DRINKALL YEARS 1969 TO 1973
Life has a funny way of dropping opportunities in your lap. It wasn’t obvious at the time but I had fallen on my feet again in terms of job satisfaction. I was starting a very productive and satisfying period of my life and was to learn a great deal.
E.A.Drinkall and Sons was a family firm of cattle dealers and farmers. There were three brothers, Richard, Keith and David. They each had a farm, Richard at Yew Tree, Keith at Church farm, Gargrave and David at Rimington. He was shortly to move from there to a larger farm, Demense, at Newsome near Gisburn on the Long Preston Road and later to Cheshire. The brothers worked together but each operated in their own segment of the business, these overlapped at times and the impression I got was that they all valued their independence but Richard was the main man. I suppose the trick was that he could run the business in such a way that the brothers held their own territory but worked, on the whole, as a team.
Richard’s Father, John was a cattle dealer also. He was very well respected but had a terrible blow when he was struck blind. I have been told by more than one person that Richard’s introduction to the business was going round the auctions with his dad and acting as his eyes. Old John would assess a beast by feeling it and discussing it with Richard and would then bid for the beast and sell it on if he bought it. He died early and Richard had to take over the business at 14 years of age. The Trustees would only allow him to spend a certain amount each week and set a limit on how much he could spend on an individual animal. I once asked Richard about this and he could remember the first animals he bought, who he bought them off, how much they cost and the person he sold them to. Over the years I was to see many examples of his uncanny ability to recognise a beast, in some cases years after he last saw it as a calf!
The basis of the trade they did in milk cows and heifers was the prosperous retailer farmers who bottled most of their production and sold it on the doorstep in the industrial towns of East Lancashire and West Yorkshire. These men were getting top price for their milk and could afford top quality cattle. The beasts were mainly friesians with some ayrshires and crosses between the two breeds. In Richard’s early days the standard dairy cow was the dairy shorthorn, favoured because the calves made either milkers or good beef cattle but as fashions in meat changed and butchers demanded more specialised carcasses and in addition, pressures on profits drove farmers to seek higher milk yields, the friesian became the standard dairy cow. The way Richard liked to run the business was to buy heifer calves off the men he had sold good cattle to, this way he knew what quality of heifer they would grow into in three years. He sold these calves to farmers in Scotland who specialised in rearing cattle and in turn, they sold Richard his calves back to him as grown, in-calf heifers.
There was a double advantage in this. The farmers were keen to buy calves off Drinkalls because they knew that on the whole, they were getting guaranteed quality, they would pay a premium for this alone but there was another advantage. They knew that when one of Richard’s calves came back into the market as a heifer Richard would always bid for it even if he didn’t actually want to buy it. This meant that the price would be driven up. Whether Richard got it or not, the farmer was on a winner and this was on his mind when buying the calf.
All the brothers farmed their own land in conjunction with the dealing business. Richard’s farm at Marton was run virtually single-handed by John Henry Pickles who managed everything with some additional help at hay-time.
A week’s work for me started at 2am. on Monday morning, I had the wagon at home, fuelled up and checked over. The box was clean, gritted and bedded down with straw. I would go down to Demense at Newsome and help David feed the calves we were taking up to market at Lanark, this took about half an hour. The we would load them and set off north through Settle, Ingleton and Kirby Lonsdale heading up the old road to Kendal. This was before the motorway opened and from Kendal we would head up the old A6 over Shap Fell towards the summit and then down the long, fast descent through Shap village, Penrith and on to Carlisle. At Carlisle we took the A74 Glasgow road until we got to Moffat where we usually stopped to sell a few calves to a farmer there. David would take over the driving then and we would get into Lanark at about 0830. Sometimes we had no stops at all apart from the changeover, other times we could have three or four drops if calves were in demand.
A frequent call on Monday morning was at Skirling Mains, Biggar, run by Dan and Kath Smith. When they married Dan was 60 and Kath 30 and what a team they made. Kath won the Scottish competition for best shepherd at least once and she was always up near the top in the lambing averages, the shepherd’s league table. She had good dogs and could work them over any ground with sheep or cattle. This dual ability is very rare, a dog is usually either a sheep dog or a cattle dog, Kath’s would do either job. I once went there shortly after she had a baby and she went out to the field with the baby in her arms and fed it while she worked the dogs and gathered my cattle for me. I told her I’d never seen anybody do those two jobs at once!
I was there one day and Kath took me over to an outhouse in the yard and told me to have a look inside. There was a litter of Border Collie pups in there and they were the bonniest sight you have ever seen. “Pick one out” she said, “You can chose before David does.” The sire of the litter was a dog called ‘Old Tam’ who had been, in his day, Scottish champion. Kath said they were well bred but if they followed Old Tam’s breeding they would have one fault, they wouldn’t go through puddles, they didn’t like getting their feet wet! I picked a bonny black and white dog, classic Border Collie markings. On the Monday David and I called in with some calves and he chose his pup. On November 26 1969 I called in at Skirling Mains to pick up a heifer and brought both pups down home, they were eight weeks old. David’s was shaping up well but got killed on the road at Demense after about six months. My dog, Fly, was to live with me and then Vera for 13 years and what a mate he was! I took the two of them back in a shoe box and when I got home Vera fell for Fly immediately. I didn’t see the kids reaction because I was away long before they woke but I’m sure they can remember the day when Fly came to be part of the family. We had another dog before that while mother and father were living with us. It was a golden retriever and I can’t for the life of me remember where it came from. What I can clearly remember is that Vera nursed it through a bad case of distemper using nothing but TLC and Fennings Fever Cure, a proprietary medicine for humans that in common with many animal medicines at that time, contained a lot of strychnine. I can’t remember where the dog went afterwards, strange thing how some things are as clear as a bell and others slip away.
Once in Lanark we would get some hot water and give the calves a quick feed of warm water and glucose. This made sure they were happy and more important, weren’t getting dehydrated. After feeding we gave them a quick brush down and unloaded the calves we were going to sell through the ring into a pen in the section of the market where the calf sale was held. Sometimes, when we had calves that had been ordered we kept them on the wagon to await their new owners collecting them. Once in the market we stood by the calves and if someone came in and wanted to buy one we would oblige. In theory, we weren’t suppose to sell calves privately once we were on the auction premises because this meant the auction lost the commission on the sale but we never took any notice of this rule. Occasionally someone would say something but on the whole, Drinkalls were such good customers at Lanark that nobody was going to give us serious hassle.
The calf sale started at about 10am. The rearing calves were sold first, this of course included ours, then the ‘bobby’ calves were sold. These were calves which because of sex or breeding were not regarded as fit for rearing. These were bought by specialised dealers who in turn sold them to firms like Crosse and Blackwell or Heinz. They were slaughtered and rendered down for gravy for baby food or geriatric meals. At the time I am writing this there is much agitation by concerned animal rights campaigners who are violently opposed to the transport of calves to the continent for rearing for veal production. They could be mistaken, there is no way that valuable veal calves are going to be routinely treated badly because they are too valuable. I hold no brief for the veal market, I refuse to eat babies, but often feel that the protesters should inform themselves better and focus on what I always regarded as the real cruelty, the treatment of bobby calves. I have no evidence that the trade persists but there has to be an outlet for them somewhere and Richard was telling me only recently that the buyers want calves that are at least a week old now as the flesh will have started to firm up so it seems obvious that they are going somewhere for meat.
While we were waiting for the sale to begin one of the auction men would come round with a bunch of numbered tickets and a pot of glue. Each calf had a ticket stuck on its huggin or hip and these numbers governed the order calves went into the ring and also served as identification marks inside the auction. Every calf also had an eartag permanently fixed in its ear from birth. This tag identified it throughout its life and the number could be traced back through the records to the original herd and dam.
At about 10am. The auctioneer arrived and got the sale under way. The seller stood in the ring as the calves were brought in one by one by the auction men. David’s job was to keep the calf moving in the ring and encourage the buyers by describing the animals good points. He could also control the price to a certain extent because if the bidding didn’t go high enough he could refuse the sale and withdraw the calf. This didn’t happen too often but was used sometimes to make it clear to the buyers that if they wanted a calf they had to bid realistically for it. The auctioneer did his best to drive the price up by encouraging the buyers also because the higher the price, the more commission the auction got. However, there was a limit as to how much time he could spend on one calf, there were others waiting to be sold. The one thing that was certain was that the price was always higher if the seller was in the ring representing the calf.
When our calves had gone through the ring David would often watch some of the better local calves go through and if he saw any that seemed to be bargains he would buy them. These sometimes went back down the country with us but very often we sold them on to our own customers the same day at a profit.
As soon as the calf sale was finished I would go into the main dairy ring to see Richard. He would often tell me to set off and pick cattle up from outlying farms. These would be beasts that he had bought privately, sometimes sight unseen, off regular customers. Many a time I left the auction and did perhaps 100 miles picking up beasts before returning to Lanark to load the days purchases for home. If I wasn’t going out to lift any cattle Richard would give me the sale numbers of the beasts he had bought and I would go and vet them for him. The conditions of sale at the Scotch markets were that the vendor was responsible for the beast until it had been examined by the buyer or his agent and accepted. In practice they were deemed accepted unless ‘chucked up’, i.e. Rejected by the buyer.
The points you looked at were general appearance, any wounds or damage, the condition and number of teeth and most important, the condition of the udder. Heifers and cows for sale that had calved and were already in milk were usually milked late the night before the sale and the teats closed with collodion. This sealed them and as the milk built up the udder swelled and showed itself to best advantage. This may sound cruel but isn’t as long as it is not carried to extreme, it is quite natural in nature for a cow to miss suckling her calf for some reason and nature’s safety valve is that the teats would start to leak, the collodion was to stop this but if the pressure got too much it would dislodge the collodion. We did exactly the same when we sold the cattle in Gisburn.
Heifers or cows in calf would not have milk but if you drew each teat you could break the natural seal and express a bit of clear fluid, we called it ‘clam’. The trick was to just draw enough to check that the quarter was normal, nature would seal the teat again because the fluid was thick and sticky. With practice a good man could tell whether all was well. A quick feel of the body of the quarter would reveal if there were any lumps or if the quarter was hard. This was always a sign of infection, usually mastitis or felon as we called it. If a beast had a faulty quarter it was described as a ‘three wheeler’ and discovery of this was a serious matter for the vendor as the buyer could chuck it up or get a large reduction in the price. In practice, a good three wheeler could give as much milk as a moderate beast which was correct but if you were buying to sell on it was a very serious fault.
Once the beasts were all vetted and passed the auction milkers would milk any that needed it and the cattle were ready to load. At this point, David and I would meet up in the restaraunt and have a meal before loading. The canteen at Lanark was very good, we used to go in the lower class end, Richard would be in with the heavy gang next door!
The next job was to get the auction staff to bring the cattle down to the loading dock and get them in the wagon. The Leyland I had at the time had a 24ft. body and would comfortably take 16 beasts. There were two dividing gates inside the box and I used to set them so that there was space for one cow on its own in the front compartment. This beast was always loaded with its head facing the calf door in the near side of the wagon. It made a handy entrance to the box if there was any trouble on the road as you were far better climbing in at the head end of the cow than at the rear end, for one thing you had more room, secondly you wouldn’t get kicked and lastly, but most important, you wouldn’t be climbing in over a pile of cow muck!. The other gate was set half way down the wagon and seven of the smallest beasts were loaded in the space between it and the front.
The reason for this loading arrangement was that the front beast had slightly more than its fair share of room, had no pressure from other beasts and consequently was guaranteed a good ride. This was handy for a larger beast or one that was slightly off colour or near to calving. When the centre door was closed, the remaining eight were loaded in the rear compartment. The inner gates were shut and the large back door which formed the whole of the rear of the wagon and acted as a loading ramp was then shut and locked.
The trick here was that as soon as the door was shut, you set off because leaving cattle to their own devices in a wagon immediately after loading was asking for trouble. The cattle soon settled down once you were on the move largely because of the novelty of the experience. If you were to stop after five minutes on the road you’d find that they had all sorted themselves out nose to tail as this gave them more room. Given good smooth riding and no sudden braking the cattle would ride comfortably like this for up to eight hours or more depending on temperature and how rested they were when loaded. The main factor in determining how well they rode, apart from the standard of driving was how secure a foothold the beasts felt they had. If the floor was clean and well gritted they would actually enjoy the ride! I have to say that I know I would have difficulty persuading the more rabid of protesters that this was so but I have no reason to lie and have carried enough to know what I’m talking about. Remember, we had a big investment in these cattle and it was in our interest to give them as comfortable a ride as possible.
David used to drive for the first lap. Often I would have done quite a lot of driving during the day and he knew I had a hard day on Tuesday so he made things as easy for me as he could. He would drive right down through Scotland as far as Shap Village where we would stop for a meal in a little wooden hut run by Mr and Mrs Graham who made the most marvellous boiled ham and chips I have ever tasted. I should mention here that David had mild diabetes and it was important that he should eat regularly. This was great for me as David always made sure I ate at the same time as him, this was one of the small things that made all the difference and was always appreciated. Apart from anything else, it’s good man management. It was a different kettle of fish when I was with the Mars Bar Kid the following day!
From Shap I drove back to Demense where we would unload the cattle. We would get back there at about 8pm. on average and David would set to to bed the cattle down for the night. I always went straight home in the wagon and after a cup of tea and a report to headquarters was into bed ready for another 2am. start. The mathematicians among you will have already worked out that this was at least an 18 hour day!
While David and I were on our way back from Lanark, Richard would be making his way over from Lanark to Ayr. On the way he would call in at a few of his customers and would perhaps buy a few heifers which I would pick up the following day. He stayed at the Station Hotel in Ayr overnight and would usually meet up there with John Harrison, another dealer who lived in Kelbrook and who had been buying in Paisley on the Monday. He drove his own wagon, at that time he had an ERF with a Perkins engine in and a wooden Jennings body out of Cheshire. This was a slightly smaller wagon than ours but faster. Any cattle he had bought in Paisley would be bedded down in Ayr market for the night and be waiting for him when he finished the day’s buying at the auction.
Lanark Auction was a limited company and the main man there was an extremely autocratic bloke called Clarke. The auction at Ayr was a privately owed venture and was run by the Craig family. Both were very important markets, in effect, Lanark was the main dairy market for the South of Scotland and drew in cattle from the Lanark area right across to the east coast. Ayr’s catchment area was the west part of Southern Scotland, the island of Arran, the Mull of Kintyre and much of Galloway.
On Monday, while David and I were coming back down the country, Keith, who farmed at Gargrave would bring his calves over to Demense and bed them down in a loose box overnight so that they were ready for me on Tuesday morning. I would be up at two in the morning and down at Demense for shortly after three. Keith was usually there when I arrived but if not, came very shortly after. We loaded up the calves and got going up the road. I drove and Keith, like David would settle down for some sleep while I got some miles in.
Our route was different once we reached Carlisle, instead of heading up the A74 we swung west above Carlisle and headed up to Dumfries and then up the valley of the Nith through Sanquar and up to Cumnock. I never passed Cumnock without remembering the Knockshinnock Colliery disaster there in 1950. A sea of mud from a bog rushed into the pit and killed 13 men, 116 were buried for two days before the rescue gangs got them out. Just north of Cumnock we swung west again out through Coylton and into Ayr. This was a country road all the way from Carlisle in those days and was a far worse trip back as regards riding cattle. Calves were no problem they simply lay down in the straw and went to sleep. We used to call in at a café car park above Dumfries sometimes where we used to meet a local farmer and sell him some calves. As with David there were other customers at times but we were usually in Ayr for about 9am. or so. There was no changeover on Tuesdays, I drove all the way. Keith certainly had a different attitude towards me than David, he was the boss and I did as I was told. I had to fend for myself as regards food, Keith seemed to exist on Mars Bars and pop. This was no problem, at least I knew where I was and there was always the bait tin, the flasks and bacon baps at Ayr in the market, I certainly didn’t go short!
Once in Ayr we unloaded all the calves for the market and gave them a feed of glucose and warm water and got them bedded down in straw ready for the customers coming. Sometimes Keith would leave some calves in the wagon as these were sold privately and were awaiting pick-up by the customers. As in Lanark, private sales were frowned on but went on anyway. Keith looked after the calf sales on his own and I was free to have some breakfast, a sleep in the cab if the weather was warm enough or a walkabout. I sometimes went in to see how the calves were selling and was surprised when I first started doing the Ayr market by Keith’s refund policy. He would stand by the better calves, in other words he gave a guarantee they would live after the sale. If a customer was unlucky and had a calf die on him all he had to do was bring the ear which had the eartag in back to Keith and he would replace the calf. The first time I saw a customer hand over a severed ear it was a bit of a shock but when you think about it it made perfect sense. Early in the day I would go and find Richard and see whether there were any cattle to pick up or calves to take out. As with Lanark, I sometimes did a considerable mileage while Richard was buying, I have gone as far as Ballantrae down the West coast or out on to the Drummore peninsula. Trips out to Strathaven were a regular occurrence.
By shortly after lunch I would be back in Ayr and ready to load for the trip home. Richard of course was in his car and Keith used to ride home with him from Ayr so I got rid of the management and could go back to doing what I did best, being a wagon driver! The trip back from Ayr was never a problem. It was a worse road than Monday’s journey but wasn’t bad as long as you took it steady. In spring, summer and autumn it was a lovely trip through wooded valleys and rolling country all the way to Carlisle. These cattle went back to Marton in those days and John Henry or Richard would be waiting for me to arrive and would help tie the cattle up in the shippon down the lane behind the dairy. Then I went home. On an exceptionally good day I could be back in Barlick before 9pm. But it was usually later and could be a lot later if the trip hadn’t been smooth! By this time, on average I’d done not far short of 40 hours work in the first two days of the week.
I had an agreement with Richard right from the start about starting time on Wednesday morning. When I went to bed on Tuesday night I never set the alarm and Vera would let me sleep until I woke up. This could be nine o’clock or half past but it meant that my body clock had taken its chance to make up for the sleep deficit I’d accumulated in the previous two days. This is a strategy I learned while on the tramp, the body is a wonderful thing and can automatically take care of itself if given a chance. Another part of the strategy was to avoid heavy food as far as possible while driving. Sandwiches and fruit were the ideal diet as far as I was concerned and if I had a meal I tended to go for salads. I’ve seen me eat two or three pounds of apples in a day and must have been on the right track as I have never had any stomach problems whatsoever. Mind you, I used to enjoy a full fatty breakfast now and again and still do!
When I eventually came to I went straight down to Marton on Wednesday and John Henry and I would start to prepare the cattle we were going to put into Gisburn Market for Thursday’s sale. Basically they all had to be milked right out and made to look as good as we could manage. Late in the afternoon they were milked again and their teats stopped. First thing after morning milking, John and I would clip them out. This was a very skilled part of the process of preparation and at first, I wasn’t allowed to do it, I still had much to learn. What you did was clip the beast in such a way that you gave the impression it had perfect conformation. When we’d finished they all had perfectly straight backs and clean tails and udders. It was wonderful what judicious clipping could do for a beast. I got very interested in this aspect of the job later but I’ll deal with that when we get to it.
By dinnertime John and I would be finished in the shippon. Richard would have been out during the morning and often customers would come down to see what we had on offer that week and would buy cattle straight out of the shippon. Many farmers preferred to buy their cattle this way as it was faster, avoided them having to go to Gisburn and the cattle had less stress and a decreased chance of picking up any infection. If he wasn’t about the farm, Richard would be off on his rounds anywhere from Halifax and Huddersfield to Manchester or out towards Preston looking at cattle to buy and selling heifers. His customers and he knew each other so well that they would trust his judgement and buy cattle unseen. On Wednesday afternoon I would be off round a list of farms delivering cattle and picking up others that had been bought. It could be fairly late in the evening before I was back home.
On Thursday morning I went to Yew Tree and picked up the cattle for the auction. We had our own byre in the market and once the cattle were tied up I got the auction staff in to wash them. At this point the cattle were stood in bare concrete booses, two to a standing and they were doused with water from a hose and soaped all over. Then they were hosed off and left to stand to drain for about quarter of an hour. In my first weeks, Richard used to be there and showed me what to do but he very soon paid me the compliment of not bothering to turn up. Nothing was ever said, it was just good man management, he showed me what to do and, when he was satisfied I was competent, left me to it. I liked this part of the job and it was a pleasure to have a byre full of clean contented cattle to work with. I know it sounds cruel to turn the hose on the cattle but it wasn’t. Too many people judge treatment of animals by human standards. My reaction to a cold water hose at that time of the morning would have been to go berserk but a cow is different! For a start it weighs almost half a ton and the heat lost by being soaked in cold water is negligible. Secondly, they are used to it, it happens to them every time it rains! Believe me, by the time they had drained off and had a bucket of cake to go at and sawdust and straw strewn around them they were warm, content and thoroughly enjoying the attention.
After giving them a bit of good hay to feed on the main part of the preparation was to brush them thoroughly. If you brush a clean cow as it’s drying off you bring up the natural oils from the skin and a black beast will look as though it has been newly varnished. Again, there were ways of brushing to enhance conformation and Richard taught me all the tricks. With a black cow, there was a small area in front of the huggin bone that if brushed against the grain improved the cow’s conformation. White cattle were treated differently. If you had a piece of dry white windsor soap and used this against the grain on the flank it raised the nap of the hair and made the beast look far heavier than it really was and improved its looks. There were other dodges as well. Sometimes if a beast had a slightly uneven udder one teat would go slightly askew as the pressure of the milk built up. They had missed that morning’s milking of course. If a teat was out of line it was marvellous what a good dab of collodion could do if put on the join between teat and udder in such a way that as it shrank it drew the teat back into line. Repeated applications would bring it back further and it was amazing how far you could move them. The vast majority of milk cows were polled at this time but occasionally you would get one with handlebars, often a Channel Island breed, but we tended to avoid these. If they did have horns it was wonderful what a bit of a rub with steel wool and an application of Driffield Oil would do. If we had a special beast I’d do the hooves as well.
By shortly after ten o’clock the cattle were looking their best, Richard would have arrived and the first customers would be coming in to look over our offering. Richard would be there in his auction smock and would be doing what he did best, selling! I said at the beginning of this section that I learned a lot working for Drinkalls, watching Richard sell was worth a pound a minute, he was, and still is, a master. Mind you, at times he didn’t half put the wind up me, I’ve stood there in the wings watching him sell a heifer for far less than he paid for it, including any ‘luck money’ he got back. I should explain that both in the Scottish markets and at Gisburn it was customary for the vendor to give the buyer some money back for ‘luck’. In Scotland this ran at about ten per cent but in Gisburn it was lower. The Scottish farmers didn’t like the paying out of luck money but they appreciated the fact that the inflation of the price did their reputation as breeders no end of good because it was always reported in the local papers if they got a particularly high price. This really became serious at some of the ram and bull sales. It was naïve to place too much reliance on prices reported in the paper. There could have been a prior arrangement with the bidder that if he got the animal a certain sum would be paid back as luck. We never dabbled in these sales but many thousands of pounds could change hands after the sale. The aim was to have the highest price beast reported in the paper.
Once the cattle were ready for the ring my job was over for a while and the next task was to get the wagon backed on to the wash, clean it out and scrub it and grit the floor. Then I would be off to the café for a bowl of soup and perhaps a bit of a wander to talk to my mates. Then I would go up to the ring and watch Richard selling. When he had finished, he and I would meet up and another list would be drawn up. Many of the buyers had their own transport and would take their purchases home. Some would want us to deliver. In addition, there would be cattle to pick up which Richard had bought unseen during the sale. There was one more category of beast which came into play at this point and this was where Richard really showed his skill as a dealer.
Some days, the auction was slow, customers would be thin on the ground, competition low and prices would fall. Many a time Richard would absorb the loss and sell, the aim was to always have a clearance by Sunday. However, on a slow day there was another way out. Richard knew his customers so well that he would bring the cattle down to the dock and we would load them on the wagon in a certain order. He would give me a list of sale numbers and a corresponding farm for each and then he would set off in the car with me following. He would be faster than me of course and by the time I arrived at the first address he would have left. What he had done was to go to the farm and sell the beast he had already designated to that farmer. I would pull in and off load the cow and then set off for the next address. Occasionally there would be a message waiting for me varying the route a bit but we always got rid of the lot. I would end the day driving back from some far flung outpost of the Drinkall empire with an empty wagon and a clearance! Sometimes of course the customers smelt a rat. I remember off-loading four heifers at a retailers near Bury one day and it wasn’t until I was climbing in the cab that the bloke said “How did you get here so quick?” I told him we had ship to shore radio but he had twigged it! “That bugger Drinkall! He’s off-loading what he couldn’t sell at Gisburn!” Actually they didn’t mind, they were just annoyed that they hadn’t tumbled to it earlier because if they had they could have got a reduction in price. However, they admired the style, liked the cattle and always came back for more. Richard was still selling to customers who had bought off his father and this is the mark of an honest trader, he can always go back and have another deal. Richard would sell at a loss if necessary to gain this outcome.
Friday was usually my day for doing maintenance on the old Leyland, David usually took my wagon to Beeston Castle market in Cheshire where he would be buying good rearing calves. Then again, I might have a load to take down the country and in that case, David would go in his car and I’d call in for the calves at Beeston Castle on my way back up the country. Sometimes Richard would go to a different dairy market and I would bring a load back in from there.
Saturday often saw another load from Scotland or closer to home. If there wasn’t a load it was maintenance day, I would be doing jobs on the wagon. Apart from major jobs like engine strip-downs I did all the maintenance. Sunday was always a rest day ready for the following week, but if I was away on Saturday there could be some maintenance to do. At the very least, I always checked the wagon over ready for Monday. Richard occasionally had to break this rule and ask me to work on Sunday but he knew that there would be a penalty, I would be like a bear with a sore arse if my Sunday was spoiled! The days of constant seven day a week working were over! By the end of the week I had done over 2000 miles and at least 80 hours. It’s important to realise that in the early days at Drinkalls, much of this mileage was done on ordinary roads, not motorways.
