From the Easterton Echoes

The Easterton Echoes is a long standing news sheet serving, as you’d expect, Easterton. Much of the content is about events in the village but from time to time little extras creep in. This little snippet comes from the December 1981 issue. This was issue 79, the first having been in May 1975.

From the Easterton Echoes for December 1981

The magazine editor clearly wanted the readers to have some idea as to who composed this verse celebrating facets of the village. I’m afraid we don’t know who was 86 then, but they were born in 1895.

Of course, we of the 21^st century can look back those 35 years and be amazed at the method of production. This was produced on a typewriter which was used without a ribbon to cut a stencil. The stencil was transferred to an ink spattering duplicating machine whish managed to press ink through the holes in the stencil made by typing and on to paper. If it was an ancient duplicator each sheet of paper would have been fed by hand and the rollers turned also by hand. More modern ones could pick up sheets of paper and may have had an electric motor to drive the mechanism.

What seems amazing is that the system worked albeit we can see that the e key didn’t cut the stencil quite as well as might have been liked. It looks too much like an o in many cases.

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The Easterton Echo

The Easterton Echo is a small, monthly (ish) newssheet published by the Parish Council and distributed in the village. We are not quite sure when it was started but we have recently been given almost all issues from March 1987 to the present date. The March 1987 issue tells us it is the 139^th issue, so presumably it had started some twelve years previously. If anyone has those early issues we’d love to have copies.

The early issues we have were produced by Sheila Judge. They were typed using a good old typewriter which, we guess, was used to cut a stencil which could be used to produce copies on an ink duplicator. How technology changes!

From time to time we’ll take a look at articles in the ‘Echo’ which usually runs to just one or two sides of closely packed typing in those earlier days and rather more pages in the more spacious newer issues. Today, as autumn approaches (the weather men say it is already with us) we are looking at a Sheila Judge poem. It’s her ‘Ode to Autumn – Easterton Style’. It comes from the September/October 1988 issue.

There is an accompanying thought – all light hearted – by Sheila about how times have changed. That comes first.

A part of Easterton Echo for September/October 1988
Click the image to enlarge

Sheila Judge’s Ode to Easterton – a very light hearted poem

The mellow smell of muck
Permeates our hall;
We do not need to see leaves turn
To tell us that it’s Fall.

All day the muck carts trundle
A-spriddling and a-sprawling,
They let us know the time o’ year
More than do leaves a-falling

The ‘Good-lifers’ all twitter on
About country air so pure;
And yes! It’s rich and fragrant too –
Specially when they spread the manoo-er!

We suspect things have moved on again and that muck spreading hardly impinges on the village at all now.