Home Farm was at various known as Edrich’s Farm and Drake’s Little Farm.
The barn at Home Farm was used for the annual Methodist Sunday School Anniversary, as described in the following extract from John Yaxley’s A Jam Round Barton Turf:
For over 100 years there was a good attendance at the Sunday School here and at the annual Sunday School Anniversary, when the children said their ‘pieces’, recitations and dialogues and sung solos, the event had to be held in the barn at nearby Home Farm to accommodate the congregation of both the afternoon and evening services. In preparation for this the preceding Saturday afternoon was a busy one.
The barn having already been cleared and swept out by the farmer, who took this as an opportunity to have a tidy up, teachers and children were busy decorating it out. In the 1930s teachers were the aforementioned Gladys Yaxley (nee Chapman) and her husband Jack who, being one of the four Yaxley brothers, builders of Toad’s Green, Smallburgh, was able to supply deals and trestles for the necessary platform.
Flowers and bracken were used as decoration, and a two-foot high curtain was erected in front of the children’s knees, although they were always dressed in their best clothes for this, their big occasion. After the harmonium had been carried down to the barn by Jack, everything was then ready for the Sunday. But even then many of the congregation had to stand outside.
Children were expected to learn two long recitations, one for the afternoon and one for the evening service. Proceeds at that time paying for an outing to Mundesley beach. The days of the horsedrawn transport were past, when Starling’s Coaches of North Walsham provided the means of travel and on one occasion an old open top coach turned up in the rain.
Methodist Sunday School Anniversary at Home Farm Barn
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For another picture go to the Welcome Gallery
Click on the building on the map for information about owners and occupiers
...we come to what was ‘Home Farm’ on our right. That is the farm house. The thatched barn and farm buildings have been converted to domestic use, but a small horse pit is still in the centre of the yard. Three to four men have been employed here in the past. And in the ’30s the farmer, Fred Loveday, used to deliver milk in two churns on a bicycle and ladle it out into jugs as required on the doorsteps of his customers.
The Jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary was celebrated here in May 1935, when a meal was laid out in the barn, and sports held on a meadow behind. Whereas the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth celebrations were shared with Neatishead and terminated with a firework display around the lake in Beeston Park.
John Yaxley’s A Jam Round Barton Turf has the following information about Home Farm: