Letters to the Editor - June 2007

All gas and gaters

Why does it take a countryman like Humphrey Phelps (April) to sum up so well the position of British farming over the last eighty years? It is all so true. I farmed through a lot of that time up to the present day when we’ll soon need to fill in a form just to open a gate – and issued by highly-paid civil servants who outnumber the actual farmers.

Ernest E Jones, Chepstow, Gwent

Mimosa revives memory of ’47

I too was interested in the pieces about the 1947 winter – Humphrey Phelps (Jan) and Joan Crouch’s letter (March). My mother was ill in bed at the time and I’d been kept off school to help. We’d recently had electricity connected and my father bought a two-bar electric fire so that we did not need a fire in the bedroom. My father was a dairy producer-retailer and delivered our milk around a large, hilly village in north Somerset. This took ages due to the state of the roads and paths. Every morning water bowls in the cowhouse had to be unfrozen somehow, and every day was a routine of feeding, milking by hand, delivering, washing all the cans and churns etc. It all took so long that before you knew it, it was time to milk again.

Time had to be found to keep a good supply of wood for the old boiler which was our only source of hot water for the dairy and the house. We had to buy in hay which worried my mother as she could see the lorry go into the yard from her bedroom window. How would it be paid for? One day a beautiful bunch of spring flowers arrived for her, delivered from a Bristol florist, a gift from an aunt in London. I was the first time I had seen mimosa and when I see it now it always reminds me of that long, bitter winter.

Ann Stacey, Midhurst, West Sussex

Ode to joyless wreckers

It has been suggested by some members of the EU that instead of playing our National Anthem we should play the EU anthem. I didn’t know there was one. I think our football fans, along with others, would soon put paid to that idea.

Another idea is that we celebrate fifty years of the EU. What’s to celebrate? The EU has wrecked our farming, our fishing and with it our ability to feed ourselves with our own produce, our legal system and democracy to name but a few things not to celebrate. What do we get in return? Well there’s job losses, imperialism from Brussels, bureaucracy, financial corruption, annual expenditure paid to the EU that would make the average person mad with rage if they knew how much this was costing them personally. Celebrate? Not me.

Ron Bird, Leighton Buzzard

Far too many Fulham farmers

I can sympathise with Robin and his mudspattered and untidy 4x4. Certain jobs require certain tools and the 4x4 is one of them. As he says, better to pop into Cambridge in one of them than the tractor. But by Robin's figures there are some 85,500 such vehicles doing legitimate work around the country. Yet a BBC News report of March 2006 says that some 187,000 4x4s had been sold in the past year. I am guessing but you might think one of these workhorses could last for seven years at least. Which puts some 1,309,000 currently in use. To me this means that the legitimate users that Robin quotes account for just about seven per cent of the total.

Seen in that light, it doesn’t seem unreasonable for Greenpeace to be saying to 4x4 users in general that this may not be the best way of getting around, of using the earth’s limited resources. Greenpeace just need to sign up for some baler twine identification classes to be sure who to target. And, presumably, legitimate users who require their 4x4s to carry out their work are allowed to claim the cost of vehicle licence duty as overheads for tax purposes?

Jay Mitchell, Shrewsbury

Murdering magpies

We feed the garden birds and love to hear their song (As distressed as our songbirds, March) but are plagued by magpies and kestrels. The National Trust nearby does not shoot magpies and says the RSPB don’t see them as being to blame for the decrease in small birds. Do they ever live in the country? If so, they would see the truth. It is such a joy to wake up to the dawn chorus. The small birds are part of our lives all day long. I agree so much about the countryside becoming noisy and full of people who never get outside to walk, see the birds or ever know the joy of a winter starlight night. They just have security lights instead.

As a new subscriber I so look forward to my magazine each month. It’s the only one I know for real country people. We seem to be an endangered species!

Lorraine Hutchin, Dunmow, Essex

Wretched grey to blame?

I wonder in spite of the seeming evidence if the real culprit has been identified? I live in the hills of the Ceiriog Valley and within a few hundred yards of my home there is a buzzard’s nest. In fact there is at least one other buzzard’s nest in the locality and if the number of young I have watched learning how to soar like their parents is anything to go by, there will be other nests in the area. At the same time, however, I have in my garden a wide range of songbirds, with thrushes, blackbirds, robins, chaffinches, yellowhammers, blue tits and long-tailed tits counted amongst their number. In addition there are crows, magpies and woodpeckers in and around the property nearly all day.