You know that at some point I’m going to go into what to you may be boring details about the machinery so I might as well do it now. I realise that machines aren’t everyone’s cup of tea but to me they are very important. My love for machinery started in my genes somewhere, it seems to me to be no surprise that my earliest clear memory is of a steam crane on Merseyway. At that age I can’t have had any appreciation of the finer points, by this I don’t just mean the mechanical details of the machine, I only remember it as an image. By finer points I mean the characteristics I eventually learned about, the fact that all machines are individual, even if made to the same design They bear a lot of resemblances to human beings, some are good from birth some are bad. Some are made good by the way they are treated, some are made bad and unreliable. The one basic truth, and in my experience, this applies to both humans and machines is that they give you back exactly what you put into them, no more and no less. There’s an old Scottish saying which applies here, ‘when a man isn’t fishing he should be mending his nets.’ My Sunday maintenance was an investment in safety, security and peace of mind during the week’s work.
It’s hard for even me to believe some of the jobs I used to do on my own. I would think nothing of doing a full brake reline all round and this meant riveting new linings to the old shoes, not fitting replacement shoes. I would change springs on my own. This involved lifting the springs up on to the axle from underneath and some weighed about 350lbs. I’ve always said I must have been as fit as a butcher’s dog, God knows there’s no chance now, apart from anything else I’ve more sense. A woman asked me the other day if I ever ‘took any exercise’. I told her I’d never felt the need, people used to pay me to do weight-lifting!
Drinkall’s had two wagons, the old Leyland Comet which had the same Vista-Vue cab as the dairy’s Leyland tankers and the new Leyland which was the latest model of the Comet. HYG the old wagon was driven by anyone and had an old type Houghton body on it. These were built at Milnthorpe up on the old A6 and were made of keruin, a Malaysian hardwood. The floor was keruin as well and this was a big mistake. You will have noticed that I keep mentioning the importance of grip for the cattle’s feet. Keruin is so hard that any grit you put on to it acts almost like ball bearings and actually worsens the grip. The only time I ever saw that wagon floor perform well was when it had a solid covering of calf bedding which wore into holes where the cattle stood. Another problem with this body was the fact that in order to make the slope on the ramp as gentle as possible the floor in the body sloped at the back. This was deadly for the cattle, try standing on a sloping floor yourself for hours at a time and you’ll see what I mean.
The body was about 7ft. 6ins. high internally and about 22ft. long. Over the cab there was a ‘Luton’, this was an extension which was closed off from the main body by a swinging door hinged at the top. This was a useful storage space for bales of straw, bags of sawdust and on occasion, new born calves. In Scotland they called this a ‘ducket’. Or as it was pronounced, a ‘dooket’.
The new Leyland, XWU 668G was basically the same but 24ft. long. Houghton’s had improved their design and it was a box section steel frame lined with keruin boards on the inside. These were painted with gloss paint inside and stained and varnished outside. The roof was galvanised steel sheet across the outside of the frame. They were a strong but heavy box. Due to a vagary of the licensing regulations, both wagons had a skeleton flat and the box sat on this and was attached by six holding down bolts along the sides. The reason for this was that the vehicles were taxed on their unladen weight and any removable body didn’t count. The unladen weight of XWU would be about 5 tons, the body weighed about three to four tons depending on how much muck there was in it and so, running at a gross of sixteen tons we had roughly eight tons payload. Notice that this was two tons less than my old Bedford which I drove on tramp. This was the penalty of heavier built vehicles and specialised bodies. On the whole XWU had a well designed box, the floor was two inch thick softwood and was flat right the way through. Every two feet there were two inch square battens across the wagon and these were a further help to the cattle. The floor and the battens took a lot of wear and one of the maintenance jobs was to replace them when necessary. A good floor meant an easy ride both for the cattle and for the driver.
The engine in the new Leyland was an improved version of the Leyland 400. The 400 referred to the cylinder capacity in cubic inches. The Mercury was powered by the AEC AV470 which was a bigger engine so in this respect I was going downhill. The new engine was designated the 401 and was actually a total re-design. It revved a lot faster and produced more power. I don’t know what the figure was but I’d guess at about 120bhp. There was a problem with it, because it was producing so much power from a relatively small engine it ran very hot in the head. Eventually the cylinder head used to crack locally round the injector housings and this was to cause a lot of trouble. The same engine was used in the Albion Riever six wheelers where it was even harder worked and I often noticed a blue flame at the end of the pipe when you passed them in the dark. It ate exhaust silencers, I’ll bet I got through two a year. They always went in the same place, burnt through where the hot gas entered from the engine. The gearbox was 5 speed constant mesh and it had an Eaton 2 speed back axle. This meant that you had two ranges in each gear, in theory you could use all ten gears but in practice you drove in one range and used the axle for minor adjustments in the gearing. With a small engine and heavy weights this was very useful as it was a very fast change and meant you could keep your revolutions up at peak performance. This was the secret of getting the most out of a wagon, if the peak torque was at 2000rpm. you wanted to be as close to this speed as you could be all the time and the key to this was gearing. Being a constant mesh box the gears were always engaged, changes were effected by engaging secondary dog clutches on the layshafts. This made them a pig of a box to change gear on unless you were used to them. You always had to double the clutch to get matching speeds and the slightest mismatch meant a terrible grating noise. David was a good driver once in top gear but I think even he would admit that he never really mastered the constant mesh box!
The most important item to the driver was the comfort of the cab. The new Leyland ‘Ergonomic ‘ cab was very good. It had a comfortable seat, an enormous windscreen giving a full view with no pillar in the middle to act as a blind spot. The heater was more than adequate. Even in the worst conditions you could keep the cab warm and the windows clear of mist and frost. This was the single biggest improvement in my lot. The Bedford TK I had at Harrisons wasn’t bad in this respect, in fact the cab was very similar but smaller, but apart from this, this was the first wagon I ever had which had what you could call a good heater. The engine compartment intruded into the cab to a point where it completely divided the driver’s side from the passenger seat, this was above elbow height at the back of the cab and sloped down to the bottom of the windscreen at the front. As usual, I rugged this up straight away to give better sound insulation than the manufacturers had intended. Although still noisy by modern standards it was reasonable and you could listen to a wireless or conversation. One of my first acts on moving in was to get Vera’s permission to buy a radio and install it in the cab. Thanks to my mother’s influence and being in choirs for so long I had a great liking for music and had a fancy to have a tape player in the cab as well. I doubt if I would have done anything about it at that time if it hadn’t been for a conversation I had with John Harrison when I must have mentioned this. He told me to have a word with his brother Bill who lived in White House Farm at Earby. Bill hadn’t gone into the family business but had taken his own path and at that time worked in Bradford for the Swedish firm Tandberg who manufactured very high class audio equipment. I think Bill had changed his car and the sound system in it was Phillips Cassette whereas his previous one had been Lear Jet Cartridge, the old eight track cassette. He gave me a box full of cartridges and I got permission off Vera again to buy two players. One was a Teleton which we had in the house and the other was a Motorola which I had in the wagon. The great virtue of the Lear system was that you simply pushed the cartridge into the slot and it started playing, it was an endless tape and as long as it was in the slot it would cycle through four tracks of stereo music. This was ideal for the kids and they played tapes all the time. The only problem was that the tapes were Bill’s sort of music, which suited me and the kids but I think that Keith especially got a bit fed up at times when I put Bach’s Greatest Hits on to ease the passage down the road! I never understood how the tapes worked, I hadn’t taken one to pieces. As they got old they stretched and you had trouble playing them. I remember coming on one night and Vera was re-assembling one of the cartridges, she had dismantled it, taken the stretch out of the tape and put it back together! It worked perfectly, hidden talents!
For it’s time, XWU was a fast wagon. It would do 60mph easily and on occasion, with a flat road and a following wind it would do over 70! The speed limit of course was nothing like this, I have an idea we were limited to 40mph. for a time and this went up to 50 later. I’m not too sure about this because I never took any notice of it, I just got from A to B as fast as I could and used my mirrors to watch out for the police. I remember that when I first started David was critical of how I hammered the wagon but I think he soon came to realise that I wasn’t ill-treating the engine, just getting the most out of it. The brothers were all drivers but they had never worked commercially and had pressure on them so they didn’t attack it in the same way that I did. This the main difference between car and wagon driving. Cars have so much excess power to weight that they are driven on part throttle nearly all the time. With a wagon, and especially with the small engines we had then, you kept the power output at maximum all the time unless you were braking or going downhill. As I got used to the work and the roads journey times between home and the Scottish markets fell slightly and this was definitely seen as a bonus by the brothers!
I looked after the maintenance and kept both wagons up to the top line. Richard encouraged this, I never had to ask twice for anything to do with maintenance and safety. XWU had automatic chassis lubrication which was good but you had to keep an eye on the pipes as they sometimes broke. I changed the filter and engine oil every fortnight and relined brakes and did minor repairs as necessary. If the paint got scratched I touched it up. The wagon was a picture and this always served you well because given the choice, the traffic commissioners and examiners would wave a shiny wagon through and go for a manky looking one! I can’t prove this theory but am convinced it worked.
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE FARM……
Back at Hey Farm, things were going well. I’ve neglected progress here so I’ll have to backtrack a bit to 1965, the year Janet was born. At that time the front room was still bare as it had been since mother and father moved out. The concrete floor was painted red and it had a modern tiled grate and the infamous flowered wallpaper applied upside down (it didn’t look too bad actually and no one ever noticed it except us!) We had progressed in the kitchen because at some point we bought a carpet square out of a pub which was having a refurbish. It was a Belgian Square, or so I was told and was a good, but thin carpet. When I got it Vera and I put it on the lawn at the front and scrubbed it with hot water and washing powder and the let it dry for a week. With hindsight it was a pitifully poor and worn carpet but to us then it was a wonderful leap forward. It didn’t reach the edge of the floor but at least it stopped my clogs rattling on the floor when I came in.
It’s probably worth mentioning that I wore wooden clogs at the time with steel irons. They weren’t as common as they used to be but many people still wore them, particularly in the mills. I used to have mine made by Alf Whiteoak at Whitemoor. He supplemented his living as a farmer by clogging and would clog a pair of old boots if the leather was good enough. By this I mean that he would take the boot upper and fit it on a wooden sole and you finished up with a good pair of clogs. I always wore double irons, two pairs fitted inside each other. These wore well and the beauty of them was that when they got worn down you could take them off, drive pegs into the old nail holes and fit new irons yourself. To this day I still have pegs, irons and clog nails in the workshop! Some people had rubber ‘irons’ but I never liked them. One big advantage of wearing clogs around cattle was that they always heard you coming and you were less likely to startle them, this meant that there was a lot less risk of you getting kicked. It was for this same reason that I always whistled when I was working with cattle that were tied up, they knew where you were and it made them a lot easier to deal with. I’ve just finished a two year contract repairing machinery in a museum and they told me when I finished that the thing they would miss most was the fact that I whistled all the time. Old habits die hard!
Back to the kitchen. I remember coming in one November evening in 1965. It had been a long day and one of those horrible November , windy, driving rain, miserable days. I didn’t have waterproof clothing then, you just wore a heavy donkey jacket and let it soak the rain up. When I came in I was cold, wet and miserable. Vera knew exactly what to do, she opened up the firedoor of the Rayburn and made me a hot pint of tea. I didn’t even take my coat off but sat there trying to get warm. As I sat there I heard a noise and looked round to see what it was. It was the corner of the carpet flapping in the draught coming in under the door! This triggered something off in me. Here I was working all the hours that God sent, with three children in the house and a wife and I couldn’t even keep them warm. I made a unilateral decision and told Vera that we were going to have central heating. I doubt if a statement like this would have much impact now, everybody has central heating. In those days it was just about unheard of in a working class home. We were still living in the era of cold bedrooms, living with all the doors closed in the house and virtually existing in winter on the hearth rug in front of the solitary fire. We didn’t even have a hearth rug! No wonder Vera looked at me as though I had taken leave of my senses. I doubt if she believed me at the time.
I can’t remember when we actually put heating in but I know it wasn’t long. I went down to Briggs and Duxbury’s and had a word with Harold Duxbury. He sent a man up to measure the house and in due course I was summoned to see Harold and he gave me the bad news. “The heating system you are proposing for Hey Farm will cost every halfpenny of £314-7-6!” or something like that. I told him the cost didn’t matter, we had to have it done and I would let him know. I got a lower price off a couple of plumbers who had a shop at the top of Newtown, I can’t for the life of me remember their names, this included double panel radiators which I insisted on but they regarded as a useless extravagance! I had to cut the channels in the floor for the pipes and drive holes through the walls to get the cost down. This was a serious matter when the walls were two feet thick. I remember I was working away in the front room with a seven pound hammer and a big star drill when Billy Entwistle, a local builder and slater came to visit. He saw what I was doing and said there was an easier way. He showed me that the walls had no foundations in the modern sense. They were simply built on blue limestone flags laid on the bare earth. This meant that the trick to getting a pipe through them was to dig a hole at each side and tunnel through. Once the pipe was in, the cavity was packed with sand and the floor re-instated. This was what I did and the system was quickly installed.
The boiler was in the washhouse and was a Wilson Wallflame oil burner. This was a wonderfully simple boiler, the burner consisted of a small jet driven by an electric motor in the middle of the base. A dip tube went down from the jet to an oil reservoir under the motor and as the jet was spun round by the motor, centrifugal force dragged the oil up the tube and threw it out of the jet against the wall of the boiler which was covered with an asbestos compound. An ignition spark ignited the oil on the wall and the oil burned up the wall of the inside surface of the boiler. A simple shutter arrangement regulated the combustion air entering under the burner and the result was that you could control combustion to give a blue flame which gave perfect results. The plumbers said we needed a 50,000BThU boiler, I told them to fit a 75,000 unit. A 600 gallon tank was put in at the back and filled and the system fired up. It took about a fortnight for the walls to heat up and we only had radiators downstairs and one in the bathroom but it transformed the house. Later, I put another radiator in the small bedroom with the lean-to roof at the top of the stairs as it was always a cold room. I think Vera would agree that it was the single most important change we made all the time we were at Hey Farm. I forget how we paid for it. I have an idea I went to Mr Batkin who was still at Burnley and borrowed £500. Whatever, we had cured the heat problem and I’m sure it was good for our health if not our temper!
While I was on for Richard we did something with the front room. We had always discussed the probability of their being an old fireplace behind the modern chimney breast but had never plucked up the courage to get on with doing something about it. One Sunday, I remember it was sunny and warm and probably in 1966 or 67, I went out to the workshop, got a seven pound sledgehammer, went into the front room and struck the chimney breast a blow just over the mantlepiece. At first Vera thought I’d had a funny turn but as soon as she realised what I was doing she joined in with a will. I broke out the masonry and Vera barrowed it outside where eventually it made the base for another garage to rent. By the end of the afternoon we had uncovered a four foot square by four feet deep fireplace complete except that the ornamental edge of the lintel that formed the mantelpiece had been broken off. We also uncovered an alcove and a small mullion window to the left of the fireplace. We swept up and that was it for the day. Over a period of weeks we got Billy Entwistle in to give us a hand and replaced the summer beam across the breast and fitted a new oak mantlepiece. The alcove and the mullion were tidied up and shelves fitted and we stripped all the casing and woodgrain paper off the oak beams. When all was tidied up, the paper stripped and the whole lot decorated we had the best front room in Barlick and it is like that to this day. In fact as I write this Hey Farm is being sold to a friend of Richard’s daughter Katherine. I may yet get to see the inside of the place again.
I’ll have to consult Vera about the year but we eventually put a very good wool fitted carpet in this room, it was a Crossley carpet with a sculpted pile and was absolutely magnificent. Jimmy Thompson at Marton made a hood and a firebasket for the hearth and I made a new front door out of a large packing case. I hasten to say it was good wood and I made the door with the old furniture and bolts and I bet every one thinks it’s the original 16th. Century door!.
By the end of 1969 all the girls were attending Church School and Vera had started doing a part time job during the day. At various times she was a dinner lady at New Road School and a Home Help for the elderly. The point I want to make here is that Vera did this not because we couldn’t manage. She did it to earn some money for herself and she always had a cache of notes stowed away somewhere which provided for clothes for the kids and little extras. I remember that one day about this time we hired a car and had a day out at Chester Zoo. On the way back we called in at a little roadside café for some tea and Vera went to order and pay, she always managed the money. After a minute or two I realised that there was some sort of minor problem at the counter so I strolled over there. I got the shock of my life, the problem was that Vera was paying for the meal with a £20 note! In those days £20 was a weeks wage for most people and I suppose the equivalent now would be a £100 note. I had never seen a note this size before and neither had the people in the café. Eventually they decided it was kosher and changed it but I was, and still am, vastly impressed. I was even more impressed when she told me that she had more than one. I can’t speak too highly of Vera’s ability to manage and prosper off sod all. I don’t know how she did it but we never went short of anything. Actually this isn’t true. There was one area of the domestic economy where Vera was woefully inadequate, she would not buy new underclothes until hers were falling to pieces! If she had any money she spent it on the kids, never herself. My reaction to this was to buy her knickers for her, I don’t think she bought any at all for years. To this day, I’m a good man in a knicker shop! Come to think, we did have one little extravagance while father and mother were still living with us.
Father and I used to have a couple of bob on the pools. He did the Treble Chance and I favoured the Three Draws. One week he got a letter and told me that we had both won that week, he had £75 from the Treble Chance and I had £15 from the Three Draws. This was good news but it all soured a little when I looked at the letter and realised that father had got it the wrong way round, it was me that had won the £75! Now Vera and I had had a running joke going whereby I had promised her that when our ship came in she could have anything she wanted that we could afford. Never a big spender, she said she’d settle for a Moreland sheepskin coat, she really fancied one. I rang Eric Hepworth up at Wood End Farm as he had a sideline on the farm, Craven Lambskins run by his wife Moira, I asked him what a Moreland Coat would cost and found we almost had enough so I sprang a surprise on Vera and we went up and bought the coat she wanted. That was the end of the pools win, but never mind, I had treasures in heaven and a very happy woman!
I feel I have to allow myself one of my polemics now about the difference between standard of living and quality of life. I hear so often nowadays people telling other people how well off we are. The classic of course in the 60’s was Harold Macmillan’s speech when he told the nation “they had never had it so good!” I’m afraid I don’t buy this. In terms of standard of living, Vera and I would be regarded now as being deprived in the late 1960’s, we had hardly any furniture, no carpets, inadequate heating, no car, TV, video or computers. We couldn’t afford holidays and our wardrobes were very basic. However, we were well fed, had three healthy children, owned seven acres and a five bedroom house. We were secure, I had a regular job, we were both healthy and depression never even entered our heads. Vera was always in the house when the children were, they never came home to an empty house, they sat down to breakfast and teatime as a family at a table with a white cloth, side plates and a good, cooked meal. I baked bread every Thursday and we usually had home fed bacon hung up somewhere. Our quality of life was excellent because we were satisfied and apart from the usual ongoing payments, we didn’t owe money to anyone. When Vera got a bit down I used to point out to her that there were people riding down the road in cars to go shopping in Barlick who daren’t go in some of the shops because they owed so much money.
Contrast this with today. It would be impossible nowadays for a couple to buy a terraced house, never mind a farm, on one working wage. Both will have to go out to work and having children becomes impossible for many people because “they can’t afford it”. They may have two cars, fitted carpets, TV, video, computers and foreign holidays but to my mind they are missing out on the basics. So, my question is, “How much better is it now compared with forty years ago?” Of course we both had to work hard. Vera washed every day and there was always a pile of ironing and the house to keep clean. I generated my fair share of washing because I had a dirty job and there was always a faint smell of animals in the house! Vera tended the garden as well, I’d do some of the heavy digging and cutting wood for the fire but the major part of the work fell to her. I was away early in the morning and didn’t usually get home until the children were in bed during the week, I was still doing 80 hours plus but it never felt hard to me. I don’t think Vera would describe it as hard either because it was an improvement on what we had before and was what we were brought up to expect. The other bonus was that we could see we were getting on, we were improving the house, the children were growing well and the amount we owed the bank was gently reducing. All told, we were managing well and didn’t have any serious problems, things could have been a lot worse.
Ted Waite was almost a member of the family by this time and there was a steady stream of visitors to the house. A regular caller was Harry Horsefield from Sunnybank Farm, Whitemoor. He used to bring his wife into Barlick to do the shopping once a week, I think it was Friday, and while she was getting the groceries and having her hair done he would come up and have an hour with us. I remember once saying to Vera when I happened to be in when he visited, “It doesn’t matter how bad things get, as long as we’ve people like that calling in to visit us everything is all right!” This applied to the kids as well. They were growing up and were mates with all the kids round about. The Farm was a wonderful place to play and look at the animals, there was usually a gang of kids roaming about, playing games and helping Ted. I know it sounds like an impossibly ideal childhood but it was like that. I’m sure none of these kids has ever forgotten the sunny days spent at the farm with the animals and seven acres of adventure playground to go at complete with a spring and a stream in the bottom of the valley. In winter of course, a slight fall of snow meant that the field was the place to be with your sledge so it was all the year round entertainment.
Mother and father of course were down at Avon Drive but they were frequent visitors at the farm, especially mother. She and Ursula, Richard’s wife soon came to an arrangement whereby mother was picked up and taken to Yew Tree where she helped with the housework. I think that they got on very well and Ursula gained a lot from having a surrogate grandmother about. This relationship continued until it became too much for mother, she was getting older and father needed more attention. I often called in on the way home, I had done this with the tanker when I was with the dairy. I remember one occasion in particular, on the 21st. of October 1966, the day the coal tip slid down on Aberfan and killed the schoolchildren in the school as they were at their lessons. I heard the news on the radio as I was driving home and by the time I was in Avon Drive turning round I was in tears. I went in the house and mother and I had a good cry about it. They always say that everybody can remember where they were the day that John Kennedy was shot, not me, I haven’t the faintest idea but Aberfan was a different kettle of fish, I had kids of my own and the thought of losing children in such a horrible, wasteful and above all, avoidable way still affects me deeply. There was of course the shameful matter of the aftermath of the tragedy, not many people remember but the government and the Coal Board had the audacity to levy a charge on the disaster fund towards the expense of clearing the tips. I shall never forgive this callous act and I hope other people will remember it also.
In passing here’s another curious fact. Every time Vera had a child I used to get stomach ache during the last weeks of pregnancy. I have seen me have to pull off the road and wait for the griping pains to subside. Mother said it was sympathetic labour pains, I have to agree with her because I have no problems otherwise with my stomach. I was reminded of this in January 1999 when I had similar pains but not as bad as Janet was having my sixth grandchild, HarryII!
Back on the job with Drinkall’s all was well. I’m not saying that everything was rosy all the time but on the whole it was a good job and good gaffers. If there was any friction at all it was with Keith, the brother who farmed at Gargrave. I got on with Richard wonderfully, he appreciated good work and had the sense to give me some rope when I got short-tempered. This didn’t happen often but the pressure of long hours and many miles sometimes took their toll. We both knew this I think and any spats soon blew over, there was never any long term aggravation. David treated me well. Apart from the fact that he always fed me, a big bonus, his wife Mary had worked at Marton in the laboratory when I was there. She was a Southwell from Salterforth and I knew her mother and father and brother as well. Her brother had terrible luck, he married a lovely little lass who also worked in the laboratory at Marton and she died very suddenly and at a young age when they had two children. They were farming on Thornton Drag at the time and I can remember thinking what rotten luck this was. Anyway, there were points of contact between me and David’s family and it made it very comfortable.
David and I had some good trips up to Lanark but we had some hairy ones as well. We set off from Demense one morning and the road was shot ice, this was often a problem on the first day of the week because the Council tended to cut down on gritting at weekends especially on roads that weren’t bus routes. David usually settled down to sleep straight away but he soon realised that I was driving a lot slower than usual. I told him we were travelling on ice and I was doing the best I could. It really was terrible, I was literally creeping round bends especially where there was any camber but we were making progress. The hope was that when we got to Long Preston and the main road the gritting wagons would be out and we could find a bit of grip.
No such luck, if anything the main road was worse than the side roads had been. By the time I got into Settle I had decided that enough was enough. I pulled in quietly to the side of the road outside the Naked Man Café in the centre of Settle and as the wagon stopped it slid quietly into the gutter until it hit the kerb. David roused himself and asked why I had stopped. I told him it was too dangerous to go on and the best thing to do was wait until the gritting wagon had done its stuff which I reckoned wouldn’t be long. David hadn’t been driving of course and didn’t realise just how bad the road was. He said he would drive and opened the door and jumped out. He went flat on his backside, got up and almost fell again. He stood there hanging on to the door of the wagon and looked at me, give him his due, he wasn’t silly, he said “I see what you mean!” and got back in. I don’t blame him, he wanted to get on and there was no way he could know just how bad it was. Just then I heard a wagon coming from behind, he was fairly motoring and as I looked in the mirror I saw this Bedford pantechnicon coming up the middle of the road and going far too fast. When he saw us stopped he took his foot off and slid straight forward instead of taking the left hand curve out towards the viaduct and finished up two feet from the window of the TV shop across the road. He reversed out and set off again, if anything he was going faster than before. We could hear him fading away into the distance when there was a loud bang, a bit of a pause, and then we heard his engine again but this time he was coming towards us! Seconds later he swept round the bend and vanished down the road the way he had come! David and I looked at each other in amazement and I said I reckoned he had spun on the river bridge and hadn’t realised he was facing the wrong way, we couldn’t think of any other explanation.
We poured a cup of coffee and sat there fretting, I was reassuring David for the third time that we were doing the right thing when we heard a wagon, this time it was the gritter. At this time Buckhaw Brow hadn’t been by-passed and by anybody’s reckoning, it was a bad piece of road so we gave him ten minutes start and then followed. What a difference a bit of salt makes. From there, right up the road we were on gritted roads and didn’t lose more than fifteen minutes. We saw several motors off the road and through the walls and I think David realised that we had done the right thing. The funny thing was the pantechnicon that had hit the bridge in Settle overtook us again up past Carlisle, still going like hell and all the off-side of the cab stoved in. Just before Lanark we passed him again parked in a lay-by, David commented that he hadn’t gained much!
