Wartime on a Tyneside farm

By Dr Deric Charlton

Image of Ryton's East Grange Farm taken by the Town Surveyor J.P. Dalton in 1900 from the iSee Gateshead collection, a magnificent resource of photos for anyone interested in Northumbrian history.

I wasn't have been much more than three years old when the farm workers developed my vocabulary by coaching me into using their rather strong language – which really riled my grandma the day that I first called her a "daft bugga"! The inquisition that quickly ensued soon revealed had taught me, and though I'm not sure of their fate, I know that their lessons went into my long-term memory and have been used since on certain occasions!

The farm staff soon expanded to include two German prisoners-of-war, who were really nice people, I recall. They must have been the Laurel and Hardy of the German Army, as Paul was tall and very thin and hailed from East Germany, while Hermann was from West Germany. Others replaced them but they never held the same place in my memory as these two did. They never taught me any German swearwords but I can well remember Hermann demonstrating a knowledge of gymnastics by hanging upside down on his feet from a beam way above the hay in the hay barn – but he never encouraged me to try the same trick!

My father's cousin also came to work on the farm, as well as having some fields just across the road from the farm, and he was a very solemn, humourless and serious person. But Tom had inner visions, and it wasn't long after he first met the Land Army girl Hilda, that he was courting her in the byres and hemmel, much to the glee of my young mates and me! They were soon married and lived happily in Ryton. Tom's father ran a coal delivery service in Ryton all his life, and I remember that he died in his mid-70s but never saw the sea, although he lived only 20 miles away from it all his days.

They never ventured far in those day; but my Grandpa did, as I can recall him taking me with him on one occasion to collect some malted barley from the famous Newcastle Brewery that lay seven miles to the east of Ryton, along the famous Scotswood Road that is immortalised in the Geordie anthem "The Blaydon Races". This was a route I would later travel many times during my school days in Newcastle, but I guess that my trip with Grandpa Charlton to collect the brewer's grain for cattle feed was one of the first that I ever did along that route.

We set off with a sturdy Clydesdale pulling a high-sided cart and clip-clopped our way down the long steady slope to Blaydon, only three miles along the road into Newcastle. We rode on over the "chain bridge" that crossed the River Tyne and then along past another three miles of the Vickers Armstrong factory complex that was constructing naval units to help us beat the Germans at sea. Well we eventually reached the brewery and I became heady with the intoxicating fumes from the malted barley – it smelled heaps better than anything I had smelled in the cow byres or pigsty! No wonder the cows liked eating it!!

After we had stacked the cart full of the soggy meal-like material we set off home again, just as a steady rain began to fall. My grandpa hadn't thought to bring any rain wear with us so I was rather soaked by the time we reached home in the dark, and he received both barrels of my grandma's tongue as a welcome home, and was probably sent off to bed without any dinner.

The farmhouse was a large limestone house with five bedrooms, so the farm worker then employed was allocated the room right above the front door, while the POWs went back to camp every evening. Now I was part of quite a large family, and had three aunts and an uncle who regularly met their parents in the farm kitchen and sat around the long whitewood table eating and arguing among themselves well into the wee small hours. I remember one night, when the family members were all arguing and the farm worker, who had been enjoying himself in one of the village pubs along the road, returned somewhat "under the weather".

Of course my grandma sent him off to bed, and the poor feller must have been scared to leave his bedroom after that, even to relieve himself. It wasn't too long until the family broke up to go to their respective homes, and one of my aunts put out her hand at the front door, to check whether it was raining or not, and reported that it was – and then that the rain had suddenly stopped! Well, someone soon realised what the "rain" was and the poor farm worker moved on to pastures new shortly afterwards.

The farm was a mixed farm of just over a hundred acres, a lot like all the others near the city sprawl that Newcastle and its suburbs were then (and still are), and my grandpa farmed dairy cows, pigs, hens and ducks and grew cereals and potatoes as well as having some beef cattle, so I soon learned a lot about all these enterprises. He used Clydesdale horses for the major farming operations and these were great to work with and always a pleasure to behold. Our home field had a limestone block on its upper slope, standing over six feet tall and was hewn into a square post, and it was a dual-purpose memento for these horses as it served as a gravestone for several, with "Daisy, Dragon and Chestnut" and dates carved in it from the last century, and it also served as a very useful itching post for them!

