Arras Farm in Market Weighton

A wonderfully full portrait of life on an East Yorkshire farm in the post-war period when major changes were taking place in farming. The film shows the highly diversified Arras Farm in Market Weighton, with women collecting potatoes by hand, sheep shearing, and chickens and ducks running free. It shows the developments in agricultural machinery, clearing hedgerows and aerial crop spraying. The plane also provides a bird’s eye view of many other local East Riding farms.

The farming family of Stephenson, which took this film, along with lots of others around this time, had been running the Arras Farm since the early nineteenth century. At that time it was owned by William Constable Maxwell and was devoted to farming rabbits before William Stephenson ploughed and hedged the farm in the 1840s. Then, after the Second World War, in an effort to make Britain self-sufficient in food, governments gave financial incentives to remove hedgerows, making larger fields for the introduction of much bigger agricultural machinery. The aerial crop spraying may be some of the earliest in Britain: the plane was owned by the family between March 1951 and August 1953.