The worst spell of slippy roads I ever saw was nothing to do with frost. We had a long spell of hot weather and it was just before the authorities rebuilt the stretch of road down Beattock as dual carriageway. They had quite naturally been cutting back on the maintenance of the old tarred and chipped road and it had worn smooth. The hot spell had melted the tar and the road had quietly acquired a skin of oil and rubber and turned into a potential skid pan, all it needed was the water! The hot spell ended one afternoon with a quick thunderstorm on the first day of Glasgow Fair. The road was full of holiday traffic and I forget now how many accidents I saw on that stretch. I remember I started counting them but gave up. There were well over fifty but none of them were serious. I have never seen so many cars and wagons off the road before or since, it must have been a bonanza for the local garages!
As I have said, working with Keith it was different experience, he regarded me as a menial and that was what he got. I never lost any sleep about this because I only had to deal with him once a week and he was asleep most of the time! I could never understand how he survived. On the odd occasion when I was with him and he was eating it was almost always a Mars Bar, I used to call him “The Mars Bar Kid” and some had another nickname for him, “Pedro”, he was very dark in complexion and I suppose the association was with a Mexican bandit! This was probably reinforced by some of his deals. He went to Bingley market every Saturday and seemed to know every dodgy character in the place. He would buy calves and stirks there and I sometimes went to pick them up if he was into any quantity. The thing that struck me about Bingley was that it was totally different than any other market we went to. Small men, small deals and generally small beasts! All right, I’m being prejudiced about both Keith and the market but at my age and writing my memoirs I’m allowed a bit of latitude! I did, however, feel sorry for Keith later. He married the daughter of a big cattle dealer in Cheshire, Percy Dodd and all looked set fair but in the end it blew up in his face with much acrimony and grief all round. I don’t care what the reasons were, nobody deserves this kind of luck and I was sorry for both of them particularly as there was a child.
Early in 1970 I had a couple of rough weeks one way and another and personally, I think the effects reverberated down the next few years, remember what I said about Chaos Theory? I reckon a pretty big butterfly flapped its wings. It was February 17 and Keith was on holiday so the plan was varied a bit. I was to take a load of calves up to Ayr and pick cattle up there and bring them back. When I say calves to Ayr, there were actually several drops, the biggest of which was at West Cairngaan right down on the southern end of the Mull of Galloway where there is a village called Drummore. The customer was Mr RWC Colledge who always impressed me as being slightly eccentric and very wealthy, he always had about six cheque books lying on the rear seat of his car! More about him later.
I set off in good time Tuesday morning and as dawn broke it was a beautiful clear sunny morning. I remember clearly that a man was touching the paint up on the front of a shop in Kendal in brilliant sunshine. A great morning to be alive in a good wagon with a light load! You have heard me say before what a fickle mistress the road over Shap Fell could be, she was going to prove this in spades before the hour was out. For the time being though, all was hunky dory and I was doing what I liked best, a good road with no traffic and the challenge of getting the best performance out of the wagon, in safety. As you were climbing the fell there were some fairly severe bends and the trick was to straighten the road out so as to be able to keep the speed up and get as far up the next climb as possible before dropping a gear. This was good driving and saved on fuel, tyres and time. The better you knew the road the more efficiently you could tackle it, I knew every bend and every place where I could get a glimpse through a fold in the hills or a gap in the trees of the road round the corner, if it was clear you could clip the bend and improve on your performance. ‘Cutting corners’ is usually seen as a pejorative term but if you read the Hendon Police Manual on driving, ‘Roadcraft’ you’ll see that the best road drivers in the world, properly trained police drivers, are encouraged to drive like this. The white line in the middle of the road isn’t a barrier, it’s an aid. At no time was this more important than when you were carrying a high load like hay and straw or reducing the G forces on standing cattle. You’ll hear me say time and time again that the old roads were more interesting, this is the reason why, you had to read the road, read the pattern of the traffic and work out what was the safest and most efficient line. When you think about it, your brain was on overdrive all the time and paradoxically, journeys were shorter and took less out of you.
On this particular morning I hammered into the foothills of Shap and the first thing I noticed was the lack of traffic coming south. There was nothing on the road but local motors. The sun went in and it became increasingly gloomy up ahead, then the first few flakes of snow started to fall. Less than a mile up the road and I was faced with a line of stationary wagons and a blizzard. I broke all the rules and started to reverse down the road to where I could get a turn round, I was lucky, got to face south and went back into Kendal where the sun was still shining! There were two choices, I either waited for the ploughs to open the road or I found a way round Shap. My judgement was that as the snow had only just started and was coming down from the north east it was a waste of time to sit hoping Shap would be cleared and the best thing to do was strike out through the Lake District towards the west coast and come up into Carlisle through Whitehaven and Workington. This was a major detour but there would be no snow on the coast and once in Carlisle I was striking out west up to Stranraer and so would get the benefit of the sea and the Gulf Stream. It was very uncommon for snow to be bad up through Galloway.
I started the long weary trail through the Lake District but had no problems with weather, it was clear right up to Carlisle and once through the city I struck out for Castle Douglas, Gatehouse of Fleet, Newton Stuart and Glenluce where I dropped my first calves at Droughduil, John McIntosh’s farm. I once asked John what Droughduil means and it is Gaelic for ‘The House without a view’. From Glenluce I went on to the Mull of Galloway and turned south for Drummore.
The Mull must be one of the most temperate climates in the world. Bounded by sea on three sides it is directly in the path of the Gulf Stream in winter and it was like an early spring day. I stopped at one point for a cup of tea and there were bumble bees buzzing about in the bramble bushes. It was hard to realise that back on Shap the snow was piling into drifts ten feet deep! West Cairngaan was a big old fashioned Scottish farm and, like many such places seemed to be working on something very close to late 19th century levels of staffing. I don’t know how many families the farm supported but there were always plenty of bodies about. Mr Colledge was the West Coast representative for Howards the firm that made the massive green Harvestore silos. He had two at Cairngaan and I was told he had two extra rings on them so as to make them the biggest in Scotland. They had flashing red lights on top so that RAF planes using the nearby bombing range wouldn’t run into them by mistake!
I got to Mr Colledge’s farm at dinnertime and after I had showed his men which calves were theirs, I went in the house for a breakfast. I hadn’t been there long when Mr Colledge came in with blood running down his arm! “That’s a good whelp you’ve got in the cab! I tried to get in and it took me straight away!” Fly, who always rode with me when I was on my own had taken his tenting job seriously and bit a lump out of the customer! Mr Colledge wouldn’t have any apology from me, he said it was his fault, he shouldn’t have tried to get in the cab and would I please go and move the wagon for him.
Back in the house Mr Colledge was bandaged up and as we sat there finishing our meal I noticed a box of shotgun cartridges on a shelf in the kitchen, Eley Yeoman Cartridges. I had never seen this particular brand before and asked if they were new. Mr Colledge said that on the contrary, they were 40 years old. Evidently, just before the outbreak of war, his father had decided to go shooting and was short of cartridges so he sent one of the men off in a pony and trap into Drummore to get him three boxes of shells. An hour later the man hadn’t got back and old Mr Colledge was getting a bit short-fused. Eventually the man came into the yard full of apologies and said that he hadn’t been able to get three boxes, they only had two and a half. When the bloke got them out of the trap he had two and a half cases, not boxes and the Colledge family had never bought a twelve bore cartridge again!
I set off again up the coast through Ballantrae and Girvan up to Ayr. We had a good customer at Ballantrae, Mr McCulloch at Laggan where I picked up 5 heifers. This was a wonderful farm, well run and a credit to the owner. His cattle were always in peak condition and it was a pleasure to call in there. He has retired now and his son declined to take the farm over, this must have been a terrible blow as the one thing that made these farms so good was continuity of ownership, it would have been unthinkable to him that his son wouldn’t eventually become the farmer at Laggan. This tradition was so strong that a man was often identified by the name of his farm.
I got to Ayr just as night was falling, there was some snow there but not much and I was the only English wagon to get through that day. I stayed in a bed and breakfast there and went home on Wednesday with the Ayr cattle.
Thursday , Friday and Saturday that week were full days of local deliveries and Sunday was maintenance day. On the Monday we had a good buy at Lanark and left 6 heifers for me to pick up on Tuesday. In addition, there was a beast to pick up at Ballantrae as well before going back into Ayr to fill up the box for home. It was a late night. On the following day I went for a tetanus booster to the doctors and then loaded 12 heifers for Andrew Snowden at Sturminster Newton in Somerset. I left at noon and it was ten at night when I got there. I had a bite to eat with them, had a couple of hours sleep in the cab and set off back home. I was back in Barlick for nine in the morning. Later that day I took 12 cows to Harry Laight’s at Droitwich.
On Friday David decided he would take XWU to Beeston and leave me mechanicking at home. Never a good decision to separate a driver from his wagon and I didn’t like it. I liked it even less when I heard that David had lost a fan belt on the way down to Beeston, failed to notice the warning light and carried on until he had boiled the engine dry, blown the gasket and partially seized the engine. He left her in Oakmore Garage at Sandiway where it was supposedly repaired. I went down for it on Sunday and it was a mess, the tappets were wide open and it was dead, no power at all. By this time I was feeling poorly, the previous days were catching up on me and my resistance was down. I left XWU at Demense for David and went home to be sick for a day or two. I have to admit that part of my thinking was that as he was responsible for buggering the engine he might as well put up with the consequences!
So, on Monday there was I was laid low with a terrible cold and a sore throat and had been in bed all weekend. David had done Lanark with Richard as co-driver going up, like in the old days. Keith had to do Ayr alone the day after and Richard came back with him. On Tuesday evening I was recovering at home and had let Ursula know I would be back in action on the Wednesday when Mary, David’s wife, came to the house from Demense. She told me that Keith had broken down with my wagon on Shap Fell and had managed to get to the Jungle Café where he and Richard were waiting for help. Could I go back to Demense with her and take HYG up to the Jungle and sort the job out? I chucked my tools into Mary’s car, we went to Demense and I set off up the road in the old Leyland to see what I could do.
When I got to the Jungle Keith was not in the best of health and temper and Richard was pretty fed up to. After asking Keith a few questions, I sent him and Richard into the café and tipped the cab of XWU so I could get to the engine and lifted the rocker cover off to have a look. What Keith had done, and don’t ask me how he’d done it because theoretically it’s impossible, was go directly from top gear to second at something over 40mph. The consequences were that he’d stripped the dog clutch on second gear but as he’d got into the gear by the time this had happened, he had over revved the engine. Normally it ran at 2000rpm. maximum but I reckon he had been up at 5000rpm. or so. The consequence was he had bent all the push rods and broken one of the cam followers, it was a miracle none of the valves had dropped in and smashed the engine. Remember, this was a poorly engine when he set off and this wouldn’t have helped.
I had the choice between sending for the breakdown wagon and transferring the cattle to HYG or attempting a temporary repair and creeping home as we were. The cattle were quiet and content so, after consulting with Richard, who left the decision to me, I took all the push rods out, straightened them as best I could by hammering them on a stone as an anvil and re-fitted them, setting the valve clearances as near as I could get them but leaving them wider than usual. I blanked off the feed to the injector on the cylinder with the broken cam follower and left the push rods out of that one, we now had a five cylinder engine! I tried it out and the engine started but ran like a basket of pots. However, the noise was all in the top end and I decided that, noisy as it was, it would run. Then I tried the gearbox. As far as I could see 2nd. Gear had gone AWOL and the rest of it was dodgy, it ground and moaned something horrible when I tried it on the car park. Top gear was direct drive, in other words, it was a straight shaft through the gearbox and I reckoned that if I could get it going and keep it in top as much as possible by going down the M6 to Samlesbury instead of down through Settle we could get home.
I went in the café, had a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich and we set off. Just for once I was in charge and I told Keith to follow me all the way to Demense so he was there to take the cattle off me and get them home if we broke down completely. It was a long weary trail and I think Richard rode with me, probably because it was the more comfortable seat!. I don’t know about Keith’s journey but it did me no good at all to listen to the engine running terribly roughly and the gear box grinding itself into ever smaller pieces. But, we made it, got the cattle off and I took XWU home. The following day a phone call to Gilbraith’s, the Leyland dealers at Accrington ascertained that there wasn’t a five speed box available. However, they had an Albion box which was exactly the same but with an overdrive on it. The premium for this was less than the cost of hiring wagons and if I got down there they could do the job in a day. Richard agreed to this so I went to Accrington and came out with new push rods and cam followers, freshly adjusted valves and one more gear than I had gone in with. Jack Ruddy, the foreman asked me if I wanted a new gear lever knob marked with six gears instead of five but I told him no. I didn’t need a notice to tell me where overdrive was and seeing as how I knew it was going to be an extremely fast wagon I didn’t want anybody else to know it had one. I mentioned this to Richard and he kept quiet about it. There was one good thing about the whole episode, Jack and his men had managed to cure the faults induced by the seize-up on Saturday and, whilst not in perfect nick, XWU was certainly far better than she had been on the Sunday when I brought it out of Sandiway. With hindsight though, I am sure the seeds had been sown for a later breakdown that was to have much more serious consequences.
XWU was a fast wagon before the new box but afterwards it was awesome. Of course it was so high geared that it was useless in overdrive unless you were going downhill or had a following wind but it meant that you could cruise on the flat at very low revs. and high speed. I never found out what the maximum speed was on the governor. I’ve seen the speedo needle go right round the clock and almost hit the stop at zero! It must have been well over 90mph. Of course it wasn’t long before David twigged something was different. We were going up to Lanark the following week with a few calves and I got her up to about 50 on the dual carriageway on the A74 and slipped it into sixth in high range. After a while David leaned over and looked at the speedo, we were doing just over 70 and passing everything on the road, he asked me if I’d altered the governor but I came clean and told him the truth. He couldn’t wait to have a go himself and after that we enjoyed the luxury of what must have been one of the fastest wagons in the world! It was a good thing having more choice and saved fuel. Eventually when we sold XWU to Bob Laird I told his driver about the overdrive and warned him not to put it in unless he was doing at least 50mph. and he didn’t believe me. Several months later I saw him on the road and he told me that all doubts had vanished! He was extremely pleased with it!
Richard left all the maintenance to me. If I wanted new tyres I didn’t have to ask permission, I just got them fitted and never ran them too far down. I always used Michelins and we got them from Peter Harrison at Chatburn Tyre Services. I can remember we were buying 900X20 tyres for HYG for £34-10-0 each at that time. Gilbraith’s at Accrington did our heavy repairs and at one point I took HYG in for new king pins. I mention this because there was a curious coincidence which is worth a mention.
The first time I went in there I saw a bloke in a brown smock sweeping the floor. When he turned round I saw it was Tom Fitton the bookie I’d won all the money off years before. I went across to talk to him and find out how he had landed up in Accrington and found it wasn’t Tom but his double! He was the splitting image of Tom and it was uncanny. The reason why this comes to mind is that he was the main man for striking king pins out of the housing in the axle. I should explain; the king pin is the swivel on which the front wheel moves when steered. They are mounted from below in the end of the axle in a taper housing so that the more weight goes on them, the tighter they become. Over the life of the pin they become very firmly fixed in the axle end and getting them out can be a problem. The certain method is to take the axle out from under the wagon and press the pins out hydraulically but this means dismantling the whole of the front end. If it can be managed, an easier way is to warm the end of the axle and drive the pins out with a seven pound hammer. The problem here is that you haven’t got a straight blow at the pin because it is under the front wing. The bloke who swept up, despite his slight build, was the best striker in the shop and he always attended to king pins. Striking well is not a matter of strength but of aim and co-ordination. This bloke came along and drove both pins out with a couple of blows, very impressive.
While we’re on the matter of steering and king pins, I was in Gilbraiths one day with XWU and one of the mechanics noticed I had ‘threepenny bit’ tyres on the front. This was what we called a peculiar wear pattern that sometimes arose because the track wasn’t quite right on the front end. Unlike the back axle, the track could be adjusted by lengthening or shortening the track rod. The mechanic brought out their new toy, an optical tracking bar they had just had delivered. He measured the track and announced that it was a mile out! I told him to leave it alone as I had just adjusted it myself and I knew I was somewhere near, I was waiting for further wear to confirm that I had it right. If I was correct the threepenny bit wear would fade out. The mechanic didn’t like this and an argument ensued. In the end, Jack Ruddy the foreman was called in to arbitrate. I told him his track bar was wrong but he wouldn’t believe me. In the end I said that I’d accept their verdict if they would track the back wheels and show me a parallel reading, which of course it had to be. This was sensible so they did it. The bar showed the back axle to be way out of track as well so Jack told them to leave my tracking alone, pack up the bar and send it back to Dunlops for checking. He told me later that I was right, the bar was faulty and they got a new one.
While I was at Gilbraiths this day I went down into Accrington for a cup of tea and a sandwich and on the way back came across a deserted churchyard under the railway viaduct. I went in out of curiosity and found a wonderful gravestone which has stuck in my memory ever since. It was very simple, it recorded the name of this young lad aged eight years and said “Killed by a falling slate during the Great Gale of 18??” What a lesson for us all and what a great metaphor for life! You never know when that slate is going to fall so the best thing to do is fill the days!
The main benefit in the early days with Drinkalls was the learning curve. The most immediate source of new skills and information was Richard and John Henry but my time with David on Monday was valuable as well. We were mostly concerned with calves then. Of course, my year at Harrods with Lionel had given me a grounding and it made me more immediately useful to Richard. Mind you, I kept some of this experience to myself. I remember one day we were in the byre at Marton and John Henry was milking. A cluster fell off a cow and I automatically got down and replaced it. When I got up John was looking at me and said “It’s not the first time you’ve done that!” I came clean but asked him not to tell Richard, there were some things it would be better if he didn’t know! I could see myself relief milking and God knows what if Richard found out I could do it! I was never very good at hand-milking, I could do it but had no speed. John Henry kept quiet and it was a long time before Richard twigged.
A feeling for stockmanship is essential if you are going to make a good job of carting cattle. I hear so much about the cruelties of animal transport nowadays from well-meaning animal rights activists who know sod all about the subject. Their version is that any transport of animals is, by definition, cruel. This is a load of balls. I am not saying that cruelty doesn’t exist, I shall get on to that later but what I do contend is that there are many skilled and caring drivers shifting stock without any cruelty at all.
Cattle, if treated properly, enjoy a ride in a wagon. I stopped many a time on the road and had a quick look in at them. You knew they were happy if they were standing quietly, peering out of the ventilation slots at the world outside and, in many cases, stood there in a dream, chewing the cud. For those of you who don’t know, a cow has a very complicated and efficient digestive system. They eat in two phases, first they graze and swallow the food, whatever it is, in fist sized balls. When they have had enough they settle down to the secondary process of ‘cudding’ the food. They won’t do this unless they are quiet and content. The mechanism is that they regurgitate a ball of food and chew it thoroughly to grind it into what is almost like thick porridge. They swallow this and it goes directly to the digestive tract where their stomach completes the process. You will never see a cow cudding if it is distracted, frightened, uncomfortable or in any way disturbed so it’s a sure sign that all is well.
The way to keep them happy in the wagon was to avoid imposing any stress on them. You did this by making sure they had a level standing, a good grip on the floor, the right temperature, plenty of ventilation and were not overcrowded or bullied. This process starts with loading them. If you were to watch me loading cattle at one of the markets you would seldom see me use a stick or force the cattle on the wagon. I always carried a stick but the main use was to touch the cows to guide them or separate them. It was also a sign of authority that cattle recognise and at times had to be used as a method of defence. Most people if asked about dangerous cattle will immediately start to think about bulls. A bull can be dangerous but the worst cases of potential damage to people I ever saw were, without exception, cows, particularly if they had a calf at foot. I have lost count of the number of broken bones I have had from cows. While I was on for Richard I had two lots of cracked ribs and a broken bone in my hand.
Take a typical day at Ayr market, Richard has bought his cattle, any that have to be milked have been done and are walking them down the alleyways to a holding pen at the back of the wagon. On the way down, both Richard and I have been watching the cattle and making assessments of size, temperament, closeness to calving and possible ill-health. If there was one that we weren’t sure of for any reason it would go in first and be gated up on its own facing the near-side of the wagon where the small calf door was. There were two reasons for this, first it was easy to inspect on the way down the road, a quick stop in a lay-by and a peep through the calf door showed you everything you needed to know. The dividing gates finished a foot above the bed of the wagon and you could look right through to the back of the wagon. If all you could see was feet the job was a good one, it meant they were all standing. Second, being on its own and protected from pressure from the other cattle during braking, the front beast had a superb ride and would stand quiet and content. Third, because it was content, it acted as a calming influence on the other cattle. If you have a bunch of cattle in the front end of the box, say you only have one gate and have split the load into two equal halves, eight beasts in each section, no matter how carefully you drive, when you brake there is some pressure on the front beast and it is pushed up against the blank front wall of the box. They hate this, it is completely outside their normal experience and their reaction is to shove back against the other cattle. To do this they put their feet against the front wall and push as hard as they can. In the process they start to climb the wall. The cattle they are pushing fight back and before you know where you are you have a section full of panicked cattle and sooner or later one will loose it’s footing and go down. Once down the other cattle tread on it. Because this is happening the cow that is down can’t get up on its brisket, in other wards it can’t get its head up and if a cow can’t do this it looses consciousness, its eyes roll back until only the whites are showing and it is in extreme distress. This is the most common cause of death in transit. If the front cow is under no stress, the beast that gets any pressure from braking is the front one of the seven in the next compartment which is up against the gate. Instead of a blank wall it has a cow next to it which is calm and cudding or at least, stood comfortably. This reassures the beast under pressure and it doesn’t fight back when leaned on, the result is no panic and a smooth ride. The same applies to the front beast of the eight in the back compartment.
So, Richard and I have identified the one we want in front and it’s walked in and the gate swung to and secured then the next seven are loaded. Because the beast at the front has slightly more room than the others we tended to pick the smaller beasts to go in the seven slot. Once again the gate is swung across and secured and the last eight walked on and the internal gates shut and the ramp put up. The trick then is to get going and not hang about. The reason for this is that even with all the vents open, a box full of cattle in a stationary wagon will start to heat up through lack of ventilation.
For the first few miles I used to drive very gently, you could feel the cattle moving about as they sorted themselves out nose to tail so they had more room. Once they had gone through this process you could start to get on a bit building up gradually and almost training the cattle to roll with the bends as it were. By the time you had done twenty miles they were experts. This didn’t mean you could throw the wagon into the bends but as long as you drove smoothly and straightened the road out you could get on at a fair clip. I always had a flask of tea or coffee in the cab and a sure way of telling whether you were driving within the beasts capabilities was to have a full cup of coffee stood on top of the engine and not spill a drop as you were going down the road.
After a couple of hours it was a good thing to stop and have a look at the cattle. You might do it before this if you had any reason to suspect that there might be trouble either from your assessment of the cattle during loading or some indication while you were going along that all was not well. It was amazing how, with experience, what was happening in the box was transmitted through the seat of your trousers. I could usually tell if a beast had gone down or panicked. Sometimes, you got them so relaxed that one would get down just for a rest. This wasn’t dangerous as long as they had their head up and were comfortable and sometimes I have let them do this but the danger is that they can get a teat stood on and this damages them as milk cattle and means they can’t be sold until they have healed up. So, if one was down you had to get it up. The way to do this on the road was to get in the box via the calf door and climb over the cattle until you got to the offender. There is a nerve in the cows back alongside the spine and if you put some pressure on this they will usually get up straight away. If this didn’t work, a kick in the ribs might do it, don’t cringe, we aren’t hurting her, she weighs nearly half a ton perhaps and all we are doing is giving her a shock. If this didn’t work their was a sure way of getting a healthy beast to get up, just pee in her ear! Cows hate this and they would get up straight away if they weren’t ill, only trouble is they shake their head when they do it! If all this failed you had a poorly cow and all you could do was get to somewhere where you could tip the beasts out and attend to the casualty.
If things were bad with the beast any port in a storm was the rule. You could pull into any farm and the farmer would help you, indeed many were either Drinkall customers or knew of the firm. Our reputation was second to none and there was never any problem on this score. It was very unusual for me to do this, I had my preferred places, Annan market on the Ayr road and Carlisle market on the Lanark run always had a gate open and a dock free for this purpose. Annan was good because the local veterinary surgeon had an office at the auction mart and a vet in residence in a house attached. I have knocked this bloke up many a time in the middle of the night for calvings, slow or milk fever and injuries. Eventually, I got him out of bed one night and he came to the door and asked me what I had for him. “Two calvers, one slow fever (glucose deficiency) and one milk fever (calcium deficiency).” He reached behind the door and shoved a plastic bag in my hand, “Here you are, get on with it, you know what to do just as much as I do!” In the bag was a bottle of Driffield oil, a set of calving chains, three injection kits each for glucose and calcium and a bar of soap! I realised I had been paid some sort of a compliment and went about my business. I backed on to the dock and let the ramp down and opened all the gates so the cattle could wander where they liked either in the wagon or on the loading dock behind. There was a light in the box and it was fairly easy to pen the cow you wanted to deal with using the internal gates and get on with attending to it. Calvings were usually simple. As soon as the cow had licked the calf you tried to get it to take a drop of milk but didn’t worry too much about this. I used to just leave them with their mother for a while as I dealt with the other cattle and had a cup of tea. When I was ready to reload I bagged the calves in a sack with their head poking out of the top and put them on the luton over the cab. Then the cattle were put back on the wagon and away you went again, nothing to it! Most trips were trouble free but my record was five calvings in one trip from Kirriemuir when I had the wagon and trailer and 32 cattle on board.
There was a funny consequence to the Annan vet. Giving me the emergency kit. A couple of weeks later we were in the auction on Thursday morning and one of our cattle which we’d calved at Marton went into an acute attack of milk fever. This is common in heavy milkers and is caused by the cows metabolism being thrown out of balance by suddenly swinging into full milk production before it’s system can compensate. The cow becomes calcium deficient because too much of its reserves are going into the milk and this affects their brain and they start to go into a coma. Richard noticed this and asked me if I had a calcium bottle in the cab. I told him yes and he said to dose the cow. I went out for my Annan kit and attended to it.
