THIS glorious picture of “old codgers” turned up in a shop in Wales, and, for a fiver, Echo Memories has brought it home.

It clearly has “Northern Despatch” imprinted in the bottom right hand corner, marking it out as having belonged to the Echo’s sister evening paper, which closed in 1985.

Not only is it an evocative picture – do you recognise anyone on it? – but behind the old codgers is an ancient tractor.

It is parked between two haystacks, and in the field in the top right there is either some stooking or windrowing going on.

Following the recent articles about cornstooks, Norman Chamberlain has been in touch from West Auckland, where he has worked on Acrum Farm since 1948.

That was the year the farm got a new binder – a horsedrawn piece of equipment that cut the corn and tied it into sheaves.

“You picked the sheaves up, one under each arm, and then stood them up – they went together quite well, with the ears at the top,” he says.

“You would put ten or 12 sheaves together in a stook which was hollow in the middle and facing the prevailing wind so that it went over them and through them.”

Four or five stookers followed the binder.

The corn dried in the stook, sometimes for three or four weeks if the weather was bad. The stooks were then “led to the stack” to await threshing – a phrase which dates back to when laden horses did all the carrying.

In contrast, grass was reaped to start the haymaking process.

A horserake piled it into a windrow, which ran the length of a field, the breeze drying it out.

“Then it was tidied up with a fork to make a cock,”

says Gordon. “The cocks were pulled together using a farmgate between two horses. Ten cocks made a pike and when it was really dry and sweated out, it was led to a barn or a stack.”

In 1949, the farm got its first combine harvester, and everything changed.