The dairy cows were all sorts, as my grandfather could never resist a bargain at Hexham Market on Tuesdays, and he used to come home with some unusually looking cows. Each cow had its own place in the limestone cow byres, and each had a flower name (Daisy, Buttercup and many others), and at milking time, they made their way in from the home field and found their place, and whoever milked them had to tie a sturdy chin around their necks and then give them some oats or turnip chips while they were being hand-milked.

One day, when I was still a primary school lad, I had helped to bring the cows in for their evening milking. After all the cows had walked into the two byres, I ventured in to tie up a long-horned Ayrshire cow, and she suddenly turned and flicked me with her horn, catching me right in the stomach. Luckily for me the doorway was right behind, and I sailed through the air and landed in the well-filled midden with a plop and only a red weal on my stomach. Her shot was perfect – only a foot each way and I would have bounced against the two-foot thick wall, which would have been a little harder than the midden – but it wouldn't have given me a long-lasting aftershave, before they even invented aftershaves!

Yet another vivid memory was the day I wandered "doon the yard" and found my father and his cousin castrating young bull calves. They looked up and saw me watching them and then told me that I was next for the operation. Well, my education wasn't well advanced at the time, but I do remember probably breaking the mile world record well ahead of Roger Banister as I hurriedly departed the farmyard that day. They never did catch me, fortunately…

Those were the days when almost everything on the farm was horse-powered, even tough my grand-parents were the proud owners of a large Morris car, which I recall had multi-coloured glass windows and was kept in a red wooden garage that always looked as though it was about to collapse. One day my grandpa and grandma were going out, another daft laddie mate and I decided to try out our latest trick. A farm worker had shown us that when you catch and hold a hen towards you, and tuck it's head under its wing, and then whirl it around for up to five minutes, it becomes dizzy (understandable!) and when you place it on the ground, it thinks it is nighttime and stays as though it was sleeping.

So my mate and I quickly caught about a dozen hens and performed our hypnotic act on them so that when my grandpa came out, he found a guard-of-honour on either side of the garage door! Naturally, he quickly went back in to warn his dear wife, who then came storming out, only to find the hens walking around the farmyard as though nothing was amiss – as we had hurriedly flicked out their heads and they had realised it was still daytime… We weren't the ones to receive a tongue lashing that day.

Technology advances on a Tyneside farm

By Dr Deric Charlton

As the country picked itself up after the Second World War the innovations to improve farming efficiency gradually appeared in our area. Of course some of them weren't actually new to farming but the farmers in our area had either been unable to afford them or they had resisted progress and didn't fancy the "new fangled gadgets" but preferred the "owld ways thet wore aalweys the best onyway."

The first I remember was when Grandpa Charlton bought his first tractor, a Standard Fordson. He must have used the same principles he applied when buying his cows – go for the lowest price! While the tractor did perform most of the time, it obeyed Murphy's Law and would develop a fault at the worst possible time.

I remember that it only had one foot pedal and that acted as a clutch as well as a footbrake. I also remember the first time – and last time – that Grandpa ever drove it. My father had joined him on the farm by then and he usually drove the tractor, and was ploughing with it one day when his father decided to have a go. Well, he steered it straight, which is desirable when you are ploughing, but when he approached the tall hawthorn hedge, he reverted to his old ways and yanked back on the steering wheel, yelling "Whoa! Whoa!" only to find that the tractor continued on its path and ploughed through the hedge.

My father came to the rescue and brought the machinery to a standstill, whereon my grandpa turned around and told his son, "The owld bugga is deafer than I am!"

But when this tractor appeared on the scene, the non-farming village experts, who frequently called in to offer heaps of useless advice, shook their heads and said, "Only the little bordies was meant te fly." Now this confused me, as the tractor was meant to replace horses on certain jobs around the farm, but it wasn't meant to fly us around as well. However, when other innovations arrived, the same experts would come along, take a look and repeat, "Only the little bordies was meant te fly." So I gathered that they had been so shattered when Orville and Wilbur Wright took to the air that this had tarnished their thinking.