At that time the common outfit for injecting calcium or glucose was to use a glass bottle containing about a half litre of the solution to be injected and a rubber pipe with a fitting that went over the neck of the bottle, a needle fitted in the end of the pipe and there was a ‘flutter valve’ which was a slit in the chamber at the top of the pipe where it fitted on the bottle which allowed air to bubble up into the bottle and compensate for the fluid that had drained down. Flutter valves were a nuisance because they tended to get sticky after repeated use no matter how well you cleaned them and you had to keep squeezing the rubber chamber to get the valve to open. A new method had come on to the market which was a disposable kit consisting of a plastic bag full of solution, an integral plastic pipe and a needle already fitted. All this was sealed in a package and sterile. Because the plastic bag collapsed as the solution drained out there was no flutter valve and it was a far better and more hygienic way of doing the job. The kit the Annan vet. had given me had the new packaging.
There are two ways of getting the calcium into the beast. The more usual and safest way was to inject into a large muscle at the top of the hind leg and massage it in. A quicker way was directly into the milk vein. This acted a lot faster but was dangerous for two reasons, first you could get air into the vein and this would kill the cow if it got to the heart, and second, you had to be careful that you didn’t introduce the calcium too quickly or it could shock the beast and kill also. I knew we wanted the cow on the road as soon as possible so I decided to go for the milk vein. The way to do it was to take the needle off the package and get it well into the vein, as soon as you were in, blood would flow copiously on to the floor. Then you broke the seal on the pack and with solution running out of the tube, slipped it over the needle. This ensured that there was no air in the system. The blood would run up the tube and you countered it by putting a little pressure on the bag to force the solution into the cow. Another advantage of the new pack was that the tube was transparent and you could see exactly what you were doing. Then it was a matter of patience, you stood there leaning on the cow and regulating the flow of solution by pressure on the bag. The cow was feeling ropey so it stood quietly through the procedure.
I was leaning against the cow and quietly introducing the calcium into the milk vein when a voice came from behind me. “What do you think you’re doing!” I looked round and it was Mr Clark the vet. from Colne. He had seen I was into the milk vein. “Have you any idea how dangerous that is!” I managed to calm him down by telling him exactly what I had done and how bad the cow was. He accepted this and all was well when he realised that I was doing everything by the book but then he noticed the package I was using. “Where did you get that. We haven’t managed to get hold of any yet!” I told him that the Scottish vets. were obviously more advanced than the English ones and he went away muttering things about the death of the profession! I’d known him for a long time and he was a bloody good vet. He came to me one day in Gisburn and asked me if I’d give one of his trainee vets a hand as he had an urgent call. Richard didn’t need me at that moment and he said it was OK.
I went with Mr Clark to a small loose box and inside was a heifer in a bad way. She was trying to calve but couldn’t pass the calf because it was too big. This was a problem that sometimes arose especially if a small built breed had been inseminated with Friesian semen. The cure was to cut the calf up inside the heifer so she could pass it and it was known as a Friesian Operation. Mr. Clark left and it soon became apparent to me that the young vet. was completely out of his depth. He knew what to do but not how to go about it. I had done these before with the vet. and knew what to do so I showed him how to go on. I am lucky on occasions like this because I have relatively small hands and this is a big advantage when you’re trying to get your arm up alongside a calf in the cows passage.
The technique is to use a piece of de-horning wire to cut the calf in half down its spine. By the time this operation is done the calf is already dead so let’s not have any cries of cruelty! The object of the exercise is to save the heifer and this operation is far quicker and safer than a caesarian section. That is only done to save the calf and the mother. De-horning wire is in effect a flexible saw blade. It was first developed for cutting cows horns off but is equally effective for what we were about to do. The first thing was to cut the calf’s head off, this is easy because by the time the operation is necessary the head is outside the heifer, it’s the haunches that are the problem. Having cut off the head you have to push the body of the calf back into the womb far enough to give you space to work. This can be the hardest part of the procedure if the heifer has any strength left because she’s trying desperately to send the calf the other way. Then you get hold of the end of a piece of de-horning wire about five feet long and pass it up alongside the calf, through its back legs and back down outside the heifer. Then you put two pieces of plastic pipe about twelve inches long over each end of the wire and slip these down inside the passage to protect it from the cutting action of the wire. The next step is to fix two pieces of wood to the ends of the wire to act as handles. After a quick check that the wire is still in place between the back legs, one person holds the plastic pipe in place and the other exerts a gentle pull and saws the wire back and forth. It cuts easily down the spine and usually keeps very straight. When the wire comes free all you have to do is push one half of the calf back, draw out the other half and then remove the remainder. All the pressure is off the heifer and after a short rest they will usually part with the cleansing and proceed just like a normal birth. They have no distress and milk normally. All that has happened is that you have lost a calf. The young vet was delighted and I told him that as far as anyone else was concerned he had done it and I had helped. Years later, I was in hospital and met Mr Clark again. He had just had a gall bladder operation and was complaining bitterly because they had him out of bed the following day. I told the two nurses who were walking him up and down the ward who he was and advised them to get a couple of bales of straw and prop him up on his brisket! We had a chat afterwards and he told me that the young vet had confessed later about who had actually done the Friesian operation.
John Henry was an expert man at calving cattle and I learned a lot from him. Usually the beast would manage by itself with a little bit of encouragement but occasionally they found it hard going and the calving chains came in handy, you slipped one over each front leg and gave the beast a bit of a hand to get rid. The only problems came when a calf wasn’t presented the right way. It could be a bit of a struggle to get a front leg straightened out and down the passage alongside the head which was the proper position. You had to push the calf back into the cow to do this and they have some fair muscles pushing the other way! We sometimes had breech calves. These were bad because the calf tended to start breathing while the head was still inside the womb and this drowned them or at least got a lot of fluid into the lungs. We never tried to turn them but calved them as quickly as possible backwards. Another danger here was that in the rush and with the force that had to be used, the pelvis of the beast could be strained. Once the calf was out a piece of straw poked up the nostril would usually get them to sneeze, a quick rub down with a handful of straw to get the circulation going and then, if possible, get the mother to lick it. A bit of salt was a good trick here, cows love it! I always had some with me and a quick sprinkle would encourage the mother to get going. There used to be a theory that ingesting the mucus covering the calf helped trigger off the process of parting with the cleansing or afterbirth, I don’t know whether it’s still current but it did no harm to try. Often the cow would get up straight away and suckle the calf, if you could get this to happen you knew all was well.
In the days before brucellosis was eradicated we occasionally got a cow that aborted or ‘picked’ as we called it. This wasn’t seen as a serious disease so much as an accident that we could have done without. One of the main reasons we hated it that the cattle that aborted invariably failed to cleanse, in other words the afterbirth didn’t come away as it should but remained half out and hanging there. We called this ‘sticking to the cleaning’. We used to wait for a couple of days and then detach the cleaning from the inside of the uterus by hand. This was a lousy job and with hindsight a very dangerous one from the point of view of infection. Lots of farmers got the vet to do things like this but John Henry was as skilled as they were in many ways and he usually did them.
There were times when we had somrthing on our hands that was to serious for us and the vet was called. I remember one cow in particular which developed a bad case of felon while we had it. ‘Felon’ was the local name for mastitis. This particular beast must have had it bad when we bought it but it hadn’t showed up in the udder. This could happen if a hard quarter was treated with antibiotics and ‘cured’ when in fact the condition had been left too long and the infection had got into the cow’s system. This was the problem in this case and it soon showed up in a general loss of condition, going of food and swellings in the joints of the legs. We got the vet in but he wasn’t very hopeful about the beast, gave it a ‘shotgun’ injection of several antibiotics mixed together and left it to see what happened. There was no improvement and it became obvious to us that this one was a candidate for ‘Jerusalem’ which was the knackers yard we sent casualties to near Bradford.
While we were coming to this conclusion we had a visit one Wednesday from one of our oldest customers, Wilf Bargh who farmed Backridge at Waddington. Richard eventually bought this farm off Wilf and lives there now. He noticed this beast that was poorly and commented that it looked in a poor way. John and I agreed and told him the story. He had a look at the cow and said that he thought there was a chance of curing it. He asked if there was any ‘felon grass’ on the farm. I told him that if he told me what it was I’d find some as neither I or John had ever heard of it. He described it as flaggy grass that grew in wet places and had a saw tooth edge to the leaf which could cut your hand if you tried to pull it up and your hand slipped. I knew where there was some in a boggy patch in Harry’s Field so I went off to get some. When I got back he told me to use my knife to cut a hole through the loose fold of flesh on the cow’s chest or brisket. I pulled the skin out and cut the slit right through it. Then, Wilf told me to thread the twitch of felon grass through the slit and leave it hanging there. He told John to dislodge it every day to keep the wound open and wait and see what developed.
I didn’t see the beast again until a week later when John and I were doing our usual Wednesday task of getting cattle ready for the market on Thursday at Gisburn. I asked John how it was going on and he showed me what was happening. The wound was still open and it was leaking pus on to the floor. John said he’d never seen as much muck come out of a wound but he thought the beast was mending a bit and was certainly eating better. Wilf came again that day and he told John that as soon as the pus stopped flowing he should replace the grass with a bunch of cotton thread soaked in disinfectant and keep the wound open with this until he thought it was clean. Then he could take the threads out and let the wound heal up.
John did all this and by the following week the wound had healed and while the cow wasn’t 100%, it was a lot better and definitely on the mend. We farmed it out to Hargy Howarth at Blackburn for him to care for it while it convalesced. John said the vet had been in on another job and when he saw the cow assumed that his injection had cured it. John told him what had actually happened and the vet was very interested because he had heard of this treatment before but had never seen it done. He reckoned that what we did when we made the wound and kept it open was create a ‘focus of infection’ like a boil. The cows natural defences had seen this as a way to get the infection out of the system and all the infection had gathered in the wound and come out as pus. I’m not qualified to comment one way or another on the theory but what I do know is that the cow was dying and three weeks later it was well on the way to recovery.
Whilst I am on the subject of problem cows I might as well tell my mad cow story. Richard bought a heifer in Ayr one week which caused us a lot of trouble. It was an Ayrshire from Ramsay Brothers who were famous for the quality of their cattle but there was a suspicion that this quality had been achieved over the years by careful breeding that was a bit too close. In other words the blood lines were so close that they could be said to be inbred. There’s no doubt they produced some good beasts but there were some bad ones as well. On this particular day, Richard and I were walking these cattle down to load them and I commented that one of them was a bit unsteady on it’s feet. Richard agreed and I loaded it on its own at the front of the wagon and kept a close eye on it on the way down the country. I thaought it might have ‘slow fever’ which was our name for Hypoglycaemia, caused by glucose deficiency. I got it home OK and it was tied up in the byre at Marton with the others.
The following morning John asked me what the hell we’d brought him! He couldn’t get anywhere near it to do anything and wanted me to give him a hand. We tried all the usual tricks like hobbling it, putting nose pincers in and tying its head up but nothing would hold it still. I remember saying to John that it was the first time I had ever seen a cow that kicked with its front legs. Richard landed down and we decided in the end that it was a bad beast and the reason why it had looked unsteady on its feet when we loaded it was that it had been ‘bottled’, in other words, sedated, for the sale.
Richard decided we weren’t having anything to do with it and he rang Ramsay Brothers to tell them that he was sending the beast back as it was unfit to sell. I don’t suppose this was a very happy conversation but in the end Richard got his way and told me that Richard Wilson, a dealer from Ayr who sod cattle in Gisburn, would take the beast back to Ramsays for us the following day after the sale had finished at Gisburn. He left me to make sure it happened. I arranged with John to leave the beast tethered in the byre by itself the following day and I’d sort it out after I’d had a word with Richard Wilson.
The following day I talked to Richard and he said he’d leave his wagon parked in the yard in such a way that I could back up to him and transfer the cow from my wagon to his. When I had finished with the sale cattle I went up to Marton, backed into the dock at Low Barn and went into the byre to get the cow. I got a shock when I realised it had broken free from its tether and was loose. I got a worse shock when it came for me, it had only one thing in its mind and that was to kill me! There was a sack lay near the door and I threw this on the floor to distract it. It immediately went down on its knees on the sack which is the way a cow will kill you if it gets the chance, knock you down and then crush you with its knees as it worries you with its horns.
I got out of the byre while it was otherwise engaged and weighed the situation up. I opened the small calf door at the front end of the wagon, got in the box and tied both gates back. Then I opened the door to the shippon and attracted the cows attention, it started after me straight away. I ran up the ramp into the box, made sure it had seen me and was still coming, and ran up the box and escaped out of the small door. I slammed the door shut, fastened it, and while the cow was still worrying the door with its head trying to find me, ran round the back, climbed over the wall of the dock and shut the back gates and the ramp. I just managed to get the lock on the ramp before the cow hit it. It simply went berserk in the box, running from one end to the other and throwing itself against the walls. I had a quick coffee and a smoke to calm me down a bit. I had it in the box but what I had to do now was work out a way of getting it transferred to Wilson’s wagon.
I decided I needed some manpower and so I went down to David’s farm at Demesne to see if I could get help. I filled with diesel while I was there and asked Ted Walker, David’s farm man, if he’d come up to Gisburn with me to give me a hand. He asked me why and I told him and I’m afraid he just laughed at me. He told me I was being soft and it couldn’t be that bad. He climbed up until he could look through one of the ventilating holes on the side of the wagon and as soon as the cow saw him it went for him. He changed his tune then and said there was no way he was having anything to do with it. I was on my own.
I went up to Gisburn and as I drew into the yard I saw a bloke I knew who helped with the milking in the auction. I can’t remember his name but he was a big handy lad about 17 stone and as strong as a horse. I buttonholed him and told him my problem. No problem, he’d go and get a stick. I told him not to bother, “Get a pick axe helve, a stick’s going to be no use with this bugger!” I went and backed into position behind Wilson’s wagon, dropped his door and waited for my mate to arrive. We decided that the plan was that he would jump on the ramp of my wagon as soon as I let it down and jeep the cow at bay with the helve as I opened the gates. We did this and then waited for the cow to explore Wilson’s wagon. As soon as it did this my mate kept it in their while I lifted the ramp and got it locked in. I have to report that I’ve never seen a cow hit as hard on the head in my life but it was only just enough to hold it back.
Once we had got the beast shut up in the other wagon we realised we had another problem. It was throwing itself from one end of the wagon to the other and every time it hit the front end the wagon rolled forwards a foot because the handbrake wasn’t holding it. I had to go and find Richard Wilson and we parked it up against a all where it couldn’t move. I impressed on Richard how dangerous the beast was and he promised me he wouldn’t open the box under any circumstances while he was on his own. I heard that in the end they took it straight to the slaughterhouse at Ayr and shot it in the yard as it came out of the wagon. Richard told me later it took two .303 bullets in the brain to drop it.
Now I know that all this will seem over-dramatised to you as you read this but believe you me, every word is true and I haven’t exaggerated the danger. Everyone worries about bulls and all right, they can be unpredictable and dangerous but once they have turned, cows are by far the worst of the two.
I’ve already mentioned doing the lying off sales in the spring for Richard when I was working my holidays from the dairy. I had this job regularly once I started driving full time for Richard. We bought mainly in Paisley but some from the East Kilbride, Hamilton and Wishaw markets. These cattle had all come straight from being kept in byres all winter and were very heavy in calf and unfit. They looked marvellous having been well fed all winter but were soft buggers and bad to ride. Things weren’t helped by the fact that these markets were all old and the floors had worn smooth. This doesn’t sound very important but cattle of this type slip easily and strain themselves, this doesn’t necessarily show but by the time you have loaded them they are tired, aching and have lost confidence in their ability to stand. It paid to give them a very easy ride and I preferred to cut numbers down a bit as they were larger cattle. Richard never complained about this as he respected my judgement. Like me, he would rather see two cows less walk out of the wagon in good order than have the loss you had to accept when they rode badly. We could always put these cattle straight into the market and sell them without resting them first. Mind you I once slipped up in a different way! All the dealers had their own mark. Drinkalls was a blue St Andrews Cross on the sale ticket stuck to the cow’s hindquarter. I once went into Wishaw to pick up 16 beasts. I backed into the dock and the auction staff drew them for me. I remember thinking they were a weary looking lot, smaller than usual and not Richard’s usual style but I was in a hurry so I loaded them and did my job. Richard met me at Gisburn and we tipped them out on to the dock. They had ridden well and I was pleased with the result. I asked Richard what he thought about their condition and he agreed I’d done a fine job. Only one thing wrong, they weren’t his cattle! When I looked closely at the mark he was right. He knew who had bought them, I have an idea it was Richard Wilson but am not sure. He rang them up and our cattle came down the next day and the others went to where they should have been. I had to stand some leg-pulling about this but to be fair, I had taken the cattle I had been given.
Talking about marks on cattle reminds me of the only time I picked cattle up off the Irish boat at Birkenhead. There was a regular trade in Irish store cattle, young beasts for fattening on the arable farms of the south but some milk heifers came over as well. We had bought some young heifers out of Ireland and on Dec 22nd 1971 I went down to Woodside Lairage at Birkenhead to pick them up. The cattle were in large pens, about 100 in each. I backed down and saw the lads in the office and they looked at my notes, went out into one of the pens and split out the beasts for me. They all looked the same! I asked them how they did it, remember they’d never seen the cattle until they came off the boat all mixed up. They showed me that each beast was marked with a combination of small clips out of the hair on their tail root, each huggin and shoulder. They were so practised they could pick these out and reckoned they never made a mistake. Wonderful skill, I was most impressed. We used a similar system on the lying off cattle, we clipped a series of small snips of hair out of them near the tail root. I forget the actual code but as I remember it no clip meant the beast was due before or near ‘Grass Day’ which was reckoned to be Mid-May, one clip meant June calving, two July and so on. This was a handy way of gauging when the cattle were due when they were out at grass at home as we kept quite a few ourselves until we could sell them fresh calved.
THE MARKETS AND THE DEALERS
Our main Scottish markets were Lanark and Ayr. Lanark was the biggest market in south west Scotland. It attracted the dealers from England and those from Aberdeen and Inverness as well. There was great competition for the cattle and usually a good trade. This attracted good cattle and therefore ensured continued interest by the dealers. I’ve already described how Lanark conformed to the usual system of cattle being the responsibility of the vendor until vetted and approved by the buyer but this wasn’t always the case. At one time Lanark used to operate under what is known as ‘farm sale’ conditions. Under this system ownership is transferred on the fall of the auctioneer’s hammer, there are no comebacks even if the beast is found to be faulty.
John Harrison’s Uncle Ralph had a big farm at Dumfries called Fontainebleau and bought a lot of cattle in Lanark. At one period he found he was getting caught with one or two ‘three wheelers’ a week and had no comeback against the vendors because of the terms of sale. He and other dealers had been complaining to the directors of the market for many months but nothing was done about it. Uncle Ralph decided to take his own remedy. At that time he had a man called John McPhail buying cattle for him in the Dumfries area and he instructed him to buy all the three teated cattle he could get. These were all entered for sale at Lanark and sold. Uncle Ralph then went in the office and told the directors that he had changed his mind about the sale conditions and that Lanark must be the best market in Scotland, he had just sold a load of incorrect cattle and got away with it. He would fetch some more the following week! The rules changed within a fortnight and ‘farm sale’ conditions were a thing of the past.
John Harrison drove his own wagon and he was good. His ERF was smaller than XWU and had a smaller engine but he usually had the edge on me on hills. We used to leave Ayr at about the same time on Tuesday and we have had many a tussle on the way down, particularly on Shap. I’d see John coming up behind me and would pull all the stops out to keep him there but he always got me on the climb. Understand that I never hindered him, we always helped the bloke behind to overtake if he had the speed and expected the same treatment ourselves. Driving wagons with a load is entirely different than driving a car. With the wagon you are always driving flat out, or at least you were in those days of what would seem to a modern driver to be seriously under-powered vehicles. A good example of this was the last pull up the north side of Shap Fell which had been widened to three lanes. At this time there were no double lines in the road. If you were coming downhill you always gave precedence to a wagon overtaking coming towards you. John would have the advantage on me here and might be travelling all of one or two miles an hour faster than me. He would start to overtake and it would be touch and go as to whether he got past me before we either hit the narrower road at the top or met something coming down. Many a time I would ease off a fraction to speed his passage because this was a dangerous moment. The problem wasn’t the wagons coming the other way but cars overtaking them. They interpreted our behaviour in their terms and it was always ‘wagons racing’ and not two blokes doing their job as best they could.
Once at the summit we were on equal terms and I used to follow him down and criticise the number of times he used his brakes! A good driver would come off Shap at a fair speed and hardly ever touch the brakes apart from the first drop from the summit which was a killer, I used to be in third gear down here and so did John. There was one point where you could see over the shoulder of the hill into the dip and if nothing was coming you notched up straight into top gear and hit the dip doing sixty miles an hour, this would get you up the next rise nicely and you could coast round the corner past the Leyland clock and down past the Jungle Café. Then into a sharp right hander and if a quick glance through the trees showed nothing coming, cut the corner on the wrong side of the road, foot down and round the long sweeping left hander at forty five all the way. Shap was such an interesting road, modern drivers on the motorway may get there faster but they didn’t have any where near the fun! The left hander I have just mentioned could be a bugger in winter. There was a gulley going away towards the top of the fell and in winter frost would flow down it like a river, I have seen it shot ice there when all the rest of the road was clear. I have to admit to having some interesting moments at times on Shap. I once came down there on a dry evening when it started to hail, I had to slow down because the hail dancing on the road in the headlights completely obscured the view. You couldn’t even see the kerb or the cats eyes.
John once came across me at Cumnock with a cow down, I think it had a touch of slow fever. Whatever, it was riding badly and giving me grief. John stopped, turned round and reversed up to me and took the cow down the country for me as he had plenty of room and could put it in a compartment on its own. Only a small thing but I shall never forget it, a simple act of concern and a helping hand, we all need them at times. On another occasion he got quite worried about me. He told Richard afterwards that his first thought was that I was getting too much road and had gone over the edge. He came round a bend and found my wagon parked in a lay-by and me dancing on the roof. He stopped and found that what I was actually doing was adjusting the wireless aerial on top of the box, I had been up a farm road and caught it on some overhanging branches and reception had suffered!
John had his share of luck one night when he broke down at Abingdon with a hot wheel bearing. He stopped near a farm and went for help, he was thinking of somewhere for his cattle to spend the night. When he got talking to the man it turned out he was a bit of a mechanic. He rooted around in a drawer in the barn and produced a new wheel bearing! He helped John get the old one off, brought out the oxy-acetylene gear and burned of the old race which had welded on to the axle, fitted the new bearing and charged him £15! Better to be born lucky than rich!
The Aberdeen dealers were serious competition in Lanark, they were interested in the same type of cattle as Richard and if there had been a good corn harvest the big farmers up there would have plenty of money to spend so they drove prices up. Richard was no slouch when the competition got hot and would drive on until he was nearing his limit and then indicate disgust and drop out of the bidding. This took some of the heat out and just as everyone had relaxed and the hammer was about to fall he would often pop a late bid in. This very often got the beast, it was all psychology. Another area where we used psychology was if we wanted two or three cows out of a field where there was a bunch of twenty or thirty. We used to go in and quietly split out the ones we wanted with no fuss, not a word said and no shouting. It was all done by getting the cows to do what they thought they wanted to do. I used to enjoy that and so, I think, did Richard.
There were other dealers, Benson from Huddersfield and Paxton from Cheshire. They weren’t really any competition for us, Benson because he didn’t want the quality we were after and Paxton because usually he was buying Cheshire cows, bigger, heavier and with more bag, not our cup of tea at all. In fact Cheshire and the Midlands were the eventual home of a lot of our beasts when they got some age and bag on them.
I used to take a lot of this type of cow down to dealer called Harry Laight, Great Horton Farm, Hampton Lovett near Droitwich. This was a frequent Friday run all the time I was with Richard. If I was doing this I would call in at Beeston Castle on the way back and pick up David’s calves. Harry’s farm was a bit of old England, buried in the backwoods behind Droitwich. In the early days there was no motorway through Birmingham and I used to have to go through Wolverhampton and all the suburbs to get past Birmingham and down on to the A5. I remember setting off one day and there was a thick fog. David left for Beeston shortly after me but turned back, it was so bad on the M6.
This was the day when there was the big pile-up on the Thelwall Viaduct. It was like a war zone and several people were killed. I drew on to the hard shoulder, got out of the wagon and sat on the banking listening to the mayhem, you couldn’t see anything, just hear the sounds. The main thing I remember about it is one big smashing noise followed by a lot of potatoes and a wagon wheel rolling out of the fog! One young driver was killed when he jumped over a fence to get away from the action. Unfortunately it was a long drop the other side on to a road and he broke his neck. I don’t think they found him until much later. We were held up for about an hour, I was lucky, I was near the front of the smash and the police wanted us out of the way so they piloted us through. I went quietly down and got into Harry’s yard about two hours late and with eyes like chapel hat pegs. He was surprised to see me but very pleased because he needed the cattle. After we had tipped them he gave me a pound note. Every trip I made after that he gave me a pound! This went on for a couple of years and in the end I told him that I was a bit worried, I was expecting the pound every time I went into his yard. He considered this for a moment and then agreed, he could see the problem. He never gave me a tip again! I know it sounds daft but I liked that and I think I went up in his estimation. Even so, that pound was nice……..
I was on my way back to Marton empty one day returning from a trip to Harry Laight’s. Just before I got to the Trentham turn off on the M6 I noticed that the car which had overtaken me was heading straight towards the back of a Triumph Herald in front of me that was tramming on quietly at about 50mph in the slow lane. The driver of the overtaking car must have been asleep but at the last second swerved out into the middle lane. As he did, he caught the off-side back end of the Triumph and it swerved left on to the bank, rolled over and finished up on the hard shoulder upside down. By the time this was happening I was already braking leaving rubber all the way. I was out of the cab before it had stopped and I ran up to the Triumph. The lady was in shock and couldn’t move because her safety belt was holding her. There was a strong smell of petrol so I kicked the windscreen in, cut the seat belt with my knife and dragged her out. I got her up on to the bank and wrapped her in a blanket. She was shaking like a leaf so I sat there cuddling her as I was sure someone else would have called the police.
