Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 107

The blacksmith in question is Walter Murphy, grandfather to the Sheails, Philip and John, who worked in the village smithy at Preston Candover for nearly seventy years until 1983 when old age obliged him to quit. On that level, this is a family portrait painted by a respectful grandson, with happy memories of summer holidays in this Hampshire village in the 1950s, and with illustrations taken from the family album. It is the flesh on the bones of the twentieth-century story. A young widowed mother is forced by circumstance back into domestic service and her son Walter, born in 1900, is brought up by her brother and ultimately follows him into the Candover smithy. There in that small rural community and occasionally buffeted, albeit obliquely, by world events, he makes a living with his hands and his wits, and moves with the passing decades from irresponsible youth into esteemed village elder. Succeeding generations of the family benefit from the education that he never had and progress into middle-class professionalism elsewhere. The smithy is eventually converted into accommodation for the groom of its new owner. It is a common enough script but these are real people living lives in real time.

There is, however, a great deal more to this as well because an almost complete set of accounts survives for the smithy from 1910 through to the 1980s, the exception being the years 1914–25. These figures are closely analyzed by the author to add substance to the story and thereby raise it from a family memoir into a detailed and significant study of change and decline for the village blacksmith. In the years leading up to the First War, for example, an average of 110 horses were being shod annually, with an average tally of 3,713 shoes per year, and this accounted for 63 per cent of the work by value. The two other principal categories of work at the time were service and repair of farm equipment, at 13 per cent, and buildings-related works, such as stoves, guttering and door/window fittings at 11 per cent. Between the Wars, the number of horses did not decline dramatically but the number of times they needed to be shod did fall away sharply as more of the heavy work was taken over by tractors and more tradesmen acquired delivery vans. Sporting horses kept by the local gentry, including a team of polo ponies, helped to keep things going but even so the number of shoes fitted in 1938 was 38 per cent below the 1910–14 average. New lines of work, such as fitting tractor draw bars to wagons and implements could not compensate for the drop in income that resulted. The Second War brought machinery upgrades, electricity and new welding skills to the smithy and in 1944, for the first time, income from farm work outstripped that from horse shoeing. The boom continued into the post-war years as a host of new machines and trailers appeared on the farms, all needing servicing and repair. Murphy’s best year ever for income in real terms was 1951. Thereafter, progressively, this kind of work moved more towards the specialist dealer and the village smithy made do with the supply of accessories and secondary items such as the sledges that were towed behind pick-up balers. This in turn fell away in the 1960s and, with the shoeing now almost completely gone, construction works relating to the improvement of farmsteads and building and restoration of houses featured more prominently.

The text also features at regular intervals biographical vignettes of leading landholding families in and around the Candover valley through the twentieth century. If slightly distracting, they do help to colour in the wider social context of the rural community and show, as in his dealings with the innovative dairy farmer Rex Paterson, the points at which Walter Murphy came into contact with this other world. The distinctive element of the work, though, is embodied in the graphs, figures and other detail that track the passage of this village smithy on its path to oblivion, and for that it is much recommended.