The electric fence made its appearance when I was a teenager, and this will live in my memory forever, as a mate and I went walking in the Roam Wall country one day, just north of Hexham, and came across this very flimsy-looking fence. Well my mate had an urgent call of nature and proceeded to relieve himself by this fence. He received a rather strong shock in the wrong part of his body and took a while to recover! It made me respect electric fences to this day, I can tell you!

Then there was the milking machine, which we resorted to as cow numbers increased. The villagers were really stroppy when they first saw the new-fangled pipes and rubber teat cluster sucking away on our cows, and guess what? They shook their heeds and muttered, "Ownly them little bordies was meant te fly." Of course my father had to pay some attention to them, and forever after he insisted that every cow had to be "stripped to the last drop" as he had to pay for the new-fangled contraption somehow!

The machine worked really well (when it worked!) but the old limestone byres were not the best place to install and maintain electrical connections, and yours truly was the one who was persuaded to climb a ladder and renew the connections. It was a shocking experience when one day, my father assured me that he had turned off the electricity, so I duly grabbed both wires and suddenly danced at the top of the ladder. He stood me my first pint of ale that evening at the golf club – it was a pint shandy of course, and he was mortified when I was sick on the way home!

Then the weedkillers and pesticides came along, and they really made the villagers say, "Ownly them little bordies was meant te fly." On reflection, they were nearer the mark this time. The cornfields of my youth were really colourful swards of oats, barley or wheat containing an attractive mixture of poppies and other wild flowers, and I daresay that the stock enjoyed the results, or never suffered as a result of such mixtures.

However, the experts told us that we had to spray to get rid of these weeds and so we started using the new-fangled hormone weedkillers that smelled "worse than muckin' oot the pig stye" – and that was really saying something! They had a chemical smell that travelled in the air, and a lot of early spray jobs didn't even kill the weeds, as they were sprayed at the wrong growth stage. The villager never saw the insecticides – mostly seed dressings that my father applied to the cereal seeds and stirred in with his had in the seed drill box. It stained his hands a purple colour and it made me cringe when he ate his packed lunch with the hands still coated in this powder. However, he lived to a ripe old age and didn't glow in the dark.

Milking cows by hand on a Tyneside farm

By Dr Deric Charlton

One of the worst events I recall from my days as a farming youth (a daft laddie) was when the Asian flu hit Tyneside. It knocked my father for six – and that told us a lot as he was rarely under the weather, unless the ale at the golf club wasn't up to scratch! This invading scourge infected him so severely that he wasn't able to get out of bed one day, so he had to ask me to milk the cows. Now this sounded like a reasonable request but for a few factors. To start with we had about 40 cows then – but we also had a new Alfa Laval milking machine. But the bad news for me was that the milking machine was having some teething problems and was out of order right then, so the job had to be undertaken the old-fashioned way, by hand.

Now I wasn't used to hand milking at the time (and tried to avoid it after that), and neither were my hand muscles. Furthermore, my father was a dogmatic believer in stripping the cow until she brought forth no more milk, whereas I had been told that this wasn't necessary. Nevertheless I began my task, taking a milking stool and a bucket and started coaxing warm milk out of the first cow.

I was sure that she knew she had a novice on her generous udder when she began trying to kick either me or the milk bucket out from under her, and it was a good half hour before I'd done my best to "empty her bag" as the townies thought milking was all about. So I moved to the second cow and began in a more determined fashion, remembering the colourful language that I'd first heard during milking before we had the machine installed, and told the cow to behave in no uncertain terms. This seemed to soothe her and the milk flowed well, although my hands were beginning to ache a little.

And so it progressed, and took me around four hours – or it seemed like that – by the time I reached the final cow. She was wondering when she was going to yield her daily contribution by then, and when I arrived to do the job by hand, she initially jumped around in her stall and then settled and tolerated the indignity of having her udder pumped by a pair of hands that ached to the stage of numbness.

