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Peat Cutters Stick To Tradition Sharon Jaffray This week many enjoyed the public holiday known as Peat Cutting Monday, and despite the less than hospitable weather conditions, hardy souls from all walks of life headed for the peat bank to mark the day by cutting a few sods of peat. Joost Pompert decided he would take Peat Cutting Monday quite literally and before long a whole bunch of 'wannabe cutters' had offered to join him at his peat bank on Stanley Common. Many years ago the peat bank was the closest your average Falklands man had to a multi-gym and even in my young day I remember men sharpening their spades and commenting that a few days in the peat bog would soon "get rid of the winter belly" ready for the "real work". And so we stood around on a windswept peat bank discussing peat cutting methods and whether bank holidays were named after peat banks rather than the financial establishments - maybe not - anyone who has spent a day in the peat bog will verify that it is no holiday. Some of the past peat cutting greats would probably have been horrified to see the occasional 20-25 sod rit hitting the bank (for the initiated a rit is 16 sods of peat, each roughly a nine inch cube with four rits to the cubic yard) or the stabbing motions used to separate the sods and there was definitely no sign of the regulation 3-2-1 neatly placed on the edge of the bank that is the trademark of a good peat cutter - but what does it matter? More importantly the younger members of the group were curious about the whole operation and keen to have a go. Even if they never take to the bank to supply the year's household fuel, they will understand what their ancestors did and know how to go about it should the need arise. Government Archivist, Jane Cameron explained that after the First World War a Bank Holiday was introduced in the Falklands in August, in line with Britain. This remained in place for over 40 years, but in the early 1960s people began to question the benefits of having a day's holiday in the middle of winter. A Secretariat memo of 1961 reads, "One often hears the August Bank Holiday criticised in that it falls in a particularly bad time of the year in the hemisphere… there are at present no public holidays during the gardening and peat-cutting season." Ms Cameron said the question of public holidays was discussed by Executive Council (ExCo) in 1965 and the decision was made to move the August holiday to the first Monday in October. Peat Cutting Monday, as it became known, was celebrated for the first time in 1966. Twenty-five years later, in 1991, ExCo discussed public holidays with 1992 Heritage year celebrations in mind. A proposal was made that August 14, the day on which Captain John Davis sighted the Falklands in 1592, should be commemorated as 'Falklands Day'. This was agreed upon and so the holiday reverted once again to winter. Falklands Day was celebrated for the next ten years, but the old arguments about the holiday coming at a time of cold weather and short daylight hours soon resurfaced. In 2001 ExCo agreed to reinstate Peat Cutting Monday. Sharon Jaffray is Deputy Editor of the Penguin News and for many years was a farmer on West Falkland First published in the Penguin News on 7 October 2005 and reproduced by kind permission of the Editor.
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