Edwardian Farm (2010) s01e08 Episode Script

1 Here in Devon, in the tranquil Tamar Valley, is a port that once bustled with industry.
Now Morwellham Quay has been brought back to life, as it would have been during the reign of King Edward Vll.
Good to be alive! On mornings like this, you really feel it, though.
Archaeologists Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn, and historian Ruth Goodman, are living the lives of Edwardian farmers for a full calendar year.
Wa-hay! Wa-hoo! Alongside farming, they've been getting to grips with the rural industries that once brought wealth to Devon.
Wow! Oh, wow! We got something! So far, spring has sprung on the farm, bringing new life and new residents, Ruth has helped harvest the first market garden produce of the season and the team have enjoyed an Edwardian Easter.
- Hallelujah! - Hallelujah! Come on, girls.
Now it's April.
In the tradition of the Devon farmer, who had one foot on the land and one in the sea, Ruth searches for new ways to make money from the ocean.
Smoked fish keep for ages.
While the boys swap the plough for a trawler net.
This is the first time anyone's done this on this boat.
But on the land, the team must keep a constant vigil over their pregnant cow.
Expanding their beef herd will be crucial to their success on the Edwardian farm.
Devon's coast, with its bountiful free harvest of fish, has long provided an income for those prepared to brave the elements.
Even before people fished in boats, they were delving into the sand looking for shellfish.
It's a tradition that continued well into the Edwardian era.
Ruth has travelled to the Dorset coast to meet John Wright, in search of a popular Edwardian harvest - the brown shrimp.
And what we do is squeeze the sand, and they get scared, and they jump out, and they jump straight into the net.
If you get a really big one, it'll jump over the net.
So I mean, of course, you can catch him second time around.
John makes his living teaching the art of foraging on land and sea.
I've seen all these images of women working on the beaches, gathering, and they sort of fall into two camps.
There's young girls, who haul their skirts up round, and people liked to take photographs of them because it was almost pornographic, ankles.
I can see what they mean, you know, it's working! Then there's other images, particularly of older women, of mature women, and they just go into the sea with their skirts straight down, for the modesty.
This really is the sort of job that people without any other form of income were doing, isn't it? You know, if you were a big tough bloke, you would be out at sea fishing, cos you could make far more money if you lived on the coast by being out than you could shrimping up and down.
No, nothing yet.
- You've got a crab.
- I have got shrimps! - I have, look! - Oh, you're better than me.
Wow, look at that, that was your first go.
You've got about ten in one scoop.
That's amazing, that is.
I think you might be able to make your fortune over this.
You can see it's a brown shrimp cos of those little speckles on the back.
That's camouflage, so it's not seen in the sand.
Shellfish were so abundant and easy to catch that they made little money at market.
Very much a poor man's food.
But Ruth has thought of a way to increase their value.
I was thinking of potting them, actually, because we've got wild garlic coming up all over the valley, so I could do wild garlic and potted shrimps.
And if I did them in nice little ramekins, then I can sell them you don't need very many to have a saleable product.
After a morning of foraging, Ruth has a bucketful of shrimp.
Mind you, I have to say, having seen just how hard it is to collect them, these little potted shrimps, there's not going to be many shrimps per pot.
There's a lot of wrapping, very few shrimps.
Yeah, it'd have to be, wouldn't it? Peter and Alex have successfully brought their beef herd through the harshest winter in 30 years by feeding them hay.
Now spring's arrived.
Traditionally, this is when cattle go out to pasture, to feed on grass.
But deep in the valley, grass is thin on the ground.
We're running so desperately low on pasture that we've taken up the offer of some meadow much further up the river valley, so we're gonna drive all of our cattle along a really quite risky drove road, along the valley to this new pasture.
But we do want to separate out some of our cows.
Alex is leaving behind one of the pregnant cows, whose due date is fast approaching It's her, innit? That one, there.
along with a prize calf they hope to sell.
You, as well.
- Morning.
- Morning.
- How are you? - Very well.
Local farmer Sarah Birt owns the pasture three miles up the valley where the cows are headed.
She's come to help them move the herd, a process known as droving.
I think they'll be glad of the new grass.
I think they certainly will, some fresh grass.
Come on! In Edwardian Britain, beef was an excellent money-maker.
Come on! Come on! To the Edwardian farm worker, these cows would have been worth almost six years' wages.
Come on, girls! So it's vital they get them to their new pasture safely.
Get them all comfortable with the lane.
Get your fresh pasture here.
Come on, girls! This is the matriarch.
And where she goes, the rest follow.
In the age before railways and the motor car, the only way to get your cattle from your farm to market was to drove.