I was much relieved the next morning to find that my father was well enough to rise from his sick bed and resume the milking, as I couldn't have done it anyway – my arms were aching and my hands were useless! And I suspect that the cows were pleased to see their familiar boss back as well. It put me off wanting to be ever become a dairy farmer, and made me determined to pursue a farming career that involved telling people how to do it, rather than do it myself…

Death and destruction on a Tyneside farm

By Dr Deric Charlton

Killing is part and parcel of life when you live on a farm! After all, we tend the stock for feeding people so it never pays to be too sensitive when you're a farmer. We were obviously sad when people like Grandpa passed on, but had to return to running the farm and attending to the daily chores, including slaughter. Naturally the livestock were familiar friends – after all, we had all the cows identified with names on their stalls!

After we moved to the farm my mother even had names for the poultry that roamed under free-range conditions and ate what they liked. One day a mate and I watched a hen as she pecked away in the straw that littered the stackyard, and we stirred it up a little and then counted all the worms that she tucked into. We were gob-smacked when we counted around 60 worms in only five minutes! We reckoned she was an Italian Leghorn by descent and liked spaghetti! And you worry about GE food, and what goes into your sausages!

One of the fragrant farmyard memories that still tingles my nasal passages is the smell of burnt feather remains after we had plucked "chickens" (layers that fell behind schedule!) just before Christmas. The villagers used to pester my parents for Christmas dinners so we soon realised that this was an excellent to cull the flock of layers, and the days before Christmas were a frenzy of pulling hen necks and then quickly plucking all the feathers before they cooled off, as they were much harder to remove then.

We would sit in a dingy outhouse, sneezing away as the poultry dandruff drifted around the place, and sit plucking feathers from hens that still jerked, in an activity that reminded me of the sheep shearing competitions down in New Zealand! But that wasn't the worst part. While hens were easily sent onto "Hen Heaven", the geese were another matter. You couldn't end their leisurely lives in the same way, and some experienced person had to cut their throats with a knife instead.

It wasn't a rare sight to see geese still running around the farmyard without their heads, until life ended for them and their culinary responsibility took over. We never reared turkeys as in our part of the planet the daft creatures were too naïve to stay out of the weather when it turned nasty, so they died well before they were needed at Christmas.

Another regular ritual was killing and preparing a pig for farm fare. This only happened a few times a year and the village butcher came along to despatch the unfortunate resident when its time had arrived. He did this with a "humane killer" – a stainless steel gun that fired a spike into the animal's brain, powered by a 0.22 calibre cartridge. Over the years the village butchers became familiar faces, and they may have been good at their jobs, but no one is perfect.

The assistant was despatching a sheep one day while I watched, and he held its head between his knees while doing the dirty deed. Suddenly the sheep turned its head when it wasn't meant to, and the butcher sent the spike into his knee! Well, the air quickly became blue with colourful phrases at that point, and the poor sheep was sent to its resting place just before the butcher was taken to a place where painkiller could be administered. But let's get back to the pig…

Once it was dead, the butcher cut it into the required traditional parts and left us to process these in the traditional way. The blood was poured into the cleaned intestines to make a long chain of black pudding, and we rubbed salt petre into the sides and left them to hang in cool conditions, allowing them to develop into delicious home-cured bacon cured the sides, and some of the rest went into sausages…

Being really civilised people we didn't eat the head, as happens in some parts of the British Isles, and haggis was a legend that existed north of the border! I'd always wondered when I was a youngster, as to why there were a series of hooks in the farm kitchen ceiling, and was relieved to know eventually that they weren't to hang up mischievous grandsons, but were for the pig remains, to be weathered by the conversations and smoke that inevitably rose in the kitchen.

Yet another lethal experience was despatching farm cats and dogs once they had reached their "use by date". These animals were useful additions to the farming staff, yet they inevitably developed problems after many years of duty and had to follow the stock on occasions, and the job usually fell to the male family members to undertake. Sometimes the males knew better when the pet's time had come to an end than the women of the enterprise, and I still remember one weekend – and the weeks of silence that followed it – when my grandpa realised that their very old, and very obese Labrador, had to be put to sleep.

