Why milkmaids - and dairy farmers - have soft hands


Parsonage Farm, near the village,
was bought from the Manor estate

THE late TOM GRIMWOOD was one of family of 11 children who moved to Wethersfield from farming in Suffolk. When Wethersfield manor estate was split up the Grimwoods, parents Chris and Eliza with sons Tom and John, bought Parsonage farm which they were then renting.
Said Tom: Our little farm was the dearest one, £50 an acre but there is a lot of other land that hadn’t been farmed for years only made £29 an acre.
While we were tenants we had built the cowshed and the Dutch barn. You couldn’t get nothing off the old man (Sir Fortescue Flannery) - he wouldn’t spend the money. We had to put our own buildings up. We had altered the house and the farm buildings and we had altered the pig yards and I had a little TT (tuberculosis tested) herd of cows and I had to make a cowshed and build a dairy. We and Nottage at Brook Farm were the only ones to go in for a TT herd, It was Walter Nottage then and afterwards George Nottage. Earlier they used to milk cows and they had a donkey and a

little cart and Charlie Bragg went round the village with a 10 gallon drum and a ‘dip out’ and people would put a pint in   a mug. They had done that for years. When the TT came on they wouldn’t allow that then. They stopped all delivering round the village then and the Co-op came round and collected the churns every morning. It used to go to Witham.
It had got to be at the top of the drive by quarter past eight every morning bar holiday times then it had to be there at quarter past seven. We had to get up an hour earlier Christmas Morning and holiday mornings. I had about a dozen cows, milked in two lots. I milked them by hand for years the latter part of the time I had a milking machine it used to take about three-quarters of a hour. You had to put cake in the mangers and put them in and tie them up. Milking kept your hands soft.
TOM GRIMWOOD’s sister Muriel, had moved back to Parsonage farm while her husband, Jack Bloomfield, was in the Royal Army Service Corps in the second World War. Their son, Edward Bloomfield was born at the farm in May 1942. He has written down his memories of life there and recalls the pedigree Suffolk horses that worked the land:
My grandfather Christopher Grimwood’s love and knowledge of this oldest breed of heavy horse in Britain accounted for their presence at The Parsonage ; we had a mare named Pride and a gelding, Dobbin, amongst others – horses with lovely temperaments that would work the whole day long when required. Granddad preferred the red-brown Suffolks to Shire horses because their hairless legs and feet could cope with the heavy soils of East Anglia.
Suffolk horses that worked the fields at Parsonage Farm
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