Wallace and Beryl Hales took over at Wrights Farm in 1947

MANY Wethersfield farmers were of Scottish descent their ancestors having come south when land was cheap there in the Depression.
Married in Wethersfield chapel on November 29, 1947, Wallace Hales,and his late wife Beryl, lived for some sixty years at Wright’s Farm on the Hedingham road just outside Wethersfield. Wallace’s father Horace farmed Wright’s before him and before him the original immigrant, his grandfather, King Wallace.
Their eldest son, Bruce and wife Sue, live at Cuckoos Farm a mile and a half away in the house where Wallace grew up
The newly married Beryl, daughter of the chapel minister, put the relatively comfortable conditions of the Manse behind her and set about running a house with no electricity and no running water.
“I kept house and kept them fed,” she said philosophically. When the babies came along “it was just another one to feed and that

was that."
“When we got married you couldn’t buy stuff. It was Utility and all that, and rationing,” said Wallace. He remembers the days of the depression in the 1930s. “Things weren’t too good then. I used to like to go to the pictures at Hedingham. I daren’t ask father for 3d to go, I knew I wouldn’t get it! Mum sometimes would ask and I would get it.
“Sometimes I used to bike to Halstead to go to the pictures. There was nothing else except the pictures.”
Wallace remembers the horses on the farm being phased out shortly after he was married. A string of tractors, Fordson, Case, Allis Chalmers and a Ferguson somewhere along the line, took their place.“The crops haven’t changed a lot,” says Wallace. “We had to grow the hay to feed the horses then and we had a few bullocks up here for a time.”
“They were my friends,” said Beryl. “I used to love them. When I was on my own and they were all working down at Cuckoos I
used to go and have a word with the bullocks.”“Now we are out of stock altogether,” adds Wallace, “Except for our two Jack

King Wallace, who came to farm in Essex from Ayrshire, with his extensive family

Wrights Farm has a number of silos for storing the grain

"We grow two wheats, then beans, then another wheat, then rape and then two wheats again. If you grow beans too often you get bean sickness, they will just wilt away.
“We were working in a bean field one beautiful spring morning when the Highland Division went by here on a route march,” Wallace recalls. “I shall always remember it. They were just far enough away and it was a beautiful sound. You may not like the bagpipes but that came across the fields and I shall never forget that.”
When your full name is Wallace Scott Hale and your grandfather rejoiced in the name of King Wallace, it is not surprising you are stirred by the pipes.