RURAL SCENES, THIS DAY, GREAT AYTON ETC

Description
Context
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This is a film showing some aspects of life and farming around harvest time in the area around Great Ayton in North Yorkshire.

The film begins with a street sign for Great Ayton, followed by a red sunset and then a daytime view of Roseberry Topping overlooking Great Ayton, and some other parts of the village.

Title – A story about BREAD by J. W
Scenes from Gt Ayton, Carlton, Swainby, Stokesley

At a wedding, a man throws confetti over the bride.
Title – Some time later

A montage follows used to represent the lapse in time between the wedding and the birth of the couple’s first child: a woman makes a phone call, an ambulance sets off, a pelican, a bag, the sign for ‘Overdene Maternity Home,’ a baby being baptised, and the baby having her nappy changed, and finally a young girl knelt by her bed praying.

Title – Give us this day

A farmer ploughs a field with a tractor.

Title – The seed time

The farmer then sows the field, again using the tractor. The first shoots of the crop are beginning to show.

Title – Rogation Sunday at

This is followed by a street sign for ‘Carlton.’

A group of boy choristers lead a procession out of a church and into a field where, led by the vicar, they gather together to sing. Next, two combine harvesters are at work in a field, and there is a sign on a round stone for ‘The Mill.’ In the distance, there is an old mill by a street near a small bridge crossing.

Title – The Mill had now been dismantled

The waterwheel driven by water and rotating the mill. A bag of grain (BOCM) is pulled by a chain, through a trap door, and up to the top of the building. At the top, the bag is untied and the grain is poured into the mill where it will be ground.

There is a road sign for ‘East Anorove’, and the outside of a house covered in flowers. In the kitchen, an elderly woman puts flour into a bowl. She goes onto knead the mixture and make it into cakes. The cakes are baked in an old coal range, and when they’re finished, she takes out freshly baked bread and bread cakes. A small boy knocks on the door, and the woman makes him some jam and bread.

Title – Blackcurrant

The boy sits on a bench eating his bread and jam which he quickly polishes off. At a church, several women decorate in preparation for the Harvest Festival. In a garden a woman breaks up some bread to put on a bird feeder.

Title – The man who feeds the ducks

A man throws bread into a river. Inside the Spencer café, a woman is having a meal.

Title – Remember these?

A woman flicks through the pages of a ration book. A group of people eat fish and chips in a street, and then the film moves to show a street sign for Kildale.

Title – A Mell Supper

A large group of people sit around tables enjoying cakes and tea. The film then switches to show eggs being sorted on a conveyer belt and packaged. In the next scene, small baby chicks are shown squashed together in trays covered in wired mesh.

Title – Milk Bar

On a pig farm, piglets run across the field, and one of the piglets suckles from its mother. Sheep are sheared, after which, these sheep graze in a field.

Title – Modern Oliver Twist

The small boy returns to the elderly woman who gives him a cake and biscuit. The film then shows a sunset through trees and a rainbow.

The End

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Unfortunately it is not known for sure who made this film, or exactly when it was made. There is some evidence that it was made by a Mr C Pashley, of whom the YFA has some 19 films that are known to be his. Mr Pashley made a couple of films of this area about the same time in the 1960s. One of these films, Great Ayton, Holly Garth & Building, made in 1966 and showing the building of Holly Garth houses, features a woman who looks very much like the woman baking the bread buns in this film. Whoever made the film was clearly a keen amateur; the film having intertitles and a definite structure around the farming year from sowing to harvesting, including the flour mill and bread making, under the Christian inspired title of ‘This Day’.

Like so many Yorkshire villages, Great Ayton can trace remnants of dwellings going back to Anglo-Saxon times. The village has had a history of tanning, weaving, corn milling and mining; and also strong influence from non-conformist churches, especially Methodists and Quakers. It was very close to becoming part of the new county of Cleveland when local government was reorganised in 1974, but a determined opposition kept Great Ayton in Yorkshire where it is the northernmost village. This victory is still celebrated each year in a fair on the High Green.

Perhaps Great Ayton is most famous for being the place where the explorer and navigator Captain James Cook lived with his farmer family at Airey Holme farm, being born up the road at Marton. The Lord of the Manor, Thomas Skottowe, paid for him to attend the local school. Cook was a highly talented surveyor, mapmaker and astronomer, these all being interconnected at that time – and generally a very keen observer of all he found. During a trip to observe the transit of Venus, on 3rd June 1768, Cook famously discovered New Zealand, Australia and other Pacific Islands. ‘Discovered’ that is for Europeans, these all being already inhabited, and claimed them for Great Britain – with the taken-for-granted arrogance of colonialism. His mother and five of her children are buried in the old church yard, whilst he himself was buried at sea, after being killed in 1779 by the natives of Hawaii and stripped of his flesh – as was the custom with the remains of a high chief.

Of particular interest in the film is the Mell supper. This is a very old tradition whereby the farmer gives a meal to those he has employed in bringing in the harvest – ‘mell’ deriving from the Icelandic mjol and Danish mel. A good account of the tradition is given by the Rev. M.C.F. Morris in his book of 1892, Yorkshire Folk Talk. In this he relates that in the North Riding the last sheath to be gathered in is called the ‘mell sheaf’. He shows the linguistic connections with Denmark, and states that it was usually accompanied with dancing. The tradition predates the Anglican Church Harvest Festival which was introduced in the nineteenth century, partly as a means to combat non-Christian festivals where alcohol was consumed – see the Context for a similar film, Sheffield Lakeland, made in 1963 around the same time as this film.

