I consider myself very lucky in that I had quite a good idea what sort of job I wanted by the time I left school. From a very young age I would spend hours browsing the toy shop shelves for model tractors, and living in Fleet, Hampshire, I could watch the goings on at the County tractor factory while walking to and from school every day. Several members of my extended family were involved with farming and as a result I spent several school holidays on various farms; I drove my first tractor (illegally!) at the tender age of 7 or so while on holiday with Granny and uncles in Worthing, so the bug was already biting. That key event consisted of a short trip along what is now the A259 from Worthing towards Ferring. The road in those days was just one lane each way with a concrete surface, grass sprouting from the joints and hardly any traffic to speak of. The tractor was a venerable spark ignition Fordson Major (often known as the E27N from Ford’s designation), and who could resist the “want a go?” enquiry from my cousin George! Within a few years, Farm Mechanisation magazine became compulsory reading and being a Meccano addict probably reinforced the general desire to “work on something mechanical”. With attendance at the county shows, spending hours climbing all over the machinery, collecting masses of sales guff as only a teenager can and reading most of the excellent Ministry of Agriculture free leaflets from cover to cover, the die was cast. Born and brought up in Hampshire and Sussex, with a fair dose of rural Gloucestershire thrown in, family circumstances meant that, come 16, my home was in West Sussex when the time came to get a job. I was lucky to have had a grammar school education and wanted to stay on in the sixth form, more for the social life than the education (the school was co-ed) but in common with a fair proportion of the baby boomers there was only really one financial choice; go and get a job! To be honest this did not bother me overmuch. I was then, and am now, a “doer”, and the promise of independence and proper money in my pocket added to the feeling of anticipation.

Looking back, life was a lot simpler and definitely less technological in the 1960s than now in 2017. The main means of communication was the red telephone box down on the corner and the very reliable letter post from the GPO (General Post Office) which offered two deliveries a day via the postie and his bike. Personal transport for the average teenager (we had only just been invented! The term was first used in 1957 by Bill Haley) was almost certainly the pushbike, and the local private bus service ran six-cylinder petrol-powered Bedford single-deckers of 1950s vintage, top speed 30mph and bottom gear on the hills. If London was the destination, British Railway’s Horsham station offered a regular steam-driven service to Victoria via Three Bridges; slow, probably draughty and a bit dusty but usually on time. In the southbound direction, Brighton was accessible by the now long gone single line via Steyning to Shoreham, and the main line went to Barnham, Bognor and Chichester. Not every family had a car, but we were lucky to be able to run a second-hand Standard 8. Although private car production had recovered to an extent there were still many pre-war vehicles about and also a smattering of ex-military kit, especially commercials. Several companies still had repainted ex-army 4wd 3-tonners, either Bedford or Ford, especially as lime spreaders, and the local garage ran an ex-American army Diamond T wrecker, which we thought was something special. Motorbikes were popular with the single blokes, 125cc BSA bantams at the lower end and the 350cc and 500cc single-cylinder Nortons and Triumphs for the more affluent. With radials being three years away in the future all the vehicle tyres were cross-ply and drum brakes were the norm. The MOT test was first invented in 1960 for cars more than 10 years old and this did not come down to 3-year-old motors until 1967. Everyone wanted to run a car, but the current wages meant that many could not really afford to, so prior to the test there was certainly a fair selection of dodgy vehicles on the road, both private cars and commercial vehicles. Practically anything went; the occasional bit hanging off, a nice line in rust, lights not working, cracked windscreens, no wipers and a good line in bald tyres. Having said all that, there were many fewer vehicles on the road and average speeds were around 35mph.

Social life for us lads centred around four things; buying the latest (vinyl) record, trying usually without success to attract a young lady, and meeting up in Horsham either to go to one of the two local cinemas or spending the evening carefully spinning out a couple of pints in the local pubs. Either of the latter occupations usually ended up in the fish and chip shop but any endeavour after 9pm required one to have independent transport of some sort as the last bus out was 9.05pm, the alternative being, in my case, a four-mile walk home.

