A farming family at Manor Farm

Recorded standing in the orchard, looking at the trees

​​Christine Shaw: I'm pretty sure it's a James Grieve*, I think my uncle told me that. Yeah. It's a well-known harvest apple. They never get more than about that size and they go soft very quickly, but they're very, very early.

Luton Orchards: And when you say harvest apple, what do you mean by that?

Christine: I mean it's to eat at harvest time, August. Not to store, not to keep. It doesn't store at all. It goes very, very quickly.

Lionel: There are a couple of crab apple trees.

C: Crab apple - that was it!

L: That was the one right there along the front [of the orchard].

C: Yes, of course. We used to make crab apple jelly.

L: You can't see the house behind these bushes, but its back garden had quite a lot of apple trees. And similarly, at Butterfield Green - behind where the cottages are - there used to be an orchard there, which I think was looked after by one person. I can't remember whether it was the Marlows'. Somebody had it and it was separate to all the cottages. Whitehill Farm had an orchard as well.

So I think the reason why there were so many orchards in Luton... was just [that] everybody had apple trees! A lot of people would have bought apples, but everything was done by cash, so it doesn't get written down.

LO: Oh, and there's the second pond. You still have two ponds on the orchard. I saw it on the [historical] maps, but I couldn't see it on the satellite [map].

L:  So it was quite a clever system. All of the water that lands on the roof goes into that pond and all of the water that lands on the yard comes round into this pond, so that they could use that for giving drinking water to the livestock.

L: Stockingstone was never a road until, I don't know, 1950s or something like that, 1940s. So my father said that it just used to be a track that went down there and to get out you had to go down the hill and then turn right on the Bedford Road. There is a garden on... if you come down Stockingstone Hill, New Bedford Road.

C: Bide-a-While garden that had fruit trees.

L: It still does. It's a shadow of this from when you worked there.

LO: Do you remember Bide-a-While?

C: Yes, because I worked there for three months. After university, I couldn't get a job and with my father's contact, I was put to work at Bide-a-While because he [thought I should] earn some money and do something. 

LO: So what did you do there?

Christine: A lot of pruning apples!

LO: The espaliers?

C: Yeah, I think there were. But I remember actually pruning tree-trees [i.e. standard trees]. He taught me how to prune trees, something I think I've long forgotten [laughs]. It's sort of happenstance. You learn things that you don't expect particularly to know and they sort of stay with you.

[Pruning the apples] was one of the more enjoyable tasks that I was put to. I feel the cold. So it was, you know, not a job that was my best choice. But doing the apples, pruning the apple trees was. I must have been there sort of, all the way through the really hard months, I think.

Car: You had an apple room, didn’t you?

Cat: Yeah. Yes. We just used to put newspaper on the floor and then just lay the apples on top. Yeah. 

Car: I guess it's quite a cool room

And I guess the other thing that's changed is the farm would have had a lot of people and now there's not many people. And so to look after the orchard would have just been presumably part of daily life, wasn't it?

L: Whitehill Farm [...] at one point it employed 15 labourers and six boys. So that really gave an idea of how many people were working on the farm. So I would imagine the orchard [...] that's why there was lots of orchards, because it was a way of having food through the wintertime.

* We've since found out that it might actually be a Laxton’s Early Crimson, followed by a King of the Pippins, a Gascoyne's Scarlet and a Bramley's Seedling

[Recorded on 24 May 2024]