HIGH HEELS AND HAMMERS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20098, 3 May 1935, Page 12

HIGH HEELS AND HAMMERS

YOUNG GIRL AS BLACKSMITH The smith is usually a mighty man, but in the little village of Newhouse, Lanardshire. the smith is a pretty young woman who .while she is making the sparks fly from red-hot iron bars, wears a pair of high-heeled shoes. She is Miss Peggy White, a 21 year-old brunette. At work in her father’s smithy, using heavy hammers on white-hot bars, shaping them into horse shoes, she displays energy that makes mere man feel ashamed. Although of small stature, she. wields 101 b or 141 b hammers with equal skill and with almost no effort, the only indication that she is exerting herself being a small wisp of hair which keeps falling over her forehead and is impatiently swept aside. Miss White first began to take an interest in the blacksmith’s shop nine years ago. Soon she graduated to swinging small hand hammers, and then when she was 16 she had acquired skill with heavy hammers. Now she is an expert at shoeing, but she told an interviewer that her special job was tyring wheels. “You would think from the way that I swing these heavy hammers that I must have an extraordinary amount of strength,” she remarked, “but in my case it is more knack than muscle. I do not know how many horses I have shod, but I remember a few years ago sharpening 25 roadmen’s picks in 27 minutes. My father told me that he had never been able to equal that record.”