Very quickly the police arrived followed by the fire brigade. The car hadn’t burned so they hosed the petrol away and started to clear up. The lady clung to me until the ambulance came, we got her on board and away to hospital and I told the police what had happened. The bloke who had caused it all was there and admitted he had been dozing at the wheel so there was an open and shut case. The bobbies took my name and address and I went on my way. Later, Vera got a letter from the lady, Anne MacDougall, she said some nice things about me and I know that Vera kept that letter for years. Anne and I have exchanged Christmas Cards every year since and I saw her once when she came to my fiftieth birthday party. When she walked in the house that day we just looked at each other and burst into tears. Anne is still alive and well although she is waiting to have a heart by-pass operation at the moment, I hope she gets it soon and has many more years, she became a part of my life when that bloke ran into her. Funny what the road drops in your lap isn’t it.
This is probably as good a place as any for another car overturning story. When I first started for Richard my first week was solid Scotland trips and two Seascales. At that time the road to Seascale hadn’t been modernised at all and was terrible as far as carrying cattle was concerned. On my second trip up there John Henry had a day off and came with me for the trip. We were going along a particularly winding and undulating piece of road when we were overtaken by a car with four people in it. They vanished over a blind summit and we heard a crash. When we crested the rise we saw the car on it’s side and a bloke climbing out of a window. I pulled up and we went to see if we could help. There was petrol all over the road and the bloke who had got out first was in the act of lighting a cigarette, to steady his nerves no doubt. I grabbed it off him and pointed out that this wasn’t necessarily the best idea he had ever had. When we looked at the car there was one person still in it in the back seat, she was a fat lady and if she’d been a sheep you’d say she was rigged, she couldn’t move. It was obvious we couldn’t get her out through the door, we would never have lifted her so I did my clog trick and kicked the windscreen in, we dragged her out to the accompaniment of the bloke who had been driving screaming at us and saying he’d have me prosecuted for criminal damage! A police car happened to come by and they rapidly took charge of the situation. I told them what I had done and the bobby said “You did exactly the right thing. Get back in your vehicle and bugger off, we’ll look after this lot!” So John and I went on our way. I couldn’t help reflecting that some people aren’t really fit to push a barrow never mind drive a car.
Mention of sheep being rigged reminds me that one of the great advantages of the driving position in a wagon is that you are high up and have a much better view, not only of the road, but the surrounding countryside as well. I was once going up to Hawick via Eskdalemuir, the birthplace of one of my heroes by the way, Thomas Telford, builder of so many of the roads I travelled. As I was going along I noticed a ewe just over the wall rigged between two stones. When a ewe is heavy in lamb they can become very ungainly and if they should lose their footing and land in an awkward position they are trapped on their back and soon die. This can happen if they get caught in brambles as well. I stopped the wagon, popped over the wall and rolled her over, after a minute or so she got unsteadily to her feet and started grazing straight away. A small act which nobody ever knew about but it did wonders for me.
Another circumstance where the view could help was first thing in the morning if you saw a car off the road. I always used to stop to have a look as many a time this could have happened late at night and the driver could still be in there. I never found one thank God but it was always as well to have a look. There is one story about one of Wild’s drivers who did this, found a stiff and swapped boots with him because his were better. He said he wouldn’t be needing them again!
Time we got back to Lanark. I used to love to watch the auctioneer working in the main cattle sale. He dominated the ring and sold cattle far faster than they would be dealt with down south. If he thought the atmosphere was getting noisy he would say so and all the bidders would stop chattering and get on with the job! They were impressive men and couldn’t do their job properly if they couldn’t dominate the ring.
Tom Bell (TCB) was a big local dealer. He had two sons, Archie and Crawford. He kept racehorses, one was called Clyde Bridge and one called TCB. He had started as a cattle drover and worked his way up to being a seriously wealthy man. I think he was going off the boil a bit when I started for Richard. I got the idea the glory days were over and I wasn’t all that impressed with his sons. I remember one day I was stood at the ringside below Richard watching the sale and TCB offered me a job in full hearing of Richard! I turned round and told him that it wouldn’t be a good idea as no man could serve two masters. This seemed to tickle him and he dropped the subject but I have an idea he was serious. A good bible quotation can come in useful sometimes but I doubt if the Elders of Wycliffe Sunday School ever imagined this was how I would use the knowledge they drummed into me!
The staff at Lanark were good. There was a bloke on the bank who drew the cattle and he was always known as ‘Chow’, I think it was because he used to chew tobacco. He kept me up to speed with all the gossip and surprised me one day when he told me that one of the biggest dealers at the market, a bloke from Seascale who we used to sell cattle to occasionally, wasn’t allowed to take cattle off the bank without written authorisation from one of the directors. He was evidently into the market for so much that he had to pay so much of his debt off each week or he wasn’t allowed to load. It was a shock to realise that some of these big men in the ring were actually sailing very close to the wind. I never had any bother, I could draw my own cattle if I wanted, nobody was worried about Drinkalls not paying, it was a nice feeling. Richard once told me a story about a dealer who went to Annan market for over fifty years. One day the auctioneers stopped the sale and made him a presentation of a gold watch. Shortly afterwards he died owing the auction many thousands of pounds! As my father used to say, the worst thing in the world to weigh up is another man’s finances
Chow gave me another surprise one day. Cattle were very thin on the ground and I hadn’t seen Richard buy a beast. I had been nagging him to let me go home empty, I could see an early night in prospect but he wouldn’t let me go. I was hanging about on the dock when Chow came out and told me to back in and get ready for my load. I thought he was pulling my leg until he opened the door. About forty black Shetland ponies came bounding out, they were a picture, every one was a Thelwell horse! My face must have been a picture but I loaded them and Richard told me to take them to Marton and put them in a field there. I asked him what he was playing at and he said he wanted to see the kids faces when they got up the following day. We had them for about ten days and people were coming from all over to look at them. He sold them on and they went, I have little doubt they paid the expenses for that day!
I used to see a bloke at Lanark who fascinated me, his name was Jack Adams and he drove for a firm from Yatton near Bristol. One of the reasons why I remember him is because it was Yatton which had the terrible tragedy when just about every woman in the village was killed in an air crash whilst on a shopping trip to France. Jack was third generation droving stock and had the biggest cattle wagon on the road at that time, a two decker articulated box. His firm ran Leyland wagons and he usually had a good tractor, a Beaver with the 680 engine and an automatic box. At one point he had one of the new Leyland gas turbine tractors on test but he said it was useless. He spent all his life on the road and had a sleeper cab.
As I say, Jack fascinated me. I noticed one day that he had unbuttoned the cuffs of his jacket sleeves and rolled them up while he vetted his cattle. I mentioned this to him and he said that he always had his jackets made this way! I had never seen anything but dummy buttons. Another thing that intrigued me was the fact that he always had a woman in the cab with him. One day he turned up with this little cracker who couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old. I asked Jack what the attraction was with a sixty year old bloke like him. “You’d better ask her” was all he’d say. So I did, she told me she was on the game in Bristol and every now and again she liked to go of for a week or two with Jack. I asked her why and she said she got fed up with tricks who used her and didn’t last more than ten minutes if she was lucky, she reckoned Jack was always good for at least half an hour! Basic I’ll admit but you have to allow she probably had a point!
We had contacts with dealers in other parts of the country as well as Scotland. There was Harry Laight at Droitwich for instance. Occasionally we would have flirtations with others but for one reason or another they didn’t stay the course. I delivered quite a few cattle to Ponteland at one time and there was the occasional foray into the south. I remember having a completely one-off during 1971, I took some stirks to Medmenham between Henley on Thames and Marlow and some Jerseys to Amersham near Rickmansworth. I mean, Richard selling Jerseys? I don’t think they ever did him any good, he said afterwards that he’d never do it again. I remember I was an object of curiosity at both places because of my clogs, you’d have thought I’d just landed from the moon. They brought the kids out to look at them at the second drop!
We had a long term relationship with a Welsh dealer called Trefor Roberts. Occasionally we would go down to one of the Welsh markets if there was a shortage of scotch heifers. The better end of the Welsh heifers weren’t bad at all, a bit lighter build perhaps but good black and white heifers nonetheless. Richard first met Trefor in Mold when he went to buy and just happened to be standing next to him. Trefor was very helpful, especially with the Welsh language as many of the farmers spoke only Welsh and used the fact to gain an advantage over strangers. Once they had met a relationship grew up. I remember us once going to Ruthin Market for cattle and the Welsh dealers had made up their minds that they were going to shut Richard out, he was seen as competition and would push prices up. Richard went in the ring and Trefor was over the other side. Richard never made a bid all day and when I backed the wagon into the dock the Welsh bloke on the bank told me I was wasting my time, I had no cattle to come. You should have seen his face when I loaded 14 nice friesian heifers! Richard had been bidding all right, he had an arrangement with Trefor that as long as he had his fag in his mouth he was bidding and Trefor did the business. I can’t remember us ever going back there! Richard told me some time ago that Trefor was dead, he committed suicide. I was sorry to hear it because even though I have a natural antipathy towards the Welsh as a race I liked Trefor a lot and he always treated me with respect.
Before we leave the dealers we must have a look at the calf trade and the men who traded in them. We dealt in calves ourselves, David and Keith were the calf men. Our calves were mostly good friesian heifer calves which we had bought of our heifer customers and as they were almost all out of cattle which had passed through Richard’s hands we knew their quality. Keith used to buy some rearing calves at Bingley and David did the same at Beeston Castle, these were the ones I often picked up on my way back from Harry Laight’s or further down the country. I know I’m a bugger for diversions but there is a Beeston story you’ve got to hear before we go any further.
In the yard at Beeston there was a wooden café presided over by a lady called Betty who reminded me in many ways of my mother. I was getting a cup of tea and a butty one day and I happened to say to her that I would have liked to have seen her when she was eighteen years old. At this time she must have been pushing seventy but had a lovely complexion and it was obvious to me anyway that she had been a beauty in her youth. She laughed and passed it off but next time I was in she showed me a picture of herself when she was in her twenties. She had a cloche hat on, flat chest and a bum-freezer skirt and she was a stunner. We were stood there looking at it and she told me that they were a wild bunch, “The kids nowadays think they’ve invented sex but by God if they could have seen us then….” She was right of course, every generation has to discover everything anew and they all think they’ve invented it. Ah well, back to the calves.
There were two other classes of young cattle, stirks for rearing and bobby calves. Stirks were young heifers and bulls, often bullocks, they had been castrated as they were unfit to breed from and would go for beef. These were bought in the south and taken north for rearing as a rule. There were of course rearers in the midlands and south but their calves were local or brought up from the West Country. The thing that never happened was stirks moving south from Scotland in quantity. I was in Bingley one day and a large wagon came in and tipped a load of stirks for sale that day. The wagon was a Scottish one and I couldn’t understand what was going on. I asked Richard about it later and he was pleased I had picked up that something was wrong. He said it was hard to be sure but it looked as though this dealer, who had sprung from nowhere, was ‘flying a kite’. Richard reckoned that what he was doing was buying and selling a lot of cattle. He either had a stake to get him going or he had managed to buy on credit somewhere. The trick was to be buying and selling in more than one market at each end of the pipeline. If the buying days and selling days alternated so much the better. He would buy a load of cattle and ship them down the country, make a quick sale, not necessarily in profit and use the proceeds either to buy or to settle his account at the next Scottish market he bought at.
After a month or two at this he would be an established dealer and remember that the markets at both ends were satisfied with the quantity because they got commission on every beast that was passed through the market. If the quantities were large enough it made sense to give the dealer some rope. The sting came when the dealer reached the point where he wasn’t getting enough to keep the kite flying but was up into large quantities. This was the time to renege at all the markets where he owed money, declare bankruptcy and claim no assets. We weren’t sure that this was what was going on but as Richard said, when the cattle start moving against the tide there is something wrong somewhere.
The bobby calf trade was an entirely different kettle of fish. I’ve touched on it before but it’s time we had a closer look at it. If there was one aspect of the cattle trade that disturbed me it was trading in calves only a few days old. Officially, you weren’t allowed to present a calf for sale if it’s navel was still wet, in other words, under a day or two old but we often saw them being sold in this condition. These calves were virtually condemned to death as soon as they were taken from their mother because they hadn’t had enough time on ‘beast milk’, the first milk the cow gives which is loaded with natural anti-bodies and nutrients, to give them a proper start in life. This didn’t matter because their destination was slaughter anyway. In those days they ended up with the big canning firms like Heinz and Crosse and Blackwell where they were slaughtered and rendered down for stock for baby and geriatric foods.
There was a coterie of dealers who specialised in this trade and they could be seen at Ayr and Lanark gathered in the ring in a solid bunch for the ‘killing calf’ sale which was immediately after the rearers had been sold. The calves would be pushed between their legs and they would bid for them. To an unenlightened observer this could be seen as market forces at play but in effect it was anything but a ‘market’, it was a ‘ring’. None of the dealers would pay much because there was no competition, they took turns to bid for the calves. After the sale they would gather and reckon up the average price of the calves and split them up between them, in this way they kept the prices low and gave themselves more profit when they sold them on. Everybody knew about this but it was very hard to prove, even harder to stop and basically nobody was very interested because the animals were throw-away items anyway.
On the way up to Lanark one day, David told me to keep an eye on the killers if I had a chance because there was going to be a bit of an upset. In the course of his Cheshire dealings he had come across a bloke called John Denson who had seen an advertisement in the Farmer’s Weekly for a man to buy calves on commission. He almost ignored the advert because he knew it was a license to print money and was sure that there would be hundreds of applicants. The deal was that someone was wanted to go into the market and buy calves and for every pound he spent he would get a shilling commission. These might not have been the exact figures but you can see the idea. Eventually he decided he might as well apply as he had nothing better to do and to his amazement, got the job, he was the only qualified applicant!
The firm who had put the advert in was one of the major food manufacturers. They had a problem which was that their supply of calves had dried up because other manufacturers had penetrated the ring and persuaded them to sell to them exclusively. The calves were an essential part of the process so they had to be obtained and if it meant investing money to break the ring, so be it.
On this particular Monday, John Denson was starting the campaign in Lanark and as far as we knew, nobody knew he was going to be there. David and I lurked at the back of the ring as the dealers took up their customary places in the ring. David pointed a bloke out to me, he was sitting on the rail of the ring with a fag in his mouth, he wore a ratting hat, a tweed jacket, a tattersall check shirt and I remember he had a tie-pin with a fox on it.
The first calf was pushed into the forest of legs in the middle of the ring and went to say five bob, the auctioneer didn’t waste time and was just going to knock it down when a bid of ten bob came from the back, John had struck the first blow. You could see all the shoulders in the ring hunch and then everyone turned to see where the bid had come from. As it was an unheard of price, the auctioneer dropped the hammer and it was Denson 1, Dealers 0. The next calf came in and the same price and result. After a couple more calves it became clear that the dealers were getting their act together. They drove the price of the calf up to thirty shillings but John still took it. They had another stab with the next one but when it got to three pounds, John let them have it. At this point he had taken every calf bar one and the price that had been paid for this one would have bought eight average calves a week earlier. The sale went on like this, John paid up to five pounds for a calf and dropped the dealers in for some at very nearly this price. As far as the dealers were concerned this was a disaster and they had no idea who the opposition was.
The word had soon got round and farmers were coming down into the calf section to see the miracle that was taking place. Men who had ten calves in the sale and would have been delighted with fifty bob were seeing their animals sold for nearer fifty quid! It was drinks all round time. Remember that the market was doing OK as well. If the price of calves rose 1000% so did their commission! The only people who weren’t happy were the dealers.
Next day at Ayr the same thing happened but this time the calves were better. Farmers soon twigged what was happening and rearing calves were being sold as killers because they would make more money. By the end of the week John’s firm had a good supply of expensive calves but the opposition had nothing. End of round one. This went on for about three weeks and during the course of events John was threatened with violence but in the end the dealers had to sit down with him and come to an agreement. I don’t know if they knew who was behind it but they didn’t need to. All they could see was that they were up against an opposition that was totally ruthless and would put them out of business unless some agreement was reached. The upshot was that John went back to his quiet life in Cheshire, lessons were learned and the division of available bobby calves went back on to a more equable footing. Our entertainment stopped but it had been instructive and interesting while it lasted!
One of the most active calf dealing families was Ross Brothers from Lochmaben between Dumfries and Lockerbie. Andrew Ross was the main man and I liked him. He was a big, plump, rosy cheeked imp of a man, always laughing and a very sharp dealer. He worked with his brothers and they used to start the week in Taunton Market and work their way up the country. Chippenham was another calling point and there would be others as well but I don’t know them all. If you look at the place names round the Dumfries area you will detect a strong Viking influence and I often thought that there was Viking blood in the Ross family somewhere. They certainly behaved that way, their course up the country was almost a trail of rape and pillage and this happened every week.
Andrew once told me a story which though outlandish was entirely typical. They had been out buying calves one day and were on their way home in the van after a session in the auction bar. At some point they hit a telegraph pole and the top broke off and speared through the top of the van killing a calf. They disentangled themselves and proceeded on their way. Passing a church they noticed a wedding was taking place so they stopped. One of the brothers got out carrying the dead calf. He went across to the wedding group having their picture taken on the church steps and put the calf in the grooms arms as a wedding present! I’ve heard that tale from three sources and think it might be true!
At one point they got into a bit of financial trouble and Alistair Ross did a runner, I think it was to Australia. Andrew carried on but found that the market in Taunton wouldn’t accept his bid, even though it was in pound notes, because the Rosses owed them money. It was fairly obvious they couldn’t do this because Andrew could always get a stooge to bid for him and no auction in the world will ignore a bunch of notes being waved in the auctioneer’s face! The following week Andrew turned up with the piper who usually played outside the blacksmith’s shop at Gretna Green. The piper, in full highland dress preceded Andrew into the market and Andrew addressed the crowd. He told them that he was taking the auction market to the race relations board because they were discriminating against Scotsmen. The auctioneer defended the auction and said that the reason they wouldn’t accept Andrew’s cash bid was because he owed them so much money. Andrew then pointed out a few home truths to the farmers. “Every man comes into this world with a mission and mine is to effect a more equable distribution of wealth between the auction and the farmers. Sure, we owe them money, but remember where that money went, into your pockets!” In the end the auction had to let them bid and they resumed the rape and pillage.
The last time I saw Andrew he was telling me that his wife had signed his pass for one more child. He had seven daughters and wanted a son. David told me later that Andrew had got his wish and was the proud father of a brand new son. He deserved it, if ever there was a loveable rogue it was Andrew Ross. I’m glad I met him, the world needs characters to stop it getting boring!
THE MEN AND THE STORIES
The best thing about the job was the men we dealt with. English farmers are good but I reckon Scotsmen have the edge. They were wonderful men and if there was one thing they respected above all, it was ability. You would hear a man describing another man as ‘an able man’, this was the highest praise they gave. Another thing I liked was that a Scottish farmer was known by the name of his farm and that was what he had carved on his crook or market stick. We had some marvellous customers and I’m afraid you’re going to have to listen to stories about some of them.
Where to start, that’s the question because you can’t grade these men in any sensible way, I think the best thing to do is sort them geographically, we shall start in the east and work our way over to the west coast.
We had an occasional calf customer at Eyemouth above Berwick on the east coast. He used to be the first stop on a regular run that I did so we’ll work through that one. My load up was always calves and the first drop after leaving Demense was at Eyemouth, from there I would head up into the Borders, through Chirnside and Coldstream to Kelso where my main drop was at Lurdenlaw. Jim Baird was the owner and what a farm it was!. The thing I liked about it most was that it had a chimney! All the barn machinery used to be driven by a boiler and steam engine. Jim’s son John used to take the wagon to tip the calves and I used to have breakfast with Mrs Baird and Mary, their daughter, if she was up! After breakfast Jim used to take me round his horses, he had one mare that used to nip your shoulder as you went past, I got used to it but Jim would never warn you. One day when I was there I gave Mary a hand to mow the lawns and pulled her leg about it being time she settled down. She told me that she had too many worries but I told her I thought the only worry she had was whether she had enough petrol in the car to get home when she had finished wreaking destruction among the men of the district! I have an idea she specialised in young farmers and vets!
Jim had his own wagon, a Leyland Beaver four wheeler, the only one I ever saw. It had the big engine and I think I could have got along with it! He once met me at six in the morning down at Carlisle to pick a bunch of calves up off me as I headed north for some cattle. About a week later I was talking to one of the police patrols and he was commiserating with the poor old white haired bugger who’s boss had sent him out at God knows what hour in the morning in order to get from Kelso to Carlisle at that time. I told him he had hold of the wrong end of the stick, Jim was the gaffer and far from being poor he owned over 2000 acres of good land and all the stock and machinery that went with it! A lot of these men bought their farms just after the war and the price would be ridiculously low. I have heard of good land being sold for £25 an acre in those times. At the time I was visiting Jim’s farm I should say the price would be well over £1,000 an acre so Jim had what you might call a long pocket!
In May 1970 when I was delivering at Lurdenlaw Jim had a mare that was horsing. He knew I was running empty to Lanark along the Peebles road so he asked me if I would take the mare to George Hunter’s at Horsbrugh Castle just east of Peebles where there was a stallion he wanted her putting to. We loaded her up and away I went. I arrived at Horsbrugh with no problems and I led her out and down the lane to the farm. There was nobody about and so I put her into an empty loose box and set off back up the lane. I hadn’t gone far when I heard a terrible noise coming from the buildings, a horse was screaming and it sounded as though a demolition gang had moved in at the same time. I looked into the box next to the mare and there was the stallion going berserk! He had caught wind of the mare and was screaming with frustration and lashing out at the sleeper wall between the boxes with his hind feet. I decided the best thing was to get the mare out of the box and into the paddock and as I was leading her out a bloke came round the corner and asked me what I was doing. I told him and he said to go ahead and then stand out of the way. He let the stallion out and it went straight for the mare and mounted her. I reckon I must have got her there just at the right time. When the stallion slid off the man grabbed a bunch of nettles and rubbed them under her tail. I asked him why and he said it helped make sure she caught. He told me that I had done just the right thing. You learn something new every day.
In common with my days on the tramp, we always tried to run the wagon loaded or at least, making money, you could hardly call 15 calves a load but the profit from them could pay the expenses. Occasionally we needed to get back quickly or there was no obvious load back so we sometimes invented one. A case in point was a winter trip I made to Lurdenlaw with a load of calves and Jim gave us a box full of straw to bring back. Straw was almost an embarrassment to him, it had to be cleared off the fields to allow cultivation and straw-burning had been made illegal so he had to bale it and cart it off whether he wanted it or not. In our home district there was no arable and straw was a valuable commodity especially in winter when the cattle were inside so it made sense to bring some back. It was a nice load for me, it was clean so the wagon wouldn’t need washing out and it would give no trouble on the way down, I could relax, be a tramp driver again and throw the wagon through the bends! Just for once, I’d been dealt a good hand of cards.
Take note here that we are about to pick up another loose end of thread that has been running through my life but hasn’t surfaced for a while. I love these occurrences when something that just seemed curious or of very little note pops its head up again and eventually triggers off an earthquake. I like the idea of Chaos Theory which states that a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the globe sets up a disturbance in the cosmos which can, eventually, trigger a hurricane in another location. A tiny disturbance in the dim and distant past had been vibrating away and I had never noticed it.
I had a swift and uneventful journey home and arrived back at Hey Farm at about five o’clock, just in time for tea with the family. As usual it was served at the table with a white cloth, side plates and plenty to eat. As we ate I noticed that Susan was a bit down and when I asked her what was the matter she burst into tears. I sat her on my lap and coaxed an explanation out of her. It transpired that she was worried because Mrs. Thomas’s rabbits were going to die of cold because they hadn’t got any straw! Maureen Thomas was Susan’s teacher at the time and lived down Gisburn Road with her husband who was head of the Local Education Authority. She had mentioned to the class that she was short of straw for the rabbits and Susan, being used to stock, had come to her own conclusion as to what the result would be! There was snow on the ground but I wrapped Susan in a rug and carried her out to the wagon where I opened up the calf door so she could see what was inside. I promised her that as soon as I had finished my tea I would take the wagon down to Mrs Thomas’s house and make sure that the rabbits were properly bedded down for the night.
After tea I went out and drove down to Maureen’s house. I dragged two bales out of the calf door and took them up the drive and rang the bell at the front door. After a moment the door opened and Maureen stood there. It was quite evident that she had just got out of the bath, she wore a caftan and her hair, which was normally pinned in a bun at the back of her head, was down over her back and shoulders. For a fraction of a second I was transported back to the fireside at Hope Memorial and Miss Hogg’s pigtail and was definitely affected! I told Maureen what I was doing there and she said she’d bedded them down with torn newspaper but was obviously pleased at the thought of someone bothering about the fate of her rabbits. I said I’d bed them down and put the rest of the straw in the shed. She asked me whether I would like a cup of coffee and I said I had to get home and out of my overalls. That was it, I fothered the rabbits and went home but I couldn’t help reflecting that Maureen Thomas, framed in that doorway with her hair down her back was one of the most attractive sights I had seen in a long time! I never strayed with any other woman all the time Vera and I lived with each other but I was definitely under pressure that night! Apart from that I had confirmation of the fact that Miss Hogg had left an indelible thumb print on my psyche all those years ago.
Jim Baird had a son-in -law called Tom Hamilton who farmed Crawford Mains on the side of the A74. I always said it was the loneliest farm in Scotland because the turn in, off the dual carriageway was so dangerous that people avoided it. I lifted cattle regularly from here and they were top class. I remember going there with the wagon and trailer one day and filling up with heifers which we loaded in the snow. I’d had a long day up Scotland and was very happy when I arrived back at Gisburn with them. Richard met me there because we were bedding them down at the auction for the night.
