Agricultural and horticultural advice and memoirs of Charles Hazell of Littlewick...

Deposited in April 1998 (acc. 6225)

Charles Hazell was born in Littleworth, near Faringdon, in 1881, one of fourteen children in a long-established farming family. He began work as a farm labourer on leaving school at the age of 11 (1892), and received tuition from his father in gardening, shearing, hedging, ditch clearing, and hay-rick building and thatching. He also kept his own pigs, chickens and rabbits. In 1895 he started managing a small farm (25a.) for an elderly widow, and he went on to become a very successful manager of larger farms. In 1913 he was offered, but refused, a post lecturing at a college run by the Ministry of Agriculture. By 1917 he was a judge for rabbit and poultry exhibition shows. On retiring from farming, he became postmaster at Littlewick Green, where in 1946 he wrote his volume of advice and memoirs. Hazell advocated organic ("natural") ways of farming and generous treatment of livestock, but he approved of many of the social changes he had experienced