Friday, April 15, 2022

“The blue rode well in the corn”

Jubal Merton, sixty, wheelwright and blacksmith:

Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969).

Also from Akenfield
Davie’s hand : Rubbish : “Just ‘music’” : “Caught in the old ways”

comments: 4

Tororo said...

Blue seems to have been as popular in rural Southern France as it was in rural England.
I'm old enough for having the memory of having been a passenger in some of these "all painted blue, aways blue" horse hay wagons, on sunny summer days.

Michael Leddy said...

What a wonderful memory to have.

There are many suggestions as to why barns (at least in the United States) are red. I think this passage should be the one and only explanation of why wagons were blue.

Tororo said...

I was told that the blue paint used (at least in Southern France, I don't know about UK and America) for carriages (the same was used for windows blinds and barn doors) was rather cheap, being made mainly with lime slurry with drops of concentrated blue color mixed in.

Michael Leddy said...

Interesting. That’s one of the (many) explanations of red barns too — the cheapest paint.

I have no idea how carriages in the U.S. were generally painted, or if there was any typical color used.