Jock Alston owned two thousand acres, he farmed sugar beet and cereals, and he maintained orchards to feed his family. In 1946, this Scot hired the fourteen-year-old Edward ‘Ted’ Barham as a farm worker.

Nowadays fourteen-year-olds are children. However, during that era, Ted was a man, who cycled to work on a bike that had been built by his father, George Geoffrey Barham, from pieces he had acquired in yard sales. Ted also used his bike for racing in the gravel pits!

Ted was the first in his family to go into farming, though his father and his brother Jimmy were employed as gardeners. Furthermore, he was significantly younger than his workmates, who were in their twenties. Yet young Ted took all of this in his stride.

Many of us ‘townies’ have sung the harvest festival hymn “We Plough the Field and Scatter” with the hazy notion of a farmer, a dog and a tractor going about their business. However, in 1940s Norfolk there were no tractors; there was a horse pulling hoes through the soil under the guidance of Ted or someone like him.

And it was very important that both horse and hoes remained in between the rows of sugar beet and did not trample the crop. The Suffolk Punch, with its appropriately sized hooves, was the farmers’ animal of choice.

Ted was in the scouts between the ages of eleven and sixteen, and he applied his scouting skills, such as tying knots and lighting fires, to the farm. Jock, in turn, was supportive of the local scouts and permitted them to go ‘on manoeuvres’ on his land.

In the harsh winter of 1946-1947, Ted had to be both scout and farm worker par excellence, protecting livestock and keeping the farm going when the fields were unworkable. He and his fellow agricultural workers succeeded in feeding the nation in peacetime as they had during the war.

Ted will be back and next time it will be the rock and roll years!