And back in medieval times, it wasn't unheard of for cattlemen to drive their cows all the way from places like the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, to London.
And even by the Edwardian period, this was something that was still practised.
But, of course, with the motor car, it became increasingly more dangerous to try and drive your cattle.
Special drove roads, some 90 feet wide, developed over the centuries.
Come on! Come on! Of course, when the railways came along, it made it much easier to transport cattle long distances, and, better still, if they were stuck in a cabin on a train, they wouldn't lose weight, they wouldn't be exercising heavily.
And if you did drive your cattle long distances, you could damage their hooves, and they would lose a lot of what actually makes them of value.
On you go.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
The matriarch leads.
She's desperate to get in front of me, though.
She's the boss, she thinks she should be in front of me.
Come on, girls! Up to 400 cattle were moved at a time.
But the boys are having trouble keeping their small herd on the right path.
Oh, no, don't go down there.
- I think - Come on! Come on! Come on, girls! Come on! If they don't get the situation under control quickly, they could lose the entire herd.
Whoa! Call them up, Peter.
Come on, girls! I think the cows have gone all the way down to the river.
It's extraordinary stuff, isn't it? At the shoreline, John is helping Ruth find another long-lost delicacy - laver.
Well, there are several types.
This is the most common type.
And it's an extraordinary material.
It's a very thin membrane, it's quite tough, and incredibly chewy, and it doesn't look at all edible.
Laver is a type of seaweed that's boiled to make a dish called laver bread.
There's lots of it about, isn't there? There's no shortage.
Nobody picks it, that's why! But in the Edwardian era, the poor would have picked laver to give their families a cheap nutritious meal.
It's protein, you could almost live off the stuff.
It's very good for you.
I think I'll take a load back and see if the boys like it.
I don't know if they've ever had laver bread.
Oh, cows! Where are you going? Come on! Alex and Peter are still trying to round up the herd.
But weighing in at almost half a ton each, it's no mean feat.
Come on! Come on.
What's happened, I've just run down a near vertical slope, just to try and get in front of them.
Cos they were building up a head of steam.
Finally, the drove is back on track.
Come on, girls.
When Sarah gave us the offer of some pasture further up the valley, we almost bit her hand off.
It's got so dry that, despite the warmth, the grass is just not pushing through, that succulent spring grass, which these cows and we've been waiting for throughout the winter.
Come on, girls! At last they've reached their destination.
And they're all just making their way up into this top field.
They've got plenty of pasture here now.
This should see them good for two or three weeks.
Peter's just shouted up at me, "Good to be alive, good to be alive.
" On mornings like this, you really feel it, though.
That was just great.
That should be Yes.
At the cottage, Ruth's processing the haul of shrimp.
Another batch ready.
The shrimp have been boiling for four minutes.
They change colour when you cook them.
They start to look a bit more pink.
Little pots of cooked, ready-to-eat shrimps were sold in the best food shops.
And they were served in the best restaurants.
You're never gonna make your fortune with shellfish.
But on the other hand, it's surprisingly reliable as a catch.
The next stage is to add some melted butter to seal the shrimp.
Mrs Beeton, she suggests cayenne pepper and whole mace in your butter for potted shrimp.
But I thought, seeing as every bit of spare ground round here is covered in wild garlic, I'd throw a bit in.
Not too much, because the Edwardians were notorious for not liking too much garlic.
Potting is one of the simplest ways of preserving.
By pouring the fat on, it fills in all the little gaps and means there's no air in there.
Bacteria need oxygen to grow, if there's no air, even the few bacteria that might be around can't get going.
It's not exactly going to make me my millions.
But this is quite a nice, steady little additional income.
Back in September, Alex and Peter built a hay rick to feed the cattle through the winter months.
of finding out whether the hay is edible.
Now the cows are feeding on grass, they've got a surplus of hay.
Edwardians would have sold this.
So Alex has asked Devon farmer, Francis Mudge, to assess its quality.
It's smelling nice, yeah.
They'd eat that, all right.
It smells, you know, fairly sweet.
The bullocks will eat that, no trouble at all.
- So you're looking for sweetness? - Yeah, you know, looking at So we've actually had a chance to bale some of the stuff out of the rick.
But this is from the top.
You can see it's not quite - That's right.
- Not quite so good as that in the bottom there.
And also I would have thought it's a different part of the field, innit? It is, actually.
It's one of the higher meadows.
Yeah.
Yeah, cos it's a lot coarser grass than at the bottom of that rick.
I mean, is this still sellable, as a feedstuff? Well, yes, cattle will still eat it.
- They'll still eat it? They'll still go for that.
- Yeah.
With expanding Edwardian cities came more horses, needing even more food.
So there was a tidy profit to be made from selling hay.
