Joan’s father, John, was Farm Manager at Mathon Court in the 1920s and 30s, when it was owned by Captain Harrison. Joan and her brother, Philip and mother, Ellen lived in a bungalow in the grounds. Mathon Court had been occupied by a group of nuns, and the gardens were overgrown and neglected, and Johns first task was to cut roads through the shrubberies. Captain Harrison and his wife ran a small residential school for secondary girls and Joan was encouraged to join in with their activities, which seem to have been quite progressive for the time. Joan attended Mathon School, but in the evening and at weekends she was able to join the girls in some of their activities. They had dancing lessons, a boat on the lake, ponies to ride, percussion band, and piano lessons. Mrs. Harrison was a keen botanist and the girls were taken for nature walks. They also walked down to church on Sunday. For their formal lessons they were taught French by a Frenchwoman from West Malvern, and History by Mr. Hughes who lived near the “Old Bell”.
Joan stayed at the village school until she was 14. The older girls taught the young ones and had cookery lessons using vegetables supplied by the farms and milk from Burford Farm. They ate the results.
When war broke out, two evacuees, boys, arrived from London and loved their life at South Hide farm, but some mothers and children who came from Birmingham never settled and soon returned to the city.
Joan remembers the fun of hay-making, and threshing, and how men would go from farm to farm when many hands were needed to complete some of these big tasks. She also remembers stored apple crops, cider-making with the horse turning the mill, and her mother making the strong-tasting farm butter. When the pig was killed (always when Joan was at school) John made the bacon (usually a mans job) and her mother flavoured the lard with rosemary.
The W.I. were busy knitting for the forces and making jam when they could get the sugar, cooking in the village hall on 4 burner paraffin stoves. There was a village “hop” which was so successful that people came from Malvern, Cradley and Bosbury. There was an American camp at Eastnor and the presence of black soldiers created a lot of interest among people who had never seen a coloured man before. Also strangers to the village were a number of Italian prisoners of war. They were quite popular, glad to be out of the war, and some of them were excellent craftsmen. By now England was short of all kinds of manufactured goods and one prisoner made good slippers. One of the Italians, known as Joe, who worked at Church Farm, was so happy here that he stayed for the rest of his life.
John and Philip were in the Home Guard which met at the village hall, and practised firing at West Malvern. In their photograph they look a great deal more formidable than “Dads Army”
In 1945 the roof of their bungalow caught fire and though many people rushed along with buckets of water the roof burnt out
About this time the Harrisons left and Mr. Boyce took over Mathon Court. He kept Ayrshire cattle and some sheep and John and Philip stayed on to work with him. The herd was known as the “Moon Hill herd”. The family moved to Cradley in 1953 and then to Newland. Joan worked on a fruit farm and then in Colwall, then Worcester, cycling to Finchers Corner and catching the bus. She sometimes walked along the country lanes at night but says she always felt safe, and perhaps the most alarming thing was the call of a vixen.
At Mathon Court, coal, fish, bread, newspapers, groceries and milk were all delivered by horse-drawn vehicles until the 1940s when motor vehicles were used. John had horses to look after too. The Harrisons kept two hunters, a heavy horse for the farm, and the girls ponies. Mangolds were grown for feed, and bracken cut for bedding.
Joan had been trained as a secretary, but there was no great pressure to work far from home when there was plenty of work locally. In particular, Kia Ora Schweppes at Colwall had a very good reputation as employers. Philip worked in farming most of his life.
At that time, Mathon had a Post Office run by the Misses Wall at Brook House, and several people remember the rather casual way it was run. There was always a candle on the table, but never a whole one, always a stump which smoked in the draught, and the knife needed to slit open an envelope seemed to have been used to spread butter.
John Pound, and his daughter, Joan.