomy passage in the progress of mankind. The twenties

and thirties of the 20c were a transitional period in this progress, rather in the manner of the

Gothic builders who, before their confidence allowed the great technological breakthrough of

the beautiful 13C pointed arch, built arches in the 12C which were not Norman nor yet truly

There were only about 1.5 million motor vehicles in the whole country then, compared to

some 30 million now. Every make of car had its own engine sound – Austin, Morris, Jowett,

Riley and so on; each was different and, since there were few cars in the village, we would

know without seeing it who was approaching – the baker in his Riley with the very distinctive

sounding pre-selector gear bore, Miss O in her Austin 7, Mr A in his Humber, or the butcher

in the biggest of them all, the Flying Standard 20. Ford still suffered from its tin-lizzie image

and, even as late as the 1960s, I was slightly amused to see three genteel sisters driving in

a Ford. Enquiries revealed that it was the only car they could find which would easily

During the war petrol was zoned, and if you were stopped and found to be out of your zone

you would be fined. The petrol was coloured for each zone – ours was pink. I can’t

remember if there was private petrol at that period, but when I bought my first car in 1948

petrol was still on coupons, and the Road Fund Tax was halved. During the zoning, if you

wanted to drive to the pictures or dog track or football, you need a couple of customers in

Of all the cars named above, only Ford remains and thrives, though all manufactured

abroad. At this time it was quite unremarkable to see motor and horse-drawn traffic coming

and going; the coal might be delivered by horse and cart or T model Ford; the baker was still

using horse-drawn vans and keeping his horses opposite the school, well after the butcher

had motorized.. A tall, covered fish van pulled by a muzzled mule trotted in from Yatton. One

of the grocers invested in a motor cycle combination. Farmer D in white smock coat would

trot idly down to the bank in cob and cart, and stop for a lengthy chat in the middle of the

Wrington at this stage, and for very many years, was the hub from which many other

villages were catered for bread, groceries, meat and hardware. Villages from Charterhouse,

Blagdon, Butcombe, Breech Hill, Chew Stoke, Burrington, Winford, Felton into Barrow

Gurney, Nailsea, Chelvey, Shipham, Sandford, Churchill and the Langfords were all well

Some of the womenfolk in these smaller hamlets seldom got out of their houses. They had

no buses, or one a week, and no telephones. If they needed boots repaired they would have

been given to the baker or butcher to take to one of the two shoe makers in Wrington. One

customer asked a butcher to take her dying cat to the vet. Someone else might need his

football coupon posted, or just a message delivered; it was all just a rural way of life. The

men doing the delivering were paid no overtime, and, given the length of time they spent just

One lady from the North visiting her daughter in Langford said when yet another visit had to

be made to Wrington that it must be the Paris of North Somerset. But we had no dispensing

chemist until after the war. The doctor rolled his own, and we had no appointments system

for him, you just rolled up. But yet it was not a cosy time, none such ever was. With no

welfare hand-outs or benefits, and nearly 3 million unemployed in a population only two-

thirds of the present day, there was real hardship for many, even in the rural areas. Even the

doctor had to be paid for, though we were fortunate enough to have a GP who would not

There was the dole which was paid out at Axbridge or Chew Magna every Friday. People

were means-tested for this which did what it says on the tin – it tested a man’s means or

income. If he had taken a lodger to help out or had a teenager earning a few shillings, or

was in receipt of an ex-soldier’s pension, his unemployment allowance would be ‘adjusted’.

One day, at the age of about 12, I was visiting Chew Magna where my maternal ancestors

had their farms, when I saw a queue of men and, strangely, a smaller one of women in the

I listened to proceedings. Behind the counter the very important man bullied the men as they

sheepishly got to the counter. “No work, sir,” they were saying, “no work, sir. No work, sir.”

“No work ?” he’d growl intimidatingly, and pay them as though the money was his own. The

women were allowed to be served ahead of the men. I can’t recall how he spoke to them,

but when he saw me, he bawled “Where did you come from ?”, and I left that place hurriedly,

Probably his memory offends me because I was brought up to believe that, although

respect, discipline, deference are essential to decent living (the Book of Wisdom declares

that “the very true beginning of her is the desire of discipline”) yet every man should bear in

mind at all times that whatever his perceived authority, importance or grandeur, that the man

he is addressing is indeed also a man, a “piece of the continent, part of the maine”, not the

untermensch.

An example of how sharply the class and subclass dividions were drawn in the villages,

there is the story of a snowy winter day when the children of a very large house not far

away, and the children of the cottage at the end of the drive, met in the Christmas

holidays.This was unusual, as was the deep snow, and in no time they had teamed up,

found some boards in a barn, and made up a toboggan and rode it up and down the steep

field, and threw a few snowballs and had a lot of fun, and went home to tea. Learning of this,

the lady of the big house was incensed, and angrily called upon the cottage and berated the

mother for allowing the children to play together. “You know that is wrong” she said. The

cottage housewife, more abrasive than many of her ilk, let the lady know what she thought

of her reactions to such innocent play. The upshot was that this cottager, her husband and