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Doc
Keeper of the Scrolls
2010 Posts
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 Posted -
17/05/2004
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12:55
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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.
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DRINKALL YEARS 1969 TO 1973 (PART 1)