What we are concerned about, first and foremost, is whether this is a good enough quality to sell at market.
Yeah, you could sell it, and animals would eat it.
There's nothing wrong with that.
It's only a bit coarser than the other, but they'll still eat it all right.
It's eatable.
You know, there's nothing wrong with that.
With the excess hay taken care of, the boys are turning their minds to the pregnant cow they held back from the drove.
They've never delivered a calf before, so have come to get some advice from an old friend.
- Hello, Sue.
- Hello, how are you? Sue Farquhar's been breeding red ruby cattle for over 15 years and has a new addition to her herd.
- And how old's this one? - Oh, that arrived yesterday morning.
Right.
Was it quite an easy birth, this one? Well, I came down in the morning to find him here.
Our calving is imminent, we've actually got, within the next couple of weeks, our calves are due.
Should we anticipate any problems when we're calving? On the whole, no.
It was a maiden heifer, one calving for the first time, we've got to give her masses of time.
When they're older, you can come round the corner and nothing's happening, and half an hour later, you've got a calf on the ground.
Just before she's due to calve, she'll get very loose at the back.
Here, either side of the tail head, she'll get a lot looser.
You can see it's quite loose.
She hasn't fully tightened back up again after calving.
But it will get looser and looser.
How much time have we then got before calving? Two days.
Two, three days.
And I suppose while ours are giving birth, we're not going to have to intervene that much.
I would hope you'll come down in the morning and you will find a calf.
Right.
It's mid-April.
The farm is in full bloom.
And Ruth's shrimp enterprise is well underway.
The cattle are feasting on their new pasture, and back on the farm, the team are carefully monitoring their expectant cow.
But there's one problem that's been nagging Alex.
Crossing the River Tamar from here by road is a 12-mile round trip.
It's something of a boundary, actually, between ourselves here and all of the villages that share the same landscape on the other side of the river.
So Alex wants to build a coracle, an ancient portable boat designed to be used by one person.
He's enlisted woodcraft expert Sean Hellman to help him make one.
- Hiya, Sean.
- Hello.
Sean's been making coracles for 20 years, using techniques handed down over the centuries.
So how do we get started? We cut a load of willow this morning.
Yeah.
- It's really fresh, really, really bendy.
- Yeah, yeah, I can see.
Such a fast-growing wood.
And I suppose in the Edwardian period, they would have known so much more about their woods than we do today.
Yes, yes, a lot of very common knowledge.
Different woods suited different things.
Willow, great for baskets, nice and flexible, excellent for the coracle here.
Sean uses a template to hold the willow wands in place.
Here we go, then.
Well, that's a nice snug fit there.
That's fine back there, so when this is bent over, we've got plenty of room.
It's going to come into there, right? No two wands are the same, are they? They're certainly not.
That's one of the joys with working wood.
The next step is to start weaving them all together, to essentially make the gunwales of the coracle.
Have you made any baskets at all? I've made a few baskets, but nothing quite this big, actually.
And nothing that I'm going to have to rely so heavily upon if I'm not to drown.
So The weaving we do is very, very basic.
Nothing special to it.
The coracle was useful for all sorts of jobs, from traversing rapids, to catching rabbits stranded in flood water, to fishing.
With the sides starting to take shape, it's time to make the seat.
There we go.
OK, so this is going in here, yeah? And all the way down.
I'm just pulling it up like this.
And it's really just this portion here.
And the portion on the end here, where it goes flat across the bottom, and we don't really need to bend it, bend the willow over a bit and just pull up.
And you can feel it flexing.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, I'm worried I'm going to pull it out.
Snap it.
Now we're going to have to pull that one out! We should have got you practising on another piece.
Earlier in the year, Peter built a hatchery to recreate the Edwardian advances in trout-breeding technology.
The trout hatched and Peter left them to grow.
But breeding is a delicate science and their chances of survival were slim.
Now he's come to see how the young trout are getting on.
They started hatching in November.
So, come April, now, they should be fairly large.
So you'd have thought you'd be able to see them- of course, they're still quite small.
But they can't be that small.
I can't see a single one.
Seriously, they're not here, are they? Basically, what they do is they start looking for food.
They must have gone through that water flow, down here, and then in there.
I honestly can't believe it.
This was such an exciting project.
This way.
This is an absolute disaster.
It serves me right for not shoring the hatchery up properly.
Whoa! Peter's followed the stream to its mouth at the mill pond.
They're in the mill pond.
And I can see them.
This is a big old pond, though.
But right now, they're small, they're defenceless.
There are predators, probably in the water and out of the water.
So, if we want to keep our trout stocks up, we need to rescue them while they're small.