There were other forms of entertainment for country-orientated types. I bought my first shotgun at age 17, a lever action Greener 20 bore, and spent many happy hours after rabbits and pigeons on a local farm. I biked over to Haywards Heath, paid £1.5s (£1.25) for the gun and a box of twenty-five cartridges and brought the weapon back strapped to my crossbar. The only trouble encountered was not, as you might expect, an enquiry from the local policeman but a chewing from my mum for not telling her first! Sea and lake fishing were also popular pastimes, both venues providing good sport with plenty of fish to catch. Out came the trusty bike for excursions to the local ponds with an annual rod licence for 7s 6d (£0.375) if I remember rightly. Apart from the licence the only cost was the occasional set of hooks and the effort to raid the garden compost heap for worms. The favourite sea venue was Newhaven West Arm, however that meant a two-hour train journey and a mile walk from the station, although the sport was almost guaranteed. It all may seem a bit primitive now but we were happy, there were plenty of jobs available at all skill levels and the country was definitely on the up.

Weekends and holidays

Living on a farm for two years from the age of 14 without doubt fed my desire to work with agricultural machinery. Church Farm was a typical Sussex Weald mixed privately owned enterprise; about two hundred acres of varied soil types from half-reasonable loam to some flinty ground that was solid chalk about four inches down, plus several patches of traditional woodland. Pigs were a main enterprise, plus feed barley, hay for the owner’s horses, potatoes for sale and home use and the occasional trailer load of logs for the farm cottage fires. Staffing consisted of the farm manager, one tractor driver (my uncle Richard) of whom more later, one stockman and casual labour as required. The tractor fleet was limited to three Fordson Majors, the youngest about 3 years old and the other two a bit more venerable. They were hard used and although well maintained did not enjoy much in the way of cosmetic care; all in all the typical workhorses of a 1960s farm. My contribution was to spend every possible hour not tied up with school work (or fishing!) driving the Fordsons on a variety of tasks, sometimes paid but often voluntarily for fun. Trailer work collecting logs, hay turning, loading bales or picking up spuds all taught me how to drive a tractor safely and effectively, under the friendly guidance of the farm manager. The more I learned and experienced the more I became convinced that a career with agricultural machinery was the way to go and alongside this, unconsciously, my lifelong affinity to Ford and Fordson was established.

I originally thought that I might become a straightforward farm worker but there was a basic flaw in that plan. Those that know me are aware that I am designed like a fishing rod; long, thin and wider at the bottom than the top, and the following will perhaps demonstrate the problem. The farm ran a venerable Massey Harris 726 combine with the separated grain going through a rotary sieve and into bags rather than into a tank. At the age of 15 I “volunteered” to bag up on the platform to give the usual incumbent a break; filling the sacks was easy enough and I soon learned how to gather and tie the sacks securely. The snag was that the bags were the infamous “West of England 2½cwt” hessian sacks. These were the standard receptacle for grain coming off a bagger combine, the name coming from the usual practice of hiring sacks from the suitably named West of England Sack Company. The idea was that each sack held four bushels and this volume of wheat weighed on average 2¼cwt, in modern terms 252lb or 114kg. I soon realised that with a lot of effort I could wiggle the full sacks across the platform and down the unloading chute but as for lifting them on a trailer afterwards; not a hope. Later in the week loading straw bales on to a flatbed trailer showed up another aspect of my membership of the seven-stone weakling brigade. I was alright loading up to about three high on the trailer by lifting alone, but emulating the farm manager chucking up the bales to seven high on the end of a pitchfork was way beyond my abilities. All in all, I loved the countryside, the machinery operation and the minor repairs but was just not strong enough, at least at the age of fifteen, for the many physical demands of the farming life. Add to this my fascination for all things mechanical and it was an easy decision to head towards the...