What Fishing Was Like During The Edwardian Era | Edwardian Farm EP8 | Absolute History

Devin's coasts with its bountiful free harvest of fish as long provides an income for those prepared to brave the elements but even before people fished in boats they were delving into the sand looking for shellfish it's a tradition that continued well into the other Wardian era Ruthie's travel to the dorset coast to meet John Wright in search of a popular Edwardian harvest the brown shrimp and what we do is squeeze the sand and they get together and they jump out and they don't thread into the net you get a really big one it will jump over the net yeah so of course you can't even catch him second time around John makes his living teaching the art of foraging on land and sea I seen all these images of women working on the beaches gathering and so forth and they sort of fall into two camps there's young girls who've all wear skirts that round and you know people like to take photographs of it because it was almost pornographic you know ankles I can see what they mean mature women and they just go in to see with a skirt straight down from the modesty any other sort of income we're doing isn't it you know if you're a big tough bloke you would be out at sea fishing she could make far more money if you've done the code something out nothing yet but a crack well you were better than me about anyone scoop that's very nice I think it might might better make you a fortune or else you can see it's a brown shrimp really good because it's a little speckles on the back that's camouflage so it's not seen in the sand shellfish was so abundant and easy to catch but they made little money at market very much of poor man's food but Ruth is thought of a way to increase their value I'm actually because we've got wild garlic coming up all over the valley so I could do wild garlic and potted shrimps and if I do them in Nice little ramekins then I can sell them you know you don't need very many to have a saleable product after a morning of foraging Ruth has a bucket full of shrimp [Music] seeing just how hard it is to collect them these little polish women today's not gonna be many shrinks Pratap no there's a lot of rapping very few true Peter and Alex have successfully brought their beef food through the harshest winter in 30 years by feeding them em now Springs arrived traditionally this is when cattle go out to pasture to feed on grass the deep in the valley grass is still on the ground we were running so desperately low on pasture that we've taken up the offer of some meadow much further up the river valley so we're gonna drive all of our cattle along a really quite risky drove road along the valley to this new pasture but we do want to separate out some of our cows alex is leaving behind one of the pregnant cows who's due date is fast approaching turn it that one there yeah along with a prized calf they hope to sell morning morning morning how are you local farmer Sara Burt owns that pasture three miles up the valley where the cows are headed she's come to help them move the herd the process known as droving I think they'll be glad of the new grass I think they certainly will some fresh grass in Edwardian Britain beef was an excellent manager to the Edwardian farm worker these cows would have been worth almost six years wages so it's vital they get them to their new pasture and safely get them more comfortable with Alain get your fresh pasture here this is the matriarch and where she goes the rest for railways and the motorcar the only way to get your cattle from your farm to market was to drove and back in medieval times wasn't unheard of for cattlemen to drive their cows all the way from places like the Highlands and Islands of Scotland to London and even by the Edwardian period this was something that was still practiced but of course with the motorcar that became increasingly more dangerous to try and drive your cattle special drove roads some 90 feet wide developed over the centuries of course when the railways came along it made it much easier to transport Castle long distances and better still if they were stuck in a cabin on a on a train they wouldn't lose weight they wouldn't be exercising heavily and if you did drive your cat or long distances obviously you could damage their hooves and they would lose a lot of what actually makes them a value the matriarch bleeds she's desperate to get in front of me though because she's the boss she thinks she should be in front of me up to 400 cattle were moved at a time but the boys are having trouble keeping their small herd on the right path yeah yeah oh if they don't get the situation under control quickly they could lose the entire herd yeah cows gone all the way down to the river the extraordinary staff and the shoreline John is helping Ruth find another long-lost delicacy lava well there's several types this is the most common type and it's an extraordinary material it's a very thin membrane quite tough and incredibly chewy and it doesn't look at all edible larva is a type of seaweed that's boiled to make a dish called lava bread no because nobody picks it that's fine but in the Edwardian era the pool would have picked lava to give their families a cheap nutritious meal it's protein rich your company won almost live off the stock it's very good for you I'll take a load back - there's Superboy's like everything over haggle over break Oh Alex and Peter are still trying to round up the bird but weighing in at almost half a tonne each