Bruce Giles: Recollections of life on Somerset Farm

My grandfather (Launce William Ernest Giles) died in 1940 when I was eight years old and Dad (Victor Rix Giles) took on the farm. Dad was the third generation after Launcelot, and my grandfather Ernest to farm the land. The old sod house was still standing when we moved into the farm and we lived in it for eight or nine months while Mum and Dad built another house.

Anyone not familiar with the property, if you go along Giles Road to the entrance to the Silverstream vineyards the sod house was on the right of their driveway. It had no running water; the hand pump was in the wash house across a cobbled area adjacent to the back door. When we lived there it did have electricity and the telephone. To have a bath we went the cowshed because that was where the hot water was for washing up after the cows were milked, there was a copper there and earlier an oil fired water heater. The sod house originally had a shingle roof on it, that is timber cut to length and split with an axe, some where along the line, it may have been my Grandfather, put a corrugated iron roof on the house.

My father and Jack Holland dismantled the sod house about 1941 and used the timber and iron off the roof and built an implement shed about where the old pigsties used to be. The implement shed is still there. Around the old homestead there were some fruit trees, apples, pears, plums quinces and a fig tree.

The story goes that in the early days when roads were being put through the roads boards could take land from farmers for roads but there was one stipulation - they could not go through any orchards, they had to be bypassed. Launcelot Giles the cunning old fellow, planted a double row of fruit trees from the sod house to the river because the natural place for the road would be to follow the river on the east side of the river but because of the fruit trees the river had to be bridged twice to carry on to Kaiapoi.

The farm was fifty six acres; it ran from Giles Road to the Middle Island Road. It was two paddocks wide with an access lane down the middle for implements or cows. When I lived on the farm over sixty ago it was mostly cropping with wheat, oats for the horses, peas, lucerne for hay, potatoes and cows. Cows were milked on it for most of its life, I remember dad saying that during the 1^st World War granddad leased some land on the Middle Island Road and milked over sixty cows.

Dad was called up for military service during the 2^nd World War but because farming was an essential industry he was exempted from the service. He did grow cereal crops and potatoes and had army personal to help with the harvesting and potato picking. At the time pickers were paid nine pence (7 cents) a bag. We picked into kerosene tins and it took eight tins to fill a bag. Good pickers could pick 70 to 90 bags a day. Picking potatoes was the only job on the farm dad paid us children for. He said he had to pay pickers so he would pay us for picking.

When the Japanese entered the war in 1941 the government started the ‘Emergency Precaution Scheme’ (E.P.S). Volunteers were asked to attend first aid courses at the Clarkville Hall. From memory six or eight men volunteered. Walter Frost, Arthur Bessel, Bob Rice, Doug Vaughan and Dad are those I can recall. I was about nine at the time and went along as a patient and the men practiced first aid. A lady came out from town once a month to take the classes. When the final exams were held I was able to give some quiet advice to anyone making mistakes putting on a sling or bandage. Many of the locals called the E.P.S. volunteers silly buggers for attending the course, you don’t volunteer for any thing, wait until you are told to do it they said. Soon after the E.P.S. was up and running the Home Guard was started and that was compulsory with parades every week but the E.P.S. volunteers were exempt home guard duties.

In the early 1940s everyone was short of money and Mum and Dad were no exception, I was still at primary school when the tax department wrote to Mum and Dad and said they wanted to audit them as they thought they were putting in false tax returns. The auditor arrived and spent hours checking the books and kept saying he couldn’t make out how a family could live on the declared income. Mum suddenly remembered the ten shillings ($1) a week per child family benefit and there were four children receiving it, that made another two pounds ($4) a week. “That makes the difference” the auditor said “I believe you can live on that.”

All the farmers helped each other on a sort of barter system with the harvesting and haymaking. Wheat was cut with a reaper and binder then stooked in the paddock for threshing or carted and stacked for threshing later. This was before the days of direct heading the grain. The strains of wheat that could be direct headed were just being developed.

Dad had a four horse team and during the cultivation season he would borrow a couple of horses from his friend Jim Wright who farmed land near the Waimakariri bridge. Jim was also a horse dealer. Horses were in demand after the war for returned soldiers who were set up on farms and needing a horse for various jobs around the farm. This suited dad and Jim. Dad would have the use of the horses without having to buy them and Jim would often bring a client round to see a horse working in a team. Several times the horse would be bought on the spot and taken out of the team leaving dad with only five horses for the rest of the day. Usually the horse could finish the day and be exchanged for another that night ready for the next day.

The job on the farm I hated most was ploughing out the corners. With a four or six horse team pulling a three furrow plough there was always an area in the corners of the paddock that the plough could not cover. With the advent of tractors with hydraulically mounted ploughs this was not a problem, just back into the corner, drop the plough and plough the corner out.

After the paddock had been ploughed dad would get out the single furrow plough, his favourite horse, old Ben and me. Dad would be on the plough and my job was to lead the horse into the corner, right up to the fence always watching the horse’s feet so it didn’t walk on you, to plough as much of the corner out as possible. The horse always had to be on the unploughed land so the plough would follow in the last furrow.

When Dad was ill at home a few weeks before he died we were talking about ‘old times’ when I told him the worst job on the farm was ploughing out the corners, with you hanging on the end of the plough and yelling at me because I was not getting Ben far enough into the corner. He surprised me saying that I had done pretty well, he didn’t yell at me as much as his father did to him when he was leading the horse.

Dad took ill in 1953, it was during the harvest time and very stressful on us all. I was serving an engineering  apprenticeship and arranged to have days off work to get the harvest in. Dad was milking thirty two cows at the time and on the days I went into work I would have to get up at 4.30 in the morning to milk, separate and feed the pigs before I left for work. I put the alarm clock on the far side of the bedroom so I had to get out of bed to turn it off. On the days I went into work my sister Janette would milk the cows and separate at night leaving me to feed the pigs.

When dad got out of hospital he decided he would have to give the horses up, he loved the horses and it was a hard decision to make. He believed the tractor wheels would pack the soil where as the horses hooves would not. He bought a Ferguson tractor in 1953. Dad was the last farmer in Clarkville to buy a tractor and sell off the horses.

These are some of my recollections of living on Somerset Farm for fourteen years from the time I was eight, when Mum and Dad took it over, until I left to get married.

Bruce Giles, 29.2.04