Poor Dulcy had rather poor house manners and also added to the farmhouse aromas, so he waited until Grandma went off for a weekend Women's Institute convention and then took the unfortunate hound over the home field, tied it to a tree, and with both barrels of his shotgun, ended the long life of the dog. When Grandma returned from her excursion and discovered an empty space in the hearth (and a definite aroma missing) she soon discovered what had occurred, and sent poor Grandpa to Coventry for a spell. Eventually everyone realised that he had done them all a favour, but it took a while before he received daily favours….

Later on I became familiar with having to put ailing farm cats to sleep. We had a cat gang to keep vermin at bay, and some came into the house to curry favour with the family, but sooner or later they lost condition (usually as a result of old age) and as the oldest son, I was usually the one asked to put the animal out of its misery, to minimise vet bills. So I learned that animals can be friends, but we have to be cruel to be kind to them on occasion as well. Some of the cats were real characters – just like the people around them!

One farm moggy was always wild, and could never be persuaded to come indoors – until one Sunday, when my father was sitting reading the Sunday newspaper, at the head of the long well worn kitchen table that had been there for about 150 years, when in walked the "wild one". The rest of the family noticed its entrance, and yet we stayed quiet, awaiting a comment from our father once he had spotted the prodigal cat. The said intruder moved around and rubbed his head against various objects within reach, and then spotted part of the newspaper that had fallen from the table, and proceeded to "do its business" right by my father's feet! It didn't take long for his nose to detect the strong aroma rising from below, and when he glanced down and saw the source of the intrusion, and the intruder, the Sunday peace suddenly ended – and the wild one quickly returned to familiar surroundings, hotly pursued by a sustained outburst of rather un-Sabbatical phrases. However, that was one cat that I didn't have to despatch – it vanished of its own accord.

One of my own encounters involved an emotional afternoon getting rid of the Greek Consul's hens. I should explain that he resided in a splendid home over a small field beyond our stackyard, on the beautiful Westfield Lane that divided the farm from the Tyneside Golf Club, which ran parallel to the main farm block. That afternoon I was "doon the yard" when I heard a crack and a whistle that reminded me of my shooting practice in the cadet force, and when it happened again I quickly discerned the direction it was coming from – only this time there was a familiar ricochet. I carefully crossed the small field and spotted the Greek Consul taking a pot shot at something and then letting go with his 0.22 rifle, so I called out and asked what on earth he was doing.

He explained that he had been recalled to his home land and that he had to leave his pets – about two dozen hens behind in Ryton. Being Greek, he couldn't bear to wring their necks, so he had phoned the village butcher and asked him to do the dirty deed, but alas, the butcher was too busy to oblige. Well being a daft lad with a sensitive heart, I offered to do the job for him, having explained that the method he was using – letting the hens out one at a time and then trying to end their days Annie Oakley style – was also lethal to people within a three-mile radius.

So he kindly accepted my offer but insisted that, instead of wringing their necks in the pre-Christmas style, that I place their heads on the ground, put a broom handle over the slender neck and keeping it in place with my feet, give the hen's torso a lethal yank to suddenly send it to "Greek Heaven". Well, it took a while to achieve my objective but I managed and then asked if I could pluck the fowl and use them as good meat, envisaging this as payment for my time and effort. However, he insisted, emotional person that he was, that they all be buried in a communal grave in his garden – and then after I had done that, sent me on my way without any remuneration! Since then, I have always treated Greek males with some caution….

One of the hazards of living on the farm and having a mother who hadn't a farming background was that we often had to share our meals in the farm kitchen with cheeps and juvenile quacks from ducklings. The poultry was my mother's part of the farm and she soon became a dab hand at rearing all sorts of hens, ducks and even bantams, and the kitchen cupboard was a great hospital for those that didn't get up and walk as soon as they emerged from their egg. She employed a range of her own remedies to ensure their survival, some of which worked a treat. One such remedy was a teaspoonful of whisky – much to the disgust of her husband, and there were quite a few feathered layers that owed their lives to this particular reviver.

One hen that we all could easily identify and who owed her existence to a "wee drap" was Droopy. She was one of many who used to hang around the concrete yard at the farmhouse back door, which was the daily feeding area of the free-ranging poultry looked after by my mother. One day, when my mother went out with her bucket of grain to feed her charges, she saw this forlorn creature standing but drooping and obviously suffering from some fowl ailment. So she took the hen indoors and gave it her "special medication" from a teaspoon. The next morning the hen was miraculously back to normal so was returned to her mates to forage around the farmyard.

