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| Title |
War brings prosperity to Fermanagh. |
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| Description |
Everybody would have been very poor pre-war, y'know. Money would've been hard to come by. Its buyin' power would have been good enough, but it would have been hard come by. Prices were very small for cattle, pigs, eggs, milk. I think milk was two and a half old pennies for a gallon. The year the war broke out, they sent to Elliot's shop, here in the townland, with a pound and I got a two hundred bag of yella meal and an eight stone pack of flour and I had change home from that and I don't know whether I had silver but I definitely had coppers, I know I'd change home from that. It shows the, like the buyin' strength now would be, well gee I'd say about forty pound, near enough it for the same two articles. And wages were small, everybody was sort of self-supporting, every person put in a lot of, farmers anyway, put in a lot of crop. They grew their own vegetables, potatoes, cured their own bacon, had their own fowl, that would be for eatin' purposes. There would have been very little bread bought or beef meat bought because they hadn't just got the price of it. I think the first start of the prosperity would've come when the Ministry of Food took over the control of milk and that would've been in October of forty-two, and the Ministry of Agriculture then paid for milk direct to the farmer. And to this day they have a grip on that, they never let, never released it. They have the grip on the milk and at the end of the day they control the price of milk to the housewife. That would have been the first start of prosperity, cattle started to rise in price, pigs, all but of course inflation had caught up, meal was in short supply, but it had arisen in price, wages and all went with it.
Ref: 90-26-47.
Interviewer: Sandra Matchett, Fermanagh County Museum.
© Fermanagh County Museum. |
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| Speaker |
Patrick Kerrin |
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| Sound |
90-26-47.mp3
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