The last days before life changed forever on the remote moors

For the latest installment of Remember When, editor Trevor Brookes finds out about one of the last families to live in a remote and little known part of Teesdale

LAURIE Lee’s enchanting and famous memoir, Cider with Rosie, paints a picture of a rural paradise in England before the outbreak of the First World War.

But the reality was somewhat different. Hard labour, poor food, equally poor pay, disease, and high infant mortality were part and parcel of life in the countryside.
“I was dumped into the long grass, aged three, and left grizzling among the beetles and grasshoppers. I lived there until I was 19 and left home to see the world and make my fortune. I knew every flower, weed, stoat, badger and bird,” Lee once recalled with a rose-tinted flourish.
It’s a stark contrast to what Mr and Mrs D Slack, of Frosterley, wrote in 1918 to Joe Ridley as Spanish flu wiped out millions of lives across Europe, including Joe’s wife, Annie, and their seven-month-old child, William Arthur.
“We are all very sorry to hear of your dear wife and child and express our deep sympathy for you on your bereavement. It will be a great loss to you and your children. There is no loss to compare to that of losing a wife especially when there are little children left without a mother and the circumstances of you left with a farm and stock to look after,” they wrote.
Joe, who himself later succumbed to disease at a young age, got on and managed as best he could on the remote farm at East Loups’s, on the moors near Cotherstone. He and his remaining five children were some of the last inhabitants to work the farm before the Army took it over for military training.
The letter of comfort from a friend – and details of a lost way of life in rural Teesdale – have emerged after Joe’s grandson, Michael, came forward following a recent feature in the Teesdale Mercury about East Loups’s, which is now a mere shell after lying derelict and bombed out by the Army since the 1930s.
Family documents – from personal letters to sheep sale invoices – have been lovingly kept for years. They even include the undertaker’s receipt of 1918, which reveals Joe chose a best pine coffin for his wife and child.
Michael, a postman from Eggleston, says his father, Thomas, was keen to pass on details of East Loups’s before he died. Other items have been given to him by family members elsewhere.
Thomas, was born in 1916 at East Loups’s, which at one time or another was called Leaps House.
“All the family went to Cotherstone school on a horse and trap until it was his turn to go. He went across the moors on a horse to school. It’s all a bit like something from a Catherine Cookson book,” says Michael. The horse was called Brownie.
“My dad remembered his father lifting him up to watch out of the window a fire at West Loups’s. He said it was massive and he said it never left him. He must have been just a nipper at the time.”
West Loups’s was never inhabited again and Michael’s ancestors took over the land.
It has been suggested that a well was close by or inside the property, but Michael says the family’s water supply came from a spring outcrop at the back of the house which never ran dry, even in the warmest of summers.

Other memories relayed including an Irishman who stayed every summer to help with haytime, along with an annual summer holiday to Butsfield Abbey, in Weardale.
Louis Smith, the founder of the local garage, one visited the farm, bringing along a car that Joe was interested in buying. It must have been quite a sight for the family whose sheltered life rarely took them further than the wild moors. Mr Smith, who drove the car along several miles of rough track to get to the farm, was to be disappointed. He never got his sale. Whether the vehicle was too impractical or money was too tight we’ll never know. Among the letters and documents is a note from the owner of East Loups's, Mr Dent, of Low Green, Mickleton, notifying the tenants of a forthcoming rent increase.
It was, he wrote, due to Lord Strathmore increasing the rent for the stints and he had little choice but to pass on the costs.
The family had taken over the tenancy of East Loups’s in about 1913 and a receipt from that year shows Joe bought 100 ewes at 38 shillings each, 26 hogs at 28 shillings and one tup for £4 – a total of about £230.
“That was a lot of money in those days,” Michael says.
Emigration from Britain between 1903 and 1913 was about 3.15 million people leaving the country. The most popular destination was Canada and the Ridley family were no different in their desire for a better life.
One of Joe’s brothers went to farm there and a postcard sent from the ship reveals how he “had a good trip with good meat.” He was aboard the SS Laurentic, a British ocean liner, which was later sunk by a mine in 1917 off Ireland with the loss of 354 lives. Men across Teesdale were being called up to fight against the Germans and the Teesdale Mercury’s archives regularly feature appeals from men who were being conscripted. Many were unsuccessful.
However, Joe received a certificate for exemption from the army in 1916 aged 34 because of his job as a farmer – and possibly because he was the only surviving parent.
The war came and went and life at East Loups’s changed little until the death of Joe’s wife and child at the end of the conflict.
The family upped sticks and moved to Neamour, in Eggleston, in the 1920s. Family legend has it that Joe’s strength was sapped after he caught an infection from a fly bite and he could no longer work the farm. He died in 1952 aged 49.
His son and Michael’s dad, Thomas, died in 2004 aged 98 – and with him went the last memories of life at East Loups’s. Snippets, receipts, birth certificates and letters are now the only clues to a life that was poles apart from Laurie Lee and his cider.