I CAN'T match Ted Ball's cider-making recollections (April 12 issue) but I can put a bit of flesh on the picture you used, with names that will bring back memories to many older local people.
With the exception of Bert Preest on the left, all are members of the Davis family of Yew Tree Cottage, Aylburton. My mother, now in her 101st year, is the little girl on the left and our guess at the date is 1908 when she would be seven. Her father, John, was a tinplate worker but like Ted Ball's father he was also a cider-maker who took his horse-drawn mill around local villages.
The oldest girl on the right is Flo Davis who married Harry Buss and older Aylburton folk will remember when they ran the village post office. Also in the picture are brothers John – in later life he emigrated to New Zealand – Fred (who moved north to the Sheffield area) and Arthur (who settled in South Wales).
My own (much later!) memories of Yew Tree Cottage, long since demolished along with the yew tree and the orchard where the picture was taken, are of huge casks of potent cider that as visiting lads in the 1930s and early 40s we were discouraged by Bill Davis from trying, a sizeable orchard filled with rough virtually inedible pears, a few Blenheim apples, which we coveted, and one prolific Victoria plum tree with large succulent fruit that we drooled over but were rarely allowed to eat. – Mike Hughes, Kenilworth, Warwick.