it's no mean feat just rung down a near-vertical slope this is trying get infront of them because they were building up a head of steam finally the droves back on track when Sara gave us the offer of some pasture further up the valley we almost been a hand off it's got so dry that despite the warmth the grass is just not pushing through that succulent spring grass which these cows and we've been waiting for throughout the winter at last they've reached their destination and they're all just making their way up into this top field so they've got plenty of pasture here now this should see them good for two or three weeks Peter's just have enough of me good to be alive who good to be alive on morning's like this you really feel it though that was just great [Music] now the cottage Routh's processing the whole of shrimp the shrimp have been boiling for four minutes they change color when you cook them they starts a bit more pink little pots of cooked ready-to-eat shrimps were sold in the best food shops and they were served in the best restaurants you're never gonna make you fortune with shellfish on the other hand it's surprisingly reliable as a catch the next stage is to add some melted butter to seal the shrimp mrs. Beeton she suggests can pepper and whole mace in your button her footage shrimp but I thought see there's every dish and a little tiny bit of spare ground right here is covered in wild garlic I throw a bit in not too much because the air board is were no tourists we're not liking too much garlic putting it on a simplest ways of preserving by pouring the fat on it fills in all the little gaps and means there's no air in there bacteria need oxygen to grow if there's no air even the few bacteria that might be around can't get going it's not exactly gonna make me my millions but this is quite a nice steady little additional in town [Music] back in September Alex and Peter built a hey Rick to feed the cattle through the winter months now the cows are feeding on grass they've got a surplus of hay an audience would have sold this so alex has asked Devin farmer Francis Mudge to assess its quality its Milan moisture it done alright the smells you know fairly sweet the Bullock's another weight that no trouble at all so you're looking for sweetness yeah yeah okay so we've actually had a chance to pay off some of the stuff out of the rear this is from the top and it like you know you can see it's not that's right not quite secreted that in the in the but in the bottom they were like right and also over the fort is a different part of the field in it yeah it is actually it's that's one of the higher meadows yeah course of grass and yeah the bottom of that right I mean is this still sellable as a feed stuff or you kind of wish delete it delete it yeah they'll still go for that with expanding at audience cities came more horses need even more food so there was a tidy profit to be made from selling hey what we are concerned about first and foremost is whether this is a good enough quality to sell at market you could sell it it couldn't animals with each other nothing wrong with that there's only it's a bit coarser than the other but they're still ate it all just to beat a bowl no there's nothing wrong with that [Music] with the excess hay taken care of the boys are turning their minds to the pregnant cow they held back from the drove they've never delivered a calf before so I've come to get some advice from an old friend sue Farkle has been breeding red ruby cattle for over 15 years there's a new addition to her herd and how old's this one oh that's a ride yesterday morning wine wasn't quite an easy birth this one well I came down in the morning to find him here our carving is imminent we've actually got within the next couple of weeks Evan we we've got our compsat Jew yes so should we anticipate any problems when the carving on the whole no if it was a maiden heifer one carving for the first time well you've got to give her masses of time but these will when they're older you can come around the corner and nothing's happening and half an hour later you got a calf on the ground just before she's due to carve hmm she'll get very loose at the back here either side of the tail head she'll get a lot looser you can see it's quite loose she hasn't fully tightened back up again after carving but it will get looser and looser how much time have we then got before carving two days to three days and I suppose while ours are giving birth we're not gonna have to intervene that much I would hope you'll come down in the morning and you will find a calf it's mid-april the farm is in full bloom and Ruth's shrimp enterprises well underway the cattle are feasting on a new pasture in battle the farm the team are carefully monitoring their expectant cow but there's one problem that's been nagging Alex crossing the river Tamar from here by road is a 12 mile trip it's something of a boundary actually between ourselves here and all of the villages that share the same landscape on the other side of the river so Alex wants to build a coracle an ancient portable boat designed to be used by one person he's enlisted woodcraft expert Shaun Hellman to help him make one Shawn's been making coracles for 20 years using techniques handed down over the centuries so how do we get started right we cut a load of willow like this morning yeah it's really fresh really really bendy yeah you can see such a fast-growing wood and I suppose in the Edwardian period they would have known so much more about