Fifteen hours a day for four pounds a week
Brian Moore has talked to Ivan Croad
Published in November ’20
Ivan Croad with a collection of country artefacts
FROM schoolboy farmworker to king of the bluffers, the road has not always been smooth for 75-year-old Ivan Croad. Born on the family farm in Buckland Newton in 1945, Ivan had his life mapped out for him at an early age. Before his tenth birthday he could milk a brace of Friesians by hand and by the time he left school aged fifteen, he was ready to put in a full day’s labour: a 5.30 am start, followed by a minimum twelve-hour day in the winter and fifteen in the summer, seven days a week. It didn’t occur to him to ask his father for a wage and it wasn’t until he was sixteen that he received his first official pay packet
of £4 for what he calls ‘a week of…
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