But this hen had a memory. Every time we went out the back door, there she was, standing on the concrete area waiting, and you would swear that as soon as she saw whoever was emerging, she would go into her "droopy mode" and appear to be a suffering fowl. And who could blame her?

Bringing in the sheaves on a Tyneside farm

By Dr Deric Charlton

Of course the war soon ended and it wasn't too long until the first tractors appeared on the land to modernise farming and spell the end of the horse as a beast of burden on the land. Although Grandpa bought a well-used Standard Fordson, the Clydesdales were kept on the farm long after the old man passed on, and they served several good purposes – one of my favourites being on threshing days. I was always excited when the thresher arrived to thresh the corn stacks, as it meant that we would soon have day when the neighbouring farmers would come and help us, just as we did when they threshed their stacks.

The thresher was a Massey Harris and it was powered by a broad belt that operated from the tractor drive wheel situated down below the driver's left footrest. However the corn sheaves had to be hoisted up onto the top of the thresher so that one man could cut the binder twine and throw them into the entry where they were threshed by the revolving drums, and this was carried out using a tall timber post on a hoist that was driven by the horse. A pulley and large fork was attached by rope to the hose's harness and once the fork was driven into some sheaves, the horse was led away and the load rose and then swung across onto the thresher top. Some times I used to lead the horse and then reverse it, and for a young lad to stand by a large Clydesdale and think that he was controlling its movements, this was responsibility indeed!

It was amazing how the corn stacks shrank as the threshing team worked away, and the chaff went into bales as the bags of grain filled and were stored in the granary, to be crushed into rolled grain for cattle feed during winter. One feature that always impressed me was the performance of the cats as they caught many mice fleeing from their homes in the diminishing stack. Before the threshing began on a stack, a roll of wire netting was erected as a temporary barrier around the stack and at least two of our mouse hunters were placed inside. The soon became busy as the mice emerged, and usually only had time to kill a mouse and maybe bite off its head before leaping to pounce on another victim. It was all go for them that day and then I suppose that they returned for another meal on the corpses that night.

My father's cousin Tom was the stacking expert. He was the one I admired as he built the corn stacks from loads of sheaves we brought in from the field. He was so used to the job that his hands were immune to the many thistles bound up in most sheaves in those days, before spraying broad-leaved weedkillers became common practice. Tom knew it all and was also expert at building corn stooks from the sheaves in the field. He would pick up sheaves in pairs and prop them together in a long group of ten or twelve that were known as a stook. This let the wind and sun dry the cut cereal crop without losing the grain and before we stacked it on a trailer – that was Tom's skill as well. He would build a load while kneeling on the sheaves, placing them carefully so that they sloped downwards slightly to the exterior, which seemed to hold them together better as the tractor and trailer wended its way back to the farm along the village roads.

Our fields were not all adjoining, and one large one was about two miles away, up over the main road between Newcastle and Hexham and beyond the colliery railway line. Another two fields were on a flat area down beyond the common land by the River Tyne known as the Ryton Willows. I can vividly remember cutting a tall crop of oats from these fields one year, using a Massey Harris binder pulled by two energetic Clydesdales and driven with a lifelong expertise by my Grandpa Charlton. Yet another two fields were more than three miles away, just beyond the large railway yards to the east of Blaydon, a larger town on the main route into Newcastle. They were only used for grazing beef cattle, thank goodness, although driving them along the main road with all its traffic was a nightmare that we had to undertake every few months. It wasn't only the traffic that we had to endure during this four-mile cattle drive, but closing and then opening all the gates along the road to prevent the curious animals from venturing into the attractive gardens and hastily chewing some exotic shrubs or flowers!

Gathering in the corn and hay crops was a regular job for me during those years. The same bogie was used to transport hay pikes, as they were called in these parts, back to the stackyard, as we used later on for the cereal harvest. There was a chain winch on the front and we would place the extended chain around the base of a hay pike, having tilting the tipping bogie with its sharpened wooden tray at the pike base. Winding in the chain would gradually slide the pike onto the bogie, and it was then roped on for the journey back to the farm. This had to well done as the fields were like a rolling sea after many years of ploughing and cultivation to develop the rig-and-furrow drainage on this heavy land.

