Dartmoor National Park Authority
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Bessie French
 | Bessie was born and brought up at Corndonford - a longhouse in the parish of Widecombe-in-the-Moor. In common with many farmers on Dartmoor the family kept a small herd of dairy cows and made butter from the surplus cream: |
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to Bessie French's memories of making butter 
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| "…the milk it was separated and the cream was scolded and then it would be made into butter. And mother loved making butter, but, we didn’t eat a great deal in the winter because it had to be sold to get money to pay the grocery bill." |  |
And she remembers how hard it was to keep the place clean:
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to Bessie French's memories of washing (53Kb - Media
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 | "…yes, it was hard work really because there was always lots of other things to wash, the pails, milk pails, everything like that had to be washed, then when you think of it, Saturdays there was two tables in the kitchen to scrub, and the bench to scrub as well, and the floor and all that passage, and the passage was 30, 33 feet was it? ...Yes…it was hard work, and then you see you’d carry pails of water out to the front door to scrub down the muck that was there but it was jolly hard work really". |
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Page updated 1 December 2005
