Yarm Fair
A fair is held in the High Street in the third week in October. It starts on the Tuesday evening and last until Saturday night. It was once a commercial fair that traded in cheese and livestock, but is now primarily a fun fair. Travellers still attend the fair, and ride horses up and down the street on the Saturday. The travellers have to wait outside the town until 6:00PM on the Tuesday, at which point they are allowed to cross the bridge over the River Tees into the town.When we talk about fairs these days we invariably refer to the white knuckle rides and gypsy fortune tellers, which provide a supporting act for the large agricultural shows such as Stokesley Show.
But in the past the annual “fair” had a more commercial connotation. Yarm Fair for example was a major three day event attracting farmers and traders from as far afield as Ireland, and it was the biggest fair in the North East for cheese.
In the early 1900’s over 500 tons of cheese would arrive in Yarm in over 400 horse drawn carts. You can imagine the faces of the modern Trading Standards officers witnessing such an amount of cheese stacked unprotected on the pavements In those days it was not uncommon either for 5,000 head of Irish Cattle to change hands at the Fair, despite them being banned from the High Street until the third day of the meeting. Hundreds of horses were were put through their paces for prospective buyers, and Malcolm Race in his delightful book - The Yarm of Yesterday* describes how one handsome horse was being looked after by a young lad whilst his grandfather was in the pub.
A prospective buyer approached the lad, who was holding the animal by the head and learned that the price was fifty pounds. The boy refused to allow the man to hold the horse’s head, but agreed to run the animal up and down the High Street. It was only after the man had paid over the money and was leading the horse away that he discovered the horse was blind. Needless to say the lad had long since disappeared!
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