The Pattern Under The Plough

‘…a rich trove of such secrets, flinty reminders of what we have forgotten. It is a journey into society’s subconscious’ Patrick Barkham The Pattern Under the Plough unearths the vanished and vanishing customs and culture of the rural communities of East Anglia in the first half of the twentieth century and shows us the importance of these old traditions and beliefs. GEORGE EWART EVANS was born in the mining town of Abercynon, South Wales, where his parents ran a grocery business. He went to grammar school and later studied at Cardiff University, graduating during the Great Depression. With little opportunity for employment, he migrated to England and started working at Sawston Village College, an experimental community school in Cambridgeshire. Here he met his wife, Florence Ellen, also a teacher. In 1941 he was called up and joined the RAF, but was consigned to routine duties because of poor hearing. In 1948 he settled in Suffolk, where he set about recording the dialect and customs of his neighbours. These oral histories became the basis of his pioneering radio broadcasts and classic books about folk life, Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay (1956), The Horse and the Furrow (1960) and The Pattern Under the Plough (1966).