The Mell supper is connected with Rogation Sunday – from the Latin word rogatio, to intercede, ask or beseech – which takes place on the fifth Sunday after Easter. This comes not as a celebration of the harvest, but as a prayer for a good harvest. Rogationtide ends with Ascension Day, which has an associated local tradition when, at a nearby beach at Boyes Staithe, near Whitby, a 'Penny (penance) Hedge’ is erected to commemorate a medieval penance imposed by the Abbot of Whitby on local noblemen who assaulted a hermit whilst he prayed. Rogation Sunday goes back to the ancient custom of ‘beating the bounds’, whereby the boundary of a local area, or Parish, was walked around in procession to protect it from incursion – from those who didn’t have land (see Knightly). It gained its name in Britain in 747, as the earlier pagan custom became taken over, as so often happened, by the Christian Church. And, again as often was the case, this led to the removal its more festive aspects (see Hutton).

Rogationtide comes shortly after Easter, to which it is associated, and hence the possible connection to the filming of chickens. Yet although the Mell festival might be on the decline, it doesn’t seem as if the same can be said about the practice of packing baby chicks in together in incubation drawers. Somewhat different from the conditions that accompanied the birth of the baby at the beginning of the film, although Overdene Maternity Home has closed, and was sold off in March 1983.

We do not know who the people seen in the film are, although Kelly’s Directory for 1925 shows an entry for a Mrs Annie Eliza Donaldson, a farmer at Anorove North, Great Ayton. Nor is it clear which mill is shown at work. Yorkshire had very many water mills, to go with its numerous rivers and high rainfall. These would mill not just corn, but also other materials for manufacturing products such as silk, paper and oil. The mill in the film is similar to that of Tocketts Mill,just nearby in Guisbrough, which closed in 1960, around the same time that this one did. That it is not a very large mill is suggested by it hauling the sacks of grain internally rather than having a ‘locum’, a projecting bay on the side of larger mills used for hoisting up sacks of grain.

Watermills go back nearly as far as the birth of agriculture itself in the Middle East, being introduced into these isles by the Romans. But the upright waterwheel is of Persian origins. The grinding action of millstones has been mainly used for cereal grains, making their nutritional content easier to digest for humans. By the time of the Domesday Book, when William the Conqueror made an inventory of property, of 1086, there were 5,624 mills in the ‘English’ area recorded south of the rivers Ribble and Tees. Later they were used in smelting iron and in other industrial products.

Mills were an important part of medieval life, with the famous miller of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, being portrayed as a rogue – a fairly common perception at the time. Although called ‘mills’, textile factories gradually ceased to use watermills, and their connection became only geographical and historical. In order to keep them running dams were often built, which often affected the landscape – producing mill ponds and narrow valleys – but also brought bitter conflicts between those on the same stretch of water.

Although there are hardly any working mills left – and these mainly for show – they might well make a come back. According to a report in the Guardian (15th November 2009), Government figures suggest that small-scale hydropower from the old mills and weirs could provide up to 3% of the UK's electricity needs, and the Energy Saving Trust claims that up to 40% of the UK's electricity could be generated by small-scale renewable energy systems such as hydropower. In fact Yorkshire is leading the way in this with the Settle Hydro community scheme, a 50KW electricity plant that can generate enough electricity for 50 homes.

Great Ayton is looked over by the well-known local landmark of Roseberry Topping (also known as Odin’s Hill and Ounsberry Topping). It has been an important part of local history, not least in predicting the weather, hence the saying, '’When Roseberrye Toppinge weares a cappe, Let Cleveland then beware a clappe.' This and various other versions have been collected together by Reginald W Corlass and Edward Hailstone. They can be found, together with more folklore on Roseberry Topping, on the remarkable Modern Antiquarianwebsite of Julian Cope (see References).

References

Reginald W Corlass and Edward Hailstone, 'Yorkshire Local Rhymes and Sayings', The Folk-Lore Record, Vol. 1., pp. 160-175 The Folk-Lore Society, London, 1878.

Richard Hough, Captain James Cook, Hodder and Stoughton, 1994.

Ronald Hutton, The stations of the sun: a history of the ritual year in Britain, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Charles Knightly, The Customs and Ceremonies of Britain: an encyclopaedia of living traditions, Thames and Hudson, London, 1986.

M C F Morris, Yorkshire Folk Talk, with Characteristics Of Those Who Speak It In The North And East Ridings, 2nd edition, A. Brown & Sons, London, 1911. (the text of the First edition can be found on the Genuki website, below).

North Yorkshire Federations of Women’s Institutes, The North Yorkshire Village Book, Countryside Books, Newbury, 1991.

John Reynolds, Windmills and Watermills, Hugh Evelyn, London, 1970.

Yorkshire Folk Talk

Great Ayton Kelly’s Directory for 1925

Great Ayton

Betty Fullard-Leo, The Demise Of Captain Cook

Julian Cope’s The Modern Antiquarianwebsite on Roseberry Topping