The Amos Family
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Farmer, Tom, Stanley, Charles, Joe
Farmer, Tom, Stanley, Charles, Joe
Joe Amos (Farmer's son)

Joe & Tom Amos
Farmer Amos
Joe & Tom Amos
Farmer Amos

The Wolverton Express October 16th 1964

Diamond wedding of veteran farmer

Last Monday Mr. and Mrs. Farmer Amos of Cosgrove celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary. Like all couples who reach the 60 year mark they have a host of memories, but few can express them so vividly and with such a wealth of detail.
Mr. Amos now 90, can reel off names, places, times and dates without hesitation. A thrashing for smoking at nine at a private school at Old Stratford; leading a prize heifer to the first Stony Stratford Fat Stock Show; drinking beer in Castlethorpe Maltings at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee; the deeds of village characters long since dead. All these recollections roll of his tongue as if happened yesterday.

And if he does get stuck for a name there is always the great family Bible, begun in 1821, or the photograph album with faded prints of relatives, favourite horses and pets.

“Quite affair”

How about the wedding day? “Well.” Says Mr. Amos, “I wanted a quiet affair so we had it in London. St. Pancras’s Church. I met my girl and her father at Euston Station and took them in a cab drawn by a chestnut horse to Holborn restaurant where we had a wedding breakfast.
“Afterwards we went over to Victoria, caught a train to Brighton where we had our honeymoon. But I was back in time for Northampton Market on the Saturday.”
Born at Castlethorpe Maltings “on July 20, 1874 at two o’clock in the morning being Monday” according to the family bible. Mr. Amos went to schools at Old Stratford, Courteenhall, Buckingham and Brighton. He was in an auctioneer’s office at Buckingham, worked for wine and spirits merchants at Aldgate, and went butchering with Farmer’s Supplies at Northampton before returning to take over the family farm.
His father and grandfather before him and farmed the Maltings and at one time they also had Cosgrove Mill and Maltings and Hanslope Maltings, a set of plough engines and two sets of threshing tackle.
Mr. and Mrs. Amos stayed at Castlethorpe until 1926 when they moved to Draycott where they apprenticed their five sons to the building trade. They returned to the district to their present home at Cosgrove in 1934.
Farmer, Tom and Joe, three sons, still live with their parents. Other sons Stan and Charlie are in New Zealand. There is one grandson.
Mrs. Amos was a grocer’s daughter, formerly Miss Ethel Kingham, of Tring, who on reaching Castlethorpe turned out to be a model farmer’s wife. She could make butter, bake bread and provide callers with traditional farmhouse fare – bread, butter, cheese, celery, ham and beer, all grown, made or brewed on the farm.
“But” she confided to our reporter, “I’ve never liked horses”. And she sat back with a twinkle in her eye as her husband expounded at length on this phenomena.
This was something he could not understand. He had been brought up with horses, ridden them almost as soon as he could walk, and ridden to hounds with the Grafton, Whaddon and Oakley Hunts by the time he was nine.
Mrs. Amos (88) does not enjoy the best of health. Though rather bowed these days Mr. Amos still likes nothing better than “a night out”. And when these roll round he will wear the hard hat, stand-up collar, bob tie and fox’s head pin for which he has been so well known in the locality for so long.
Farmer, butcher, horseman, Special Constable and a man of many interests with a perceptive eye and fabulous memory Mr. Amos gave us the recipe for his long life – plenty of farmhouse beer, fat bacon and home-made bread.