OK, given that grandad was a farmer I presume it's for something like dragging sacks about on the back of a trailer (or maybe lifting if you had a pair of them)?
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wotizzit?
May 31, 2023
Last reply: 3 years ago
27 Replies
I might have hazarded as a guess not sacks, but animal carcases.
Hmmm ... it did have a few hairs around the prongs, but he wasn't a cattle farmer, though they did keep the occasional pig ...
or bales of hay when they were a box like shape rather than the large hay rolls of today.
Or stacking stooks of wheat, or a thatcher's tool for laying reeds?
Might have been a sort off coarse comb for horses manes too.
The latter struck me just before I opened your post. For combing out reeds or straw before laying it as thatch
That looks to me as though it is more for pulling through something to tease it out. Did he have horses that would have needed grooming?
Wouldn't explain the curvy handle.
The thatcher's combs I have seen have longer teeth.
Tools like that were used by London dockers to shift sacks so I don't see why farmers wouldn't have done likewise. (Well, apart from the fact that dockers tended to have an incentive for stuff to just fall out of sacks, boxes, stoutly nailed chests etc.)
I was under the impression that dock workers used a hook for handling things.
That must be why things in cardboard boxes say, "No hooks."
My understanding came from my maternal grandfather (East End born and bred) who had a tool just like that.
According to Wikipedia, it is:
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It wasn't only boxes that required "no hooks". Some sacks would rip with a standard single or double hook.
And it seems t'was so on both sides of the pond.
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Ah, very similar to mine ...
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Almost identical, a stevedore's cat paw hook
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I had only ever seen the last of those four. The first is entirely new to me.
Useful with a bitchfromhell wife no doubt
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