So when we drove over the field to head home, it was like sailing an ocean yacht! By, but you had to hang on!! Then once on the road we would steadily drive along the village roads, exchanging varying remarks with villagers as we passed by them. I recall that it always seemed to be a race against time or the weather. The tractor had no lights on it, so we had to gather as many loads as we could before darkness fell, but the weather was an ongoing threat, and it usually started to rain as the last few loads were being collected from the field, giving the operation a lingering aroma of fresh rain on the soil, combined with the sweet scent of coumarin from the hay, or the characteristic aromas of dried wheat, barley or oats.

Returning to those harvesting days in my memory reminds me of some of the other local farmers we worked with – all great characters. There was one whose farmhouse was right in the village centre, at the Lane Head, and having the "townies" all around him must have plagued him, as he had developed a rather aggressive approach to them by the time I was an active youth. His fields were right next to the house we lived in until moving onto the farm after my grandpa died in 1950, and my young mates and I naturally used the closed-grazed one, with a super hollow in it, to play cowboys and Indians and other youthful games.

Another of his fields was an excellent shortcut to the primary school that I attended, and yet we had make sure that "Wor Jackie" wasn't around before making a dash for it and then out onto the main road and along to school. One day he just happened to be there when three of us were playing and ran after us, so we took off and ran into the back of one friend's home, then out the back door and away through the allotments. He kept on after us apparently, though we never stopped to check for the first mile, but wended our way rapidly though the back lanes of the village until we panted to a halt by the cemetery! He never did catch us that day, but our parents had to tolerate some rather strong remarks on our behalf.

He was well-known among the other farmers for being a bit "stingy" on threshing days, and I recall some of them relating that when they once sat down for lunch they thought they were being served "banana-skin sandwiches" as the bread was rather thinly cut and spread and there was little filling on offer! And another then remarked that the teapot had been filled straight from the hot tap, so the brew wasn't really pleasant… The last I ever heard of this particular farmer was that one day he was ploughing a field with his horse and a swarm of bees settled on them both. He was daft enough to try fighting them off, and ended up in hospital with many stings. I never heard about the fate of the horse but suspect it was more sensible.

The other farmers were far friendlier and we used to help each other when necessary. One farmer was a wiry old guy, of a similar age to my grandpa whose two sons were running their two farms mostly by then. One day we were binding the cereal crop in a field next to theirs, when someone spotted a red fox in the crop. So the old fellow and his son went home quickly and returned with their shotguns, and the son's red setter dog. I was standing watching when the dog suddenly emerged from the corn not too far from the old man – but fortunately far enough for the dog's sake, as he raised his gun and took a shot at what he though was the fox. Well, the sons fairly cursed him for his prompt action – "You daft owld bugga! Thet's the dug, not the bloody fox!"

Yet another village farmers was also a contractor and supplied the machinery and some supervisory manpower during important operations like threshing, baling, spraying crops and the like. Over the years he and his family grew wealthier than most of the other farmers as a result of his initiative in supplying the essential equipment for these important farming jobs, so the farmhouse gradually turned into what the other farmers would describe as a palace.

One of the village tradesmen related to us during a pint-supping evening, that he had a mate who had tiled the contractors' bathroom in recent weeks. This tiler went along to estimate the job and materials needed, and of course he asked the farmer's wife how far she would like the tiles to cover the bathroom walls, bearing in mind that most customers preferred them to be up to "splash height" at about four or five feet. But not this lady. She immediately replied emphatically, "Why, reet up te the top, man!" It raised a good few laughs that night, and made the minds boggle.

Sheep Farming Systems - Basic Guide

When going into sheep you’ll have to decide what kind of enterprise you want to run. This can be tricky as it depends on important issues such as how much time you’ll have to farm, what your facilities are like, and how much money you want to invest and the expected returns.

If you get someone to describe the various sheep farming systems, you could easily end up more confused than enlightened. But here’s an attempt!