Is the culprit that wretched tree rat, the grey squirrel? In my previous home having seen squirrels raiding nests for eggs and young, I set out to cull these creatures and watched the number of songbirds duly increase. Nature will be what nature wants but domesticated grey squirrels soon learn that young nestlings and eggs are a very tasty addition to well-stocked bird feeding points.

David Cooper, Llangollen

‘Bread and cheese’, dibs or snobs

As a child I lived in Leicestershire. At this time of year I am reminded of my schooldays whenever I pass a hawthorn bush with big swollen buds. I nip a few off and chew them and am instantly reminded that we did this while walking to the village school. We called the buds ‘bread and cheese’ and I have often wondered why we did it and why the name. My explanation is that after the lack of fresh greens and vitamins during the winter, the buds – perhaps the first edible green food – were sprinkled on bread and cheese. I have asked several friends from different parts of the UK and some did and others didn’t do this. I would like to construct a ‘map’ of the bread and cheese areas and would welcome any letters.

I also wrote to Countryman about cow tenting and have been interested that replies came from Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire. I would welcome more letters to construct a tenting ‘map’. And while I’m writing, does anybody remember the name they gave to fire stones – dibs or snobs? In Leicestershire we were snob people!

Pat Jenkins, Gunner's Copse, Bushey Lane, Old Odiham Road, Alton, Hampshire GU34 4BT

Fuller explanation

In Merlin Evans’ interesting article Dyed in the Wool (Feb) she omitted one word that has a wool origin. Her husband walked the dog along the river, while she was visiting the National Woollen Museum, though I doubt if he was fulling wool by treading it. For this is the origin of the word to walk from the Anglo-Saxon to full. Its use to get from one place to another on foot is a secondary meaning. The early fulling mills were called Walk Mills and they are still called this in Germanspeaking countries. The verb ‘to full’ comes from the Norman French, who actually introduced fulling mills when the cam was invented so the circular motion of a waterwheel could be transformed into the up and down motion of fulling hammers. Such fulling mills required expensive investment and so were normally yet another manorial monopoly. No doubt some unfortunate people still had to walk cloth with their feet in baths of water and urine.

Tenter frames could also be outside, not just in barns. Sometimes, near the site of medieval walk mills one can find hills with the windward side having level platforms cut into them on which the tenter frames were erected. The field name ‘Tenter Field’ may be an indication of such a field, though the platforms can have been ploughed out.

Spinster indicates the spinning was carried out by a woman; a man who spun would have been a spinner, just as a weaver was a man and webster a woman. Sometimes such names have survived as surnames; lister was a woman who worked with lye or alkali, the potash made by burning bracken which was used to clean the wool of grease. There are other names with male and female forms e.g. Baker-Baxter and Brewer-Brewster.

Janet Edmunds, Preston

Cheap, healthy holidays on the farm

Denise Aylmer-Aylmore’s letter about farming in 1941 brought back memories. I came back from Burma in 1946 to be demobbed, and in my first year of getting used to civvy-street, I went on a harvesting holiday at Hereford. These harvesting arrangements in the days of post-war austerity provided farmers with much-needed casual labour and us with a cheap, healthy holiday.

Accommodation was at Redhill Hostel, a bus ride from Hereford, with ‘plentiful good food’. Each day we were taken out to farms, which paid seven or eight shillings a day. Our first job was potato-picking for three days at a farm near Pontrilas. A machine went along the rows lifting the plants and leaving the spuds on top of the ground. We had to gather them into buckets or sacks, involving frequent bending and backache at the end of the day! Next we went to a Welsh hill farm just across the border from Pontrilas. No modern equipment there! Potato rows were turned over by a horse-drawn plough which cut up some spuds and left others half buried. Second day there we were picking cider apples, then we helped with the threshing. A great roaring monster was threshing first peas then barley in clouds of dust, and spewing out great heaps of chaff and straw. We raked the chaff away and pitchforked the straw into a mow, refreshing ourselves with plentiful farmhouse scrumpy cider – we were hot and sweaty and its strength didn’t seem to affect us. The straw was coming out too fast for us to clear, and the farmer came over with his pitchfork and lifted an enormous pile in one go. We couldn’t avoid breathing in the great cloud of chaff and a friend ended up with a week in hospital with congestion of the lung.

Next week we went potato picking at a big, well-organised farm at Sugwas, picking into wire baskets, much easier than sacks or buckets. Our final job was apple picking at an orchard near Tarrington. That was before dwarf trees. They had great tall trees which we tackled with long ladders. We were taught to always prop towards the centre of the trees so that if the ladder shifted it always fell inward and was still supported. We couldn’t take any apples away but could eat as many as we liked. Have you tried eating more than one Newton Wonder a day?

Jack Harvey, Chessington

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