Travelswith Henrietta

Henrietta has been part of our family for over thirty years. It was in the dim and distant past that I saw her one afternoon in a shed, just outside Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, waiting for a scrap man to come and collect her. That far back in time the collecting of old tractors was not a big thing and for one of her age, around twenty years, and with a kerosene engine, she was alone and unloved

Majors and Super Majors were becoming rare items to trade. A complete and original E1ADKN was even rarer, the price was right, so she came home to Swaffham.

This was to be the first of many trips we did together. I got her to the works, in Wisbech, and put a spare battery on her, filled her with petrol and she started up. I ran her for a little while to see that everything was OK then hitched her up to an Agrotiller rotovator that I had bought from the depot for £25.00. The total bill for tractor and rotovator was £95.00.

I borrowed the works trade plates and on the Saturday morning set off for home, a distance of around 30 miles.

We reached Downham Market without incident. She purred along at a steady 10 mph. The E1ADKN is a little slower than the diesel version but this gives you time to look around and enjoy the countryside.

It was a fairly good road although it bends and curves a lot through the fen landscape. Some of the way it follows the drainage channel that run beside the road. I drove this road daily, to and from the depot and, in the winter time, on misty days when the water in the channel was high, it was quite difficult to tell where the road ended and the water began. They were the same colour in the cars headlights. No problem on this day though, it was bright and sunny although cold.

Downham Market is about halfway between Wisbech and Swaffham but Henrietta and I took a slight detour. My brother lives nearby and he had a small piece of land that needed cultivation. I was going to try my new purchases. After a cup of coffee we set off to the field and soon Henrietta was hard at work. She was so successful that neighbours came over to see what was going on and soon Henrietta was working their land too! A great mornings play! But it was soon time to complete the trip home. The trip did not finish at Swaffham, however, we lived in a bungalow on an estate and had nowhere to park both cars and a tractor. Henrietta was going to live on a friend’s farm where she could be kept under cover and, as this was another four miles on. It was early evening when we finally got her bedded down in a nice warm shed.

The years passed and Henrietta travelled regularly to Swaffham to cultivate my allotment or transport loads of garden waste to the tip. In the wintertime there were trips around the local countryside to collect logs from the forest for heating both our house and the large old ex-public house where my business partner lived. She still comes in handy when maintenance is needed in the garden.

Then there was the scenery transport every December, for the Swaffham Players, the local amateur dramatic society I belonged to.

Every year the Players performed three plays and a pantomime. I acted on stage in those days having “trod the boards” in another group. Over the years I played clergyman and bishops, penniless landowners with daughters to marry off and a Russian scientist complete with accent! All type casting as you can see!

Eventually I gave up performing and became stage manager and scenery artist for ten years, building and painting sets from village streets to house interiors.

We built the sets in a local school, the headmaster of which was a keen thespian. He got promotion to another school in the town one spring, and his successor did not realise what a tenant she had in one of the classrooms.

The scenery was stored on a balcony area, in what was the old Shire Hall or courtroom of the town. We used to drop 12’x6’ flat wood and canvas structures over the balcony rail and erect them in the classroom below and paint them.

Mrs P, the new head mistress, brought a group of her friends round to see her new school one Saturday. Imagine their surprise when, on opening the classroom door, to find the classroom changed to a house interior complete with staircase and landing areas and a load of strange people swinging from step ladders, painting and wallpapering like mad.

The completed sets would be stripped down, transported on Henrietta’s trailer about a mile and then re-erected on the stage of the local high school and at the end of the run, would be dismantled and taken back to the Shire Hall for storage.

More long trips were to come when I began working for Agricultural Training Groups in the East of England. Having a collection of small implements meant that when I was booked for Paint Spraying courses, I could take along a genuine article for the trainees to paint, this was usually one of the ploughs and it would travel far and wide in my trailer behind the old Range Rover or Ford Sierra and would be prepared and sprayed many times in the course of a training year.