We can really start to see the shape of the coracle coming together now.
I think I'm just a little bit gung-ho on that first one.
I can feel it starting to feel like the sort of thing that can support a full man's weight in water.
Oh, when we've completely woven it, we can stand here.
You see, it'll also take a person's weight quite happily.
That's really good now.
OK, that's the last ones woven round there, so are we pretty much there? We're pretty much there.
I'll just kneel on top here.
- There we go.
- And bounce up and down a bit! Originally, coracles were covered in a horse or cow hide.
OK, if you just pull the corner out there But by the Edwardian period, tar-coated calico was used, a strong, light and waterproof material.
Let's just wrap it right over.
Now we've positioned the calico onto the coracle, we need to sew it on.
It's rather different to sewing buttons on your shirt.
Once stitched, the coracle is complete, and should last for years.
So I should really sort of just try it out for size.
Despite household goods being readily available to Edwardians, farmers still made many products themselves.
Ruth is making lanolin, a natural fat extracted from a sheep's fleece.
It absorbs really well into human skin, so you make an awful lot of skin ointments out of it.
It's also really good as a grease, being a natural thing, it sort of absorbs nicely into things like wood.
So wherever you've got wooden moving parts, you can use it as a lubricant there.
Ruth is using a copper to warm the fleeces, a large, cast-iron tub heated from below.
Right, now I've just to bring this up to the boil.
And that will melt all the fats in the wool and allow them to be released from the wool.
And they'll start to rise to the top of the vat.
- What, they've all gone? - All gone.
Every single one, they just left.
- So you don't have - They didn't stick around.
any trout in your hatchery any more? - No.
The boys have come to rescue the immature trout from the millpond.
The little baby trout.
It's the perfect opportunity for a willing volunteer to test out the coracle.
What's this? That is a 1912 life jacket.
As last seen on the Titanic.
We all know what happened to that.
Peter and Alex make a net using cork floats, which they will use to trawl the millpond for the trout.
Thank you very much.
- Happy? - Yeah.
This is the coracle's maiden voyage, a true test of her seaworthiness.
It floats.
Does it float with a Peter Ginn in it, though? That's the question.
That first foot's got to go right in, in the middle.
Stay in the middle.
Stay in the middle.
Cool.
I'm good.
Ohh! Look, forget the coracle! I've got to get my hat back.
You do realise every trout in the millpond has now shot up the stream? Despite his soaking, Peter finally manages a successful launch.
Now all he has to do is catch something.
Your hat, Peter, just behind you.
Oh, yeah.
- Right.
- Right.
Let's get trawling.
If there are any trout in here, Peter, they are extremely well camouflaged.
Have we? No fish? That's about it.
No fish, I'm afraid.
This is our last-ditch attempt.
Yeah, last-ditch attempt.
- Oh! - What? There we are! There we go.
Despite their catch, most of the trout have evaded the net.
It seems Peter's dreams of being an Edwardian trout breeder are not to be.
So, I'll see you back at the cottage mate, OK? Oi! Alex? Don't you dare! How am I going to get out? Alex! A day later and Ruth's lanolin is ready.
Now, this has sort of cooled quite a lot now, and all the fat's come to the top.
You can see it as this sort of it almost looks like butter.
I'm just going to take it off the surface.
Once in the pot, the lanolin will harden, ready to be put to good use.
Every morning, the boys have been checking on the pregnant cow, waiting for her calf to arrive.
I think what Sue said, though, about this in here - The muscles here, yeah? - Yeah.
They're still quite tense.
So not imminent just yet.
But first, there's a more pressing concern to deal with.
We're going to have to find ways with which to keep the flies off, and I think the first thing we can do for these teats, because they are getting bitten, bitten really quite badly, is to get some lanolin on them.
Lucky for us, Ruth makes things in bulk.
You can see here that she's got problems with the flies.
You can see here on my hand, see that bit of blood there? We've actually heard rumours about how bad the flies can be down here.
And this is early in the year, and it's quite a cold year, so this is - There's already a lot of flies about.
- This is an ominous sign.
The calves would be the Edwardian farmer's biggest money spinner.
So it's essential they keep a constant watch on a cow's condition.
But while they wait for their new arrival, the boys have managed to interest their friend, Francis Mudge, in the prize calf they held back from the drove.
One calf.
One red ruby calf.
Well, it's time for us to sort of cash in early on our beef herd, so He's looking pretty good, really.
Got a nice coat on him.
Come on! Your price is going down rapidly if you start doing this! We've got to get you on that boat.
If I can't load him, I can't buy him! - There's a good boy.
- Go on.
Go on, boy.
He'll sit down on the bloody deck, though.
- He didn't want to leave home.