their woods than we do today almost certainly yes yes a lot of very common knowledge different woods suited to different things willow great for baskets nice and flexible you're excellent for the coracle right Shawn uses a template to hold the willow ones in place here we go then so what's nice snug fit there that's fine back there so one went over that we've got plenty of rose going to come into there right okay yeah [Music] no two ones for the same are they that's certainly not there's one of the joys with working would the next step is to start weaving them all together to essentially make the gunnels of the coracle have you made in baskets at all I've made a few baskets but nothing quite this big actually and nothing that I'm gonna have to rely so heavily upon if I'm not to drown so the weaving we do is very very basic no think nothing special to it the coracle was useful for all sorts of jobs from traversing Rapids to catching rabbits stranded in floodwater to fishing okay with the sides starting to take shape it's time to make the seat okay so this is going in here yep and all the way down I'm just pulling it up like this and it's really just this portion here yeah and the portion on the end here where it goes flat across the bottom II we don't really need to bend it bend the willow over a bit and just pull up and we can feel it I'm worried I'm gonna pull it out on another face [Music] earlier in the year Peter built a hatchery to recreate the Edwardian advances in [ __ ] reading technology the trout hatched competed left them to grow but breeding was a delicate science and their chances of survival is slim [Music] now he's come to see how the young trout are getting on they start hatching November so come April now they should be fairly large so you just thought you'd be able to see in which they're still quite small they can't be that small I can't see a single one they seriously they're not here basically what they do is they start looking for food so they must have gone through that water flow down here and in there I honestly can't believe it this is such an exciting project this is actually disaster right Peter's followed the stream to its mouth at the mill pond there in the mill ponds and I can see him this is a big old pond though but right now they're small they're defenseless the Predators probably in the water ran out of the water so you know if we want to keep our trout stocks up we need to rescue them while they're small we can really start to see the shape of the coracle coming together now I think I was just a little bit gung-ho on that first one well yeah I can feel it starting to feel like the sort of thing that can support the full man's weight and in water when we've completely woven it we can stand here right okay we'll take a person's weight quite happily that's really good now okay that's the last one's woven around there so I'll be pretty much there we're pretty much there oh just kneel on top here there we go originally coracles were covered in a horse or cow hide just pull the corner out there but by the Edwardian period tar coated calico was used a strong light and a waterproof material it's just right now we've positioned the calico onto the coracle we need to sew it on it's rather more different to sewing buttons on your shirt Oh once stitched the coracle is complete and should last for years Julie so just try it out for the size despite household goods being readily available to it audience farmers still made many products themselves [Music] Ruth is making lanolin a natural fat extracted from a sheep's fleece absorbs really well into the human skin so you make an awful lot of skin ointment out of it it's also really good as a grease because it's being an actual thing it sort of absorbs nicely into things like wood so helps where have you got what sort of wooden moving parts you can use as a lubricant there Ruth is using a copper to warm the fleeces a large cast iron tub heated from below all right now I'm just got to bring this up to the boil and that will melt all the fat's in the wall and allow them to be released from the wall and they'll start to rise to the top of the VAT they've all gone they've all gone but every single one they just left say you don't have they didn't stick around put it that way any trout in your hatchery anymore not always have come to rescue the image or trout's their milk pond a little baby trout perfect opportunity for a willing volunteer to test out the coracle what's this that is a 19-12 life jacket as last seen on the titanic happen to that Peter and Alex make a net using cork floats which they will use to trawl the Mill Pond for the trout happy yeah oh my this is the coracles maiden voyage a true test of her seaworthiness the floats does it float with a beginning if though question that first foots got to go right in in the middle stay in the middle [Applause] do you realize every trout in the milk wanders now despite is soaking peter finally manages a successful launch now all he has to do is catch something yeah Peter just behind you right right [Music] but there are many trout in a PITA they are extremely well camouflaged have we no fish no fishermen right [Music] this is our last-ditch attempt yet last-ditch attempt oh there we are there we go despite their catch most of the trout have evaded the net it seems Peters dreams of being an Edwardian trout breeder and not to be so I'll see you back at the cottage right okay Alex don't you dare day later and Ruth's lanolin is ready a lot