John Attrill on Harvest

I mean harvesting was with a binder.

Called a binder, it cut the corn and tied it up into sheaves and spewed them out and then of course we had to pick up the sheaves of corn and put them in little, we called them stooks.

You stood them up for the corn to mature about a dozen sheaves in a stook, yes.

There were horse drawn grass cutters but not a lot of machinery really. In the winter when you wanted to thrash the corn, out of the stacks which you’d so carefully built at harvest time, then the thrashing machine came round and that was drawn along by a steam engine and then activated with a fly wheel from the steam engine to drive the machine to thrash the corn and I well remember that.

And going down to Whitwell Station to get steam coal a few days before they came.