The Ambridge Socialist
1st October
The Bosses Harvest Supper & Ours
The Harvest Supper is a traditional autumn event which features songs and beer. Usually it’s an occasion where farm workers praise the boss and become mildly inebriated.
A traditional Harvest Supper song for example:
Here’s a health to our Master,
The Lord of the Feast,
God bless his endeavours
And send him increase
May all his crop prosper
So we reap them next year
Here’s the master’s good health boys
Come drink off your beer
No doubt David Archer knows the words off by heart. The Ambridge Socialist suggests John Barleycorn Must Die as a rather more accurate depiction or rural life
Lark Rise to Candleford and Ambridge
The Archers does Candleford on Sunday (Radio 4) but don’t let the Archers put you off. The book is a classic describing rural life in Oxfordshire in the 1880s although written many decades later. Its best understood as semi-fictionalised. It was not cider country but there is a lot of passages about home brewing and brewsters. Rough Music also features as a reminder of traditional country values.
A line reads: ‘who posted the box containing a dead mouse to Mrs Meddlesome’. Answer: George Grundy
Stella and Pip
Work in Progress
Will and George
Happy families beckon
Leave a Reply