ADA RICHARDS

CATALOGUE

RECORDING

SUMMARY

BORN: Cheriton, Devon, 1912

LIVED: Brendon, Countisbury, Porlock

RECORDING MADE: 2000

RECORDING LENGTH: 1 hour 50 minutes

Ada Richards is pretty stoical. She'd been knocked over by a school bus two days before she was due to be recorded, but it hadn't occurred to her to cancel. She had even made a cake. Her parents were farmers and her mother took in visitors - Mr Usher among them. Her father lost a hand in a thrashing accident when she was young.

Her childhood memories are of helping on the farm, selling whortleberries in Lynton, breaking in Exmoor ponies, and falling asleep at school. At shearing time, she would take a jug of beer out to the men in the barn, who had arrived with their white suits strapped to their backs, and in the evening they'd have a singsong. She sings herself, but was too shy to join in at the time. Songs were more like stories then, she says. It was at a shearing party that she met her husband, John, whose family farmed above Porlock.

Ada Richards died in August 2006.

Photograph by Mark J. Rattenbury