Here is the photo of blackthorn in flower near Bransholme Centre as promised in the previous blog (s.p.b.).
Recently the main theme in an episode of Countryfile (BBC, Sunday evenings) was the growing and processing of sugar beet. The sugar beet factory at Wissington was often shown, the largest such site in Britain and which always extracted large volumes of water from the River Wissey alongside which it was developed. Wissington is a site on the edge of a section of the Fens which juts into west Norfolk between Hilgay and Methwold Hythe. It is five miles south of the village I was brought up in and which I have written about recently. As such, and before car ownership became common, it offered employment opportunities locally rather than working on farms. As I worked on a farm I never really went on the site, but sometimes on a bike ride would go to the site just to see all the lorries queuing up to tip their load of sugar beet. This during the ‘campaign’.
Sugar beet is a root crop, planted in the spring and harvested November to February, these the months of the ‘campaign’. Until the invention, and purchase by the farmer, of a precision drill, sugar beet seeds were sold in rows just after Easter and which then had to be ‘singled’ by hand so each beet could grow properly. This was a job my father hated, so fiddly; some men used a dutch hoe, some a standard hoe. A good worker could earn extra if his rows were well singled. I tried it once, but was too slow.
Each lorry passed over a weighbridge twice, going in and coming out after unloading the beet, the farmer being paid for the weight of beet unloaded. Around 20% of a beet’s weight was extractable sugar; the remainder had uses, especially molasses, a constituent of cattle feed.
Most of the smaller sugar beet factories that existed in the 1960s in Norfolk, Lincolnshire and the East Riding have subsequently closed. Some lorries coming to Whittington today have travelled over 100 miles. Ironically, now that ‘self sufficiency’ has again become a political byword, most of the sugar consumed (which of course is too much anyway) comes from Caribbean sugar cane plantations. The acreage of sugar beet grown in the Eastern Counties today is a fraction of post-war production.