Antique farming hand tools are valuable link to the past

I look back and think, I remember in the 1960’s, when I watched a farmer harvesting sugar beet.

He was standing by a horse and cart, the cart was not very large, and the method of harvesting the sugar beet was to take a two-pronged fork, and lift each individual root out of the ground, hold it in his hand, and with a hook, chop off the leaves, then put the sugar beet into a small heap on the ground with others that had been harvested.

I was trying to work out what his actual achievement in weight would have been in a day.

A turnip chopper (Image: Supplied) I would have thought, possibly, he might have achieved half a ton, maybe represented by two loads of the horse and cart.

The implement he used was almost prehistoric in appearance, it was like a spade handle with this long two-pronged fork at the end.

I would have thought this was a back-breaking job, but this was the way farmers’ with small holdings had to work; a process known as ‘knocking and topping’.

Many of the tools they used were created by the local blacksmith for a specific purpose.

These old agricultural hand tools are now quite rare.

Barns with undiscovered treasures hanging on the wall have long since gone; the barns converted into living accommodation, and no treasures to be found from the past.

There are still collectors of ancient farming hand-tools, both in this country and in America.

Styles and fashions vary from country to country, and there are places here locally, where you can see very good collections of these antique tools.

Gressenhall Rural Life Museum, near Dereham, is a good place to start.

There is, obviously, numerous farmers with collections of their own.

Another source of delight is to visit the Old Vicarage Gardens at East Ruston where Alan Gray and his partner have assembled a wonderful selection of by-gone tools, which are available to view on entrance to the gardens.

Some of these tools for the smallholder, maybe somebody just farming sixty, eighty or maybe a hundred acres, much of the work was done by hand, and the implements were quite expensive to buy, but even the Army and Navy Stores, in their catalogue, of 1939, list various hand-tools of use to the smallholder.

A grinder for about £3 in 1939 at the Army & Navy Stores (Image: Supplied) These old tools, I imagine, mean little to the man in the street, but those people connected with the land, here in Norfolk or elsewhere, will be delighted to see that these old implements are collected and preserved for posterity.

They may not be enormously valuable, but they do fill a niche of collecting relating to farming.

Fortunately, we have enthusiasts who buy old implements and hand tools, and take great care in restoring them to their former glory for collectors.

I am sure there are stories behind each implement. How hard, tiring, back breaking work that had to be done; no machinery to make life a little easier in those days. Each item a reminder of the past.