Elsted Manor Farms

Eric Shaxon's extraordinary film captures everyday life on a South Downs farm, near Harting, West Sussex, during the 1930s

Eric Shaxon's film shows the wide variety of farm activities and machinery used at Elsted Manor Farms in Harting, West Sussex during the 1930s. It features haymaking, muck-spreading, ploughing, fertilising, potato riddling and livestock rearing using both tractors and horse-drawn machinery as well as a host of rural characters. We also see work in the dairy, a milk bottling plant as well as Harting's celebration of the 1935 Silver Jubilee - a 'hay gymkhana'.

Elsted Manor Farms' was filmed by Eric Shaxson,the brother-in-law of W. Lory Hosking and Everard Hosking. All three men worked the land of Elsted Manor Farms, near Harting, West Sussex during the 1930s and 1940s. Everard Hosking was one of the three partners of Elsted Manor Farms Ltd which comprised of Engine Farm, Colebrook Farm, in East Harting, and Bays Farm. The partnership of farms was dissolved in the 1940s.