- He didn't want to go.
He must like it here.
- You'll make a good rump steak.
- That's harsh.
Next time we see him is on the dinner table.
- That's the way it goes, Peter.
- I know.
Back at the cottage, Ruth's been boiling up a nutritious snack of laver bread.
- It's taken ten hours to boil it.
- Ten hours? So this is going to be like a taste sensation, yeah? Well, it's quite a strong flavour.
- So you had fun down on the foreshore, then? - Mm.
I never knew which type of seaweed it was, you know? Cos I used to eat this as a kid.
For centuries, if everything else failed, if crops failed or you were out of work and you had nothing else, you could always go down to the seashore and gather seaweed.
- Well, it certainly smells of the foreshore.
- It doesn't, doesn't it? Strange, that as an island, we're surrounded by all these food sources we completely ignore.
This is like the hedgerow of the sea, isn't it? So I was thinking, the potted shrimps have been pretty good.
I thought I might do something like a smokery, to smoke all the fish coming in off the boats.
Peter and I have managed to acquire ourselves two positions as deck hands.
- Oh, have you? - On a trawler.
Not just any old trawler.
This trawler hasn't trawled for 70 years.
So who do they employ? Not a couple of fisherman.
Alex and I.
Couple of complete novices.
But we'll get fish, we'll get loads of fish.
This coming from the man who managed to capsize the coracle, in about 30 seconds of being in it.
Yeah, but the lessons learned on that day will be employed in our next endeavour.
Before we set out, I've got to make some rope for the boat.
- For the nets? - Just general purpose rope for on deck.
Yeah, I think we should take some of your lanolin, Ruth.
You might as well.
It's not doing much here.
Apparently it was used as a sort of lubricant for the rigging.
I thought you were worried about your delicate little hands there, Peter.
In preparation for their trawling expedition, Alex has come to see rope maker, Ted Baker.
- Hello, Alex, how are you? - Very well.
- Welcome to the rope walk.
- Great stuff.
- This is what we're going to be making today? - That's right.
It's made from sisal.
And it's a fibre.
Very thin, grows in The sisal fibres are spun into a string, from which the rope is made.
But by the time we've finished twisting and turning our rope, we'll have a rope that can pull about half a ton.
It's called a rope walk because there's a bit of walking up and down to do.
The first thing I'm going to get you to do, Alex Take our sisal here right up to the other end of the rope walk.
And hook it over the right-hand hook on the wheel.
- Off I go.
- That's it.
Alex, I should point out, in the old days they used to run.
Well, I'll try and pick the pace up, Ted.
Just slip it over the right-hand hook.
The rope walk at Morwellham Quay is 20 yards long.
Britain's longest rope walk was at Chatham Docks on the River Medway, and is still in use today.
At a quarter of a mile long, workers used bicycles to travel its length.
Now what we're going to do, by turning the handle up at the other end, is twist each of these pairs into one.
So we'll end up with three strong, single lines to make our three-core rope with.
48, 49 50.
With the three stands of sisal fully twisted, Alex can now begin combining them to make the rope, using the rope maker's top.
It's making itself.
I'm not really doing anything, just stopping this top from slipping out completely.
But that's great, and you can see the twists working against each other there.
It's looking fairly even to me.
Very often young people would be doing this, for 12 hours a day, six days a week.
And they would be expected to make about three miles of rope a day.
- Three miles a day? - Three miles a day, yeah.
The final job is to stretch out the excess energy wound into the rope.
That's it.
Starting to go.
I don't want to pull this post out the ground there.
If you just let it drop on the floor We can see we've got a nice straight piece of rope for you to use there.
Ruth also wants to get involved in the fishing industry.
But women were considered to be bad luck on ships, so she's decided to stay on land and smoke some mackerel instead.
So many Devon people sort of live with one foot on sea and one foot on shore, you know, combining a bit of both.
The processing of the fishing catch was a way that many people made a living in this part of the world.
So I thought setting up a smokery would be a really sensible thing to do.
So what I'm going to need to do is find some way of blocking up the windows.
And then I'm going to need rods going across that I can hang the fish on.
The floor's great, cos I can just have piles of sawdust smouldering away down the centre of it to provide the smoke.
It's funny that you can do such a major, commercial scale production in a shonky little shed.
Devon was at the heart of Edwardian Britain's fishing industry.
Trawlers, the most powerful fishing vessels of the day, were invented there, and over 10,000 tons of fish were landed in Devon's ports each year.
Many of the ships employed casual deck hands and Devon farmers could earn extra money during the quiet months on the farm.
Peter and Alex will be working for Paul Welsh, owner and skipper of the Keewaydin, a traditional sailing trawler.
