Pea Pulling

There was always plenty of opportunity for earning some cash during the school holidays  -  a number of Methley farms specialised in the crop and organising casual labour for picking. Huddlestones would also purchase fields outside the area and transport the pickers in and complete the process through to marketing the bags of peas.

Most pickers took a bucket to fill and then transferred the gathered peas into sacks, however you could start by rolling the sack down and pulling the pea straws with one hand and dragging the pea pods off into the  sack with the other hand.

But lets start at the assembly at 7.30am at the farm, everybody piles onto that distinctive yellow farm truck of Huddlestones containing empty sacks, weighing scales, weights, baling chord and hay forks and off we go  collecting pickers from Three Lane Ends and Airedale with their bottles of tea and jam sandwiches.

Pulling could be at Coney Moor or somewhere near Tadcaster and on arrival the pea pullers would take a position at the edge of the field, say 1 yard apart and start to pull, fill the sacks and inch forward throwing  the discarded straws behind.   Start to eat the peas at your peril, once you’d started you couldn’t stop.  Often there would be another find, occasionally an old coin, but mostly the old clay pipe stems  dropped by the farmers of years ago. On more than one occasion I found a clay pipe bowl - I wish I had hung on to them.

Some pickers made faster progress especially the experienced women pickers, and after one hour the first full sacks are being toted to the weigh scales to be measured at 42lbs.  Too little and you had to go back for more, too many and they gave them back in the next sack along with a payment ticket.

By 1.0 clockl I’ve nearly completed the fourth sack and wondering whether to go for the fifth or pack it in.   No decision really, because there’s nowhere to go and I have to wait with my tickets for payout time  anyway.   So on with the fifth sack - the nimble fingered quickies have probably reached 8 or 9 by now in spite of the yacking.  Behind us the weigh scales are being advanced nearer to the pickers and behind them the truck is being loaded up from the first of two stacks of full sacks of about 400.

At long last I’ve finished and Harold Crompton the Farm Manager is driving in with the cash  -   ‘Five at 4/6 thats one pound two and a tanner for thee lad’

Must make sure I collect a boiling for home before we climb back on the truck.

Potato Picking

Now this was hard work.   School half term holidays again but this time we would be set in groups/relays to follow the tractor which went along the furrows and the scrattor would throw the potatoes up to the surface.  Each relay would collect the crop into sturdy wire baskets and from them fill sacks placed along the furrow, or empty the baskets direct on to a following trailer.

On reaching a given mark the relay would then go back to the starter mark just in time to start gathering as the tractor re-started the cycle.

I always envied Walt Riby sat on the tractor but of course we wern’t to realise that the farmers had started working long before and would work long after we had finished.

Payment method was for the day so we all got the same.  You often wondered if it was worth it with clothes mucked up and shoe soles caked so thick you could hardly walk.

There were many other opportunities for casual work if you were hard up including sprouts, frozen hands with this -  turnips, slashed fingers here - - beetroot, bloody hands here.