Varieties like King Edward, Golden Wonder and Kerr’s Pink once rolled off the tongue like tatties rolling down the pit face.
Today most potatoes are grown by specialists with sophisticated machinery and purpose-built environmentally controlled stores filled with huge quantities of spuds stored sky-high in ton boxes.
Dressing or grading is often carried out in sophisticated central stores using machinery built by Tong, Peal or Downs.
Before this, old-time potato sheds had to be insulated with straw bales to make them frost free and relatively warm.
Turn the clock back even further and it was a completely different scene, with potatoes stored outside in pits insulated first with a layer of wheat-straw bunches, then a covering of earth with a ventilation strip left along the top. They were constructed at lifting time often in the same field and preferably next to a road.
Generally safe from normal frosts, excessive winters could see the crop ruined.
Diseased tubers could spread potato rot throughout, again causing ruin.
Long periods of frost might prevent dressing, causing shortages and price rises which the farmer couldn’t capitalise on because he couldn’t open his pits.
Fresher weather would see dressing start, leading to a glut and poor price, such were the vagaries of potato growing.
A quiet spell, a window in the weather, a good price or an order for seed needing fulfilled would see dressing commence.
A large squad of men and women were assembled from farm staff and casual labour or squads supplied by potato merchants.
First the pit was stripped, with the straw kept for covering the sacks of dressed potatoes. Sometimes in frosty weather the earth covering was rock hard and prised back in a solid sheet to uncover the crop.
Once uncovered the dresser was set in position and jacked up on to its blocks. These machines worked by reciprocating wire-mesh riddles which allowed differing sizes to be separated out.
Because of the to-and-fro motion the machine had to be on flat-bottomed blocks to stop it moving across the ground.
The tiny chats fell through and landed in a wire basket at the bottom of a chute. These were of no value other than pig food, unlike now when they are sold as baby boilers.
The marketable tops or ware came off the top riddle, while seed came off the bottom riddle. Both went up a picking table spilt by a board.
Two to four people stood on either side picking out stones, clods, diseased, green or damaged potatoes before the remainder reached the top and fell into the respective sacks hung below.
The poor quality potatoes or brock fed cattle or pigs, although clean brock could go for human consumption in times of scarcity.
By the time the potatoes reached the end of the dresser all the earth had been shaken off and fallen through the riddles, and any sprouts on the tubers were knocked off.
Sometimes someone else stood at the intake elevator to pick out rotten tatties before the rest of the crop was soiled.
Pickers standing all day in the same spot could be chilled to the marrow, and army greatcoats and layers of sacking were worn, while straw was put in the boots.
The jobs at either end kept you warm.
At the pit face were those harping and keeping the dresser filled. This was done by hard manual graft, with the harp often made by Spear & Jackson. This was shaped like a big shovel but made from individual tines for a sparred effect. At the end of the tines were balls about the size of a marble to stop them spearing individual potatoes.
Working on earth floors the balls had a very long life, but when concrete-floored potato stores appeared these balls wore out and fell off regularly.
After a short while harping into the feed elevator, or on some older versions straight on to the riddles, the jackets would all come off as the harper got progressively warmer.
A steady rhythm was vital to keep an even supply and conserve energy.
A nice clean crop that hadn’t sprouted made the job easier, while a heavily sprouted crop meant much more effort.
At the other end were the men on the bags being filled from the dressed potatoes dropping from the picking-table.
After a bag was filled a flap was flipped over to fill the empty bag hanging next door. This was the case for both seed and ware potatoes, which for a long time were both filled into hundredweight jute sacks.
Filled bags were unhooked and set on the Whites of Auchtermuchty steelyard.
Once the weight was adjusted by adding or subtracting spuds, the bag was stitched using binder twine and a large sack needle.
These bags were stacked at the side, ready for shipment to the local station by horsemen or tractor men or loaded on to a merchant’s lorry.
At day’s end or if the weather changed a mad rush was under way to get the exposed part of the pit covered, and the remaining bags of dressed tatties were covered and given a thick covering of straw.
Another job needing done at regular intervals was shifting the dresser closer to the shortening pit. This entailed digging it out from the soil and shoots that had fallen through the riddles and covered the frame.
Before the arrival of mechanical dressers in the 1800s (Cooch & Son of Northampton in 1885), dressing utensils included round riddles of varying mesh sizes with wooden rims.
These were held by a man or a woman while the harper threw potatoes on to them for the holders to shake them to lose earth and smalls before placing them on a frame, sometimes made by Wallace of Glasgow, to pick out any brock.
The riddle was emptied into a hopper and into a bag hanging below.
Sometimes a large wooden frame was used to place several riddles on at once.
When mechanical dressers came along they could either be a reciprocating type built by Shanks, MacRobert, Barclay Ross & Hutcheson, Tullos or Cooch; or revolving barrel types from, among others, JB Edlington of Gainsborough.
Initially they were hand-operated by turning a large handle, but the arrival of the small petrol engine by the likes of Lister, Petter and Wolseley took the backache out of that particular job.
The putt-putt of these little engines would have to compete against the whistle of the snell winds but at least the heat from the exhaust was a little crumb of comfort at the open-air pit face.