now and all the facts come to the top you can see it as this sort of it always looks like butter no I'm just to take it off the surface once in the pot the lanolin will Harden and ready to be put to good use every morning the boys have been checking on the pregnant cow waiting for her calf to arrive I think what sue said though about this in here the the muscles here yeah yeah there's still quite tense so not imminent just yet but first there's a more pressing concern to deal with then we're gonna have to find ways with which to keep the flies off and I think the first thing we can do for these teeth because they are getting bitten they're getting bitten really quite badly yeah get some lanolin on them lucky for us Ruth make things in bulk you can see here that she's she's got problems with the Flies you see here on my hands he's that bit of blood there we've actually heard rumors about how bad the flies can be down here and this is early in the year and it's quite a cold year so this is a lot of flies about this is an ominous sign the calves would be the edwardian farmers biggest money spinner so it's essential they keep a constant watch on the cows condition [Music] but while they wait for their new arrival the boys have managed to interest their friend Francis much in the prize car they held back road one car Ruby car will is time for us to the cash in early on [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] I'm on the level but you want to go you must like it you make a good run stick that's harsh lovely jobs Tommy Sam is on the table back at the cottage Ruth's been boiling up a nutritious snack of lava bread this is gonna be a sensation yeah Wow it's quite a strong flavor so you had fun down on the foreshore then I never knew which time to see we did watch you know because I sweet this is a kid for the centuries you know if anything else everything else failed if crops failed or you know or you were out of work and you had nothing else you could always go down to the seashore and gather seaweed with only smells of the foreshore strange isn't it that as an island we're surrounded by all these food sources that we can was completely ignored it's just like the hedgerow of the sea is now hmm drama is thinking the potted shrimps are being pretty good you know I thought I might do something like a smoker E or something sort of smoke all the fish coming in off the boats yes well Peter and I have managed to acquire ourselves to positions as deckhands Oh have you on and faller not just any old trawler its trawler hasn't rolled for 70 years so who's they employ not a couple of fishermen complete novices but we'll get fish we'll get loads of fish this coming from the man who learns to capsize the coracle in about 30 seconds of being in it the lessons learnt on that day will be employed in honest endeavor but before we set out I've got to make some rope for the boat all right what for the nets yeah just some general purpose wrote for on deck yeah but I think we should take some of y'all know name Ruth then we might as well it's not doing very much here apparently was used in a sort of lubricant for the rigging I thought you were worrying about your delicate little hands in preparation for their trolling expedition Alex has come to see rope maker Ted Baker hello Alex how are you oh well nice to meet you welcome to the rope walk great start good so this is what we're gonna be making today is it that's right it's made from sisal right and it's a fiber very thin grows in the sisal fibers are spun into B string from which the Rope is made but by the time we finished twisting and turning our rope yep we'll have a rope that can pull about half a ton right it's called a rope walk because there's a bit of walking up and down to do right okay so the first thing I'm gonna get you to do Alex yeah take our sisal here right up to the other end of the rope walk okay and hook it over the right hand hook right hook okay that's it Alex I should point out in the old days they used to run you know so I picked the place up to just slip it over the right hand hook okay bit more well and Keene is 20 yards long Britain's longest rope will visit Chatham docks on the River Medway still in use today it's a quarter of a mile long workers used bicycles to travel its length now what we're going to do by turning the handle up at the other end yeah is twist each of these pairs into one so we'll end up with three strong single lines to make our three core rope with 49 with the three strands of sisal fully twisted Alex can now begin combining them to make the rope using the rope makers top it's actually making itself I'm not really doing anything just stopping this top from slipping out completely but that's great and you can see the twists working against each other they're looking fairly even to me very often young people would be doing this for 12 hours a day six days a week and they would be expected to make about three miles of rope a day three miles a day the final job is to stretch out the excess energy wound into the rope that's starting to go strong you go I don't have pull this pose down if you just let it drop on the floor we can see we've got a nice straight piece of rope for you to use there Ruth also wants to get involved in the fishing industry but women were considered to be bad luck on ships so she's decided to stay on land and smoke some mackerel instead so many Devon people sort of live with one foot on sea and one foot on sure you know combining a bit of both and