Living Memories interview with Marjorie Longdin Interviewer Lorna Payne - February 2008

Below are a number of extracts from the interview:-

I came to live at Wellingly Grange in 1949.  I had been a nurse, trained at the General Infirmary at Leeds and it was quite a different atmosphere leaving a very busy hospital and moving to a very quiet farm, 2 miles out of the village, 300 acres, mainly arable, with sheep. At that time it employed 3 men, my husband and his father.

 Now my father was a farmer and he always said that all those footpaths between farms, which have caused so much controversy, they were made there, not for people to walk for leisure but for workers to walk from one farm to the next to help at busy times. 

 We had 3 employed men. Later we had a farm student who went to Askham Brian, and he did a survey of the farm and he came to show John what he had developed and he said. ‘You know, in the future, you are going to be able to run this farm with one large tractor and one man’, and we thought, well, this is ridiculous……

 I remember the day when somebody said ‘There’s a new machine that cuts the corn and thrashes it at the same time and it’s called a combine’. Everybody rushed to Firbeck where this machine was working to have a look at it. And then they brought in a potato lifting machine which only needed 4 women on it, so the mechanisation since 1949 has been absolutely unbelievable. 

……..there was a payment to pull up hedges and plough up grassland because of this shortage of food in the 50s. It amuses me very much now because my son is getting paid to put hedges back.

 ……… there was a little private school near the Royal Oak in a wooden hut. The Misses Goodwin. Well, my husband ….. went to the ordinary school, and he always said that the building of all the new houses were a great improvement because the quality of the school children went up. He remembered them all, some of them with no shoes and patched trousers. It was a feudal village, you see, there were the big houses and then there were the work people and of course always the pubs.  Everybody employed a lot of labour you see in those days.

 The village started to grow roughly about 45 years ago. ….. Then Ben Bailey got permission for York Road and Lancaster Crescent which was the beginning of Tickhill growing to be what it is today.  

(For a transcript of the full interview, click here)