Horse Power and Magic

The pioneering oral historian, George Ewart Evans, began to record the farming ways of East Anglia in the 1950s by listening to old men and women whose memories went back more than fifty or sixty years. Many were agricultural labourers, born before the turn of the century, who had worked on farms before the arrival of mechanisation.

It was assumed at that time that horses would soon disappear from the farms, and that this was the last chance of recording the part they had played for centuri...