Paul, an experienced sailor, bought the Keewaydin to realise his dream of trawling the seas by sail.
And this will be his first opportunity to give it a go.
He's taking out a crew of seven in search of a catch, and has put the boys straight to work.
One job on the boat is just to lubricate these lanyards so that they pass through the dead-eyes smoothly.
And, basically, we've got some of the lanolin that Ruth has extracted from sheep's fleeces.
It's in a sort of grease form.
Is this the sort of thing you're looking for? Yeah, that'll do the job, that's perfect.
At Paul's request, Alex has brought along the rope he made.
It'll be put to good use, holding in place the tiller, which steers the ship.
You can actually sit back on the rope, pull it tight.
And actually kind of sit but lean back on it.
You'll see when we're sailing, you'll see the purpose of it.
Excellent.
And it just means that when we're out sailing, and we've got some wind in the sails, I've got a little bit more control here, yeah? Painting the trawler with tar was a continuous job.
Today it's Peter's turn.
And what does this do for the boat? It's to preserve the wood, it's the rainwater that's the worst thing for the wood.
Seawater is a better preservative.
The more we go sailing, the better preserved the boat gets.
A lot of boats sit up creeks and rot faster than boats that spend all their lives at sea.
This is something I've been really looking forward to.
This whole idea that as a farmer in Edwardian Britain, down in this part of the country, not only would you be working the land, but you'd also be getting out to sea.
Two, six, heave! Two, six, heave! With the maintenance done, it's time for the hard work to begin, preparing the ship to sail.
Built in 1913, the 80-foot long Keewaydin is one of the last sail powered trawlers left in the UK.
Take the main up.
Heave! Two, six, heave! Two, six, heave! Time for our first rum of the day, I think, Peter.
But before the boys can have a drink, they need to get the trawl net into the water for the first time in 70 years.
I was wondering why you had a large tree of wood.
That's the beam and that's hopefully going to hold the fishnet open.
Right.
Heave! This is a job where you could lose your fingers.
If this beam flips back, it can jam you up, feet in the rigging, over you go.
It's dangerous stuff, this.
Down it goes.
As the trawl net descends, it's vital that the wind stays high to keep the boat moving forwards.
It's this motion that holds the mouth of the net open.
If the wind drops, the net could tangle and they'll catch nothing.
So I'm cleaning all these fish ready for the smoking.
I want to get them flat so that the smoke can get right in around the fish.
Fresh fish are nice - there's quite a short life, a couple of days at most.
But smoked fish keep for ages.
Before she smokes the fish, Ruth is salting them.
The salt dries the fish, making it less easy for bacteria to take hold.
What you're really trying to do is come up with a fish that transports well, keeps reasonably well, but, most importantly, tastes good.
You need something that your market will bear, something that people will want to buy.
After salting for several hours, the first batch of fish are ready to be smoked.
I'm just going to lay them in.
I need a good separation between the fish, so the smoke can really get all the way round and no fish touches any other.
I don't really want to light a little fire of twigs inside my wooden shed.
So I thought I'd follow Mrs Beeton's advice, and put slugs of hot iron into the piles of sawdust to get them smouldering.
I've just found any old bits of iron I can, so I've got a couple of irons and a horseshoe and so forth.
And I've got to get them super-hot.
I'm gonna make some piles of sawdust in the shed.
This is sawdust, come from the boat builders.
Which is absolutely ideal, because it's a mixture of woods, but mostly hardwood rather than pine.
Hardwoods are better for smoking, as they contain more of the chemicals which preserve the fish.
Bit more on that one.
I hope I've got this hot enough.
That's better.
It's starting to smoke.
While Ruth's smoking venture is progressing well, the boys are struggling out at sea.
So we've got the net dropped, but we've just got this massive problem.
It's the wind.
It's just died on us.
The thing is, without the wind, we've got no power source.
And it's only when we get momentum with the boat that we'll actually start to drag the net.
Away from the farm, you think maybe you don't have to depend on the weather.
Once again, the process is all weather-dependent.
In the Edwardian era, trawling was revolutionised by steam power.
These powerful new trawlers were capable of pulling in up to eight times as many fish and spelt the end for trawling under sail.
Alex is beginning to see why.
Day like today, we're struggling.
We're struggling with the wind.
So when steam comes along, imagine what fishermen would have been thinking.
Can they get the money together to invest? But being far from a ready supply of coal, Devon was slow to adopt this new technology.
Its trawling fleet started to get left behind.
And a lot of the sailors of these boats said, "Look, if you stick to the sailing smacks, you won't decimate the cod stocks in the North Sea.
" And it would have probably remained sustainable.
But, obviously, money came in and the steam drifters caught more fish on calm days.
