Dartmoor National Park Authority

John was born and brought up at Stiniel near Chagford. As a boy he worked on his father’s farm and remembers harvest time as a very sociable occasion with large teas taken by his mother to the fields:

"…hay harvest was - well and corn harvest - was a real social thing, I mean mother would bring up a great basket full of what we call splits, buns and cream and jam we’d made from whortleberries we’d picked on the moor, we used to take a pony and cart and go up by the Warren Inn there, Vitifer Mines, and pick the whortleberries there, ‘erts’ as we called them and we were paid so much a pint for them, of course we ate as many as we, money wasn’t important to us, so we ate as many as we…took home you see, and I remember we used to have tin trays there and sit on the trays and slide down the steep of the mines you see, terrific fun, like tobogganing you see, and then all come home at night with these erts that we’d picked and mother made jam for them…"

"…and I mean the rabbits would eat a swathe round the outside of every cornfield as wide as this kitchen, they really would, they’d eat right round and when we cut it with a binder we kids would all wait, blood thirsty little sods, we’d all wait with sticks and …the rabbits would all keep going until the binder got right in the middle before they had to make a run for it you see and we had to run after them and catch as many of these rabbits as we could you see, clout these rabbits, um, nowadays there might be an outcry about it but it was perfectly normal thing to do then like, and in fact we all needed the rabbit for feed anyway, I mean it was serious stuff. But while they ate a lot of the profit of the farm in one way they still provided a tremendous amount of income to the farm".