The message
from Janet Baraclough contains these words:

I used to have a strain dating pre- WW2. They were the
many-generation descendants of beans stolen from a "Big House" garden
by my friend's great-grandfather, who was a servant there. The story
was, he'd asked the head gardener for some and been refused with a flea
in his ear, so he helped himself anyway. His descendants had kept them
going as a principal of the class struggle :-)

For years my Ole Man saved seed - maybe consistently from 1945 - and
they would have been Scarlet Emperor. When he died saving beans was the
last thing on our minds, or I might have been growing beans almost as
old.

Probably.

I only grew one crop and TBH they weren't particularly good runner
beans. At the time I worked for Gardener's World and the beans got a
mention on TV. I was contacted by some bean-gene researcher at Dublin
University who was delighted to get hold of such an old strain.

The Ole Man used to dig four long, deep trenches, and fill them up with
lots of good stuff, and plant four rows, two rows of beans to a row of
crossed poles.

To begin with, we salted them down in a big stone crock, then, in 1954/5
we got a secondhand ice-cream freezer (domestic freezers were
more-or-less unheard of, then) and in the summer of 1955 I dried hops
from the hedge, bought a sack of malted barley from the local brewery
(carried home in stages in smaller sacks, on me bike...) and made about
ten gallons of rather pleasant beer in that crock. It had the
consistency of Guinness, the strength of Chimay and the colour of a
summer ale, and it tasted all the better for being totally illegal. (Mr.
Marples removed the duty from home-made brews quite a few years after
that...)

--
Rusty
Open the creaking gate to make a horrid.squeak, then lower the foobar.
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