So steam fishing meant that you could virtually fish in any conditions, whereas, sailing you could only go out with the right wind.
What you're saying is, actually, steam fishing affected the stocks around the British Isles? Yeah.
Steam trawling had such an impact on fish stocks, that even in the Edwardian period, the North Sea was showing signs of overfishing.
We're getting somewhere now.
We've got a little bit of wind.
We've got enough, I think.
Finally, there's a change of fortune and the wind picks up.
It's pulling, that's the important thing.
Which means we are trawling now.
We're now officially trawling.
They're moving through water at two knots.
The trawl nets should be open and catching fish.
Each trawl would have lasted up to five hours.
It's time to haul in the nets.
This is the device that has changed fishing for ever.
In the Edwardian era, this was one job that Devon trawlers did turn to steam for.
Steam powered capstones were used to haul in the catch.
To bring it in by hand would have been a back-breaking three-hour job.
When you think about a good haul being up to a ton in weight, you can imagine the amount of power that you would need.
And that's just the catch, not even taking into consideration the drag of the net in the water.
And just the sheer weight of the equipment itself.
The rope's gone way slack, way out.
The rope's gone slack.
This is the first time anyone has done this on this boat.
It's hard enough putting it out.
It's even harder bringing it in! We're going to haul it by hand.
You can see the end of it, but it may well be twisted, which is a bad, bad sign.
We've almost entirely lost the wind now, so as the tide's pushing us, we're rolling over the net, so the whole thing's got stuck underneath the boat.
At last the net comes into view.
They still have no idea what it holds.
There you go! But there's a problem.
That's snagged on something.
If it snagged on something, it was that high off the bottom.
Actually, something's sticking up.
That's what I reckon.
It's rough ground.
We've clouted something quite prominent on the seabed, and as a consequence, we've ripped thorough the net, scarred the beam, and in all the fiddling around, I think the fish will have scarpered from the net.
For an Edwardian fisherman, this would have been a disaster.
No fish meant no pay.
This is our catch.
A collection of sea urchins.
Fishing was a dangerous job, and in Edwardian Devon, dozens of fishermen were lost to the sea each year.
Often their bodies were never recovered, so families looked for other ways to grieve.
Some turned to the church, others turned to spiritualism.
O, Supreme Being, bless this, our circle, and keep us safe when we transport ourselves beyond the veil to the realms of the unknown.
Spiritualists believed it was possible to commune with the dead.
From parlour rooms to theatres across the country, it was a great craze of the Edwardian age, often taking the form of a séance.
I've brought with me the mystic Egyptian planchette.
Occultist Peter Leckie is an expert in the history of the spiritualist movement.
He's come to demonstrate how a séance would have worked.
Is there anybody that you would like to contact? - My ancestor, Isaac.
- Isaac.
- Is that Isaac there? - That's Isaac.
He's a fisherman, or was a fisherman.
Just place one hand.
O, ye that dwell beyond the veil, if you are with us, use our hands as your portal.
Is there anybody with us? Please let us know.
Try to keep your hands on the planchette if you can.
So we have somebody with us.
My goodness.
Was this person lost at sea? - He drowned, yeah.
- He drowned, right, OK.
Sometimes, when the whole crew was lost, say, they have to have somebody on land to pray for them.
So it's quite clear that this person just feels lost.
Both the Victorians and the Edwardians lived in a world in which death was much more present than today.
Most people experienced the loss of their children at some stage, or husbands, brothers you know, sisters and mothers.
Mortality was completely different from how it is now.
And you could say that the spiritualist movement provided a great deal of solace for many people who were in deep distress.
Some spiritualists carried out serious scientific investigations, looking for real proof of the afterlife.
But others used tricks, such as levitation and sleight of hand, to cash in on people's willingness to believe, as Peter is revealing.
The table would lift up and move around.
If you put your hands behind your backs now, quickly the table will just fall down.
The Edwardians wanted to see it.
And that's why lots of illusionists became involved.
Because they were good at the tricks.
People had not much experience of illusionists They hadn't seen Houdini, you know.
They hadn't seen all that stuff, magicians on the telly, they weren't used to camera tricks, they were, in many senses, very naive.
But even the great Edwardian escapologist, Harry Houdini, harboured a personal desire for spiritualism to provide answers.
Houdini, of course, when he lost his mother when she died, he was desperate to contact her.
And so he went round to loads and loads of mediums and psychics, and mentalists, as they were called then, anyway.
A lot of them at that time were doing these tricks, having people behind the curtains, moving things up and down.
So he set out on a mission to debunk these people, and often disguised himself and went along, then stood up and said, "I know how you're doing that trick.
