[church bells ring]
[sound of hooves]
[clock strikes]
[sound of a steam engine]
[clock strikes]
[whistle[
[clock strikes]
[music plays]
[sound of cattle]
[noise of cattle and shouts]
Morning Mr Drew! How's the market today?
Oh, pretty busy. Yes, pretty busy.
Some first-rate meat out there today. Price controlled of course. Little bit changed from the old days, eh Johnson?
Ha, you're right, it is.
Yes, there've been some changes.
As editor of this town's newspaper I've seen the changes happen as news items.
Drew - he's the market auctioneer - he's seen them happen as money figures.
Now take the market for instance. Nowadays the market's more than a barometer of the town's prosperity.
It shows how the whole country's faring.
Through here, every Wednesday, passes a large part of the nation's meat.
We're fitting in with a national plan.
Local farmers no longer sell food for as much as it'll fetch in competition, or as little.
Prices are fixed in advance by the Ministry of Food, according to grade.
Out in the market, there are government officials.
They judge the grade each animal is to be put into.
Farmers still have the incentive to produce as many grade-A beasts as they can,
because they fetch the best price.
And the community knows in advance what its meat is going to cost.
These cattle in from Benson's aren't for meat yet; they're for fattening -
what we call store stock.
So the selling price isn't government controlled.
They'll fetch under auction as much as another farmer reckons he can pay and still show a profit,
after he's fattened them for meat.
Our farmers who congregate each week in the market
are putting a great deal of skill into feeding Great Britain at war.
They work hard and they've had long experience.
[vehicle noise]
The animals to be killed for meat are sent off to the slaughterhouse.
A local one if the meat's to be consumed locally,
But if another part of the country needs the meat more, well then it'll be shipped there by road or rail.
[clatter of hooves and shouting]
Well, that's the marketplace.
But don't get the idea that that's all.
Too many people visit a country town on market day and see all the excitement and quaint goings-on,
and go away thinking they've seen its heart and soul.
No, we take more knowing than that.
Our roots go pretty deep, back to the seventh century.
Our church contains pieces of the whole pattern of English history and development.
It was the last landmark to those pilgrims who left England in 1630,
to found a colony in America.
Then we were a handful of people living in what the records of those times called a decayed and ruined port.
But they deepened the river in the 18th century,
and today, well, there are twenty-two-and-a-half thousand of us living in the town now.
No millionaires that I know of, but on the other hand we've had less unemployment than some parts of the country.
All working pretty hard, enjoying our leisure in our own way.
And so far as I can see very little signs of decay in the things that matter.
Twenty-two-and-a-half thousand people:
tilling the soil, timber milling, label printing, boot and shoelace manufacturing, running road transport -
and fishing, because we're near enough to the sea to have that bit of England's heritage in us.
Quite a few of us are sailors and fishermen.
Hardly a day passes when nine wagonloads of shellfish don't go out of here for the bigger towns further inland.
As for the port, well that's prospered with the years too.
It's an inland port of course,
but in peacetime it took in a fair quantity of grain, fruit and other cargoes from the continent,
as well as the local shipping.
But basically of course we're agricultural.
The town's grown out of the soil and most of the jobs we do have some connection with it.
Bill Garson's forge for instance.
There's a lot of electric welding done there now,
and most of it is repair and maintenance of the new mechanical implements used on the land.
Like most towns in Britain, you'll find the old and the picturesque that still serves a use, side-by-side with the new.
That's because we've developed slowly, along with the rest of the country.
The good public buildings, post offices, a fine large, airy school and modern garages.
Electricity is general all over the town.
And there aren't many kids round here over the age of ten who don't know how to use a telephone.
On market days there's also the stall market.
This is really an extension of the shopping centre and caters for the extra people who come in from the farms and villages.
Here you'll meet mostly the womenfolk of our town:
The farmer's wife, the doctor's housekeeper, the publicans wife, the vicar's daughter.
All buying vegetables, clothes, flowers, the knickknacks of the domestic household.
Among them nowadays you'll find strange faces:
city people who took refuge with us from the bombed-out areas.
Some of them have settled down to live here.
And the stall market isn't as busy as it was before the war - that's because of the rationing.
Yes, the people of a country town are rationed too.
Even though they are growing the food, they're growing it for the whole nation.
not only themselves.
I think that's one of the big changes in country town life: this awareness of being part of something bigger.
Rationing's helped to bring it home to us, the number of our fighting men who've been to foreign countries.
