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Pettaugh History

This section of the Pettaugh website now carries information about the activities of the Pettaugh History Society.  It has articles of interest about publications by authors living in Pettaugh.  The Society was formed in 2009 by Hilary Marlow and Richard Clark to act as a publisher of a book about Pettaugh ('Pettaugh Preserved - a confection of memories, 1930to 1970, from a small Suffolk village') which was a collection of photographs and captions describing the lives of people who lived in the village.   This was followed by two more books, 'A Suffolk Mission Room - the history of the Pettaugh Mission Room' and 'Backwards into the Pond', a collection of anecdotes about village life in Pettaugh from 1930 to 1960'.  The most recent book, 'Blindness and the Power of Inner Vision' by Hilary Marlow, has just been published by Footprint Press, a South African publishing house with a print run in the UK which will be distributed by the Pettaugh History Society; details are given in one of the sections of this website.

This Pettaugh History section is being updated but progress is dependent on resources being available.  Until such time that the structure of the site is refined and more articles uploaded, a photograph to remind us of past times is shown below.  The photograph is one of a series of images which were kindly provided by Richard Cutting.  These photographs, which are remarkable for their clarity and artistry, provide a colourful record of life on the farm at the time that mechanisation had recently replaced the power of the horse.  The photograph shows  farmworker, George Read throwing a bundle of wheat up to Kenneth Cutting.  The wheat had been cut with a binder which tied the sheaves into bundles.  A number of these were carefully stacked up into 'shucks', the Suffolk word for 'stooks'.  These were allowed to dry in the field for a week or so before being taken to the threshing yard at the farm for the grain to be separated. In modern times, a combine harvester takes over the entire operation of cutting and threshing the grain.  The driver of the modern machine has an on-board computer guided by a GPS system which determines the most efficient way of harvesting the grain from a field.  This type of combine harvester can process in about 15 minutes what seven men could achieve in a week using a binder and steam-driven threshing machine. 

 

Collecting grain harvest George Read lifting sheaves Kenneth on tumbrel Untitled 41