Ploughing with horses – how to do it

If you've ever seen on television a programme in which someone is struggling to plough with horses and wondered how people ever managed such an exhausting task – watch Maurice Atkinson talking to Malcolm McPhie on this video on the Hutton Rudby History Society Facebook page.

This is Malcolm's introductory note:

We are fortunate to live in a village surrounded by fields in all directions. Many of them require ploughing each year to prepare the ground for the next crop, a task that most would take for granted. Prior to WWII this activity was largely accomplished by horses and a ploughman.

This video is an interview with retired farmer, Maurice Atkinson (aged 91 on September 15th!) where I asked him to talk about learning to plough using horses.

In the interview he describes how his grandfather (Cooper Atkinson of Goslingmire Farm) spent an afternoon teaching him the necessary skills. The year was 1939 and Maurice was only 12 years old at the time.

Unfortunately we don’t have any photographs of Maurice working with horses, but have shown one of his father Eric W. Atkinson working with horses and one of Maurice in his teenage years working with a tractor.

Maurice, his father, and his grandfather were all prize winners at local ploughing and hedge cutting competitions.

In the second part of the video Maurice uses a scale model of a Ransome Plough to describe the complexities of setting one up correctly. He was a skilled blacksmith and welder and made the model himself.

We are lucky to have such in depth knowledge of farming in the 1930’s on our doorstep.

There should be no need to fight with a plough.  "A plough should run on its own," explains Maurice.  "It'll run on its own if it's set right."