Ashover: Pigs were killed for black market

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Ruth Gordon, Derbyshire County Council’s Local Studies Librarian, shares another fascinating extract from the book Ashover Remembered, which brings together personal accounts of village life in the 20th century.

Slaughtering a pig on a farm in the first half of the last century

ONE of the main sources of meat during the Second World War was home-produced pork. Here Howard Davison, a farmer from Miltown, Ashover, describes the killing of pigs in those days.

“The pigs were big. They weren’t the little pigs that you see nowadays. The biggest we had was 42 stone.

“It was a monster, it was like a sofa! We had some fat out of that, and bacon. It was a pig, aye.

“Of course, during the war time we had pigs and we should have had a permit to kill perhaps two pigs a year, something like that. But, I shall never forget once, we’d one permit and we’d six pigs hanging up.

“All done at night in the dark. Jack Bown, from Butterley, he was the main pig killer around here.

“He was a real old character and he’d farm during the day and go roaming about in the hills all night. He did all our pigs.

“And one time, we were busy killing this pig in this shed in the yard – illegally of course – and old Jack Hayes from Dicklant came down the yard and looks in.

“He says, ‘What would tha do if I were inspector?’ And Jack Bown comes up to him and says, ‘I’d slit his throat’. And he’d got knife in his hand. And poor old Jack Hayes, he nearly fainted.

“He thought he were going to kill him. I’ll never forget that. But we killed all those pigs and it was all sold on black market, it all went to locals and folks came at night and we got rid of ‘em.

“You stood the pig at the side of the pig form and you reached over it and grabbed a leg a-piece and pulled it on to its back.

“As quick as that. Before the pig had time to do anything else. You just pulled it, one pair o’ legs up in the air and dragged him on to the form.

“That was it. Jack, he’d stun them first, and then slit the throat to bleed them. We should collect the blood of course, for black pudding and then, we’d a big copper boiling in the yard, that we used to boil clothes in, for washing, my mother had got that stoked up, full of boiling water.

“Then it was my job carrying buckets of boiling water and pouring it over this pig and they were scraping the hairs off it, cleaning it.

“And then, of course, it had to be cut up, hams, sides and head and all the bits and bobs connected to it and then it was my mother’s job to start cooking – pork pies and all the trimmings and everything.

“We would salt the pigs in the pantry. They were laid out on these salting stones in the pantry. And the hams, that was another job of mine, rubbing salt into ’em. It was a time-consuming job that.

“My mother used to buy a solid block of salt – it’d be about nine inches square and two feet long, and crush it up and then we would rub all this salt into the meat.

“And your hands, they were red raw. And then it was left to soak in and, when it had sort of dried, they were all hung up on the walls and muslin put round them, to stop flies getting into it.

“And then you sort of fed off that for the rest of the year. Kept cutting lumps off. And it was different bacon, pork to what we get nowadays, ham. It was different flavoured altogether.”

Howard’s memories live on, thanks to local resident Margaret Wombwell and Derbyshire Libraries. Margaret started, early in 2003, tape recording a couple of her elderly friends recalling their lives in the village.

More and more people came forward to offer their own memories. The end result was 75 years of social history told by the people who lived it, re-creating the rich variety of Ashover village life in the first half of the 20th century.

All the original interviews are available in Matlock Library but, in order to share these delightful memories more widely, a selection describing the village itself, colourful tales of public transport and memories of the Second World War have been published.

To buy Ashover Remembered, send a cheque or postal order for £4, made payable to Derbyshire County Council, to Local Studies Library, DCC, County Hall, Matlock DE4 3AG.

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