North Herts Gazette, 14th August, 1980
When boys lined up for a mass caning
Reporter Ann Dodwell speaks to Pirton man Jack Burton and hears about what village life was like in the past and how it compares with life today.
Take a handful of Pirton villagers back to a day in April 1919, and you are likely to find you’ve touched on a sore point. The marks may have faded, but the painful memory of the day the village schoolmaster held a mass caning is still firmly imprinted on their minds! Trouble started when a hot air balloon found itself in hot water over Pegsdon Hills, and had to make an emergency landing just outside Pirton, at Highdown. It caused quite a stir. Most of the village lads decided to take a closer look instead of returning to school for afternoon lessons. The balloon was a welcome diversion for them, but its arrival infuriated the strict schoolmaster who sent his daughter, a teacher, off in hot pursuit of the truants. “Come back at once, you boys,” she said, arriving out of breath in the field where the balloon landed.“Not on your life, Miss, this is much more exciting than school,” came the general reply. There wasn’t much the poor schoolmarm could do except turn tail and tell her father. He had no doubt as to what he must do. Next day he lined the lads up in the largest form room, and caned every one of them.
Jack Burton remembers the day well, but he was one of the lucky ones. “I must have been going back to school later than the other boys and I missed out on going up to see the balloon. “I can still picture the old schoolmaster now. He was certainly furious that afternoon!” said Jack. “It was quite a sight the next morning, the line of boys waiting to be caned stretched right round the walls of the class room.”
A visit to an exhibition in the village to mark the school’s centenary in 1977 brought the memory back even more vividly for Jack, who has plenty of other tales to tell about life in Pirton.
He was born in the village and has lived there for all of his 72 years. The main change he finds is that so many people leave the village each day now to work, he can remember when few people ventured outside to work or play. Until the First World War most people would have worked on the land, farming always was Pirton’s main “industry,” and in those days a large farm would employ 20 to 30 people whereas now a farmer manages with three or four workers. There are also far more families in the village now although the total population probably is not so very different from what it was at the turn of the century. “Family planning wasn’t exactly talked about when I was young, and families tended to be large, although, of course, there was a higher rate of child deaths then,” said Jack. “The population dropped off in the period between the wars as the job situation got bad. But with so many families moving in to new council and private homes after the Second World War it has picked up again.” The effect of all this has been to lessen the feeling of community spirit in Pirton.
Jack said a lot of people in the village were related in the early days, the same number of people belonged to far fewer families than they do now in the days of one or two children households. Jack comes from good old village stock, he can trace the Burtons back in Pirton to the time of the Napoleonic Wars.
Helped Jack’s father, Bert was a farmer with a smallholding of his own. When Jack left school in 1921, you left at 13 in those days unless you were lucky enough to win a scholarship to Hitchin Grammar School, he helped on the farm. “We produced butter and milk for the village and people came to the farm to collect them, milkmen weren’t heard of,” he said. Bert Burton’s farm had to be sold when he went broke, but the family moved into Crabtree House when his father died. Jack still lives in Crabtree House, and loves it, taking a special pride in his beautiful garden. “This has been the family home since 1887, and the cottage itself probably dates back to the early 1600s,” he said.
In the 1920s Pirton suffered high unemployment and poverty along with the rest of the country. Jack, in common with a good many other young villagers, had to look beyond farming for his living. “I tried my hand at being a shop assistant, brush salesman and finally an insurance salesman, all unsuccessful ventures, but finally got lucky when I was offered a job in an aircraft factory at Hatfield.” In the early 1930s you had a good job if you earned £2 a week, and one paying £2.10s a week was considered marvellous. Jack worked through the war, as his was a reserved occupation and stayed at the Hatfield factory for 13 years.
He travelled to and from Pirton every day and clearly remembers the war years, in particular the day the flying bomb fell. It wiped out the village’s small Baptist chapel and damaged about half of its homes in one way or another, but miraculously no one was hurt. “That was incredible. When you saw the havoc it caused, with loads of people made homeless, it was unbelievable that nobody was killed.” The blast ripped the roof off Crabtree House but, like most of the villagers, Jack managed to pick up the pieces and carry on.“That was what was really nice about living in the village then, if you were really down on your uppers, someone would always come along and help, especially at times like that.”
Jack set up his own nursery at Crabtree House after the war and made his living there for 20 years before retiring in 1972 and selling most of the land round his home for the building of new private homes. Jack has spent a good deal of money on restoring his home, too. “Selling the land has enabled me to have the place done up, if I had retired and not sold the land I wouldn’t have been able to do half the work here I have done,” he said.
It’s certainly different, looking out now onto new houses, but there are plenty of reminders of the past inside the pretty white cottage. They include an old wood and leather flail used for beating down wheat in the fields and a device for flattening straw, commonly used in the village in the days when the women did homework for the hatting industry in Luton. “There were only a few women left doing this when I was a lad, but my grandmother certainly used to plait and my uncle was made to stay at home and do the same when he was a lad because he could make more money doing that than he could out on the land.”
Market day trips, and trips to fairs were a major outing in the 1800s, some village lads were even sent to try to sell their services to local farmers, but Jack’s grandmother claimed to have made an incredible journey even further afield. “We were told she had been to London on the first train ever to leave the newly built Hitchin station – and that was almost as impressive in her day as claiming to have been to the moon is now!” he said.
