Unraveling the Legacy of 'Ask the Fellows that Cut the Hay'

Where are the Fellows who Cut the Hay?

I was preparing to talk about my latest book at a traditional music conference and reflected on the fact that in writing Ask the Fellows that Cut the Hay George Ewart Evans had unwittingly recorded our final years of living in harmony with the natural world. He was researching his book in the early 1950s, and it was only after its publication in 1956 that global CO2 emissions began to grow exponentially, to the point where today, they are some six times higher than they were 70 years ago. This is something that now concerns us all, as we collectively strive to reverse this trend and achieve what politicians like to call net-zero.

As Evans recorded, life had changed little for centuries. His next door neighbour Robert Savage, was the fifth generation of men in his family to have been a shepherd at Grove Farm Blaxhall. He wore a smock and walked in front of his sheep, as was the tradition in Suffolk, rather than driving them from behind. Listening to him speak, Evans realised that he was hearing words that dated back to Chaucer that had been passed down the generations.

While life in the early 20th century was at times tough, people were pretty much self-sufficient. Robert Savage’s wife Priscilla told Evans how bacon, beer and bread were staples of cottage life. She baked bread from flour grown and milled in the village, brewed beer, and kept a pig at the bottom of the garden. The milkman collected milk from Lime Tree Farm and delivered it around the village. The distance your food travelled before reaching your table could then be measured in yards, not miles.

The way of life that Evans recorded was one lived without the support of the NHS, social services, or even unemployment benefits to fall back on when work dried up. Most men worked on the land, and while some went to Burton on Trent to work in the maltings in the winter months, others were laid off when there was nothing to do on the farms. A few would be fortunate enough to be paid by the parish to repair the roads, with stones the women had picked from the fields.

Blaxhall was a small village with fewer than 300 residents, but it had shops, a pub, church and even a shoemaker.  Perhaps most striking of all was that there were forty families called Ling, and twenty called Smith. The sense of community was so strong, you could be forgiven for thinking it was one big happy family!

But none of this was on my mind when I joined the University of East Anglia’s creative writing MA course. I’d wanted to write a book about George Ewart Evans for most of my life, having first discovered his writing when I was fourteen years old, when I had a weekend job on a farm near Blaxhall. Robert Savage’s son Russell was the farm shepherd, and tractor drivers Toby and Kenny Ling were members of that extended Blaxhall family.

As so many have found over the years, that UEA creative writing MA took my writing to another level, and gave me the inspiration I needed to realise that long held ambition. My quest, I realised, was to see where those Evans had interviewed were now. How had their children and grandchildren led different lives, and what had happened to life on the land since Evans wrote his books.

My starting point was Daphne Gant, a granddaughter of Robert Savage who lived near Blaxhall church. Her husband John had worked on a farm in the village, and she told me how David Gentleman, who illustrated many of Evans’s books, had sat in her garden painting the view. She’d lived in Blaxhall all her life, and told me how once she’d known everyone in the village, but now many of the houses were second homes. Daphne told me how John’s wages had paid the rent and put food on the table, but she had taken on casual work in the fields to pay for things like a fridge and TV.

A grandson had a different story. Although he had started out as a shepherd, working with his father Russell, had become interested in engineering and left the land. Later, when grain ceased to be handled in hessian sacks, he started a very successful company that installed grain handling equipment. When he retired, he took his wife on a world cruise. I also met his daughter, who is an archivist working in Ipswich. This was something that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.

With my own book published in April 2024, I realise that just as Evans captured how life was just before global CO2 emissions started to accelerate, my book tells the story of those who returning to traditional ways, marking the start of the decline of CO2 emissions. Perhaps a future author will capture our arrival at net-zero in the 2050s, a century after Evans wrote his ground-breaking book.