As I drove into the yard I saw Richard get out of his car and smelt a rat immediately, he was carrying a flask and a packet of butties! This looked like a sign that I hadn’t finished my day’s work yet and it was dark all ready. I backed the trailer up to the dock, unhooked and backed the wagon into the dock alongside and we tipped the cattle out and contained them while we sorted them out. Richard explained that he thought he had a customer for some of the beasts and what he wanted me to do was to take him and a box full of beasts down to Bury to see if we could get shut of some. I have an idea he had more cattle about than he was comfortable with, hence the rush. I agreed of course because I had been asked nicely. We had a phone at Hey Farm then and I asked Richard to get a message to Vera to let her know where I was, because of recent events this was quite important but we’ll come to that shortly.
Remember what I said about cattle riding well? This load was a case in point. Not only could cattle ride well but they could come out of the box looking better than they went in! The way this works is this; all cattle differ in temperament. Some are dominant, some subservient and there is a middle range. Riding in the wagon under ideal circumstances, and cold weather was just right for them, levelled them out. The dominant ones are quietened by the experience, the quiet ones wake up because of the novelty and the mid range stay as they are. By the way, another factor at night is that I always drove with the light on in the box, I always felt this helped them. The key to selling a bunch of cattle together, assuming overall good quality which we had, is to have them matched so that they complement each other rather than show each other up. The sixteen we picked out matched perfectly. We bedded the others down while our chosen ones rested on the dock then we loaded up and set off.
I enjoyed having Richard with me, we talked as equals and I know he knew how much I respected his ability. In return, I was quite sure he admired my skills, I was good at my job and I knew it. This wasn’t a matter of arrogance but of fact and I enjoyed the status it gave me both with Richard and with our customers. They knew what the relationship between me and Richard was and treated me accordingly. I doubt if he ever said a wrong word about me. We were soon down at Bury and struck off west to a farm I hadn’t been to before. There was a large concrete yard lit with floodlights and we tipped the cattle out into it. They were a picture and Richard immediately swung into selling mode! Inside ten minutes he had sold the lot and we were off back up the road. Richard was a happy bunny and was in a very good mood. I was pleased but also certain of one thing, there would be no back-hander for me simply because we had done a good deal! Richard paid the wage but no more I had no quarrel with this, he didn’t expect me to share the bad luck so why should he share the good? But a bit extra would have been nice every now and again!
Crawford Mains was unusual, perhaps unique in one another respect. It had it’s own cemetery! At some time, the local church had been near the farm, I don’t know why the village it served had been moved but when I knew the farm there was a ruined church and a beautifully kept graveyard. It always struck me that in Scotland the upkeep of cemeteries was a charge on the local rate and the council kept them tidy, this always struck me as a very civilised practise and one that England would do well to copy.
A bit further up the A74, past the Lanark turn off the road entered some wild country. It was a grass moorland that was only good for sheep and forestry, I think a lot of it belonged to Lord Home of the Hirsel whose seat was just up the road at Douglas. There was a turn off to the west which eventually brought you out at Sanquar on the Ayr road. A couple of miles down this road was Crawfordjohn, a regular port of call for me and David on a Monday morning. There was a local saying which described the place well; “Into Crawfordjohn, out of the world.” The farm was run by the Wilson brothers, one of whom was married. The main brother was called Willy and to put it mildly, he was a bit fond! We always had a cup of tea and there was plenty of bodily contact on the settle and I got the occasional knee fondle in the early days until Willy realised he was flogging a dead horse so to speak! I once took my friend Colin Barritt in there on a trip up the country but didn’t warn him about Willy! He got the treatment and has never forgotten it! There was always a coal fire burning in the cottage range in the kitchen and the baking was superb. The farm was spotless and one thing that struck me was the old fashioned practice of feeding the cattle in the byre on whole oat sheaves just as they had come from the binder. Harvesting oats with a reaper-binder was still common practice in Scotland as the oats dried well in the shook and didn’t need any fancy machinery to cart and store.
While we are on the A74 we might as well mention Walter Jackson at Lockerbie. He was a regular call on Monday morning and had been buying calves off Drinkalls for years. I remember once running low on diesel as I came down the road from a long trip up to the north but had no money. I had a passenger that day, I can’t remember who it was but he was most impressed when I drew off the main road at Lockerbie on to this side road, stopped at a house on the side of the road, knocked on the door and they gave me £50 when I asked for it. As I got back in the bloke in the cab said “Have you got many calling shops like that?” “Scores” I said, and the nice thing was it was perfectly true!
We’re getting over towards the Ayr side now so I’ll start at the market. If you want a happy life it’s a good idea to treat the people you come into contact with respect. This is true of the customers but also when you are dealing with the staff at the markets. At Ayr, one of my mainstays was Andy Stead and his brother John who had both worked there for years. Andy was a boozer and had a wonderful red-veined face. I used to go to the market pub with him for a drink at lunch time and never lost my sense of shock when I saw Scotsmen spoiling good whisky by pouring lemonade in it! The bottles of lemonade stood on the bar and you helped yourself for free. Andy was a great character and would recite Burns at the drop of a hat. Until you’ve heard Andy reciting the “Address to the Haggis” you’ve never lived! I’d love to be able to say that I heard it at a Burns supper or Tarbolton Show but I’d be a liar. I heard it in the rain in the yard at Ayr Market one day and have never forgotten it. Mind you, from what I’ve heard about Tarbolton Show I wasn’t qualified to be there, when men of Andy’s ilk go out for a good drink they don’t stop until they are paralytic!
One feature of the auction yard at Ayr which was still there in those days was the old loading docks for transferring cattle from the auction to cattle wagons on the railway. This used to be the standard method of shifting cattle long distances and Gisburn had a siding as well. John Harrison has told me that his father and Tommy Wrathall from Skipton used to bring cattle down from Scotland to Earby and Skipton. At Earby, they were unloaded in a siding next to the station and walked straight into the yard of the White House Farm the family home. John says that it was a good service and very fast and reliable. Andy could remember these days and told me how fast they could clear the auction at the end of the day.
Another good friend in Ayr Market was John Reid from Maybole. John was an ex railway man, he had been in a signal box all his life. His hobby which passed the time on in the box was stick dressing, making shepherds crooks with ram’s horn handles and hazel or blackthorn shanks. I used to bring him horns up from Lancashire and he kept my man down there going with hazel shanks. He made me a beautiful crook with a thistle on the handle and carved with the name of my the farm, “The Hey”, just as they do in Scotland. Vera has this now but I have a good stick as well. I was always keeping my eye open for good saplings at the side of the road. We used sticks all the time and our standard was an ash ‘sappy’, this was a straight ash stick cut while young and full of sap. If you held it by the thin end and used it gently they would last until someone pinched it off you. I cut some with a bent root and this became the handle. I once found the perfect market stick with a lovely ninety degree bend handle. I dried it, sanded it and varnished it and gave it to Richard. He had it stolen the same day, somebody else recognised a good sappy when they saw one. I usually had two or three in the cab and used to give them to my mates as I was on my travels.
In Scotland the standard shank for a crook was a hazel cut near running water. Vera’s stick is hazel. However, there is an even better shank but much rarer in the North of England because you seldom find a straight one, this is blackthorn, the hedgerow tree that bears sloes. Vera and I had gone up the dale with Cyril Richardson one day and we called in at a friend of his at Aysgarth who was a stick dresser. While we were in his workshop I spotted a blackthorn shank in the corner, it was the best I have ever seen, straight as a shot and slow grown, you could tell by the number of knobbles down it where side shoots had grown. I homed in on this and asked him what he was going to do with it. He said he had been drying it for five years and was going to use it for a shank in a crook he was entering in the Great Yorkshire Show at Harrogate. I told him that I wanted it when it was finished and would he let me know when I could have it. I then forgot all about it until Christmas two years later when Vera gave it to me as a present. I don’t know whether he ever entered it in a show but it stands in the corner in the front room and still gives me pleasure.
We had a couple of good customers in Coylton just before you got into Ayr. Keith and I would call there and I often delivered during my other trips north for cattle. One was Mr Aitken who didn’t buy many calves but was a good man out of the old school. I called in there once and I had a lousy cold, I can still hear the advice he gave me as we drank tea in the kitchen, “Lie close to a bottle of whisky Stanley!” Not bad advice actually but he never did tell me whether I should open the bottle or not!
The other customer was Gavin Young who had the cleanest farm in Scotland bar none. I never saw a thing out of place at his farm and his buildings were spotless. They even scrubbed and disinfected the roof beams and the boarding under the roof! Perhaps this is one of the reasons why he was so successful at calf rearing. He bought about 200 a year off us and they were never the top quality, he preferred middling calves, he said he could put the quality on if they were half decent. I doubt if he lost one calf a year and anyone who has ever dabbled in the game will know just how high a level of stockmanship that is.
There was another man I always remember, he was called Mr Brown and bought the occasional calf off us in the market. I don’t know a lot about him but he always had on the most magnificent, highly polished brown boots. They looked like a couple of conkers straight out of the shell!
A regular customer in Ayr was John McKellar who lived with his sister out near the coast on the Girvan road at a farm which had a Gaelic name that sounded like Muckyduck. I’m sure it isn’t spelt like that but that’s how it is pronounced. Almost every week he bought two best heifer calves from us, they were always specially selected for him and kept in the wagon until he came. He paid top price and got the best.
I always helped him to bag them up and very often he would go for a bit of lunch first and take me with him. One day, he told me an incredible story but, knowing John, I’m prepared to bet that every word was true. One day he got a letter from the Supervisor of the British Rail sidings at Port Alexander, north west of Glasgow, asking him if he would contact the yard and make an appointment to discuss what they were going to do with his train load of steel! John rang the man and asked him what was going on, he pointed out that he was a farmer near Ayr and knew nothing about wagons full of steel, were they sure they had the right man? The BR person said that they were absolutely certain, they had done a lot of research. He reminded John that a relation of his had owned and operated a steel fabrication company in Glasgow during the war and as the last surviving relative, he was responsible for the offending train. John agreed to go to Port Alexander and meet the man.
When he arrived at the yard he was taken over to the far side where there was a very large string of wagons parked. It was obvious they had been there for a long while because there were young trees growing round it, John said they finally agreed it had been sat there for 27 years! He was shown one of the original consignment notes that were clipped to each wagon to direct railway staff as to how to dispose of the consignment at each stage of the journey and it had his relation’s firm’s name on it. He gathered that BR were slightly embarrassed about the train and the length of time it had been there. They were about to develop part of the yard for other purposes and the easiest way out of their predicament was to find the legal owner of the consignment and unload the whole problem on to them. John had become spot ball!
John took a copy of the consignment note and went away to seek advice. His solicitor investigated the matter and eventually came up with what seemed to be an explanation. Closer examination of the consignment note had given some clues. The wagons were carrying strips of perforated metal that were used in the Western Desert during the African campaign for making temporary landing strips in the desert. There was a consignment number on the note which identified the customer as the Ministry of Supply and the reason why the wagons were at Port Alexander was because someone had put this on the notes instead of Port of Alexandria which was, of course, in Egypt! Once the wagons arrived in the siding, as far as the old London, Midland and Scottish Railways was concerned, they were at their destination!
Several legal problems now presented themselves, the LMSR was defunct having been amalgamated into British Railways when rail was nationalised after the war so BR was deeming the owner of the steel to be the owner of the wagons also. The Ministry of Supply was long defunct but a search of the records revealed that the consignment was officially listed as being ‘Lost at Sea due to Enemy Action’, a ploy no doubt used to account for the absence of the consignment, and Her Majesty’s Government had no interest in the matter. The legal advice was that John was perfectly safe in law to accept ownership and scrap the lot! He got quotations for the removal, picked a firm and they came in and scrapped the lot and paid out! John never said what happened to the money but I got the impression that he wasn’t the only family member left so someone somewhere had a windfall.
While we are on the subject of funny bits of paper, we had a customer at Allerton near Bradford, Bob Morphet. I was in his kitchen having a cup of tea one day after delivering some cattle and I noticed a framed document on the wall that looked like a summons. I asked Bob about it and he told me that he once had an interest in a demolition firm which had a contract with British Rail for demolishing several redundant railway stations. They fulfilled the contract and were paid out and Bob forgot all about it. A couple of years later, he got a call from a man at BR who made rather a strange request! If Bob was assured in writing that the result of the court case would be an Absolute Discharge, would he allow BR to prosecute him for stealing a railway station!
What had happened was that the arm of BR which had responsibility for selling surplus property had taken a client to view the redundant station at Heckmondwyke. When they got there they had a bit of a shock, it was missing! Investigation showed that BR had made a mistake when they gave Bob the list of stations to demolish and had mistakenly included Heckmondwyke. They consequently had a hole in their inventory and the legal eagles had decided that the most effective way of accounting for the loss of the asset was to prosecute Bob for stealing it, he would of course have a cast iron defence and could not be held responsible but in legal terms, the absence of the station would be accounted for. So this was why Bob had a framed summons on the wall which declared to the world that he had been charged with ‘Feloniously Stealing and Taking Away Heckmondwyke Railway Station’. Life really is stranger than fiction sometimes!
Back to the Scotsmen! We seem to have skipped across to Ayr and missed some good men out so we have to backtrack now to Strathaven, always pronounced ‘Straven’. We had a good customer in Jim Donald at Braehead above Strathaven. He didn’t come into Lanark much and I used to go out to him regularly to lift heifers. I always liked to go to Braehead and usually arrived there at dinnertime. I can’t ever remember going to Jim’s without being fed! He was also a good man for Richard in that he had a relation who worked in a distillery and he kept Richard supplied with Thin Red Line whisky which was good stuff! I went in one day and was sat down at the table straight away, it was scrubbed white and all that was on it was a bowl of salt, a big lump of home made butter and a knife and fork each. Then a big pan of potatoes boiled in their skins was tipped on the table and I was initiated into ‘Skinny Tatties’! It was the first picking of Jim’s favourite potato, the Golden Wonder and if ever anything was appositely named, it was that potato. You spiked a spud on your fork and then peeled it with your knife and thumb, you just lifted a piece of skin and stripped it back just like peeling a banana. Once you had discarded the skin you dipped the spud in the butter and then touched it in the salt and straight into your mouth. That was all we had, a bellyful of the best potatoes I have ever had in my life and to wash them down everyone had a glass of whisky. I can remember looking round the table and there were all ages sat there and I often think when I hear dieticians pontificating as to what we should eat to stay healthy that those people might not have known much about diet but by God they knew what was good for them! Jim also grew Kerr’s Pink which he liked as well but not as much as the Golden Wonder. I’ve often wondered if Golden Wonder crisps were named after this spud.
A bit further over towards Kilmarnock on the road between Galston and the A76 at Cross-roads was Clinchyard , home of Nancy and Hughie Anderson. Hughie was a fiery, good hearted man and Nancy was lovely, they had a daughter who was an imp and every visit there was a joy. I’ve never seen a farm so heavily stocked, it didn’t seem to matter how many cattle you put in the fields, the grass gained on them! Hughie was, and still is, a brilliant farmer and had his own ideas. He took it into his head once that he wanted a South Devon bull so Richard found him one about 9 months old. I picked it up from Demense and had it on its own in a clean wagon bedded up with straw. It was the most beautiful calf you’ve ever seen, its eyelashes were blond and impossibly long. I remember when I got home I brought the girls out to see it. It stayed in the wagon overnight and I took it up the following morning. As so often happens with young stock, all didn’t go well. It got a viral infection and Hughie said that it was only saved because Nancy nursed it night and day. It survived and I went up many years later, I think it would be about 1988 and it was still going strong. Incidentally, so was Nancy she had at least one more child!
I was at Clinchyard sometime in late 1972 with the wagon and trailer. I was filling up with some heifers from Hughie and had a full load. We were just having a cup of tea and a bun when I noticed that the sky to the North had turned black, not dark, black! I asked Hughie if it was what I thought it was, snow, and he said I was right and the sooner I got away the better. It started as I left Clinchyard and by the time I got to Cross-roads and turned down the A76 it was gathering on the road. By the time I got to Mauchline, six miles down the road, it was almost a foot deep, I’ve never seen snow fall so heavily. There is a steep hill though Mauchline and of course, the gritting wagons had been taken by surprise. I got to the top of the hill which is in the village itself and, getting into second gear, started creeping down. There was a van in front of me but he was moving as fast as me so I had no problem. Just then I saw an artic coming over the bridge at the bottom of the hill, he was fully loaded and came storming up the hill at about the same speed as I was going down. I watched him come and thought how well he was doing. This is often the case on fresh snow, you can actually get a grip on the snow itself.
Everything was going well until the van pulled into the kerb in order to make a delivery! This simple act entirely changed the situation. I knew that if I tried to brake, 60 feet of wagon and trailer was going to slide down the road and jack-knife and there wasn’t room for the steel wagon to avoid either hitting me or being hit. All I could do was gently apply the trailer brake to put some drag on the wagon. The driver of the steel wagon had seen what was going on but by this time was too close to the van to stop, there wouldn’t have been enough room for me. All he could do was put his foot down and clear the van as fast as possible. It was the correct decision but at the time I couldn’t see how I was going to miss him. The van driver had got out and I decided that if I was going to hit anything it would be the van. A gap opened just as I got to the van and I took his mirror off as I went through. It happened so slowly that both the other driver and myself had time to open the window, reach out and pull our mirrors in to the cab to stop them clashing. He grinned at me when we passed about two inches apart. I suspect my eyes were looking like saucers! Neither of us stopped, we couldn’t and I suppose the van driver wrote his mirror off to experience!
When I got to New Cumnock the police had closed the road. I pulled up and pointed out that I had a bit of a problem as I was loaded with cattle, there wasn’t room to turn round and I couldn’t possibly back a wagon and trailer half a mile back up the road in a blizzard! (We’ll get round to the difficulties of reversing a wagon and four wheeled trailer later) Common sense prevailed and the bobby let me through and said he would radio to Sanquar that I was coming and ask them to send the plough up to meet me, this isn’t as surprising as it sounds, remember that all these blokes came from farming stock and understood the problems. It’s about fifteen miles from New Cumnock to Sanquar and I set out to enjoy myself! This might surprise you me saying this but I had seen plenty of snow on milk pick up for Harrisons and we could never allow ourselves to be stopped by it. I had ideal conditions actually, the road was closed and there was very little likelihood of local traffic so I had a clear run over fresh snow, the best sort. Away I went.
First thing to say is that a wagon and trailer is the best combination you can have in snow. The trailer is running in the wheel tracks of the wagon and so doesn’t know there is any problem and, if the combination is set up right with the trailer towbar sloping up to the hitch, the more weight you put into pulling the trailer, the more weight is transferred to the driving wheels of the wagon. I’d designed the outfit so the hitch was right! By now the snow was drifting but all that means is that you occasionally hit four feet of snow but beyond that there will be a clear or lightly covered stretch of road so as long as you have enough momentum to burst through the drift you are OK. It must have been an impressive sight if there had been anybody about to see me. Every time I hit a drift snow burst out like an explosion and blinded me for a fraction of a second. My only worry was that I might come across a car abandoned in the middle of the road. There were a couple but being Scots they had got them well in to the side. In England, especially nowadays, I would never have got through because bad drivers would have blocked the road by carelessly abandoning their vehicles. I came down into Sanquar and met the plough at the fireworks factory. I pulled in and had a word and he decided not to go out until morning when I told him how bad it was. He told me that the ploughs had gone down towards Dumfries about half an hour before so I should have a clear run. He was right and the funny thing was that my overall time back home was about ten minutes better than usual!
I had another fast journey time in March 1970 but for a different reason. The clutch hydraulic slave cylinder on XWU failed just as we were getting ready to come out of Lanark. I took over from David and we set off home with no clutch or rather, a permanently engaged clutch. The only way to start off was put it in bottom gear and press the starter, after that you were OK as long as you kept moving and matched up engine speed to gearbox when changing. We got to Demense in 4hrs. and 5 mins an improvement of almost a quarter of an hour on our usual time. It’s amazing how much power a clutch soaks up when you are changing gear. The improvement was down to having no clutch pedal and I never did a better time. Even after I fitted a new slave cylinder the clutch was not right so in the end I fitted a new plate, pressure cover and withdrawal bearing on my Sunday off at home. This was a complete cure.
In 1970 I was involved in a little incident up at Carlisle while on my way back from Scotland on Monday the 21st of June. I don’t think David had been to Lanark that day but somebody was riding with me, I can’t remember who. At this time the M6 was being constructed round Carlisle and there was a big set of road works at the Golden Fleece, just south of the city. The road was covered in mud and it had just had a light shower of rain. There was an army convoy coming in the other direction and as we came up a steep rise and round a right hand corner in the road works I realised that the Land Rover coming in the opposite direction wasn’t going to make it. I was only creeping along and stopped. As he slid across the road and hit my back wheel I let the brake off so I was rolling backwards, this minimised the impact but even so, the Land Rover was a mess. Nobody was hurt and next thing we knew was another Land Rover hurtled up the wrong side of the road and almost ran into the front of me. A young officer, Second Lieutenant Campbell jumped out and ordered me to drive on!
I’m afraid his man management skills were minimal, this was entirely the wrong way to treat me. I got out of the cab and told him that neither I or his bent Land Rover were going anywhere until I had some witnesses and the name of his insurance company as we would be making a claim for any damage caused by his incompetent driver. The bloke behind me had seen it all and gave me his name and address, he was a commercial traveller from Aberdeen. Lt. Campbell was going a funny purple colour and just then the police arrived. They weighed up the situation, had a word with my witness and ordered the officer to give me full details of who they were and all the names involved. The bobby told me that it was useless asking for the name of the insurance company as there wasn’t one! The government didn’t have insurance, they stood it themselves. I was given full details and we got our claim paid in full for a new rear wing, a tyre and one or two other odds and sods.
It strikes me that one of the things which would surprise a modern driver would be the total absence of any paperwork connected with my job. We had no invoices or receipts and most of the time no log book or stock records either! Everything was done by word of mouth and I think I was the only one who wrote everything down! One of the reasons why I can be so precise about so many names dates and places is that I still have my diaries and every beast I ever carried is booked down. I’m not saying the system was perfect, Richard sent me to Halifax one day to pick up a cow. He gave me the wrong name, the wrong farm and sent me on the wrong day. You should have seen his face when I came back with the right cow! I only once got into any sort of trouble over log books. I was tramming down Beattock drag one evening doing well over 70mph when I saw a uniformed figure in the distance step out into the road and raise his hand! I braked as hard as I dared and managed to pull into the lay-by. There was smoke coming out of the brakes and I daren’t put the handbrake on as it could have split the drums as they cooled, I just shoved it in reverse. It was the police sergeant from Beattock who had stopped me and as I came round the front of the wagon he said “Log Book and stock book please driver” I just grinned at him and told him I wasn’t going to waste his time, he had caught a fish! He said something about the fact that I was honest and took my particulars. I got back in and drove off. I never heard a thing about it! To this day I can’t understand what happened. All I can say is that it reminds me of a story which was told about two drivers from Wild’s transport in Barlick. They were pulled up for speeding and the one who was the passenger got quite physical with the bobby to the extent that in the end he said he was going to report them both, and took their particulars. They got back in the cab and drove off and the man who had been driving played hell with his mate for making matters worse, he was sure they would get done. “I don’t think so.” said the passenger “You won’t hear any more about it!” and with that he produced the bobby’s note book which he had picked out of his top pocket!
All the characters and good men weren’t in Scotland, we had plenty of home grown ones! One of my favourite trips out was up to Halifax, we had a bunch of customers in the Ripponden, Stainland area. Smithie Brothers always fascinated me, they farmed together and were a typical close-knit Yorkshire farming family. If you were in you were in but if you fell out with one you fell out with the lot. I always got on well with them and used to suit them by always backing into the yard for either unloading or lifting cattle. They said I was the only wagon of that size who ever attempted it! I was struck by how clean their cows lay in winter in the byre and asked Jim Smithie once how he managed it. His reply was short and to the point; “Keep their muck stiff Stanley!”
They had a famous neighbour at Stainland Hall, Lord Joseph Kagan of Gannex fame. He was a mate of Harold Wilson the Prime Minister and thought himself no end of a man. The Smithie Brothers had rented some of the Stainland Hall land for years and in the end made Kagan an offer for it. He mucked them about for months and one night Jim and Roy decided they had had enough. They marched down to the hall, went straight in through the front door and into the dining room where a smart dinner party was going on. In no uncertain terms they told Lord Kagan what they thought about him and where he could shove his land! With that they walked out and forgot it until, about a fortnight later, they got a message to say that their offer was accepted and the land was theirs. This method of dealing with matters was entirely typical of them, they went straight to the point. They always had a bad name for Kagan, they said he was a wrong ‘un and of course in the end they were proved right and Kagan was gaoled.
Another favourite was Joe Jagger and his wife at Royd Farm, Ripponden. Joe was a big bluff bull of a man and had a defective volume control, he could only shout! He and his wife used to hold conversations across the yard at the tops of their voices and it was a pantomime. Joe was no mug, he had a gritting contract with the local council and a small milk round as well I think. When the surveyors were laying out the line of the M62 across Rocking Stones they had a big problem. The moor was so rough and boggy that the only way they could get about efficiently was with a helicopter. This was, of course, costing a lot of money. Joe got to hear about this in the pub one night and said he could solve their problem at much less cost. He fitted them out with ponies and sledges, the method that local farmers had been using for transport on the moor and steep slopes for at least a thousand years. It solved most of the problems and I’m sure Joe made a bob or two out of it.
I called in one day to pick up a jersey cow which was Mrs Jagger’s favourite. She kept telling me how beautiful its eyes were and what a lovely milker it was, funny thing is that it died on the next owner! I have this theory that cattle which have been kept by women always pine when they leave them. Not scientific I know but I’ve see it happen too many times.