And the women who are getting letters with foreign postmarks from their menfolk in the four corners of the world.
The war has made us more dependent on each other, no doubt about that.
So, we formed our own information committee to answer the questions that crop up in the town.
When is there going to be some timber? I want to make chicken huts.
Will there soon be some more alarm clocks on sale around here?
It's the job of the men and women on the committee
to get the answers from the government departments concerned.
We in the country towns, the same as those in the cities, have become more communal.
To avoid waste, we've turned the Guildhall into a communal restaurant,
where anyone can get a dinner for a shilling.
In peacetime the Guildhall's the showcase of the town with its own museum.
It goes back to medieval days when King John first gave us our Charter.
Every day, 400 of us eat together here,
and the pictures of our previous mayors and nobles, who used to banquet here rather more ceremoniously, look on.
Food means a lot to the country townsman.
We spend our lives close to the best of it.
And talking of food, fruit and vegetable canning is one of our industries.
Nowadays it's carried on mostly by the women of the town,
who still, bless their hearts, manage to look after their homes and children as well.
Forty thousand cans a day from this factory,
and a good deal of it is going to our men overseas.
Then there's seeds, sugar beet, grass, cabbage, turnip
all brought in from our fields to the warehouses at the end of the season.
The land around us is rich and gives good crops,
and there's always been a demand for the seeds.
Before the war, we'd a large export trade.
Today, we're growing more and more food for ourselves,
and these seeds of ours are producing good crops all over the country.
It doesn't take many men to run the seed warehouse these days.
The drying and grading is done by machinery.
30 bags an hour during the season, examined, sorted, cleaned, dried and re-sacked.
Up to 900 tons of good fertile seed per season go out of here.
Our railway yard has been made pretty busy by the seed and canning industries.
There aren't many men left on the railway now, but the women help.
And we dispatch tons of seeds and thousands of hundredweights of vegetables every year.
[noise of a steam engine]
There's another change to be noticed too at our railway station:
trains from London and the other cities bringing in city people.
Not for holidays, but to work on the land and help with the harvest.
They live in camps. There's one just outside the town.
The local farmers tell the Ministry of Agriculture the help they need in the fields,
and the office workers, factory workers, even the forces on leave muck in.
They get paid for it and have a change at the same time.
I think most of us are agreed that this mixing of the townsmen and the countrymen at their job
is one of the big, good changes.
Well, there's not much more to tell you.
You've seen how we look, and how we work. Ah yes, how we play. Well, that's simple.
First of all there's the park, laid out and maintained by public money.
Here the kiddies have their swings and roundabouts and can play in safety away from the roads.
By the way the number of babies born in our town is higher than the average in Great Britain.
We're a pretty healthy people and we like outdoor sports.
Most of us die old and each year there are more new babies playing in the park.
At the end of the day the workers come in,
cycling over the bridge from the fields, the docks, the one or two factories on the outskirts.
A lot of us go to the cinema.
There are three in this town and they're all pretty well used.
The inn is even more important to a small town's life than to a city's, because we all know each other.
Also we have our own roller skating rink.
The girls in the town seem to do well at this as you can see for yourselves.
[music plays]
One of our youngsters, Jane Tampson, won a gold medal last year. Here she is, coming up now.
For us who aren't so nimble there's the indoor bowls club.
We're very proud of it. It's one of the finest in the country and was built and is carried on by local money.
There's Bill Garson who runs the forge we saw.
Ha, he bowls a right good wood.
Most of the menfolk come here at some time or another in their lives and we've some champion players.
But because we're at war we can't relax entirely.
There'll be some of us going on duty while the others are playing.
People like home guards protecting the buildings and crops, and drilling.
Huh, it's rum to think how many of us have an expert knowledge of soldiering now,
who didn't know one end of a rifle from another a few years ago.
I suppose the most popular pastime, with the younger people anyway, is the Saturday dance.
You won't find us doing polka country dances at these dos.
They're only done on special occasions and not many of the younger generation know them.
No, we're modern enough in our dancing.
You'll find the Joans, the Marys, the Phyllises grouped around young Tom Hope.
He's a farmer's son, now on leave awhile from the Royal Air Force.
Fresh romances budding in the new generation of our people.
Old ones continuing their steady course.
You'll find too, if you're observant, the quiet ordinary human things.
Someone being lonely.
[clock strikes]
While outside, the familiar silhouettes, the ancient scenes, darken,
on the daily change, the life of twenty-two-and-a-half thousand people who make it a community called country town.
[clock strikes]