Letters to the Editor - April 2009

Regarding the article ‘British Boys for British Farms’ (January) — what a challenge for the boys and for us as staff. My wife, Vivien, and I were warden and matron of the BBBF Training Centre in North Cadbury Court, near Yeovil, from 1958 to 1961. (The centre had moved from Ham Green in Bristol to Cadbury in the early 1950s). We had up to thirty-six teenage boys at any one time, with four to six coming in each week.

They came from London, and cities and towns in Wales and the West Country. They spent the first week in the hostel doing the household chores — scrubbing, peeling spuds, making beds (“I’m not doing that, mister; that’s woman’s work”, so we did it together). It was a real eye-opener for most, but it gave a chance to work alongside them and to get to know each other.

For the next seven weeks or so the boys walked or cycled to local farms to sample and learn how things work on the farm. After about eight weeks they were taken to a farm anywhere in the West Country and we kept in touch for another three years.

We all (and I mean ‘all’) learnt a lot and laughed a lot. Most of the lads came straight from school where the longest they had ever spent on one activity was a double lesson period. Suddenly to be all morning or all day on the same task came as something of a shock. Learning to stick at a job was, at that stage, more important than learning the technicalities of agricultural theory and something that would be useful in any walk of life. But with help from what were then the Somerset Farm Institute and the Ministry of Agriculture, we did include some very basic theory.

On Sundays we wound up the day with a session of writing a letter home (“Mum, I’m writing this very slowly because you don’t read very fast”) and with ‘family circle’ – a hymn or two and a Christian thought that, again, would be useful in any walk of life.

As well as the centre at North Cadbury, there were similar ones at Park Hill in Derbyshire, and Wilderwick House in East Grinstead. I often wonder how many BBBF ‘graduates’ are still on farms? Although I have been involved in agriculture ever since leaving Cadbury, I have met only one or two ‘old boys’.

Wherever they are, and whatever they are doing, I hope that their time with BBBF has proved to be useful. (A full account of BBBF can be found in a booklet written by Barbara Vessey, published by the YMCA, ISBN 0 948185 04 X.)

David Berkley, Hemyock, Devon

I read with great interest ‘A G Street’s mystery book’ in the February issue. Like Jeremy Hobson I spend many a happy hour searching the shelves of secondhand bookshops for old books of farming and the countryside (searching the internet is not half so much fun).

Over the last few years I have obtained a few books by A G Street and thoroughly enjoyed reading them — several times each.

My mother (now eighty) tells me my grandfather, farming in the 1930s, also appreciated the writings of A G Street as an honest and informed commentator on agriculture and the countryside.
When speaking to groups about the life of a ‘twenty-first-century farmer’s wife’ — of which I am one — I often end with two quotes:
“Countryfolk do not desire great wealth; rather they want stability and peace.”
“I have long felt that many of our national troubles are due to the fact that our administrators and their advisers live their lives too far away from the people to whom there decisions mean so much.”

Both are by A G Street and written in 1935, but how true they are over seventy years later. Should I be reassured that country folk had such thoughts so long ago and the industry is still ‘hanging on’ or should I be depressed that things have not changed?

Sarah Helliwell, Edale

Last week I made a discovery in my local supermarket. I spotted the Feburary issue of The Countryman and was attracted to it because of Graham Jennings’ article ‘Exmoor’s Literary Landscape’, which captured the essence of the area perfectly.

I was born in Devon, and cut my teeth on R D Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, simply because my surname is Ridd. I am descended from the real Ridds who populated the Exmoor area, and have always felt privileged that Blackmore immortalised my rather rare last name.

Until she died three years ago, my cousin, the real Lorna Ridd, lived in a small village in North Devon, keeping the traditional ways and dying at eighty-nine in the same cottage that she was born in — a cottage that had been in the Ridd family for 180 years. When she died, it was the passing of an era. Lorna was a true villager, and she has become part of Devon rural heritage.

There was a proliferation of Ridds in the Culbone area, and many are buried in the churchyard there. It is fun to speculate that Coleridge may have met some of them, or that they may have watched over him silently from their graves while he wrestled with his poem ‘Kubla Khan’.

Fanciful, yes, but no more so than Blackmore’s story of a love between Lorna Doone and John Ridd, members of two families at odds.

Jenny Ridd, East Sussex

Kenneth Steven’s beautiful poem (January) and evocative description of the mystical Clonmacnoise emerging through swirling mist made me remember some of the
lines from T W Rolleston’s poem ‘The Dead at Clonmacnoise’:

In a quiet watered land
A land of roses
Stands St Kieran’s city fair
And the warriors of Erin
In their famous generations
Slumber there.

Many and many a son of
Conn the Hundred Fighter
Lies here at rest
Many a blue eye of the Clan Colman
The turf covers,
Many a swan-white breast.

It is very pleasing when one lovely poem evokes the memory of another one read and enjoyed years ago.

Joan Howes, Basingstoke

I was surprised and not a little disappointed to read through the January and February issues and find no article to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the birth of the poet Robert Burns, often referred to as the Ploughman-Poet. What more of a ‘countryman’ could you ask for?

You can imagine my utter disbelief when I read the article on the daisy in ‘Wild About Britain’ by Janet Merza, to discover no reference whatsoever to one of the most charming poems in literature (I nearly wrote Scottish literature, but the poetry of Robert Burns has an international reputation), namely ‘To a Mountain-Daisy, on Turning One Down, with the Plough, in April 1786’. This is a companion piece to its more celebrated sibling, ‘To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest, with the Plough, November, 1785’. In one publication of the poems, the comment is made:
“The mountain daisy was composed as the poet has related, at the plough, the field where he crushed the ‘wee, modest crimson-tipped flower’ lies next to that in which he turned up the nest of the mouse, and both are on the farm of Mossgiel, Ayrshire.”
The crimson tips referred to in the opening line of the poem are very noticeable in the illustration in your article on the daisy. Incidentally, my copy of the Scots Dialect Dictionary has this entry:
Gowan: the generic name for the daisy; the common or mountain daisy.

William Lavender, Isle of Bute

Early one morning our old verger was found on his hands and knees in the church porch searching for something. When asked what he had lost, he replied: “Nay, it’s not me, it’s the vicar. He tumbled all his length here last night and he Told my old woman he’d lost his equilibrium.”

F Spink, Harrogate

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