Poacher's Pie

Readers Union, 1977. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. h/b 160 pages, condition is very good. Poachers, princes and plum-pickers all have their say in the incomparable Fred Archer's ninth book which celebrates the lives of the little master men who grew their asparagus and cabbages on the black soil of the Vale of Evesham. He writes of the market gardeners, upright and industrious, and of the men who worked for them, like Kick Pudding, the student of Darwin. And he tells of the farmers who considered themselves above cabbages, employed the farm laboureres in their tied cottages, and hunted with the emigre French dukes. These Orleanist princes lived in great style just down the Worcester road at Wood Norton Hall, entertained the crowned heads of Europe to hunting and shooting and provided the folk of Evesham and Ashton with jobs, certainly, but also with an endless source of enjoyable and scandalous speculation in the Whistling Ploughman or the Jolly Gardeners. The well-stocked coverts of Wood Norton also provided temptation and the killing of one of the Duke's keepers resulted in a murder trial at Worcester assizes in 1890. In the powerful centrepiece of his book Fred Archer retells the whole stark story of the poacher brothers, Sam and Joe Boswell and their accomplice Lovely Hill, from the newspaper reports of the time and from the memories of people, including his own mother and uncle, who knew the families involved. He tells how the Salvation Army came to Evesham and his Uncle Fred played the G trombone in the band; how the townspeople ran amuck when done out of the Coronation festivities for Edward VII; and how a sister of a pretender to the throne of France, who was to become grandmother of the present King of Spain, got married in a galvanised tin tabernacle in Evesham. Poacher's Pie is a book of riches, teeming with people from every walk of life in Fred Archer's Cotswolds, and a worthy successor to When Village Bells Were Silent.