I'm 93 years old today. Well, I think it's today. The 30th or the 31st of March 1931. The two possible dates on which I was born into this world. But nobody can remember which one. The family are divided, but my passport says 30th March 1931 and over the years that’s the date I’ve chosen. If I had a job where I didn’t work weekends then I’d choose the birthday that fell on a Saturday or Sunday but working five days a week has never been my way. My way has been to work all seven days. I don’t know anything else and of that I’m glad. It might surprise some folk that despite farming and training racehorses in Ryedale, North Yorkshire for over 60 years I’m actually a West Riding lad. I was born in Lepton, a hamlet four miles to the east of Huddersfield, on the road to Wakefield, a place which the family had stumbled upon by chance in the search for farm work. I remember nothing of Lepton, and I was barely a year old before the family relocated again, this time to North Yorkshire. The association with horses and farming can be traced back in the family to William Easterby, a blacksmith who worked in Wighill which is a hamlet a couple of miles north of the Yorkshire brewery town of Tadcaster. Tenancy of the blacksmith’s was passed down the generations of Easterbys, with the rents being payable to the owners of the Inn. The very buildings in which William worked still stand to this day behind the White Swan Inn. The parish records of Wighill bear testimony to the centuries of births, baptisms and marriages and the churchyard of All Saints Church holds captive the bones of Easterbys long deceased. Two headstones stand in the southern part of the graveyard marking the place where my great grandfather Henry and great great grandfather, Samuel, were laid to rest. Their names can still be read on the tablets of crumbling sandstone, but in time the northern rain and wind will erase the engravings. Although blacksmithing and farming have put bread on the Easterby table for centuries, ventures into other trades have also been documented. My great uncle Thomas was the landlord of the Swan Inn in Wighill in the 1850s, Samuel Easterby was a butcher, and there was also the Reverend Richard Easterby, who left the area to become the Vicar of Lastingham. Another branch of the family lived in Kirbymoorside on the southern edge of the North York Moors, including a scallywag by the name of Thomas Easterby who was deported to Australia in 1851 for a long list of felonies including poaching and receiving stolen goods. Thomas stole an overcoat and for this he was transported to Tasmania, never to return, setting up as a sheep farmer after his release from the penal colony. My grandfather, Henry Easterby, was born in Wighill in 1866. Like so many children in the nineteenth century Henry had a tough start to life, losing his mother when he was just a year old and becoming an orphan when his father died at the age of three. Henry was adopted by the Wilson family in Walton, then lived for a short while with his uncle back in Wighill. He would leave Wighill to set up as a blacksmith in Hunslet, Leeds with his new wife, my grandmother Elinor. Henry was a giant of a man, and blessed with immense strength. As well as a blacksmith he was a bare-knuckle fighter, known by the name of ‘Beeswing’. Perhaps it was a consequence of the hard start to life that had made my grandfather the man he was. It was in Hunslet that Henry and Elinor’s first child, my Uncle Walter, was born. Uncle Walter would later become a huge influence in my life, and you will hear more of Walter Easterby as my story is told. In 1893 the Easterby family relocated again, this time to North Frodingham in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where Henry would run the blacksmith’s shop in the Main Street. It was in the blacksmith’s shop in North Frodingham that my father, William, was born in 1897, with sister Elsie, brother Reginald and little sister Eveling following to complete the five. A further relocation was to come soon after, to the nearby Carr Farm, and it was there that my father was to spend his younger years working on the farm for Henry before leaving to make his own way in the world. My father was known to everyone as ‘Billy’. In terms of occupation I’m not quite sure what he was. He reckoned to be a farmer but he didn’t ever seem to do a lot of farming, or anything else for that matter. However, ‘farmer’ was how his occupation appeared on the official forms he filled in, and in the censuses that record the details of the family and their movements through time. |
|
That's all for now and we'll continue the story another time. |
 |
| |||||||||||||
|
|