This particular day it was my last stop and I was feeling a bit peckish. Joe asked me if I wanted a pork butty and a pot of tea and this seemed like a good idea so we went in the house. Now everyone has a different idea of what constitutes an acceptable level of tidiness in a house. On a scale of one to ten, Joe and his wife would be at about three! Everything needed to support human life was on the table, including the milk and butter and a parrot in a cage. There was an enormous rolltop desk which had about three secret compartments in it, I know because Joe showed me all of them! Joe grabbed a balm cake and ripped it in half, then he got hold of the meat and tore a piece off it with his hands, I should mention that they were covered in cow shit! He slapped the meat between the two halves of the balm cake and gave it me. Just at this moment Mrs Jagger came in with my pint of tea and asked Joe if he’d offered me any stuffing. I said I’d like some so Joe opened my butty up, grabbed a jug off the table and poured some liquid stuffing on like sauce! I have to report it was one of the best pork butties I have ever had!
We sat there drinking tea and Joe asked me if I wanted to buy a parrot. As a matter of fact I’d have loved a parrot but Vera couldn’t stand birds, she had a phobia about them. One once got into the bedroom after I had gone to work and she waited until Fred Smith the milkman came and got him to come upstairs and get the bird out of the room before she’d get up. I hasten to add she wasn’t frightened of anything else as far as I know, not even me! She used to say I was like an orange, thick-skinned on the outside and soft in the centre! Be that as it may, Joe wasn’t taking no for an answer and he took the parrot out of the cage and put it on my shoulder. He said I could have it for thirty bob and the cage thrown in. This was suspiciously cheap but I was enjoying the parrot rubbing up against my ear and muttering to me ‘Eh, th’art a grand ‘un.” and then it bit my ear! I shot out of my chair with blood streaming down my neck, the parrot took off and Joe shouted to me to block the fireplace or it would go up the chimney. The parrot was zooming round the kitchen knocking ornaments off the mantelpiece and the top of the desk. At this moment Mrs Jagger returned and gave Joe the biggest tongue lashing I’ve ever seen anyone hand out. It turned out that the parrot belonged to his son and was known to be vicious, Joe got a kick out of seeing it bite people! It took us ten minutes to catch it and get it back in the cage and Mrs Jagger calmed down a bit.
Joe was friendly with the Smithie brothers and they would occasionally declare a holiday, they called it ‘Having a set-off’. They would wash, shave and change and go somewhere for the day. I suppose it was some sort of demonstration of independence. They had the power to decide what they did within the framework of looking after the stock and milking. It pleased them to exercise this power whenever they felt like it.
Further along the road towards Outlane was William Wheelwright’s farm. They were big retailers and quite autocratic but good customers of Drinkalls. They bought the best heifers and I think we took most of their cows.
Over towards Blackburn we had one customer in particular who sticks in my mind, Hargreaves Haworth and his wife Minnie at Fernhurst Farm. Hargy was a wonderful man. He was a small vigorous white haired bloke who had a genius for getting casualty cows on the road again. If we had a beast that was low in condition due to some ailment it had had or accident in calving, I would take them across the Hargy and he would keep them until they were back on form. He didn’t pay for them, Richard used to give him the difference between what it was worth when it went there and its value when we took it away and if it was a milker, Hargy had the advantage of that. Hargy’s secret was lots of TLC, more different kinds of proven than you could poke a stick at and Karswood Poultry Spice. This was a proprietary supplement which was originally intended to stimulate birds into lay but Hargy reckoned that a scoop full of dried beet pulp with spice on it was the best thing there was to tempt a cow back to eating. His theory was very simple, if you can get a cow to eat it will thrive and put on condition. There’s no doubt about it that it worked! I have taken cows there that staggered off the wagon and three months later they have sold in Gisburn for top prices! Hargy was one of our best assets. Minnie wore a black wig, I don’t know why, I think she just thought it made her look younger. She kept it on a polystyrene head in the kitchen and used to put it on like a hat whenever she went out of the house!
Bill Robertshaw farmed at Summerseat near Bury and was one of the most interesting men I’ve ever met. He had a slightly strange appearance, his head was generally cocked on one side a bit and he wore very thick glasses which gave him a slightly owlish look. As I got to know him I found out that he had been a prisoner of war of the Japanese and had been almost beaten to death on several occasions. He was deaf in one ear, blind in one eye and had various other areas of damage that he never went into. The point was that this bloke was still paying the price for our freedom 30 years after the event. He didn’t complain but apart from losing an eye and an ear I’ll bet he was in physical and mental pain every day of his life. I remember losing my temper with him one day when we were trying to load some cattle and he was a bit slow. I apologised immediately afterwards but feel ashamed to this day for my intemperance. His wife was a lovely lady and they had a son Philip who they thought the world of. I remember us having a conversation once and they told me they gave a certain amount to charity every month and the way they decided how much to give was to work out what would hurt but not deprive them. Yes, there are people like this in the world but you don’t often get to meet them.
I called in one day and they told me that their son had vanished. There had been some sort of upset and he had simply packed his bag and left. Bill and his wife were devastated and couldn’t understand where they had gone wrong. I told them I thought they’d been too soft on him. Anyway, there was nothing I could do about it so I went on my way.
Months later, in March 1972 I took 8 beasts to a new customer, Bob Peate at Thornton Hall, Thornton le Moors near Chester. We unloaded the cattle and then went in the kitchen for a cup of tea and a bun. He was a nice bloke and when I got into the kitchen I was astonished, there was room to ride a motor bike round the table! It was an enormous room, it must have been thirty feet square. Dominating the space at each end of the kitchen were two loudspeaker units as big as fridge freezers! I asked him about them and he played me some music on them, they were fantastic, I’ve never heard bass like that apart from in a church. Anyway, after a bit more music I decided it was time I left and as we went outside I saw a bloke over the other side of the yard who seemed to duck round the corner when he saw me. I told Bob I’d forgotten something and went back into the house. He followed me in and asked me what I’d left. I asked him how long he had employed the young fellow I saw in the yard. I told him that I recognised him and he was causing his parents a lot of grief by not contacting them, it was Philip Robertshaw! Mr Peate promised he’d have a quiet word with him when the time was right, I gave him the Robertshaw’s address and got in the wagon and drove away. I didn’t think I was the right person to approach him but Mr Peate must have done his job well because shortly afterwards I heard that Philip was back home.
This happened much later and in the meantime, back at the farm, there was to be a momentous event. Starting June 4th. 1971 the Graham Family took a holiday and went away to the seaside for the whole fortnight! For a week before we went the weather forecasters were predicting the hottest June in living memory. Vera liked the sound of Ayr so we booked into a nice B&B I knew near the auction, hired a car from Seeds at Colne and set off for the north!
It was the wettest, coldest most miserable fortnight anybody has ever seen! I swear there were icebergs floating down the Clyde! We did our best and I think the kids had a good time but I have a picture of the three of them stood shivering in the water in their swimming costumes. I repeated the picture twenty years later with them stood in the Indian Ocean at Perth, Western Australia but we didn’t even dream this would be possible in those days. It really was bad weather and I still feel cheated, we had saved so long for it.
Shortly after we arrived back there was another notable, but no where near as happy, incident. It was Sunday and the sun was shining, I was lay on the lawn being pestered by the kids and Fly who was acting daft and trying to lick me to death. I reached out and flicked his hindquarters with the back of my hand and broke his leg just below the hip joint! Within seconds we were all in tears. It was a freak incident, I must have just caught him in the wrong place while there was stress on the bone, at least that’s what Mr Clarke said when he arrived after Vera had rung him up. He said it was a bad break and the best thing to do was put him down. I told him no way, he could amputate the leg if he wanted but I wanted Fly around if only to remind me that I didn’t know my own strength. Before this I’d been known to flick one of the girls legs if they were acting up but I never touched them again, I was frightened of hurting them.
Mr Clarke took Fly away and I think he sent him to Edinburgh, whatever, he came back ten days later with a pin in his leg and slowly recovered. He went back later and had the pin taken out and the only way you could see that anything was wrong was when he got up if he’d been lying down, there was a sort of hesitation as he rose. We eventually got the bill, it was for £10-0-0! I have an idea Mr Clark was perhaps letting me claim some green shield stamps back. He treated us well and I for one will never forget him.
The girls of course were growing up now, Margaret was 10, Susan 8 and Janet 6 years old. You couldn’t have asked for happier or more rewarding children. I’m sure Vera would agree with me if I say these were tremendously rewarding times. I was still working far too hard and Vera was working part time as well but we had good reason for living and I don’t think the kids went short of anything. Except perhaps a sunny fortnight at Ayr!
As for the house, we had carpets all the way up the stairs, along the landing and actually round the toilet! Vera and I had always agreed that we’d know we were affluent when we got fitted carpet right through. Mind you, we hadn’t got the kitchen carpeted yet, we were still working on that. We had a black and white TV set and, until Vera got fed up with it and sold it one day while I was out, a ‘cottage’ three piece suit. The ‘cottage’ bit meant it was overgrown beechwood chairs with fitted cushions and was about the cheapest thing you could get!
In 1972 we had some more excitement, the County Council compulsorily purchased the barn and part of the front croft so they could widen the road and alter the gradient. I had to decide whether to ask for a new barn or take the money. Vera and I decided to take the money as we were only playing at farming and the farm wasn’t really big enough for a barn. I arranged for us to retain the stone slates and between June and July the barn was demolished, the road widened and various improvements made like re-grading the top end of the field and new fencing. For reasons which will be apparent shortly, I was at home on August 18th and arranged with the contractor to let me use the big tracked Caterpillar shovel they had on site.
Talk about big boys toys! I was annoyed with the Council because at the top end of the road widening they had left a blank end where the old hedge and bank started and it was ten feet higher than the road. I thought it was an eyesore and very dangerous. On Friday I went up there with the shovel, stripped the top soil, took the bank out and spread it in the field to level it and replaced the topsoil. I spent all day Saturday tracking the field down and harrowing it and on the Sunday I re-seeded it. I often look at that part of the field as I drive past and wonder if anybody ever realises what it could have been. I made a lovely job of the field and probably averted several accidents over the years.
My idea with the slates was to re-roof the whole of Hey Farm. I measured it up and bought all the timber for it and consulted with Billy Entwistle about how I should go about it. He examined the roof and told me I’d be fool to bother with it. All it needed was a few slates replacing and it was good for another fifty years. I took notice of what he said, we replaced the slates and some ridge stones and it stands today as good as Billy said it would. The timber was taking no fault stacked at the back of the house and sheeted up.
As it turned out, August 1972 was to be one of those months where, with hindsight, I would have done well to go and find myself a big hole and crawl into it! It wasn’t going to be all that good for Richard either!
Looking back, the rot set in on August 10 when the starter on HYG jammed in gear, demolished the starter ring and ripped various bits off the bell housing. I can’t remember where it was at the time but I towed it into Gilbraiths at Accrington and left them to deal with it.
We had been having a bit of bother with XWU for a while. It was suffering from a common Leyland disorder at the time. The block of the 401 engine was basically the old 350 block bored out and upgraded and they had reached the limiting factor, they couldn’t get rid of the heat fast enough. XWU had done over 250,000 hard miles and the cylinder head was cracking round the injector holes. We had had one serious rebuild but it still wasn’t right and I told Richard he should bite the bullet and put a service engine in and have a fresh start. The M6 had opened from the top side of Carlisle and we had more motorway running and this wasn’t helping either. We got to the stage where we were having to stop around Carlisle and let her cool down a bit.
On Friday the 11th of August David took it to Beeston and it boiled on him at Cuddington and he had to be towed into Gilbraiths. On Saturday I brought HYG out of Gilbraiths and we used that for Scotland the following week. On Wednesday the 23rd I brought XWU out of Gilbraiths and wanted to take it straight back in it was so noisy, it was obvious it wasn’t right, the following day it dropped two valves into no. 6 cylinder but luckily this happened just as it started and I stopped quickly enough to be lucky and avoid too much damage. Back to Gilbraiths again, this time I raised my voice I’m afraid, the engine was giving us a very clear message but once again, it was decided to repair it. I think Gilbraiths must have been advocating repair because they made more money that way, whatever, they had another crack at it. On Monday, August the 28th. Keith brought XWU out of Accrington ready for Ayr on the Tuesday.
We set off to Ayr and I said straight away that all wasn’t well. I doubted if we’d even get to Ayr. The temperature was OK but there was a nasty knock in the top end. We got to Ayr and eventually I set off back on my own with a load of cattle and a couple of calves on the luton. As I dropped down the slight slope to the Golden Fleece I had the revs. well up to give me a run at the hill beyond and was hammering up at full chat, I dropped half a gear on the axle and at this point everything went pear shaped.
With hindsight I know exactly what the problem was, Gilbraiths had fitted a reconditioned cylinder head which, in common with all reconditioned heads, had been skimmed on a grinder to make sure it was absolutely flat. When you have skimmed a head you should re-cut the valves so they don’t stand proud of the face of the head. Somebody hadn’t done this or hadn’t cut them back enough so every time the piston came up the cylinder it was hitting the valves but only a minute blow. This is never a dead flat blow because the piston has a slight hollow in the top and each time the valve was struck it slightly distorted the valve stem. Eventually one of the valves, usually the exhaust because it is hotter, fails due to fatigue and the head drops in the cylinder. There is no room in the cylinder when the piston is at top dead centre so the piston is instantaneously stopped.
A lot of things happen very quickly now. The piston has stopped but the crankshaft keeps going and something has to give. In my case, the connecting rod broke and smashed through the cast iron block into the camshaft which bent, seized and broke. This brought all the valves to a stop wherever they were and the impact of the pistons on the valves destroyed the valve gear and broke the crankshaft. All I knew was that there was a big bang and all power stopped. I threw the motor into neutral and coasted across on to the hard shoulder and into a slip road which was an emergency entrance to the gritting depot on the other side of the road. There I was, neatly parked and well out of the way but with certain pressing problems.
The first and most important was the cattle. They were OK and were standing quietly cudding so no immediate worries. I could have gone for the emergency phone but decided not to. I went and sat on the hard shoulder and waited until something interesting showed up. The first bit of luck was a cattle wagon from Penrith. I waved him down and asked him where he was going. He said he had a load of sheep on for Penrith market and I asked him to come back for me when he had tipped and pick up my cattle and take them and me down to Marton. He said he’d do this and away he went. Shortly afterwards I saw Richard’s new BMW 2500 and waved him down as well. He had just taken delivery of the BMW after a series of Rovers and was pleased as punch with it. I told him where we were at, asked him to inform the police we were all sorted out, the wagon was off the carriageway and we’d get it lifted the following morning. I said I’d come to Marton first and could he wait up for me. All this was agreed, he went off down the country and a couple of hours later the cattle wagon came back for me and my ladies.
In the meantime the police had been to see me. They’d arranged for the staff at the gritting depot to open the locked gate on the slip road so that the other wagon could turn to back on to me. By the time he arrived we were all set up. We transferred the cattle and the calves and I chucked all my belongings into his cab and had a drink out of the flask he had brought back for me and off we went bemoaning the fact that gaffers never listen to drivers when they really ought to. What’s the point in having a dog and when it barks, ignoring it!
We arrived at Marton at about half past midnight and tipped the cows. Richard told me to take his car and go home. At this point I must have lost my presence of mind! The two calves on the luton were accredited and Demense was our accredited premises. If we dropped the calves at Marton we would be breaking the law. I remember saying to Richard that we’d done everything right up to that point, why spoil it. The wagon had to go back past Demense, and I could follow him down, bed the calves up in a loose box and then go home. It only made half an hour difference and everything would be done properly. He agreed, I set off after the wagon, we dropped the calves, he set off back to his bed in Penrith and I set off to mine in Barlick.
Afterwards, I was asked what speed I was doing as I went home. I reckoned it was about 45mph and I’m sure I was right. The radio was playing and I was enjoying driving Richard’s new car which was impressive, dead quiet and smooth as a piece of silk. I was climbing up the hill into Gisburn over the railway bridge when a car hurtled round the right hand bend at the top of the hill completely on the wrong side of the road! I didn’t even think but reacted instinctively. Remember I wasn’t used to driving cars, I hadn’t even got one at the time. I reacted just as I would have done in the wagon which was to avoid hitting the other bloke because if I did I would kill him. I went for the near side verge but must have hit a soft spot which pulled me in and I hit the breast wall. As I said earlier, the police wanted to know how fast I was travelling and when I said 45mph they said it was impossible because I couldn’t have stopped as quickly as I did. I reckon they were wrong, what happened was that the car went over completely in a somersault, slid on its off side down the road and then hit the bank again and finished upright but across the road. I never saw the car afterwards but they tell me every panel was damaged including the boot!
Be that as it may, I finished up sat in the seat of the car, headlights shining on the wall and the radio still playing. I opened the door and climbed out and the first thing I saw was the other car stopped down the road. I could see the driver in silhouette against his headlights. He had got out and was looking back up the road. When he saw me get out, he jumped in his vehicle and drove away. I have a message for him, you didn’t know whether there was anyone else in with me and you didn’t care, you were as pissed as a newt and all you were thinking about was your licence. I hope you have dreamed about it ever since.
I remember thinking that the next thing was to get to the telephone at the top of the hill in Gisburn and at this point I noticed one of the suspension coil springs stood on top of a cats eye in the road. “Hello Zebedee, what are you doing here?” If you don’t understand that you’ve never watched Magic Roundabout! At this point the road came up and hit me. I worked it out that I’d fallen over so I got up to see whether it would happen again, it did. I was becoming aware that my right arm and shoulder weren’t as they ought to be so I decided to stay as close to the floor as I could and started to crawl up the road. I don’t remember a lot about the next period of time, I don’t even know how long it was. I came to at the telephone box and managed to dial 999. I had an interesting conversation with a lady and I was told later that I kept passing out so it was a while before they got me located, I don’t think they had automatic call identification then. Once I was certain the cavalry was on its way I attended to the next pressing matter which was the fact that I wanted to move my bowels, shock had hit me. I apologise to the residents but I managed very nicely in the patch of Michelmas Daisies behind the box. What intrigues me is how I managed to get my trousers undone and back up again afterwards. I didn’t manage it for six weeks afterwards.
I got down in the gutter and made myself comfortable, I lit my pipe and surveyed Gisburn from low level for about twenty minutes. Then there was movement on the station as George Horton and his mate rolled up in the ambulance followed by two bobbies in a car. George’s mate examined me and said “It’s his legs!” I told him there was nowt wrong with my legs, I just had them doubled up because it was comfortable, it was my shoulder and collar bone that was broken. George’s mate would have none of it and he lifted me by my shoulders while George straightened my legs out. I think I passed out then and came to in time to hear George saying “He’s right, it’s his right shoulder!” That sorted out they got me in the ambulance and the bobbies had a word with me. I told them what had happened, where the car was and asked them to contact Richard. We set off for Burnley Victoria Hospital. I swear that George’s mate ran over every manhole and kerb between Gisburn and Burnley! All ambulances should have air suspension not cart springs.
When we got to Burnley a sister had a look at me and strapped my shoulder up. She said that was all they could do and asked me one or two questions. By this time I was coming to and was hurting but all I wanted to do was get home. A doctor came in and had a look at me and decided I was all right. Funny thing was they never X-Rayed me. Then the bobbies came in and wanted to breathalyse me. I had no objection, as I told them I hadn’t had a drink for a month but the sister was incensed, “What if he’s got broken ribs or a punctured lung?” The bobbies weren’t interested and I told the sister I had no pain in my chest so why didn’t we just do it then we could all go home. I blew down the tube, result zero, honour satisfied all round and George and his mate took me home. I remember when they got me in and I saw Vera I just burst into tears and that’s the last I can recall about that evening.
So, there I was, best driver in the world and the averages had got me. You never think it can happen but if it doesn’t, all you can say is you’ve been lucky. A good driver cuts the odds down as far as he or she can but if someone drives straight at you there is no chance. There were a couple of immediate sequels, the police told me they were considering charging me with ‘Driving Without Due Care’, I don’t think they believed there was another car, this was later dropped but I was so angry! The other thing is that the bobby told me I must have a good gaffer because when they told him the car was a write off he said never mind the car, I can get another, how’s Stanley? Thanks Richard.
I got plenty of time at home for once. It was to be two months before I got back behind the wheel and my main task now was to get healed up and mobile again. I went to hospital and I had a broken collar bone, a chipped shoulder socket and a cracked shoulder blade, they said I’d be lucky if I ever got my arm above the shoulder again. I told Fred Smith our milkman this and he said that what I ought to do was put a rope through one of the ham hooks on the beam in the kitchen and use it to pull my arm up over my head! Sounded sensible so I did it, and I have to report it was painful! The consultant at the fracture clinic was delighted with my progress. He asked me how I had done it and when I told him he said if he made patients do that he’d be struck off.
Vera was a good nurse but hard. I couldn’t manage the buttons on my trousers and she used to make me wait for her to button me up when I’d had a pee! The kids thought it was great, they had daddy at home all the time. I did a lot of reading and really only one thing stands out in my mind about the time. I was sat in the kitchen one day and Susan came in crying. This was nothing fresh, Susan used crying as a safety valve and used to have weep many a time. I cuddled her too me and in the end persuaded her to tell me what was wrong. “I’ve set fire to the curtains in your bedroom.” Deathly hush while this sank in and then a rush up the stairs to see what could be saved. One of the curtains was half burnt, the plastic curtain rail was drooping and there was a black mark on the ceiling. But no fire! Years after I found that Janet had put it out with a jug of water but at the time it was a mystery.
As I said, at this time I did a lot of reading and thinking and I came to one or two conclusions. For years I had been convinced that I would die when I was 42. Don’t ask me where that one came from but I had the idea in my head. I knew I wouldn’t want to be driving much longer and made up my mind that I would be off the road by my 40th. birthday. Four years to go!
There had been big changes in the cattle industry as well. We had managed well enough through the foot and mouth epidemic of 1968 but we now had to contend with the scheme to eradicate brucellosis in cattle. This disease is contagious abortion in cattle but in humans it used to be called undulating fever. It’s almost like flu and is very debilitating. At one time it was recognised as the occupational disease of vets and I caught it off raw milk while working for the dairy. Once you get it it stays with you for life. All cattle were to be tested for the disease and any that were free and kept on designated farms with proper precautions against infection like double fencing were called accredited cattle and had to be kept separate from non-accredited ones.
For years I had been a fan of the four wheeled trailer. It went out of fashion in this country largely due to the archaic regulations which stated that there had to be a mechanical connection to the trailer brake and a trailer brake man as well as a driver. I think this regulation was changed in the 1968 Transport Act, modern air brake systems made it unnecessary. It struck me that a wagon and trailer would be ideal for our job, accredited cattle in one box and non-accredited in the other. I’d talked about this to Richard and he came round to the idea. I have an idea he mentioned it to John Harrison as well because he was actually the first to do it to my knowledge. John bought a Scania wagon in late 1971 and by late 1972 or early 1973 had a single wheeled Dyson trailer on which he mounted the Jennings box off his old ERF. It did the job but always looked like a pup dragging along behind. The roof line was wrong and it looked as though it was cocked up at the front. Sorry John!
Richard asked me to do some research into it while I was ill and I roped John Harrison in as well. I recommended two wagons, an ERF with Gardner engine, David Brown box and an Eaton back axle or a Volvo F88 four wheeler. John found a demonstration drawbar F88 for sale at Ailsa Motors in Glasgow but Richard thought the cab was too big. I told Richard that if he bought the wagon to look after me it would be the Volvo, if he bought it to look after himself, it would be the ERF. He went for the ERF and made a mistake, if he’d got the Volvo I would have done more years with him. On the whole, he did well!
Richard and David came for me one day and we went to Reliance Motors at Brighouse to look at the ERF chassis. As we walked into the showroom the salesman said he didn’t know the firm but he liked the uniform. We were all wearing identical jackets in green thornproof twill from Eric Spencer who had a stall at Gisburn auction. We went out to have a look at what was to turn out to be my new motor. It had the Gardner 6LX engine, old-fashioned but very reliable. Problem was it was only 150bhp and this for 32 tons gross! It was specially built for drawbar use and had a heavier propshaft and back cross member in the chassis and was fitted with full three line air brakes, the safest system on the road, now superseded I understand, under EEC regulations by the simpler, two line system. I had my arm in a sling but they helped me up into the cab and the salesman asked me what I thought about it. “I’ve seen better hen huts.” And I had too. The cab was fibre glass and very old fashioned, apart from the outside shape it was exactly the same as the cab on the old Albino at Marton Dairy! However, Richard must have liked the cab and the fuel figures because he bought it and eventually it went to Houghtons at Milnthorpe for a varnished box exactly the same as the one on XWU. The really nice thing to me was the number when it was registered. My first wagon was TWY 972 and this one, which was to prove to be my last, was TWY 136L. Margaret noticed this straight away when she saw it, she never forgets a vehicle number. By the way, driving must be in the genes, Margaret has her Class I licence and drives a 38 ton artic occasionally for her husband Mick who has his own wagon.
This reminds me of another small thing, when I first started driving all you needed to drive a wagon was a car driving licence. Theoretically it was possible to take a driving test on a small car and go straight out on to an eight wheeler! The 1968 Transport Act brought in the Heavy Goods Licence and the firm you worked for had to certify you were experienced and you got your HGV under ‘grandad’ rights. We all lobbied at Marton for them to put us in for Class 1 artic licences which they could have done, but Bill Mills wouldn’t bend the rules and we all finished up with four wheeler licences. Many other things changed as well. For years wagon drivers had been routinely referred to as ‘Knights of the Road’ but with more competition for space on the roads and an ever increasing awareness of pollution HGV’s were becoming the bad guys. I remember my surprise one morning while negotiating the main street of the village of Oulton in Cheshire one morning when a reverend gentleman in a Morris Minor wound down his window, shouted “Polluter” at me and drove away! It was a sign of the times and was one of the small nails in the coffin of my wagon driving.