1. Run a mixed-age (or age-balanced) flock of the one breed, breeding your own replacements and selling all surplus stock.
• This is the usual commercial system on large sheep farms.
• Here ewes last for say four seasons after which they are drafted from the flock, called draft or cast-for-age (CFA) ewes.
• By the time they are culled, the replacement ewe lambs that have grown to be two-tooths come in to replace them.
• So the flock is made up of 25% two-tooths, 25% four-tooths, 25% six-tooths and 25% of old five-year-olds.
• There is wastage over time so if you know this, you usually put more than 25% two-tooths into the flock knowing for example the greatest loss is barren two tooths.
• The enterprise makes money from selling store lambs (wethers and rams) at weaning together with any ewe lambs that are not needed for replacements.

2. The same system as 1 above but keep some of the surplus lambs to sell later as hoggets (“lambs”) for meat.
• This again is for larger operations and is done where the farm has the feed to grow the weaned lambs on to heavier weights as hoggets for the meat “lamb” market before they have two permanent teeth which normally erupt at 12-14 months.
• They are sold through autumn and winter when there is a big demand for these “lambs”.

3. Buy in weaner store lambs and grow them on for meat.
• This is a simple system of fattening weaners and quitting them as meat “lambs” before they have two permanent teeth.
• They could be of any sex with ram lambs growing the fastest and making most money, followed by wethers and then ewe lambs.
• Grow ram and ewe lambs separately. Ewes and wethers can be grown together.

4. Buy in weaner ewe lambs and grow them to sell as two-tooth ewes for breeding when 18 months old, ready for the ram.
• This is a large-farm operation where you buy good ewe lambs and grow them on for about a year to put in the special two-tooth sales in late summer before autumn mating.
• These are the very best of breeding stock and have at least 4-5 productive seasons ahead of them so you expect them to sell for premium prices.
• But then of course they need priority feed for a long time so the economics need to be carefully watched.
• On some large sheep farms, they keep more ewe lambs than they need and after they have selected their replacement two-tooths, they’ll put the surplus on the market.

5. Buy weaner ewe lambs, and grow them to be mated as hoggets. Then after weaning their lambs sell them as two-tooths.
• Here you increase the efficiency of the enterprise by getting a lamb out of most of the hoggets (e.g. 50%) but still hit the premium breeding sales for two-tooths.
• You would have to declare that they have lambed as hoggets, and in any case it would be hard to hide as the lambed ones would show udder development.
• The two-tooths that had lambed as hoggets would be a great buy as research always showed that hoggets that lambed were more productive sheep over their lifetime.

6. Buy old-cast-for age (CFA) ewes, mate them and sell them in spring with lambs at foot.
• CFA ewes are usually five years of age and are sold with guaranteed teeth and udders. Some farmer’s CFA ewes could be six-year-old ewes and would be worth buying too if they were sound.
• They should be capable of producing at least one more lamb crop, and if carefully managed on good lowland conditions you may be able to get a second crop out of most of them.
• They would normally be mated to a meat breed sire and sold in early spring – “all counted”.
• This means that if you are bidding on a ewe and her twins and the bid is $40, that’s $40 for each of them. They are all the same price.
• In this system you don’t have ewes and lambs through the summer with all the work involved.
• This would be an ideal system to start a sheep breeding enterprise on small farms if owners had experience.

7. The same system as 6 but sell the ewes at weaning for meat and grow the lambs to greater weights to slaughter as hoggets.
• Here you farm the ewes and lambs through the summer.
• There will be quite a bit of work to do such as docking lambs and shearing the ewes and maybe the lambs.
• Dipping too may be needed if blowfly problems show up and drenching for internal parasites.
• You sell all the ewes for meat at weaning, or you could put them in the store sale and other farmers may see an opportunity to buy them and get another lamb out of most of them if they were sound in teeth and udder.
• These ewes would need careful management as quite a few could “pack up” and die.

8. Keep a permanent wether flock.
• This is a very simple system were you keep sheep simply as grazing machines and was common in the days of hill country development. Income comes from wool and animals sold when mutton prices are good. You need to have a supply of young wethers to replace them.

9. Buy and sell sheep of any age.
• Here you are simply “dealing’ in sheep hoping that your bargains outnumber your losses.