NATURE COLUMN: Bill Cawley
THE other day was Harvest Sunday and a memory of how well this religious festival was kept in the past came back to me as I listened to the radio service.
The tradition, as it presently stands, is not an ancient one and owes its existence to an eccentric Cornish clergyman Reverend Robert Hawker, who adapted the festival in the 1840s basing it on its pagan connections.
The festival took place in early October and was introduced to thank God for providing plenty as the harvest was gathered in.
Bread made from the first cut of corn was served to parishioners.
Hawker followed in a long line of Anglican eccentrics. He liked to wear colourful clothes, a pink hat, a poncho made from a yellow horse blanket and a claret coloured coat.
He also excommunicated his cat for catching a mouse on a Sunday and pretended to be a mermaid disporting on rocks singing badly.
The Victorian harvest festival quickly spread in popularity around the country.
I came across a delightful account in The Sentinel of a well-attended Harvest Festival Sunday celebrated at Endon in October 1874.
The music was provided by Endon and Stanley choirs singing the harvest home.
The church was adorned with corn, fruit and flowers. The font with its floating cross of red geraniums and pansies in moss was very pretty. The pulpit was elaborately adorned. On the altar was a basket of grapes, melons and rosy apples and on the credence table a bouquet of flowers.
Local farmers and gentry then sat for a meal and afterwards the farmers enjoyed ‘weed’ in the school play ground (I think we can take it they mean tobacco).
Music, singing and dancing and the ‘good old English country dance Sir Roger de Coverley brought to a close a very happy day’.
The produce was distributed to the local poor in the workhouse.
Of course in a time of pandemic the modern day harvest festival has had to adapt to the exigencies of the times.
I heard on TV a harvest festival held in Suffolk which was a drive-in which over 100 vehicles attended organised by young farmers, the food was distributed to the poor and homeless of Ipswich so in this regard a tradition from the Victorian past was maintained.
One unusual item was harvested in the autumn of 1948 when St Edward’s Hospital in Cheddleton unveiled their ‘smokes for the future’ plan guaranteeing patients with a regular supply of cigarettes.
The hospital attendant Mr Jackson – the snout baron of the establishment – was proudly photographed beside the fronds of the 500 tobacco plant in the garden of the hospital about to be cropped and rolled.