" Yes, I mean, such important figures, publicly speaking about something, nowadays it tends to be very, very fringe.
While the séance goes on into the night, back on the boat, the boys are trying to keep their spirits up.
- Is that fish stew? - No, it's beef stew.
- Nice beef, though.
- So they could afford beef? Well, this is the bonus of having farmers on your crew.
Oh, is it? Right, yeah.
So have you got the trawling bug, then, Paul? Yeah, I have.
We've learned quite a lot.
And you're learning from scratch, cos back in Edwardian times you would have been learning from previous generations, where the good fish were, where the bad ground was It started as a boy, I'd think, but all we're doing is just learning from a book now.
It's a blessing to get off the farm sometimes.
And to have that experience of not only having had the hands on the plough, but now to have the hands on the tiller.
It's hard work, a lot harder than I thought it would be.
I guess it's pretty similar, isn't it? The hand on the tiller and the plough.
The two are quite similar, really.
Bravo! One last throw of the dice.
If we can get round to the harbour mouth, there's a chance, with the current coming out of the harbour mouth, we'll catch some of those fish.
But first, there's crucial work to be done on the nets.
We now need to do a few repairs.
So I'm following Lee's lead and I'm getting out onto the rigging.
And I've just got to sew up some of these holes.
Tears in the nets were common and even a good net would only last a few months.
At last, the net is ready and can be carefully lowered.
Back on the farm, the mackerel have been smoking for 24 hours.
They look really good.
It's got several weeks keeping power without any form of refrigeration.
For the Edwardian farmer, this would have provided extra income for very little investment.
And it's cost us virtually nothing to do this.
The nets have been down for long enough.
Now it's the moment of truth.
- Right, these four.
- You're going faster than they are down there.
Safety line's on now.
Watch your fingers.
We've got something there.
Sea cabbage.
We've got a sea cabbage.
- It's coming in now.
- Oh, wow! We got something! - I can hardly believe it! - We have got some fish! - I can't believe there's one! - We've got a fish.
- We've got a fish.
- But that is absolutely fabulous eating.
- Is it? - Yeah.
- Oh, wow! - I can't believe we caught a fish.
I was just convinced we'd be trawling along on its back.
Go on, Alex.
Paul, congratulations.
First time you've trawled from this boat.
- It's the first fish I've caught like that.
- Excellent.
A good week at sea could yield up to two and a half tons of fish, which was kept on ice.
So there we go, that should keep that little fella nice and fresh.
One fish.
Useless to try and do anything commercial with, so this one will do for tea.
Normally only the wings of the skate are eaten and must be soaked thoroughly before cooking.
And then you've got to get this skin off.
That's the hard bit.
Really fresh fish does best when you do almost nothing to it, so I'm just going to flash fry this in a little bit of melted butter with a handful of that wild garlic that's everywhere now.
For the last few weeks, Alex and Peter have been diligently watching their pregnant cow.
Now, reunited with the rest of the herd, she has a surprise for Alex.
I was just tidying up in the rick yard first thing this morning and I looked out into the field.
And then, of course, I realised, actually, that our cow had calved.
And it's a fantastic sight to see.
They're fantastic mothers.
And in many ways, it's best to let them just get on and do the job in the field, so it's great to see that it's all gone well.
This is the most pleasing part of having a herd, really, seeing new life come into the herd.
And I'm enormously proud that we've come so far.
Whilst I think our fishing ambitions may need a little work, it's good to come back to the farm and see that our main business is doing well.
- So here it is.
- The skate.
- The big catch.
- The fruits of your labour.
Smells good, doesn't it? Cos out of all the fish in the sea, we have to go and catch the one that's famous for being bony.
I'm definitely pleased about this calf.
You know, it's good so early in the year to have some product from the land, if you like.
To have something there, standing squarely on four legs, ready to make us money.
A good sound job there.
It affords us the opportunity to then take our feet onto the sea.
Safe in the knowledge that we know we've got some money coming our way.
So how did the shrimping and smoking go? I didn't get a huge yield with the shrimping.
It was OK.
It wasn't vast.
It was solid but not vast.
And the mackerel smoked up beautiful.
It's nice to have that security in having more than one resource for making a living, isn't it? If the land fails, you can turn to the sea, if the sea fails, you can turn to the land.
And I suppose in Devon, with two coastlines, north and south, so many of the population are using both resources.
Well, at least we didn't lose the net, Peter.
We did manage to save the net.
Cos that, of course, would have cost a fisherman back in the early 20th century an enormous amount of money.
One hand on the tiller, one hand on the plough.
You're definitely for the plough? Definitely for the plough, but the occasional day with a hand on tiller would be nice.
Preferably boating up and down the river.