Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 106

For agricultural historians the particular interest in this book lies in the chapter entitled ‘Potato-picking sixty years ago’ (pp.135–42) and the section on Brigg Fair (pp.56–61). These are, of course, recollections of boyhood rather than academic accounts, but nonetheless they record some sharp insights. John Rhodes describes the organization and routines of potato harvesting during the second world war: the carts, the horse-drawn and tractor-drawn machinery, the stints, the osier baskets, the clothing, keeping hunger at bay when out in the fields all day, the hours kept, the pay, the back-ache, and the gangs of German and Italian POWs and of local ‘ladies’. Your reviewer now knows why the coarseness of the latter caused his father, as foreman, to prevent him from going out with them, whereas working with the POWs was encouraged (good for the Latin!).

Rhodes lived in the small town of Brigg, made famous for its Fair by Percy Grainger and Delius, still an important event in the 1930s, especially for the horse trade. The latter attracted many ‘gyppoes’ from afar, who would parade horses and ponies at the trot down the main streets. Rhodes was just old enough to be a little more than an enthralled spectator. At the age of 8–9 he was entrusted by one owner with the task of holding a shire horse for quite a long time in the hustle and bustle, whilst the stranger went ‘for a drink’. Even town boys in the 1930s were sometimes able to get to know horses and their feeding and handling, as some horses were still used for haulage work: in Rhodes’ case drawing the UDC dust carts and dilly carts (for night soil), in his grandfather’s charge.

However, the book has a wider appeal too, because it was written by one of a relatively small, but clearly defined age cohort of boys. We were too young for wartime service, but old enough to remember something about pre-war days and still more about the war. We were old enough to pass through our teens before the term ‘teenager’ came into vogue, not young enough to agree too readily with the ‘Angry Young Men’. We were the cohort born c.1927–35 (Rhodes was born in 1930), when the birth rate was at the lowest levels so far recorded, and we fell into jobs easily in a period of labour shortage – we had ‘never had it so good’! Widening access to grammar schools in the inter-war period coincided with the low birth rates, both factors helping us to compete well with returning ex-servicemen for university places in a period of rapid expansion. Our youthful experiences must have coloured our views of the post-war world and may help to explain the effects we had on the rest of the country.

So John Rhodes, one of the first-generation grammar school boys, from his very sharp youthful observations, has painted a remarkably detailed picture of life in a small market town. The topics include his council estate and elementary school, Brigg Grammar School for Boys, ‘culture, comics and books’, ‘church, cubs and the cinema’, the war, ‘leisure and pleasure’, ‘teenage angst and the sap rising’, as well as the topics mentioned above. The prose is as clear, correct and eloquent as one expects from an Oxford graduate in English, who taught the subject for many years and became the head of a comprehensive school. The price of the book is modest, the production professional. And, by the way, ‘yeller-belly’ means ‘born in Lincolnshire’, one traditional explanation being that the term alludes to the yellow waistcoats of the Lincolnshire Regiment in pre-khaki days.