When the East of England Show came round the painted plough would be hitched to Henrietta and we would drive the sixty miles to the Showground so that she and the plough could appear on the Training Board trade stand to show what sort of thing we were teaching and of course, Henrietta was a talking point and a focus of interest. Many times I heard farmers telling their friends, “I had one of these tractors” at which time I would lift the bonnet and innocently ask “With rubber injection pipes”? Then the farmer would look more closely and a conversation would start which would usually end with him being invited onto a relevant training course. So as well as a source of interest, Henrietta became a sales lady too.

Ann has been a teacher for many years now and is always looking for teaching aids. Henrietta, along with our other tractors and implements have been used in local school as an introduction into food production and as a model for the art classes. When we acquired a Bental flour mill we put together a small show that involved me demonstrating cutting the crop with a scythe, threshing it with a flail, grinding the wheat to flour with the mill driven from Henrietta’s belt pulley and letting the children see, and feel the change from grain to flour. We then took the flour into the domestic science room, sifted it to show the bran and then added yeast, producing bread rolls for the children to take home at the end of the day.

An extra refinement here was to introduce butter making with the loan of a butter churn from a friend. With the help of a local dairy farmer, I was always able to get full cream milk and could get the children all making their own small piece of butter with the help of a container and vigorous shaking.

This “show” became so successful that I took Henrietta and the mill all over Norfolk and into Cambridgeshire, setting up the implements in the school yard, meeting the children and introducing them to Henrietta, giving them a short Health and Safety talk then starting the demonstration. I like to think I brought a little enlightenment to pupils by explaining that bread came from the environment around them and not from supermarkets, I did have one teacher come to me after a demonstration and say that she now knew where flour came from thanks to me!

Henrietta continued to travel to the East of England Show all through the 1980’s and 1990’s and even appeared with a Grimme’ potato harvester in tow when the Norfolk Farm Machinery Club held their Cultivation event at Sporle a few years ago. We had a stand there showing our Silver Medal winning “RiteHite” that controlled the drop height of potatoes falling into a trailer.

We attended “Fordson 500” in the 1990’s, at Newark Show Ground, a trip of over 100 miles but this time Henrietta did not go under her own power. I decided that a speed of ten miles per hour was a bit too slow for this sort of trip so she was loaded on to a trailer and went behind Nuffy who can speed up to twenty miles per hour. A 2 am start got us to the Newark Showground around 9.00 am and this included stops for breakfast and a couple of rest breaks.

There were over 1000 Ford tractors there on those days, ranging from the Fordson MOM right through to the New Performance Super and all variations in between. It was here that I first met Mark and Edward and “My” Petrol Dexta, She and Henrietta were amongst the rare tractors at the show, there was only one Petrol Dexta and only eleven spark ignition Majors out of the thousand tractor there.

Having tracked there once on a trailer, when “Tractor 2000” was announced, we booked our spot again and once more took Nuffy and Henrietta only this time Henrietta came behind on her own wheels on a towing frame. Again we met up with Mark and Edward, their Petrol Dexta and a couple of their Majors, and a great time was had by all.

I must not forget to mention that, on these long trips, I had a support team of Ann and my 90+ year old father, who followed in the car or went ahead for fuel, coffee and fish and chips for the driver and Nuffy.

We also used to enjoy ploughing at Holkam near Wells-next-the-Sea in September. This is a forty mile round trip from where we live and there were two ploughing days to attend. The two days were some fortnight apart so, as we usually took both Henrietta and Nuffy, Henrietta and her plough would go on the morning before the Plough Day and stay with friends on the site whilst Nuffy and her plough would leave on the morning of the day getting both tractors on their plots for the 11 am start. Henrietta would then stay over until the next Plough Day after which I would drive Henrietta home and Ann would then drive me back to collect Nuffy. At times like these you really appreciated her fast road speed.

On these days I had to plough at a reasonably high standard to please my strict critics, note the stick enforcing strong opinions on my technique!

(Apologise for the slight fading in these last few pictures, they came from my office wall).