era, the depression in agriculture was again acute. By then, great quantities of frozen meat were entering the country from distant parts and stock faming was also in trouble. It was to take the lessons of two World Wars to bring peace-time farming into its own again.
   Against this background of almost continuous agricultural depression, there was one man in Ash who achieved a remarkable degree of success. The man was George Day, who came to the parish from Harvel in Meopham in 1887, continued in active farming for upwards of forty-five years and finished his working life as owner of North Ash cum Turner’s Farm and the adjoining New House, otherwise New Hayes, Farm in Hartley. As such, he

owned the whole of the site of what is now New Ash Green.
   Day was a man of parts. He served on the Dartford Rural District Council from its inception in the eighteen-nineties until 1938 and was for fifteen years its chairman; he was also for fifteen years a number of the Kent County Council. Those interests put no curb on his farming activities, which he had extended during the First World War to the Hartley farm, of which he was tenant for some years before he acquired the freehold. One secret of his success may have rested on his extensive cultivation of what was certainly not a traditional Ash crop. It is said that, at one time, he had a hundred and sixty acres planted with fruit.