Britain, I learned, is still far behind other countries in this advance of electricity. Only fifty three per cent. of our farms have it as compared with ninety eight per cent. in the United States, and more than eighty per cent in most of Europe. To find out for myself just what happens when a rural community undergoes electrification, I visited the ancient Fenland village of Reach, near Cambridge, and talked to some of its people.

Today, Reach which has never known even a gas supply has a population of 360 spread over seven farms, sixty seven old houses, and twenty two new council homes. There are two inns, two churches, one general shop, and a school, so that the village is fairly typical of many rural communities now experiencing similar changes.

Reach's oldest resident is Mrs. Badcock, chosen to perform the switching on ceremony. She has lived all her eighty four years in the village, and was born fifty yards from her present cottage. Mrs. Badcock recalls one winter's night when Reach was so dark that she couldn't find her own home, and nearly fell into the river. Now, with the advent of electricity, Mrs. Badcock and her seventy five year old husband have a new television set standing in their tiny living room.

Next, I gate crashed a home permanent waving party. "We've been planning this for months, so that we could all get together," Mrs. Muriel Debenham, aged thirty, told me.

In the bright little council house kitchen, Thelma Archer and Peggy Dellar were busy with the damp locks of Mrs. Debenham and her neighbour, Violet Aldous, while a friend nursed Mrs. Aldous' baby, Carol. "It's so much easier now that we have plenty of hot water and two electric hand dryers," they told me.

Piglets willingly accept their foster-mother.....

Electrically-milked cows suffer fewer discomforts.....

And "oh, the washing day nightmare!" they chorused. Today, Mrs. Debenham owns an electric copper. This time last year she had to send sheets and blankets to the laundry, and boil the rest in an enamel bucket on the oil stove. The job took practically all day, even when she lighted the stove at seven in the morning, and started operations a little later.

Sometimes, if the wind was blowing from the wrong direction, the stove would go out unnoticed, and she would have to begin all over again. Now, Mrs. Debenham finishes her week's wash by lunch time, and there are no dirty marks on her clean shirts from the old fashioned iron which she has since discarded in favour of one worked by electricity.

This new form of power has also altered her amusements. Previously, she and her husband, an agricultural worker, went to the pictures at Cambridge or Newmarket. But late buses run only twice a week, so now they stay at home and watch TV instead. In the lofty, cream painted village schoolroom, the headmistress, Mrs. Bendall, described some of the benefits that electricity has brought to the forty children under her care.

"On winter afternoons, before we had electricity, the last lesson always had to be in the form of a story which I told or read to my class because the light from the hanging oil lamps was so very poor," she told me. There was tremendous excitement last Christmas when, for the first time, the children saw a big Christmas tree with coloured electric bulbs flashing from all its branches.

When whist drives, concerts, or dances were held in the school hall, volunteer helpers brought along oil pressure lamps from their homes. "Today, musicians can read their scores in comfort, and everybody can see what cards they or their opponents are playing which helps a lot!" Enthused, Bendall. Old age pensioners' parties, and mothers' afternoon socials, too, are more cheerful functions when held in a well lighted room.

Before the advent of electricity brought refrigerators to Reach, ice-cream was only an occasional treat.

Glasgow born Mrs. Mary McMillan is a home help in Reach. Formerly, after a long, tiring day, she found that facing her own housework on her return was very depressing. Then, her only method of heating water was on a coal fire or an oil stove", But now I have an electric cooker, and a copper as well. So while I'm getting our tea my copper's boiling ten gallons of hot water, wonderful! "It was in this new council house that I discovered a man to whom the advent of electricity may mean the fulfilment of a private ambition. Mr. McMillan is waiting for his wife to go to London for a weekend so that he can try his hand at making some Scotch pancakes on the hot plate. I mean to try then," he confided, "'but I daren't do anything while she's here. If housewives proved enthusiastic about this new magic that has come to the Fenland villages, the farmers were even more delighted. On the farm, electricity can do almost any job.

With increased financial support from the government, a big speed up with electricity has been taking place during the past months. By 1958, nearly 200.000 farms and

Grass and Grain drying is made much easier.....

In addition to his job as clerk to the parish council, Mr. A. J. Housden farms 200 acres at Reach. He lives with his wife, two sons, and a young daughter on 500 years old Manor Farm, where the entire family hail the new order as a welcome relief from drudgery. "We feel we are really becoming up to date at last," said Mrs. Emma Housden. "I tell my husband I don't know how I managed when I had to get my children off to school by the eight o'clock bus, apart from all the other work especially at harvest time."

Her husband thought that his chief electrical boon to date, perhaps, was the lighting of his pigpens. Now he can see to feed the animals after dark, and attend to them in a night emergency. Last year it was always a case of hunting for lamps. "I could have saved many piglets in the past if I'd had a heater," he explained. He recalled finding a whole prematurely born litter dead from cold one winter morning. Nobody had expected the babies so soon. An electrically heated floor, such as modern breeders install would have kept the new arrivals alive until help arrived. Another valuable asset, now that farmers once again are allowed to kill a pig or shoot game, is a modern deep freeze unit. If, for example, an animal breaks his leg and has to be destroyed, the carcass can be stored for months until needed.

Occasionally, however, members of the Victorian breed exhibit definite resistance to modern changes.

Such as the old man, who, invited to switch on the newly installed electric light in his living room, muttered, "You don't get me monkeying about with them things, I'll leave it to the missus!" Again, there was the confirmed bachelor who hurled the contents of his tea cup, made with boiling water from an electric kettle, into the yard outside the kitchen door, remarking testily, "I ain't goin' to poison meself with no electrical tea!"

Poultry farms welcome latest methods.....