the the processing of the fishing catch was a way that many people made a living in this part of the world so I thought setting up a smoker II would be a really sensible thing to do so what I'm going to need to do is find some way of blocking up the windows and then I'm going to need rods going across that I can hang the fish on the floor is great because I can just have piles of sawdust smoldering away down the center of it to provide the smoke it's funny that you can do such a major commercial scale production in a shanthi little shed [Music] Devon was at the heart of Edwardian Britain's fishing industry trawlers the most powerful fishing vessels of the day were invented there and over 10,000 tons of fish were landed in Devin's ports each year many of the ships employed casual deckhands and Devon farmers could earn extra money during the quiet months of Peter and Alex will be working with a Paul Welsh owner and skipper of the key Weyden a traditional sailing trawler Paul an experienced sailor bought the key waiting to realize his dream of trawling the seas by sale and this will be his first opportunity to give it a go he's taking out a crew of seven in search of a catch and has put the boys straight to work it's just to lubricate these lanyards so that they pass through the dead ice smoothly and basically we've got some of the lanolin that roof is extracted from sheeps pieces it's in this or grease form is this the sort of thing you're looking for yep I'll do the job that's perfect okay what's the fur balls request alex has brought along the rope he made it'll be put to good use holding in place the tiller which steers the ship you can actually sit back on the rope pull it tight right pull it tight and actually come to sit but lean back on it but you'll see when we're sailing you why the purpose of it excellent and it just means that when we're out sailing and we've really got some wind in the sails I've got I've got a little bit more control here yeah yeah painting the trawler with tar was a continuous job today it's Peters turn and what does this do for the boat it said preserve the wood there it's the rainwater that's the worst thing for the wood so sea water is a better preservative more we go sailing the better preserve the boat gets a lot of boats sit up creeps and rock and class than folks that spend all their lives at sea this is something I've been really looking forward to this whole idea that as a farmer you know already and Britain has been in this part of the country not only would you be working the land could you'd also be getting out to sea - six five - six Eve with the maintenance done it's time for the hard work to begin preparing the ship to sail built in 1913 the 80 foot long key Weyden is one of the last sail power trawlers left in the UK [Music] Tombo first run of the day a few people before the boys can have a drink they need to get the troll bat into the water the first time in 70 years I was wondering why you had a large tree well that's the beam and that's hopefully gonna hold the fish net open right it's a job we could lose your fingers this beam flips back you can jam you up feet in the rigging however you go your stuffers down it goes as the trawl net descends it's vital that the wind stays high to keep the boat moving fools it's this motion that holds the mouth of the net open boom if the wind drops the net could tangle and they'll catch nothing [Music] cleaning all these fish now ready for the smoking I want to get them flat I said the smoke can get right in around the fish fresh fish on ice there's quite a short life couple of days at most that's smoked fish keep for ages before she smokes the fish Ruth is salting them the salt drives the fish making it less easy for bacteria to take hold what you're really trying to do is come up with a fish that transports well keeps reasonably well but most importantly tastes good you need something that your market will bear something that people will want to buy after salting for several hours the first batch of fish are ready to be smoked I'm just gonna lay them in I need a good separation between the fish so that the smoke can really get all the way around and no fish touches any other [Music] I don't really want to light a little fire of twigs I wouldn't [ __ ] so I thought I'd follow mrs. Beaton's advice and put slugs the hot iron into the piles of sawdust to get them smoldering so I've just found any old bits of iron I can so I love a couple of irons out there and I'm hoarse shoo and so forth I'm gonna get them superhot and then make some piles of sawdust in the shed this is sawdust come from the boatbuilders which is absolutely ideal because it's a mixture of woods but mostly hardwood wrong and pine hardwoods are better for smoking as they contain more of the chemicals which preserve the fish [Music] while Ruth's smoking venture is progressing well the boys are struggling out at sea so we've got the net dropped but we've just got this massive problem is the wind it's just died on us the thing is without the wind you know we've got no power source but it's only when we get momentum with the boat that will actually start to drag the net away from the farm you think you know maybe you don't have to depend on the weather but once again it's the process it's all weather dependent yes in the Edwardian era trawling was revolutionized by steam power these powerful new trawlers were capable of pulling in up to eight times as many fish and spelt the end for trawling on the sail alex is