And Water Eaton Was The Brightest Jewel In The Crown (2 March 1978)

I feel very sorry for the people of the West Country and North Scotland who have been snowbound recently.  At this time of writing some of them still are.  I could not help noticing, however, how much better those who normally lived in the higher, more exposed places, seem to be coping than those who lived lower down.  You might say they were more used to it.  But that is less than half the truth.  The fact is that they had made themselves more prepared for it whenever it might choose to come.  Each of those isolated farmsteads was a fortress of self-sufficiency.  Had it not been for the lost livestock, the human occupants would have been happy enough.

That was certainly true of such habitations where I used to live – in Yorkshire, which usually gets a fair dollop of snow at some time during the winter.  Whenever there was a considerable snowfall, we newsboys down in the towns and cities had a good idea where it could be causing trouble.  We phoned outlying villages, if there was an answer we knew at once that at any rate the telephone lines to that spot were not down.  The answerer usually cheerfully told us that the village was cut off by a six-foot drift along one road and an eight-foot drift along another, but there was nothing at all to worry about, so long as it didn’t last more than a couple of weeks or so.

But could he tell us how the farmers higher up were fixed.  Well, he had been outside and had a look round and all the places he could see had their chimneys smoking all right.  Most of them had sensed this coming and had got most of the sheep down into the folds.  In any case, there was never any need to worry about chaps like “Owd Tom Shepherd.”  He sometimes stayed up there 15 or 16 weeks at a time (stretching a point) on his own, without ever coming down.

All this was before electricity had reached such farmsteads.  It was also before that now-much-used fuel called bottled gas came on the scene.

Talking of electricity – which I wasn’t exactly – reminds me of an incident which occurred in Bletchley after the last war, when the Council were trying to bring their older council houses up to scratch.  One project comprised changing the small number of houses off Manor Road from gas to electric lighting.  It was thought all the tenants would welcome this, but one of them said he didn’t want the electric.  He had had the gas ever since the house was built and was quite satisfied with it!  No amount of talk about the alleged advantages of television, mains wireless, refrigeration, washing machinery, etc, would budge him.

I have forgotten how the question was resolved, but I think it was the last instance to come to my knowledge of an attitude on the part of householders particularly that had been widespread throughout the country not much more than 20 years previously.  Farmers and small businessmen, too, did not entirely trust those wires that came down from a pole and through a wall.  Certainly, they did not wish to rely on them entirely for anything.  And this at a time when major industries were already moving from north to south mainly because of this newer source of power.

But then, Bletchley’s street lamps were not changed from gas until Water Eaton came into the urban district in the 1930’s were they?  The gas company at Fenny had not thought it worthwhile to lay a gas main to Water Eaton.  So the Eatonians were still without street lamps and were also making do with oil and paraffin lamps in their homes.  One of the first services they demanded of the authority which for years had been pestering to take them over was street lighting.  The council had to agree that electric could be cheapest and quickest.  And so, for a short time. Little old Water Eaton was the brightest jewel in the bigger crown of Bletchley.

If the storms have shown us anything, they have shown on what slender threads our greatly enhanced modern “life style” depends.  On the whole our grandparents were much more like those hill farmers than we are.  They housed, fed and clothed themselves with an eye to the worst that the weather could throw at them.  They held themselves responsible for their kids and for their aged kinsfolk, too.

If possible, a good stock of fuel was kept.  There was often a small fireplace in the main bedroom and some time before retiring some live coals were taken from the downstairs fire and placed in the bedroom grate, where they were still hot after the residents went to bed.  And that warming pan wasn’t just a pretty decoration.

And those heavy and well-lined going-out clothes were not a matter of Victorian prudery.  Like the millgirls’ shawls, which covered the head as well as the shoulders, they could be a matter of life and death in bad weather with so little public or private transport available.