Captain Blackadder: Permission granted, Baldrick, as long as it isn't the one about where babies come from.
Private Baldrick: No, the thing is: The way I see it, these days there's a war on, right? And, ages ago, there wasn't a war on, right? So, there must have been a moment when there not being a war on went away, right? And there being a war on came along. So, what I want to know is: How did we get from the one case of affairs to the other case of affairs?
Captain Blackadder: Do you mean, "how did the war start?"
[Baldrick thinks for a moment]
Private Baldrick: Yeah!
Thanks to IMDB for the memory of this, and other, gems http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0526712/quotes
This is part 2 of my Grundy saga; if you've not read part 1 you can do that here
PHOTO: evening over Grange Farm
Joe is the first Grundy to be introduced in the mid 1970s, farming Grange Farm as a tenant farmer, a widower with two sons. At this time, there were cows & pigs at Grange Farm, but no women; *my Susan* having never been heard, at least to my memory. The scriptwriters were heaping the bad luck on the Grundies even then, with their cows being slaughtered as part of a disease control measure, and Joe and Eddie soon started the turkey business that they still operate. Dairy cows returned to Grange Farm in the 1980s.
Caroline (nee Bone) arrived soon after, and Clarrie also comes on the scene in the 1970s. She’s the daughter of Jethro Larkin, long standing farm labourer at Brookfield. Eddie met her and became romantically entwined when he was employed by Phil Archer to refit the kitchen at the Larkin’s tied cottage… the old range having let Clarrie down badly when she tried to cook dinner to impress her friends, Caroline and Shula. Sadly, Jethro is later to die at the hands of David’s chainsaw, but that’s another story.
The 1980s sees the weddings of a succession of couples we know today.. Shula (although Mark her first husband was subsequently killed), Pat and Tony, Clarrie and Eddy, Neil and Susan, David and Ruth. We’re re-introduced to Eddie’s brother Alf, who then, as now, is a wrong’un. He’s been in prison, and on his release he’s even happy to steal from his own family. Eddie has none of the dishonest traits of his brother, but never totally settles to life as a tenant farmer, always dreaming of making it big in the country music business. Still he’s enormously happy with his marriage to Clarrie, who keeps him (and Joe) going through both good times and bad.
Like many other properties in Ambridge, at this time Grange Farm was owned by the Bellamy Estate. Ralph Bellamy, husband to Lillian and father of James, was the Estate’s owner, and probably the last of the old village Squires – before him, the owner was actually referred to as *the Squire*. If my memory’s right, his actual name was Lawson-Hope, and he’s immortalised in the Lawson-Hope seat on the village green. This system of rural patronage, where a kindly Squire collected reasonable (sometimes peppercorn) rents from all the lower orders in a village, may not have ever really existed, but it was certainly replaced by the much harder nosed, profit driven approach to land use that we see now. Justin Elliot has just appointed Rob Tichener (boo! hiss!) as his Estate Manager, a role that Tichener is clearly unsuited to, given his poor ability at accurate accounting. But, back to the 1980s; the late 1980s in fact, as Lilian Bellamy sold the Bellamy Estate after the death of Ralph. She kept Blossom Hill Cottage, for the time being.
When Caroline Bone came to the village in the 1970s, she was a newly qualified chef and young aristocrat. Working in The Bull at first, her moneyed background ensured that she’d rise quickly and she later became Manager at Jack Woolley’s country hotel, Grey Gables. As well as an affair with Brian Aldridge and a relationship with Cameron Fraser (the new owner of the Bellamy Estate), she twice married well, first to Guy Pemberton, later to Oliver Sterling. All three men come into our story as part of the change of ownership of Grange Farm, but like all things Archers, there’s more than one tale woven around them. Cameron Fraser was both a cad and a swindler, while Guy, on the other hand, was an absolute sweetie, but older than her. Guy died after less than a year of marriage, and left Caroline the Dower House (where they lived) and a share in The Bull public house.
After Guy’s death, his son Simon Pemberton became the owner of the Estate. By this time, the late 1990s, it was no longer referred to as the Bellamy estate and took the name of its locality.. the Berrow Estate. Owner Simon is another nasty piece of work, an early example of a domestic violence abuser and rapist; prior to Rob Tichener, there had been a number of them. Shula, who was still an estate agent at that time, worked for Simon in the estate office, and began a relationship with him; she was later assaulted by him when she accused him of two-timing her. The Grundies’ luck almost lost them their farm during Simon’s ownership, when a fire in their milking parlour devastated their farm finances, with the loss of equipment and all their cattle. This meant that they couldn’t pay the rent due that quarter. Simon took his chance to get rid of them, pretending that the fire was due to neglect. He lost at a tribunal, and the Grundies were saved – for the time being.
PHOTO: Summer at Grange Farm QUARTER DAYS
BL was in fact a consortium of businessmen and women, of whom only Brian Aldridge had any prior knowledge of farming. Ultimately, the board of directors made decisions about how their land would be used, and the board’s chair was a man named Matt Crawford. From a business background rather than the landed gentry, Matt had little patience with BL’s tenant farmers, the Grundies and the Archers (Pat and Tony). He was keen to engineer a reason to evict the Grundies, and soon he had his wish, with bad luck striking again in 2000 and preventing them from paying their rent. The board’s decision was to evict. Soon there would only be Pat and Tony Archer to be removed…
Brian spoke up for them at that board meeting, but was unwise enough to mention that moving to a council flat in Meadow Rise would have been the death of Joe. When the board realised that the Grundies would not be homeless, but in fact would be housed by the Council - even though on the sixth floor of a high rise flat after living in the country all their lives - their sympathy evaporated. The Grundies were on their way to the city, living amongst the underclass, and thus began a profoundly difficult time for them, particularly young Ed.
Will, as usual, escaped the bad luck… being old enough to live independently, the council wouldn’t house him. He was rescued by Caroline who allowed him to live in a flat in her own home. Once again, the script takes us into the realms of Will the lucky brother, and his contempt for his unlucky younger sibling Ed. More of which in a later blog, when we look at the next stage in Grange Farm's story - how it came into the ownership of Oliver Sterling.