beginning to see why daylight today we're struggling in there we're struggling with the wind so when steam comes along you can imagine what fishermen would have been thinking can they get the money together to invest but being far from a ready supply of coal Devon was slow to adopt this new technology it's trolling field started to get left behind a lot of the sailors of these boats yeah I said look if you stick to the sailing smacks you won't decimate the the the cod stocks and the North Sea and it would have been probably remained sustainable but I obviously money came in and and the steam drifters caught more fish on calm days and so it's a steam fishing men that you could virtually fishing in any conditions whereas sailing you could only go out with the right wind so what you're saying is that actually steam fishing affected that the stocks around the British Isles yeah steam trawling had such an impact on fish stocks that even in the Edwardian period the North Sea was showing signs of overfishing we're getting somewhere now a little bit of wind we've got another thing finally there's a change of fortune and the wind picks up it's it's pulling that's the important thing which means we are trawling now we're now officially trawling they're moving through water at two knots the trawl net should be open and catching fish each troll would have lasted up to five hours it's time to haul in the nets this is devices changed fishing in the Edwardian era this was one job that Devon trawlers did turn to steam for steam-powered capstans were used to haul in the catch to bring it in by hand would have been a back-breaking three-hour job and when you think about a good haul being sort of up to a ton of power that you would need that's just [Music] she departed [Music] you can see the end of it but [Applause] [Music] we've almost entirely lost the win now as a tie it's pushing us we're rolling over the net so the whole thing's got stuck underneath the boat at last the net comes into view they still have no idea what it holds but there's a crime that's the snack oncoming that snagged a [ __ ] that goes I mean it was that off the ground whatever you need something sticking up that's what I recognizing this rough friend we've clouded something quite prominent on the seabed and as a consequence we've ripped through the net here scarred beam and in all the fiddling around I think the fish will have scarpered from the net for Ana Libyan fishermen this would have been a disaster no fish no pain well this is Oh catch a collection of sea urchins fishing was a dangerous job and in edwardian Devon dozens of fishermen were lost to the sea each year often their bodies were never recovered so families looked for other ways to grieve some turn to the church others turn to spiritualism those who Preem being blessed this our circle and keep us safe when we transport ourselves beyond the veil to the realms of the unknown spiritualists believed it was possible to commune with the dead from parlour rooms to theaters across the country it was a great craze of the Edwardian age often taking the form of a seance I brought with me the mystic Egyptian planet a cultist Peter Leki is an expert in the history of the spiritualist movement he's come to demonstrate how a seance would have worked so is there anybody that you would like to contact well your ancestor Isaac Isaac is that Isaac that size oh he's a fisherman or was a fisherman just place one hand oh you did well beyond the veil if you are with us use our hands as your portal is there anybody with us please let us know [Music] try to keep your hands on the planchette if you can so we have somebody with us very goodness was this person lost at sea he drank yeah he drowned right okay sometimes when the whole crew was lost said they have to have somebody on land to pray for them so it's quite clear that this person just feels lost both Victorians and the earth wardens lived in a world in which death was much more present than it is in the modern world most people experienced the loss of their children at some stage or our husbands brothers you know sisters of mother's mortality was completely different from how it is now and you could say that the Spiritualist movement provided a great deal of Solace for many people who are in deep distress some spiritualists carried out serious scientific investigations looking for real proof of the afterlife but others use tricks such as levitation and sleight of hand to cash in on people's willingness to believe as peta is revealing the table would wanted to see it and that's why lots of illusionists became involved because they were good at the tricks people had not much experience of illusionist scene all that stuff you know all the magicians on the telly they weren't used to camera tricks they were in many senses very naive but even the grated wooden escapologist Harry Houdini harbored a personal desire for spiritualism to provide answers Houdini of course when he lost his mother when she died he was desperate to contact her so he went around to loads and loads of mediums and psychics and Mentalist as they were called in anyway of course a lot of them at that time we're doing these tricks we're having people behind the curtains moving things up and down so he set out on a mission on a mission to debunk these people and often disguised himself and went along and then stood up and said I know how you're doing that trick yes I mean such important figures publicly speaking about something nowadays it tends