LIVING SOCIAL HISTORY BRITISH ISLES OCCUPATIONS CRAFTS

 The dust-wrapper states:
 Many occupations, crafts and traditional ways of life in Britain will soon have vanished without trace.  In some cases, poverty is being replaced by affluence in others, one type of poverty is being replaced by another, a new kind of rootless poverty that can draw no sustenance from the land or from past generations. This book is an affectionate record of  a vanishing age, of working communities and working individuals who made their living from the land, the rivers and the sea.  

Based entirely on conversations and personal memories, and illustrated with contemporary photographs of the times remembered,  the book has a special quality of warmth and vividness. 
Judith Cook who has been collecting this kind of material for over twenty years, has the gift of making people talk to her and the rare ability to convey their speech patterns and ways of thought so that they come alive on the printed page. The people she talked to - who among other things mined, fished, worked the land, brewed ale, and worked in stone and slate - have lived through an era which has spanned man's first flight and the first landing on the moon. Their way of life, which is in many parts of the country has remained unchanged over the centuries, is fast passing from sight and even from memory. Judith Cook has succeeded brilliantly in doing is to record the stories of some extraordinary ordinary people, how they worked and how they left before it was too late. 

With 33 photographic illustrations.

In good condition with dust wrapper.