Those who remember the 1939 - 45 war may remember the disruption it caused in the village. Significant though such changes may have been, I do not think they were nearly as great as the upheaval which came to Hillesley with the war of 1914.
I left school when I was thirteen. My father had only one man and when he was called up at the end of 19161 thought myself very grown up to leave school and start work. I was soon disillusioned, perhaps because the country had entered its worst period of shortages and war-time restrictions.
Of course the war made its first impact when our young men enlisted and went off to fight for King and Country. A much worse time was to come when, in the fighting at the Maine and Ypres, so many 1-lillesley boys lost their lives.
One of the first things to happen to our country community was the commandeering of our horses. I well remember the consternation in our household when a telegram arrived to say that my father's good brown mare 'Lassie' had been commandeered and the cart and harness were left on the roadside in Wickwar.
Most people will remember that the Great War started with horses and finished with tanks and armoured cars. Yet to the end of the campaign, guns, ammunition and supplies were hauled up to the front line by horses and mules.
The Army fed its horses well and this meant a constant supply of good hay. Our farmers began to dread the arrival of a non-combatant officer with a captain's uniform. He was the hay-procurement officer and however farmers might talk of the many hungry mouths they had to feed, a proportion of their best hay would be booked for the Government. Adorned by a broad arrow the haystacks awaited the arrival of the Army hay trussers. Bold Canadians, driving chuck wagons with fast horses attached to them, and a squad of girls and men who waited on the engine which drove the wire-tying presser, would arrive on the village scene. All these men and girls were quartered in whatever village they visited, the bales of hay were whisked away to Charfield station en route for France, and after a few days the whole outfit moved away to descend like locusts on the stacks of another district.
By the end of 191 6 the German blockade had begun to bite really hard. All food trades worked under great difficulties, but the meat distribution was done, I think, under worse restrictions than any other. All meat was controlled by the Food Office at Sodbury and a rough method of allocation was that for one week live cattle and sheep were assembled at Sodbury and butchers from all over the district drew lots for whatever was to be had. There was a butcher at Hawkesbury, Mr. Eeles, and if he and my father were lucky enough to get a bullock each we could come home together as far as the turning to Upton. No cattle lorries then! Our bullocks would be tired then and Mr. Eeles would take his up the hill and I would come on to Hillesley. If, for some reason, I had to bring one strange animal alone it was sometimes a hair-raising task to get over the commons.
The other week was often far worse since the allocation was of frozen Australian meat. It all came to Sodbury and was there collected by each butcher. Often it was delayed and sometimes my father would arrive on a Friday night with three or four quarters of bony beef frozen as hard as iron. We had to work all night to cut the miserable stuff into the minute rations then allowed. Often it was impossible to distribute the ration over the scattered villages and sometimes I had to go to Tresham on Sunday mornings. Our chapel elders thought this very wrong. I suppose they thought it better to let the people to hungry than break the Sabbath!
When I took the meagre portions to people's houses I would see on the cottage tables the grey brown loaf of the poor quality to which bread had declined by 1917. A lump of bright yellow margarine of a taste the people hated as much as the bread, and a packet of greasy American lard. The lard was steam rendered, so very different from the home-made product which had once graced the toast of village folk. No wonder that when, at the end of the war, the flu epidemic struck, people had no resistance with which to fight the infection.
As in the 1939 war, we had our Agricultural Committees for ordering the ploughing up programme, and the Dig for Victory' campaign. Some farmers had neither the skill or the equipment to deal with the work and this meant that the first tractors, imported from America and equipped with Cockshutt ploughs made under licence at Lister's, made their appearance on our farms. I never saw any steam tackle but the tractors were a great sensation although I do not think anybody really thought they would ever replace our horses.
These were some of the changes which the Great War brought to our village. Changes which really started the transformation from a self-supporting community largely dominated by a benevolent squirearchy to the village as we know it today.