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Stories from the past
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Cathy Le Feuvre continues to uncover interesting artefacts held in the Jersey Heritage collections which reveal stories from the Island’s rural history
Only 10 percent of artefacts held by Jersey Heritage can be displayed at any one time and although the Museum exhibitions do change from time to time, Jersey Heritage has several large collections – Social History, Art and Archaeology – where artefacts are held in safe and secure storage, but which are rarely seen by the public.
At the Jersey Heritage Augrès Object Store at the Sir Francis Cook Gallery in Trinity there are 19,000 social history objects which tell the story of Jersey’s history including items that give us a glimpse into our rural past.
Hand Sower Seed
Sugar Beet Press
These days we’re used to seeing tractors in Jersey’s fields and while some jobs in the countryside will always rely on people, technology is becoming increasingly important including for the time consuming, heavy and challenging tasks like ploughing.
Although we do see dedicated workers planting potatoes by hand, especially on the steep côtils, hand sowing of crops is not that common. But farmers and growers have always sought ways to try to make their work a little easier.
The Aero Broadcast Hand Seed Sower is an early form of ‘technology’, which is thought to date from around the 1940s. According to the instructions on the contraption, the farmer would tie themselves to the machine, which features a red wooden seed box to which is attached a canvas seed bag. Walking up and down the field, seed would be distributed across the soil by a metal star shaped wheel that spun when the farmer moved a long wooden cane with a handle at each end. That is attached to a wooden cog by a leather cord and there’s a small wooden handle towards the back of the wooden box, which closes and opens a metal hatch that releases the seed flow onto the distributor.
Maybe some help with an arduous task, but still hard work!
From the early days of the Occupation in summer 1940 some essential food items quickly began to be in short supply and sugar was something that increasingly became difficult to find.
Islanders tried to live as ‘normal’ a life as possible, so they figured out ingenious ways to make up for the food shortages and even to create cakes and puddings… but making those delicious dishes sweet was a challenge.
In the Social History Collection at the Augrès Store there’s a homemade contraption that was used to make a sugary syrup from a root vegetable called sugar beet.
The sugar beet press is made from what looks like the metal rim of a car tyre to which is attached a wooden barrel type structure fixed to the top, and a pressing mechanism. After the sugar beet was peeled and boiled for hours until it became tender, archivists believe it was then put into a cloth where the liquid was squeezed out before the remaining ‘mush’ was transferred to the wooden barrel. In the same way a cider press extracts liquid from apples, the screw mechanism forced a heavy weight down onto the sugar beet mush and liquid came out. It’s thought that liquid would have been boiled a second time to make it more concentrated and the result was a little like raw sugar rather than the refined sugar that we have now, but it was at least a little sweetener in dark times!
If you have questions or information about objects held in the Jersey Heritage collections you may contact.