By October I was getting better and occasionally went into the Dog for a Guinness at dinnertime. I was in their one day when I got talking to an old bloke and he told me he was engineer at Bancroft where they still ran a steam engine. He said if I had nothing better to do I could walk over and have a look at it. I went that afternoon and got the shock of my life! I had never actually seen a stationary engine working and as soon as I walked in I was blown away. If you like machinery you’ve got to love steam engines. It was, to my eye, massive. Two great cylinders, a large flywheel and a rope drive winging off into the roof. It was wonderful and I sat there watching it run for a couple of hours. In the end I thanked George Bleasdale, the engine tenter and went home for my tea. Little did I know what had just happened!
On October 31 Richard, Ursula and John came for me and we went up to Milnthorpe to pick up TWY. We went into the office and Richard signed the papers and a cheque, I admired the carpet and asked what it was. They told me it was bitumen backed squares and was made of pig bristle. They had to be watered once a month to keep the pile and were called Heuga. I stored this information away and we went out for the wagon.
I still didn’t like the cab but the rest was wonderful. Blue and white cab, aluminium chassis and dark blue metal and varnished wood on the box. It was exactly the same box as XWU, same size and no surprises. We all got in the wagon except Ursula who drove the car back and we set off down the road. The first thing that struck me was the noise but we could always rug it up to get that down. The second thing was the massive torque of the Gardner engine compared with the Leyland. It pulled like a steam engine and would get better as it got some miles on it. As a four wheeler it was just about right except for the cab. It remained to be seen what would happen when we hung another 16 ton on the back of it!
We still had to get the trailer and Richard let me have my head. I told him we needed a Dyson from Liverpool and after looking at the prices he asked me why a Dyson was £200 more than a York trailer. I told him to come back and ask me the same question in twenty years time! They were built like battleships, all the piping was solid copper and they used the best of everything. They didn’t have a standard trailer, you told them what you wanted so I drew up my own specification. It was to be the same length as our box on the wagon and was to have a short drawbar angled up to the wagon hitch so that weight was put on the rear wheels of the wagon when it was pulling. Richard wanted to set Houghtons on building the box but I persuaded him to wait until they had the trailer chassis so that they could get the box roofs exactly in line. I went down to Dysons with the wagon and we measured everything up and ordered the trailer.
Meanwhile, young Harrison was making his move, I was asking him the other night when he put his trailer on the road and he said it was late in 1973 but I am sure this is wrong because he had his on the road before us and I remember that my first load with the trailer was a lying off sale at Paisley so that would be in April 1973, I can’t be exact because I haven’t got my diary for this year. John had his trailer on the road before us and so the trip we made to the Commercial Motor Show at Kelvin Hall Glasgow must have been in August/September 1972. John was going to see the show but also to see what sort of a deal he could get on a trailer. He had a spare set of wheels which fitted his new Scania and wanted to use them on his trailer so he needed only one spare. I still cherish the look on the York Trailer’s salesman’s face when he realised that John was asking him for a price for a trailer with no wheels! John had a Lancia car at that time and I remember looking at the speedo as we were going up the A74 and we were doing a ridiculous speed! It was the fastest journey I had ever made to Glasgow by road.
John eventually settled for a Dyson trailer for the same reasons as we did, they were the best. Incidentally, he told me the other day that he sold it to Craig’s at Ayr and they mounted a meat box on it. I’ll bet it’s still on the road somewhere! He cut the luton of his old Jenning’s box off and mounted it on the trailer and was in business. He tells me that he had to change the gearbox in the Scania to get a lower gearing to cope with the trailer. We didn’t have any problems like that, we were low geared enough! TWY wasn’t in the same class as XWU for speed or comfort but if lightly loaded was almost as fast over a trip because it pulled so much better up the hills.
I soon realised that we had a problem with the new wagon. There was a vibration in the transmission which I didn’t like but nobody else noticed it and when I said we should get it sorted I was discouraged. We hadn’t gone on for long when it did an oil seal in the axle, it went back to Reliance under warranty of course and a new seal was fitted. Shortly after this it did another seal and I began to look more closely into the problem. My suspicions grew when it did a pinion bearing in the back axle and I told Richard there was a basic flaw in the design of the wagon which, if we didn’t get it sorted would lead to many more problems. He agreed to let me take the wagon to ERF at Sandbach and tell them what was wrong.
Now I know what you must be thinking, here we go with another tall tale about how Stanley was the best mechanic in the world etc. I forgive you, but unfortunately, I was right and ERF were wrong! When I got down there I saw a bloke called Johnson I think, he was their service manager at the time. I told him his wagon was designed wrong and we wanted it altering! He asked me what the problem was.
Briefly, the propeller shaft in a wagon has to have flexibility built into it because the back axle can move relative to the drive train because of the fact it is mounted on springs. This is allowed for by inserting two universal joints in the shaft and a sliding cardan shaft to allow the length to vary. These universal joints are actually a Hooke joint named after Robert Hooke who invented the principle in the 17th. century. The crucial factor in the installation of a Hooke joint is that the input and output shafts must be exactly parallel. The ERF had an angle on the joint behind the gearbox but none on the one in front of the back axle so the shaft into the back axle was speeding up and slowing down twice in every revolution and this was the source of the vibration. Vibration causes ‘fretting corrosion’ which is a specialised form of attrition of metal which can happen even if the metal in question is submerged in oil. It was this that was destroying bearings and it would eventually exfoliate the hardened surface off the gear and pinion in the back axle. The bloke was impressed I know but he wasn’t going to let on to me that I was getting to him. He sent up to the works for one of their designers and got me to go through the theory again.
The designer didn’t handle the interview well, his brief was obviously to get rid of me. He ignored the engineering logic and demanded an explanation as to why they hadn’t had this problem before. I told him that it wasn’t my job to design his wagons but the most likely explanation I could give was that the normal ERF propeller shaft was flexible enough to soak up the vibration but because this wagon had been built for a trailer and seeing as it was a four wheel wagon needed a longer shaft, they had fitted a far heavier shaft which, being rigid, was transmitting the vibration to the axle. I told him the gearbox would be the next item to suffer. I also told him the cure was simple, put a wedge under each back spring to tilt the axle forwards and restore parallelism to the input and output shafts.
It didn’t do any good, they fitted new bearings in the tail shaft of the gearbox and the pinion housing on the back axle and sent me away. A couple of months later I was back with a noisy rear axle, the hardening was flaking off the crown wheel and pinion. There was no argument. They fitted all new bearings in the shaft, a completely new back axle and a modification to the mounting of the axle. Guess what the modification was! That’s right, two wedges under the springs! I had a coffee with the service manager and he said if ever I wanted a job he would be pleased to hear from me. I asked him when I got my consultancy payment but he just smiled………. It was a complete cure, the vibration had gone and we had no more trouble with the transmission after that. It was a far better wagon to drive, it ran smoothly at maximum speed, 52mph. and I suppose that was fast enough! Mind you, I missed that high gear!
In March 1973 we got word that the trailer was ready and I went down to Liverpool to collect it. Dysons was an incredibly old fashioned factory. Basically it was a blacksmith’s shop! Their method of building a trailer was to chalk out a space on the floor, put two fitters in it and a pile of steel and give them the drawings! It was slow but they were good men and did a near perfect job. Their main business was building special high capacity trailers for the oil industry. Some of them would carry 300 tons in the desert!
When I got there my trailer was in the yard resplendent in three coats of red oxide primer. I backed down and we hooked on and did check measurements to make sure it was legal. It was a quarter of an inch inside the maximum length allowed under Construction and Use regulations. This was a shade short of 60 feet long. It was enormous! I realised that this wasn’t a delivery of a trailer but a launching ceremony. The foreman brought a bottle of beer out for each of the fitters and I was given a ten bob note and a pack of Dyson playing cards! There was also a message to go and see a lady in the office. I went up expecting to get paper work off a secretary and found I was dealing with the owner of the firm! She asked if the trailer was going to have a coach-built box the same as the wagon and I said yes. She asked me to let them know when it was done as they’d like a photograph of it in front of the works. Later on I did this, I went down with a clean wagon, they did the picture and I was told later that an eight feet long enlargement of it was on the wall in their main reception.
I took the trailer up to Milnthorpe and was very impressed every time I looked in the mirror. They say size doesn’t matter but you can forget this as far as wagons are concerned, the bigger the machine the bigger the ego of the driver! I was now in the big league! Early in April 1973 we had another family outing to Milnthorpe and picked the finished trailer up. It was magnificent! The roof line matched exactly and we had a very handsome and practical outfit. Richard was delighted and he and the kids, John and Richard piled in for the ride home. It had been impressive before but now the box was on it the only word is awesome! What tickled me was the way it followed, as I turned out of the yard at Houghtons I looked in the near side mirror and watched the trailer come out behind us looking as though it was going straight across the road! It didn’t of course but it was a strange feeling watching what seemed to be another wagon following you all the time.
All this was very well but I now had a major problem. I’m not going to go into the technicalities too much but reversing a long wheelbase wagon and a four wheeled trailer with a short drawbar is like playing three dimensional chess. The problem is that if you are backing in a straight line, the rules you are playing under reverse themselves every time the vehicle moves to one side or the other away from dead straight. Of course you couldn’t steer dead straight so you had trouble. The secret was to reverse in a gentle curve so you were on the same lock every time, all you had to do to steer was vary the lock. Another problem arose here, the nearer you got to your target the straighter your steering became and any pot hole or rut could steer the front axle of the trailer and throw you off course. That’s enough about that but take it from me it was the most difficult thing I have ever had to do as a driver.
Richard had a load for me out of Paisley the following day, 32 lying off cattle so I went to Gisburn Auction yard where there was plenty of room and started practising. The first thing I did was drive in a circle on full lock to see how much the back wheel track of the trailer cut in on the wagon. It was amazing, less than two feet! Then I had a crack at reversing, I spent about an hour and a half and whilst I had improved, I was by no means expert. What was worrying me was the fact that Paisley Market was in a back street lined with parked cars and it was sometimes a problem to get in with a wagon, never mind with a trailer. I suspect I had a disturbed sleep that night!
The following day dawned cold and clear and away I went to Paisley. The trailer wasn’t slowing me down much and I was making good time. As I climbed Tebay on the M6 I was pulled in by the police on to the junction. Mystified I climbed out and asked them what the problem was. It turned out that all they wanted to do was have a look at the outfit! I told them it was the first day out and they congratulated me on the turn-out. I don’t think this would happen now but a lot of the police drivers had done some time on wagons in those days and appreciated a nice outfit.
As I was going up the A74 past Lesmahagow I heard a song on the radio, I couldn’t believe it! I had never heard this song before, the words were “Give me Forty Acres and I’ll turn this Rig around!” I should say it would have been impossible to find a more appropriate song to describe how I felt as I neared Paisley that morning. It took me 15 years to find a recording of that song but I still have it and every time I play it I am taken back to that morning. Wonderful.
I arrived at Paisley and turned left down the back street to the auction entrance. My heart fell into my boots, there were cars parked on both sides of the road and barely room between to drive the wagon, never mind turn. I stopped at the gate and went into the yard to see what room I had. Luckily there were two docks empty next to the wall on the left, this was the easiest target I could have asked for but I would be backing alongside the wall on my blind side. What made things worse was that the other drivers had heard on the grapevine that I had the trailer and I had an audience! I lit my pipe, tried to look professional and climbed in the wagon. I drove forward, got the outfit on a nice curve and reversed straight in to the far dock in one move! I got out, unhitched the trailer and backed the wagon in alongside. When I went on to the dock expecting congratulations all round I got a shock. The only bloke there was the banksman who drew the cattle. He gave me thirty shillings, I looked at it and asked what it was for. He said the drivers were taking bets as to whether I would get in and he had backed me and won a packet! I told him it was a fluke and he must never bet on me again!
We loaded the cattle and they were big, fat buggers. One thing was sure and certain, I was going to find out now how the Gardner would perform with a proper load behind it. I coupled up and sailed out into the Paisley traffic. It was a fair pull up the back street back on to the main road and the exhaust pointed out sideways under the front end of the cab. My God did it bark when it was pulling! It was a lovely exhaust note and I’ll bet the windows were rattling as I passed. I had to wend my way out on to the dual carriageway and there was no chance to open her up properly but I was surprised by how well it pulled at very low revs. The Gardner was famous for this, it was a long stroke design, hopelessly old-fashioned even then but it was a wonderful machine for getting away. It was obvious that the clutch was going to last a long time.
Eventually I got out on to the dual carriageway and wound her up until I was doing my 52 mph. I soon found that once you got going, it was a very comfortable ride and a slight incline didn’t call for any changes of gear. Another advantage that the Gardner had was that the timing was variable. We need to get technical again just for a minute or two. The accelerator pedal on a Gardner isn’t connected directly to the pump rod which is the mechanism in the pump which controls the fuel delivery to the injectors. Normally, it would be and a separate governor on the pump controlled the maximum speed. The pedal did two things, it controlled the governor setting and also varied the injector pump timing, the further down you pushed the pedal the more it advanced the pump. All right so far?
Consider then, you are driving down the road with your foot hard down for maximum speed and full advance on the pump, just what you want for flat going. You hit an incline and the wagon slows down, if you keep your foot to the boards all you are doing is saying to the governor, “You can go faster if you want to.” This is of no interest to the governor because the engine hasn’t got enough power to give that speed so it continues to labour, perhaps slowing down even more as the load comes on. If you think about it, you can let your foot off the pedal and allow it to come back up until it reaches the point where the pedal position matches the speed the engine, and governor, are actually running at. You can feel the contact as it comes back and you haven’t lost any power because the governor is still running as fast as it can and the fuel rod is fully open. But, and this is the magic part, as you lifted your foot off the pedal you retarded the pump timing and the power goes up! It isn’t a violent rise but seems a lot more than it actually is because it comes in as you lift your foot and this is against nature! It soon became second nature to ease back on the pedal and get that bit more out of the engine. You’d be amazed if you knew the number of men who drove Gardners all their lives and didn’t know how this worked.
Another handy thing was the fact that it had a clutch brake on it. When you pushed the clutch pedal down two thirds of the way it disengaged it as normal. If you pushed it the rest of the way it slowed the engine down by a brake on the flywheel, this meant that you could get a far faster change both up and down the box.
The bottom line was that it was underpowered but against this had to be set the fact that it took less driving because you could leave the gearlever alone. Changes on the Eaton 2 speed axle were made by pre-selecting and then dipping the clutch for a change down or just lifting the power off a fraction for a change up. A lot of the gradients on the good roads could be accommodated by the axle alone. I knew my times on the road and I was only fractionally behind my normal schedule and this fell into line when you realised that I had twice as many beasts on board and was doing almost the same miles to the gallon as the Leyland. Richard was making money!
I soon settled down into the wagon and trailer and it worked well in the markets. We could separate the accredited from the non-accredited and the Ministry men were quite happy with it. The Scottish hauliers were very interested in what we had done. They could see the sense in having a vehicle that was a flexible size, it could be used as an ordinary four wheel wagon for picking up cattle from farms but had double the capacity for long distance transport of cattle. There was another advantage for us. I used to leave the trailer at Demense on Sunday and David loaded the calves into the trailer the night before we set off. On Monday evening Keith brought his Ayr calves down and put them straight into the trailer so this gave us less to do on Monday and Tuesday mornings.
In Lanark and Ayr I used to leave the trailer on the docks and the cattle could be brought down and left in the pen behind the wagon and, because the ramp was down, wandered in and out of the box. When they were loaded they were totally at home. The outfit rode much steadier because of the weight and the trailer was brilliant for cattle. It had double wheels all round and was even more stable than the wagon. The cattle rode better than ever.
I had a funny experience one afternoon as I came down from Scotland with a load of beasts. I was just coming along the road into Long Preston and it was thundering but not raining. I saw something in the field to the right of the road in the river bottom which was so extraordinary that I pulled up at the side of the road and got out to watch. Another wagon stopped behind me, he had seen the same thing. What we were looking at was bolts of lightning striking the ground and where they hit they left a big blue ball of fire which rolled round for a second or two and then vanished with a sharp crack. There were dozens of these and I was fascinated, I had read about them but never seen them before. They were working their way over towards the road so I decided discretion was the better part of valour and drove on.
Years later I described this to a bloke who knows about these things and he told me that what I had seen was ball lightning which is a mysterious and very rare phenomenon. He told me he would have given his bottom dollar to have witnessed the sight, he had been studying it for years and never seen it! I had a similar experience years before when driving the tanker. I was passing Ferrybridge Power Station when I saw one of the cooling towers rotate gently and subside into the ground! I stopped and watched and saw another one do it. Years later I became friendly with the man who is production manager at Ferrybridge and he told me that it was a vortex effect that had done it and even though the towers were rebuilt in different positions and made stronger they still have a ban on traffic on the road between the towers when the wind rises above a certain speed.
Back home at Hey Farm, by mid 1973 we were getting sorted out a bit. The drive had been tidied up after the road widening, the walls rebuilt and everything painted up. Inside the house we had carpeted the kitchen with the Heuga tiles I had seen at Houghtons and they were just the thing. You could move them around so that wear was evened out and Vera used to water them once a week, usually on a Saturday night when we went to bed. In the morning there was a slight smell of wet goats but the pile was erect again and we had a new carpet! Vera had put a lot of work in on the garden and we had flagged the area in front of the house. The porch got damaged during a gale so I rebuilt it and got Billy Ent to put a stone slate roof on it. All told, Hey Farm was developing into a desirable residence!
It would be about this time when Old Arthur Entwistle came into our lives. He was Billy Entwistle’s brother and had moved out of Barlick during the war to go and work in the tool room at the Rover Car Company in Coventry. The Rover Company were the original owners of the factories in the Barlick district which later became Rolls Royce. He was called Old Arthur to distinguish him from his son, Young Arthur of whom more later. We all got on well from the day we first met. Old Arthur was retired and had a workshop at home and used to get workshop deprivation syndrome while they were staying in Barlick so he used mine for essential therapy. Vera got the remains of an old oak settle from Cyril Richardson and Arthur and I restored it in our spare time. He carved the new rear panel for it and I rebuilt the rest. I got some oak from Harold Duxbury that had been in the workshop down the Butts since before I was born so we knew it was dry! We got a refectory table at the same time and bought a good 17th century oak kist off Maureen Thomas who by now was living on Park Avenue. What with the carpeted floor, the oak beams and the 17th century furniture our kitchen was beginning to look the part. Arthur was a caravan and Land Rover man and I was very impressed by the latter which had been sound proofed and was a very comfortable and utilitarian vehicle. Arthur and his wife Amy who was also a Barlicker were to be a feature of our lives for years to come.
There isn’t really a lot to report about the job at Drinkalls. I had my routine and got a lot of miles in and shifted a lot of cattle. With hindsight we were seeing the last years of cattle dealing on that sort of scale, there were signs that it was beginning to taper off but none of us recognised it at the time. One or two incidents do however come to mind so let’s have a few more stories.
Richard was a master at buying cattle but occasionally slipped up on some of the peripheral matters. He set off one day cattle buying and ranged right up the country as far as Jim Bairds. I was there when he came home that night, I had called in at Yew Tree to leave a message for him when he walked in. Ursula made us both a cup of tea and a slice of one of her famous sponge cakes and we settled down to plan out the next day or two. After a while Ursula asked Richard where John was. He said he didn’t know and Ursula said he should because he’d taken John with him when he went! Richard had a quick recap and realised he had left John at Lurdenlaw! A quick phone call confirmed this and if I remember right I brought him back later that week when I took a load of calves up to Jim Baird’s.
Another time Richard sent me to a farm somewhere where I hadn’t been before. I forget where it was but have an idea it was at the back of Bolton. I had to pick up a full load of cattle and took the trailer. I asked him whether there was room to turn round and he said there was so when I got to the lane down to the farm I turned in and went right into the yard. The lane was about three quarters of a mile long and very narrow but this was no matter, I was used to having a couple of inches either side. When I got into the yard I realised that Richard’s idea of plenty of room and mine were at variance. There wasn’t room to swing a cat, in fact, I couldn’t immediately see how I was going to turn the wagon round, never mind the trailer.
The farmer was most impressed that I had got in with the wagon, “We’ve never had anything that size in the yard before.” I told him he never would again if I couldn’t get out! I weighed the job up and decided we might be able to manage. I asked him if he had a good tractor and chain, he said he had. I got the wagon partly turned round and then we hooked the tractor on to the front end of the wagon, threw buckets of water on the setts and dragged the front of the wagon round until I could get it turned round. This left the question of the trailer. I told him we should load the cattle first and then I hooked on to the trailer with the towing eye on the front bumper and pushed the trailer out of the lane by ‘nosing’ it. This sounds easy but isn’t, I had to be guided all the way out and it took about an hour to get out on to the main road. Needless to say, when I got back to Marton I had some valuable words of advice for Richard on the subject of yard sizes! The secret of success in circumstances like these is to tell yourself you have all the time in the world, keep your cool and get on with it.
I was up Scotland one day and had to pick some cattle up out of a field on my own. Fly was never a good cattle dog, I hadn’t the time to train him and it’s not a good thing to have a dog around cattle that aren’t used to it and are heavy in calf. However, there were times when he came in handy and this was one of them. I already had the trailer full and dropped it off while I backed the wagon into the gateway to load. We got them in OK, I hooked up and set off down the road but something was nagging at the back of my mind. I had gone about five miles when it dawned on me what was the matter. I’d left Fly! I had to go another couple of miles before I found a spot where I could drop the trailer off. I went back and it had started snowing gently. I arrived at the field and there was poor old Fly sat under the wall with snow stuck to his coat and a very mournful expression on his face.
I got him into the cab. He normally rode with his head facing me so he could keep an eye on what I was doing but this time he turned his back on me! Not only that but he farted continuously all the way home! When I eventually arrived home he jumped out of the cab, shot in the house under the settle and wouldn’t come out. Vera was certain I’d hit him until I explained. Funny thing was he wouldn’t come with me for about a week. Instead of being ready at the door when I left he just stayed under the settle. In the end he decided he had made his point and normal service was resumed.
I was one my way back from Ayr one Tuesday and was running late, it had been a big day. I had enough room in the wagon to pick up six beasts at Tom Hamilton’s at Cairn near Cumnock. It was a dark November night and a nasty cold rain was falling. I dropped off the trailer at the bottom of the hill on the main road and went up with the wagon. It was a bad lane and a very awkward yard on a slope. We got the cattle in and Tom persuaded me to have a cup of tea. I wasn’t looking forward to the trip home so I went in. What a sight! TV hadn’t started to erode the society up there at this time and the big kitchen was full of dogs, kids, women, men a piper and a fiddler. They were just starting an impromptu celeagh. The piper was playing a tune as I went in and I sat there with a cup of tea and a ‘sensation’ of whisky and wondered what the bloody hell I was doing setting off down the road after being out of bed for sixteen hours and another five to do! I pulled myself together and said goodnight and they all thought I was a big man, they knew what sort of a day I had done and they admired the fact that I was going to drive all the way to England with the biggest wagon that went into Ayr. Big deal, I got down the lane, Tom came with me and helped me hook up in the freezing rain and he asked me whether I would be all right. I told him yes, got in, started up and drove off reflecting on the fact that there must be a different way to skin a cat.
We got into the winter of 1973/74 and there was one moment of glory. David and I were going up to Lanark on the M6 just coming up to Tebay. It had snowed and there was about six inches on the road and no salt. We were light loaded, only a few calves and I was running flat out and no problems with the fresh padded snow in the near side lane. The outside lanes were virgin snow, nobody had marked them. As we climbed the hill we came on the back end of a slow moving line of vehicles that stretched as far as the eye could see. There were many artics in the line and they were only just managing to keep going so the speed of the queue was that of the slowest vehicle. I made a quick decision and swung out into the centre lane before I got to the line of traffic. I wanted to know how the wagon would cope. There was a slight resistance from the virgin snow but nothing serious so I decided to have a go. I heard David say something about me being a bit ambitious but I was committed, still flat out, doing about 50mph and trailing a big plume of fresh snow behind me. I passed everything in sight! David was counting wagons and so was I but I gave up at 150! I reckon it must have been one of the best overtaking moves ever and was very pleased. As we passed I could see wagons pulling out into our wheelmarks but they had no momentum and simply formed a new line of slow moving traffic. There was even a police car but I didn’t see what happened to him. I think we proved that day that if you’re in snow and you’ve the choice of a wagon and trailer or an artic, go for the former. As I said to David, this was why they were so popular on the continent.
During the back half of 1973 there were big changes afoot, some of which I had no inkling of. They really belong to the pattern of the next five years so I’ll end this segment and start the next with the changes. At this point there was no cloud on the horizon beyond the fact that I knew I couldn’t carry on doing these hours and this amount of work for ever. With hindsight, I was getting tired, I was 37 years old and the old nagging thought was there at the back of my mind, I expected death at 42.
52938
R C COLLEDGE
In the Drinkall Years chapter of my memoirs I talked about R C Colledge, a man who was a big farmer at Drummore on the Galloway Peninsula. He was a good customer for calves and I often delivered scores at a time for him. I had mail on the 28th of April 2009 from a lady called Liz Pratten who is his daughter and stumbled across the chapter on Oneguy.
We had a long chat on the phone and it was great to know that in her words I had ‘captured her father so well’. She has made sure all the family know about the reference and in the course of our conversation she confirmed the accuracy of my memory about certain things. She remembered the cartridges on the press, knew about Fly ripping her father’s arm open and also remembered the cottage called ‘Nae View’ on the side of the main road on the left as you entered the village. It’s nice to have some reassurance that your memory hasn’t played tricks!
She told me that she was at boarding school in Ayr at the time I was going there and that’s why she missed my visits. She said that her dad used to call and see her at school if he was at the market in Ayr. He used to turn up in a beaten up old green pickup truck with a couple of calves bagged up in the back, their heads poking out of the necks of the sacks that were restraining them. Her friends pulled her leg about it because all the other parents were in smart cars but she knew that her dad probably had more money than the others.
When you write something and make it public it’s always so nice to get feedback like this. Proof that you have got it right and given pleasure to people. That’s all the reward I need…
30 April 2009
CHAPTER 7. DRINKALL YEARS 1969 TO 1973
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Stanley
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CHAPTER 7. DRINKALL YEARS 1969 TO 1973
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
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