to be very very friend while the seance goes on into the night back on the boat the boys are trying to keep their spirits up that fish too nice beef stew beef but they okay well this is the bonus having farmers on your courage so if you got the tooling bug then pull yeah I have yeah we've learned quite a lot are you learning from scratch really because of course back in the audience arms you would have been learning from your father from previous generations where the good fish were where the background was and started as a boy I should think we all are we're doing is just learning from a book now it's a blessing to get off the farm sometimes mmm and to have that experience of not only having had two hands on the plow but now tap the hands in the - oh it's hard work as he's a lot harder than I thought it would be I guess it's pretty similar isn't it you hand on the tiller and the play mmm the two are quite similar really as we were efficient of hey very light oh I am hitting and rolling all night it's weather snow only old weather when the wind blows I think what these species are saying is right we hole up of the boys and steer like it's wind weather [Music] my last further dice if we can get round to the harbor mouth there's a chance that they can't coming out of the hog mouth who will catch some of those fish but first there's crucial work to be done on the nets we're now needs to do a few repairs so i'm following Lee's lead I'm getting out on for the rigging and I'm just gonna soak up some of these holes tears in the nets were common and even a good net would only last a few months at last the net is ready and can be carefully lowered back on the farm the mackerel have been smoking for 24 hours they look really good but it's got several weeks keeping power without any form of refrigeration for the edwardian farmer this would have provided extra income for very little investment has cost us virtually nothing to do this [Music] as we were fishing a very let's have been down for long enough now it's the moment of truth you cannot catch me we've got something there very cabbage goddamn see cabbage he's coming in now oh wow I can't believe we call the [ __ ] oh is this convenience it would be we beat rolling along in fact that's your first time you told from this voice the first fish I caught like that excellent a good week at sea could yield up to two and a half tons of fish which was kept on ice so there we go first you keep that little feeler nice and fresh [Music] useless to try and do anything commercial with their ass poses wanna be 30 normally only the wings of the skate are eaten must be soaked thoroughly before cooking and then you've got to get this skin off what's the hard bit really fresh fish does best when you do almost nothing to it so I'm just gonna flash fry this in a little bit of melted butter with a handful of that wild garlic that's everywhere at the moment [Music] for the last few weeks Alex and Peter have been diligently watching their pregnant cow now reunited with the rest of the herd she has a surprise for Alex I was just tidying up in the RIC yard first thing this morning and I looked out into the field and then of course I realized actually that our cow had carved and it's a fantastic sight to see they're fantastic mothers and in many ways it's best to let them just get on and do the job in the field so it's great to see that it's all gone well this is the most pleasing part of having a herd really seeing new life coming to the herd and I'm enormous ly proud that we've come so far whilst I think our fishing ambitions may need a little work it's good to come back to the farm and see that our main business is doing well [Music] escape the fruits of your labor first of all the fish in the sea we have to catch the ones being bony I'm definitely pleased about this calf you know it's good so early in the year to have some foot up from the land if you like you know to have something there standing squarely all four legs ready to make us money yeah good sound job there yeah so forwards is the opportunity to then take our feet on to the sea safe in the knowledge that we we know we've got some money coming our way yeah so how did the shrimping the smoking goat doing it hugely yield me the shrimping it was okay isn't vast it was solid but not bad and the macro smoked up beautiful it's nicely to have that security having more than one resource making you live in isn't it you know if the land fails you you can turn to the CFTC photos we've returned to them and that's posing Devon in the two coastlines north and south so many of the population are using both resources well at least we didn't lose the net Peter we did manage to to save the net as that intercourse would have cost a fisherman back in the early 20th century so one hand on the tiller one hand on the plow you're definitely for the plow line definitely for the plow but the occasional day with the handle on teller preferably boating up and down the river yeah next time on accordion farm the traveling dairy school arrives with a secret of making clotted cream the strawberries are ready to harvest attracting tourists for a Rodian Empire Day celebration

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 196,921

Rating: 4.9065733 out of 5

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, edwardian farm, edwardian farming, fishing documentary, edwardian fishing, sea shanties

Id: DKufTquFOZE

Length: 56min 39sec (3399 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020